Invisible Dead

by Sam Wiebe

I drove out to Burnaby once more. Past the PNE Fairgrounds and the Hastings Park racetrack. Past Anton’s, a line of impatient customers waiting for a table even at this hour. Past Brown’s Books and a bar called Oscar’s. Past a strange block of one-floor storefronts, all of them selling bridal wear or industrial appliances. If I’d continued up Hastings I’d end up on Burnaby Mountain, below the castle-like Simon Fraser University. Streets pulse and thrum like the strings of an acoustic bass, and bizarre arrangements of buildings could be a type of architectural poetry.

  Deep thoughts for someone heading to get his face kicked in.

  As I passed another Safeway, Everett phoned. I put him on the speaker.

  “Okay,” he said, some of the agitation gone from his voice. “I told him.”

  “And?”

  “There’s a pub near the Inn called the Mountain Glen. It’s at the foot of Burnaby Mountain, at the end of a cul-de-sac, kind of out of the way.”

  “I know it,” I said.

  “There’s an upstairs and a downstairs. I’ll meet you upstairs.”

  “And Rhodes’ll be there?”

  “That’s all he told me to tell you.”

  “See you then.”

  “Be polite, Dave.”

  I followed the SFU bus line off Hastings and onto Pandora. I left the main road and weaved through an unlit housing tract. It was as if an unwritten curfew had been passed on that neighborhood. No noise, no one in the street.

  The Mountain Glen was done up like a cross between a Bavarian tavern and a longhouse. Inside it was all sports bar. Screens everywhere, functional seating. Cheap Pitcher Tuesdays, Wing Wednesdays, other promotions for other days. It was packed with an equal mix of students and older sports fans. The TVs played highlights.

  The toilets were upstairs. Going up I ran into a traffic jam of frat-boy-types on the narrow landing. They manoeuvred around me, lost in their griping about the Canucks.

  The top floor had more tables than booths. Dead centre was a table for four. Ken Everett sat facing the staircase.

  His left eye bulged. The lid was closed, the skin purpled and rubbed with a liniment I could smell over the sweat and beer. He swivelled his head furtively. He recognized me. Otherwise he didn’t react to my presence. Everyone else seemed fascinated by me. The volume dropped as I took a seat.

  I gestured to the shiner. “Go a few rounds?”

  He was drinking his usual Black Tooth Grin. His hand didn’t close around the glass, but was holding it daintily, pinky extended. I caught sight of the metal cast over two fingers.

  “You’re real hilarious,” he said.

  “Rhodes do that to you?”

  My back was to the washroom. Everett’s good eye travelled past my right shoulder. I looked over in time to see the man from the house seat himself to my right.

  He smiled at me. The kind of smile that means farewell. His hands unfurled the napkin-wrapped cutlery setting in front of him.

  “How are things?” I asked him. “First-time homeowner?”

  “We’ve had our words,” he said, unfolding the napkin, setting aside the fork and spoon.

  I looked over at Everett. Everett wasn’t making eye contact with the man. I asked Everett, “Is Rhodes coming or isn’t he?”

  “He’s taking his dogs for a piss.”

  “So he’ll be coming back here soon.”

  “He’s here already,” said Everett.

  The washroom door opened and out strode a bullet-headed mastiff followed by another. They were slobbering and their nails clawed into the wood floor as they fought against the pull of the choke chains that held them back. Behind them, taking his time, with the other ends of the long chains wrapped around his forearm, was Terry Rhodes.

  He was short and wore denim, wore his silver mane of hair long and unruly but his beard kept cropped and dyed ink black. Bad teeth in a wide grin and small grey roaming eyes.

  Most of the patrons had slipped away, either out of revulsion from the dogs or a keen apprehension for bad shit about to go down. A few stayed in their booths, and I noticed at least one cellphone camera held at the ready. Rhodes didn’t care.

  The only open seat was next to Everett, across from his unnamed enforcer. Rhodes grabbed the back of the chair and dragged it carelessly in a semicircle around Everett’s back. Everett watched the dogs. Rhodes dropped the chair next to me, straddled it backward so he could rest his elbows on the back. Our knees were touching.

  One of the dogs, the slightly bigger one, was nuzzling Everett’s knee. Its slobber-coated mouth ran up against Everett’s thigh. With his good hand Everett gingerly and discreetly pushed the head away. Immediately the dog’s oversized head retraced its path toward Everett’s crotch. Everett began pushing it away again but Rhodes shook his head.

  “Let Fuck have at it,” he said.

  Everett put his hands on the table. The dog sniffed and reared up to set its paw against the inside of Everett’s knee, splaying his legs out wider. Its head banged against the underside of the table. I watched the dog’s back. It was all one muscle, covered over with scars and patches where the fur didn’t grow. The other dog lay with its head folded on its forelegs and generated drool.

  The first dog’s head poked out between the table and Everett’s abdomen, pushing Everett back. The paw trailed up to Everett’s throat and down over his breast and Everett, in a fit of terror and revulsion, flung the dog off him. His shirt had been torn and the flesh beneath scraped white.

  “Sorry,” he said to Rhodes, and then without being bidden he repeated it to the dog. “I’m sorry.”

  “Kenny,” Rhodes said, “if you don’t want Fuck up in your face, give him something else.”

  Everett complied, extending his good leg. The dog mounted him, pistoning its haunches into Everett’s shin. The remaining patrons turned away and vacated. Even the iPhone paparazzi were overcome by a sudden flight of decency and withdrew. Rhodes’s enforcer stared down at his table setting, his hands folded at a perfect ninety degree angle. Rhodes watched the dog with glee.

  “ ’At’s it,” he purred. “Give it to her. Give it to the bitch. ’At’s it.”

  He looked over at me.

  “Love dogs,” he said. “Love everything about them. Love how they eat, love how they fight, how they fuck. Don’tcha love the way a dog just—fucks. It don’t care where or when. It gets the urge to fuck something, it fucking fucks it, fucks it hard. No talk, just slams it in. That’s fucking nature, that’s how things are meant to be. Waitress.”

  The two servers in their black dresses had removed themselves to the edge of the stairs and were whispering. Deciding who it would be. Both were blonde. The one with a pink streak in her hair shook her head, frantic. The other, taller girl took pity on her and came up to our table.

  “That meat you got downstairs,” Rhodes said. “Sitting on the bar.”

  “It’s for our meat draw,” the waitress said. “Tickets are two dollars, three for—”

  “Bring us up the T-bone.”

  The waitress didn’t hesitate.

  “I’d like a Vodka Collins with celery,” Rhodes’s enforcer said to her back as she fled.

  Fuck wound down and let go of Everett’s leg. Everett stood up. He looked at his soaked and soiled pant leg. He headed for the washroom.

  “Kenny,” Rhodes called out.

  Everett stopped.

  “Leave it.”

  Everett paused. Looked at the wood floor. Returned to his seat.

  Once he’d sat, Rhodes said, “I’m just joshin’ you, Kenny. Go get cleaned up.”

  Everett stood and once more crossed the floor of the bar.

  “Kenny.”

  Once more Everett stopped. His hands were balled into fists. Even the dislocated fingers were wrapped in on themselves, the metal cast bent.

  “Kenny,” Rhodes said. “Kenny Boy. Just wondering. Was it good for you too?”

  Rhodes laughed and waved his hand. Everett about-faced and walked into the washroom
door. Rhodes laughed harder. Everett turned the handle and went inside.

  “That was Fuck being gentle with him,” Rhodes said to me. He slid a hand down the taut cord of muscle attached to the dog’s back. “Wasn’t that you being gentle, baby? Wasn’t that? Yeeeessss.”

  The dog growled at him and shrugged off his hand. Rhodes dropped out of his chair instantly, his weight landing on the dog. He cinched his arm around the dog’s throat. He bit the dog’s ear.

  “Gotta be the pack leader,” Rhodes said to me. “Never let ’em forget.”

  He pulled himself into his seat. He pointed at the other dog.

  “Holy don’t challenge me. Holy just lives to watch. All pious watching his brother give it to some bitch. You got dogs?”

  “I did,” I said.

  “What was its name?”

  “I didn’t name her.”

  The waitress brought over the steak, still in its packaging. Rhodes lifted it off her tray and flung it to the dogs. They tore through the plastic and Styrofoam, Fuck taking the lead, the blood pack still attached to the slab.

  “What’d you call her?” Rhodes said.

  “I told you, she didn’t have a name.”

  “I mean when you called her, what did you call her? Call her ‘dog’?”

  “Yeah—‘dog,’ ‘pup,’ ‘you.’ ”

  “Coyotes get her?”

  “Lymphoma.”

  “Bad ending,” Rhodes said. “Speaking of bad endings—Kenny told me you’re Matt Wakeland’s son. That right?”

  I nodded.

  “He was a surly old mick.”

  “Scottish Presbyterian actually.”

  “Point being he was an old bastard even when I was a kid nickin’ titty mags from the chink grocer, my first week on the coast. One time he beat the balls off me, you wouldn’t believe.”

  He stroked Holy’s coat as the dog gnawed at the table leg. Fuck had carried off the bone.

  “You as tough as he was?”

  “I’m a better dresser,” I said.

  “You boxed amateur. He train you?”

  “I used to lose a lot. He wasn’t exactly Cus D’Amato. And I don’t like fighting.”

  “Different kinds of fights,” Rhodes said. “You know your old man wouldn’t take a dime?”

  “I know.”

  “Not even a beer on the house. And him a beat cop dealin’ all day with hypes and whores.”

  He looked around, saw an abandoned beer on a nearby table, stretched over and downed it.

  “One time,” he said, “he ran me in for drunk and disorderly. And I’m rocking my vest, patches out. No doubt anyone’s mind I’m an Exile. I get bounced from stir the next day. I go have a few, then look for Constable Matt to set him straight on who he can and can’t arrest in my city. That stubborn motherfucker, know what he did?” Rhodes shook his head, grinning nostalgically. “Saps me and runs me in again. We do the same dance about four times in a row before I leave to take care of something else. Now what do you call that?”

  Everett rejoined us, taking the seat across from Rhodes’s enforcer, removed from the dogs.

  “I’m serious,” Rhodes said. “What do you call that? Is it toughness? Is it stupidity? What’s that called?”

  “Doing the right thing,” I said.

  “Explain to me how that’s right,” Rhodes said. “That fourth time I threatened to fuck his wife in front of him—guess that’d be your mom. And I’d’a done it too if this Quebec City thing hadn’t’ve come up. And still he busts me like I’ve said nothing, like he doesn’t think I’m the type that follows through.”

  “There was no figuring him out,” I said. “I mean, he used to watch Hee Haw.”

  “My old lady got me this dog trainer video,” Rhodes said. “Fucking thing is my bible.”

  One of the dogs squatted and squeezed out a coil of feces. It nosed a scrap of Styrofoam restlessly.

  “I know a dipshit ran his whole crew off The Art of War or one of those dink manuals. Me, everything I do comes out of nature. In nature you got an alpha and a pack. You stay alpha by being the toughest and best, and when you’re not toughest and best, then you’re not the alpha and you don’t deserve to be. Can’t be two alphas. Everybody’s got to stay in line.”

  Rhodes’s enforcer drank his Vodka Collins, staring languidly around the room like a bored date. The empty booths, the sports paraphernalia, the waitresses all but cowering. He took all this in, disinterested.

  “I’m guessing this is an analogy,” I said.

  Rhodes belted me. It was open hand and it stung. I felt something press into my side. His enforcer had a blade at my rib cage. He was still looking around the room.

  Rhodes stood and leaned on the table. Jabbed a finger in my chest.

  “I don’t do analogies,” he said. “I am the fucking alpha, and everyone does what I fucking say. And if I wanted Charley to gut you like a marlin in front of those two spooked cunts then that’s what’s going to happen.”

  His chair had toppled to the ground. He righted it, sank back down.

  “Now what do you want from me?” he said.

  “I want to know what happened to Chelsea Loam.”

  “Don’t know her, never saw her.”

  “She used to sometimes go by Charity.”

  His fist struck the side of my head, knocking me toward the knife held by his enforcer. My shoulder struck his. I felt the knife’s slight puncture.

  “What in fuck’s wrong with you?” Rhodes said. He took out his wallet, peeled off fifties. “Is it money you want?”

  “I get by,” I said.

  He struck me with a left. I turned my head but I didn’t block it. It took me out of the chair, onto the floor. The dogs were barking. Rhodes kicked them away. He clouted me across the top of the head as I tried to stand and soccer-kicked me in the solar plexus. My lungs emptied. I flopped onto my back, trying to pull in oxygen. Rhodes placed the heel of his boot across my jaw and applied pressure.

  “Do you not understand how easily I could get rid of you? Of everyone that ever knew you? There’s not that many. Dear old mom, couple ex-girlfriends, ex-boyfriends, some low-rent cops, your gook partner and his wife. You not existing would be simple. Do you not get that?”

  The pressure on my throat relaxed slightly.

  “I get it,” I said.

  “You didn’t know that before today? Wanted to see if I was what I said I was?”

  “Didn’t have any doubt,” I said.

  “Then what?”

  “Thought I’d appeal to your sense of decency.”

  Rhodes crouched over me, looking at his enforcer.

  “See, Gains, this is what I’m talking about. What do you do, you get a guy like this?”

  “Pretty straightforward,” the enforcer said. Charles Gains. I recognized the name.

  Rhodes took the knife from Gains and held it to my throat.

  “Tell me you’re leaving this alone,” he said to me. “Tell me or I’ll make you chew on your own eye.”

  “I’ll stop,” I said.

  “Say it like you mean it.”

  “I’ll stop.”

  “Like you mean it. Like—akh.”

  Puzzled and disgusted, he stood up and let the knife fall. It bounced off my stomach and slid to the floor. Rhodes sat down and swept a hand through his tangled mane.

  “Unbelievable,” Rhodes said. “You really wouldn’t’ve stopped.”

  He looked over at Gains, who had retrieved the blade.

  “See that’s what I’ve been saying, Charley. That same stupid stubbornness. There’s gotta be a way to put that to work for us.”

  “Or not,” Gains said.

  Rhodes moved his wrist horizontally, signalling why bother?

  “It’s not like he’s a threat. Sit up.”

  I did.

  Rhodes bent down to look me in the face, his hands rubbing over his knees and thighs. Everett still in his seat, watching us, watching the dogs. Gains unconcerned.
<
br />   “Charity,” Rhodes said.

  I coughed. “That’s her.”

  “And you think I killed her, that’s why you’re here.”

  “Did you?”

  Rhodes seated himself in my chair. Up close his shock of hair was a smattering of ivory, yellow, silver, slate. I passed a hand over the puncture in my side to make sure it wasn’t significant. Rhodes grinned at me like a clay idol.

  “Fact is I didn’t,” he said. “Fact is, night of the party, we did our thing and she left upright and breathing. Never saw her again.”

  “No clue where she went?” I asked.

  “Clues,” he said to Gains in a scoffing tone. To me he said, “I don’t deal much in clues. You spend time with her family?”

  “Some,” I said.

  “Think she’s special?” Rhodes spat on the floor. “The amount of slit out there just like her, you could buy it by the pound.

  “And I liked her,” he continued, his voice dropping in volume, softening. “She gave good head, she didn’t steal too much, and she had her habit under control. But all that don’t make her unique. They all got sob stories.”

  “No one else at the party she connected with?”

  “How do I know? You got dope and a cock, sooner or later a junkie whore’s gonna get ’round to you.”

  “But she was with you. Wouldn’t that keep her from interacting with too many people?”

  “I get any woman I want when I want,” Rhodes said. “What they do when they’re not sucking my dick doesn’t matter to me. Anything else you’d like to ask?”

  “She have any STDs?”

  “Ask her doctor.”

  “Anything more you could tell me?”

  I grabbed the table to pull myself up. Rhodes kicked out at my arm. I fell back, sprawled on the ground. I felt boots landing on my ribs and shoulders. He bent down and seized a handful of my hair, raised my head up and drove it back into the floor. My vision turned into a swim of colours.

  While he put the boots to me he kept saying, “Is it worth it? You fucking challenge me, for some whore? It worth it now?”

  The dogs howled.

  I turned over onto my stomach, tried to push off the floor. I felt the weight of Rhodes’s boot between the shoulder blades, grinding me into the floorboards. I coughed. Something warm and wet streamed over my neck.