Business

by J. P. Meyboom

  “Listen, you prick,” Hornsmith said through clenched teeth, “when I take this story public, that you killed my demented mother-in-law, you can be sure a plague of lawyers, advocacy groups, media, and other assorted bottom-feeders will be investigating your business for months. Possibly years. Not good for sales. The Department of Health will suspend your licence and the police will wonder who else you’ve killed.”

  Courtney looked like he wanted to cry. Lips all pouty. He shivered some more. “We haven’t killed anyone.”

  “Possibly,” said Hornsmith, “but by the time that’s clear, it won’t matter anymore. The damage will be done. Be smart. Do this my way. Do you have a cremator?”

  Courtney’s arms tensed. His hands gripped the rail. It looked like he might flip over the gurney. The blue veins in his temples throbbed. His eyes went stone-like as he appeared to recalculate his position. After a moment, he nodded.

  “The book deal goes away?” Courtney seemed ready to news-proof his world.

  “On my word.”

  “My cousin has a funeral home with a new cremator.”

  “And a good cremulator?”

  Courtney nodded again. “They came as a package.”

  “Forget the autopsy. She always wanted to be cremated.”

  Hornsmith held open the door to the observation room and waited for us to move into the warmth. “Just to show you I can be a reasonable fellow,” he said, “I’ll cancel the TV series deal as well.”

  We stood around and stamped our feet to get our circulation back. When Courtney looked away, Hornsmith winked at me and gave a big shit-eating grin. His beard was wet with condensation from the icy room. He rubbed his hands and straightened his back.

  “This is a win-win,” Hornsmith said. “We’re all going to get rich. Even you, Dr. Courtney. In spite of your efforts to sabotage yourself. You stick with me. I’ll have you farting through silk underwear.”

  “We’ll need a signed agreement,” Courtney said, ever practical. “I’ll have something for you by Monday at my downtown office.”

  The poor bastard looked wilted. The few hairs he still had in his comb-over lay across his shiny dome like limp seaweed. His shoulders slumped. His eyes downcast. Silent. When we left the viewing room, he marched off down the corridor without a look back to see whether we’d follow.

  Hornsmith chuckled as we watched Courtney’s retreat.

  “And that’s how we do it,“ he said to no one in particular. “I’m going to miss this business.”

  SEVEN

  Marla’s Show

  KIRKLAND LAKE, Saturday night: red and blue strobes throbbed. Marla vibed electric. Marla levitated. Marla gyrated on stage with The Raging Socket. She expanded and filled the bar. She threw one hand over her head and brought it down, caressing her body under her clammy T-shirt. With her other hand, she rubbed the microphone between her legs. Sweat flew from her forehead. Her eyes closed in ferocious ecstasy. She twisted and twirled and contorted to the frantic rhythms pounded out by the speed-crazed drummer on his wobbly kit. The skinny guitar player fell to his knees, every sharp note intact.

  “It’s Saturday night,” she shouted, “let’s raise some hell!”

  The hoarse crowd chanted, “Yeah! Yeah!”

  Booze sloshed over the floor. The air was sour with sweat and beer. People danced on tables. People rolled on the wet floor. Bodies dripped against one another in the dark. Bass and drum thumped. Marla, high priestess of the night, transported the locals from their dreary paycheque lives into her mystical circle.

  Transfixed, I squeezed against the wall at the back of the bar with the mob. Marla had summoned her fool, and I’d obeyed. Ten hours on the Greyhound, early by a day to surprise her. There I was, excited and filled with desire for her nails in my back. Anxious for her smile and the taste of her salty, smoky mouth on my tongue, I watched her rip up the night. It didn’t matter if the warm bottled beer tasted bitter.

  She surveyed the crowd and said, “If you never play me, I’ll hold you down when it gets rough, I’ll protect you from the storm.” The microphone amplified her heavy breath. The crowd cheered. “A woman knows a real man can’t deny her worth,” she shouted over the noise. “You fuck with me, I’ll do my worst!”

  The noise from the band’s amps pushed the air so hard the drapes behind the bar fluttered and the overhead chandeliers swayed. The room howled. Someone threw a bottle at the wall. Glass shards exploded over the room. People screamed. People laughed. She encouraged communal chaos.

  When the set finished, the rickety stairway up to the green room strained under a stampede of groupies, roadies, and various hangers-on who all groped through the dark to get upstairs, where the party insiders continued their havoc. Breathless, I followed two steps at a time, eager to find Marla in the crowd. A fat shaven thug in a black T-shirt with some device rammed into his ear guarded the door at end of the gloomy corridor. He put a hand on my chest.

  “I’m with the band,” I said.

  He shrugged, zombified, and patted me down before letting me pass. Inside, the party room was choked with the smell of dope and cigarettes. Beer bottles clanked through the blare of music from unseen speakers. Shouts and shrieks of laughter rose above the din.

  Marla was at the back, flopped in the lap of an older guy with short silver hair. He wore round red-tinted glasses in a silver frame and a striped black shirt. Lover Man was my guess. Her legs dangled over the arm of the couch. He stroked her thigh. She laughed. She didn’t notice me. A hot shock flashed across my chest. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. She’d said he wouldn’t be here. I hung back. Reconfigured. Adjusted to the new picture.

  I always played her cool. Out of sight, out of mind. That suited her. She banished all who came too close or clung too desperately. We had our own code. A secret understanding. A matter of unspoken passions that no one could come between. I wanted to believe in our little conspiracy. Just Marla and me. I realized now I could’ve been wrong.

  The lights flashed on and off without warning. A bell summoned the crowd. Everyone cheered. The next set was imminent. When I approached the bar with its sombre bartender, his thick hands laced at rest over his belly with the patience of an executioner, the crowd, moving in unison under some invisible command, hoisted Marla on high and carried her out to the stage. I showed my back to the room and signalled for a drink. I didn’t want her to catch me. My legs almost buckled under the weight of this new-found calamity. The bar held me up. I reconsidered. I made myself invisible. I should’ve stayed away.

  A few people lingered in the litter-strewn room. Muted voices of a more serious note hung in the air. Lover Man huddled with a long-haired First Nations guy who sported a fistful of silver rings and a black silk bomber jacket with a red and gold crest that read Eagle Creek First Nations. They moved over to the bar next to me. Invisible, my ears cocked dog sharp into their business.

  “I’m expecting a big shipment,” Lover Man said. “We can hide it in the mine shaft for now.”

  “Sure,” said Eagle Creek. He poured himself a glass of Diet Coke from the can served up by the executioner behind the bar. “We’ll keep it there till the coffins are ready.”

  “When’s that?” Lover Man lit a smoke with a wooden match. Sulphur filled the air. He looked right through me with his red lenses. My invisibility held.

  “A few weeks. We just got the cedar.”

  Lover Man grinned a row of rusty nails.

  “And no more middlemen, right?”

  Eagle Creek scanned the room, then sawed a ringed finger across his throat. A silver skull flashed in the light.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “the mountain keeps its secrets.”

  They moved away. Snatches of their conversation trailed. Eagle Creek said something incomprehensible, then: “The paper said he was from away, by the clothes. The body was found in the place of sacrifice. Headless. Hands cut off, too. No way to ID.”

  Lover Man nodded. “That’ll give everyone somet
hing to think about.”

  Both men laughed. Their shoulders heaved. Pirate humour. I’d heard enough. It sounded like they were talking murder. Marla’s playmates sounded like stone cold killers. Ice crawled across my scalp and down my arms. It was time to go.

  In haste, I tripped over my feet and fell down the last three steps into the bar downstairs. From his perch on high, the bored security guy watched me pick myself off the floor. The band was playing onstage, but instead of the adoring throng, hollow-eyed demons jerked to the beat. I elbowed through the crowd to the exit. No one seemed to notice or care about the violence with which I rammed myself through the room. The thump of my heart was the only sound in my ears.

  It was Saturday night in Kirkland Lake. A light rain glittered up the street. Marla had said to meet her Sunday morning at the HoJo on the Trans-Canada Highway. I’d arrived early to surprise her. Now I wanted to get away any way I could. Too bad the last bus home had departed hours ago.

  I stood outside the bar, looked at the rain, and wondered what to do, when Eagle Creek came out behind me. He lit a cigarette.

  “This puts a damper on the night,” he said after a while. My invisibility had worn off.

  “Yeah, I guess,” I said.

  “Where you from? You look like you’re lost.” Eagle Creek flicked his ash at a raindrop.

  “Down south.”

  “Looking for something?” He had a hint of steel in his voice.

  “Nothing.” I didn’t face him in hopes he’d go away. “Waiting for a friend.”

  “What kind of friend you waiting for?”

  “Girlfriend,” I said. “I’m going to meet her in the morning. I’m early.”

  “Women,” he said, “they’ll get you to do the dumbest things. I had a woman once got me so crazy I actually did time for her.”

  “Really?” I should’ve kept quiet. This was dangerous ground. The longer we engaged, the stronger the pull into Marla’s other world. Her dark world.

  “Yeah, she had me thinking there was another guy. She made me nuts with it. She had me believing like it was this guy who worked at the hardware store. I finally stabbed him through the lung. Almost killed him.”

  He laughed and produced a long serrated hunting knife from his waistband. The thing looked like a sword. He jabbed at his invisible foe with conviction.

  “Turned out she wasn’t doing him at all. She was just working me up.”

  “Shit,” I managed.

  He laughed some more and stuck the knife/sword back in his pants.

  “Don’t worry, buddy, I’m just having some fun with you. Where’s your car?”

  “I came on the Greyhound.”

  “Man, you travel rough. This chick better be something. Where you staying?”

  “The HoJo on the Trans-Canada, I guess.”

  “Need a little dope? Some smack? Some coke? Some meth?”

  “Thanks, I’m fixed,” I said.

  “Then let me give you a ride. It’s too wet and too far and there’s no taxi in this town.”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “No, I insist,” he said. “It’s my civic duty to help strangers get where they’re supposed to be without anything happening to them.”

  There was no choice. He took me by the arm through the rain across the street to a restored black ’64 Thunderbird. White walls. Dual chrome exhausts. White leatherette seats with red trim. A dream catcher dangled from the mirror. Big trunk. Think: body disposal.

  The rain spiderwebbed on the window. Eagle Creek drove into the night. We seemed to be headed out of town into the dense treed wilderness. Fear this, my mind said. If he reaches over, jam your fingers into his eyes. I glanced at him to target the spot. My fingers gripped the leatherette.

  To fill the silence, I said, “What business are you in?”

  “Coffins,” said Eagle Creek. “I’m the sales rep for a coffin maker. We make them out of cedar lined with silk or cotton printed with traditional patterns. Cedar purifies. We ship them to the Indigenous People across the country.”

  “Business good?”

  “Oh, yeah. People are dying to get them.”

  He laughed too loudly at his own joke. He lit a joint from the car lighter and passed it over. Shadow goblins flitted by the roadside. Telephone poles like crucifixes. Something rattled in the back of the car every time we hit a pothole. Metal on metal. Like a shovel or a pick banging the side of the trunk.

  After a while, he wheeled the car off the road into a dirt patch by an old trailer. We bumped to a stop. My body tensed like a sprinter at the gate. My hand gripped the door handle, ready to yank it open and flee.

  “I gotta get something,” Eagle Creek said. “Stay here.”

  He was out of the car without another word. A yellow light burned through the cracked window of the trailer. Some busted lawn furniture and a rusty barbecue lay tipped over in the rain, monuments to parties past. A huge mutt on a chain exploded from under the trailer. White teeth flashed in the night. Eagle Creek kicked the dog in its ear with enough force that it yelped back to its lair. He entered the trailer without knocking.

  Unsure where I was or where to go, I stayed in the car. Took a couple of breaths. Told myself this would be all right. Marla trucked trouble in ways that were becoming clearer, but for now her murderous her pals didn’t know who I was. They had no reason to harm me. So I told myself.

  After about ten minutes, Eagle Creek returned to the car, slightly winded. No explanations. He sniffed hard, exhaled, and squared his shoulders. Off the glow of the dashboard, his silver rings glinted with blood, which he wiped off on his jeans. It could’ve been barbecue sauce. Sure. Like he’d stopped in for a quick bite and a kind word with an old friend. Why not? Could’ve been. Could’ve been anything. But I’m pretty sure it was blood.

  Once the car was back on the road, he said, “If that girl shows up, you’d best go back wherever you came from. You shouldn’t be here.”

  “I guess you’re right.”

  We rode in silence for the rest of the drive with just the windshield wipers scraping over the glass to keep us company. Eventually, a yellow HoJo sign beamed out of the dark: The Road Ends, Relaxation Begins. A cheerful beacon of hope that this night might end well after all. We parked under the awning. My hands unclenched. Fingers aching.

  “Thanks for the ride,” I said, grateful we’d arrived to a place of safety.

  “I’m sure I’ve seen you somewhere before,” he said.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, I’m going to think about it. I hope it wasn’t something bad.”

  After Eagle Creek peeled away in the Thunderbird, I entered the motel reception area and rang the little counter bell they kept for late-night travellers. The old lady who came out in her housecoat didn’t want to give me a room. I had no credit card. No luggage. No car parked outside. At the offer of cash in advance, she relented.

  In the room, I slammed in the deadbolt. Moved the TV from the desk to the floor and pushed the desk against the door. Then I piled a chair on top of the desk. Anyone coming in after me would have to work for it. Door secured, I retreated into the bathroom for a hot shower.

  Marla was out with Lover Man. Maybe somewhere for dinner. Then who knows what. Probably in this motel. I curled up, naked and wet on the bed. Stifled my rage and my sorrow with a pillow between my teeth. I pictured her across his table. Smiling. Flirting. Listening like she cared. Hiding her loneliness. Seeking something that devil could never give her. Seeking something she didn’t even know she wanted. She liked me, sure. But she didn’t consider me a good catch. She missed my potential. Thought me too broke. Too naive. Too much soul and not much else. She lacked the imagination to go to the ends of the earth with me. She wanted cash and comfort. She had no use for soul.

  Though Eagle Creek scared me, fear I could work around. Fear I could protect myself from. Marla made me sad. No amount of deadbolting or furniture piling could protect me from that. I told myself I didn
’t care. Outside, cold raindrops the size of grapes spattered the window.

  Marla was in a booth with Lover Man and Eagle Creek at the motel restaurant the next morning. I couldn’t get out of sight fast enough. Eagle Creek spied me first. He deadpanned it like he didn’t notice. Marla pretended to be surprised. She waved me over.

  “This is my friend Paul,” she said, all smiles. “What are you doing here?”

  Lover Man had heard of me. He chewed his breakfast steak and said, “The nutty greeting card guy, right?”

  Marla kept it tight. Marla told Lover Man I was her writer friend. That worked. For killers like him, we were a neutered species.

  “He’s here looking for his girlfriend, boss,” Eagle Creek said. He seemed to study the three of us for a moment. Then he said, “I found his sorry ass in the rain outside the bar last night.”

  Lover Man cut his meat. Eagle Creek stabbed his fried egg and watched the yellow yolk bleed into the home fries.

  Marla didn’t flinch.

  “You had breakfast?” Lover Man said. “Have some coffee. Tell us about this girl.”

  I’d checked my crazy fear from the night before. Now wasn’t the time to lose it. Marla moved in a hard world of violent characters. This could end badly and we’d all end up in cedar coffins. Keep it light. That was the plan. They had no idea. If Marla kept herself together, we’d be fine. I slipped in beside Eagle Creek.

  “She makes me crazy,” I said, improvising with speed and conviction. “She’s not from around here. She travels a lot. She said she’d be here this weekend, so I came up ten hours on the Greyhound to be with her. She said it was going to be all right.”

  “That’s a coincidence,” said Lover Man. “You here, us here. Running into each other in this place.”

  “Coincidence, I guess.”

  He looked at the others and said, “Do you believe in coincidence?”

  Marla poured tea from a small metal pot and said nothing. Eagle Creek shook his head.