I nodded as he faded through the door. I swiveled back to the bar and Mex had left the full bottle in front of me.
CHAPTER 12
Arrivals
On Sundays, I would take a cab out of the city. It was my time away and the closest thing I’d ever have to a trip of my own, even though it was just for a few hours. No one knew about these departures, not even Arnie. It took about 45 minutes to get to Pearson from the downtown core. I’d direct the driver towards Terminal 1, International Arrivals and head into the airport. I would sit and watch, usually alone, as anyone who’s got a heart would be standing and waiting for their loved ones to arrive. That’s what I was there for: the arrivals.
Husbands came home to warm embraces and filled their arms up with jubilant children. Military men made it back and said nothing at all, wrestling within themselves to find a way to touch again while walking away silently, holding hands with their lover. Teenagers came back from their first taste of the world, sun-kissed skin glowing, brown locks bleached light and with optimism about the future in their eyes, and relief in their parent’s.
The holidays were particularly special. There were amiable handshakes and hugs fired like Colts in all directions. Family traveled from all over the world from distant countries or neighbouring provinces, it didn’t really matter because they all came to break bread and be together.
Maybe I sugar-coated it all a little for my own benefit, maybe it wasn’t all a perfect celluloid reflection, but it was damn near close. Mine was a life of struggle, but out there watching everyone else I could feel something that could be misconstrued as hope. This could keep my own heart beating beneath my ribs and my head in the game. A man can lose himself altogether and one day, well, he just isn’t there anymore.
Life skips certain people on a few things. I know what I had to do to survive. I wouldn’t ever have what these people had. I’d made choices and couldn’t go back in time to undo them. I knew what I was. I knew what I was doing. Still, it didn’t mean I cared not for a little goodness now and again. If that made me soft, I could live with that.
“You’re early.”
“No, you’re late.”
The man’s name was Dietrich. He sat down beside me and pulled the tab back on his coffee cup lid. He took a discerning sip and his lips puckered from the heat. Minutes passed and he said nothing. He just watched the people come and go, beside me.
I started meeting Dietrich years ago, in the airport bar. He would order a scotch and soda and I a whisky. We drank and talked. This had become a habit and soon we agreed upon a day or two each month to get together. He kept his blond hair neat, almost militant. He had a long face and was always clean-shaven. It was a good face by all accounts. On this day, he wore a grey suit similar to the ones cops wear when they don’t want to look like cops.
Dietrich set his coffee on the marble floor and looked back at the next batch of arrivals. I didn’t look at him but could make out the semblance of an honest smile in my peripheral view.
“You been here long?” he asked, reaching down for his cooling coffee.
“I lost track of time, so I couldn’t say.”
“I see.” He paused to take a sip of coffee. “How’s your record?”
I smiled. Dietrich knew I was a boxer of some kind. Normally I wouldn’t tell someone my business, any of it, but it’s hard to keep making up stories about cut lips and black eyes.
“Been a rough week actually, but I came out on top.”
“Seems you always do.”
“So far, but there’s no place but down from the top, isn’t that what they say?”
He smiled in response, but kept watching the crowd of people collecting their luggage and loved ones. He took another sip and finally seemed pleased with the temperature.
There was a brief moment of silence and then he spoke up again.
“I have something for you.” Dietrich reached into his inside coat pocket and took a rectangular object, wrapped in plain yellow paper. He set it down on the wide armrest of the chair.
“Open it.”
I unwrapped the package and inside was a small chessboard.
“Have you ever played before?”
I said I hadn’t.
“It is not unlike your boxing. It takes patience, strategy, a calculating mind and ends in violence.” He said the last part with a laugh.
Dietrich explained the rules and we played a few games, all of which I mostly stumbled through and lost terribly. We talked some more about nothing at all and watched our arrivals. Hours passed and so did new matches of chess. Dietrich was right, it was like boxing and I fell in love with it instantly. For once, win or lose, things didn’t end up with me bleeding all over myself.
CHAPTER 13
Interrogation
Pattys can fight. That’s one stereotype that I’ve witnessed to be true. Bastards toss even better when they’re drunk. It’s something of a paradox really. Put them in front of a tussle and they won’t quit until the job is done, but give them a job and they won’t lift a finger.
I didn’t catch the fighter’s name, but his first punch got through my defense and I felt my solar plexus go soft. He’d been leading with lefts for some time and then hammered me with a dynamite right cross to the kisser. I sacrificed my defensive position to land a firm cross of my own on his jawbone. I felt it break, but still he was able to plant a concrete fist into the soft flesh that was once my solar plexus, and I felt something rupture. He saw me wince and moved in for the kill flagrantly, his eyes filled with brazen ferocity. Overconfidence was his undoing, and I put all my force into a haymaker, which I know I said was a fool’s errand, but sometimes with the right planning and a little luck, it works. I sent the six-and-a-half foot Irishman staggering until his own feet tangled in a ridiculous fashion and he went down.
I didn’t watch the ref count. I didn’t need to. I couldn’t hear a thing, but I could see the salivating crowd, and smell my victory all over my body and in the air around me.
I saw Arnie and Pink watching me and I raised my arms skyward. At that very moment, the volume rushed back into my ears and everything came alive again for me. The crowd wanted more, so much more. I knew another fight would kill me, and Arnie knew this too. Arnie was a lot of things, but he was no fool and he knew fighting. He watched each footstep with microscopic dissection. He left all emotion out of it and watched the look each man wore on his face and the intensity in their eyes. He was able to decide the outcome of every match with remarkable accuracy before the first punch had even been thrown.
He called the night despite the outstanding match, stating aloud that it wasn’t possible that another fight could match the strength of its predecessor and why belittle that. It helped that he offered everyone a free round. The room was promptly flooded with cleavage and silver trays of splash.
I knew the expectation was that I’d leave the floor unaided to maintain the pretence of the triumphant gladiator. Once behind the curtain, I collapsed from internal bleeding, among other things. There were muffled sounds and distorted lights. Legs danced all around me and then there was nothing.
When I woke I was on a hospital bed but I was not in a hospital. I was covered with blankets up to my neck, keeping me warm. There was a saline drip and needle in my arm. I lay there in the centre of the dressing room where the night had begun.
Arnie always had two doctors on call. They were good doctors, not like the down-and-outers you see in films that depict situations similar to mine. They simply had their own vices, which at some point Arnie had exploited. They now owed him.
There was a box with a signal button by my left hand, which I pushed. Moments later, the doctor came into the dressing room, asked me a few standard questions and put a light in each eye.
“How long until I’m back on the floor, doc?”
“Let’s start with back on your feet, okay?”
“Okay, so when will I be back on my feet?”
“Two or three days, as long as you rest now
.”
I felt my body ease into exhaustion. The doctor inserted a needle into the tube that was feeding my arm, adding another drug to my saline drip. I started to slide off into the void where everything was white; the world had bled me out.
Hours later, the light flooded into my pupils. It felt like I’d been asleep for years. My head throbbed as I tried to regain my focus. The girl that Arnie had brought in the other night was sitting on the bench in front of me. She looked like a mirage through my glassy eyes. She had one black eye, evidence of Arnie’s violence against her. I smiled a sick smile, as I knew he wouldn’t let that stop her from working.
We looked at each other. I could tell she was sizing me up, reading my face. I knew I couldn’t let her have anything. I couldn’t give anything away.
“You think you can hide yourself from me, is that it?”
Her eyes pierced mine like pushpins and her words caught me off guard. No one had ever done that, not even Arnie.
“You’re starting to recover.” Her accent was thick.
“Your English is good,” I said, changing the subject.
“Don’t do that.” She pulled her knees up into her chest as though she suddenly felt a chill.
“Look, I’m tired. Give me the day and come back on Sunday, okay?”
“It is Sunday.”
“It is?”
“Yes.”
It was like that. Days just disappeared like they had never existed in the first place.
“So what are you doing here? What do you want from me?” I asked.
“Just to talk.”
“To talk. About what?”
“Whatever.”
“I don’t do that.”
“Everyone does that.”
“Not me. Listen kid, you should take off. You shouldn’t be in here.”
She let her tiny feet fall back to the floor. They were bare and innocent, like those of a young child.
“You can leave. I mean, if you wanted to, you could just walk out of here and never come back. But me, I am an ocean away from my home, in a place God does not know about.” She looked away from me for only a moment, and then seemed to pull herself together. “I have no passport, no friends or family, no money. Even if I could leave, it would be useless. They would find me and kill me. But you have money. You are a citizen. Why do you stay?” She looked at me, searchingly.
“I’m a fighter, kid. I don’t know anything else, so I fight.” “Arnie pays you?”
“He does.”
“Do you kill?”
“That’s never my intention.”
Her eyes traveled towards the ceiling as she gave some thought to what I’d just said.
“I’m afraid. I know what’s to come and I am really afraid.”
Tears welled up in her eyes, which pleaded with mine. This time I was stronger and gave her nothing. She was too, and forced the tears back deep inside.
“I can’t help you even if I wanted to,” I said, flatly.
“I know.” She smiled a fake smile.
“Look kid, some of the girls take something to help them through the first time. Others take something all the time.” I knew right away that she wouldn’t take a damn thing. She’d fight and wrestle her way through it. She wouldn’t last long; the bold ones never do.
“Can I come talk to you again?”
“No.”
“Maybe tomorrow?”
“Don’t.”
She smiled a real smile this time and it was honest. I knew that I was seeing the last of a girl that soon would be gone forever. No one, not even her closest family would ever recognize her again, not that they would even get the chance. She got up from the bench and started to leave the room.
“What’s your name, kid?”
“Danika. Yours?”
“Kendall.”
“No it isn’t.” She smiled that same defiant grin again and left the room.
I had lost my very first fight to a girl.
CHAPTER 14
Déjà Vu
It’s been said that there are two things that can save a man’s soul and two things that can just as easily condemn it; women and rock and roll can keep a man alive or bury him, but I don’t really believe in that kind of romantic horseshit. For me, there are only two things that’ll keep me out of the ground, and those are my right and left hands. Even then, it’s not a sure thing.
You have to quickly learn the rules of the yard. If you want to beat a bully, you can’t outsmart him. Unfortunately, there’s no clever way to stop the beatings. Sure, if your tongue has enough silver on it, you can chirp your way out of a few scrapes, but eventually, they’ll keep on coming. The only way to end getting your ass kicked is to step into him; beat him so hard, so mercilessly, and put fear into his heart. A good walloping isn’t enough. He’ll find you the next day and beat you harder than before, because all you managed to do was to make him angry. I call it the hornet’s nest theory.
How you handle a bully translates into the way you handle moments of violence for the rest of your life. In a fight, you really only have two options. You either out-box the man or you make him fear you. No matter the force with which you hit him, the impact is twice as hard if a man has fear in his heart. I’ve seen many fall because an opponent outfoxed him with his eyes. While it’s typically said of a woman, a man can just as readily send another man to ruin with just a glance.
Musings, that’s what I have when I drink. Most people drink to forget, to live in the moment. I drink so I can be alone with my thoughts and unscramble the eggs. I had been sitting at the bar in a place uptown, the name of which I couldn’t remember, drinking whiskey for hours and thinking. The barman has been good to me. You know the sort; he was generous with his pours and no bullshit “Hey, Pal” conversations.
I was to meet Fletcher Fielding. His name was right out of a book and he was Arnie’s contact on the outside. My job tonight was to give him a list of women that had been earmarked for importing, who were mostly Romanian from the look of things. Although Arnie hadn’t told me these details, I had looked for myself in the package of papers Arnie had given to me to carry. Knowing kept me on top of things.
I had never met Fletcher and today was the first time Arnie had mentioned his name. I felt pretty confident in Arnie’s trust for me with this job. More importantly, I was sitting in an uptown bar filled with people who slept in clean linen sheets, wore overpriced cologne, adorned their napes with fancy rocks and lived taxable lives. This meant only one of two things with regards to Fletcher; either he thought there was no better place to meet than away from the typical lower class elements associated with Arnie’s line of business, or more likely, Fletcher was a clean-sheet man himself. Not that I really cared; I was drinking Jack when it should have been fine bourbon but it was still on Arnie’s dime.
This particular upscale joint was busy. The noise was at a buzzing level so that conversations could be heard by the people engaged in them and yet still remain private. There were a few empty seats at the bar, but it had four sides and was large enough that the barman could have benefitted from two assistants on a night like this. I figured his pace would help keep me sober enough for my meeting. I had a gentleman sitting next to me who was drinking Limey Gimlets. He looked like a Brit too. His chin kept crashing against his sternum like an Australian wave during the stormy season, so I knew his ears had shut off. I kept the seat to my right free, telling the odd adventurer that I was meeting someone.
I watched the barman pour another drink for the Yorkie, who had inadvertently managed to muster enough coordination to tap the rim of his empty glass in the barman’s presence. I tried the same trick and tapped my empty glass as well, but he avoided my gesture and took an order from a group of Suits who had just set the colour of their money on the mahogany. Their colours were brighter than mine.
“You should do the same if you want Mike to notice you.”
The sound of a female voice addressing me was startling. I looked to
my right and a woman in a red crepe sleeveless dress slid her firm beautiful body into the empty chair beside me. I stared at her legs long and hard, partly because she was beautiful but mostly because I had seen this pair of stems before. Then I noticed she was smiling at me.
“Now I know it’s you. You did the same thing two years ago,” she said. Her lips were parted in a way that led me to believe she was about to smile.
“Excuse me?” I responded. At least I think I said something like that.
“You don’t remember me. It was a long time ago, I guess.”
She crossed her legs and I looked directly at her.
“I remember you.”
“You do?” She became a little vulnerable. I remained stone-faced.
“Yeah I saw you on TV once. You’re an actress, right?”
She looked disappointed and started to get up to leave. I gently put my hand on her arm to stop her.
“How’s the car?”
She stared at me with a bewildered look. I don’t know why I did it. Maybe it was because she looked disappointed. Maybe it was because I wanted to feel what it felt like to talk to someone like her or maybe it was because she was warm and was so damn beautiful. Maybe it was all of the reasons at once.
She sat back down and ordered a drink.
“The car is in the shop, actually. Bad gasket or something like that. It will probably cost me upwards of five hundred dollars.”
“If it does, switch mechanics.”
“Okay, I will.” She looked down at her drink and smiled a little, playing with her glass and rotating it around in a circle. “I really thought I’d never see you again.”
I didn’t know what to say but found it impossible to conceal what I was feeling. She fidgeted in her chair a little. I didn’t say anything and took a drink. She kept looking at me and although I didn’t look back at her, I knew there was hurt and disappointment in her eyes.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have intruded. I just wanted to come over and say hello.”
She got up and walked away. I took a drink and cursed under my breath, and told myself I was doing the right thing by letting her go. I did it once before and it was right then, but at this moment it really felt completely wrong. I left my drink, got up and went after her. I moved through the crowded room and put my hand on her back as I approached. She turned around to face me.
Of Violence and Cliché Page 6