Surface Rights

by Melissa Hardy

  “Well, you’re fresh out of luck,” Romy told him.

  “Excuse me?”

  J.R. was shaking like a dog. Verna noticed that his splotchy forehead was beaded with perspiration. Was he running a fever?

  “Because they’re gone.”

  “Gone?” J.R. repeated, not computing. “But … I … where did they go?”

  “I smoked them, asshole,” said Romy. “And why are you shaking like that, anyway? Are you some sort of Powder Monkey? Are you … like … riding the White Pony?”

  J.R. shook his head. “Nah. I’m clean. I’m sick. Pneumonia or the flu or something. Sleeping out in the bush these couple of nights … goddamned bugs. Can I sit down? I feel dizzy.” Without waiting for an answer, he careened over to the peacock chair and plopped himself down. He leaned his head back and carefully closed his eyes. “I can’t believe you smoked my Camels!” He began to keen softly, rolling his head from side to side.

  Verna turned to Romy. “Powder Monkey? White Pony?”

  “Meth,” Romy explained. “As in ‘methadrine.’ As in crystal meth.”

  “I find the fact that you know these things deeply disturbing,” Verna told her.

  “I was in a rehab centre,” Romy pointed out.

  “My last pack!” J.R. moaned. “What am I going to do now?”

  “Well and how the hell was I supposed to know it was your last pack?” Romy demanded. “And what were they doing in my mother’s bedroom in the first place? Huh? Answer me that!”

  J.R. opened his eyes. “I was sort of hanging out here.” Then, “Well! She give me a key, didn’t she?” He glanced at Verna. “And then you came along and I didn’t know what was up with that, so I took off. Left in a hurry. “

  Verna held up a hand. “Wait a minute. Hold on. You were squatting here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “In this house?”

  “I told you.”

  “And you only left on Tuesday?”

  “She give me a key!” J.R. defended himself. “It’s not squatting when they give you the key.” He pulled a key with a green tag from his shirt pocket and waggled it at her.

  “It’s squatting when a dead person gave you a key however long ago and years later you decide you’re going to use it to break into a house and squat there!” Verna countered.

  “Well,” said J.R. stubbornly, “that’s not how I see it.” He returned the key to his pocket. “Fern was my fiancée, and, if her and me had gotten married like she wanted to … like we planned, this’d be part of the matrimonial property — it’d belong to me. Part of it, anyway. I figured that’d give me the right to stay here, at least until I get myself sorted out. Wasn’t hurting anything or anybody. Then you had to come along. And those others.”

  While this exchange was going on, Romy had been working things out. “You said you took off. How?”

  “Waited until Verna here was inside, then I climbed out the window,” said J.R. “Slid down the roof of the shed. Cut my leg on a rusty drainpipe going down.” He glanced down at his right leg; a dirty rag was wrapped tightly around his lower calf. “Hasn’t healed. I think it’s festering.”

  Romy turned to Verna. “That explains it.”

  “Explains what?” Verna asked. “The smell?”

  “No! Explains why the window was left open and the door was locked from inside. And the Camels. Mom would have never smoked Camels. Camels are foul. Worse than those butt-legged puffers of Winonah’s.”

  J.R. took umbrage at this. “If they’re so disgusting, why did you smoke them?”

  “I was desperate,” retorted Romy, “just like Mom must have been desperate to hook up with a loser like you. Ew!”

  “I was different when your mother knew me,” J.R. defended himself. “Good-looking. Strong. Not like now. I’ve had a hard life. Not my fault things turned out like they did.”

  “Well, whose fault is it?”

  Verna interceded wearily. “Romy, please. What’s done is done. Let’s just move on.”

  “Yeah,” said J.R. “We gotta move on. Look to the future.”

  “Which brings me to this.” Verna retrieved the Notice of Intention to Perform Assessment Work from the pocket of her overalls and waved it at him. “How hell do you get off thinking you can stake a claim on my property?”

  “Our property,” Romy corrected her.

  “Our property.”

  J.R. shrugged. “What about it? I got a licence. It’s my right. It’s anybody’s right got a licence.”

  “But what do you hope to gain by it?”

  He laughed. A ragged laugh that escalated into a dry racking cough; it sounded like there was a ball rolling around loose in his trachea. Then, in a ravaged voice, “Gold.”

  “Gold?”

  “One way or another.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  J.R. looked at her through narrowed, blinking eyes. Through their glazed pupils she could just glimpse his reptilian brain firing. “Don’t tell me I have to spell it out, Verna.”

  It took her a moment, then, “Oh,” she said. “You mean extortion.” Relief flooded her — relief that he had just beaten her to a plan she had already settled on. Hard on its heels, however, came anger. How dare he put her in such a bind?

  “Call it whatever you like, but I got myself to look after. And I’m sick. Real sick. I need medicine — expensive medicine. I need a place to stay. I gotta eat. And, like I said, Fern was my lady. This … what was hers … I figure I got a right to some of part of that. That’s what I figure. And I don’t expect for a minute that you’d give it to me out of the kindness of your heart. Fern said you were cold. Cold as ice. Her words.”

  Verna flinched to hear Fern’s estimation of her charity; it tore the sting right out of her anger. Well and what did I expect? she thought, freefalling. She had kicked Fern out of her house and contrived never to see her again and now.… Well, now it was too late. And it had been too late for a very long time. Years. “Okay,” she said roughly. “Let’s you and I talk dollars and cents. But downstairs. I need a drink.”

  “What about me?” Romy wailed.

  “Finish your dinner.”

  “But I don’t like people watching me while I eat!”

  “Stay up here until you finish, then come downstairs.”

  “But it takes me forever! Hours!” Romy protested. “Can’t I just skip it tonight? Just this once?”

  “No,” said Verna, “or I swear, Romy, I’ll call 911. And I’m taking one of your cigarettes. For Romeo here.”

  “What?” Romy was outraged. “No!”

  Verna reached for the pack of Virginia Slims on the bedside table. So did Romy. The brief tug of war ended in an easy triumph for Verna — Romy was as weak as a sick cat. “Ah-ha!” Verna crowed. “For that I’ll take two! Come on, Romy! Paisley got you a whole carton.”

  Romy collapsed back into a stack of pillows and crossed her stick arms over her sunken chest. She pouted. “You better not do anything bad to my Auntie Verna,” she told J.R. “Or Jude will rip you open and tear you limb from limb. He’ll eat your balls, too. He specially likes balls.”

  J.R. blinked. “I thought his name was Fang.”

  “So, fill me in on my sister’s life,” Verna said to J.R. She was standing at the counter in the kitchen, building J.R. a rum and Diet Coke. He sat at the kitchen table, cracking his knuckles and his neck and picking his venous ruin of a nose. Every few moments he would cough — a dry, inconclusive rattle. Unproductive. That was how doctors described such coughs. “How did you meet her?” she asked. “You don’t exactly seem like her type.” And what had Fern’s type been, anyway? Pretty, marginal, faintly artistic. Of these attributes only “marginal” would seem to apply to J.R.

  “Well, uh … in Toronto,” he muttered, glancing sideways at Jude, whose body language — hackles high, tail low — continued to send a message of vigilance, as did the soft, low-pitched ruffle of a growl that emanated, every few minutes, from his throat. “In
ninety-seven,” he added.

  Ninety-seven, thought Verna. Eight years ago. This goes back awhile. “So you’re not from around here?”

  “No.”

  “But you came here because of her? Because of Fern?”

  “You could say that.”

  She handed him the drink, noting, as she did, the tremor in his hands when he took the glass from her. Like an old man’s tremor. Like Donald’s, toward the end. Returning to the counter she made herself yet another vodka and tonic — possibly her fifth, no, probably her fifth — but no matter. As it turned out, finding a strange man on the roof outside her dead sister’s window had had a remarkably sobering effect upon her; in fact, she felt downright lucid. “Where have you been staying? After I showed up, that is.”

  “I told you.” He was cranky, restless. “Outdoors. On the other side of the lake. Why do you think I’m so sick? Sleeping on the ground in my condition. I got an old pup tent, but it’s mouldy and it leaks. Bought it in a yard sale. Somebody else’s old junk. The bastard who sold me said it didn’t leak. Swore to it. He lied.”

  Verna glanced around. After the dimly lit bedroom, the yellow kitchen seemed to blaze with light. In all this radiance J.R. appeared even pastier and sweatier than he had upstairs; he had collapsed back upon himself as though aware that the degree of scrutiny afforded by so bright a space worked to his disadvantage. He reminded her of a grub worm, slimy, unnaturally pale. She wrinkled up her nose. “It’s way too bright in here,” she said. “Why don’t we go onto the porch?”

  “Yeah. Good.” J.R. seemed relieved at the prospect of darkness. He followed her out to the porch, taking the Heywood rocker farthest from the door. She sat in the other rocker and Jude positioned himself between them. She glanced to where Lionel had been earlier in the evening. She was relieved to find that he was still there, sitting cross-legged and gazing out towards the lake. Thank you, she thought.

  “Don’t mention it,” Lionel said.

  “I’ll have that cigarette now,” J.R. said.

  Verna handed him both Virginia Slims. He looked confused and tried to give one back. Verna shook her head. “No,” she said. “I don’t smoke.”

  “That’s right,” said J.R. “Your type never does.”

  “What type is that?”

  “Miss Prissy.”

  The phone rang, startling J.R. He jumped, splattering some of his drink on his mud-caked jeans, then shuddered back into his chair. Verna rose from the rocker. Miss Prissy! A version of Super Grammarian, she supposed. “Don’t get your knickers in a knot,” she told him. “It’s probably just Carmen checking in on Romy.” Then, when he continued to look uneasy, “A friend,” she said. “Checking on a sick child.”

  “You going to take that dog with you?” J.R. tucked one of the cigarettes into his breast pocket and scrounged around in his pants pocket for a lighter.

  “Why?” asked Verna, but Jude followed her into the house and down the hall to the kitchen, anyway. She picked up the phone.

  It was Carmen. She sounded excited. “I found out something. Something about your mysterious J.R. Eubanks.”

  “He’s here.” Verna kept her voice low. “Eubanks, I mean. He’s here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “‘Here’ as in on the porch,” said Verna. “I caught him breaking into Fern’s old bedroom.”

  “Breaking in?”

  “It’s a long story,” said Verna. “Anyway, the bastard’s pretty keen to be bought off. I’m just working out the details now.”

  “Okay, but first you’d better listen to this,” Carmen told her. “Just so you know who you’re dealing with. I have a membership in an online government public records database — for background checks. You know, criminal records, property records, bankruptcies and liens, sex offenders. That sort of thing. Very useful for checking out prospective clients.”

  “Yeah, and …?”

  “So I did a search on your guy. Seems he’s has been in and out of prison most of his life, from juvi onward. Botched B and Es for the most part, a couple of car thefts, small stuff, but — and this is the freaky part — in ninety-nine he was charged with aggravated assault — for the sexual transmission of HIV. Charged with infecting this woman with HIV.”

  Verna’s heart turned over. “I’m sorry, Carmen. What did you say?”

  “The sexual transmission of HIV,” Carmen repeated. “You know. The AIDS virus. Some woman in Toronto — Fosbrink was her name. It seems he’s known he was HIV-positive since the mid-nineties, but he didn’t bother to tell her before sleeping with her. The case was thrown out of court. Some legal technicality. The trial judge had misdirected himself or something. It wasn’t that Eubanks was innocent. He was guilty as hell and everybody knew it. Anyway, he ended up back in prison the following year, but on a different charge — a bar fight that spun out of control. He just got out of Beaver Creek in Gravenhurst last month. The Fosbrink woman died in 2002. Cause of death: some kind of pneumonia called PCP, common among AIDS patients.”

  Ninety-nine, Verna thought, and Fern had died in 2001. “Excuse me, when did he go back to prison? This last time, I mean.”

  “2000.”

  “2000,” Verna repeated. “Thanks for this, Carmen. This is really helpful information. More helpful than you know. But I’d better go.”

  “Keep me posted.”

  “I will.”

  “Oh, and Verna?”

  “What?”

  “Whatever you do, don’t sleep with him!” Carmen hung up.

  Verna replaced the receiver and leaned back against the counter, trying to work the chronology out. So J.R. had been in and out of prison all his life. That meant long exposure to shared needles and unsafe sex. He had been diagnosed with HIV in the mid-nineties — mid-nineties, what would that be? Ninety-four through ninety-six? In ninety-seven he had met Fern and their thing — whatever that thing had been — was presumably over by ninety-nine when he was tried, but not convicted for aggravated assault with a deadly penis. Then in 2000 he went to jail because of some bar fight, and, while he was incarcerated, both the the Fosbrink woman and Fern had died from AIDS-related causes. Clearly the Fosbrink woman was not the only person he had infected. He had infected Fern, as well. It was just that no one had made the connection until now — because no one had known about J.R. and Fern; because only she had known that Fern had tested positive for HIV and had died of an AIDS-related cancer. She looked at Jude. “It’s official,” she told him. “That son of a bitch killed my sister!”

  Jude glanced at his bowl and wagged his tail hopefully.

  “No, you don’t understand. That goddamned son of a bitch killed my sister!”

  Jude barked.

  “What? You’ve had your dinner!”

  Jude’s ears drooped; his head dangled.

  “Oh, all right. But only because you’ve been such a mensch tonight. Honestly, Jude, I’ve never thought you capable of conveying menace or anything really beyond a kind of goofy bonhomie, but tonight you rocked it as Fang. You really did.” Jude trotted over to his bowl and stood before it. She crossed the floor, dropped to her knees and wrapped her arms around his neck. “Jude!” She pressed her mouth against his cheek and earflap and whispered, “He killed our Fern, Jude! What are we going to do? We’ve got to do something. But what?” She released the dog, stood, and bent over to scoop kibble out of the bag of Iams. As she did, the orange bottle of OxyContin that she had removed from Romy’s discarded clothing earlier in the evening popped out of the front pocket of her overalls and into the bag of dog food. She was reaching into the bag to fish it out when a thought occurred to her. Going to the front door, she leaned out. “How’s your drink?” she asked the shadowy, hunched figure in the rocker.

  “Gone.”

  “How about I freshen it up for you? After all, the night is young.”

  “Sure!”

  She took the glass he offered her, and, returning to the kitchen, extracted a grey marble mortar and pestle f
rom the cabinet. Let’s make this a double, she thought. No, on second thought, let’s make it a triple. Plucking three OxyContins from the bottle, she proceeded to crush them into a fine powder. The lucidity that had prevailed since she had seen J.R. through the window of Fern’s bedroom crumbled away. Verna was now officially drunk. And very pissed off.

  Ten minutes into his doctored rum and Coke, Verna, who was watching carefully, like a spider, noticed a distinct difference in J.R.’s demeanour. All his tense urgency seemed to drain away and he began to slump in the rocker and slide slowly down until he lay sprawled in it, almost prone, the glass half full on his sunken belly.

  “So, about Fern,” Verna began. “How did you meet her?”

  Up to that point getting any information out of J.R. had been like prying shrapnel from a wound. Under the influence of the painkillers, however, he became more forthcoming. “Underground parking garage,” he said. “Queen Street West area. I was the attendant. An attendant. That’s the only kind of job you can get when you got a record — a lousy one. Ex-cons and sand niggers, that’s who they hire. All day long stuck underground in this little booth. You never see the sun. Well, you never see the sun in Toronto, anyway. But still. Underground. It’s like you died and they buried you. You do know I got a record?”

  “No,” lied Verna. “Why would I?”

  He didn’t seem to register the coldness in her voice, the barely suppressed fury. He looked like he was enjoying himself. He probably thought they were having a pleasant conversation.

  “Well, you do now.” He sighed. “I guess I just assume people know. Like it’s branded on my forehead or something. According to most people, it’s the most important thing about me, the only thing worth knowing. But it’s not the only thing worth knowing. Nossir. I got my good points and she saw ’em — Fern did. Lot of people won’t have nothing to do with you if you got a record. Treat you like dirt. But not Fern.”

  “So she knew you had a record?”

  “Sure she did. After a while. Once we’d … you know. You don’t just say ‘Hi, that’ll be seven dollars. I got a record.’”