“Don’t tell me what to do!”
The cat licked his fur carelessly, like an adult pretending to have infinite patience for a misbehaving child.
“Do you want to hear more about the Shrikun, or shall we call it a night?”
I kicked an empty bottle, the last childish outburst I allowed myself before I got it together.
“Go on.”
“Shrikun use Forms against people to manipulate them or trick them.”
The damn cat paused again. I said nothing and he smiled at me.
“Humans mostly trust animals. Shrikun use that trust against people. They are clever creatures. Their goal is to convert whites to greys and then finally greys to blacks. A Form that dies grey becomes nothing. It just vanishes and is a loss to the Shrikun.”
“It just vanishes?”
The cat looked at me speculatively and I realized I messed up again.
“Reiteration is allowed. The truth is, I don’t know for sure what happens to greys. Lamia might know. I do know that whites go somewhere, that I am sure of, but I don’t know where or what the place might be. It’s beyond my clearance, so to speak.”
The cat stopped with its explanation and looked up at me.
“What’s this I hear about you going by another name? Kent or something?”
“I’m assuming Lamia told you that? Not sure how she’d even know about it.”
“It’s her business to know things about you.”
“Social norms haven’t ever mattered all that much to me. I never liked William and I can call myself whatever I want.”
“That is true, but neither I or Lamia can. Whatever name is on your birth certificate is the name we must address you by.”
“Why?”
“Oh William. Rules are rules.”
“Bunch of crap, that’s all that is.”
Without warning, the cat broke from beside my feet and ran into the shadows. There was the sound of an overturned garbage can and then silence. I watched the shadows for a moment, and then the tabby emerged with something hanging from between its teeth. I looked closely and realized it was a mouse that he had just captured and killed.
“Don’t give me that look.” Maneki swallowed the dead rodent whole and then licked his paws. “After all, I am still a cat.”
CHAPTER 5
1999 – Spilled Milk
Me, I’m not one of the good ones. I want to get this out of the way right now before there are any misunderstandings. I’m the nick when you shave, the skip in the record.
I don’t lie to myself like the Italians do by trying to fit in. Goddamn Mafia, there’s some expired fruit if I ever saw any. Heck, most people lie to themselves more than they tell themselves the truth. Life is easier that way. That’s why so many people believe in God, to have a reason for their struggle.
Imagine being content working for some manager who clock watches the shit out of your shift. There’s nothing more dangerous than a person who believes to their core in the ideals of a faceless corporation. More output is expected from you each year despite recessions and market crashes. Toil away for two weeks off out of 52. Pay bills, taxes to a government that embezzles it for whores and heart surgeries. Routine is a clever way of saying suicide, just depends on the scale you’re using to measure these things.
We’re the chosen beasts, the animal burdened with self-awareness. No child tells their parent that when they grow up they want to take inventory, clean toilets, or sell insurance. What if we lived in a world where people didn’t give up on their dreams, had hope, and saw things through to the end? People don’t understand that their dreams are as important as eating and breathing. Most of us don’t even ask why it takes us so long to fall asleep at night or the reason for those headaches. That’s most people. Me, I’d rather put my fist into another man’s milky throat and fly through life anonymously any day. Maybe I’ve navigated my way through the complexities of the simple 24-hour heartbeat or maybe I’m just simple, you do the math.
I didn’t work for Loudon for very long. About two years, give or take a few months. In those days, the Louse had a pool hall off College Street that isn’t there anymore, much like the rest of College Street that I used to know. I worked for him for about a year, taking book and roughing up jacks that owed him money. I didn’t like the work, but I got to meet the kind of people who could help me get ahead and sometimes I’d come into a sizable stack of cabbage. Loudon was bad at keeping tabs on his staff and in turn, missed a lot of side transactions. That’s what happens when you fill your nose with blow three or four times a day. It also made him unpredictable, like most honest-to-badness addicts.
Despite my disdain for the modern working man, I too was in this thing for the scratch. I wanted money and more importantly, I was encumbered with the same problem every other living chap is faced with, and that problem was very simple: as much as I wanted money, I needed it even more. So yeah, I’m a hypocrite. Show me someone breathing who isn’t.
Loudon was a real poison peach though, and was unpredictable at best. Unstable people can’t be trusted. They tip the scales in favour of chaos, although a little chaos at the right time is good, in my humble opinion. Keeps us all honest. But the Louse, well, he was different. He had a temper too.
Loudon would beat up on this immigrant kid with a gimp arm who used to come to the hall from time to time. Once, he decided to lay into the kid and give him a good going over. I stepped in before he spread on the icing, and popped Loudon one right in the nose. He lost his footing and tumbled backwards, falling into a cue rack. The cues went all over the floor like an emptied box of toothpicks. He frantically tossed the cues off himself and got up quickly, red in the face with a mark on the snout and nothing much to cry about but boy did he sing.
“You hit me!” He said it as though it hadn’t happened yet.
“I did.”
“Over this piece of retard shit?” It really was a question he wanted an answer to.
You see Lousy hated the kid because he was a gimp, because he came from another country and he beat up on him for those reasons alone. Not because the kid stole from him, not because the kid irritated him, but because he was brown and handicapped to boot. So I let him know what it felt like to be the smaller of two people. I never much liked bullies. It gave me great pleasure to set one right on his ass.
“You should leave the kid be, Lou.” I wasn’t asking and he knew it.
“You should know your place.” He didn’t deliver his words with confidence and everyone in the place was now watching. He knew that, too.
“I’ve got to go make some calls.”
I turned my back to him and started to walk away
“Now hold on a second, I ain’t finished talking to you yet.”
“No, we’re done here.”
I kept on walking. Loudon put foot to floor and came after me, gripped my arm, spun me around and lunged forth with a telegraphed roundhouse. I moved and he missed. Then I put a cowbell fist into his left cheek that sent him round like a dreidel. He was done and so was my time in his employ.
I learned something very valuable about the industry I was entering into. This thing, this street game of players and pawns has eyes and those eyes are always on the lookout for fresh meat. I didn’t know it at the time, but that little play didn’t go unnoticed and it landed me an interview for another job.
It’s my belief that every single person was born to be really great at something. Maybe it’s painting or baseball. Maybe it’s cooking or killing. Everyone has a skill inside that is well hidden, waiting to be discovered and put into play. Most people never get to know what it is they were born to do. I was about to get that chance.
CHAPTER 6
Arnie
We are all of us human, some just a little less so than others. I watched the guy to the left of me rain heaps of salt upon his French fries. He said his name was Rusty. The Polack on my right didn’t speak any English, had weak eyes, stunk wretchedly of mothballs, and I was pretty su
re he could carry himself in a tussle.
The Polack, who went by Stentinowski, stared with disgust as Rusty licked the salt granules off a fry with tedious concentration and put the limp golden rod back on the serving tray. He did this one by one, treating each side of the rectangular fry with the careful attention of his sweaty tongue. Between each one he’d suck hard on the straw of his pop can, wetting his licker for the next go round.
I had been sandwiched between these two lovelies for about a half an hour, waiting for a guy named Arnie.
Ten minutes later, the face of a criminal strolled into the restaurant with crooked lips and a smile parting them. Arnie wasn’t impressive to look at but had killed over a dozen men, raped as many women and couldn’t remember the names of any of them. Albanians never do. He had thinning hair slicked and combed towards the back with pride, as you’d imagine a crook would keep his hair. He wore clothes that exceeded his standing in life by satirical margins. All in all, Arnie was a prize, and right there is where I misjudged him. You see, Arnie wore the mask of a fool but underneath was a deadly rattlesnake contorted into the shape of a man. He was cunning and had a willingness to act on desires most folks only read about in their morning newspaper.
Arnie could shed his skin in mere seconds. He was so charming he could talk Joan of Arc into shaking hands with the English and then shrewd enough to convince her it might be nice to have a campfire and celebrate. He was evil; there’s an interesting one for ya, but he was the very definition of the word. Arnie couldn’t find Jesus in church, but that doesn’t carry very far because I could never find him there either.
He placed an order with the fat waiter and a plate of greasy Chink food arrived promptly in front of his greedy mouth. He surveyed the food and put a fork up in my direction.
“You gonna eat?”
“Me?”
“Yeah you, stupid. When I point at you I don’t mean the runny yolk next to you.”
“I’m not hungry,” I said casually.
“I didn’t ask if you were hungry, I asked if you are going to eat.”
“No.”
“No, what?”
“No, I am not going to eat.”
“Shit boy, you’re going to have a hard life if you can’t answer simple directs like the one I just gave you.” He smiled at me, slurping back some noodles as he said it. Sauce leaked from the corners of his mouth, traveled downward until it pooled into a droplet beneath his chin and hung there, vibrating precariously for a moment until it came free and fell back onto his plate of food.
Gen Go Chow, only place with a whole bunch of slants running around like free-range chickens serving every kind of food under the sun. They even served burritos. Imagine that, zips serving cholo food. Model minority achievement is happening in this glorious modern North America, right under the belly of the white sloth. The Bible says the meek shall inherit the earth; whoever wrote that hadn’t counted on the Chinese work ethic.
Arnie liked the place because the owner usually sent him home with a young girl after the meal. The young girl usually didn’t come back the way she left.
“What’s your problem?”
Arnie put his fork up in Stentinowski’s face. Stentinowski didn’t answer because Stentinowski didn’t understand Arnie’s question. He didn’t understand the question because as I said before he didn’t speak English. Arnie knew this but asked anyway, because Arnie was a real-life son of a bitch.
With his eyes on his noodles, he looked at me again with his fork. “You know what his problem is?” he asked me, moving his fork back towards Stentinowski.
“I don’t.”
“I do.” He paused as he shoveled another mouthful of white wormy noodles into his gape. He chewed with his mouth open and the noodles churned like real worms all bunched up in a fisherman’s bait container.
Stentinowski’s eyes bulged at him with a dumbfounded look, while Arnie continued to fork at him.
“You want to preserve your youth. Amen, don’t we all! You look preserved, and you sure as hell smell preserved, ‘cause all I smell over my food is the awful stink of mothballs.” He looked up from his food at the three of us, like Stentinowski’s smell was a group fault.
Stentinowski looked to Rusty and me for help. Then Arnie reached over and slapped him in the face. Hard, but not really hard and nothing that would cause Stentinowski any real pain. Stentinowski’s face went childlike, as though his own father had just hit him and he might start to cry. There’s nothing more defeating than watching a simple act of violence reduce a man into a state worthy of your pity. I felt nothing for him.
Arnie mindlessly tortured the last noodle on his plate with his fork. I watched him cut it into tiny sections. All he needed now was a magnifying glass and a little bit of sunshine. He looked up from his plate and at me, but addressed the three of us.
“Have you all been introduced?”
We nodded that we had.
“Good. Do you know why you’re here?”
There was a long pause and then I spoke up.
“For a job.”
“Is that what you were told?”
We nodded in unison again.
“Well it ain’t like that. I mean, I brought you in to fight.”
We all took an investigative glance at each other.
“Every second Friday I run private, unsanctioned fights in a section near the harbour. You three are on my bill for tonight. You’ll fight anywhere from one to three fights, depending on how you do. There’s money in it, if you win. If you lose, I don’t see you again. Make sense?”
It did and we said so. Arnie looked the three of us over closely.
“Do you have any questions?”
We didn’t
“Perfect.”
He put a finger in Stentinowski’s face.
“Get mean, boy! You won’t be able to stink these guys to death!”
Stentinowski had no idea what Arnie said but understood perfectly what he meant from the expression on his face.
Arnie stood up from the table, threw some cash down onto his filthy plate and smiled as the bills mixed with the leftover sauce.
“I will be there at some point tonight. Don’t disappoint me, boys.”
Seconds later, the manager was standing beside him with an awkward young Chinese waif not even close to legal age. She looked sickly and thin, and there were tracks all up and down her arms. It was her eyes that killed you though; they were grey and lifeless, swimming in rancid morphine. She stood there just looking off into nowhere with her glassy eyes and skin peppered with ripe bruises, like some sort of Asian trout. Arnie put his hands on her waist and gripped her firmly. He looked at her in such a way that a chill rippled through the three of us simultaneously.
He took her by the arm and she apathetically allowed herself to be towed from the restaurant. I watched the limp, lifeless girl vanish through the restaurant doors with evil in its purest form: Man.
CHAPTER 7
Pink Dark Agnes
The eastern Toronto harbour was quiet at night. It was the commercial section of the harbourfront and therefore received little to no traffic in the evenings and into the night. I hadn’t been standing alone long when a man walked out from behind a boathouse and made his way towards me.
“You Kendall?”
“Yep.”
“Follow me, please.”
I did. The man’s accent was thick and I put it somewhere around Eastern Europe, Czech maybe. We walked for ten minutes in silence. I kept looking for some sort of warehouse or factory, but there wasn’t much along the wharf that matched the description I had formulated in my mind as to what Arnie’s place might look like. Then the man stopped walking and pointed.
“There, you see?”
I nodded that I did.
“You go. Ask for Pink, yeah?”
“Yeah, okay.”
The man walked away and was out of view before I managed to collect myself. I headed towards the cruise ship he had pointed to.<
br />
The cruise liner was old and nothing that would meet today’s standards for fantasy holidays. Still, it was in good seaworthy shape from what I could tell, based on my limited understanding of such things. The name that adorned the boat was “Dark Agnes”, which meant nothing to me and the letters were barely visible. It was lightless on the pier and the vessel was moored discretely and purposefully. The ship itself showed no signs of life aboard. If another ship were to pass Dark Agnes on the open water at night, a seafarer would surely think it a ghost ship, or miss it entirely.
I arrived at the base of the gangplank when a man appeared. He was older, maybe in his fifties, with a head full of grey hair that was kept neat and short. His face was a little too meaty but didn’t detract from his overall ruggedly handsome appearance. He was smoking a cigarette and he took a pull on the filter. He wore a white collared shirt with the top two buttons flying loose, exposing a portion of grey chest hair. His sleeves were rolled up comfortably as the night temperature was warm. He carried himself with an insouciant air that belied his true characteristics. He looked down at me and then spoke.
“Nice night.”
“If you’re into that.”
He smiled a little at my reply.
“You Kendall?”
This man also had a similar accent, but it was subtle.
“Yes. You Pink?”
“Pinkerton, but some call me Pink and a few have said Pinky.” He paused and reflected a moment like he was going to add something more, but then didn’t.
“Uh huh, whatever.”
“You’re late.”
“No, I’m not.”
“You calling me a liar?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I am lying. First time in my life. I just like to check a fighter’s spirit so as not to waste anyone’s time.” He laughed. It was a good laugh and he shifted to his Form momentarily. It was black tiger.
“Do I come up or not?”
“Come, come!”
I mounted the gangplank and made my way aboard. When I reached the top of the plank, the man named Pink threw his arm around my shoulders as he guided me indoors.
Of Violence and Cliché Page 3