One Hit Wonders

by Patrick Warner

  “I screwed everything up.”

  “You done screwed nothing important up, my love.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Did.”

  “Didn’t”

  “Did,” with a catch of breath like she was stifling a laugh, “It matters, Al. I betrayed everyone. Myself even. I can’t believe what we were going to do to Freddy. What kind of monster…?”

  “Ya, pretty bad…”

  “You mean that?”

  “Damn straight. You’re not the only one who had time to think. Time to get cleaned up. That old Drano sure fucks up the mental prognostications.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying, darlin’, that none of that shit matters. It was never about that. That was all fantasy, a coke dream. It was only ever about you and me.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “I have to see you, sweet cheeks. I just want to see you and talk to you.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I promised Freddy.”

  “You gotta let me see you one more time [pause]. I just wanna talk.”

  [Long silence]

  “Al, is there something wrong?”

  “I lied when I said I was down south to caddy at a seniors’ tournament. I was at a private medical clinic. I was reluctant to say anything until I had some news.”

  “What news? Oh my God, it’s serious, isn’t it?”

  “Not over the phone, sweetheart. Meet me.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Meet me.”

  “I promised Freddy.”

  “Meet me. He doesn’t need to know. Please, Lila?”

  [Long pause]

  “Lila, baby. Meet me at the Harbour Lounge, the back room. I’ll be there at three.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Yes, you can. Back room. Corner booth. By the ferns. I’ll wait.”

  “No, I can’t, Al.”

  “You have to,” he said, and hung up.

  Had Al been a betting man, he would have placed a month’s salary on her being there (a known unknown). What he didn’t count on was old snotball his bad self, Snuffy.

  At exactly three o’ clock Al walked through the front door of his former happy hunting grounds for what he knew would be the very last time. Same musty-mouldy carpet smell, same worn pool tables, same losers chained to the slots. He walked into the main bar. Same bartender, different waitress, this one looked all of sixteen and was spectacularly over-endowed. He ambled through to the back room, approached the corner booth: no Lila. He took a seat, ordered a drink from the waitress. It turned out she had next to no personality, nor was she half so pretty up close, though the two silicon buoys surgically attached to her chest still mesmerized him in a boing-giddy-boing kind of way.

  He waited thirty minutes, but no Lila.

  On a hunch, he decided to check out the back parking lot. He reckoned there was a chance Lila was back there in a taxi, biting her nails as she tried to screw up the nerve to go inside.

  No sign of her.

  About three quarters of the parking spaces were taken, which meant there was probably a lot of jim-jam going on next door in the Five Season’s Motel.

  Al rounded the corner to take a look into the short arm of the L-shaped lot. It was at that moment—just as he craned his neck forward—that Snuffy walked out from behind the garbage tip and tapped Al right in the middle of his forehead with a ball-peen hammer. “There, now, motherfucker.”

  Al heard a crack—more of a fleshy smack really—at about the same moment he saw a flare of light. Despite obvious evidence to the contrary, he had the perverse idea that he had been struck by lightning. Many golfers are hit by lightning, he thought, as he staggered, it’s just my time.

  Then BAM! Snuffy let him have it again, this time much harder, on the right kneecap. “I’m fucking talking to you.”

  Al experienced a new ground zero of pain and confusion. He doubled over.

  “Snuff, man, what the fuck?”

  “Not the right answer,” Snuffy shouted, bringing the hammer down full force on Al’s other kneecap.

  Al pictured a Venn diagram he hadn’t laid eyes on since his high school days. Forehead, knee, knee—three centres of hurt, with the intersection of all three being that tiny inviolate space which contained everything he had in him that would not let him scream.

  Snuffy kicked him in the chest and Al fell flat on his back.

  “Snuffy. Hold up.”

  “Hold up for nothing. The next one is going to go right here,” he said, pointing to his left temple, and immediately looked confused, like he was trying to decide if his left was Al’s right or his right was Al’s left. “You’re fucking us over.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Gosse said you’re fucking us over. He sent me here to find out the truth.”

  “I ain’t fucking you over.”

  “You came up with another plan, didn’t ya? You came up with another way to do the job that don’t require Gosse and me.”

  “Fuck. That’s not it. Lila freaked out, is all. Lost her bottle, told Freddy, threatened to tell the cops. I’m trying to talk her around. We need to regroup, is all.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “No bullshit. I came down here to meet her. She’s inside, front lounge, near the pool tables, in the white dress. Go see for yourself.”

  “Ya right. So you can run away.”

  “Even if I could—and you’ve seen to that you son-of-a-bitch—where am I going to run to?”

  “You fucking stay put.”

  “Come on.”

  “Come on, nothing,” Snuffy said, leaning forward and bringing the hammer down on Al’s right knee for a second time. This time there was an audible bone crack. There was also the sound of his scream, high-pitched and porcine.

  Snuffy stepped over Al and made for the back door of the lounge. Al knew he had only about two minutes. He began to drag his injured body towards where he thought he had parked his car. He was about halfway across the lot when a white jeep came careening around the side of the building, stopped dead, then gunned it straight at him. The driver’s face was mostly obscured by shades and a baseball hat, but there was no mistaking that quiff of red hair sicking out the side.

  The front left tire of the jeep passed over Al’s groin region. He jack-knifed, smashing his head against the driver’s side door, leaving a small dent. A second later came the pressure of the back tire. By then he was in a world of hurt, too far gone to really care.

  The door to Al’s hospital room swings open and the night nurse pokes her head in.

  “We can hear you all over the floor. People are trying to get some rest.”

  “Yes, nurse, I’ll keep it down. Didn’t realize I was making so much noise. Just watching TV.”

  “Your TV isn’t even on.”

  “I meant the one in here,” he says, tapping on his skull.

  She hands him a plastic cup containing two blue pills. “These will get you through the night. Tomorrow may be a hard day for you.”

  Al detected in her tone something like pleasure.

  “Why so?”

  “Doctor says no more morphine.”

  “Hell, ya. And about time, too. I thought you all were trying to turn me into a junkie so you could have your way with me.”

  Al is only half joking. He has come to see his hospital stay as an opportunity to clean up. Already from within his morphine dream he can see his cocaine dream more clearly. The whole robbery idea, he realizes, was a cocaine-induced delusion. He knew this all along but kept the thought at bay. Lila thought it was all for real and when she suddenly understood that none of it was, she cracked.

  Hindsight, Al decides, is knowing what an asshole you have been. He should have known it would all go wrong.

  This is exactly the kind of no-bullshit thinking he needs to foster in himself if he is ever going to return to what h
is mama always referred to as ordinary everyday reality, if he is ever going to get back to the fabled brass tacks. He has to ignore the part of himself that believes they could have pulled it off. He has to bleed his bloated ego. And it is working. He suddenly has an overwhelming craving to get back to a former vision of himself, to be the Al Calhoun of old. Despite the frog cast and its psychological counterpart of heavy-duty medication, he knows he is getting better, getting stronger every day. He knows one day very soon he will return to strength and on that day, a new angle will appear, a new angel.

  First things first, though. He has to get his facts straight. No jumping the gun this time. No fantasies. The cops picked up Snuffy not because Al finked on him, but because there was a witness. When the cops asked Al why Snuffy had attacked him he told them it was a case of mistaken identity. He said he had never seen the low-life before. When they asked Al about being run over he told them it was a case of hit and run. It all happened so fast. Never saw who was behind the wheel; felt it though, felt the tires roll over him before everything went black. The whole thing, he said, had been a series of unfortunate events. The witness who identified Snuffy also saw the hit and run, but she wrongly identified the make and colour of the truck—two facts Al happily corroborated for the police. Al now knew that the cops were looking for a green Dodge Caravan. As for the driver, probably some octogenarian with failing vision, he said, possibly inebriated. Probably thought he ran over a sandbag. He then made a case for mandatory driving tests for seniors every five years. He was going to propose starting up a new organization, MAOFD, Mothers Against Old Fart Drivers, but he could see the cops were starting to look at him funny. He apologized for speculating, said it was the drugs, said he had little else to do lying in a hospital bed all day.

  Al knows there is no point in fingering Freddy. Freddy has made it clear from his actions and from his complete radio silence that as far as Al and Gosse are concerned, it’s over. Getting the police involved would only implicate Lila in the whole mess. And no one wants that; no one wants the police questioning leaky Lila.

  In her letter, Lila made it clear that she, too, is making a fresh start.

  Al decides to follow a similar course of action. He is going to get out of town just as soon as he consults with a lawyer and pursues the only claim open to him. He is going to sue the owners of the Harbour Lounge, on whose property he had sustained grievous and life-threatening injuries, such that his lucrative career as a golf professional has been seriously interrupted and is, in all likelihood, over. He knows there will probably be a major chunk of change for him once it all plays out in the courts. The settlement may even be enough to let him live out his days in Mexico, where the prescription drugs are cheap and as easy to get as liquor and women, and where doctors are willing to try out experimental stem-cell treatments not yet approved in the rest of North America.

  The blue pills kick in. Darkness pushes in around the periphery of Al’s vision. There is no resisting. He feels a head rush, hears a suction sound and a gurgle, like water going down a drain. A death rattle, he thinks. You have died in your sleep, he tells himself. Knowing he is asleep means he isn’t dead, doesn’t it, even if he can’t wake up?

  18

  VIOLENCE OF MIND finally drove me to therapy. It began as a slow explosion in my left temple the morning Lila broke down and gave me the news that remained news. Told me about her two-hundred-dollar a day habit. Told me about the long period of drift in her life. Told me about her affair with Al. Told me about the years of feeling unloved that led to her getting involved with him. Told me about their visits to the Five Season’s Motel. Accused me of having grown tired of her. Said I no longer desired her. Said I’d fallen in love with a muse of my own invention. Said this muse was my first love and that she, Lila, was my affair. Told me in the weeks and months following about her spiritual breakthrough, about her growing relationship with Jesus. Told me about the cravings therapy unleashed in her. Told me about life with her father, Llewellyn, a drunk. Told me about her alcoholic mother, Carla, who died when Lila was thirteen. Described this event as a root cause. Told me (later again in the post-therapy stage) we had grown too far apart. Said she could not decide if she should leave, that I should decide. Was angry when I said she should stay, when I told her I still loved her, when I told her she had to decide if she still loved me. And while all this went on we fell back into the same old pattern. My rage about all that had happened went underground, fracked a deep reservoir of bile that stayed online long after Lila’s death. Would not let me grieve. Sucked every emotion into its mix and returned it to me, reeking of blood, armed with knives and axes.

  Even now it infects. Everything I told you about Lila’s breakdown, about Snuffy attacking Al, about how it all played out is—to the best of my knowledge—absolutely true, all except for one detail: who drove the truck. I made it sound like it was me, but that was wishful thinking, a measure of the murderous feelings I harboured and still harbour toward Al Calhoun. How I still want to hurt him for coming between us, for taking advantage of a weakness.

  I couldn’t have driven the truck that ran over him because I don’t drive.

  I don’t know how to drive. I never learned.

  So who drove the truck?

  My best guess would be Gosse. More than likely he and Snuffy had been tailing Al after he got back to town, and had followed him to the Harbour Lounge. I picture Gosse watching from the road while Snuffy went to work on Al with the hemispherical hammer head. When Gosse saw Snuffy run inside, he reacted opportunistically, saw his chance to give Al a second helping of pain.

  Who else could it have been but Gosse?

  I shouldn’t care but I still do. And that’s the problem. Months after Lila’s death, my emotional state keeps fertilizing revenge fantasies. Anger is a black door shutting out everything else in my life. I need to grieve; I need to experience all the emotions bottled up inside me; I need to let them out, watch as they squirm in a rose-coloured petri dish.

  Unable to get there on my own, I make an appointment to see a psychologist Ted recommended, whom he’d met in a creative-writing workshop. The psychologist dabbled in the thriller genre on evenings and weekends and was working on a novel. Ted said that as a counsellor he was highly regarded. He was Harvard-trained. In spite of this, he was open to new kinds of therapy. And he particularly liked working with creative types.

  The psychologist who looks like DH Lawrence sits in his wood-panelled office and strokes his beard. He is thinking about the second chapter in his novel in which Manuel, the burro dealer, places a green parakeet feather in a plastic-wrapped pound of marijuana before burying the package in a burlap sack of coffee beans he then loads on the white-faced mule with soft brown ears.

  It is a lost scene from a book that no one will ever lay eyes on. It comes from a private part of him that will remain unknown except to those editors who rejected the sample chapters he sent them. The psychologist frowns. It is possible no one has read the parakeet scene, his favourite in the book. Perhaps none of the nameless editors who agreed to read his manuscript had persevered to page twenty-eight.

  He waits for the pangs of grief that usually accompany thoughts about his unappreciated inner life, but none come. Today, he is well-adjusted.

  His middle years have taught him that creative expression, and not approval, is the important thing. Applause makes the world warmer and more suffocating. An audience makes unreasonable claims on the available oxygen. The psychologist pulls hard on his beard, his eyebrows lifting as he contemplates whether he is telling himself a lie. Linking failed efforts to higher purpose is exactly the kind of coping advice he regularly metes out to his clients.

  Preparing to meet with his ten o’clock, he quietly performs a number of vocal exercises he first learned in church choir but has since modified: the-top-of-the-tip-the-tram-the-tongs, the-tongue-sucking-teeth, the-tip-of-the-top, the-thrust. He flubs it the first time—cotton mouth.

  Three months into a
schedule of twice-weekly sessions with Freddy M and his newest client still hasn’t verbalized much beyond hello or goodbye. Freddy just shows up to each session with a few typewritten pages. His fictions—as he insists on calling them—are chaotic and pornographic: character sketches of criminals, fragments from a family saga that read like a modern re-telling of a nineteenth-century novel, a surreal mother and daughter coming-of-age piece, and a slapstick parody of commercialism featuring Jesus Christ.

  Their counselling sessions generally follow the same pattern: the psychologist sits on one side of his desk, reading aloud Freddy’s fictions, occasionally pausing to look up, while his client sits across from him, in a straight-backed chair, his body turned towards the window. From time to time the psychologist removes his glasses and drops them on his desk. Sometimes he rubs his eyes. This is a sign that he is about to ponder aloud the possible meaning of a specific image or scene. This is his signal to Freddy to pay attention.

  The psychologist has learned not to expect any response from his client, at least not immediately. He simply verbalizes his thoughts about what Freddy has given him to read, allowing the words to float in the air like so many candle smuts. He knows his methods are unorthodox, but he has little choice. His client has refused to participate in traditional therapy, refused to engage in guided conversation. Although Freddy rarely says anything at all, he demonstrates a sophisticated repertoire of non-verbal communication: frowns, biting of nails, hard stares, running his fingers through his hair, tapping his foot, flaring his nostrils, clenching his jaw, blinking, tucking his left hand under his right armpit, knocking his knees together, rocking on his buttocks, and sometimes closing his eyes while simultaneously moving his lips.

  By reading his client’s body language, the psychologist gradually learns the limits of the game. Direct questions are not tolerated: they make Freddy freeze, make him irritable, and sometimes enraged. The psychologist can speculate about—and even criticize—the content of Freddy’s fictions, but he dares not comment on grammar or style. He made this mistake only once, during their tenth session, when he interrupted his reading of the text to point out how punctuation had strongly undermined the meaning of one of Freddy’s more syntactically ambitious sentences: “Son of, and indivisible from, the all-knowing and most high, who knew every hair on every head, and therefore must have had at least a passing familiarity with the comb-overs of the corporately inclined band of hirsute homosapiens who had hounded me to my death.” He had hardly finished speaking when Freddy stood up and walked to the south side of the room where methodically and slowly he pounded his fist on the wall three times. Asked to return to his seat, he complied, but spent the rest of the session sitting with his face buried in his hands, breathing loudly through his fingers.