We'll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night

by Joel Thomas Hynes

  No choice, no choice Johnny me son. Insurance tells me if I wants to collect I’ll have to press charges. I hates to do it, you knows now, I hates to do it. But I got to. Time enough you went somewhere to get a bit of help anyhow.

  Pius, God love the big lumbering old prick, smirking over the delicious string of charges on Johnny. Sending his own flesh and blood off to the boys’ home for the sake of collecting on his burnt-out Cavalier. Tanya bawling and wailing in the courtroom like one of them Italian funeral women when they carts Johnny away for a full fucken year. And not a word out of any of em except Tanya, who couldnt ever get a ride out the highway but sent lots of useless fucked-up letters about what was going on up on the hill or what happened the other morning down by the fish plant. No money though, no tobacco, not a measly visit, not even Christmas. Fuck em Johnny. This was the little dilemma too, when he finally ruptured out of the woods and onto the highway that night with the sole busted out of his left sneaker and his hood shredded to ribbons, deep gash in his forearm from where he slipped in the pleading dark and landed with a full-bodied thud into a deserted bottle pit, this was his little dilemma then, to go east or west. But what was east? Home? Fuck that. Last place he’d be welcome, but where they’d expect him to run to, young and stupid, back to familiar turf. So he went west, towards fuck knows where. Sixteen-year-old Johnny couldnt think of a single town he knew the name of except Corner Brook, and he wasnt even sure if that was in Newfoundland or not. He got one ride, then dropped at the turnoff to Adeytown, middle of nowhere, next to an angry black pond and a sign that said Clarenville 18 km. And he sat on the guardrail and pondered the wound on his arm, coated with rusty dirt and slivers of green glass, and his feet were blazing cold and wet and the zipper of his hoodie was torn away so he huddled and shivered and waited, waited, almost jumped out into the road when the first beam of headlights came blinding round the turn. Young Johnny, not hitchhiking but dancing jumping jacks on the side of the road like he’s crawled up from some wreck at the bottom of the pond beside him, desperate, desperate to put as many miles as possible between himself and that beige hellhole and that chunky McGregor fuck. Johnny jumps and shouts and dances and waves and the first car pulls over and stops a few yards ahead of him and as he’s running to catch up a second car pulls in behind and before Johnny can even sort out what’s happening he’s making a scramble over the guardrail and tumbling arse over kettle down the gravel embankment and landing with a mute sludgy splash into the stinking bog below. He tries to push himself upright onto his feet but his freshly bleeding arm sinks to the shoulder in the muddy shit masquerading as the bottom of the pond. His head goes under and he tries to kick free, find a foothold, grab hold of something, anything, a soft memory, the icy water like black knives in his ears and eyes, and next it’s McGregor’s sneering pug face at the gates and the cops are driving into the gravel lot, McGregor shouting You little bastard. You little bastard.

  Thinkin back, hey Johnny, think they mighta sent you to the hospital or something? No. Arm infected for weeks afterwards. Headaches, fevers. All the feeling gone in three of his toes. And McGregor then, sitting on the edge of his bunk while Johnny’s lost in a blistering haze of sweat and terrible voices and wall sprites. McGregor gleefully tellin Johnny all he’s heard about a man named Steve Puddester and another man named Pius Keough.

  And this sister of yours, Johnny? This Tanya Keough? Well youre lucky youre lying down, that’s all I have to say.

  Black SUV pulls up outside one of the units at the Best Western and a sharp-dressed mama gets out, forties, trim and slim, long black hair, black coat and slacks, white collared blouse, high heels. Fucken hell. She keys open the door to her unit and strolls inside, confident, at ease. Comes out a minute later and unloads a suitcase and travel bag from the back of her rig, big forty of white wine tucked under her arm. Johnny watches all this, without lookin like he’s watchin. He squeezes the wad of bills in his pants pockets and wonders on a room. Mind of the time himself and Madonna took a room up at the Greenwood in the Pearl for over a week and went fucken mad. Madonna. This was months into it, two of em coming off a dry spell. Johnny came and collected Madonna on the steps of the Health Sciences where she was chairing a goddamn Narcotics Anonymous meeting. Fuck sakes. Not like he twisted her arm though. There was just this look between them. An understanding. Sharing. One day at a time. Serenity now. Christ Almighty.

  Let’s get fucked up girl.

  Youre bad Johnny Keough.

  Couple of bottles of brandy, her favourite. Couple of bottles of vodka. A drop of Crown Royal of course. A dozen Black Horse, little bag of E, Xanax, them speedy little yellow pills, chunk of hash, enough rock to flatline an elephant, lots of codeine. Go big or stay the fuck home, hey Johnny? Johnny after playing getaway driver for the brothers, Darren and Pat Janes, after they lifted two ATM machines right off a downtown street that Sunday morning. Took the ATMs out to the White Hills and went at the fuckers for about an hour with mauls and pry bars and a blowtorch and finally Pat takes out this fucken massive industrial-strength grinder and cracks it open like a peanut shell. Forty-five hundred bucks, cut three ways. And nothing ever come of it. Wasnt in the news, not a word about it around town. Like they werent even missed, the ATMs. That’s just twisted, what? Johnny took Madonna to the mall, decked her out with all that La Senza gear, makeup and the like, then off to the Greenwood. Not because it was the cheapest place on the go, but you gotta keep a low profile after pulling a job like that. Not going checking into some ritzy place downtown and have everybody wondering how you got so flush all of a sudden. Plus you cant get away with nothing in the fancy places. And everything has to be on a fucken card. But the Greenwood, you know, it’s tucked away up there in the woods and you can jump into the pond naked and howl at the moon and smoke in bed and no one gives a fuck. By the end of it Johnny was shooting straight vodka up his arm and Madonna said she couldnt fuck anymore because she was too sore. She just couldnt handle Johnny’s cock no more. And she was so serious, hey Johnny, and so beautiful beneath that red lampshade that Johnny thought he could search the world across and never lay eyes upon a worthy likeness, that he might as well marry her.

  But I did not.

  No. If we coulda just left it at that, left it all behind at the Greenwood and got back on the straight and narrow the way we’d been trying to live.

  But we did not.

  Then an evening not long after when she told Johnny she was going to an NA meeting and Johnny said he was going to an AA meeting and he met her walking down the stairs at Shiner’s place with half the month’s rent worth of rock in her hand.

  Oh, are we gettin fucked up?

  We are fucked up Johnny.

  And they stayed that way, Johnny and Madonna, back and forth between the crack and the oxy, the good old cottonballs. Up and down. Flush and busted. Holding your breath behind the curtains while the landlord pounded on the front door. Vicious, screamin rackets. Sex was just sex. Two strangers fucking the DTs out of their systems. That’s the way it went, the way it stayed. Until the teapot, that day. Until she just never woke up that morning, never made it to the courthouse. The doctors said she took a few too many Valium on top of the cottonballs, lay down on the couch and her heart just fucken quit. Never felt a thing. Never knew she was going. And who knows if that’s better or worse, really.

  That McGregor fuck, see here Johnny, sure he was only in his twenties back then. He was only a young feller, a pup, not much older than you are now. Funny when you thinks on it, the way you remembers folks towering over you like that and how they stays that way in your head. But that’s hardly the case now is it? McGregor, he’s likely a greyed-out pasty-faced obese bald-headed bag of nerves these days. Assuming he got more than one smack in the face over the years aside from the one Johnny gave him that night. That was some fucken crack Johnny gave McGregor. Top teeth rattling around in his gums, laid out on the floor of Johnny’s cell with blood bubbling out of his nostrils. And Johnny coulda
made a go for it then too, McGregor’s gear all there, his keys and everything. But that smack was all the strength he had in him. Everything Johnny had in him—the insides of Mikey’s head splattered halfways across the gravel pit, his new John Deere cap hanging from a branch in a big black spruce almost twenty feet away. All Johnny’s whole life under Pius’s roof and rules. Kicked around and turned out in the yard like a stray dog from the time he could walk. Never smiled at, never picked up into anyone’s arms, never read to, never told he was nothing other than a fucken thief and a burden. And now here doing a stint for arson and theft-over-five after Pius pressed charges. And then to find out that Pius’s not even his fucken real father? All that went into that punch. Burnt him to the fucken ground, did young Johnny. McGregor was in the right place at the right time, for Johnny. Cause that’s the only proper way to send the message, by taking out the messenger. And nothing ever come of that neither, hey Johnny, come to think on it. Nothing come of it. Johnny on his feet for the first time in a week after the big escape and all the lads treating him like a fucken god, that’s all that come of it. Started calling him Steve McQueen, but Johnny didnt like that so they stopped. But this is the boys. The guards simply never mentioned nothing to him. Johnny kept waiting to get hauled out of his bunk in the middle of the night, or slapped with a dozen charges—assault, escaping custody, unlawfully at large—but nothing. McGregor took sick for about six weeks, and the week he was back on the job Johnny walked out the front gates, released to the rest of his fate.

  8

  Rain is picking up Johnny, drizzle’s not good enough. And not a car excepting a string of million-dollar motorhomes twenty minutes back. What to do, this hour. Must be near on nine o’clock in the night now. Colder it’s gettin too. Here’s that missus again Johnny, standin in the open doorway of her room, big tumbler glass of white wine in her hand and some sort of novel or textbook tucked under her arm. She eyes Johnny up and down, the sight of him, hair stuck to his forehead, layer of drizzle shimmering on the shoulders of the suit. Johnny looks over, offers a nod, but that other kinda nod, the quick raise of the chin that’s not sayin Hello, hi, nice night, nice to see you, but more or less the kinda nod that says What the fuck are you lookin at? Have I got something on belong to you? Take a fucken picture. And Johnny cant stand that he just done that, but it’s done now and that’s all’s to it. Johnny Keough, ladies’ man. This class dolly with the shiny black hair and skin-tight business suit, she glares back at Johnny, flicks her smoke out across the parking lot, shifts her book from under one arm to the other, then turns and purposely, however subtly, offers up a soft swing of the hips. Eases the door closed behind her without a sound.

  Fucken hell Johnny, there was something in that.

  Here you are Johnny, grown man. Aside from the fact of that niggling warrant youre free to roam too. Able-bodied. Add subtract multiply and divide. Read and write. All them battered HMP books, whatever you could get your hands on—The Waste Land, Country Wisdom and Know-How, Peter Rabbit, Far from Shore, The Morality of Law, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Outsiders, That Far Greater Bay, Shake Hands with the Devil, Addiction by Prescription, A Guide to New York City Restaurants, Do It Yourself Home Wiring, The Stranger beside Me, The Artist’s Way, The Weekend Mechanic. Fuck, Johnny read em all. That one about that burnt-out motherfucker in Alberta blowing up oil rigs. A whole bunch by that fella, bleak as fuck, from somewhere in New Brunswick, somewhere around these parts, with the big long titles where everyone always turns against this one family and someone ends up fucked around in the backwoods or wrongly accused or some such shit. And no one ever gets their revenge until years and years later when it dont matter no more. Books? Fucken hell, Johnny ripped through thousands. Anything you needs to know about proper chain tension, fucken vapour barriers, Lee Harvey Oswald, where to eat in Manhattan. All kinds of knowledge and info logged away in the old noggin, hey Johnny. Useless, the lot of it. None of it changes nothing. None of it mends nothing. You can scour every bookshelf on the planet and you wont come up with not one fucken phrase that changes where you comes from or what youve been up to, been through, who you fucken are. Blood is blood is blood. Youd think you could only contain so much in that soggy old brain of yours. Think after a time youd force all that other shit out. Or burn it off, what with all the chemicals and pharmaceuticals and booze and draws. But no, it all keeps bubbling back up, stuff that went on twenty-odd years ago, ten years, last fucken week. Old scars and open wounds. Everything always spinning in the head, bullying you to the brink of madness, stuff you cant do one fucken thing to change. It’s still there, all of it, always. And wretched fucken woe to the weak, flimsy, brittle motherfucker who wants to take a hard look at it, sort it out somehow, talk about it.

  This is Johnny with his head spun back to a night in another hotel, when he was somewhere around four or five. Pius gone to some fisheries meeting and his missus, Old Bat Shit, gone to bingo. Only thing that steadied her nerves apparently, blowing wads of cash at bingo. Sister Tanya was babysitting and Johnny fell asleep in the living room chair with a He-Man colouring book, and when he woke up he was lying across the back seat of a massive car, like a Crown Vic or a Lincoln, one of them real cushy smooth and bouncy ones, but one that stank to the high heavens of salt fish and damp tobacco and something else Johnny couldnt quite pinpoint, something sweet. And a man, an older man, somewhere around Pius’s age, maybe younger, in the driver’s seat, and no big sister Tanya in sight until Johnny let out a holler from the back seat and she suddenly appeared, like she was asleep across the man’s lap or something. Fuck sakes Johnny.

  Go back to sleep John-John, we’re going on an adventure, we are. Close your eyes love, we’re going on a trip.

  And Johnny lulled, soothed back to sleep by the big springy car, and comes round again when the man, the driver, is hefting him from the back seat and into Tanya’s arms.

  Waiting at the counter in a smoky lobby in the stifled dead of night until a shadow slips Tanya a key. Up a muffled set of stairs and down a dank gloomy hallway, an aquarium with no water, a fake tree, the sounds of a small dog yapping and whoops and shouts and music coming from behind the numbered doors they pass. Johnny trails his index finger along the wall as they walk and his fingertip comes back coated in a greasy grey gunk. Then into their own room with a bathtub and sink right there in the room, and a TV at the foot of the bed, a telephone, a rickety desk and chair, flowers on the walls.

  An adventure John-John, just me and you.

  Johnny is asleep again within seconds of his head hitting the pillow and when he wakes sometime later he needs to pee so badly but lies paralyzed in the big bed and doesnt cry out in the dark for fear of finding out that he either is or isnt alone in the room. From his pillow he can distinguish the shadowed blue outline of the toilet in the adjoining room and he imagines himself walkin across the floor and standin before it and relieving himself of this stabbing burn in his belly, hot reprieve flooding out into the bowl, and when he wakes again the pain in his belly is gone but he’s cold and wet and Tanya is yelling at him for the love of Christ to get up out of the bed, but she’s laughing and there’s a presence in the far corner, seated at the small desk, and there’s bottles and a sweet metallic smoke in the air and Tanya is stumbling and falling about like she was aboard a boat as she peels Johnny’s pants to his ankles and slings them into the corner at the dark figure seated there. Pajama bottoms from a duffle bag, the bed stripped of its sheets and a thin green towel laid across the wet spot and then Johnny laid across the towel, the comforter thrown back over his head, moans and grunts and giggles and hushes and the bed rocking, slamming, thump thump thumping against the wall, the lamp of the bedside table tumbling to the floor and more hushed giggles and then the thumping and slamming gets so that Johnny thinks the ceiling, the roof, the sky is gonna come crashing down on top of him and then nothing. Quiet. The room door clicking shut. Tanya snoring and a cigarette smouldering in the bottom of a whisky bottle on the desk across
the room. Then daylight, morning, and Tanya gives Johnny a Pepsi and the biggest bag of cheese balls he’s ever seen. Mighty Mouse on the TV and Johnny sits up in bed and eats his breakfast and watches Mighty Mouse rescue a flock of sheep from a wicked starving pack of wolves while Tanya sits on the corner edge of the mattress with a can of beer and sobs and moans and guzzles the beer and sniffles and wails, and over the heroic roar of the end credits and between the hiccups and snots Johnny hears Tanya say, Listen to me, listen to me John-John. Listen to me. Youre not my brother. Do you hear me? Youre not my brother . . .

  Next it’s Pius, God love his rotten drawers, in the doorway barking orders and stompin around, flingin clothes and kickin bottles. The bag of cheese balls explodes off the far wall in a flurry of cheese dust and leaves a greasy orange streak across the floral wallpaper. Tanya crouched in the corner, howling, her hands flailing manic out before her as Pius beats her about the head with one of Johnny’s grubby sneakers.

  And then the long silent ride home.

  The long ride home, hey Johnny.

  Youre not drowned yet!

  What?

  I said youre not drowned. Not yet.

  This is the classy gal with the coal-black hair standin in the doorway of her room again, clutching about the neck the clunky forty of white wine that’s already over half gone.

  You wanna come in an dry off?

  Johnny dont think twice, tries his best not to sprint across the rain-slickened parking lot towards her, ends up somewhere in between a walk and a run, a sorta gimpish, fruity skip which he loathes the reality of but finds himself useless to bring under control. But no matter anyhow, cause as he gains ground towards the hotel she steps inside her room and closes the door very quickly and Johnny stops dead in his tracks. Fuck sakes. The door opens a few inches and Johnny sees she’s got the security chain fastened. She peeks out at Johnny and he can feel the dry sterile heat emanating from her room.