by Fraser Nixon
“It’s a fine question and I’ll ask you the same.”
“Ah,” Jack said. “There you go.”
A pause while we drank. Funny how quickly we returned to the shorthand of youth, a Pitman’s of our upbringing. At length I said: “I went to ground. Her people summer down in New England somewhere so I got a shack at Memphremagog and sweated it out.”
“Did the school push you or did you jump?” asked Jack.
“Both.”
“What was it?
Here I took a drink and lit another of Jack’s cigarets. He watched me. My hand remained steady. I breathed out slowly and told some of the truth. I’d been stealing morphine, mostly, from the hospital dispensary. They were never able to nab me outright but had come close. It was that and my grades. In the end I’d held a trump card and between the board of governors and myself was forged an understanding. I’d ducked a censure or quodding, but there’d be no medical degree for myself from McGill, and that was a fact everlasting.
There, I’d said it. It’d been bottled up long enough, and the confession was a relief, in its way. I drank more wine.
“How much did you pocket?” asked Jack after a spell.
“More than enough for me and to sell. You’d be tickled to hear my clientele. A few real hyas muckamucks. Some Chinamen from time to time. When I lost my entree I had to shift gears. It was none for them, then after awhile none for me. I had enough saved up for the shack by the lake. Read my Tacitus and had my fishing rod and thought I’d wait for her to come back in September to try again.”
“She’ll never marry you,” Jack said.
“I know.”
To counter the rising bile I swallowed more wine. Rancour. Jack squeezed lemon juice over wet bivalves. It was far better not to speculate on what you cannot control. That woman, the ache of my heart. Instead observe your present surroundings. Looming above were dark heavy beams bisecting white plaster. It was all cod-Tudor and pretense at the Derby, Old Blighty transplanted to the colonies. Best roast beef to be had, however.
“Look at this place,” I said. “Do you know what it reminds me of?”
Jack tipped an oyster into his mouth.
“Remember the Royal Ensign? Seventeen Mile House on the Island?” I asked.
Jack peered about.
“You’re right,” he said. “When was that now?”
“Boat race weekend it must have been. Why else would we have gone over? Six, seven years ago. Swiftsure.”
“We had bathtub gin with those two doozies, what were their names...”
“Elizabeth and Rebecca,” I said.
“Then borrowed Billy’s Ford and the keys to his pa’s cabin.”
“That cabin. Quel bordel,” I said.
“They got sick on the booze. You broke the gramophone.”
“You chopped down a totem pole in Sooke Harbour,” I countered.
Jack put his hand to his face in mock shame. “Ye gods.”
“Timber!”
My elbow was on the spread cloth and I let my forearm fall. When my hand hit the tabletop it rattled the oyster shells on the plate. Heads turned: old buffers with mottled faces. I chewed over a bland smile. Seventeen Mile House was far out on the road to Sooke, western Vancouver Island. The shores of the Pacific, our home at the edge of the world. They’d been good times together, years ago now, fresh back from the war.
“Liz and Becky. You burned their knickers in the stove, didn’t you? Wonder where they are now,” I said.
“Probably knitting booties,” said Jack.
“Those were the days.”
“And look at us now,” he went.
We were back in the past for just a moment, until the soup came. We spooned it up. More wine. At last the meat arrived, good and rare and red. Spuds, celery as requested, squab and cress. Warmth coursed through me. A plate cleaned in steady, animal hunger, at last I leaned back, replete, and listened to other diners chewing. Heavy sterling fork tines squeaked on china. Gustatory grunts, a cork popping, a woman’s laughter, the human hum of conversation and pleasure eased by money. Dark-suited men and gowned ladies gestured as waiters passed to and fro. Jack pushed his plate away and lit another cigaret. He demanded coffee of a flunky. As an aside to me he said: “Pass me your flask when it comes. For the trou normand. Bloody law, wine but no spirits.”
“Break it then,” I said.
Jack shot me a look.
“Knew that you were my man. If only you’d been around for the election last spring. That would’ve been something.”
“So what is it now?”
“Guess.”
“You said Chicago.”
“You heard right.”
“And Brown, who’s he when he’s at home?” I asked.
“Brown is a wee man who needed the fear of God put back in him. He’s the worst kind of Caledonian, stubborn as a mule, but amenable to our ends.”
“And those are?”
“I’ll respect your intelligence and assume you’ve figured it out.”
“Booze.”
“On the money.”
“The monkey at the quay,” I said.
Jack laid out the rudiments. Rich wets down south don’t like to drink piss. Leave the furniture polish for the punters. They wanted the real McCoy. The good stuff was supercargo shipped straight out of Glasgow or Liverpool as ballast or coal or what-have-you into Montreal, port of call. The monkey took care of the crew when they made land, and Jack indemnified the harbourmaster when the ship came in, as it did today. Brown was paid to look away and not make a peep.
“He’s Customs?” I asked.
“Correct. We’ve exploited his vice, but a little reminder is always in order for that type. He’s a weakling and a physical coward. In any event, tonight’s the night, hence your presence.”
“What are you, exactly?” I asked.
“You could say I’m an intermediary and guide over international frontiers. I truly could use your help. I want you to have a piece, for old times’ sake. This is the real work.”
“Repayment for your largesse?” I asked, gesturing to the dirty plates.
“No, not a favour. A job.”
He reached into his billfold and took out five twenties.
“For your time and trouble. There’ll be more tomorrow, on the other side.”
Jack placed the money on the table and covered it with a serviette. I had perhaps a buck fifty in change in my trouser pocket. These days it was two bits for twenty-five cigarets. I now had a full stomach and a head of wine and no other prospects on the good green earth. Here was something. Crime.
One of Jack’s salient qualities was his ability to make things happen. His talent was luck. My strengths, if any, were far different. This was the world, here, now. Living wasn’t to be found in the past with a woman who didn’t love me, a lost profession, the calumny of enemies. I’d tried to be respectable, to be righteous. Jack had taken another path and seemed to have thrived. I asked myself, having come this far, and with my back to the wall, what had I to lose? Jack held my gaze as I took the money, then poured hooch from my flask into his java. I tucked the notes away.
“Tonight,” I repeated.
“Finish your coffee.”
I did. The bill came and Jack paid up. We rose and while exiting were smiled at by the pretty coat-check girl. Jack winked, tipped her two dollars. Her eyes to him and then to me, a shadow from his lustre. Back out on the street it was now cold, autumn-grim, and I eyed Jack’s warm topcoat enviously.
“Where to?” I asked.
“Griffintown.”
A WIND WAS rising as we picked our way through the slum, a maze of dirty brick tenements filled with quarrelling Hibernians and their squalling brats, as per the Pope’s orders. Go forth and multiply, ye sons of Erin. Factories crowded by millworks and stables. There hung throughout a pall of brown coalsmoke and river stink, worse than St. Lawrence Main to the east. In Griffintown you had your shanty Irish landed from Cork and enviro
ns; the Main, by comparison, swarmed with Chosen from their own Pale of Settlement on the Ural Steppes. Both peoples crossed the water by way of an exodus, running either from the Famine and Major Boycott or the Tsar and his Cossacks to be jammed hugger-mugger in warrens and fresh misery. Micks and Kikes a pair of lost tribes here in the New World, same as the old one. Meanwhile stray cats loped down alleyways and skinny vicious curs growled at silent rats.
Corner hawks loitered and sized up we two strolling pushovers. Jack’s easy carriage, boxer’s build, and damn-your-eyes air bought us a pass, despite his Beau Brummell attire. I balled fists in my pockets and thought of my fresh hundred-dollar stake. They’d roll you for a piece of string down this way. Jack whistled a song I couldn’t place. We were now near Wellington. A pair of drunks on a stoop fought over a bottle. Dark figures in recessed doorways grunted, copulating. I shuddered as dwarf streetlamps sputtered. Jack pushed open a door into a tavern. Smoke hung from the ceiling down to my celluloid collar. We were steadily watched by whiskered, simian faces as Jack made his way to a table near a smeared, greasy window. He jerked his head past the topers, their paws curled around quart bottles, and I went to the bar for two of Black Horse, two dimes all told, thank you very much. Back at the table Jack sat and watched an entranceway across the street.
“Looks clean,” he said. “Shall we?”
We took our untouched, corked bottles with us out again and across the road to a beat-up pile of dreary lodgings. Indoors was the smell of wet woollens left too long on the stove, stewed cabbage, damp, mould, cruelty, and mice. Jack led up three flights of stairs. I heard muffled curses behind one door, someone sobbing piteously behind another.
On the topmost landing Jack took out an almost comically oversized key, like something out of a Vaudeville sketch, and used it to open a giant padlock on a numberless door. The security seemed needless. There was no electricity in the room, which was lit only by the pale glow from without. It was furnished with a chair, a basin on a dresser, an iron bedframe with sagging mattress, an ancient wardrobe, and a view out the window to the tavern we’d just been in. Jack took a long suspicious gander at the street below. Satisfied, he drew the curtain, lit a candle, and set it on the floor behind an accordion shade.
“Never too careful.”
I took the chair. Jack removed his coat despite the cold. I put my hat on my knee. Jack passed me a corkscrew to open the bottles. We hoisted silently and drank. There was a framed picture on the wall depicting a saint. Jack took it down and laid it on the dresser face-up. Then he pulled a small glass vial from his pocket and yanked a rubber stopper from its neck with his teeth. From it Jack poured white powder onto the glass, over a print of St. Veronica with her mouchoir. I got that old anxious feeling, a roiling loosening of my bowels. Cocaine was near enough morphine in the pharmacopoeia to evoke a buried desire.
“We’ve a long night ahead of us,” Jack said. “Need some pep. How’s that sound?”
“Nerve food, sure.”
“Chock full of vitamins.”
He used a short tube to sniff some of the cocaine and passed the whole works to me. I took a noseful, tasted metal at the back of my throat, and touched the source of the flavour with my tongue. I drank some beer to wash it away. Jack offered a cigaret and we smoked.
“It’s like this,” he said. “Three trucks along the canal at midnight. Three drivers. I’m riding with the first, you with the last. Had another chap lined up but he’s out sick, or so he says. Yankee I know. So it’s just the two of us. Should be three at least but there’s nothing I can do. We drive to a safe crossing near Indian land. You and I stick with the trucks all the way to just outside Plattsburgh. It’s a long way ’round and not normally how things are done but everyone’s shorthanded so this is how it has to be. I’ve got us a room at the Republic. Tomorrow we come back on the noon train. Do you have papers?”
“Militia. My library card.”
Jack laughed. “Good.”
He got up and went to the wardrobe, opened it and took out a hatbox.
“Artillery,” he said.
He put the box on the bed and lifted out two revolvers and a case of shells. Now I saw why the ridiculous lock was on the door. Jack handed over a Webley Mark IV. It’d been awhile since I’d handled one. I hefted it, broke it open, spun the cylinder, and looked down the barrel.
“Where’s the head?”
“Down the hall,” Jack said. “I’m going to change.”
He took a dark coat out of the wardrobe. With composure, I retreated and groped along an unlit passageway to the W.C. with knees no worse from quaking. Firearms. Revolvers are tools built for use. Pick one up and carry it around and you will pull its trigger, sure as shooting.
Carefully I micturated in the filthy lavatory without touching the surroundings. My fastidious medical training had augmented and grounded an abhorrence of uncleanliness; my sterile urine was probably the cleanest substance in the room.
I returned to find Jack knotting a new tie. While he whistled I loaded the Webley and sat down. We drank more ale, smoked tobacco, and let the world burn itself out. My mind sharpened to a whetted blade with clarity and insight. Previously unrecognized associations aligned themselves into an organized pattern. The potential danger ahead was evaluated and rationalized. I felt excitement at action after such sloth. The empty summer gone, autumn quickening. I wasn’t going to leave on a train, not yet. This city, this city which had harried me from den to den, scoured by hounds, this city would see me turn and rue its hunt. I’d show my teeth. Money would lend an ease, command. Laura. I will have her, or no one will. I picked up the weapon while Jack hummed that tune and loaded his. What was the song? He checked his wristwatch and snapped his fingers.
“Time.”
WE PREPARED OURSELVES. Another sniff of the powder. My gun in my belt for now, under my suitcoat. Out and downstairs, back on the pavement, and over to the canal.
“If we’re separated,” Jack said, “try the bar at the Dominion quarter past nine every night for a week. I’ll either be there or I’ll leave you a message. I’m Pete, you’re Sam. No soap after a week, well...”
“Nothing to fear. This is good. Thanks, Jack.”
I meant it. Once again he’d dropped out of the sky and got me moving.
“You bet. Here they come.”
Jack shone an electric torch on and off thrice. Headlamps coming towards us along the slough dipped the same number of times. Our convoy. The lead truck slowed. Jack motioned me to the tail. We shook hands.
“See you at the Hotel Republic.” he said.
“Live free or die,” I went.
I climbed into the cab of the third truck. The driver was a big brute, unwashed and unshaven.
“Evening.”
He grunted.
A freight pulled by as we set off. One of the boxcars had Santa Fe–Pacific stencilled on its side, a long way from home. I cracked my knuckles, a bad habit ill-befitting any prospective surgeon. Number it amongst the traits ensuring my unsuitability for a reputable profession. Our truck pulled ahead of the engine and we parallelled it on Commissioners. The driver shifted up, accelerated, shifted again, braked a little. The truck swayed. We turned away from the westbound train.
Later, crossing the river, I saw the village of St. Lambert lit up on the left. After it, heading south, darkness grew, with fewer lights, then none. One or two hardy motorists shared the road at this quiet hour. The convoy had scattered. Half an hour or so passed, then more. I saw an empty police ’car at a crossroads in the middle of nowhere with its headlamps on and doors open. I exchanged looks with the driver and unbuttoned my coat to reveal the gun handle.
Too late I realized I had nothing to smoke and gritted my teeth. The drug had me fast and slow. We drove. Eventually I crossed my arms and closed my eyes. Over the motor I imagined hearing bottles chiming together back and forth in the payload. Glasses clinked. There was the pop of a cork from a bottle of Champagne. A band played “The Japane
se Sandman.” Laura toyed with white pearls around her milk-white throat. She was ginger-haired like Jack, but green-eyed to his blue. Redheads have a natural antipathy; you never see them together at the altar. Isn’t that so? Laura’s gloved hands, her black gown, her emerald eyes in candlelight, auburn hair piled up in rings. She laughed at some stupid witticism of mine. The dancers turned on the parquet slowly, underwater. A drumbeat. The truck hit a pothole and jolted me out of my reverie. Some time had passed; it was difficult to reckon how much and no sign of the moon.
We were driving along a dirt side road and spotted our two trucks waiting ahead. They started up and turned right onto a rutted track leading into the woods. The driver pulled out a cigaret packet and passed one to me in either the Christian spirit or one of criminal solidarity. The brand was Taxi: “Smoked in Drawing Rooms and Clubs,” yes, and in bootleggers’ trucks. The tires rolled along the grooves in the dry ground, no lamps shining. Our train moved along in the dark by feel. My eyes were staring wide but all I saw were orange coals reflected in the windscreen. I opened my window and chucked the stub out. There was the smell of slack water, pine, night. We inched along in low gear. My hand moved to the revolver handle and I gripped it, palm slick with sweat.
The driver muttered: “Contresaintciboire.” Three blind mice. See how we run. A firecracker went off, a sudden stark light. We slammed into the truck ahead of us. More firecrackers. No. Shots. Headlamps from the woods ahead, beside, behind us. Ambush. Shouts. My hand pulled at the door release. The gun stuck in my belt. The driver tried to reverse. A crack. The windscreen shattered. Another retort, then it was Chinese New Year. My door opened and I fell out of the cab as the driver’s head exploded red in the alien light. I landed and rolled into a ditch, frantically pulling the weapon free. More shouting in English and French. I crawled away into bracken through dead leaves and a dry gulch, away, away from the light and the noise. Light swung my way and there was a loud percussion as a tree trunk splintered near my head. Stray bullet, or was I in someone’s sights? Move, move. Get up. Run. With leaden legs I lurched to my feet, crouching and shambling away, my collar sprung, now hatless. Boughs slashed at my face. Faster, faster. Deeper into the woods, into the night. I stumbled over fallen trunks, blood roaring in my ears. My knees collapsed as I blundered down a bank into a creek bed, then back up and deeper into the bush. Was it the cops? All sense of direction lost. It’s dangerous to carry on. You’ll trip a cordon, stumble into a trap. Go to ground, find some deep hole and crawl into it. Instinct of the hunted animal. Hide, rest, wait for dawn. I reached out to a tree. From pillar to post I snuck along until I found a windfall. I crawled under it, my hand a claw gripping the Webley, lungs gulping for air, my heart hammering, body now wracked and shivering in shock, ears pricked for any footfall. Dig deeper, deeper, wait for whatever comes and shoot it down. This is it. You’re in it now.