by Ian Truman
“We’re getting ready for the legalization,” Boulay said, trying to get back in the loop.
“Legalization?” I asked. “You still think that will fly?”
“Oh yes. Very much,” Boulay said.
I looked at my boss. He smirked sideways: maybe.
“Well, I’ll believe it when I see it,” I said.
“Trudeau’s government makes it an almost certainty,” Boulay added as he handed me his business card. There was something in the way he did it that rubbed me the wrong way. It was just so fake that my first reflex would have been to punch the guy. What an annoying piece of shit. Ten seconds in the same room as him, and I wanted to break his nose. Just one jab. One quick jab, and he’d shut the fuck up. Maybe that was why my boss wanted me there with him at the same time just to see if I’d do it and get a laugh out of it.
I wasn’t going to. I was a professional now, and that meant something. I looked at the card. Black and white with a red square on it. “D&B Designs” written inside of it. Flipped it back and forth and shoved it in my pocket. If my boss hired this guy, there was a reason to it. That’s as much as I could care about it.
“We expect to be in a very favourable position for that market once it opens,” my boss said. It was hard to tell if he believed any of it, but it did make good business sense to be ready just in case.
Boulay showed me a few samples of boxes and other packaging. We were far from the dime bags of my youth. I remembered buying weed wrapped up in Saran wrap up at Atwater station on our way to a game when I was a teenager. Those were the fucking days.
Now, they were going for that elite market. Nice cardboard, like a little gift box. They were going for that textured black you see in expensive stores at Place Montreal-Trust. White square frame and three dots as a logo, with the series of products written underneath it. It looked expensive. That was the point, but then again, it did feel like every other thing you saw in stores everywhere these days.
They were gonna advertise this shit the way they advertised protein bars, lifestyles and SUVs: chug an energy drink before you train, have your protein shake during, and then chill out with your designer weed right after to help with the strains.
Fits your looks and looks amazing on selfies.
I didn’t like it. I could even say I hated it, but then again, it wasn’t my job to like it or not. I wasn’t gonna say another word about anything, so my boss said, “I’ll look at everything and keep in touch.” That was Boulay’s cue to leave.
“Of course.” He looked at me and couldn’t know what to make of me. I could see all the cogs running under his perfect little haircut: guy walking in with jeans, superstar shoes with an Adidas jacket and a poor boy hat. How could that guy be more important than he was? It was fun watching him trying to figure out if he needed to be nice to me or not.
He just awkwardly tried to extend a handshake. I didn’t move, so he just said, “Bon! On se r’parle bientôt dans ce cas,” and went for the stairs. Fucking hipsters, I thought.
It wasn’t until he was all the way down and we heard the door close behind him that I turned to my boss. He spread his arms wide, trying to show off the look.
“Do you like the shirt?” he asked.
“I don’t know anything about fashion.”
“Probably not, no,” he joked, looking at me. “But you can like it or not, still.”
“Do you need me to have an opinion about it?”
“If you care to, yeah. Don’t be such a drag. I’m having a really good day.”
“It looks good.”
“It does, right? Hugo Boss.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Sure you did.”
“Never cared for it, then,”
“One day I’ll teach you about getting dressed the way I need to teach you how to cook.”
“I did get that one lesson.” I smiled.
“Meh! Sometimes one is enough. In your case, I don’t know. The Irish, we’re set in our ways sometimes. That was great work, by the way, in Hamilton. Impressive work.”
“I’d rather not call it work,” I replied in all honesty. “I’ll say thanks because it’s you. But I don’t want to call it work.”
He decided not to disagree. I decided to change the subject. I didn’t want to get into Cillian’s death and Hamilton and Michael Cook, so I said, “You’re going legitimate,” asking about the packaging. I took one, flipped it back and forth with no real purpose, then dropped it on back on the table where it was.
“You like it?” he asked.
“Looks like you’re about to sell tea bags at a grocery store.”
“It’s a bit the idea, yeah. The market’s going legal. I just happen to have my hands deep into supplies. Demand and sales network are gonna change, but its all part of the same pie as far as I’m concerned. I just went out to L.A. a few weeks ago. You should really see what they have going down there: candy, cakes, bio kale salads with weed croutons in them. We’re really just playing catch-up here in the great white north.”
“You think you’re gonna sell more?”
“Well, we’re not gonna sell less. Keeping prices high will be the most difficult part of it. This is where this kind of thing comes in,” he said about his marketing plans. “Whether I sell at Atwater station or Atwater market, I don’t care. I don’t care where the money comes from, it’s coming in, and that’s all I know.”
“Better money at the Atwater market.”
“Oh, it really is.”
“If they keep making crime legal, they might just civilize the rest of us.”
He laughed. “I can’t disagree there. What can I tell you? Drugs are going legal, gambling went online, porn is a commodity now like air and water and fucking internet or Hydro-Quebec.”
“Sex is cheap?”
“Not as much as you’d think.”
“Taxes are gonna kill you though.”
“Nah, I got accountants for that.”
He invited me to sit down, so I did. Took off my poor boy hat, slapped my hands on my thighs, saying, “So, What do you need me for?”
“Ready to work already and not shy about it, too. I like that. It’s why I hired you. You’re just here to work, get things done, and you’re not entirely stupid either.”
“Not entirely stupid?”
“Well, if any of us would be any smarter, we would’ve made the cut at Concordia, at least.” I laughed. “I’m sorry about your former job. I understand the redevelopments got to it.”
“Yeah. Those towers, man, what can you do?”
“Hey, they did you a favour if you ask me. Maybe you would have spent your entire life there, shifting boxes left and right. What a waste that would have been. You have to be ambitious, Mr. Kennedy. See this place? I owned this place for so long, I forgot I had it. Some bike rental service had been here for as long as I can remember.”
“Went out of business?”
“I fucking hate bicycles,” he said. He was serious about it, too. “But I like it. I like this place. I’ll get it up to speed soon enough. I swear.” He smiled. “I walk in here, and I feel like I’m in a Scorsese movie. I love it.”
Then he got down to business, slapped his hands together.
“So! About the job. Long story short, no matter the legal situation here in Canada, our biggest markets are still in the U.S. East Coast all the way to Washington. It was going legal over Obama, and it’s there somewhere down the line, but now Trump seems to be doubling down on policing, which is great news for us. We’re providing a lot for the eastern seaboard, and for better or worse, we need to cross somewhere.”
“Can weed really be that lucrative?”
“Well, you know, it’s just easy, steady money. It’s always there. Other drugs come and go, but weed is like beer. It’s always going to be there. Sure, it’s a lot of small numbers when you sell it, but it does add up to a big chunk of change at the end of the year.”<
br />
He reached inside his drawer for an envelope and handed it to me.
“There’s three thousand dollars in there.”
“You need me to deliver this to someone?”
“Three thousand is your pay, my friend. It’s pretty good, probably too much, I got to admit, so consider this a welcoming gift. I happen to like an underdog such as yourself. Maybe I just want to see how you’re going to fare. Maybe I’m just in a really good mood,” he admitted. “Now, we have someone working in Frelighsburg, you just need to talk to her. Tough little chick. Farm girl, plenty of guts, you know? Not afraid of hard work and that attitude, pfff.”
“You like her?”
“I like her a lot.” He smiled. “She even punched me once.”
“She did?”
“That kind of girl.”
“You deserved it?”
I didn’t expect any confession of further details, but he enjoyed the joke and that was good. “Well, who ever really deserved anything?” He was enjoying himself.
“What’s her name?”
“Paws off. You’re married.”
“Trust me, I am well aware of that.”
“Josianne Dandurand,” he said. “Sounds Québécois but she speaks perfect English and don’t be fooled. If she ain’t Irish I don’t know who is.”
“What’s the job?”
“Just ask her if she got her envelope. She’ll say ‘yes.’ You ask her if she liked it. She’ll say ‘yes’ too. It was a pretty good envelope. Then tell her she’ll get another one in three months. Be nice about the whole thing. They’re good people down there by the border. They’re doing the real work.”
“You’ll pay me three thousand dollars just to ask if she got an envelope?”
“We’re really nice people up here too,” he said. “This is really just public relations but it’s part of the job just the same. Get your face around, break you in.”
How the hell am I gonna get to Frelighsburg? I asked myself. “Where the fuck is Frelighsburg to start with?” I asked him.
“One of your colleagues has a car, doesn’t he?” He was talking about Karl. Right there it occurred to me that the money was there to recruit my friends just as much as it was to recruit me. He was smiling, so it had to be that.
Three thousand would cover the guys. Me and Karl on this one, and the others on future jobs. I didn’t mind working with Ryan or Phil. I liked them both, and even if they’d beat up or kill a guy and have little to no shame about it, they were not mean or vicious people.
I had to be careful with Karl. Karl was truly mean. It was deep in his heart. Karl liked to hurt people. Karl would stomp me in under a minute if he wanted to. No second thoughts, no remorse. He was going to be as useful as he was going to be dangerous.
I looked up to my boss as he waited for me to process all of this.
“That was really good work you guys did in Hamilton,” he finally said.
He waited for me to process that as well. I was going to have to navigate things carefully.
“They’re not gonna do that for cheap,” I admitted. It felt like he had me exactly where he wanted. He leaned back into his chair, perfectly satisfied with how things had turned out.
“Expenses,” he said. “Can’t do business without them.”
Chapter 4
I was terrified of failure, always had been. Strangely enough, that felt like the opposite of how I had been raised. People of the Pointe were born to lose. It was on the jobs and in the bars or in school and at the hockey practices before that. That shit you see in the movies where the scrawny kid gets some unexpected support from his community and then makes something of himself, well, I never saw that in real life. We were told early not to try. Sometimes with hockey, maybe. People would get behind that one kid who might just make it pro.
But for the rest of us, about school or jobs or money? “Don’t bother” was what you got or at least some version of it. Most of the time it came as “What? Are you trying to be somebody?”
I was thirty-six now, and I didn’t know how to do anything useful. I was terrified of the years I had wasted. I was terrified of the life that was ahead of me. I wanted money. I wasn’t afraid to say it. I wanted to make money, real money. Sometimes I think I’d worry about getting hungry till the end of days, so now I wanted more.
I was done being nervous about my next meal or my next payment. I wanted to buy land, endless rows of trees hovering above a long dirt road to a centennial estate. I wanted that or something as simple as a new hot water tank and windows that wouldn’t let the wind through in winter. I wanted something as simple as a real couch and a room of my own.
I was dreaming big because I needed a lot of things that were small. And now I had this envelope in my hand with three thousand dollars in it and I had been told it was a start. Three thousand was a lot of money when you were poor.
I gave Karl a call and hoped for the best. “You need something?” I hadn’t even said hello yet, and he was snapping at me.
He was right, though, and I wasn’t gonna make excuses, so I just went on with it and said, “I have some work you could be interested in.”
“What kind of work?” He wasn’t in for the small talk. I hadn’t called much since we had dealt with Cillian’s death, and that made me sort of an asshole even by Karl’s very low standards.
“The kind where you get to drive around looking for people, and you get paid for it this time.”
“What? You got yourself in the mob now?”
I had to stop and think about that for a second, and then I said, “Yeah. I guess I did.”
He thought about it for a moment then asked, “How much?”
“A thousand would cover it? I don’t think there’s more than five hours of work on this one.”
“Still new to this?”
“First day, first gig.”
“You gonna make the cut?”
I was getting fed up with this. “At least I was invited to the game. You want the job or not?”
“You need me or just my car?”
Now he was just being pissy, and I was done with it. “I’ll need all four of you somewhere down the line,” I snapped back. “You, Phil, Ryan, and your car. You can be happy I called you first if ever you need to feel special.”
“Well, that took you long enough.” I could hear him fucking smiling at the other end of the phone.
“You’re an asshole, Karl.”
“Of course! But I’m an asshole that’s on your side.”
“You’re on my side now?”
“As long as it works for me.”
That was about as much loyalty as you’d expect from a guy like Karl. At least he was upfront and honest about it. Truth was, I had to feel lucky he took the call in the first place, so I asked again, “A thousand?”
“Make it twelve hundred.”
“I could also rent a car2go.”
“No, you won’t.” He was right. I wouldn’t. “I could’ve tried to squeeze you out for fifteen.”
“I could have lowballed you for eight hundred.”
“I wouldn’t’ve gone there, and you know it.”
“All right. All right, then. Twelve hundred.”
“Deal.”
“Good,” I said.
But then he dared to add, “That was assuming you were paying for gas.”
Obviously. I said to myself. Hell, I smiled and almost laughed.
What was I thinking? Karl giving me a fair deal? Of course I was paying for gas.
He picked me up at Atwater market to bypass some of the construction, but we were soon stuck in the hellish landscape that were Montreal highways. There was nowhere to go and very little to talk about, nothing to talk about, in fact.
Things were still tense, and I couldn’t figure if we were supposed to talk about things being tense, which reminded me of the way Patricia would talk to me during one of our fights. Maybe I shou
ld’ve gone straight to dick jokes, which felt much more natural to gentlemen such as ourselves. Phil would’ve gone there twenty minutes ago already, and that would have squared things away, and maybe that was why I needed Phil in this whole thing. He didn’t care about anything; he just did things, and that was that. Worked out for him so far, too.
Karl was harder to read. I didn’t know if I liked the guy or not. Sometimes I wanted to stab my own eardrums at the very idea of hearing him talk about how good he was at whatever he did and that forever fed-up attitude of his, like he knew how to run the fucking country better than everyone else around. No matter what anyone did, he just had this way of looking at you like you were the worst waste of his time in the history of mankind, and you felt it, too.
He seemed to respect me for some reason, and that was fine and all. Maybe it was the new kid and that fatherly perspective or the brutal lack of sleep; I just didn’t have any patience for the arrogance anymore.
On the other hand, Karl was Karl. He was ruthless, cold, likely insane, and sometimes that was a good thing. He seemed to legitimately enjoy hurting people, and sometimes that was a good thing, too. Most of all, Karl fucking hated to lose. He just couldn’t stand it.
Somewhere along the ride he just said, “You probably didn’t need me for this.”
He was right about that. We were out to pick fucking daisies if you asked me. “Deliver this message, not even the envelope itself. Ask about the envelope and tell her there’s another one coming.” That felt simple enough. I was starting at the bottom of the ladder, and that was fine with me. Karl hated it, but I had accepted that.
“This is PR 101,” I told him just because he needed an answer. “We do this one simple job, start to get our faces around, meet one or two people, and that’s that.”
“They could’ve wired that fucking money.”
“Hey, it’s a job, and I’m getting paid. The money’s good.”
“Waste of my time.”
“You know what?” I said. “Twelve hundred bucks for this. Do fifteen years of fucking shipping at thirteen bucks an hour, and only then you get to complain to me about the job.”