by Giles Blunt
When Red Bear had first come along, all dressed in white, talking of his contacts in the spirit world, Kevin had written him off as just another nutcase. That had been almost a year ago. Kevin and Leon had been sitting outside the Lemon Tree on Algonquin Avenue, shooting the breeze, watching the girls go by. It was likely going to be the last perfect day of summer, and all the tables were taken. Red Bear got out of a black car—someone else had been driving—and headed inside the shop. A few minutes later he reappeared with a lemonade and came right over.
“You mind if I sit here?” He said it to Leon, not Kevin.
Leon shrugged. “It’s a free country.”
Red Bear pulled the chair out and spun it around, then sat down facing them with his elbows on its back. The fringes of his white jacket hung nearly to the pavement.
“In exchange for your kindness, I will read your cards.” Red Bear had a curiously formal way of speaking, as if he were translating from another language.
Kevin was expecting a Tarot deck, but Red Bear pulled out an ordinary pack of cards and fanned them out across the table. “Pick a card to represent yourself,” he said to Leon. Leon tapped the king of hearts, nothing subtle about Leon. He sat back and rubbed his forehead with his index finger. He had a small scar there, and sometimes he rubbed at it as if he could erase it.
Red Bear gathered up all the cards except the king, shuffled them, and then began laying them out in squares and crosses. A deep groove of concentration formed between his brows. “You’ve recently had trouble with a relative,” he said. “A difference over money.”
Leon looked at Kevin. His cousin had stayed with him the past winter and had stolen two hundred dollars before hopping on a Greyhound in the middle of the night. Next day, Leon had gotten drunk and beat the hell out of some stranger in the Chinook Tavern, till Kevin had managed to pull him off. Leon had raged about his cousin for weeks afterwards.
“That’s pretty right on,” he said to Red Bear. “Keep going.”
“There is violence in your past.” Red Bear looked up from the cards, a trace of concern on his brow. “You can be a violent man.”
Leon laughed. Maybe with nerves.
“Not really. I’ve mellowed out a lot. Well, okay. Yeah. I been known to lose my temper now and again.”
Red Bear returned his gaze to the cards. “You have coming up some major opportunities for development. Perhaps a way to channel this anger.”
“Okay, all right. Can we move on to another subject, please?”
“You are leaving behind a period of romantic frustration.”
“I hope so,” Leon said. “Women, man. I could use a little action along that line.”
“You are alone right now—romantically, I mean—you’ve been alone for some time.” Red Bear snapped a two of hearts across the king and took off his sunglasses, looked up at Leon. “That, my friend, is about to change.”
It was then that Kevin realized what a handsome guy Red Bear was. Strong bones in that face, two little parentheses at the corners of his mouth when he smiled, and those eyes. When he took off his sunglasses, Red Bear’s eyes were the palest blue Kevin had ever seen, paler than a husky’s, almost transparent.
Red Bear had pointed out a lot of other stuff in Leon’s cards that Kevin could not now remember. Leon had been impressed, excited even, but Kevin hadn’t been, not then: lucky guess on the money thing, and the rest was the sort of crap you saw in astrology columns all the time.
“You’re skeptical,” Red Bear had said to Kevin. Those transparent eyes, those amazing cheekbones. Cherokee. The word had popped into Kevin’s mind, even though he didn’t know a Cherokee from a Blackfoot. The man looked every inch the Red Bear, even before he mentioned his background.
“It doesn’t matter if you believe,” Red Bear said. “A thing will be true whether you believe it or not.” He spread the cards again. “Pick one to represent yourself.”
“Naw, that’s okay.”
“Go ahead. Pick one.”
“No, really. It’s not my kind of thing.”
“I’ll pick one for you.” Red Bear selected a jack of diamonds. Jack of all trades? Jack-off? One-eyed jack? One-eyed monster?
Red Bear shuffled the cards and snapped them off the top of the deck one by one.
“Problems with the family,” he said. “Someone older than you. The two of you bump heads now and again.”
Close. Very close, but Kevin didn’t say anything.
“You have recently overcome a bad habit, perhaps an addiction. That shows clearly, here.” He tapped the pair of threes with a seven of diamonds. Kevin felt the hair at the back of his neck lift.
The queen of hearts came up, separated from the king by another three. “You have a lady in your life,” Red Bear said.
“Not me, man. Broke up with one about six months ago, and now I’m as single as they come.”
“I didn’t say a lover. I said you had a lady in your life. A good woman who loves you. But this habit or addiction is a problem between you.”
Well, all right. That could be Terri. Once you have an addiction, a lot of stuff follows. Call it a lucky guess followed by common sense.
Snap, snap, snap. King, ace, king.
“Oh, you are easy to read, my friend. A pleasure, too.”
“Why’s that?”
Red Bear tapped the cards—strong finger, manicured nail. “The kings, my friend. The kings. You are going to be rich.”
Kevin laughed out loud at that one.
Red Bear leaned forward, squinted at the air around him. “I’m seeing a lot of odd shapes around you. T shapes. This lady of yours, is her name Tammy? Something like that?”
“There’s someone named Terri,” Kevin said. “But she’s not my lady.”
“Really? I see a strong connection there.”
Red Bear finished his lemonade and got up. Somehow he could drink a lemonade and make it seem as serious as bourbon. He signalled to the black car parked across the street. The car started up and made a U-turn, stopping right in front of the café.
“If I see you again, my friend, maybe you’ll tell me how you plan to make all that money.”
“You’re the one who sees the future. You’re going to have to tell me.”
Red Bear had grinned—teeth by Paramount Pictures—and opened the car door.
Kevin rubbed the bite on his neck and stared at the rough wood of the cabin ceiling. He heard another car drive up, and a couple of shouts. That would be Leon back from town; he always made a racket when he rolled up. He’d be knocking on Kevin’s door any minute, wanting to shoot the breeze. Big talker, Leon, but a little too prone to violence for Kevin’s peace of mind. And his talk was getting strange since they’d taken up with Red Bear. Spooky, even.
Although Kevin didn’t believe in astrology or card reading or any of that paranormal blather, Red Bear had been close enough on a couple of counts that a tiny vibration of fear had started in the pit of his stomach. And even though Red Bear treated him pretty well, that fear had never really quit; it hung on like a low-grade fever.
There had been four in Kevin’s outfit back before Red Bear arrived on the scene. Kanga was ostensibly their leader—basically because he owned the only car that could be trusted to make the trip to Toronto and back to pick up the dope. Kanga was a serious pothead who smoked the stuff all day long. He’d once told Kevin that the only reason he’d started dealing was so he could afford his own habit. He tried to counterbalance the weed with a regimen of weight training, but Kevin figured he only did the weight training because it involved a lot of sitting still. Kanga was an optimist, a hopelessly amiable leader—if you could call someone who could hardly keep a toe on the earth leader. He was trim and fit and didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about the future.
Leon Rutkowski was a reformed speed freak with an extremely unpredictable temper. Except for the incident in the Chinook, Kevin had never seen it personally, but he had heard things: one story concerning a man who e
nded up in hospital, another involving a baseball bat. Leon was all for making lots of money. In fact, Kanga had once said he never would have gotten into the heroin trade if Leon hadn’t bugged him about it so much. They were already well into it when Kevin joined up. Leon was stringy, but with a pot belly that hung over the belt of his jeans owing to the junk food he was so fond of. Kevin wasn’t sure why, but Leon had seemed a good deal calmer since Red Bear had come on the scene; healthier, too, putting more thought into what he ate. And he’d stopped complaining about not getting laid. Every now and again Red Bear would bring babes up from Toronto, hookers no doubt, and share them with Leon.
Then there was Toof. His real name was Morris Tilley, but everyone called him Toof because of the extra incisor that pushed its way to the front of his unruly dentition. That, along with his floppy hair and the droopy way he held his head, combined to give him a doglike air, which was quite appropriate because he was really more of a mascot than a serious member of the outfit. Toof talked a lot and, owing to the fact that he was a hopeless pothead, what he said did not always make sense. And he had an absolute genius for getting lost—not easy to do in a place the size of Algonquin Bay, but Toof seemed to lack the inner positioning device that allows most human beings to leave home in the morning with a reasonable expectation of finding their way back.
Red Bear had come along at the lowest point in their fortunes. The Viking Riders had become more aggressive, consolidating their grip on the whole northern territory. Suddenly they seemed to be moving tons more dope, and there was precious little Kanga and his boys could do about it. Kevin had been reduced to skulking along Oak Street, hoping that some of his old clientele would remain loyal enough to buy the odd dime of smack. A few did, but not enough. Everyone was afraid of the Viking Riders.
Kanga had decided it was time to have a “sit-down” with the bikers. See, that was the kind of blue-sky optimist Kanga was. You have a problem with bikers, you take over a bag of sensimilla and smoke a peace pipe with them. The bikers had agreed to the sit-down, but it hadn’t gone well at all. The gang told Kanga, overexplicitly in his view, to cease and desist operating in their territory. Otherwise, they would introduce him to a world of pain. To emphasize the point, one of the bikers—a big mother named Wombat—had pissed on him. Literally.
First their customers, then their suppliers dried up; they didn’t want Kanga’s group as subcontractors. Everybody had to deal exclusively with the Riders or risk being put out of business, to use the polite term. In desperation, Kanga had ventured further afield for product, driving as far as Montreal to round up first-class narcotics.
“You’re out of your mind,” Kevin had told him. “There’s no way we’re going to be able to move that stuff without the Riders going berserk.”
They were in Kanga’s basement apartment. Kanga was on his back at his Universal gym, smoking a joint. He took a hit, offered it to Kevin, who declined, and set it in the ashtray.
Kanga smiled and pressed another one-fifty. He held the weight and released smoke through his teeth. “That’s the beauty part,” he said, his voice all gaspy from the weed. “I’m not gonna go into competition with them. I’m going to set us up as their suppliers.”
“Don’t do it, man. Don’t even think that. They’ll just rip you off. They’re already moving so much dope, you’re not going to be able to beat whatever price they’re getting.”
“Leave it to me, man. I know what I’m doing.”
“You going to wear a wetsuit this time?”
“Hey, fuck you, man. That was just one goon.” Kanga set down the weight and took another hit off the joint. His words emerged smokily between clenched teeth. “The other guys were actually kind of apologetic about it.”
And so Kanga had set up another meeting with the Viking Riders. Kevin and Leon and Toof had never seen him again.
Without Kanga, the group had rapidly gone to hell. Kevin had made regular trips to Toronto and brought back small amounts of speed and heroin by train. But it didn’t add up to a paying proposition. What with all the stress of their misfortunes, he’d found himself once again with a needle in his arm. It had taken all his strength to quit again: methadone, twelve-step, the whole pathetic cabaret. By then, he had been barely able to make the rent on his miserable little apartment.
“The thing to do,” Leon had mused one day. “Instead of buying from the Viking Riders, or trying to buy around them—what we should do is take over their import business.”
They were sitting in the sun on a rock cut near the railway tracks, watching the French girls heading down Front Street to the École Secondaire.
“Somehow they’re bringing the stuff in from the States,” Leon went on, “and now they’re shipping it across the goddamn country. If we could somehow take over that end of things they’d be forced to deal with us.”
“Yeah,” Toof said, wheezing through a plume of pot smoke. “That sounds good. Why don’t we do that?”
“Because Kanga had the same idea,” Kevin said. “And Kanga never came back.”
So there they had been: Leon a talker, not a leader; Kevin with no ambition whatsoever to run things; and Toof out of the question. It was onto this bleak stage that Red Bear had first strode, promising them magic and riches. How could a junkie resist?
Red Bear rapidly made Algonquin Bay his own, using little more than his good looks and a deck of cards. He could often be found at Everett’s Coffee Bar on Sumner, the last of the independent coffee joints. He would sit at a corner table with his deck of cards, and after a while people just came to him. Everett’s didn’t mind; Red Bear brought people in. They’d buy a coffee and go over to him and he’d read their cards. They knew he was good, Kevin figured, because he charged so much: seventy-five bucks a pop, thank you very much. He also did astrology charts, which cost twice as much.
It was difficult to have a conversation with him, because people were always coming over to the table to get a reading. Kevin didn’t know how much he earned doing this, but it had to be substantial, and naturally tax-free. And it gave him an in with all sorts of people: The local musicians started going to him, and once he’d got a couple of hairstylists among his clientele, they spread the word. He claimed to have done some modelling in Toronto—he was certainly handsome enough—but Kevin figured he had to have some other source of income. But whatever it was, Red Bear kept it pretty much under wraps. Certainly he never attracted any police attention.
When he wasn’t reading cards, Red Bear went out of his way to befriend Kevin and Leon. He gave them samples of the best pot either of them had ever tried, he took them to the movies a couple of times and he was always buying them drinks, although he didn’t drink much himself. He didn’t even seem to mind Toof. Like the other two, Kevin was flattered by the attention, even if he remained a little suspicious of it.
Over the next few months, Red Bear became a major part of their lives. Eventually he revealed his other business to them, which was shipping medium-sized packets of cocaine and heroin cross-country. He did this from a location just outside Algonquin Bay. He wouldn’t say where.
“You’d better watch out for the Viking Riders,” Kevin warned him. “We told you what happened to Kanga.”
“I am not worried about the Riders,” Red Bear said. “I am protected.”
“Protected?”
By way of answer, Red Bear had just pointed to the sky.
One chilly spring night—it must have been late April, early May, before the flies were out—they were all down at the beach. Red Bear had constructed a beautiful fire—an altar fire, he called it—that burned slow and steady for hours. Leon and Toof were there, the sky was all Milky Way and a breeze blew in off the lake. Waves slapped quietly on the shore; from further down the beach came the noises of a party in progress, but the mood among the four had been contemplative, even solemn.
Red Bear had asked about their life stories. Leon poked thoughtfully at the treads of his hiking boots with a stick, cleani
ng the mud off them, while he talked about his past. He was the only child of two drunkards, one of whom had killed the other when Leon was sixteen and would probably never get out of prison. He got the scar on his forehead when his mother had thrown a toaster at him. Toof stared into the flames, firelight flickering in his eyes, as he told Red Bear he was the youngest of seven, raised by a widowed mom who worked three jobs and never knew which of her sons would end up in the nick next. Kevin didn’t say too much. Parents died when he was ten years old. Fell in love with poetry. Dropped out of college after second year. Got wired to smack. Kicked it. He didn’t mention that he was skin-popping again; no need to burden the others with too much information.
The three of them looked at Red Bear. So far, they knew nothing about him, other than that he came from a reserve somewhere up north.
He smiled, those perfect teeth gleaming in the firelight. “You want to know about me? I will tell you. This, of course, is the first thing you have to know.” He pulled out his wallet and snapped a card on the table.
Kevin picked it up. It was a status card issued by the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, confirming that Raymond Red Bear was a member of the Chippewa First Nation at Red Lake, which was located beyond the northern shores of Lake Superior and boasted a climate that made Algonquin Bay look like Florida.
Firelight flickered on Red Bear’s face like a stage effect. His voice was soft, all but inaudible above the lapping waves.
“Life on the reserve,” he told them, “was cold. Hard. Our house never had enough heat. There was never enough food in the refrigerator. Every morning the frost formed patterns on the bedroom window.”
Red Bear fell silent, staring into the fire. No one said anything for a while.
Finally Leon said, “Are you going to tell us more?”
Red Bear shook his head. “I would like to. I trust you. I trust all of you.” He looked at them: Leon, Kevin and Toof, one after another. “But there are things of which I cannot speak. And other things which you are just not ready to know. There is certain knowledge only a few must have.”
