Blindside

by J. R. Carroll

  In Simmonds’ fist was a bottle of Victoria Bitter, his eleventh in two and a half hours, and not surprisingly he was showing signs of wear and tear. In Bill Simmonds’ case, that always meant a filthy disposition. It wasn’t only the VB, but the Jack Daniel’s Old No 7 chasers that were causing the perspiration to burst from his crater-sized pores and seep through his hair and into his too-tight, slightly frayed shirt collar. Judging from the successive sweat rings under his arms, he’d worn the same once-white shirt three or four days running.

  Fat Man’s wife of many years, so Wes had learned, had finally come to her senses and vacated the marriage a couple of years ago. In her absence the slide had rapidly set in— according to first-hand reports Fat Man’s ‘living quarters’ were now a no-go zone in which the extended families of rodents and other forms of lowlife flourished under cover of wall-to-wall pizza or Hungry Jack’s cartons and discarded Victor Bravo cans. The way one comedian told it, Bill Simmonds’ standard of house training was roughly equivalent to that of a retarded ocelot, with maybe the ocelot just getting the nod in a tight call.

  Right now—oiled, angry and warming to the intensity of his verbal assaults—he was ripping his necktie loose with scarred and blotched fingers, legacy of third-degree burns long ago. His eyes had developed that fixed, glassy stare: an alcoholic’s stare, made even uglier by the fact that a vein had burst in the left one, turning it into a blood-filled egg.

  ‘You’re a fuckin’ pathetic loser, Wes,’ he was saying yet again, maybe for the fifteenth time since Wes had arrived. This had become his catchphrase for the day.‘Lo-ser, with a capital “L”. I’ve always said that. You’re so far down the fuckin’ scale of life forms I can barely see you, you grubby little lowdown cunt. You’re a goddamn nobody, a nothin’—a zit. A zit on the face of a maggot.’

  He took a long pull on the Victor Bravo, wiped his mouth with the back of his hambone-sized paw and followed up with what was left of the Jack. Ice rattled against his teeth. ‘Beats me how you managed to play football all those years. You got no dash, no go, no cojones, nothin’. You’re a thing, Wes. You may believe otherwise, but you are wrong. If I saw you flattened out there by a fuckin’ truck, know what I’d say? I’d say roadkill. There’s some fuckin’ roadkill. But I wouldn’t bother gettin’ a shovel to scrape it off. I’d leave it for the damn crows to clean up—if they’d eat it. And that’s a big if.’

  He paused for a moment, glowing and visibly impressed with the level of abuse so far as he gathered some ammunition for the next salvo, then added:‘Reckon you were a hard man in your day,don’t you? Real tough son of a gun. Got news:bullshit, Wes—that’s a myth of your own creation. Your daddy was no pistol. Any coward can blindside someone and king hit him. I could find any dope off the fuckin’street—any dope I choose— and I guarantee he could kick your shitty butt right over this building. Bet on that, you weasel. Weasel!’ He slammed his fist on the table:everything in the room jumped,even the bartender.

  Fat Man had lost it just for a moment after that. His hair was wild, his face had gone purple and there were bits of foam on his lips. Wes kept his trap shut. He knew Fat Man well in this condition and it definitely wasn’t worth arguing with the bastard—not when he was owed some cash and a favour or two. Wes just wanted to collect what was coming to him and split, but Fat Man was making him wait, and suffer. Mind games, nothing more. Wes was used to it. It was a yawn.

  When he had some self-control back, Fat Man said, ‘So, what’ve you got to say for yourself, Wesley? Any fucking thing? Or are you gonna drop your pants and cop it up the rear end as usual?’

  Wes drank from his VB, forcing himself to maintain eye contact with Fat Man, focusing on the less horrible one, then said levelly, ‘Whatever, Bill.’

  ‘“Whatever, Bill”,’ Fat Man mimicked. An ugly leer twisted his shiny dial.‘Listen to the lowdown, cock-flashing little piece of pond slime: “Whatever, Bill”. Is that supposed to be your response to my question?’

  ‘Well, I forget what your fuckin’ question was, to be honest,’ Wes said, trying for a slight smile. ‘Refresh my memory.’

  Fat Man stared at him with an intense loathing pumped into every feature. ‘Listen, douche bag—first thing, don’t call me Bill, right? Ever. It’s Mr Simmonds to you—or sir. Only people who call me Bill are people I respect. Not grubs and perverts. Second, you’ve never been honest in your miserable life—right? Right?

  ’ ‘If you say so.’

  ‘I do say so. I do indeed. Now, run along and get me another fuckin’ beer, you slippery worm. And don’t forget the fuckin’ Jack. Make it a double this time.’

  ‘Need it like an extra hole in your arse,’ Wes said to himself, heading for the bar. He was reasonably sure Fat Man didn’t hear him. The barman pulled two VBs from the packed ice, unscrewed the tops, set them on the soggy bar towel, then poured the jiggers of Jack No 7 over a generous fill of ice.

  ‘Nine dollars even,’ he said.

  Christ. Fat Man never had to dip into his kick here, but he still made Wes shout every other round. More power games.

  When he was seated again Fat Man was on his phone, rambling incoherently to someone he obviously didn’t care for—another cop, a dodgy acquaintance, one of his many other snitches, maybe even his ex-wife. When he was smashed he treated everyone with the same hostility and contempt.‘I don’t fuckin’care,’he shouted into the piece. ‘Oh, spareme the gruesome details. Just do it. Do it. I’m not interested in the fuckin’ whys and wherefores. Listen to me. Pay attention one final time: have it in the account by tomorrow, all of it, or I’m comin’ over for a social visit. We’ll have a nice cuppa tea together. Understand me? We in synch here? Or not? We marching to the same drumbeat? I sure hope so, for the sake of your good health, my friend.’ He snapped the phone shut and dropped it into his shirt pocket. ‘Prick,’ he said. ‘One thing I can’t stomach, it’s a fuckin’ welsher.’

  Wes swallowed some beer, allowed a few moments to pass, then said, ‘I hate to bring up the subject of money after all that, Mr Simmonds, but any chance of a payday comin’ my way about now?’

  ‘Payday? You?’ Fat Man said, throwing him a puzzled frown. More mind games.

  ‘I did the job, didn’t I?’

  Fat Man smiled, almost benignly. ‘That you did, Wesley, that you did. And I’m a man who pays his way.’ He reached into his pocket, removing a crumpled fistful of notes and some change. Coins spilled freely onto the floor, but he paid them no mind. ‘Gotta pay your freight in this life,’ he mumbled. ‘Now let’s see . . .’ He selected a fifty, seemed to hesitate, then fished out another one and tossed the two notes on the table among the booze slops. ‘There you go. Paid in full.’

  Wes looked at the pitiful offering. He had fully expected five hundred, given that he’d put two days into the job. Five hundred was nothing to Fat Man. He would lose that much during a night on the town, even before he’d hit the casino. He’d put that much on a horse just for interest.

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ he said.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Fat Man said, all innocence, drawing him in, eager for fresh hostilities.

  Wes stepped around it. ‘You know.’

  ‘Don’t know, don’t care,’ Fat Man shrugged, and took a solid belt of his Jack.

  ‘It’s an insult,’ Wes said. ‘Come on, I have to live.’

  ‘Why?’ Fat Man said. ‘Who says so?’

  But Wes had turned away, slowly, silently, his face a portrait of ever-deepening unhappiness. This was a pointless and humiliating exercise. It was what Simmonds did best.

  ‘Wesley,’ Fat Man said.‘No-one says you have to live. No-one. Least of all me.’

  Wes refused to meet his glazed, shitfaced, one-eyed stare. Fat Man was challenging him, but Wes wasn’t about to take the bait. It just wasn’t worth it. At the same time, however, he felt he had to make a stand of some sort. There was the small matter of his own admittedly diminished self-respect to contend with—a near-invisible
entity lost in the wilderness.

  In a while Fat Man said,‘Tell you what. D’you know who that guy was?’

  ‘What guy?’ Wes said, finally forcing himself to return Fat Man’s reddened gaze.

  ‘The one you were watching for me, you reject. You . . . you waste of sperm. Come on, get with it.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’ Did he give a toss?

  ‘Shaun. Randall. McCreadie. Do those three words mean anything? Shift any gears in that lowly, primeval brain of yours?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m sure they do. Flashback: 1992. Sprawling country mansion of departed multimillionaire car salesman, George Petrakos, and his equally departed wife Stephanie. Formerly the well-known porn queen with the big, luscious tits.’

  Wes sat up.‘Shaun McCreadie? He was one of those bent cops. They knocked off squillions.’

  ‘Yeah. They knocked off squillions, and they knocked off George and Stephanie into the bargain. Remember that part? Boom, boom: up close and real personal. Slaughterhouse job.’

  Wes was nodding, piecing it all together in his mind. It was a sensational case—but was it eleven years ago? Must’ve been. Now McCreadie’s out and Wes had tailed him. Shit.

  ‘Shaun McCreadie’s a stone cold killer, Wes. Killed a man several days ago, in fact. That’s right. Now, if you prefer, I’ll arrange for him to find out that some termite called Wesley Ford has been spying on him, following him around, trying to nose into his private business, and I’ll see to it he has your address, phone number, shirt size and all. How would you like that?’

  Wes just looked at him, trying not to blink, trying to ascertain how serious he was in his stupor. The damp, overlong hair had fallen over his perspiring brow, making him look even crazier and cock-eyed than he was. Wes couldn’t believe he ever remembered anything in the mornings.

  Fat Man droned on:‘Because, you see, because I can do that sort of thing, Wes. Done it all my life. I’ve built my career and reputation—my name—on the slippery backs of treacherous little bug species just like you. It means nothing—nothing. I chew ’em up and spit ’em out, dime a dozen. You’re not happy with your wages, put it in writing. Go and see the ombudsman for bugs. Complain to the bug species union. See how that plays. Or try begging on the floor, why doncha? If I wanted to, I’d squash you like I’d crack a flea with my fuckin’ thumbnail. That’s what it is to me, Wes—cracking a flea in half.’ He finished his Victor Bravo and stood up, steadying himself by keeping his hands on the table. ‘Now I’m going to take one of my Johnsons to the can for a drain,’ he said. ‘When I come back, I want you gone from my pub. You’ve overstayed your welcome, once again.’

  He paused at the door of the men’s room, turned and said, ‘You want more money? Go and get some off McCreadie, Wes. He’s got squillions to go around. Do that and you’re a better man than Bernie Walsh ever was.’ Then he laughed, a booming, thunderous blast of noise that rolled in waves through the bar, and shambled inside, swearing as he bounced off the walls.

  Wes drove to another hotel, a major gaming venue not far from where he lived in the northern suburbs, and fed his hundred into the machines. Queen of the Nile chewed up the first fifty, and then Inca Sun snaffled the second. Since he was playing maximum lines and three credits per line, the whole process lasted about ten minutes. Wes didn’t enjoy any of it. He went to the bar for a beer and reviewed his situation.

  Examined from any angle, it did not look promising. As much as he hated copping all that abuse from Simmonds— Mr Simmonds—he had no choice in the matter. He needed to stay onside with the bastard, unfortunately. Fat Man did it to plenty of people, Wes knew that, and took it all with a grain of salt. It was his idea of public relations. What did they call it? Community policing. Wes could sit there all afternoon and let the words wash over him with no ill effect. He refused to be roused. Once it started—as it always did—Wes just sort of shut down internally till the storm passed, let him get it all out of his system. Eventually he ran out of steam.

  Bill Simmonds had serious problems. Christ he put away a heap of piss. Wes had known him for six, seven years, and Fat Man had always been a heavy boozer, extremely heavy, but he used to be able to hold it. Now he couldn’t. He used to boast about how he could drink all day and night and it would have no effect on him, and it was true, but then suddenly reality kicked in. It hit him right out of nowhere. Wes could remember the occasion when he first noticed. Fat Man was sitting opposite him in a bar just like he was today, in the middle of a tirade about something—or someone—and Wes looked at him and saw how out of it he was. He was completely gone. His eyes had popped and his big head was sort of rolling around on his shoulders, he was swaying from the waist up, and he was making no sense, none. It was that sudden and dramatic. One minute he was normal, next minute he was a cot case. He had lost it that day—now it was all downhill fast. Wes would not have been at all surprised if Fat Man’s liver was shot. His brain certainly was. He sure must’ve had a lot of dirt on some important people to hold onto that job. He was old enough to retire on a decent pension, as well as what he’d squirrelled away from graft over the years, but he never would, not until he had to. He enjoyed screwing people’s lives and watching them squirm too much.

  Wes was impervious to Fat Man’s insults because he knew the truth in his own heart. As a player—an acknowledged champion—he had learned how to control his violent urge whenever someone tried to wind him up. His policy was not to retaliate—not immediately. In so doing he had received more than his share of punishment over time, but in football as in life, what went around came around. When the chance arrived to square off Wes did so with interest, and was rarely reported. The incident Simmonds referred to—the blindsiding affair—was a notorious chapter of the game in which he had shattered the jaw of a star player from behind at a critical time during a final. The player had had it coming for a long while and his number came up when he gained possession following a scrimmage on the half-forward line. It was the perfect setup. No umpire saw it, and in those days there weren’t TV cameras covering every corner of the field. Despite legal threats from the victim himself and trial by media he was never booked, although there was a police investigation that eventually went nowhere. But the incident dogged him and pretty much hastened his retirement that year even though he had a couple more good seasons in him.

  So Bill Simmonds’ insults didn’t matter. Wes’s trophy collection was ample evidence of that. The time was coming, however, when he was going to have to sell all those trophies, as a number of sporting champions had been forced to do of late. Trophies and medals were all very nice on the shelves, and they brought back memories, but they didn’t pay the bills or put a new shirt on your back. And Wes was staring down the poverty barrel as a result of what the experts called his ‘sexual dysfunction’. In his last trial he was ordered to undergo a course in psychotherapy, to which he’d readily agreed—the alternative was six months in the sin bin. It was all words, pure bullshit, as he knew it would be.

  Wes was no sick puppy. He was no more deviant than ninety percent of the human race. People got off doing all kinds of weird shit: playing with blow-up toys, flaying themselves, checking out rock spider porno on the World Wide Web, watching smutty or snuff movies, tarting themselves up in ladies’ underwear and bras and putting on wigs, lipstick and make-up. Wes had even heard of a guy who stored high-heeled shoes in his freezer: every now and again he’d whip ’em out and have himself some fun. And if one of those psychiatrists on the panel wasn’t a goddamn card-carrying shirt-lifter Wes was a poor judge. In this life it’s a case of whatever floats your boat, baby.

  Wes became a lab specimen as these high-paid eggheads devoted several months trying to get to the bottom of this sexual dysfunction of his—what they also called his ‘compulsive disorder’—to discover the underlying cause that drove him to perpetrate these indecent acts on unsuspecting females. They were right about the compulsive part—Wes only ever acted on the spur of the momen
t. The chance presented itself and he seized it. He did not hide in shadows preying on victims, and nor was he armed with anything apart from his tool. Wes was smart enough to pick up the pace, learn the correct responses and terminology, tell them exactly what they wanted to hear. Pretty soon he could’ve run the sessions himself. He could have told them all along that there was no big mystery to solve. Exposing himself out in the open in broad daylight was a buzz—simple as that. Gave him a real boner. But of course the psychiatrists wouldn’t buy a simple answer. Fact was, he preferred flashing his wanger to a woman he’d never seen before to actual physical sex. What was the harm, anyway?

  Experts claimed it did psychological damage, and could lead to more heavy-duty offences—assault, rape, even murder—as the buzz wore off, but that was not so in Wes’s case. He harboured no violent fantasies; he had no intention of hurting or raping anyone. Off the field he was a pussycat, plain and simple. Christ. Come to that he had little or no interest in actually screwing women, or having a ‘normal, healthy relationship’ with one. Why, he did not know. He’d never had a proper long-term girlfriend, despite the many opportunities to come his way over the years. One-on-one, women completely defeated him. This had been so for as long as he could remember, and it was an issue Wes had no desire to unpack.

  For all that he was now marked as a serial offender, and without the services of Bill Simmonds he might easily score a year or two in the big house for his latest transgression. Simmonds would help so long as Wes could be of use to him, and Wes hadn’t let him down yet. Reliable snoops and general dogsbodies—someone like Wes who knew his way around the seamier precincts—were invaluable but becoming rare these days, no doubt because the heavy drug scene had raised the stakes so much that people weren’t game to cross the main players. So if Simmonds chose to be the bastard and shortchange him, so be it. There were bigger fish to fry.