Down with the Underdogs

by Ian Truman

There was just something logical to the mechanics of it. The way the bolt action moved and how smooth the motion was. There was a full clip in there. I moved the bolt back and forth a couple times, the unused bullets popping out like a charm and falling on the hard dirt at my feet with a faint twomp.

  I picked them up, noticed they had nylon tips much like Karl’s bullets.

  “You guys made these?”

  “Karl reloads his own. Yours are from the store. As close to a dumdum as you can get on the open market,” the cousin said. “Quarter-inch hole up front, fully blown out in the back.” He smiled. “Don’t worry, you’ll see it.”

  I liked that. I slipped the bullets back in the mag, then slapped it back in the rifle. We sure as shit weren’t going hunting for deer.

  Phil and Ryan walked out with a bunch of crap from Boulay’s store. They dropped it in the field and walked back.

  “You’re paying for this party,” Karl said. “Only natural you go first.”

  “Three hundred bucks for a fucking tree stump,” I said. Everyone laughed. They picked up a gun each and waited on me.

  You have got to be kidding me, I thought and then I fired. The kick of the .30-06 was worse than I expected, but I took it and smiled. The pressure felt good. The smell of burnt gunpowder was new to me, and it felt like something I could get used to.

  I loaded the next bullet. The guys started firing. The noise of rapid gunfire lost itself in the distance. We didn’t hit much at first, but that was fine. There was no shortage of bullets.

  Chapter 21

  Things weren’t always that good. Things weren’t always that fun. They couldn’t be. Most of the time, work wasn’t even worth mentioning. On the daily grind of things, the job turned out to be like many other jobs. You showed up early and looked busy for a while, then crammed in a few good hours and went home without a hitch.

  That had been true for most of my life and still was up to that one moment. That one job fucked up my mood. I learned that day what shame was. I never really knew disgust until then.

  A text came in with an address, reading clear it? It was from Sean Cullens. It was a job, and I wanted the money and loved my work so far. Why would this one be any different? It was because the guy living there didn’t deserve it. I cleared him out of his apartment anyways, but he didn’t deserve it.

  The address was on Ann. The contrast was brutal. Across the street stood one of the glass towers and on my side was this shitty 1900s duplex, brown brick, original wooden frames still on half the windows. The wooden balcony was rotted, filled with garbage and garbage cans and boxes full of old wallpaper drenched in months of rain and animal waste. I imagined Sean Cullens walking up those stairs and seeing the pile of shit and saying, “Fuck it, this one’s going to Kennedy.”

  I knocked on the door. I could smell the stench through the frame, that wet, mushroomy scent seeping through the cracks. No one answered, so I knocked again, louder this time. Still no one answered. I decided to break in.

  I looked right across the street at some construction guys leaning against a sparkling red Ford F-350. I hated how damn good the truck looked. Some guy in a Tesla was stopping by to check on the progress of the job. I hated how good he looked.

  Not so long ago, I was the broke motherfucker these assholes were kicking out. Now I was the Irish enforcer kicking out the old and the sick to make room for the rich. Being poor used to mean something to me. I wasn’t so sure anymore. What an asshole I had become, and I knew damn well they wouldn’t even recognize me for it. The rich wouldn’t give me a fucking room up in their towers, so why the fuck was I doing their dirty work?

  Sean Cullens was the reason, so I shut up about it.

  I forced myself against the knob. Broke the door open. The rotten frame gave me no trouble, but the stench of the place was downright sickening. There was no other way to describe it than saying the place smelled like a garbage truck had ditched its load in the public toilets of an emergency room and then some.

  How anyone managed to live that way was beyond me, but that wasn’t what disgusted me about the job. What disgusted me was that I should have been helping the guy. I should have let him have his place, this place, the only place he had ever known, by the looks of it. It must’ve taken decades to pile up all of that shit.

  I should have said, “Give him a year or two, he’s dead anyways. Build somewhere else before you get to this one, there’s plenty of land around.” But I didn’t. That wasn’t happening anyways. Someone with money called someone who called Sean Cullens, who handed me the job. No one would wait for this guy to die in peace.

  I stepped inside. The corridor was narrowed by a wall of newspapers, decades of them, stacked neatly in what looked like bundles of ten. They stretched from the front door to the kitchen in the back.

  For a moment, I imagined it going well. I thought I was going to talk to the guy, convince him to move out, convince him living here was shit now. I’d say, “Who the fuck would want to live like that?” I’d say it was gonna get worse, that he’d be better off elsewhere. For a minute, I almost believe we’d sit down at his coffee table and I would give him some money to move or tell him, “Fuck it! Here’s four thousand bucks. Buy new shit instead,” and let the old waste he had been hoarding go to some fucking container.

  A bulldozer was headed for his building anyways.

  Maybe I was going to convince him to call social services to find him a place in a nice public home, riverside maybe, out in one of the small, quiet towns that surrounded Montreal, away from the noise and the trucks and the corruption of this fucking city. Finish his life on a small bench under a willow tree where birds come to feed in the shade of a bright summer day and all that.

  By the time I made it to the kitchen, any illusions about this job were gone.

  The sink was overloaded with unimaginable numbers of dishes. You couldn’t find room for a cup on the kitchen counter; about forty small white ones were lined up there, with varying amounts of coffee still in them. All of them lined up perfectly. All the little handles on the same side. I looked into one and found a thick layer of greenish mould at the bottom of it. Why the hell was this guy lining up this shit so perfectly while the rest was an absolute nightmare, I had no idea.

  The place was filled with everything from children’s bicycles to car parts to barbecues in various states of disrepair stacked in a corner. The only window was covered in yellowish goo and plastic, and a stack of empty bottles crowded the edge of it.

  It was so bad, I almost didn’t see him. I couldn’t make the shape of the old man sitting at his table. It should have startled me, but it didn’t. It just felt like it couldn’t be real, like a prop in a horror movie. But he was there, all right. The man was insane. He had to be. He wasn’t frantic or a lunatic or running around; I could have handled that. This was worse. It was like his soul had been drained from him. The grey of his skin seemed impossible. The way his ribs showed through was hard to look at.

  Why hadn’t any of the neighbours taken care of him? What the fuck was the government not doing? At least one fucking human being must’ve come to his door over the years. I couldn’t imagine how long he must have been there.

  There was a void in his eyes, like he was looking beyond. It was just empty. Even the stare in Michael Cook’s eye before I killed him didn’t compare to that. I understood pain. I understood anger. I understood rage and being fed up, I even understood despair. The stare this guy had…I couldn’t figure out.

  He didn’t try to move, didn’t try to bail. “Listen,” I said, and he started growling. Not fighting, not screaming, not shouting. It was just this growl, deep and fucking disturbing. It got to me, all right. Can’t lie about that, just a fucking growl through two deep and difficult breaths.

  He was almost naked, which could have been worse but I couldn’t help but stare at his pointy ribs, wondering how any man could let himself starve that way. I hated it, and I wanted out of there.r />
  “We need to talk,” I said and then he snapped at me, just started shouting “ah” very long and very loudly as if he couldn’t get to any other syllable, I wasn’t startled, I wasn’t scared. I raised a fist in case he decided move. He cringed, afraid I was going to hit him. I had to admit I wanted to. He was probably the weakest person I had ever seen, and my first reflex was to punch him. I hated myself for that. Always thought I’d only fight a man toe to toe. This guy was proving me otherwise.

  I was gonna punch him just because he was scared, just because he was different, just because he was weak. The things you learned about yourself sometimes. It wasn’t pretty at all.

  I saw scars on his thighs, long, single lines, old scars in the form of fresh skin that never healed properly, all going the same direction. He had similar ones, on his forearms, crossing blotches I could only assume were cigarette burns from a few decades ago.

  “You need to leave, man. And not just for the apartment. Jesus Christ. No one can live like this.”

  That’s when he started crying. He just couldn’t help himself. He just sat there, crying in front of me. It was the saddest thing I ever had ever seen. I would swear to that. Heavy sobs between two impossible breaths.

  “Come on, man,” I said. “Don’t do this.”

  Shit! I almost started crying myself. He was gone at this point, done for and gone. It hit me really hard, like this fucking weight stuck in the middle of my chest.

  I was fighting it, cringing to keep it down.

  Bottle it up, goddamnit, I thought. Otherwise I might have found enough kindness in me not to finish the job, and that couldn’t happen.

  So I did it. I just got pissed at him instead of being pissed at myself. Talking to a man was one thing. Dealing with a crook was something else. This guy was clearly mentally ill and that was something else. I didn’t know how to deal with that. How the fuck do you deal with that? I didn’t know.

  “Come on, man!” I shouted. He looked even more scared. I reached to grab his arm, “Fucking joke’s over.”

  That just made him snap and he bolted. The chair went one way, and he wasn’t looking where he was going. Looked like a scared animal, if you asked me, like a fucking rat running from a car. He smashed his face against the wall. The paper-thin skin on his head tore easily and the weird part of it was it barely bled. That was the strangest fucking part of it. There was hardly any blood at all, just some pasty, dark oil. I could’ve puked right there.

  He stumbled, trying to find his footing. I should have tried to hold him up. I should have called nine-one-one, told them to bring some case worker or some shit. I should have offered to clean his wound, sit him down, and reach for a fucking Band-Aid.

  I didn’t move. Or not fast enough, anyways. He stumbled against the opposite wall. Decades of newspaper started crumbling down on him.

  Rats and cockroaches bolted from behind the fucking mess. It must’ve weighed a ton, probably more. The floor shook and then I heard, the damp twomp of the bundles crashing against the other wall and onto the floor, and the guy was underneath there somewhere gasping his own death wish to anyone who’d hear it.

  Then came the smell of mushrooms and mould.

  “Goddamnit!” I shouted. This kind of job wasn’t me. Fuck! That kind of job wasn’t me. I’d never forget his face. Jesus fucking Christ.

  I called nine-one-one, told them to call social services. Then I got out.

  I wasn’t gonna wait around to answer questions. I wasn’t gonna stick around to see if he made it.

  Fuck that, I was thinking. I just needed to get the hell out of there.

  The construction crew across the street looked at me. One guy asked me in French if everything was okay. I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to tell. I just walked away. Couldn’t seem to get the smell out of my skin.

  I hadn’t even touched the guy, but the world would see it differently. These guys would see it differently, and that bothered me for some reason. All they knew was that I had walked in there and by the time I walked out, first responders were on their way. I sure as shit didn’t look like no social worker, and I sure as hell wasn’t no paramedic. There was no mistaking what the fuck I was doing there.

  The stares from the construction workers across the street…tough, rugged men who worked outside with concrete and steel, come rain or shine or snow. These men looked at me with fear and disgust, and I hated them.

  Bunch of fucking hypocrites. They never complained when the job was good and the overtime was coming in.

  Three weeks later, they tore the place down. Every time I walked down a street or across the construction sites, the same fearful stares. The story went around, it seemed. No one ever said a goddamned word, but I saw the looks on their faces. Anger, fear and disgust, but no one ever complained about the job, did they?

  So long as the cash keeps coming in, right?

  Chapter 22

  Kicking an old man out of his lifelong apartment was shit. It was absolute shit, and for the first time in my life all I could feel was resentment towards myself. It was there in my guts, and I fucking hated it. I couldn’t take that shit home. I didn’t want to take that shit home. I couldn’t tell my wife the taxes and the car and the fucking yoga classes were getting paid because I was beating down on people poorer than us for a living now.

  I couldn’t make it home that night. Not right away. Drinking this one into oblivion wasn’t gonna happen. I couldn’t talk about it with the guys, let alone my boss. I knew Karl would just spit me some shit about the survival of the fittest and Ryan would just say the guy would land somewhere else “so don’t worry about it,” and Phil might have understood but Phil spent most of the money I was shovelling his way on fucking Walking Dead collectibles and vintage video games. Phil’s advice didn’t count right now.

  I had spent most of the day wandering among restaurants and coffee shops to take a piss, visit the Old Port and wait by the river. Before I knew it, it was night, and Pat was gonna give me the silent treatment, and all I could muster was “Believe me, I couldn’t make it home on this one.” Like it was gonna make a difference.

  I started thinking about Ma and my dad and Cillian, my life before his death, before Michael Cook, but most of all, I thought about how my life was before Montreal became cool again. That day was shitty enough to make an Anglo long for the good old days of the referendums. At least back then you knew who the enemy was.

  I needed the advice of someone from back in the day. I knew exactly who to talk to. So I dragged my fat Irish ass up the hill all the way to Sherbrooke.

  I found Hugo’s door in the shitty part of NDG, the one squeezed between the highway and Westmount. Hugo had bought a duplex in that stretch, right on the edge of “old money.” He lived on the second floor and opened his tattoo shop right there at street level to cash in on rich kids’ allowances.

  Hugo was pushing sixty now. He had that no-bullshit attitude I needed. Most of all, he couldn’t be moved or impressed by anything. If he was gonna give me advice, it would sure as shit be what I needed to hear. At least that was the impression of this guy that Cillian had built up. Hugo’s not-so-hidden past as a biker helped.

  I looked at my watch. It was 10 p.m. I thought about it for a minute but decided to ring him anyways. A minute later the lights came up. Hugo opened the door and looked my way.

  He had a long grey beard and cavernous eyes and a Neurosis T-shirt from ten years earlier that went well with his near-dead complexion. “You here to talk about Cillian?” he said. His cut-to-the-chase attitude was well deserved.

  I didn’t answer.

  “Let’s go to the shop,” he said. “Kid’s asleep.”

  The smell of antiseptic hit me as we walked in. There was nothing like an old school tattoo shop to remind you of your working-class origins. I liked the smell of it, the look of it: the shitty flash art on the wall, the little swing door by the counter and the neon lights of pin-up women
in the window.

  A nineteenth-century black and white photo of a fully tattooed samurai hung over the reception desk. It was framed in rosewood and next to it was a little note on paper: “It’s an original. Touch it and you lose a finger” with a photo of Hugo’s mean fucking face printed in black and white next to it.

  “Pick some flash,” he said, pointing to the wall. “It’s too late to draw anything new right now.”

  I looked at the drawings of pin-up girls and sailors and anchors and didn’t like any of it. I looked at leopards and panthers and lion heads. I looked at bald eagles and rats leaving a boat and martini glasses with dice and naked ladies in them. “Man’s ruin” was written underneath it. That felt slightly closer to home but still, I wasn’t a gambling man.

  “Got anything Irish?”

  He sat one butt cheek on his stool and pointed to another set of flash frames.

  “Got the Maid of Erin?” I asked.

  “As a statue or a harp.”

  “The harp.”

  “Yeah.” He reached for the drawers of his tool chest. “I probably got that somewhere already.”

  I waited. He found the drawing and got his things ready. “Come on in,” he said, with a wide, welcoming smile.

  Believe it or not, this was only my fifth tattoo, and for better or worse, the first four looked like chicken scratch. I had that Blood for Blood skull from way before Buddha, the signer, completely lost his fucking mind. I never took the trouble of getting it removed or covered. For better or worse, Blood for Blood had been the equivalent of Johnny Cash to an entire generation of people like me, and that still counted for something.

  The second tattoo was those black flag bars every punk in the universe seemed to get at some point in their life.

  I somehow thought it would be a good idea to get the Montreal flower tattooed on the back of my arm one day, and the last one was a shameful set of nautical stars down the side of my ribs that were just a fucking waste of space.