The Black Ace

by G B Joyce

And I told him that we were there because Mars’s widow asked us to be.

  “And why isn’t she here asking herself?”

  I said that she had spent the day at the funeral home looking after the inevitable particulars and was in no shape to come out that night. And that maybe she’d find it all too painful.

  “And no family, I suppose?”

  I let that go with a nod. “Well, sir, you can ‘wonder’ all you like,” he said, shutting a notebook. “My job isn’t to help you get past your wondering. It is …”

  And he went on. I gave up with the eye contact. As if the day hadn’t been long enough. I should have known that the guy who was working the desk on the night shift, especially an older guy, was going to be sour.

  Finally I’d had enough. I took out my BlackBerry, wrote a note to myself with his name and number, and saved it. “That’s fine, officer,” I said. “I appreciate your limited help. If you want you can let whoever comes in here on the day shift tomorrow know that I’ll be phoning in. If that doesn’t work out, I’ll call the regional headquarters.”

  I knew I had overstepped even before Chief put his big glove on my shoulder.

  “I don’t need to see you out,” the old hump said before adjusting his glasses and burying his head in some paperwork.

  7

  God in his Providence must have decided that Swift Current needed a good wash or a cold shower. When we got back to the Jeep freezing rain was pelting down. Chief and I took it to a run. Arthur checked in and as soon as I shut the passenger-side door I popped a Celebrex. I had five left in my vial. I thought I was going to need one before the flight Tuesday morning and another after. I didn’t bother trying to hide the pain around Chief. Practically every guy in the league returned from the war with a Purple Heart. I had my knee. Chief had a right shoulder that kept popping out, a career-ending liability for a tough guy who made his living with his right fist.

  The radio brought bad tidings. A young thing did her weather update in a sunny voice at odds with her script.

  It’s six thirty. From Weather One the forecast for southwestern Saskatchewan, Monday night through Tuesday morning: Freezing rain and winds out of the west at fifty kilometres an hour with gusts up to eighty kilometres an hour and temperatures of minus five. We have a high-winds and traffic advisory for the area. Tuesday afternoon: Cloudy with freezing rain giving way to snow …

  “What next? Hail, frogs, and smiting of the first-born?” I said.

  It turned out to be worse than frogs. Little Miss Sunshine gave us the traffic update.

  We remind those of you heading to the east, the Trans-Canada is closed. Two separate accidents involving multiple vehicles and tractor-trailers jackknifing. The local authorities are strongly advising against drivers getting out on the road tonight.

  I thought of my luggage sitting there at the Hotel Saskatchewan. I didn’t have even a toothbrush with me. Then I thought of dying in an icy ditch beside the highway. “Forget it. Let’s get rooms before they’re all booked. I don’t know if I’m up for imposing on Mitzi. I haven’t seen the guy in twenty years and then I’m sleeping in his house while he’s sleeping in a casket. No thanks.”

  We must have been the last ones on the road to get the news. After five Sorry We’re Full for the Nights, we secured the last remaining room at some dump. One queen-size bed at that. Spread out, Chief could have spilled out over all four sides of it, I thought, while I filled out the standard personal-information file and declined to have my email registered. And while I waited for my credit card to be processed, I thought of the one trip out to Brandon last winter when I had the room next to Chief and I realized that it was him snoring and not a muscle car revving at 3 A.M.

  We had nothing to take to our room. We went there out of habit and surveyed the crib. Bed, end table, and desk wouldn’t have moved for a dollar at a lawn sale. I sent texts to my daughter at the prep school in Minnesota,

  how it go vs St Paul Kennedy … looks like I won’t make it 4 coupla weeks stuff came up

  to Sandy, who was expecting to go out to dinner with me Tuesday night,

  went out to swift current to pay respects to my good friend martin storms stuck here now bunking with good friend Chief

  and to Hunts to tell him that my road trip wasn’t ending when or how I had hoped.

  Chicago was in L.A. that night and the game was televised. The set in the room was older than we were and the motel owner must have forgotten to pay the cable bill. And I didn’t have my laptop, not that there was wireless. “Let’s grab a bite and then we’ll find somewhere to watch the game,” I said. “I need a drink. Let’s call a cab.”

  8

  The Imperial Tavern in downtown Swift Current adjoined a by-the-night-week-month flophouse and one of western Canada’s greasiest spoons. I felt like we were being watched even before we ducked into the Big I’s lounge. An eye, two storeys high, was painted on the facade of the building. I’m sure a critic somewhere would consider it a fine example of primitivism, but I imagined that the artist had painted a ceiling and didn’t want to waste any leftover paint before cleaning his brushes with vodka. If his inspiration was an eye he had seen in the bar, it would have been VLT-glazed and bloodshot.

  The Imperial’s fixtures and decor were as old as I was. The room smelled of fermented urine and mildew. At the side of the bar closest to the front door sat the joint’s only two women. Flora and Fauna were skanks in bad repair. Their matching lipstick was a shade of pickled beet and looked like it had been applied with a three-inch brush. Their complexions matched the filters of the Marlboros they had stubbed out in the smokers’ room. Their expressions said No Good Men. Their expressions were commentary on market supply and personal history. They gave Chief and me the Once Over Twice, felt some old embers almost glow, and then worked up the strength to drain their glasses down to the ice cubes.

  “I got a bad feeling, Shadow,” Chief said. He did a three-sixty scan of the room. “Let’s get out of here. Let’s go someplace else.”

  “C’mon.”

  “No, seriously. This is gonna be ugly, I know it.”

  “C’mon Chief, when in Rome, you know,” I said. “Let’s just have a couple. Watch the game.”

  Any analogy to Rome proved non-operative. On a much later, fully sober second thought, Chief had got it right.

  I spied two huge bikers in your standard-issue 4XL leather vests sitting at the far end of the bar. Maybe they were an inch shorter than Chief, but the smaller of the two had forty pounds on him. Guessing their age, I would have put them at forty or so, using the fading of their tattoos to carbon date them. Though beer and years had softened them around the middle, their biceps would have spanned twenty inches, the product of thousands of hours of gym work when they had thousands of days to serve as guests of the Correctional Service of Canada. Typical thing: These boys didn’t lift for chiselled bodybuilder looks or anything remotely athletic. They wanted size to intimidate and strength to do damage and the tag team had both. It turned out that Butch had spent a few years as a jobber on Stampede Wrestling, donning a mask for an easy gig that enabled him to deal steroids and pharmaceuticals to the other members of the circus. Sundance’s backstory was a little less colourful. He had been tried and dubiously acquitted in a double murder of a lawyer who had represented members of his former club and her husband. When I would pass Butch and Sundance on my way to the head I couldn’t tell if they were a source of the reek of the joint or if they just wore it as a result of their residence in this shithole. Either way, it was as anti-social as hell, which I suppose was the desired effect. When I would pass on the way back I didn’t bother checking out their advertised allegiances. I pitied them. They had made some questionable career choices. All of us in the room had. All of us didn’t have a Something More than Recreational Bag of Weed out in plain sight. They did. All of us weren’t running a Cash and Carry Recreational Pharmacy with a stream of losers coming into the I as a customer base. They were and were blata
nt about it. Turned out meth was the Special of the Day.

  They didn’t seem to mind our presence. Maybe I’d look like a cop somewhere, but they probably knew them all in Swift Current by sight. And Chief didn’t look like a cop at all.

  Chief and I were damp and weary but Mitzi’s pork chops had provided us the necessary stomach liner for a few beers. Draught was out of the question. The last time the lines were cleaned was the Year of the Great Flood. I stuck to a Canadian. Chief nursed a Blue. He wasn’t a drinker and that was probably a good thing for his health and the physical well-being of those around him.

  Last week’s Southwest Booster was on an empty seat at our table. There, on the front page, was a photo of Martin Mars. He was sitting at his desk, as it turned out, at the gas station where he heaved his last sigh. He had both hands clasped around a souvenir coffee mug with a raven on its side. I recognized it from my days in the German league when my career was winding down, the Berlin Ravens. Whisper managed a slight smile for the photographer.

  Mars Petroleum Co., the Swift Current–based gasoline distributor, could have another significant link in its thriving chain.

  Reports out of Regina suggest that MPC will be entering into an agreement with Garageland Canada, which has 50 big-box auto-parts and hardware stores across Canada.

  “It’s not done by any stretch,” said MPC president Martin Mars yesterday. “There are some details to iron out. It was a bidding process to have exclusive ties to Garageland and we feel that we came up with a successful bid. Exactly how it’s going to play out, I can’t really say right now, but it’s a great growth opportunity for our company.”

  Hopeful, forward-looking, happy: It fit with Mitzi’s theory. Swift Current probably had its fair share of despair, and a few of its citizens would like to choose their own time to exit. A guy looking to close deals like that didn’t seem to be a prime candidate.

  We parked ourselves at a table in line of sight of an old TV hung precariously on chains strung from the ceiling. The game was in L.A. and they showed the brief tribute and pre-game moment of silence at the top of the broadcast. No surprise, Grant Tomlin butted his way in front of a camera and started flashing his cosmetic dental work and his even less-genuine insight into the game. “Isn’t that the way it goes, Gord,” Tomlin said, looking squarely at the camera, as if Gord were a thousand miles away and not holding the microphone. “Every once in a while a player is never noticed until the moment of greatest need presents itself. And that’s the Martin Mars story, Gord. God rest his soul.”

  “He never even met Whisper,” I said. My indignation amped the volume of the fact-checking and the bartender gave me a nonchalant inspection lest I had been over-served. He skipped over to Chief and shot him a hateful glance, obviously holding back the urge to say, “We don’t get your kind in here,” or to goad him by asking if he was with the native outreach down the road.

  My stomach knotted when Chicago scored on the second shift. Our goaltender, Fournier, shit the bed, again. His wife had given birth to twins in August and, doubly sleep-deprived, he was having a small disaster of a season. Hunts said we should have traded him when the rabbit died.

  By the third period I had a serious steam on. Bad news for my company: Fournier was pulled after giving up four goals on nine shots. Our backup was a backup for a good reason. He stopped a few shots but gave up three more, even though it looked like Chicago was easing up with a 7–2 lead in the last minutes.

  I didn’t take my eyes off the dirty screen, mostly because I found the setting so depressing, but Chief did a scan of the room and the alarm light started to flash.

  “I don’t like it,” he said.

  I had no idea what he was talking about. I was lost in the game. “Don’t like what?” I asked.

  “The way those kids are looking at us.”

  I still didn’t clue in, but when I turned my head to look at him I saw two eyes burning a hole in me, eyes belonging to a thickchested kid in his not-so-old high school football sweater. He was standing over by the pool table and it was his shot, but he dropped his cue on the vomit-stained felt. He then walked away from the table and over toward us, stopping at spitting distance. And then he spat on the floor, close enough to my pant leg to make me look down.

  The bartender looked on wearily. There was no need to bring in entertainment on a Monday night. This stuff always sufficed.

  No. 51. I made him to be a linebacker. Maybe six-one, maybe 210, jacked, ’roided, maybe a year or two out of high school. The number suited him, one short of a full deck.

  “Where’d you say you were from?” No. 51 said. It wasn’t a question that gave me hope of having a civil drink in an uncivil place. His three other playmates fell in behind him and worked up their toughest looks. For reasons that escaped me at that moment but not for long they seemed awfully brave.

  “Just passing through,” I said and forced a smile. It was a Pick 6 Lottery Longshot that it would defuse a confrontation. “We’re in town for a funeral.”

  “Whose?”

  “Martin Mars. We were friends of his a long time ago,” I said. There was no chance he’d let us grieve peacefully. “He doesn’t have any friends,” the linebacker said. “Not in this town.”

  He turned to smile at his friends. I could see the name on his back. HANLEY. He was too young and too unthinking to come to any conclusions beyond his basic wants, occasional needs, and animal instincts. He voiced received opinion, I figured, probably from an authority figure he never bothered to question.

  Chief had his thousand-yard stare on. He didn’t see me at all. The handle had been pulled and his eyes were all Cherries, Lemons, Bars, Bells, and Sevens.

  I saw everything. Out of one eye I could see that Chicago had scored again. Out of the other I saw the kid take one step inside spitting distance. With the room temperature rising I grew a third eye, and it saw three of his buddies walking over from the pool table with cues in hand. With my fourth eye I saw the bartender back away to the farthest neutral corner and turn his back on the proceedings. And they were proceeding to go ugly.

  “Why don’t you go back to where you come from, city boy, take your girlfriend with you?” No. 51 said. It was four-beer courage and home-field advantage that made him and his buddies so bold, though why Martin Mars would get their backs up I didn’t know.

  I looked over at Chief. He was lost somewhere, like a veteran haunted by what he’d seen at war. For Chief it wasn’t grenades lobbed up to the trench or a hill that had to be won, but it was something close. It was Mangler in Fort Wayne or Dog in Muskegon or Kayo in Worcester. Or maybe it was in the league, Joey K in Detroit or the Reaper wherever he was playing.

  No. 51 pushed the table in and it bumped Chief just below the rib cage. My winger shot to his feet and that launched the table into the linebacker, though it wasn’t heavy enough to knock him back more than a couple of steps. Fight or flight kicked in for me and I was strongly leaning to the latter.

  The adrenalin was flowing but my toggle switch was flipped from flight to fight when one of No. 51’s buddies swung a cue at me. No. 54. He swung from the left side of the plate. I jumped back and he fouled one off my chest. While this went on, No. 51 flung the table back at Chief. All four rushed us. Chief had a handful of the linebacker’s sweater and one-punched him with a right hand. I heard a nose crunch like a wafer. The poor kid, he found out the hard way that life’s different without a face mask.

  No. 54 must have read the scouting report. He broke a cue over Chief’s bum shoulder. I had never seen the Big Man wince before. His lips went thin as a dime. It lasted a tenth of a second.

  They were just boys in their twenties and they outnumbered us, but we would have been more than all right all things being no more unequal. However, my fifth and sixth eyes and all other sensory tools at my disposal failed to pick up a meteorological shift: Six hundred pounds of biker in two pairs of boots with steel shanks and steel toes were blowing in at the backs of the hometown heroes. I
was in against two high school punks and Sundance, who had a full eighty pounds on me. I took my best shot at him and landed it but he kept coming, wrapping me in a bear hug, lifting me off the floor, and then driving me into the wall, my head cracking the already cracked plaster. While he was crushing my ribs and blood ran down the back of my neck, Nos. 51 and 58 took potshots at me from the side. Sundance dropped me in a heap on the floor and it was only then that I realized Chief’s fight with Butch had rolled into the back of the room by the door to the parking lot. Like me, Chief was dealing with a three-on-one. Unlike me, he had a chair cracked over his back. Unlike me, the next time he’d look in the mirror he’d see the imprint of Butch’s skull ring.

  And then, suddenly, the shit-kicking subsided and the room went quiet.

  Someone once said that in a game success rides on having a sense of Where You Are. For bikers, it must be about having a sense of Where Not to Be, and for these two at that moment Where Not to Be was the I. Butch and Sundance left Chief and me in messy piles on the messy floor, then picked up their weed and wares and blew out the back door with less than a minute to spare. They were on their home turf and had the benefit of local knowledge. They were down the evolutionary chain but up the grid in some sort of network. They must have been tipped off, had to have been the bartender who didn’t make a peep when they set up shop. I didn’t hear him say anything. Then again, there was a lot going on and I had an earful of blood.

  I had dropped a couple of bucks in the jukebox a half hour before but my songs came up when I was too busy and bruised to enjoy them. I had told Chief that I wanted to play “something for Whisper.” One was playing when a pair of Mounties walked through the front door and our party. They were big boys and had big guns. Something for Whisper was playing as they strongly recommended that we cease and desist. It was Moe Bandy singing about watching his children grow and the Lord letting the cold wind blow. We were out the door before the last verse of “Till I’m Too Old to Die Young.”