Down with the Underdogs

by Ian Truman

  He didn’t like the comment, but that was the end of the discussion. The ego on that motherfucker, it was downright impressive.

  I looked outside the car. The Bonaventure traffic felt like it was clearing, and the Champlain traffic was bearable. Soon the hellish landscapes of endless suburbs were upon us. After a while the small houses of Brossard made way for the low-rises of the industrial districts.

  I couldn’t see it, but I knew it was there: my old job. That warehouse that I would have worked at all my life if it had stayed on the island. I imagined myself back at the end of that fucking bus, snoozing for ninety minutes as I was headed to nowhere. It was painful.

  I remembered the work itself, boring, restless work. Always the same: brown boxes, products, SKUs, quantities, markdown, more, and repeat. Every day, every week, every year, the same brown fucking boxes.

  Then the boredom of the suburbs vanished behind us, and we got into the farmlands beyond. I started thinking about our time driving down to Hamilton, eighteen months earlier. This was as far gone from Montreal as I had been since and, come to think of it, I had never left the island all that much my entire life.

  Heavy winds pushed the car sideways; we were running a hundred thirty km per hour now. I looked out at the clouds coming in from the west. I watched as tractors and trucks harvested fields that would feed the world. It should have felt like a beautiful thing and yet, all I saw was the death of a man.

  The road felt the same, the way the fields and the trees lined up felt the same. I could picture those small houses in Hamilton. Everywhere the same small house with the triangular roof you didn’t see anywhere in Montreal. I remembered that one abandoned pier and the water the night I had killed Michael Cook. It should have been a terrible thing, the murder of a man. The morality of it had yet to hit me. I remembered that one moment before I pushed the weights down. I remembered struggling with it, and then it was gone.

  I just mostly felt nothing anymore. Morals and the weight of the world, it was only as relevant as I was making it relevant, and that was the truth.

  Frelighsburg turned out to be as boring as any city kid could expect a small town to be boring. A gas station doubled as the dépanneur with a small pharmacy next to it. Some old lady on her porch cursing life away and a bunch of white kids dressed in some cheap, sad version of hip-hop fashion that you couldn’t help but look down on.

  We found the farm at the end of some country road, and I thanked God the cell phone somehow got a signal all the way there, or we would never’ve found it.

  There was a woman there, and we just assumed it was Dandurand. She was a strong-built woman, the way you’d expect them to be on a farm. She was working on a trailer and she wasn’t fucking around. The lady was loading up a thousand-watt generator to the back of that thing by herself.

  We walked out and felt the damp soil under tiny bits of gravel. It was a rapid reminder of things you forgot about when you lived in the city. It was the humidity, the smell of it, the thickness of the trees in the soft rain. It was in the wind and the noises, or rather the absence of noise, and that peace. I could never get used to it.

  “I don’t know why he always sends me the new guys,” she said. She said it loud enough for us to hear but made no effort to look our way.

  We walked around the place a bit. It was a lot of apple trees and a few wooden crates stacked on skids for transport. White empty bins and other equipment rusting against a shack, so busted you wondered why they kept it.

  “That the border?” Karl asked as he looked in the distance.

  She looked south and nodded as she strapped down the generator. “About five hundred yards that way.”

  Karl didn’t answer. I didn’t answer. The air was too thick for small talk.

  I looked south, and it was startling how it looked nothing like you imagined. I had never been to the States, never felt the need. But the way you saw it on the news or on TV or on the internet, I was imagining the extensive power of the United States of America right at my door. I imagined the full force of the border patrol and that wall you kept seeing on the Mexican side of the country and the drones and the Minutemen, secondary search stations with attack dogs, biometric scans and electronic scrutiny.

  There was nothing there at all. Oaks and maple trees as patches of woods clashed with some field. I could waltz right into Vermont if I wanted too. An apple orchard and a perfect line of pine trees down a dirt road were all that stopped me. There were no walls on the northern end of that goddamned country.

  Canada was too boring to register on the U.S. radar but we’d sell them weed all right, lots and lots of weed from Maine all the way to fucking Florida.

  “Want an apple?” Dandurand asked, throwing one to each of us. “Still early but we got a few good ones.” She took a bite. “Organic, too. You know you want to keep those chemicals out of your system as much as possible.”

  “And you’re a weed farmer?” I asked.

  “Organic weed farmer.”

  Jesus Christ, I was dealing with a hippie. I took a bite. “You got the envelope?”

  “Yeah, I got an envelope.”

  “You’ll get another one in three months.”

  “All right.” She paused, and there was a smirk on her face like she knew something was going on. “That it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “I really need to tell him to stop doing that to you guys.”

  “You mean new guys.”

  “A few times a year, yeah.”

  “He could’ve texted you just the same?”

  “But where would be the fun in that? Right.”

  The boss had pulled our leg. He didn’t need us to drive all the way out here for this. Fucking Irish, I thought.

  She raised her shoulders. What can you do? “It’s always nice to get you boys from the city to drive out to where the real work is done,” she said, smirking.

  “You taking on any new clients?” Karl asked her. That one came out of left field to me.

  “Depends on who and depends what,” was her answer. She looked at him, intrigued at the proposal. She seemed to want to know where this was going. I had no fucking clue what Karl was up to, but I had to keep my mouth shut to save face. I was pissed at him; you could rest assured of that.

  “I got a cousin who’s looking for an alternative to Cornwall.”

  “You got a cousin.” She took a bite.

  Karl just shrugged his shoulders.

  “An alternative to Cornwall?” she said. “Mohawks are getting too expensive for ya?”

  “I don’t need an answer now,” he replied as he handed her his card. “Just let me know if there’s any way we can land on something in the future.” The fucking way Karl was speaking, you’d think he was selling car parts for a regional supplier.

  “All right,” she said. She nodded and smiled at Karl. “We’ll talk soon enough.”

  “Absolutely. It’s all I could hope for,” he said, and that was that.

  I was gonna need to have a talk with the motherfucker.

  Chapter 5

  The drive home was as silent and painful as the way there. We also seemed to have caught ourselves a stooge on the way back. Karl didn’t seem to notice, or perhaps he didn’t care. But there was this boring grey Nissan that had been tailing us all the way from nowhere-by-the-border to Montreal.

  He was there, about fifty years behind us on the highway. He followed us across the Champlain Bridge. He navigated the same god-awful construction lanes with us and exited on Bonaventure towards downtown. Seemed like he made no attempt at hiding.

  We got off the highway and headed east on University towards Wellington. I was getting off soon. The way Karl had bypassed me back at the orchard, I was gonna handle this grey Nissan on my own. “Your money’s in the glove compartment,” I said.

  “Twelve hundred?” he asked. I didn’t like the implication, but I counted twice.

  “Twelve hun
dred,” I said. I put it under a bunch of papers he had in there to hide it. “Just drop me off at the red light. It’ll be easier for you to get back to NDG if you go up to Sherbrooke from here.”

  “All right,” he said. He parked the car in a no parking zone under the tracks. “Hey, if you got more work like this, I’m always ready for it.” For one second, it almost seemed like he was done being pissed with the world, like there was an ounce of humility in him.

  I opened the door and said, “Don’t put your phone too far.” I got out of the car, then leaned against it and looked back in. “Oh, and, Karl?” I added.

  “What?”

  “You’re gonna make money off these jobs and I’m gonna make money off these jobs, too, but at the end of the day I’m the one answering to the boss,” I said. “Don’t think this is the kind of gig where you just get to hand out business cards anywhere.”

  Karl was not the kind of guy you could intimidate. Far from it. Usually you didn’t want to go there. He was the scorched-earth kind of guy if you pushed him in any way. The slightest misplaced comment and he’d want to come after you. If I didn’t stand my ground right there, he was gonna stomp me somewhere down the line, and I couldn’t wait on that to happen so I said, “You do something like that on my jobs without talking to me first, and you’re in for unemployment.”

  That was as veiled a threat as I could make. He understood the implications. The simple word “unemployment” in his mind could come with fights and knifings. But I was going to get some feedback on today. He knew it. No point on pointing it out. Sure, my boss wanted us to meet people and be connected, but we hadn’t asked first about outside business, and that was the issue. I could see several ways this could be seen as an unwarranted intrusion in someone else’s business.

  This was one of these rare times when he had crossed the line of his own twisted logic and my threat could be justified. Any other day, or maybe with anyone else, he would have jumped out of the car and we would have gone pound for pound. I could hold my ground the way any Irish knew how to hold his ground, but Karl knew how to hurt you very well.

  It could have come to that, but not this time. He just stared ahead and swallowed the warning. That much was already a fucking miracle for the guy.

  “Anything else?” he said.

  “I’m done if you are.”

  “Fair enough,” he said, and that was the end of it for now. He drove away. I could move on to my next fucking problem.

  I looked at my phone. It was eleven-thirty, and I was tired. I had a string of texts from Patricia asking about things we needed and things we needed to do, when did I expect to come home or at least be able to text back? The last one was from twenty minutes ago and read, “reveille juste pas le p’tit quand tu rentre, okay?” and it made me miss the days when the French would only come up during good sex and good times.

  I looked up from the screen. The city lights were kicking in, and the noise of the train and highway felt loud. I looked towards university. The car was still there, parked just inside the signature orange cones of the construction sites along one of the segments of the Bonaventure highway they had yet to demolish.

  I started walking west slowly, making sure he’d see me. The car’s lights came on, and he took a left. I stopped at the corner of Ann Street and looked back. He pulled to the curb, and it was the only place I’d meet him. If he was mafia, perhaps the competition, then it would be a bad spot to do anything; there was a police station right there across the street. That could be too little to save my skin, but it wasn’t a bad place, either. Retaliation for Michael Cook would’ve come differently. They would have hit me sideways, so I could rule out the Heritage Front on this one.

  My outlook on life really turned to shit the day Cillian died, and it had gotten worse since. I was going down, and people all around me were down just as bad. It was the cop who wouldn’t investigate Cillian’s death properly. It was Patricia who wouldn’t stop me from going to Hamilton. It was the locksmith who let us look at private footage just for the fuck of it or the gay barman who sold his former friends in five minutes to save his own ass. It was the Nazi skin Cillian beat in a third-tier MMA fight, a murder for five hundred bucks and the kicks of it.

  My moral compass was fucked, and I was trying to bring it back north for a moment. Bottom line was that everyone had been okay with us killing Michael Cook or eager to look away. So long as it didn’t fuck up their daily grind, most people didn’t give a shit. I came back from my thoughts and tried to think of who else I had pissed off recently.

  If he wasn’t mafia or some racist piece of shit looking for payback, then it could mean police, and I didn’t know what he wanted. I needed to find out sooner rather than later.

  I could see the car, but couldn’t see the guy. Two days on the job and I had a stooge. “Jesus Christ,” I said to myself. Fuck it! I wasn’t one to mess around.

  I walked towards him head on. I leaned against the hood, fist clenched against the metal. I was looking through the windshield, trying to find his eyes behind those sunglasses. Broad, defined shoulders, and you could make out the veins on his neck. The guy was a fighter or at least one of those crazy fitness motherfuckers, but I didn’t sense any hostility or any desire from him to run me over.

  If he was pissed at me, he hid it well.

  I tapped on his hood twice, pointed towards the passenger door. I heard the knock of the locks being released. I let myself in, shut the door and just asked, “So, what do you want?”

  He looked at me, trying to size me up. I looked at his face. He was half-Chinese. Or at least I assumed he was half-Chinese. I pondered the possibility that another group could be eyeing the Frelighsburg crossing. I was still too new to this to know who was who and what they owned.

  I tried to size him up. He was fit as I had ever seen a man to be, not a single ounce of fat on the guy, trimmed hair, black shirt with the sleeves rolled up, veins on his forearms popping out. He was in his late forties, maybe. I noticed he had the cauliflower ears of judo fighters. Could have been an enforcer, but he didn’t have any tattoos that I could see.

  “That’s particularly bold,” he said.

  He didn’t have an accent that I could single out. It wasn’t French Canadian, it wasn’t NDG or West Island. It wasn’t Anjou or St-Leonard or any one of the accents you’d find in Montreal. I pegged him for a guy from Ottawa, but I could be wrong. Ottawa was the most boring city in the world, and this guy was just a cop.

  “I’m not much for bullshit,” I replied. “So I need to know. Which one are you? Montreal? SQ? RCMP?”

  He looked at me, trying to figure out how aggressive I could get. I was calm. I was downright calm if you asked me. He sized me up just the same. Was I dangerous? Was I a guy you could work with? Or both?

  “We’re federal. It’s all I’m gonna tell you.”

  “Federal,” I said. “All right.”

  The math was simple in my head. That was my life now, and it all registered a bit too naturally for comfort. Something happened, you figured out what happened, and you dealt with it. Cops and crime were the same. Cops were part of a system. You could deal with them, navigate them, argue with them, use them, drop them, flee, cry, be terrified, and die. It was all part of the same game. I was knee deep in Irish mob deals, weed re-marketing projects, border crossings and now federal police. Not bad for a first day on the job, and I hadn’t even seen any action yet.

  “Well,” he insisted. “You’ve just started something. Go on now. Where are you going to take it from here?”

  “There wouldn’t be much to talk about,” I said. I wasn’t convinced of that myself.

  “Nuh-uh! That’s not gonna be good enough. I’ve dragged my ass from Montreal to the border and back in the goddamn traffic. You know I could probably find out who you are from the prints you left on my door or run some pictures around. So why don’t you cut the bullshit and just be a decent human being and stop messing aro
und? You want to be at the table, be at the table. This is a discussion only if you make it a discussion. Otherwise I’m in charge, and you follow one way or another.”

  I thought about it and grinned. Was I looking for a way out of the job on day one? Was that what I was doing in that car? I didn’t see it that way. I didn’t care about crime or an honest job. I was just done being poor. I could do this, I could do something else. All I cared about was getting paid.

  “No? Nothing?” he insisted.

  I couldn’t find an answer.

  “All right. Well, let’s start with this,” he said. “You see? I’ve been doing this job for decades. And I do mean decades. So I know absolutely everything, and trust me when I say this. Absolutely everything. You were with Sean Cullens two days ago, and he gives you some of his time after the game, too. And for a minute I’m thinking it’s not so unusual. This is just another poor sucker from Sean’s days as a shylock looking for some money. But then two days later, I see you at the border and trust me, I swear, I know everything, but I don’t know you. I’ve never heard of you before, never seen your face. So, let me ask you, simply, who the hell are you?”

  I took a deep breath. He had me in the ropes, and he knew it. I just needed a second to plant my foot there and save face. RCMP was on my back now. I had little to nothing to do with anything so far, but that would change soon enough. I sighed a short, heavy breath and decided that if I was going to be a part of all of this, staying in the dark about the cops working my case could be a horrible idea. So I made the call and said, “D’Arcy Kennedy. My name is D’Arcy Kennedy.”

  “D’Arcy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nobody’s called D’Arcy anymore.”

  “My name is D’Arcy Kennedy.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  “I can get my Medicare card out for you if that will help.” He grinned.

  “All right. So, Mr. Kennedy, let’s start with something simple. How is it that you know Sean Cullens?”

  I wasn’t gonna bite to that. I looked at him. Easy there, buddy.