“I’ll need another bullet,” I said
“Knew you were true blue.”
We killed the bottle. The men in front of the tavern moved away. There came over me a flush of heat and cold commingled, of past, present, and future aligning, a fuse slotted into place. I’d never experienced anything quite like it and was at last allowed to identify the sensation: surrender. This was my fate, tangled in a skein with Jack’s. I must follow the thread to its end, wherever it led. While Jack slept I spent a painful night upright in the chair, the Webley in my hand, waiting for the dawn.
FRIDAY
SOMETIME DURING THE long night it began to snow. I smoked the hours away and watched slow flakes fall from an iron sky. Near daybreak drays hauled wagons through the white. Plodders sloshed muddy footprints through the splodge and then came saltshakers, sandmen, and shovellers who cursed and huffed over heavy masses. By and by the sky unveiled blue and it became one of those sere eastern mornings I hated to admit I loved. By noon the city’s heat and friction would melt the snow to dirty gutter runnels. While watching Montreal light up I faded. A voice woke me.
“Friday.”
“Friday,” I repeated.
Jack’s eyes burned bloodshot and his face was raw, lip swollen. My poor body ached and itched, blood boiling from the rum and salt. The cardboard cigaret deck was crushed and empty, one bullet smoked for each regret. Jack sat Indian-style on the bed. On my sinister zygomatic ran a pulse of hot pain from the blow that’d knocked me out. The room stank of cordite, stale tobacco, and men, worse than a pool hall the morning after. Out the window fingers of ice weighed down telephone wires in the building’s shadow.
“So, what’s the interior of the Mount Royal Club like?” I asked.
“Pardon?”
“You heard.”
“Clever brute,” Jack said.
His eyes glittered out from beneath lowered lids, a colder blue. My own were brown near black with the pupils pinholes in the iris, stinging and sullen.
“Hungry?” asked Jack.
“Not half.”
A gramophone wailed out Caruso from a downstairs room. I felt none too clean and in need of a cooking in the bath.
“Let’s move the motor elsewhere,” I suggested.
“Fine idea. We’ll need it later,” Jack said.
So Jack was determined to carry through his mad scheme. I noticed he hadn’t answered my question. We creaked to life, my mind pinwheeling, an ache near the crook of my arm where the needle’d bit through the skin back in the day. An observant coroner would see the scar there.
Together Jack and I shambled down to the street and walked to where we’d left the sedan. I circled the block to make sure it hadn’t been marked for a clipping. The Senator or Trudeau might’ve contacted the cops and given over our particulars, hoping the authorities were up to the task of taking us down. The force owned a fleet of five blue Frontenacs, and there were plenty more patrolmen on foot. The likelihood of our being rousted was low but we took meagre precautions nonetheless.
Jack suggested we leave the Auburn in a scrub lot on the back side of the mountain. I nixed the idea as obvious and with too many places for the police to stake us out, rifles at the ready. My notion was to scatter it as a leaf in the forest amongst other motors. Jack agreed, too tired to argue me, and we parked on a side street in east Westmount. From there we hacked it back into town, Jack off to his hotel and I to mine after a stop at the tobacconist’s for twenty Forest and Streams. We agreed to meet in the Morgan’s toy department at one.
With some care I approached the ancient ’hop in the faded red velvet coat outside the Wayside and slipped him two dollars. No sir, no one has been nosing around the hotel asking questions about any of the guests lately and your room has been entered only by the chambermaid. A nancy behind the front desk handed me my key without any interest and I went up. In the lift a frost seeped through me, a premonition, but the room proved to be untouched. Before anything else I went to the toilet and urinated, then refilled the Webley’s empty chamber from the hidden box of cartridges. I sat down on the bed in a cold sweat.
What was I becoming? One virtue of the recent activity had been its usefulness as a distraction from contemplation. Now that I was alone in a quiet room doubt made its assault. I was a pathetic creature prey to the manipulation of others. None of the fine qualities grafted onto me by my education and upbringing had flourished; I was no one’s idea of a gentleman, with no rectitude, no finer sentiment.
A reverie manifested from the future: I was a clerk quietly rolling pennies for the Bank of British North America, courting the fair stenographer daughter of a lumberman back in Vancouver. She and I would walk past the arch in Stanley Park and look across the inlet to the pyramids of raw yellow sulphur beneath the mountains on the far shore. We were engaged, and in love, and the Pater would officiate at the wedding ceremony. All my efforts at that hellish cabin in ’Magog where I’d wrestled away my addiction to morphine were rewarded, my trespasses forgiven. I’d turned over a new leaf and settled down.
It was no use. The Pater’d sniff out the corruption oozing from my pores. He’d recognize his son for a wastrel, a thief, a drunk. Jack was the true prodigal. It’s the way of the striving Scotch-Irish: without a calling or a title or a bank account I was the worst of my class.
The only way I was headed back west was in a box. There were no further colonies to ship me off to and hide the family’s shame, except the North. Fancy that, me manning a Hudson’s Bay Company post on Frobisher Bay or the bank of the Great Slave Lake, the true
With deliberate care I re-counted every banknote by denomination in piles on the bedspread, a finite amount shrinking nickel by dime. Tonight that’d change, should Jack’s plan play out. Thinking on that, I smoked. Truly the essence of life was in this endless waiting for something to happen. All the interstices, the queuing for tickets, crowded bus trips, and painful midnight walks to empty rooms, all the moments that the mind wiped clean. Instead it crammed itself with detritus and reckoned up restaurant receipt totals. Unwanted snatches of popular songs reverberated. There’s no drama in the quintessence, the eternal wasted moments like this point in space and time. The Earth was in constant motion and Einstein could do the maths. Was it possible to walk it all back, unshoot the Senator’s thug and cradle Rex the dog? The poor bitch cowering in a corner. I closed my eyes to banish the image and unbidden Laura’s shape materialized. I felt a tumescence of arousal and touched my erection. Humiliated, I rubbed my eye sockets and felt every dendrite fray, raw nerves spitting electricity. I rolled my money together and pocketed the gun. Animal vigour seemed the only real activity, a pursuit of appetite. It was time to go.
With my Gladstone carry-all I left the hotel but kept the key, having paid for three more days. From there I repaired to an old haunt on Craig Street for an ale. It was dark as sin inside,
