Up in Smoke

by Ross Pennie

  He called a taxi on his new phone, was surprised how quickly it came, and jumped in. Minutes later, they were coming up on Kelly’s SuperMart. On a whim, he asked the driver to turn in and wait. He wouldn’t be long. The cabbie, who hadn’t said a word since Zol had got in, pointed to the meter and shrugged — no problem.

  Zol had never been inside the tobacco shop that occupied the front corner of Kelly’s supermarket, but he’d walked passed it and glanced through the window countless times. The intriguing shapes of pipes, lighters, and other paraphernalia displayed in the glass cases had often caught his eye, as did the swashbuckling images on the tobacco tins.

  Today, he was ready to do more than look at the pipes and tobacco. He was prepared to make a purchase. As he stepped into the shop, and the door closed behind him, he was instantly enveloped by a gorgeous, complex aroma. The odours flooded his mind with countless memories — summers hanging bundles of leaves to dry in his dad’s stuffy tobacco kilns, evenings courting Francine over too many cigars and bottles of red wine, and nights entwined with Colleen, loving her and savouring smoky whiskys.

  He steadied himself at the counter as Andy Williams crooned a private, dreamy rendition of “Days of Wine and Roses.” It was far from his favourite style of music, but he had no control over this crossed-wires, odours-music thing. He had no choice but to give into it and hope it was brief.

  If the stocky, middle-aged lady behind the counter thought Zol was behaving strangely by staring blankly at the ceiling, she didn’t show it. She was too busy peering into a handheld device and checking her inventory. Her plain, fleshy face and drab grey blouse reminded him of the librarian at Max’s school. Not someone you wanted to get on the wrong side of. After Andy had finished crooning his way through a dozen or more bars, Zol gave a slight wave to catch the woman’s attention and ventured a tentative smile. “I’d like the finest pipe tobacco you have in stock.”

  She removed her reading glasses and let them dangle across her bosom from the silver chain around her neck. “Domestic or imported?”

  Anything but Dennis Badger’s local crap, he wanted to tell her. “Imported,” he said.

  “Mild, mellow, or full-bodied?” she said.

  “Um . . . mellow?”

  “I’d say you’re after something full-bodied. I have a nice Davidoff, the Blue Mixture.”

  “What sort of aroma does it have? A hint of vanilla by any chance?” He had happy childhood memories of the whiffs of vanilla escaping from his dad’s tobacco pouch. When Dad sat down to smoke his pipe, he was usually in his best mood; he sometimes told stories about the pranks he got up to as a kid back in Hungary.

  The clerk’s face softened, as if she sensed Zol was actually going to spend some serious coin. She took a packet from a locked case, put her glasses back on, and, reading from the label, told him, “It promises a rich, chocolaty smell in the tin and a smooth smoke offering a sweet, woodsy taste and . . .” she thrust out her bosom and grinned, “. . . a hint of vanilla.”

  He raised his eyebrows and chuckled. “Almost good enough to eat.”

  “I wouldn’t do that. Not at these prices.”

  “You say it’s imported?”

  “From Denmark.”

  If Danish pipe tobacco was half as good as the butter cookies the Danes shipped all over the world in those large blue tins, he knew this would be okay. “How much is it?”

  “Ninety-two twenty-five,” she said without blinking.

  Ninety-two dollars? This stuff was more expensive than Scotch. He swallowed hard and did his best to keep a straight face. “For how many grams?”

  “Two hundred and fifty.” She held up the bundle of five small tobacco tins presented together as elegantly as a lifetime investment from Birks or Tiffany’s. “This is the minimum I can sell you, I’m afraid. Because of the way it’s packaged.”

  He slid his credit card into the machine and punched in his PIN. He knew this was going to be worth it.

  The taxi driver tooted at Zol as he exited the store. He hopped in. Again, the cabbie still didn’t say a word. The midday traffic was light, and they got to Scenic Drive and Zol’s street in a matter of minutes. The house looked okay. He could see through the window that his minivan and Colleen’s Merc were still in the garage. There were no vans parked on the street or at the neighbours’ on either side.

  He went in the front door, turned off the alarm, and set his purchase on the kitchen counter. The house felt strange. Eerie. Alien. Something was wrong. He flipped on the halogens, froze, and listened. Then he realized what was different. The dead quiet. It was his house, but he never got to experience it like this — alone. Ermalinda always greeted him at the door with a string of chatter. Max was usually clicking on the computer, or banging around the kitchen making himself a snack, or up in bed snoring the place down.

  He scanned the kitchen. Colleen had left everything spotless. Nothing looked out of place.

  He jumped and nearly knocked the shopping bag onto the floor as something snapped, then whirred, beside him. He wasn’t alone after all. His heart pounded in his ears. He turned, arms up in defence, ready to fight. But no one was there. Two seconds later, another snap, and the whirring settled into a familiar hum.

  How stupid — it was just the fridge coming on. His heart fell back into his chest, but it took awhile for the pounding to fade.

  Excited by his purchase, he looked at the bag. The clerk had wrapped her best tobacco in white tissue paper, sealed it with a gold sticker, and placed it in a hunter-green paper bag a manly man wouldn’t be embarrassed to carry. He chuckled at the irony. The makers of fine tobacco got men to part with serious money because they were selling them a lot more than shredded leaves and nicotine. They were selling a dream. Single malt distillers played the same game. It wasn’t ethyl alcohol they were peddling, it was prestige. Trouble was, all three — nicotine, alcohol, and prestige — were addictive.

  He dropped his jacket on a chair and went into the computer room. He’d lined one wall completely with bookshelves and loaded it with DVDs — movies, TV shows, and video games. Mostly for Max. He couldn’t let himself think about the money those disks represented. Was this a collection or another addiction? Or were they one and the same?

  The DVDs were not in any particular order, though Max was careful they were returned to their proper cases. In the early days, he hadn’t looked after them, left them strewn all over the place. He’d learned the hard way that the most exciting part of a video game could get ruined by careless gouges on the disk.

  It took awhile, and Zol’s back ached as he perused the shelves peering at the fine print, but he finally found Mary Poppins. And behind her, the blue Birks box.

  He brought the box to the kitchen, paused for a deep breath, then lifted the lid. He took out the loon and couldn’t help smiling. He caressed her with both hands and felt a warmth gathering in his chest. He lifted the little creature, held her nose-to-nose with his, and stared into her unwavering onyx eyes. What scenes had they witnessed in the past two thousand years?

  He turned the silky-smooth pipe in his hands and examined it from every angle. The bird and the rectangular block she was nestling on, the size of half a deck of cards, had been carved from a single piece of dark grey pipestone. The whole thing fit perfectly in the human palm and balanced there gracefully.

  The magical thing about fine art was you knew it when you saw it. Actually, you didn’t see it, you beheld it. You succumbed to its presence. Moisture stung his eyes. It took quite a while to blink away the mistiness.

  The carver had fashioned a large cavity, the tobacco chamber, into the loon’s back. The chamber appeared empty but charred. He turned the bird on her back and tapped her against his palm. Nothing fell out of the cavity, no bits of tobacco, no pieces of dirt, not even a dead spider. He went nose-to-nose with the little bird again and put his lips over the small draw hole in
the base. A bitter, flinty taste met his tongue, which he wiped away with the back of his hand. The bitterness faded, and he blew gently through the hole. A few motes of dust puffed from the chamber. He blew twice more, then inverted the bird again and tapped a few tiny bits of debris into his palm. Should he save those for the archaeologists? They could be hundreds of years old. He set them on a saucer, raised the pipe again to his lips, and made one final blow before inhaling through the draw hole. It was amazing how easily the air flowed, and with the right amount of resistance. This pipe was going to give a very nice smoke.

  He opened the packet of Davidoff’s finest, taking care to damage as little of the packaging as possible. It seemed wrong to rip the elegant wrapping. He removed a tin and slit its seal with his fingernail. He pried it open and breathed deeply. Delicious! The woman at the shop had promised chocolate, but that was only the beginning.

  As he started itemizing the aromas, Warren Zevon took over the kitchen, belting out “Werewolves of London.” When Warren’s ebullient howls reached their peak, Zol knew he’d hit the jackpot with this Davidoff stuff.

  He fished a paperclip and a disposable lighter from the junk drawer and carried them with the loon, the saucer, and the tobacco tin into the sunroom. He set them on the table and eased into his recliner. The buttery leather never failed to soothe.

  He’d never been a pipe smoker, but when he was little his dad taught him how to pack his after-dinner pipe for him. There was a knack to it, which Zol mastered at an early age. Tobacco had to be trickled, not dumped, into a pipe’s chamber. Then it had to be tamped to the proper density. If you tamped the tobacco too hard, the pipe wouldn’t draw. Too lightly, and the tobacco would burn too quickly — all flame and little smoke. The novelty of preparing Dad’s pipe, without being allowed more than an occasional puff, wore off by the time he became a teenager. But it was a skill you never forgot, like stringing tobacco leaves by the thousands, hanging them on wooden laths, and hefting them day after day into the stifling drying kilns.

  And now, he was packing an heirloom calumet and tamping it with a paperclip he’d adapted for the purpose. He tried drawing on the pipe before lighting it. It gave the perfect amount of resistance, like sucking through a drinking straw. He flicked on the lighter and waved the flame in a circular motion over the tobacco surface while taking short puffs. No smoke yet, only a brief glow as a few strands of tobacco swelled and unravelled in the brief flame of this the customary “charring light.” He extinguished the lighter and tamped gently once again, this time with his finger. Now the loon was ready for a proper lighting.

  He applied the flame and drew short puffs, like his father used to do. The Davidoff and the loon did the rest.

  Now this was a smoke. Richer, smoother, sweeter than he remembered his father’s ever being. All the same, it was the by-product of incomplete combustion, so it made him cough and stung his eyes and throat. He puffed again and again, and gave into the seduction. The loon’s eyes winked at him through the blue haze, and an orchestral version of “Rêverie” by Claude Debussy filled his brain with its glorious, sinuous melody. He sat back, breathed deeply, and let his mother’s favourite musical piece waft through him. He really should give her a call.

  As the orchestra played in his head, he puffed contentedly. The pipe went out twice, which was par for the course. Fiddling, re-tamping, and re-lighting were integral to the ritual. This pipe drew nicely, its smoke flowing in an effortless stream.

  The Debussy lasted longer than his usual crossed-wire snippets of synesthesia, and by the time the piece had finished he’d smoked down to the dottle. He cleared the spent tobacco from the chamber and repacked it with fresh Davidoff. He set the pipe in his lap, then pecked at the keypad on the 7-Eleven phone.

  “Hi, Mum,” he said. “What’s new?” She’d told everyone to stop asking her how she was doing. The short answer was that she had early lung cancer and chemotherapy wasn’t such a big deal. The long answer was filled with a host of side effects, indignities, and future worries she wasn’t prepared to discuss.

  “Your father, he going crazy with that metal detector thing again.”

  “What’s he doing?”

  “Walking beside road, checking ditches for stray coins and other stuff.”

  “That’s harmless. And, hey, he might find something valuable.”

  “He look ridiculous.”

  He lifted the pipe from his lap and held it in his palm. Should he tell her what he’d been doing? She wouldn’t approve. But what the heck. “You know our little friend with the shiny black eyes?”

  “Shhh, Zollie. I hope you not tell anyone. Is it safe?”

  “Safe and warm, right here on my lap.”

  “Your lap? You supposed to hide it, so no one will see.”

  “Don’t worry, she’s fine.”

  “Did you say warm? What do you mean warm?” Her tone betrayed her alarm. “Like from smoking?” She never missed a trick.

  “Just a little.”

  “Zollie, how could you?”

  “I was curious. It’s not every day you get to smoke a two-thousand-year-old pipe.” Come to think of it, he’d done it twice in the past few days.

  “I gave it to you for safekeeping only.”

  “Mum, it’s okay. I’ll take good care of her.” He did his best to sound reassuring before they said their goodbyes.

  What would Mum have said if he’d told her he’d puffed on the red-eyed loon with Dennis Badger and Chief Falcon? She and Dad would be apoplectic that he’d touched the now infamous stolen artifact, tainted by theft, murder, and wanton destruction. His parents had an unfailing belief in the power of honesty, though that sometimes clashed with their morbid fear of authority fostered by their upbringing behind the Iron Curtain.

  He closed the flip phone and set it on the table beside the pipe. They looked good together, about the same size, but separated by two thousand years of technology. A lot of heartbreaks in that time, in both the New World and the Old. Wars, famines, plagues, wildlife extinctions, environmental disasters, superstitions, addictions, unspeakable pedophilia in residential schools. The two worlds shared it all because heartbreak went with being human, whoever you were.

  A strange clanging woke him up with a start. He looked around, but it was too dark to see much. What? Oh, the phone. It was ringing and buzzing beside him. And flashing. Six-forty. He’d slept a good three hours, maybe more.

  “Hello?”

  “That you, Zol?” It was Hamish.

  “Yeah?”

  “You weren’t asleep?”

  “Didn’t get much last night.”

  “I talked to Colleen. They seem comfortable in the house.”

  “Thanks.”

  “That’s not why I called.”

  Zol rubbed his eyes. “Yeah?”

  “The mass-spec results. Just talked to my guy. They’re in. And looking good.”

  Zol shook the cobwebs from his head and pushed his heels down, stowing the recliner’s footrest. “How good?” His feet were now firmly on the floor, his head surprisingly clear.

  “He’s calling them probably positive for 5-FNN.”

  Probably? What did that mean?

  “Pending confirmatory testing,” Hamish continued. “He says there’s a fluorinated nicotine derivative in the leaf Olivia sent you and in eight of ten samples from the cigarettes I got at that smoke shop on Grand Basin.”

  “Did he run controls?”

  “Of course,” Hamish said. “We did do a proper job of it.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing remotely resembling 5-FNN in ten brand-name samples.”

  That sounded good. “And?”

  “Here’s the good part — it’s in the Rollies and Hat-Tricks from the rez.”

  “That’s amazing.”

  “Actually, Zol, it’s science.”
r />   An awkward silence hung between them.

  “Zol? You still there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What are you going to do now?”

  He had no answer. But he did know the hard part had yet to begin.

  CHAPTER 38

  On Thursday morning, Zol worked from home. He’d enjoyed a second smoke last night and almost had another this morning, but when he’d lifted the lid on the Davidoff, he realized that, like his dad, he was not a morning smoker. Before noon, coffee was his drug of choice.

  He’d had his breakfast, and now he was in the computer room using the 7-Eleven phone and his new Gmail account to stay in touch with Nancy at the Simcoe Health Unit. Max had sounded fine enough on the phone this morning, but very disappointed that Francine’s Hong Kong flight was being delayed for twenty-four hours. Mechanical difficulties with the aircraft, according to Allie. He hoped that was true and that Allie wasn’t covering for another of Francine’s deceptions.

  The landline in the kitchen started ringing. He looked at his watch. Ten after ten. It was probably him, so if the phone was still tapped it didn’t matter. He walked to the kitchen and looked at the caller ID — number withheld. It was either him or a telemarketer.

  He planted his feet, closed his eyes for a sec, then picked up.

  “Hello?”

  “Zollie? Dennis. You’re looking for me?”

  He’d called back surprisingly quickly. Chief Bob Falcon hadn’t wasted any time passing on the message and impressing Dennis with its importance. A good sign.

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “Then talk away.”

  “Face to face.”

  “You White guys never learn. Face to face isn’t good for you. No matter what comes out of your mouth, your body language betrays what you’re really thinking. You’re better using the phone. Shoot. I’m all ears.”

  “Sorry, Dennis, this isn’t the sort of conversation I want to have on the phone, especially one that might not be secure, if you know what I mean.”