Down with the Underdogs

by Ian Truman

  But she liked it. And rule of thumb: if she liked it, then I liked it, and that was fine with me. I just wanted more of the same: food, beer, work, friends, sleep, and all at my fucking house. All this was her, and if she wanted it, why wouldn’t I give it to her? The damn trinkets were too expensive, and then we had fucking lattés and insanely expensive cheeses and croissants and chocolate danishes and all the luxuries of the modern world. I gave it to her. Money didn’t matter. I had to work, though, and my time was getting expensive.

  We walked down to the canal, crossed the little pedestrian bridge back onto our side of the water where the bank wasn’t steep, and Liam couldn’t fall down a cement wall.

  She laid the blanket on the grass, took Liam out of his stroller, laid him there under the shade of a tree. There were families around, and the old poor mixed easily with the new rich among the hipsters of Saint-Henri.

  I looked at my wife and said, “I need to work.”

  And she said, “Je’l sais.” In French. When she spoke French, that usually meant I was either getting laid or I was in serious trouble. “C’est correct,” she snapped, saying it was okay without meaning a word of it.

  I still couldn’t figure out exactly how bad it was but she was pissed, all right. Pissed and tense and gone. I think “gone” was the best word for it.

  Jesus fucking Christ.

  I watched her as she was playing with my son. Liam was trying to catch a tiny blade of grass. I should have been down there with them, but I had to be the asshole for a few more days.

  Only a few more days.

  I swiped open my phone and took out a piece of paper and a pen. There was a list of the sketchiest garages in the city that weren’t connected to us or the Haitian or the bikers in any way that my boss knew of. Not many of them could pull a repair job on such a busted Audi.

  I checked Patricia out one last time, wished I could bring myself to slide there on the grass, play with the kid for more than five minutes without feeling utterly inadequate. I felt utterly inadequate all the time with Liam. Couldn’t figure it out. I hated myself for not being able to just lie there for even five fucking minutes. I couldn’t explain it, but I couldn’t do it.

  Maybe I was meant to hurt people. Maybe I was meant to find them and make sure they didn’t get out of their fucking corner. That was who I was now, and I couldn’t bring myself to hate it. That was probably the worst part of it.

  I couldn’t get anything out of the first few phone calls. My angle was to pretend to be some insurance company looking into a claim one of our customers made. The car “race” had made the news, and it was suspicious to start with. The first few guys had no Audis in the shop, then one of them had one, but not for that kind of repair. I said we would withhold payments until we could assess the damage and be sure it was unrelated to the illegal racing that had made the news. That didn’t seem to faze the guy.

  I didn’t think he was rich enough to risk a client bailing on a few thousand dollars in damage, so he had to be telling the truth.

  Twenty minutes later I was still at my city picnic table calling people when Patricia got up. Liam was asleep now. I looked at her and I should have offered to walk home with her or carry the bag or make her some fucking tea and give her a massage or do a fucking load of laundry.

  I didn’t do a goddamn thing. I looked at her, the baby weight she had gained. She wasn’t small to start with and the little belly was more than a little belly now, but I still loved her and I still thought she was sexy as fucking hell, but I didn’t get up, and she barely glanced my way.

  She grabbed the heavy bags on one shoulder and walked out of the park without even saying bye and I just looked at her knowing we were done, for a while at least. I was gonna have to work my way back into that one.

  There was nothing else to do about it. That was the exact moment I knew my job had killed my family life.

  I just sat there and accepted it. Two minutes later she was across the street and I looked at her and her curves and the stroller and the way her hair floated down her back and those shirts that were handing loosely on one shoulder.

  I’m sorry, I thought. I really fucking am.

  But what was done was done, and I needed to see it through.

  I texted her “just a few more days” with the vain hope it would matter.

  Then I looked ahead at the canal, looked at the waters, looked at the people on jogging dates and the tourists on their rented bikes out here all the way out from the Old Port. I threw away the rest of my cold coffee and about ten bucks worth of designer bagel and cream cheese that tasted like a regular fucking bagel and cream cheese.

  I hated the fuck out of everything, but a few seconds later I was texting everyone to see if someone had gotten lucky.

  Turned out the answer came from Phil. He had talked to two of his friends from the East-End who ran tow trucks. He asked them to ask around. I was told the competition in that market was fierce, but people talked online just like everybody else.

  Phil and his friends had found a post somewhere saying “busted Audi, charged him two hundred bucks for a quarter-mile run.”

  Phil asked if he should look into it. I told him to put on his best fucking Québécois accent. “Swear a lot,” I told him. “Make sure no one would ever trace it back to the Irish in any way shape or form.”

  “Chu la’d’su, osti! No problem,” he said. You couldn’t mistake the accent.

  A few phone calls later, Phil had it on good authority that a fairly busted-up Audi had been towed that night from an alleyway parking spot west of downtown to a garage in the industrial strip of Ville Saint-Pierre. I forwarded all of this to Sean and the boss, text only. I didn’t have it in me to talk to anyone right now.

  I flipped my phone to black, looked at the screen for a few seconds. I was almost done with the job and wished Patricia had stuck around just so I could tell her so. A few days more, and I would’ve flown her down south to a beach or a resort or wherever rich people went when they were losing their fucking mind over work.

  But I didn’t bother going home later that night. I texted Patricia, saying, “just let me know if you need anything.”

  I wasn’t expecting an answer.

  I dragged my ass up the hill, out of the Pointe and into downtown, longing for the old days where fifteen bucks an hour was great money and the St-Patrick’s Day parades were filled with Irish kids being little brats and Cillian being the fuck-up that he was and I could stand around with a beer in my hand, grabbing a handful of my wife’s big ass live in the street.

  I missed my youth when getting kicked in the face by a girl at a show was a well-recognized method for hooking up.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” I said out loud. I really missed it.

  But then I Googled “hotels” and walked into the first one that had four stars on it.

  I sighed and pushed on the pristine, clear-windowed door.

  A blast of AC welcomed me to the second set of doors. Some guy in a cute-looking red suit walked up to me. I had never travelled, never taken a plane or even booked myself a room. I didn’t know how you talked to these guys.

  “Can I take your bags?”

  “I don’t have any,” I replied coldly.

  He was startled by my tone, but didn’t seem surprised about the fact that I was empty-handed.

  I took out some money, handed him ten bucks.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but why?” he asked.

  “How much would you have made if you had taken my bags up?”

  “Oh, sir, that’s not necessary.”

  “Shut up with the sir, and take my money.”

  “That’s really not necessary. Thank you so much, and welcome, sir,” he insisted as he held the door. He’d be a lot happier the minute he’d manage to get rid of me, that was for sure. I was so fucking sick of people being overly polite with me. Six months ago, this guy wouldn’t have let me through the door.

 
Fuck you! I was thinking but I walked in there, all right. I made my way to the receptionist desk, asked for a room. “Just a room,” I said. No reply.

  I handed her my credit card. She did what she had to do and handed me a receipt. I was careful not to look at how much they were charging me for a bed and some clean sheets.

  “Bar?” I asked. The hostess didn’t like me. She stayed professional, but I could tell she didn’t like me at all. I didn’t care anymore. If they were good enough to take my money, then they’d be good enough to handle my bad mood for a night or two.

  I made my way to the bar. The place looked even better than the lobby.

  “You all right?” the barman asked. The accent was thick French Canadian.

  “Separated,” I replied.

  “Long time?”

  I rested my weight on my left butt cheek and dug for my phone. I looked at the time and said, “Oh, maybe forty, forty-five minutes ago.”

  He snapped a shot glass in front of me. “First one on the house,” he said. “Some guy left without taking his shot earlier.”

  “They have you count everything, don’t they?”

  He hesitated, but it was too late to skimp on the details so he said, “Yeah.”

  “Even in a classy place like this?”

  “Especially in a classy place like this.”

  I rested my phone face down on the bar, put my wallet and keys on top of it along with a pack of gum, and pushed the neat little pile just outside where my elbows would reach.

  “Everywhere is the fucking same, then,” I said, lifting the shooter and tanking it.

  “She’ll be back?”

  “Probably,” was the only answer I had. I tanked the drink and asked for two more. I dropped a few twenties on the counter and told the guy to tell me when I was done.

  Cillian always had it with women. I wasn’t so good or I hadn’t been so lucky. Patricia was the sixth woman I had ever slept with. I think I had two or three relationships you would call relationships. No more than that.

  Cillian always had a way with the girls that I couldn’t figure out to save my life. Maybe that was true of all things in life. The kid had this energy, like nothing could stop him. Problems just seemed to bounce off him. He sincerely and legitimately did not give a fuck. I, on the other hand, was a stubborn, stuck-up mule who carried the weight no matter what.

  Cillian was bold, but Cillian was dead and I was still here. That should have counted for something. It didn’t feel that way, though.

  The silence in the hotel was not something I could ever accustom myself to. I needed to hear the neighbour’s complaints and the noise of the port or the trains and the highways. The soft music in the background wasn’t doing it for me. I needed the sounds of cats fighting and raccoons scavenging for scraps and homeless drunks cursing Verdun’s no-drinking policy.

  This place was too quiet for any fucking normal human being. Then three people walked in, and the small talk they had going on was enough to make me get up and leave.

  I tanked the drink, asked the bartender for a bottle upstairs.

  “There’s a mini-bar in your room already,” he said.

  So I tipped him and left.

  “Sir, this is way too much,” he said.

  I was too messed up to care. The elevator ride couldn’t bring me to my room fast enough. The little card couldn’t open the door fast enough. The gray carpet and bland décor wasn’t shitty enough for me. This was too classy for D’Arcy Keenan Kennedy.

  I looked out the window, down the hill to where my house was. The last time I had slept away from my home was in that trashy hotel down in Oshawa on our way to Hamilton. This place was a fucking luxury palace, yet I couldn’t bring myself to feel at home.

  I wanted to have Cillian’s charisma, his vibe, his drive. I wanted to do things so wildly stupid that I could end up dead in the canal from living too much. The only thing I could manage was to take my shoes off before I crashed in the bed.

  The text came in from Sean Cullens at three in the morning. We were hitting the garage in a few hours. That meant I was running on four or five hours of sleep, most if it alcohol-induced. I doubted I could get back to sleep. Twenty minutes went by, forty minutes went by, a whole fucking hour went by before I decided to call it quits.

  I called the front desk, asked if they could get me any Wake-Ups.

  “I’m not sure I could accommodate that,” the guy said at first.

  I said, “I’m not asking for cocaine. I just need some Wake-Ups. I can’t be the first guy ever to ask for freaking Wake-Ups.”

  My tone meant trouble. I didn’t like it but it just came out that way. I was tired and hung over and Irish.

  “It’ll be a couple minutes,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  “Have a good night, sir.”

  I hung up. Patricia was gone, Liam was gone. For now at least. I couldn’t imagine that fight being permanent, but for one night it was permanent enough. I looked outside thinking about my dead brother and Ducas and how he was gonna die soon and how the image of Michael Cook, there in the waters of Lake Ontario, permanently engraved in my mind.

  “Have a good night,” the guy said. Like that was gonna happen.

  Chapter 32

  We didn’t mind that the body shop was a shithole out in Ville Saint-Pierre. We didn’t mind that Ville Saint-Pierre was a shithole so messed up it made the old streets of the Pointe seem like a great place to live.

  We didn’t mind the seventy-two neighbouring doors slapped against the shoebox we had to get into, all the same in some tenement building four stories high that looked like it was meant to host all the rats in the universe.

  We didn’t care for any of it. The job had taken too long, the patience had run thin. We walked in through the one large garage door, waltzed right in like we owned the fucking place.

  Five workers were busy on as many cars as they could cram in there. The clanking of hydraulic pumps and drills mixed with the occasional drop of a tire.

  There was a desk about twenty feet inside that looked like where you stopped to meet someone. Cheap paper calendar on the desk, cheaper one on the wall with half-naked women handling power tools in the most unlikely ways. There was a kid sitting there, in his early twenties, dirty little fucker with a look about him like he had stolen a lot of cars when he was younger. He knew exactly what was going on in a second.

  I looked around and saw the Audi that had cost Karl his BMW and his licence. I looked at the bumper that almost killed me, looked at the wheels that had crushed one of my best friend’s legs.

  “Clear the room!” Cullens shouted over the noises of the place. The mechanics stopped their work. They fell silent when they saw Karl dragging the owner out of his office.

  Cullens threw an envelope at him. “For the day’s work,” he said. “Make sure they get some of it, too,” he added pointing to the blue collars.

  “But—”

  Sean cut him off. “Go to some restaurant. Food’s on me. Don’t worry, your place will still be here when we’re done.”

  When they all saw a black Expedition pull up in the garage with the boss in it, they all decided not to ask any more questions.

  The kid at the desk was about to get up and seemed relieved, thinking he was out of trouble, but I said, “Not you,” and I sat him back down. I took a few twenties from my wallet and dropped them on his desk. I picked up the garage’s phone and pointed to the Audi.

  “Call him,” I told the kid. “Tell him to come pick up his car.”

  “That one is nowhere near ready.”

  “Parts came in early,” I said. “You tell him that.” My tone wasn’t begging for a reply.

  He grabbed the money, looked through some papers, and took the phone from my hand.

  Car’s ready, he told him. He needed the space so the sooner he could pick the car up, the better. The kid scribbled something down and then put the re
ceiver back.

  “Says he’ll be there within the hour.”

  That was good. “You sit right there like nothing’s happening and you’ll get twice that,” I said.

  “I could do more stealing a car.”

  “Want to tell that to them,” I said, pointing to Sean and Karl. The two of them next to one another, they looked as mean as you could imagine. Dark, cold, and distant mean. You didn’t fuck with either of them alone separately. The both of them together? It would be brutal and unforgiving.

  “So, you’re the good cop?” the kid asked me.

  “Nicest of what’s left,” was my answer.

  That’s when Phil took it upon himself to trash Ducas’ car. Limped over there with his cast. Sean didn’t want him there in the first place but Phil wouldn’t have it any other way. He wanted revenge. He slashed the tires, smashed the windows, dropped battery acid on the paint job. When he started welding random parts onto the car in the most unlikely ways possible. Phil was working through some shit on this one. No one was going to get in his way.

  Ducas showed up forty minutes later. By the time he made it to the kid’s desk it was too late for him. He gave one look at his Audi, Phil standing next to him with a blowtorch in his hand, chucks sticking out of the hood like antennas, brake pads welded all over the car for no fucking reason. Phil just smiled and it wasn’t the nice kind of smile either. There was hatred in there, all right.

  Maybe Ducas thought about bolting, but he didn’t move. Phil was looking straight at him with that obnoxious grin on his face. This was one of those few moments in life I had learned to appreciate. There was this one moment of absolute resignation in the man’s mind and in his heart, and on his face. It was that one moment, that half-second where he knew there is absolutely nothing to be done. It was the bliss of pure and absolute abandon. I saw that look on Ducas’ face that day. I wasn’t gonna forget it.

  The garage door banged shut. Ducas was trapped.

  “Make sure you keep him alive,” the boss had told us. No one really answered Yes.