Читать книгу Dan Sharp Mysteries 6-Book Bundle - Jeffrey Round - Страница 26

Known locally as “the 69,” the highway to Sudbury does little to prepare you for the city itself. True, the farther north you go the more barren the terrain becomes as the Canadian Shield rises from the earth like a giantess spreading her apron to shelter a multitude of stunted children, the towns and cities marginalized and tethered on the periphery of the land. Offering boreal forests in the south and tundra to the north, the Shield is better known for its abundant mineral deposits and the mining communities that have exploited them for more than a century.

The landscape had changed greatly since Dan’s time. Much of the change was positive in ecological terms, undoing years of bad. The International Nickel Company’s much-vaunted Superstack, a 1,247-foot, concrete chimney, had been built not long after Dan was born, as if to commemorate his arrival. The poisons and pollutants that once blanketed the town were now sent spinning into the atmosphere at an altitude high enough to cut Sudbury’s pollution by more than ninety percent. His aunt recalled days when she’d had a raw throat all summer long from the sulphur emissions, conjuring images of ash films that blackened the snow outside her basement apartment in winter.

For miles around, forests had strangled on the noxious by-products of mining, the conifers turning rust-red as their needles dropped and the plants slowly died. The region’s pink-grey granite turned black with soot and the vegetation crawled farther and farther into the bush while lakes filled with acid and the fish population shrank and died. With the coming of the Superstack that suddenly stopped, as urban centres to the south began to report mysterious lines of yellow haze scrawling across the sky. Even Inco’s reinvented Tower of Babel couldn’t whitewash the filthy scud away forever. It had to come down somewhere.

To a child, Sudbury had seemed an intricate playground of things gone wonderfully awry: houses jutting from mountainsides, car-sized boulders in basements with washing machines and furnaces tucked around these incongruences. Buildings pitched and tilted to the sway of winding streets, as though the Crooked Man who’d built a Crooked House had returned with a vengeance to construct an entire derelict, lopsided town crowned by the searing gold spill of slag dumps, a magisterial ring of fire poured down nightly on the Earth.

Local legend saw the town nested in the crater of an extinct volcano, just waiting for the return of the fiery forces to extinguish it again. Geologists speculated it was the site of a giant meteor crash that gave the area its vast iron and nickel ore deposits. Years of annual spring floods led some to conjecture that the downtown was in actuality a giant swamp, as water rose over the streets with their smattering of English and French names that mingled New and Old World history: LaSalle, Elgin, Wellington, and the generic but obligatory catch-alls of King and Queen. Who the hell Frood was, no one seemed to know or care. At times the floods were so severe they seemed to be mocking the city planners until they put their heads together in the mid-sixties and devised a drainage system that dealt with the problem once and for all.

Despite its problems, Sudbury affected a sense of homegrown achievement. Schoolchildren recited proudly how prior to the first Apollo moon launch the flight crew trained in the terrain around the city because it resembled the lunar landscape closely enough to launch an astronaut’s career in earnest.

But if Sudbury was the moon by proxy, then the Flourmill District was the dark side of that moon, an industrial, monochromatic soot-on-soot neighbourhood of the type that sprawled throughout England in Victorian times, finally slouching across the ocean to end up reborn as a living museum exiled in northern Ontario ever after. It made the gritty black-and-white misery of other industrial centres seem like a dove’s cry.

Dan pictured the cold-water flat without a bathtub where for years he’d washed in a sink with a tap that never entirely turned off, and whose drips left a turquoise stain on the ceramic basin, just a few streets over from the colossal concrete towers that sat like a giant six-pack of dynamite behind his home. The nearest of the six bore an irregular hole the size of a small child just a few feet above the ground. Lore had it the flourmill had once been set for destruction. The hole, it was said, offered testimony to the fact that even explosives had failed to topple it. Children’s fancy, of course. More likely the dimple had been caused by an errant bulldozer that limped off afterwards with a damaged shovel, having learned to pick on something closer to its own size. As a child, you never admitted you came from the Flourmill District. Not only was it the wrong side of the tracks, it had seemed the worst place to come from in the entire country.

Dan passed a tavern he hadn’t thought of in years, a shallow trough where he’d been sent more than once in search of his father. “Get your father home for supper,” his Aunt Marge instructed in her chirpy voice, though Dan knew supper would be long put away by the time he returned, with or without his father. Dan never had a problem getting into Sudbury’s bars. The bartenders, if they guessed his age, simply turned a blind eye. Or perhaps they knew him for Stuart Sharp’s son. More than one son or daughter had shown up to fetch their parents over the years. Many returned for a longer stay once they came of age. More likely, they assumed Dan was as old as his dark looks proclaimed, which was significantly older than his actual years.

Inside, he knew, was the latest generation of miners, the hard-working men who earned their living pulling precious metal out of the bowels of the Earth, a whole under-class who spent their hours toiling in darkness, not seeing the sun for weeks at a time, who woke one day wondering where their lives had gone and how they’d managed to miss out on them. Meanwhile, their children had grown up without them, their wives had become bored and discontented, and no one could tell them what it had all been for. Until his death, Dan’s father had been one of these men, his personality stuck on edgy, his face so expressionless it had probably not exercised its muscles in years. Permanent immobility was written all over it.

He found the house on the hill at the top of Bloor Street, the same flowered curtains in the windows as when he was a child. Probably they weren’t the same, but no doubt his aunt had replaced the originals with curtains of the same style and colour. He sometimes wondered if growing up surrounded by rock had convinced her that all things were more or less permanent, and that efforts should be taken to preserve them just as they were.

He stepped down the crumbling concrete steps and stopped for a moment where his four-year-old self had heard one of the neighbours say, “She’s gone, poor thing.” The woman had looked at him with such a pitiful gaze that it etched itself onto his heart forever. His mom was gone again, that much he understood. Where she’d gone or when she’d return, no one could say. Except that time she hadn’t come back.

Leyla was waiting at the door with open arms and a ready smile. He wanted to say something like, “You haven’t changed a bit,” but it was such an obvious lie it would only have caused embarrassment. Pretty as a teenager, her looks had been fleeting, like her youth. Her skin sagged, her pallor the colour of oatmeal. She hadn’t gotten stout, but her once impressive breasts were, he gathered, more of a hindrance now than an enticement. She seemed to have wrapped them in an old sweater to keep them from getting in the way. The one thing that hadn’t changed was the glint of joy in her eyes. Dan gave her a peck on the cheek and squeezed her in his arms. She felt tiny.

“Mom’s been so excited knowing you were coming,” she said, in a way that told him his absence the past few years had been more marked than he cared to believe. “How’s Ked?” she asked.

“He’s good. He’s really tall now. Almost as tall as me.”

“They grow so fast you can’t keep up with them. Geez, eh? It’s funny. Mine are nearly grown too. I hardly see them any more.”

She still talked like a high school majorette. Dan recalled her fondness for mohair sweaters, pleated skirts, and hair barrettes.

She put a hand on his shoulder and nodded to the bedroom door. “Go on in, Danny. She’s been waiting for ya.”

Gloom met his eyes, a half-drawn shade simply masking the fact that the light was permanently obscured by the house next door. The wallpaper was Sedona Rose on Pickle Green, some daft artist’s rendering of happiness and cheer. Paper daisies in a snow-white vase sat atop a dresser. The room smelled of disinfectant covered with something homely. If he were to die of a wasting disease, he knew, he could do worse than come back here to be tended to by Leyla. Everything had been tidied up and put away, the room almost too clean to admit to any suffering. He imagined the dull days winding ahead for his aunt, but with a fixed value attached to their number.

On the mantle ranged the usual collection of cards: Get Well Soon, Heard You Needed Some Cheering, and Hope You’re Feeling Better — his own hadn’t reached them yet. All with the usual compulsory euphemisms that said everything but the truth: Goodbye For All Time or Prepare To Meet Your Maker. From behind one card peeked the corner of a photograph: himself as a dirty-faced kid of three or four, with a grin to break your heart. What had happened to that boy? Dan wondered.

His eyes adjusted. His aunt lay on the far side of the bed, as if avoiding the light. Flannel rose in soft swells around her sleeping head. A hearing aid curled around one ear like a pink foetus, her hair Marcel-waved into tiny seashells. As a boy he’d watched, fascinated, as she egg-whited the tips of curls and stuck them to her cheeks. Imagining herself glamorous, no doubt. Maybe she’d fancied herself a movie star: Joan Fontaine or Lana Turner. And why not? Life held few enough rewards for someone like her.

At one point she’d briefly turned Jehovah’s Witness, driven for comfort by a husband’s beatings and a brother’s drinking. Eventually the husband vanished, though Leyla said for years afterwards her mother would turn a hopeful ear to the door if there were footsteps outside at night, still praying for his return. It never came. No one knew if he were still alive or, if dead, where he’d been buried. The consensus was that he’d come to a bad end somewhere and that it had been well deserved, whatever it was. Dan recalled her sweaters that always smelled of dampness. She would wait till his dad had gone to work and then start in on him, clutching him to her chest and making him promise he would never drink, smoke, or swear. Devil’s work. His father did all three, Dan knew. He used to wonder if she’d asked him to make the same promise. He hadn’t listened, if she had. But even religion hadn’t lasted forever, like most things in her life.

He remembered her as a woman who spent much of her time planning diets of one sort or another: the grapefruit-only diet, the no-bread diet, the sugar-free diet, and various others with no particular name. All of them defined by a lack. She’d never been a great cook, but she always made sure there was food on the table for Dan and Leyla. Her specialty was peas in gravy on white bread, with greasy ground beef mixed in. Her version of a balanced meal, no doubt. Some days there might be mashed potatoes instead of the sliced bread with its tan leathery borders. Afterwards, orange fat lay congealed at the bottom of the electric frying pan — her one frivolity — until its rounded corners slid under the iridescent soap bubbles in the sink. Most of her days were spent in silence, which was just as well because when she spoke people looked in fright at the sound of her voice, like a whoopee cushion on Prozac. But more than anything, he remembered her as a woman who had taken in another woman’s child to raise as her own.

Someone — probably Leyla — had propped a chair in the corner. He dragged it close and sat next to her. Here she was, his aunt who had always been kind, always accepting. His aunt, who had spent thirty years selling tickets at the movie theatre before retiring on a government pension. Goodbye and thanks for a job well done. When she was younger she’d dreamed of reinventing herself by opening the classifieds to see what fascinating job she could apply for that might just blow her horizons wide open and make all her dreams come true. What’ll it be next: waitress at Kresge’s Red Grill or counter help at Herb’s Bowl-a-Rama? Another time it was a day cashier at Woolworth’s followed by a stint as stock clerk at Zeller’s. The options were stupefying. Maybe she thought they’d go on forever, but one day they ran out and she ended up where she began, dying of emphysema, her life and choices behind her forever.

Dan leaned over the bed, taking care not to bump the fat green cylinder that pumped itself out via the long thin tube attached over her head and feeding into her nostrils. Her skin was wrinkled and translucent, as if, oxygen-starved, her body had subsisted on a diet of light. Her hands were swollen like pudgy starfish.

Here, then, was the salt of the earth. It didn’t get any better or purer.

Eyelids flickered open, eyes cornflower blue. “Hello, Danny,” she said, as though she’d seen him only a short while before.

“Hello, Auntie.”

“My goodness, you look awfully good. Handsome as ever. It’s so nice to see you home again.”

The sentence must have exceeded her lung capacity, because Dan heard the intake of breath, the sharp rasp behind the words.

“How are you feeling?” he asked. “Is Leyla doing a good job of looking after you?”

She spoke a little slower, pacing herself. “Oh, don’t you worry — she’s doing a good job. You know what she’s like.” She took a long pull on her oxygen.

There was a peaceful sound to her voice. Or maybe it was resignation — he’d never known her to be a fighter. She would just as easily go along with whatever Death had in store for her as a request for supper to be made for visitors. Compliance — her greatest virtue — was one and the same with her.

They spoke for ten minutes before Dan felt her tiring. She wouldn’t let him go, hanging onto him as long as she could. “I’ll come back again tomorrow,” he promised.

She shook her head. She needed more of him right now. “Will you go out to visit his grave while you’re here?” she asked, squeezing his hand as though encouraging a small boy about to tackle a very big task.

“Sure.” He turned his eyes to hers. He hadn’t intended to go to the cemetery and knew he probably wouldn’t keep his word, but she wanted him to say yes. “And maybe hers, too.”

“You haven’t been out for a long time,” she said, heaping on the reasons to go now that she’d got him to say he would, just as she’d once made him promise never to drink, smoke, or swear.

“No,” he said. “I haven’t.”

“You weren’t so lucky when it came to parents,” she said.

“I had you,” Dan said, resting his hand on her arm.

“Still do.” Her eyes teared up a little. “He loved you too, you know. Even though you thought he didn’t.” She took another pull on the oxygen.

Dan shook his head. “I don’t know.”

With all the presence she could summon, she gazed directly at him. “He did,” she insisted.

Dan smiled indulgently. “Maybe I didn’t understand him. It was a long time ago. It doesn’t matter now.”

“Doesn’t it matter to you?” she asked. She was silent for a while. “I think you’re right. Maybe you never understood your father.” Her eyes carried a look of well-worn sorrow.

“You knew him better than I did,” Dan managed. Don’t, he told himself. Don’t argue with a dying woman.

“It broke his heart when you left.” She smiled pityingly, as though she knew she would hurt him by saying this. “You didn’t know that, did you?”

Dan went on as though he hadn’t heard her. “I had to go. He always seemed so angry. I never knew why. At the time, I thought he hated me.”

“Yes,” his aunt said, her eyes a long way off. “He was an angry man. But it wasn’t you he hated.” She sniffled. “She was no angel either. Your mum, I mean. She went out and drank and hung around with god knows who half the night. No, she was no angel herself. You wouldn’t remember — you were just a little kid, Daniel.”

Something boomed in the distance, a prelude to doom, that well-worn fiddler’s march to the scaffold. There was a worn quality to her voice, water rushing against a shore. The memories were returning, like some half-forgotten love affair. Only the story ended in death — the first by pneumonia, the other through self-destruction.

“It broke my heart watching him drink himself to death. Though for a few years he tried hard not to — for you.” Dan gave her a sharp look, but she caught him. “Yes, for you. Maybe to make it up to her, too,” she allowed. “But you can’t change the past. I just wish you’d known he loved you, no matter what he felt about himself. No — it wasn’t you he hated. It was only himself.”

Her voice had gone quiet. Dan leaned in to hear her better. He saw his father as a thoughtless man who destroyed the things he loved. Then he saw himself kicking at Ralph and screaming at Ked in his impatience, wondering again what drove him to do those things.

“They were arguing over you,” she said. “He said, ‘Christine, you shouldn’t be going out with a small child in the house.’ And him working till all hours, and it being Christmas too, but your mum was drunk and he couldn’t stop her.” She paused for a long time before she continued. “She went out somewhere — the bar probably — we never found out. But she went out. He locked the door, as he did every night, and went to bed. I guess he thought she had a key. Or maybe he thought he’d wake up and let her in, but he didn’t hear her … if she knocked.” She was looking off now, not talking to him but to the past, the people she saw there. “We found her nearly froze to death on the doorstep in the morning. He was never the same after she died. Never the same.”

Dan could hardly breathe. The dream came back to him, the one with the Christmas ornament and the glittery tree and the strange scratching sound at the door. The door his father had locked when his mother left and not opened for her in time. He looked at his aunt folded into the covers, vanishing before his eyes, into sleep, into time. “He locked her out? In the cold?”

Her eyes turned to him. “He locked her out of the house. Maybe he thought she’d go and stay with her sister, but she didn’t.”

She finished her tale of old sorrow and lay back on the pillow, eyes pleading with him to let her be, as though she’d finally done her work and might now go to a much-deserved sleep, forever to forget what she had told him.

Dan glanced up at the dancing neon of girls kicking up their legs and waving top hats while a floating martini poured itself endlessly onto the sidewalk. He’d promised his aunt he’d visit his father’s grave, and perhaps this was it. He caught his breath and ducked inside.

The interior smelled of litter and broken hearts. It was a commoner’s pub, but the noise was an uncommon racket. As taverns went, the Colson lay between a back alley asylum for life’s unwanted-unwashed and one of those annoying modern-day wonders bent on fusing good cheer, good times, and good friends by invoking the holy trinity of Darts, Karaoke, and Trivia, with quizzes about dead Motown artists and quick-time sports statistics that interested no one but the poor sods who surprised themselves silly by knowing the answers in real time: Hey, Bernie! Next round’s on me!

This one was a simple watering hole for the working men and women looking for a chance to put up their feet, catch their breath, recount the day’s troubles and have a cold one, two, four or more, to help shorten the hours as best they could. The camaraderie was cheap, and for the most part you got what you paid for. As for gizmos and gadgets, the condom dispenser outside the “Gents” took first prize over the ATM affixed to the “Ladies.”

Jukeboxes had gone out of style long before the compact disc killed vinyl, but this one boasted an impressive relic, an antique by any standards, sitting over in the darkened corner behind an unused bar. Now and then, one of the faithful would walk over with a confident smile — This one’s for all the boys in shaft number 3! — fish around in his pockets and toss in a slug, punching the litany of numbers like Moses transcribing the stone tablets for God’s Chosen. Good old Sudbury, thirty years on and still happily awash in the cat-gut twang of Freddy Fender and Conway Twitty, second only to the power chords of Bachman Turner Overdrive. Three minutes and thirty-three seconds of pure golden oldie pleasure. Just another Sudbury Saturday night. Old Tom and his PEI stompers had it right: Inco, bingo, and getting stinko was pretty much all there was on the menu.

Dan took a seat in the shadows. He was too late for day prices, but that was probably just as well — he wasn’t planning on staying long. A drink or two at most. He looked around the room where his father had spent so many hours. How many drinks had it taken him to reach that place where it all stopped mattering, and the wife he’d killed without meaning to appeared before him with a smile and a forgiving kiss?

The bartender stood behind his dispensary, a dry cloth over one shoulder, pouring drink with the tireless faith of a priest in the confessional keeping watch over his flock by night. On the countertop a tray overflowed with dimpled beer steins, gold up to here, white froth above the cut, and all for a tinker’s dam. He added one to the count and pulled another.

Behind Dan, a fat blonde laughed a high glossy trill, her table covered in empty glasses. Her look said trash but her saucy eyes said she could see the cheque good at any bank. Her smile was a retina-blinding flash of good times and fun company, and maybe more if you played your cards her way. She reached for a cigarette, lit up, and tossed the deadened stick into a tray overflowing with burnt match ends and bent stubs like charnel house bones. What No Smoking sign was that, dearie?

A grubby one-armed man looked over at the blonde, calculating the moves in her direction. He paused, Casanova on the steps of the Vatican considering coming out of retirement to try his hand at eternal beauty one last time. A maturer man now, holding back a moment where once he would have pounced.

And suddenly Dan saw her, floating between tables, tray raised in a silent blessing. The Angel of Mercy who never spilled a drop as she poured her beatitude from one vessel to another: Marilyn’s cleavage, but with Maggie Smith’s face, and aware to the penny how much every inch was worth. A smile extended long enough to hear his request and return to the bar. Time for niceties later, if required.

He could still recall his last visit: he’d been thirteen, not quite fourteen. The doorman loomed like a refugee from a disreputable sideshow, looking him up and down before pronouncing Dan invisible and turning away in boredom. The whole time he was inside Dan waited for someone to tell him to leave, if not to pick him up by his scruff and toss him freeform through the door, while he scoured the room for a sign of the old man.

This was after his father had taken to drink again following the years of uneasy sobriety — the effects of a strike that had gone on past being amusing, the pleasures of idle afternoons long since worn thin. In their place, a bone-wearying boredom had set in along with occasional flashes of rage at “the man” — sometimes elevated to “the fucking man” — exacerbated by the bottle he talked to day and night. It had taken Dan a while to understand that his father wasn’t referring to a specific man, but a collective one composed of bosses and managers and mine owners who “day after frigging day” conspired to keep him from his rightful place of employment under the ground.

No matter that he cursed the very same man just as thoroughly when there was no strike on. What the young Dan suspected, and eventually understood, was that his father hated things as much when they went smoothly as when they didn’t. And when it came down to it, he pretty much hated all things equally, no questions asked.

That night, he’d found his father sitting alone in a corner nursing a whiskey on a table that held three empty glasses and a plastic-framed menu boasting that The Best Eat Here! A morose man, weaned in silence and hard times, sipping at his drink without a word. Now that Dan thought about it, it might have been around the anniversary of his mother’s death, probably why his aunt had been even more insistent than usual that he find his father and bring him home.

That night Dan found him wrapped in his all-weather coat, a no-colour garment that smelled of tar and fish, with rips along the seam where the insulation had fallen out, like something bludgeoned to death with a tire iron. Loneliness was never pretty, even when it dressed up for a Saturday night, and it was seldom inviting to anyone on the outside.

When Dan tried to coax him home, his father looked murder at him. To Stuart Sharp, home was never where the heart lay, no matter how dark and stormy the world outside. When Dan asked why he wanted to sit there drinking alone, his father replied with all the silence in the world. It was what he did best, after all.

Now Dan picked up his glass and took a sip. He had a few more to go before he caught up to the old man.

Even for alcoholics there is a hierarchy of drunkenness: drink, drank, drunk, and drunkard. The tag on the liquor doesn’t count for much. You don’t get there any faster on expensive cognac than on cheap red wine, or even dollar-store cologne if you have the stomach for it, though the first goes down a bit nicer. Put a smelly aquarium in the corner, fill it with bloated carp, and the crowd appeal goes up for some reason known only to God and His Angels. Something to look at other than the waitress’s titties and the busboy’s bottom, maybe.

It was as if there were two worlds, one for the perfect, privileged people in film and on television, and another for the rest of us who are neither perfect nor privileged enough to matter. But it was when you crossed over the River Merry into the Land of Shame that you knew you’d taken a very wrong turn. Especially if you couldn’t remember how you got there and forgot to leave a trail of breadcrumbs to plot your way back again. Drinking itself wasn’t the problem. The problem, Dan knew, lay in the degree that it took hold of your life and ran you about without your knowing.

Still, at its best drink could make you soar above the crowd. When the mood hit and the vintage suited, there was nothing better. You felt it in your veins, the way it lifted you up like a gifted amateur at a karaoke rally, turning heads with the talent you knew you had in you all along. It was the bird that flew high and took you, grateful, along with it, tucked beneath its spreading wings, till you touched the golden ball in the sky. At its worst, it carried a sledgehammer’s swing like those games at the midway, as you downed one drink after another without ever ringing the bell, when you knew with agonizing certainty that with the right drink you could slam that bell all the way home. Only you can’t do it, swing after swing, because the rhythm is always wrong, no matter how ballsy you get, how rotten with drink, and you sink without flying upwards, without singing the song in your veins, going down as fast as you’d lose a wager on a three-legged dog. Dan knew he was in for a night of lead boots.

The lack of a karaoke machine didn’t stop the optimistic or the desperate. From a far corner came the ragged improvising of one fellow who looked not long for this world, or perhaps he’d stopped in from the next for a quick one, blessing the living with his rendition of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” a laryngeal howl, raw as a fresh sunburn, and joined by an unlikely back-up from old times. Mick Jagger hungry for the glory days and Grace Slick coming down off a month-long bender.

Him: a wizened little monkey face, lips screwed up, his rock & roll all pain and attitude. Her: hair fringed like a sixties hippie, eyes staring from some forgotten acid trip, like she’s haunted by a memory fixed in her brain that won’t let go. Still, she’s neatly put together: white blouse belted on over tight black jeans, Nancy Sinatra boots, good cleavage even in the light. She’s over fifty, but then he might be nearly twice that.

One of the sure signs of being an alcoholic is when your three best friends are bartenders. These two had friends in spades, while all around them sat the tired faces of the hard-working men and women who looked like little more than deflated balloons and empty overcoats draped over chairs. What they all had in common was the uncelebrated lot of the working man and woman.

The singer sent the notes skyward with a particularly inventive phrasing to his rendition. “Go, Georgie!” some die-hard rock & roller called out, with Grace cheering him on. Made for each other, the pair was. She put her hand on the inside of his thigh, let it creep upwards with a raucous laugh, like it was an old joke they were sharing. The tune turned and he began to crow like a rooster, quenching thirst and drowning troubles as one. A covering of chartreuse over iodine: “The Green, Green Grass of Home” had never sounded so agonizingly verdant.

Dan reeled into his pocket and pulled out a mash of bills, peeled two off and slapped them onto the table. Maggie Smith came over and snapped them up, teeth stained chromium yellow like unpolished silverware.

Over by the door, a stain seemed to be trying to ooze into the shag without much success. Dan sidestepped it and staggered from the bar to stand breathing in the night air. That good clean Sudbury air, bought and paid for by the generosity of Inco.

Mist hissed from the sewer grates where shadows huddled against the cold, home to the unlucky and unloved. The cityscape faded into grey over the disembodied forms of a pair of unhappy wraiths. They glanced up at his passing. Purple hair and nose rings. Where did they get the money? Nifty hair and piercings didn’t come cheap.

Dan walked on, trying to imagine his life if he’d stayed. Where would he be now if he hadn’t taken that first step onto the tarmac of the 69, never lifted his thumb, opened the cab of the truck and said with stunning alacrity as though he’d done the same thing a million times before, “I’m heading for TO”? Stacking empties at the LCBO, probably, or driving a cab or even working as a clerk at the gleaming new taxation centre. Or maybe he would have died, one fistfight too many, the blinding flash of a brain hemorrhage followed by everlasting blackness. A line on a tombstone to indicate his whereabouts underground. But he would never, ever be working underground. Not for Inco. Not for Falconbridge Mines. Not for anybody.

Maybe he’d be the older man groping the teenaged striplings with their nervous eyes and taut tummies, jeans sloping down to reveal, pinked and toned, those smooth, muted buttocks, watching with quiet patience, one hand on his rod, while the trestle trembled and a boy timed his ejaculations to spew over his fist at the shriek of a train passing overhead in the dull monotony of a summer’s afternoon, as the brooding older man with the scar on his right temple tried to recollect the shape of the future. His future. While the dark, mutinous side of him tried, and failed, to imagine the rest of his life.

Dan shook off the image. Memory’s way was perilous.

He hadn’t gone a block before his bladder nagged him to stop and take care of business. He looked around and stepped inside a cul-de-sac, like ducking into a darkened church, standing a few feet out of sight from the road while he fumbled with his fly and relieved himself. He looked down and laughed: You’re pretty sizeable. He thought of the shocked look on the cyclist’s face as he pushed him against the fence. He sprayed a box labelled with a brand of tissue papers, the drops splattering back at him, managing to wet his fingers in the draw. This, he knew, was the prelude to sloppy drunk. He was halfway through his meditations when he heard the voices. He swayed toward the dark and hoped he’d finish before they appeared or else that they would pass quickly and not look into the alley’s dim depths and see him at prayer.

Shadows appeared over his shoulder, thrown long by the street lamps. From the sound of their footsteps he knew they’d turned down the entrance to the alley. He still had the presence of mind to feel embarrassed at being caught. He shook himself and zipped up before turning, ready to smile and laugh at his predicament.

At first he took them for an older couple. They looked burnt-out wisps of human beings. She appeared to be arguing, stumbling while leaning against him as they moved closer. Then he recognized them as the forms huddled on the sewer grates.

She looked him up and down, sizing him up for something. A coffin, maybe. “What are you doing, fuckhead? You fucking pissing in the street?”

A part of his brain considered this: not the nicest of greetings. Certainly not words to cheer you at two in the morning in a back alley. They continued toward him with their jerky, spastic walk, propping each other up like badly conjoined twins. Purple hair glinted in the moonlight. She wore a tight clingy skirt and leopard print leotards. The boy was in jeans with a black T. A tattooed dragon clawed its way up his throat and wrapped itself around his neck. Both had on pricey leather jackets. Between them they had enough piercings to fill a small jewellery box. Must’ve been hell getting through airport security.

“Did you hear me? I said what are you doing?” She snarled like a Ringwraith. There should have been smoke wreathing from her lips. “I want money, you cocksucker!” Her arm clutched a purse in a ridiculous parody of a woman. “How much you got, fuckin’ dickhead?”

“Yeah!” said the guy. “We want your money. How much you got?” He laughed and rattled a chain wrapped around his fist. They were close enough for Dan to see their faces. The flat-eyed, no-mind stare of heroin addicts doing their diddly dance. Sid and Nancy in On The Town.

“Scum,” Dan mumbled.

The chain quivered in quick junkie twitches. “You talkin’ to me?” the boy demanded. Make that Sid and Nancy in Taxi Driver. The perfect couple. She had a cunt for a mouth; he had an arsehole for a brain.

Behind him, a fire escape traced a route to the roof, but it was blocked above the first floor. The only way out of the alley lay behind this highly colourful odd couple. At least Sally would be impressed. Dan reasoned he could bluff his way out or, if it came to it, he could manage the two of them without much trouble. They weren’t big and they were addicts. They were probably used to rolling drunks who couldn’t put up much of a fight. Then again, he was drunk.

They moved faster than he expected. She swung the purse, clipping Dan on the bridge of the nose with a wallop. His hands went up to his face as his throat constricted in rage. The sky pitched, shrank, then resumed normal proportions above. The brick had found its mark.

Sid raised an arm to follow up with the chain. Fuelled by anger and pain, Dan booted him in the balls. The boy staggered and fell to the sidewalk, the slither of leather on concrete. Through his outraged howl, Dan heard the click. Something glinted. Metal. Longer and sharper than a piercing. Nancy came at him, blade in hand, suddenly looking more than capable as Sid writhed on the ground. She would have at him for her man. Adrenaline surged like lightning. With no time for niceties, Dan kicked her in the stomach and sent her and her purple hair reeling.

He watched, awed by the slow-motion trajectory as she flipped and rolled and landed against the curb. Her head hit, making an ugly, disturbing sound like the clack of false teeth. She lay still. Was she breathing? In that light, it was impossible to tell. If anyone came around the corner, they’d be calling him the assailant. The boy would claim he’d attacked them. That he’d been bigger and faster — maybe fast enough to kill a teenaged girl. Self-defence had brought out the knife.

Over by the curb. An arm moved. Reached up to feel the head. Thank. Fuck. He hadn’t killed her after all. For a moment he wanted to go over and help, but quickly thought better of it. The head looked around, fixing him with a hateful stare. Hands planted themselves in the dirt. The body twitched, inching upwards. She was like the Evil Dead, already coming after him again.

He flashed on the pub. Remembered he’d paid in cash. No paper trail. No one knew his name. Wasn’t a regular. And was very very grateful.

Time to go.