“You just gonna stand there?”
Claire grinned to take the sting out and I stuck my tongue out at her.
“Nope. Watch.”
It was a cross between a deep knee bend and a controlled collapse and then I raised back up.
She clapped loudly and Fred rolled over to look for the cause of all the excitement.
“Bravo. And for an encore?”
“I may pee without aid or assistance.”
She made a face at me as I sagged down again and sweat poured out to stain my gown at the throat and crotch. After I’d done six of the bends, I sat down on the ground and started to lean back and forth, covering maybe six inches of an arc per time. After ten of these, I had to stop and rest, and Claire kissed me.
“My hero. How does it feel?”
“Hurts.”
My breath was coming in short gasps and there were spots in front of my eyes.
“How?” Her voice was low and soft so I rolled myself onto a nearby bench and she kissed me again.
“It’s knives in the small of my back. Short ones with wide blades. Never enough to kill, just to wound. They go peck-peck-peck.”
Fred was eating a dandelion and Claire rescued the bright yellow flower and then sat back to listen. She listened brilliantly and understood and when she didn’t understand, she’d ask about specifics. When she didn’t agree, she’d wait and make her point afterwards.
“The knives come with each breath. With each inhalation and exhalation and movement. They peck when I even think about moving but that’s not real. That’s just psychology.”
I got up and did the whole routine all over again. Claire watched and wrestled with Fred for a bit and the sun just shone down.
When we were back in my room, Claire saw an audio tape on the bed and handed it to me along with a note that read “LISTEN TO ME.” When asked nicely, the peppermint nurse lent me someone’s portable stereo and I listened to a conversation caught in the middle.
“Be it ever so humble.”
It was Claire speaking dryly and politely and it was a good recording.
“Could be worse.”
That was Thompson and then he grunted and repeated, “Could be worse.”
Sounds of glasses and ice and liquid coming through very clear and then Claire spoke up. “Here, I’m not gonna drink alone.”
Clinking sound like a toast and then Thompson, “Lawyers’ lunch.”
The sound of another drink, maybe two being filled.
“How bad is it?”
“Seen worse, seen better. The Crown should know something’s bush about it all and, well, maybe they’ll do the right thing.”
“And . . . ?”
“Then they’ll drop the charges. Or they’ll come on hard, depending on local politics, and then we’ll go to appeals and the Crown will continue to press hard or let us go. If they press hard, then we go to the provincial Court of Appeal. Beyond that there’s the Supreme Court, where I’ve never been.”
Thompson kept speaking and I could hear him drinking. “That’s simplified but basically true. The Crown can drop the case now, or during the preliminary hearings, or in the court during the case, or during appeals, or during re-appeals or anywhere else that seems good to them.”
There was a long pause and then he went on, with his voice sounding progressively slurred. “We’ve only got to win once. They’ve got to win every single time.”
She spoke up, still dryly, still without passion. “Monty used to say the whole system was like a starfish. Once it started eating you, it couldn’t stop, it was built to start eating and its very nature prevented it from stopping. The whole thing was to avoid getting tasted in the first place.”
“Yeah. The system can’t afford to stop once it starts, they can’t afford to admit they make mistakes. My dad was in the army and he used to say, ‘Never complain, never explain.’ It applies to the law too.”
More drinking.
“Been hearing some stuff about Sam. Rough stuff. Bad stuff. Doesn’t match what seems to be happening. Married, straight, and respectable. He even has a baby son, who is where by the way?”
“I left him with a friend.”
“I thought you had just come into town, you found a friend that quick? Did you know someone here before?”
“No. A woman called Ramirez is watching Fred. She’s one of the cops who arrested Sam. We both have kids and started talking when I tried to go down to the station house and Sam was on his way to the hospital. She thinks I’m okay. Just making some bad choices.”
“Well, shave my ass, a cop. See, this is a nice town, lived here all my life and I can definitely say it’s a nice town. So which one is the real Sam? Married? Straight and true? Respectable? Thief? Killer? Drug addict? Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy?”
Claire laughed. “He was one and now he’s the other. I’ve got to go. Thanks for the drinks.”
There was a gasp, a female one. Then the sound of kissing and the sound of cloth on cloth, then skin on skin.
I looked across at Claire, who was sitting on the chair at the end of the bed and bouncing Fred on her knee.
The sound of skin on skin kept coming, then the sounds of more kissing, then gasps and the creaking of a bed, moans, sighs, gasps.
Across the room, Claire was chucking Fred under the chin and making him laugh. On the tape, the noises petered out and then I heard Claire again. “Well, keep in touch. Anything you need, just give me a call.”
Thompson, his voice completely slurring. “Sure.”
“Do you want me to call a cab?”
“Nah, I’ll be fine.”
Sound of a door shutting and a lock closing, then she laughed.
“I never will understand . . .”
When the tape was over, I handed it over to her.
“Ummm. Sweetheart?”
She was putting the headphones on and trying to stop Fred from biting his own toes. “Yes?”
“Did you sleep with Thompson?”
“No. Why? Should I?”
I looked out the window but there were no answers there.
“Then we have a problem. Someone really doesn’t like us.”
Claire listened to the tape and rewound it to the start before answering slowly. “I think you’re right.”
She said it calmly enough but I could see that she was angry. Her brows were drawn together and her lips were tight and narrow. She exhaled and spoke. “What are we going to do about it?”
I thought about breaking the tape into small pieces but I reconsidered. “I don’t know yet.”
Two tiny red spots appeared on her cheeks, signs of strong emotion. “When you’re done with him or her, then they’re mine.”
She exhaled through her nose and listened to the tape for a second time. “Okay. Some of it seems to be part of a conversation that Thompson and I had at my hotel room the night after you were arrested. He came by to introduce himself and ask me some questions.”
I looked at her quizzically. “To your hotel room? He came to your hotel room?”
She laughed but it sounded brittle. “Yes. Very un-lawyer-like. He called before he came and asked a few questions, and he could have asked the rest of them over the phone but he came over instead. Actually, I thought he was going to dump you.”
Claire patted Fred down and checked his diaper.
“When he got up to the room, though, he was flushed and angry. Sort of scared and smelling of booze and cigarettes. Does he smoke?”
I had to think about that and a series of images of my lawyer flashed through my mind’s eye. Smokers have tells, twitches, just like any other addict, but there are also a bunch of physical signs that hadn’t been there.
“No. His hands are clean, his breath is okay, his teeth are pearly white-ish. And I’ve never seen him light up. He does drink, though.”
“Does he ever, he drank about half a bottle of Stolichnaya. He asked a bunch of questions about your past, mine too, for that matter.”
“What did you tell him?”
She smiled sweetly. “The truth, of course. Don’t you remember the rule?”
I smiled back. “Yeah. Always tell your own lawyer the truth and always tell the other guy’s lawyer the lies.”
Another golden rule of thieves. I thought it through and then spoke slowly. “Walsh put some pressure on him. I think he went to you to try to deal with it.”
“Fine. Is he going to fold?”
“I doubt it. He’s too angry. He’ll be even angrier if I let him hear the tape.”
“Yes, he will.”
Claire and I looked at each other across the bed and smiled and the tape sat there in the space between and steamed its poison.
10
They made us take a taxi when they finally let me out of the hospital. I argued until Dr. Leung told me I would be staying if I didn’t get a cab and at that point I agreed. Claire had a bag with my clothes over one shoulder and pushed the stroller with Fred while Leung pushed me in a wheelchair. One tire wasn’t straight and kept grinding as he lectured in a dry, flat voice.
“. . . so take it easy. No stress, no strain, and no exercise beyond the stretching we’ve talked about. No alcohol, no coffee, nothing caffeinated. Those things would strain your system. What little is left, that is.”
The nurses and orderlies paid us no attention as we passed and finally we made it to the main entrance.
“No red meat. Fish and chicken, though, wouldn’t hurt. Just a little.”
“Doc?”
He leaned over until I could see his nose.
“Yes?”
“You’ve got a lousy bedside manner.”
He smiled and kept on pushing.
The peppermint nurse caught up with us and pushed something into my hands. “Mr. Haaviko? You forgot this . . .”
This was a vase half full of dandelions that Claire and Fred had picked for me. The nurse exhaled loudly, wiped her brow theatrically, and left.
Claire stifled a laugh. “She likes you.”
She sounded entertained as Leung pushed the chair up to the bench outside the doors and motioned for her to go on. My wife smiled on one side of her face and folded the stroller up while ignoring both of us. With effort I got my ass to the bench and sat down, but Claire didn’t add anything and I had to ask.
“Okay, I’ll bite, why do you say that?”
Claire had the stroller in a small, compact bundle under one arm and Fred in a larger, squirming bundle under the other. “She had three buttons undone and then did this.”
She inhaled and her breasts rode up under a pale lavender silk blouse. Something tingled inside and I recognized the first real, concrete urge for sex since I’d been beaten. Claire noticed and winked while Leung helped me to my feet and thought about what Claire had said. Then he added, “I’ll talk to her.”
The cab was waiting and a red-headed kid in his late teens opened the door and I let my family get in first.
Leung held out his hand. “Well, Mr. Haaviko, or Parker, or whatever. It’s been a pleasure and I hope never to see you again.”
I shook the strangely limp and lifeless hand.
“Ditto. There’s a book out called How to Win Friends and Influence People. I’ll send you a copy.”
That made him smile and he bowed slightly at the waist. “Good luck.”
Leung nodded to the driver and we left. Maybe ten blocks away we were long out of sight of the hospital so I kissed Claire and Fred and relaxed a little.
“Can we get out here?”
“Why? It’s another, what? Six blocks? Something like that ’til home.”
“I need the exercise.”
We got out at the corner and she paid off the cabbie while I assembled the stroller and inserted Fred. Main Street ran parallel to the Red River and there was a wide park with trees from the edge of the street down to the water. Some people were fishing and others walking and the shops along the way were mostly small with not a single chain store or national brand in sight. Cars were parked up against the curb and people said hello and good day. The sun was bright and not too warm and we walked very slowly towards the river. As we went, we looked around at everything.
“Look, over there, a coffee shop with an attached diner. No Starbucks that I can see, no premium Colombian brew with extra caffeine for the added addiction factor, no smog, fewish panhandlers, low street crime. Too many cell phones, though. Not as bad as Toronto, thank God.”
Claire was quiet and let me push Fred for a while before linking her arm through mine and taking over. “You do it all wrong. Let me.”
We walked in silence and turned into the park past an empty baseball diamond and a small sandbox.
“I’m sorry but I have to tell you. I borrowed some money from my parents.”
She wasn’t sorry, not really, she was just being polite and I let it lie there between us as we passed a hot dog cart and another one selling French fries. There were yells from down on the river as someone fishing caught something big, so we turned to watch the battle as a six-year-old boy wrestled a silvery fat-bodied carp into the air. There was a bench so we sat down and Fred started to snore loudly.
“Sam, c’mon, tell me, how do you feel about me borrowing the money?”
My first instinct was to lie, my second was to get angry but, instead, I just let it go. “Bad. Like I’m a failure. But there’s nothing I can do about it. How much have we got in the kitty now?”
“The rent’s paid for this month and one more plus grocery money for three weeks. Four or five if we go for welfare cooking, which is both hot and brown.”
Long pause.
“Ground beef and macaroni.”
“And liver and potatoes.”
“Blech.”
She pressed the side of her butt into my hip.
I changed the subject. “It’s a nice town.”
Claire patted my knee and then squeezed my shoulder. Fred rolled over awkwardly and humped his butt up until it was pointing at the sky. She stared at him and then spoke. “You sound wistful.”
“Well, we’re not going to stay, are we? Which means I can be wistful as I want in consideration of all the things that could have happened for us here.”
I could see far away across Main where an elderly man in a white coat was sweeping the sidewalk in front of a barbershop. He used a corn broom and stopped as I watched to talk to a passerby. I started to say something and Fred farted loudly and startled us both into quickly hushed laughter.
When I could breathe again, I said, “Remember what they say in the Maritimes?”
“What?”
I put on my worst Newfie accent and did an impression. “Well, now, me boyo, your cough sure sounds better.”
Claire snorted once and tucked Fred back under the light blanket. The old man across the street went back to work and then cleaned a spot on the display window with the edge of his sleeve and some spit. I talked as I watched the man. “You know, you’d never see that in Edmonton.”
Claire nodded agreement. “Or in Calgary, or Vancouver, and certainly not in the big, bad, old Toronto. No one in any of those cities would ever sweep their own sidewalk. They’d wait until the city did it or the wind picked up.”
“Yep. It’s really a very nice town, all things considered. Friendly, clean, and we’ve got no past here. That’s nice in a lot of ways. It gives some leeway just to be here.”
Fred woke up and whined until I gave him my finger to bite. Then he settled down and went back to chewing on me and I thought about how many times I’d used that finger to hurt someone or to threaten pain, to extort or to steal. Fred’s puckered face didn’t care, though, he didn’t know and he didn’t care and I couldn’t feel much else but love at that moment. Claire sat back and I could feel the tension leaving her body. Like always, she knew before I did. When she spoke, her voice was husky. “And you’re clean here, so am I.”
“Right. No one’s looking for me that hard. And I’ve never had a
real job and I’d kind of like to know what it’s like.”
She got up and helped me to my feet as Fred looked from face to face and blew spit bubbles.
“Right, well then, that’s decided, so let’s get home. I’m sure your damned dog has ripped the place to shit by now.”
As we walked down the road, I linked my arm back in hers. “Why is he my dog when he does something bad and your dog when he does something good?”
She laughed and refused to answer, which I felt was extremely unfair.
11
“So, how do I look?”
Claire moved around in front of me and adjusted the tie.
“Like an ex-con looking for work.”
I was wearing an expensive, pale gray suit with a pale blue cotton shirt and a pair of oxfords with steel toes, fairly useful remnants from a life of crime. They were good for kicking a door in or crunching up a kneecap without breaking a toe.
“But an attractive, reliable, honest ex-con looking for work, right?”
“Oh, yes. Gently changing the subject, she says, this tie. Have you ever untied it or did you just make a knot sometime last decade and leave it?”
“Yes. How can you tell?”
She pulled at the knot, which did nothing, so she stepped back to pick at it with her teeth.
“I was kidding. I was only kidding.”
The clothes made me feel like a loser. These clothes were not me, these clothes were the ones I wore when I talked to the judges and the prosecuting attorneys. These were the clothes that translated into a badge of failure. Fred crawled over and bit my knee and I cheered up.
“You still love me, don’t you, Fred?”
He kept chewing and I sat down and started to wrestle with him, which he seemed to like. Fred had my blond hair and Claire’s chocolate brown eyes and a belligerent personality that he got from God-knows-where. He was ten months old and we’d conceived him in prison just after Claire and I had decided it was maybe perhaps time for me to go straight. The dog came over and licked us both, which made Fred grunt.
“Owf, owf.”
“Claire, he said ‘Daddy,’ plain as day!”
An Ordinary Decent Criminal Page 7