The sedan slid icily to a stop at the bottom of Poplar—or Popple’s—Hill, just off the Richibucto Road, in the driveway of Jehial States, a couple miles north of Eatman Avenue where the boys lived. It slid. To a stop. Everyone lurched forward, shifting from half-in-shadow to half-in-moonlight and back again. Blurring.
Neither bothered nor pleased, Silver whistled and, because Jehial’s house was on a slight slope, turned the car around so it was aimed at the legislature across the river. Fredericton’s lights sparkled through the winter night, competing with the stars, across the frozen-up Saint John.
The moon glowers. Silver, Rufus, and George exit the car: slick black in moonlight, sleek black against snow. Their feet go crump, crump through the squeaky snow. Their breaths are pale, ephemeral amoeba. Silver whistles “Auld Lang Syne"; he goes to the trunk.
George walks with a loping slouch. He’d shifted the hammer from his back pocket to the inside of his shirt, and, as he’d left the car, it’d fallen out, luckily, into plush snow. Silver, not lucky, got out the opposite side, missing the hammer.
He cracked the trunk: “How about that bottle of beer?”
George: “Okay!” He sweated inside his seemingly ice-cold blood and nerves, almost delirious that, by losing the hammer, he’d prevented further damnation.
The radio bleated hits tearful, excited. “Route 66,” “Nature Boy,” “Lush Life.” The light jangle of change in Silver’s pocket chimed with the “moon-spoon-June” jingles. The coins shifting in Silver’s pocket sounded to Rue a lot like jailer’s keys. He shuddered. No one paid any mind. But the noise was proof of piles of cash on Silver. Rue could imagine Silver as a Royal Bank manager, flush with money flashing George VI’s mocking face. Smell of woodsmoke pungently, sight of blue smoke shifting erratically in air, taste of runny noses on upper lips. Silver opened the trunk, got the boys one beer to share. The trio did get nicely on in ale. But if anyone fell down drunk, there was a blanket in back of the car.
The stars were flint, just broken bits of light, there, on the Richibucto Road, right outside the city limits and right beside obsidian wilderness. No better spot, amen, to use a hammer. Moonlit, the wind blew cold. The moon could tree and hang itself forever. The woods they’d stopped by was chilly but welcoming. Sleep couldn’t be too far. After sharing a beer, after waking a bootlegger. In the meantime, everyone’s shivering; six hands shaking with the tall brown New Brunswick beer bottle as it goes around.
As Silver lowered his hand, the moonlight shot off the pretty chrome casing of his Rolex Victory watch, a souvenir for war vets. Brown leather bound the timepiece to Silver’s wrist, its skin as fragile as that of a butterfly. At Silver’s neck, a black glass-bead rosary flashed. Silver was a slight, short man. He could be eclipsed. He could be taken without too much force. Here was a modus operandi, more or less. Rufus glared at Georgie, said nothing.
He thought, “Don’t Silver look a lick like Elmer Fudd?”
Far as Rue was concerned, Georgie was fuckin up again. And all he had to do was bust out Silver’s brains. He was, as usual, the rough part of a smooth plan: Would George hit Silver, please, so they could go into a house and eat?
Rue said to George, “Let’s go off a ways to chat about that gal.”
Silver laughs: “Can’t a married man listen in?”
Rue says, “You’ll hear all bout it later.” He puts an arm around George and they huddle away some paces from the car. White breath and black words venting.
Georgie was feelin queasy. “Well, I dropped the hammer.”
Rudy ask, “Where?”
George said, “Other side of the car.”
Frowning disgust, Rufus now ask, “What’s wrong wit ja, Joygee? Lost yer nerve?”
George say, “Ain’t hittin Silver. He’s been a pal.”
Rufus was unmoved: “Huh. Yer yellow skin’s yellow from the bone.”
George whimpered, “You want me to knock im off?”
Rue say, “You ain’t gonna hit him, I gonna hit him. Smack the fuck outta him.”
George almost sobbed: “Jiminy Cripes! No!”
Now Rue was just disgusted. “Damn it all to Hell!”
George protest: “I can’t hit Silver. I knows him.”
Rufus affirmed, “I gettin some cash money, get ma clothes out the cleaners. That’s that.”
George stamp his feet and shuffle a bit. “Why don’t we just knock over the damned cleaners?”
Rue’d not equivocate: “We’ll split the take dollar for dollar. We’ll sit at the big table, counting out his money.”
Jittery, George yelled over to where Silver was standin, “Silver, you know any cathouses round here?”
Silver let out a big laugh: “Beer’s gettin cold!”
The Hamiltons drifted back to the car. As they approached the vehicle, and while Silver’s vision was still blocked by the open trunk and while George was musing about the moonlight, Rue noticed where the hammer lay, only slightly shrouded by snow, and figured he could retrieve it, if-when needed, without much notice. Silver say, “Cheers, boys!” The bottle circled in the brilliant dark, followed by slurps. An opera of fraternity.
The car radio crooned saxophone and tambourine; it was the gravelly crooning of Nat King Cole striking sparks off ice. Cigarette-black and brackish phlegm spat into snow. Issuing from beer-oiled throats, men’s cussings mixed together Prime Minister Saint-Laurent and shit. But nobody noticed how evil multiplies, fanning out and circulating like the money supply—M1—itself.
The radio spoke a newspaper sermon. Men in black leather shoes and white cotton shirts and sable silk ties were about to decide the future. Mao was driving white moneybags out of China, but the Brits and the Yanks wanted to make him stop. Hollywood beauties were posing just as, elsewhere, nationalist Chinese and their allies were fleeing. The Royal Bank was bulking up on broken treaties and buffalo bones.
The New Brunswick government announced, “The battle against venereal diseases is being fought relentlessly. A Division of Dental Health has been added….”
Silver screeched at the idea of dentists checking crotches. The Hamiltons howled louder.
Silver ask, “Boys, guess what this province’s first-ever law was?” George and Rufus look at each other, shrug. Silver say, “A law to outlaw fucking sheep!”
The guys giggled. But what if the sheep liked being fucked by farm boys?
Silver opened up his wallet and, as the dreamy, glossy bills flickered in the moonlight, paraded photographs of his blond darling children, his stunning looker of a wife, Donna, glistening, sleek. She was the tenderly looked-after kind of blonde who could expect to sport a new mink coat every Christmas. Georgie gulped the acid of envy; Rufus smiled glaringly, extra brittle. Fragments of hard snow, spiking down, nailed loneliness into Rue’s heart, with early January of 1949 falling into history, with night and with chill, but without solace.
Silver sipped and mentally added up his bill, while standing in the snow looking at a cackling Rufus and George.
He wondered, “Are they ludicrous, or are they stupid?” See George, his cigarette drooling with his words because his nerves now made him feel small, shitty, and awkward. See Rue, looking like a jolly golliwog.
“Some can’t handle booze, and others won’t,” mused Silver. He had a sudden taste for red-and-white wine—the colour of blood on snow. The 1949 Custom Model Ford sedan glowed hotly in the cold.
Three men were there, drinking a single bottle of beer, together, before midnight. Just three men glad to be alive on a frigid night.
There were no complaints. No diagnosis of brain damage or lesions. No immeasurably deep snow. No mudflats adjacent, not really. No bloody blanket. No charred crucifix. No easy road to Saint John or to Hell. No dark rum. No tears. No host of crows. No talk of Robbie Burns’s statue, snow-topped, on the Green in Fredtown, its back turned against the river and scowling up at the university. No rills of meltwater cascading in a gully. No one laid low against the law. No blue-eyed n
ihilism. No well-dressed surliness. No complaints.
II
GEORGIE announced he’d stop up at Jehial’s, that rough, brown-moon-faced man, since they was parked in his driveway. Just go knock on the door and see if there was home brew about. Nice if some beer’d come in, or a quart of rum.
Adjusting his dark-coloured taxi cap, Silver crooned, “Fine, fine.” All was fine.
Georgie trudged up the ice-slick, hilly path. Rue and Silver shrank under the blackening moonlight and their chuckles and chat grew subtler the further George rose up that hill and neared Jehial’s door. He banged on it four, five times.
He hollered; then Jehial hollered, “Who there?” “George Hamilton.”
Jehial said, “Show your face so I can see you.” George stood at the flimsy deal door.
Him ask, “You got any home brew?”
Jehial spoke through thin pine. “Aincha drunk nough tonight? I know I has.”
George parried: “Blondola an me just got a new baby girl.”
Unseen, Rue slipped into the front seat of the car beside the slightly tipsy Silver. He was almost unheard.
(The wind bears the sound of a man crying “Oh!”)
Jehial ask, “What was that? Ya creep up here to thief my kindling?”
George protested: “When Blondola comes out the hospital, come on down and have dinner with us.”
III
A HAMMER’D hit Silver like a train. His ears—once ringing with music and laughter—were now ringed with blood. A detonation of blood inside the car: a deafening roar inside Silver’s skull. His head slumped on his neck and spewed red ooze. Moseying blood slid down.
Imagine the blood aquariuming Silver’s brain. The resistless hammer squashing the egg of the brain, its lobster-paste merde, its waspish humming. Then a dynamite of pain. Imagine the whiplash of the hammer, the sizzle of it against the skull, the brilliant cum of blood, accumulating redness, almost like a cloud, and the sussurus of pain, molesting, eclipsing, his nerves. The whinnying blood. Silver’s last breaths making a noise like hardwood cracking. To make his skull a bloody egg, smashed open like a piñata, consciousness seeping out, sparkling.
The hammer bit into and took away a cleft of ear too, like a hungry dog dragging down a pig. The hammer thudded against the skull with the same lasting tone of piano hammers striking strings. Its solid and sucking ingress brought on an egress of liquids and sighs. Silver was expectorating blood onto the steering wheel and the back of the front seat.
After five minutes at Jehial’s, George said, “See ya!” He clambered carefully down the tricky driveway, and went to Silver’s taxi from the back.
From the right side of Silver, Rue bark, “George, take the wheel.”
George went straight to the front of the car and looked in. He saw Silver. His head lay back over the front seat. Georgie then snapped open the driver-side door, ask, in a muffled shout, “What happened here?”
Rufus cussed, “You lost your nerve so I hit the so-and-so cause I ain’t goin home without cash to get my coat out the tailors and my clothes out the cleaners.”
George whimpered: “You shouldn’t've done it! I told ya I know the man.”
Rue snarled: “I’s gettin cash and my clothes out the cleaners.’”
Rue pulled the wallet out Silver’s back pocket, and stuck it, grinning, in his own shirt pocket. Rue caressed the snoozing man’s wallet, enjoying its smooth and still-body-warm feel. He felt uplifted. He giggled involuntarily, nervously, in homage to his sense of relief and of joyous accomplishment.
George doubled over, not to laugh but to vomit, though nothing would come. He say, “Why doncha smooth over Silver’s hair, hide that big injury in his head?”
Rue snorted: “Quit fumbling, Jawgee! Strip off his watch—it looks like gold—and that silly black rope around his neck. Take his wedding ring too.”
George got to work. He tore his buddy’s Rolex Victory off the limp left wrist. It felt like cool bone in his hands. Rue thrust his fist insolently down Silver’s right pocket and withdrew a handful of silver and some paper money. Georgie did the same on Silver’s left and got silver off the pocket. Grunting, George tugged the wedding ring of hammered gold off Silver’s hand and stuck it in his own pocket.
Rue said, “Silver’s just a little bit fucked up, I guess.”
“What we gonna do?”
“Drive.” An awful lot of blood rinsed on him.
Georgie shoved Silver’s short form aside with his hips as he took the wheel. He was now the proud owner of a mint-condition—if soiled—1949 Ford. Rue sat on Silver’s right. Two erect bodies kept slumping Silver’s body propped upright. George donned Silver’s navy blue taxi-driver’s cap, now violet. Boots went squelch, squish, squelch on the carpeted floor of the car, already whorishly wet.
First they drove without lights because George couldn’t master the headlights. He fiddled desperately with all the dashboard switches and knobs. He drove Silver and his brother—as if they were picnicking—down to the Lyric gravel pit back of the Hamilton shack on Eatman Avenue. They had to navigate snowy roads so strewn with potholes, any new car would look raggedy, old, and beat up after only a few miles. Parked invisibly in the gravel pit, now argentine as a moon crater, the boys completed their cannibalizing of Silver’s property.
George riffled through the wallet, divvying up the hard-to-come-by, dollar for dollar. Twenties, tens, fives, twos, and ones. Silver sat there in the silvery light and nodded his acquiescence. George got $88 and the watch and the ring; Rufus had $87 but also grabbed the clutch of coins. He also unhooked Silver’s black glass crucifix and beads.
The fraternal assailants stumbled from that snowy black car, its driver’s seat ruddy as if in a state of ruins. There be bloodstains on the rear left door of the sedan as well as a black streak on the upholstery behind the driver’s front seat, and then further incrimination, crimson, dripping onto the rear right door on the metal trimming. Bleeding turned the snow slushy silvery pink.
Rue now detailed a plan to stuff Silver in the trunk and deposit cab and cabby on a wharf in harlot-and-what-have-you Saint John, so cops’d pin this battery on the loose citizens of that louche city. But George said nope, leave Silver on the side of a deserted road. Rufus shrugged.
The lads drove six or seven miles down the opaque Richibucto Road, swerved into a half-forgotten by-road, then slid down a slope and, thus, smack into the frame of an abandoned, rotting car. This accident busted the right-hand parking light of the Ford and scraped it up. Georgie backed up six or seven feet. Then he got a blanket from the trunk and laid it on the black snow. Rue and him hauled Silver from the car. They was gonna dump Silver in any old snow under a tree. George had his shoulders, Rue had his feet. Unbuttoned, Silver’s head looked bad. The wound in his head was prettier than a scab, lovelier than a scar would have been.
Rufus guffawed, “He look fly-ugly.” He laughed. “Nope, he be fly-on-a-pig-ugly.”
George joked: “He look fly-on-a-pig-in-shit-ugly.” Now gut-splitting laughter—to the edge of tears.
Rue say, “He is shit-ugly!”
George still had a mood to screech as they took the soft, yielding Silver and laid him onto the blanket, wrapped him up, then carried him six yards in the woods and stretched him beneath a pine, on government snow, upon Crown land.
In the car, George found a flashlight under the dashboard. He turned it on, but dropped it when he saw how bloody the car was.
He say, “Let’s put Silver back in the car, drive downtown to the hospital, and park there—in front of Emergency.”
Rufus countered: “Naw, blow everything up! Torch the car and the corpse.” But Fredericton was too near to try such a pyrotechnical scheme. Rue sneer, “Leave Silver here. If it snows, the snow will cover up our tracks and he’ll disappear and the Mounties won’t have a body and won’t have a case.”
George ask, “What if wolves or dogs dig him out, gnaw on him?”
Rue growled. “And what if th
e cops find him?” George was sad: “Shouldn’t've slugged im.”
Rue: “Shut up! Who’s got the brains here?”
George: “Haps you shouldn’t've done the braining.”
Rue shrug. “Whole lot of us is gonna feel pain, sooner later….
Squeeze him into the trunk. Leave his ass in Saint John.”
“What?” George’s breath was explosive fog. He was scared, but flush with cash. He stared into the guilty woods. In back, there was bogs, brush, and forgotten graves.
Rufus decided: “You’s gonna drop the man’s ass and car down Saint John to smear suspicion on niggers and crackers down there.”
The brothers went and picked up Silver. A sigh parted the man’s lips, and they dropped him and scrammed. But they looked at each other, felt silly, and turned and saw Silver laid out flat, stiff, akimbo, in the snow. So they went back, hefted him up again.
Dragging the dead weight back to the car, Rue joshed, “Joyge, ya go down to 47 Moore Street, buy a heap of liquor. But when you’re drinking, walk back, one room to the other—some here, some there—eyein the gals and drinkin slow. Then you choose one, and don’t feel bad: every bed in that house has seen three generations of whores.”
George nodded okay; he already had his mind set on one of them ladies, Lovea, even as he was manhandling the bleeding, inconvenient Silver.
The brethren now jammed, bent, and crammed Silver into the trunk. They squished his pint-size body into an ant-size space. Silver’s head looked squashed lying against the spare tire and wheel, and his legs doubled up with the feet on the outside left corner near the trunk lid—just like that. He was partially wrapped in a Canadian Tire car blanket.
Tryin to squeeze Silver nicely into this unorthodox sarcophagus, George kept slammin the lid on Silver’s frozen and bloody right foot. Panicky, he just kept mashin the trunk lid on the man’s foot, thus continuously mangling the appendage. Groans came from Silver, and that just made Georgie feel worse. Rue pushed the man’s messed-up foot into the trunk and then slammed the lid. Then Rue tore up Silver’s wallet pics of his cutie-pie wife and pretty kids and flung the man’s crucifix deep into irreligious woods.
George & Rue Page 11