I didn’t have any screams left.
So I started laughing and laughing.
The fawn will do that, give up.
Say, “You got me.”
Welcome the wolves’ fangs to its throat.
Nod hello to Death.
10
I woke up propped up against a log at Kitsilano beach, legs half buried in the cold sand. I could see the tips of a pair of shoes. I wiggled my toes and the shoes moved—good, they were mine.
Small waves lapped against the shore. The tide was coming in. The sky was blue.
I was alive. Sort of.
My head pounded. My tongue was uncooked steak. I had dry, cracked lips and sand in every nook and cranny. And I’d been shit on by a flock of seagulls. Or maybe only one bird. Though, in that case, one with some serious digestion tract issues.
Years ago, must’ve been late 40s, I’d flipped through a copy of Life magazine I found on the street and inside was a four-page spread on this artist fella, Jackson Pollock, and his style of drip painting. Something about his work always stuck with me. And now I resembled one, a museum piece for the ages:
The Seagull (b. 1953)
Fitch Visits the Beach, 1958
Bird shit on human canvas
Or, look at it another way and I was road kill left for dead, half buried in the sand and dirt and grit at the side of the highway.
“Anyone get the license plate of that truck?” I said, sitting up. The seagull sitting on the next log over didn’t answer and neither did anybody else because there was no one else around. “Was it you?” I asked the seagull. Better to be upfront, air out the laundry. I felt like we might be sharing the next few minutes on this planet as the waves came in and the sun rose over the mountains and if the bird did it, okay, we could get past it and be friends. Everything needed to poop and sometimes you were the pooper and sometimes you were the poopee. Life worked like that. Shit and be shit on, the endless cycle.
The gull didn’t answer.
“Silent type, huh?”
Guilt ridden, the gull squawked and flew away.
“I forgive you,” I yelled, which was silly but it let me know that what happened to me hadn’t seemed to have left any permanent damage to the ol’ noggin, at least nothing other than the inevitable nightmares I’d be having until I slept the long sleep in the pine box. Yes, I could still make with the talk. And after a few more minutes of collecting myself, I realized I could still make with the walk so I got up and hoofed it over the Burrard bridge towards downtown.
No land speed records were broken that day. Not by me, anyway. There may have been a few records set as various pedestrians hurried around me and past me and generally did their very best to stay away from the limping, smelly weirdo covered in bird excrement. They made with the wide eyes and the shakes of the head and I made with the head down and focus on keeping my feet moving.
When I finally made it back to Gastown, the ghost was waiting patiently for me, sitting on the rear bumper of my tow truck, legs swinging, reading a book. There, just like that. The ghost.
“Hello,” I said, voice shaky. Figured it was best to face madness head on at this point.
The ghost waved.
The ghost tipped its head to the side.
Okay, I saw it now. The ghost was, in fact, a teenage girl, maybe 14 years old.
“Hi,” she said. Then, “You look like shit, Fitch.”
“So nice of you to notice. And I look better than I feel, believe it or not.”
“What happened to you the other night? You acted real loony and pushed me away after I got you out of that warehouse. I was trying to help.”
“Right, sorry about that. I’m still piecing things together. Been waiting long?”
“Off and on for a few days.”
“Days?”
She nodded. “I watched from the doorway across from your building as some guy parked your tow truck and then took off. I was curious so I followed him to the warehouse. Saw you sitting in the Continental while that palooka hooked up the Buick. Then you were forced inside and I decided you needed help. What’d they do to you, anyway?”
“Drugged,” I said. I’d gone over it in my head and it was the only thing that made sense.
“By that preacher guy, Quest?”
“I think so. He was about to remove all my teeth and give me a new set of fake choppers. You saved my bacon, no doubt.”
“He was gonna remove all your teeth?”
“That’s his racket. Gets the down-and-out in the door with some ‘medication,’ some fancy talk, a promise of ‘new smile, new life’ and then hands out doses of the crazy juice and gives ‘em the business with ‘the glow.’ After that, a little dental surgery between friends, where he removes every one of their teeth and replaces them with dentures. So they walk away with a new set of choppers, probably convinced he’d helped them.”
She frowned. “You okay, Fitch?”
No, not at all. In no way shape or form was I okay. Instead, I said, “Three things. One, what’s your name? Two, how did you know to find me at the warehouse? And, three, why did you help?”
She put out her hand. I shook it. She said, “Eleanor Stevens, but call me ‘Ellie.’ And Adora told me about you. She said you needed help with this here tow rig.” Ellie patted the side of the truck. “Learning the business.”
“And she sent you?”
Ellie’s jaw went out, defiant. “Yeah, what’s it to ya?”
“Nothin’,” I said, “just not who I expected.”
“Because I’m a girl?”
“No, because you should be doin’ algebra equations and gossipin’ about boys not towing cars and sneaking into warehouses at night to save the likes of me. Though I won’t complain about the last one.”
“Yeah, well, my dad never wanted to raise me square. And I do go to school but it’s Saturday today. And boys are dumb.”
“You’re making very valid points.” Then it dawned on me. “Stevens? As in Rolly Stevens, the tow truck king of Vancouver?”
“The very one.”
“I’m sorry about what happened to your father.”
She looked down at the ground, didn’t answer. I thought back: her father, Rolly, had “slipped” in the shower at his health club and gone into a coma. He’d died a few days later. In my scattershot, throw-as-many-darts-at-the-board-in-hopes-that-one-hits-the-target accusatory rant at Adora, when she visited me in the hospital, after the Dead Clown affair, I’d essentially laid the blame at her feet. And she neither officially denied nor confirmed the accusation. But I’d always assumed it was part of her strategy to take over the Vancouver criminal rackets. But I was second-guessing that now and thrown for a loop, truth be told. Though the loop was about to get even more twisty and dangerous, especially when the bomb dropped and blew the tracks up altogether.
Detonation in five…
“By the way,” said Ellie, “neither are you, you know. What I expected. You look like a guy that could make a bum sit up after you walked by and thank the heavens above he’s not as low down as you.”
Four…
I gave her the fist gun and an index finger trigger pull. “And you’ve got Adora’s aim.”
Three…
Ellie blew the smoke off the index finger of her own pistol. “Of course.”
Two…
And then I saw it: the jaw line, the nose. “Wait, you mean…?”
One…
Ellie nodded. “Oh, you didn’t know? Figures she wouldn’t talk about it.” She stopped and kicked the tire of my tow truck. “Yeah,” she said, looking up at me. “Adora Carmichael is my mom.”
Boom.
11
In the diner washroom, I did my best to clean up. What I really needed was a complete overhaul, to be taken apart and itemized, each piece considered for its continued value to the whole. Once the extent of the damage was assessed, broken parts could be fixed or
replaced, as necessary. Then, a patient re-build and a nice buff and polish to get the finished Fitch ready for the showroom floor. Instead, I made do with rinsing my hair in the sink, scrubbing my hands and face with all the soap I could get out of the dispenser and throwing my suit jacket into the garbage. It was beyond salvage.
Ellie was waiting in the booth, talking to Glenda. I sat down across from her.
“You sure you’re old enough to drink coffee, honey?”
“Very sure.”
Glenda looked at me quizzically. “Should she be…?”
I shrugged and nodded sure, why not. None of my business, really. So Glenda poured us both a cup and said she’d be right back with our pie. The pie was Glenda’s idea. My stomach was a small boat on high seas, rolling with the waves, unsure whether it would capsize or not.
Ellie Stevens drank her coffee with about a litre of milk and a cup of sugar, turning a fine cup of quality joe into a sugary sweet concoction. She added the ingredients in her dessert recipe and stirred a whirlpool.
“The hard stuff, huh?” I asked.
“Yeah, you gotta problem with that?”
“Nope.” I mocked digging in my inside pocket, glancing furtively around. “You want some whisky in there, too?”
Her eyes lit up. “Yeah, okay.”
I took my hand out of my pocket, nothing there. Only the middle finger I was giving her. “Yeah, right, you’re still a kid.”
She sighed and rolled her eyes so far back I worried they wouldn’t re-center. “And you’re still an asshole.”
“Everybody needs one.”
“Eww.”
Glenda came back with two pieces of cherry pie. Now that the food was in front of me I realized it’d been a long time since I ate. No longer the small boat on the high seas, my stomach was a growling bear nosing through a campsite saying “feed me.” I made short work of the pie and sat back, letting the sugar and fat do their work.
After Ellie had dropped the Adora/mom bombshell I had asked for a ceasefire and then suggested we make our way to the diner so I could clean up, yes, but mostly so it’d give me a chance to collect my thoughts. Which I’d almost managed to do by the time I sat down in the booth, but I still needed some fine-tuning. I knew I’d be better as soon I went back to the rooming house and slept for, oh, maybe three years or so but sleep would have to wait. There was still this teenage girl sitting across from me, drinking coffee and nibbling at a piece of cherry pie. She who I’d originally thought was a ghost. She who’d saved my bacon when it was roasting over the fire. She who, apparently, was the daughter of Adora Carmichael and Rolly Stevens.
“What?” she asked.
I’d been staring. “Sorry, shellshock.”
“I still can’t get over it. That guy was fixin’ to rip out all your teeth.”
“Before he called himself Quest, Janssen used to be a dentist, until he lost his license and went underground. Offered his services to the down-and-out under the guise of helping them but I think he got his jollies doin’ it, the sick bastard. Probably liked the feeling of having them owe him, his army of society’s rejects.”
“That’s bananas.”
I had to agree with her, though I didn’t even tell her about the really bananas part. How somewhere along the line, between my run in with Janssen and waking up half-buried in the sand at Kitsilano beach, I’d received a haircut. Close on the sides, a little bit off the top. I’d had to do a double take in the washroom mirror but it was true. My hair was definitely shorter than before and smelled faintly of pomade, underneath the overpowering ammonia of my new cologne, Eau de Seagull Shit. “Yeah, it’s been one hell of a few days. I also have a metric ton of questions.”
“Adora said that might happen. What you lack in looks and finesse you make up for in an admirable, if not dogged, curiosity. Like a basset hound.”
I reached again into my inside jacket pocket. “Tell her I’ve got something in here for her as well.”
Ellie grinned. “You betcha.”
“But you don’t call her ‘mom’?”
“Not to her face, which really ticks her off. And that, Fitch, is what I call fun.”
Fun, sure. Like mother like daughter.
“And she’s okay with us discussing this?”
“I don’t care if she is or not. My life.”
“True. And I’m not above bribery, so tell you what? I get Glenda to make us a pot of coffee and leave it on the table and you tell me everything.”
“No interruptions?”
“None.”
“And I get to drink as much of the java as I want to?”
“Yup.”
Ellie quickly drained what was left of her milky, sugary “coffee” and held out the empty mug for a refill. “Deal,” she said.
12
Days passed. A new routine played over and over like the latest hit 45, in which the lyrics were simple and easily learnable and the melody was fairly annoying but also catchy, so that it looped in the head, lodging there like a tick burrowed into a dog. And the drums, the heartbeat, were steady and kept everything on track and on time. So that by the end of the song it was easier than not to lift the needle and place it back at the beginning. Familiarity. Comfort. Engaging with the “known” instead of the “unknown” being the best way not to leave any silence lying around. Because a silence bored is a silence asking questions, getting in your business, sticking its nose where it doesn’t belong.
So, radio station DJ, play the song again. And again. On repeat. And the song was this:
Wake up in the middle of the night, covered in sweat
Check pulse—yes still alive
Vow to never fall asleep again because that way the nightmare about being eaten alive by people-goblins can’t come
Brew hotplate coffee, drink, repeat (helps with 3)
Sit in chair by window and wait for sunrise
Close eyes briefly only to be met with same nightmare
Revisit #3, realizing that the nightmare/flashback has followed you to the waking hours
Shiver
Sweat more
Shower
Brush teeth
Get dressed
Put one foot outside, say “Oh, hell no” and retreat back inside to the safety of your boarding house room
Wait for Ellie to come by with food from diner (which is always chicken noodle soup for some reason)
See #4
Sit in chair by window until sunset
Reaffirm #3
Fail at #3
Start back at #1
Sweating. The drug Janssen had slipped me while I was helpless in the dentist chair oozes out of my pores.
It oozes out neon green, purple.
Look down, no trace.
Crazy loses meaning in a world of crazy.
Sweating.
Fearing the memory flash of goblin maw, of green-yellow mottled skin, a catalyst that would transport me beyond the void, to the other side, possibly never to return.
One afternoon—maybe a Tuesday, maybe a Friday (who could say, really, days of the week were such an arbitrary description of time anymore)—my landlady, good ol’ Ms. Crawley, stopped by to say hello and spread her particular brand of cheer. She lived next door so it wasn’t a long trip. Still, somehow, she was breathing a little heavy and slightly out of breath. Rather disconcerting.
“It stinks in there,” she said, as I opened the door. Not sure if she noticed but I kept the chain on. Though not particularly worried my landlady was a goblin with a human skin disguise waiting to crack my bones open and suck the marrow, I was also willing to err on the side of caution. “You need to open a window now-and-then, Fitch.”
“I’m trying to see who’ll break first, me or the roaches.”
She moved forward, closer to the gap in the door. Her breath was a bouquet of cheap sherry and nicotine. “Testy testy.”
“Was there something else you n
eeded…?”
“You’ve been on the hallway phone a lot lately, haven’t you?”
“Guilty as charged,” I said. Acting on a few suspicions and digging for the associated dirt helped pass the hours between night sweats and day sweats and those pesky in-between sweats. Like about Janssen and his history. Something about the way he’d said, “We don’t like that” when I called him crazy got me wondering. Janssen was a slimy operator with a scaly exterior and the gift of the gab, not unlike a chatty lizard, so it was difficult to tell when strikes got through. But I’d hit a sore spot, no doubt. I remembered how some of the Ontario fellas around the hobo camp where I first met Janssen used to call him the “Kingston Kook” when Janssen wasn’t around. I’d always assumed it was because he’d spent some time in Kingston and was nuttier than a bowl of cashews but now I thought there might be a little more to it. “But with Mrs. Henry in the hospital for her bum ticker, I thought it best to maintain the status quo.”
Winking, she said, “Well, you may be dialing out a lot, but what I don’t hear is that phone ring much anymore. You know the call I mean. The one late at night. Your lady with the fancy dress and car. I mean, it’s no wonder, Fitch. She’s way outta your league. You look like a pile of moose dung these days.”
“And your visits are like a ray of sunshine, I ever tell you that?”
Ms. Crawley lit a cigarette, took a puff and tilted her head up and to the side to exhale. I think it was supposed to be sexy. Uh oh. I sensed danger ahead. “I was pouring myself an afternoon libation and thought maybe you could use some company. Cooped up here in all day…”
Oh my. Rock say hello to Bottom. All I could stammer out was an eloquent, “Um…oh…uh…”
“Never really looked at you twice, truth be told, you were too young to know how to satisfy a real woman. But I’ve always been a sucker for a man gone to seed. I like ‘em a little broken and scarred.”
40 Nickels Page 6