New Canadian Noir

by Claude Lalumiere

  Clive could see the chicken sitting inside its cage, unaware of his presence. He approached the cart, looking for a latch that would open the glass box and allow him access to his enemy – a clear path to a neck that needed wringing. He ran his fingers around the frame, feeling for the mechanism, but found nothing. It was too dark to see how the box opened. Clive considered shattering one of the panes, ramming his elbow through it, hoping not to cut himself too severely. But that would alert the workers, rouse the chicken, remove the advantage of surprise. He tried to calculate whether or not he would have enough time to get his fingers around the throat of a panicked and alarmed chicken before rescue was at hand.

  Clive was still considering his options when he felt something underfoot. It was an extension cord. He reached down and hooked it with a couple of his fingers. Following it along its path, he arrived at a multi-socketed plug that rested at the end of a larger power line near one of the empty booths. Perhaps he could risk a little light to find his way in the dark, thought Clive. It might go unquestioned by the busy men long enough for him to accomplish the assassination and slip away unnoticed.

  Clive plugged in the chicken cart and the tic-tac-toe board lit up. Freshly reset, the game blinked twice and then defaulted into automatic mode. No one was feeding change into the coin slot, but tic was matched against tac in a brutal duel that ended in stalemate each time. Clive could see that it wasn’t the chicken playing at all. The machine was playing itself. And there was something else he noticed by the light provided by the red and blue Xs and Os.

  The chicken was brown.

  “Who’s that?” said a gravelly voice from behind one row of wooden stands. It was the old carney from the dart-toss – the one who had baited Clive into challenging the genius chicken. Clive’s first instinct, having been discovered trespassing, was to flee. He fought the impulse, determined to seek answers instead.

  Clive walked around the left flank of the games alley and found a small campfire burning behind the stands with several wooden crates pulled up next to it. The carney was seated on one, warming himself over the modest blaze that had been invisible from the alley.

  “What happened to The World’s Smartest Chicken?” asked Clive.

  The carney pointed at the chicken in the rig through a narrow gap in the alley’s wooden façade. It remained nestled, eyes closed, dozing for the night.

  “You’re looking at it, kid.”

  “That’s not the same chicken as before.”

  The carney considered the chicken currently residing in the glass cage, then returned his attention to the spit that was set up over the campfire. He’d been cooking up some fowl for his dinner before the boy interrupted.

  “No, I guess that makes this one the new world champ.”

  “I don’t get it? Did it beat the other chicken in a match or something?”

  “You could say that,” nodded the carney, tearing away a strip of greasy skin from the roasted bird’s plucked breast as it sizzled over the open flame. “It wasn’t no tic-tac-toe match, though. It was more of a taste test.”

  The carney cackled slightly to himself as he popped the loose skin into his mouth and sucked at the tips of his fingers where he’d just been holding it.

  Clive noticed a small pile of discarded white feathers behind the games-alley backdrop. A slight nighttime breeze played with them, scattered them in random directions. They’d all be blown away by tomorrow, gone like the rest of the carnival.

  “You want a drumstick?” asked the carney, tearing one of the tender legs off his meal and offering it to the boy.

  Clive remembered the stories he’d heard of tribes in the deepest darkest jungles of the world. Some of them would eat their defeated enemies as a way to imbue themselves with their strength, their power. It was both a sign of respect for their fallen foes and a way of stealing all they ever were and making it their own. Clive had thought that sounded kind of dumb when he first heard about it. But the way he saw things and the way he thought about them kept changing the more living he got under his belt. These days he wasn’t so sure about much of anything. He wasn’t even sure if that much uncertainty in life frightened or excited him.

  “Yeah,” he said, and sat down to eat.

  GOOD FOR GRAPES

  Kelly Robson

  Simon wouldn’t have set foot in Canada again if the harvest hadn’t been late. He’d badmouthed the Okanagan all over the world, from Coonawarra to the Cape, calling it a shithouse of overpriced land, badly managed vines, and wannabe wine-makers who had no business being anywhere near a ferment. Threw it off, every time.

  Nothing did more damage to wine than amateurs with money.

  But California was early and BC was late, and when Simon got the email from High Bench Estates, he had just finished laying a Rockpile Cabernet into new French oak barrels and he was planning to hit a Nicaraguan beach for a few months before Australia called him home to a hot February. But he had expenses, two of them, living with his ex in Melbourne. He’d emailed back with a jacked-up fee, and High Bench still wanted him.

  So instead of surf and beer and stoned girls, he got a flight north and a long ride on a stinking Greyhound toward a valley full of no-hopers and vinifera trying like hell to ripen through frost.

  Simon hunkered down in the bus’ triple backseat and tipped airplane bottles of rum into a travel mug. Just past Hope, the mountain pines turned from green to red. He probably wouldn’t have noticed if the hippie kids in the next seat hadn’t freaked out over all that dead forest. Pine beetles, apparently, killing trees by the millions. He listened to them whine about climate change for a minute or two, and then plugged into his earbuds.

  The French oak back in Rockpile cost over three grand a barrel. A few pennies too much to pay for wood, but Rockpile was a professional operation from rootstock to shoot. Simon had worked twenty-hour shifts coaxing the juice through a textbook ferment and after a couple of years in those barrels, it’d bottle okay. The winery investors would be happy.

  His ex had been happy too, when he sent her the money he wouldn’t be spending in Nicaragua. And High Bench – well, if the old man was going to put Simon through the wringer again he just better hand over a fat cheque with a smile on his face.

  When the Greyhound turned off the highway, Simon punched a text into the cheap burner he’d picked up at the Vancouver airport. The red truck was waiting for him – he remembered its antique fenders and peeling paint better than the two vineyard grunts leaning on the bumper. Huey and Duey, he thought. Interchangeable. Both tanned deep brown but for the pale sunglass rings around their eyes and the white baseball cap stripes above their eyebrows.

  Simon eyed the cuts and nicks knotting their forearms. “How they hanging?”

  “Looking good,” said Huey. “The Merlot was ready to come off three days back but they said to wait.”

  Two minutes off the bus and it was already amateur hour. “Who made that call? Not the old man. His Honour would never wait to put it in steel.”

  Huey opened his mouth to answer but Duey shoved an elbow in his ribs.

  Simon tried again. “He didn’t wait for winter last time. Nothing shy about him. Thought he could get a ferment from green grapes just by throwing in a pack of yeast.”

  Duey grunted and tossed Simon’s bag in the back of the truck.

  Simon watched the rows climb past the truck window as they wound up the bench. The Cabernet Sauvignon on one side was throwing out suckers and cordons and big fat watery clusters just like he expected. Bad farming, sloppy grapes.

  The Cabernet Franc on the other side was only four or five years old. Nothing like the gnarled century-old Barossa vines he’d cut his teeth on, but they looked okay. Probably managed by a community college viticulture grad, doing it by the book. That would be fine until the owner decided he needed a higher yield. Then the kid would get canned and the vines would go to shit.

  It was decent land, though. The slope coasted down to the lake, steep enough to
create a nice breeze. Put it a thousand miles south and they might be able to make a bottle or two worth drinking.

  “I bet the old man gets a gleam in his eye every time he drives down this road,” said Simon.

  Huey smirked. “The Franc belongs to a couple of Vancouver kids. They’re going broke. And we’re gonna get the lease on that rangy Cab Sauv. In a year or two High Bench will have all this land from mountain to lake.”

  Duey spat out the window. “Be a shitload of work slapping those vines into shape.”

  Simon felt a little sorry for the neighbours. Not for going broke – anyone stupid enough to put cash into Canadianwine deserved what they got. But nobody deserved the pain that came from tangling with the old man. He fought dirty.

  Simon had worked a lot of crush pads. They blurred together into one cool expanse of concrete walled over with stainless-steel tanks and towering racks of oak. Three, sometimes even four harvests a year. California, New Zealand, South Africa, and Australia were in his usual rotation. Bordeaux and Tuscany now and then, just to pick up a few old tricks. Occasionally Washington or Oregon, twice Texas. British Columbia just the once. He’d sworn never again.

  Most wineries left Simon alone to do his work. Only one owner had ever sat on top of him, poking him in the ribs and questioning his every move. At first Simon had ignored the old man and just tried to get on with the ferment. But it had escalated.

  Duey turned the truck onto a potholed lane. Simon got one glimpse of a new tasting room building before they turned onto a farm track dividing the blocks. He twisted in his seat and watched the estate spread out below as they climbed the mountain.

  The Quonset hut was still there, set deep into the rock and shaded by a row of Ponderosa pine. Even at this distance the fresh yellow paint couldn’t disguise the rust around the joints. The landscaping around the new tasting room was still raw. Two cars and three motorhomes threw long shadows across the parking lot. The setting sun turned the valley rose and gold, the lake a long dark pool from bend to bend.

  The vineyards stopped halfway up the mountain. A twenty-foot trailer was parked at the edge of the snake fence.

  “You got the camper, that okay?” said Huey. “They said you’d want some privacy.”

  “It’s a long climb from crush pad to bed,” Simon said. Not that he hadn’t slept on concrete once or twice.

  “We’ll leave you the truck.”

  Duey dropped Simon’s bag in the dust. The two of them waved and trudged down the track.

  The trailer groaned under his weight but it smelled fresh enough. The bed was made, the water tank was full, and someone – bless them – had put six cans of Victoria Bitter in the fridge. There was a carton of eggs too, some milk, butter and cheese, and a loaf of bread beside the toaster. He flipped the safety catches on the cupboards. Coffee. More beer.

  Simon added a dozen VB to the fridge and finished the cold stuff can by can, thinking how he should be on warm sand, watching tan lines wink at him from the brown backs of girls doing yoga in bikinis. He didn’t look out the windows, not at the stars overhead, not at the lake below or the mountains between, and certainly not at the grapes that waited in ranks for the frost.

  The rising sun turned the camper into an aluminum oven. Simon dragged a nylon lawn chair over to the snake fence and watched the light creep down the mountain. The first movement was in the campground off the highway – the harvest was worked by French Canadian gypsies, if he remembered right. Just after dawn, they rolled out of their tents and headed down the road six and eight to a car. An hour later the valley was busy as rush hour, harvesters and trucks working the wide flat blocks at the bottom of the valley, roped pickers stripping the vines on the steep slopes above.

  But at High Bench, the only signs of life were the starlings squawking in the rows. Nobody working the harvest or even taking samples. Nobody around the Quonset hut. No sign of Huey and Duey. The whole estate spread out below him, so quiet it was almost spooky. He cracked a can and drained it, then got in the truck and drove downhill.

  The tasting room door was locked. No surprise there – far too early to be waiting on tourists.

  Footsteps sounded on the concrete behind him. A pair of big-eyed deer hopped over the fence. Simon waved them off. The deer trotted into the home block and began browsing on the vines.

  “Pest management isn’t my department,” he said. But he ran the deer up the rows anyway, tossing pebbles at their flashing tails. He chased them over the drainage ditch and into someone else’s vineyard – rows of Chardy that had been stripped weeks ago, the vines ravaged, leaves flyblown.

  As he walked back down through the blocks, Simon had to admit the High Bench vines didn’t look too bad. The fruit would never properly ripen, though. He plucked a few grapes, chewed them up and spat the pips into his palm. The seeds were still green. No hint of telltale brown.

  When he got back to the parking lot, the winery was still deserted. The Quonset hut was locked tight, its roll-down door secured with a padlocked chain. Simon ran his hand over the deep scars at the bottom of the metal door. The rust scraped over the pads of his fingers.

  Seven years ago the door had been secured with two shot bolts threaded with heavy locks. Simon had hacked them off with an axe after the old man had locked him out of the crush pad.

  Simon turned his back on the hut. He should just go back to the snake fence and drink beer until the old man came to find him. But there was no point in putting it off. And he wanted his cheque.

  The track continued up a steep slope bordered by Ponderosa pines, blocked by a metal gate marked Private. Simon dragged it open and left it swinging as he drove up the twisting switchbacks that climbed the ridge above the vineyards.

  How many times had he stomped up this driveway on foot, angry as hell after a day of putting right what the old man had done wrong? The first time he had been sure of winning the argument, imagining he could beard the old man in his den. After a few more fights he began to learn that the old man never lost an argument. Nothing, not evidence, not education, not boots on the ground, or a lifetime on the crush pad meant a thing to a man like that.

  At the top of the drive crouched a house sharp and cold as a razor blade, a steel and glass box cantilevered over the cliff on a pair of iron beams.

  Simon flubbed the clutch and the truck’s engine coughed and died. He started it up again and pulled around back alongside the old man’s hunter-green Jaguar.

  This house was new. Seven years ago it had been a fake Tudor pile with flagstones and flower gardens, even a bloody grape arbor. Now no hint of the old house remained, its skeleton bulldozed into landfill and replaced by this thin slice of modernism.

  One kind of rich man’s dream exchanged for another. When this one got stale the Ponderosa pines would see a new dream form on the edge of the cliff, if the pine beetles didn’t kill them off first.

  The back wall was flat zinc siding, the door a slab of black marble. Simon knocked once, waited, then knocked again. He tried the door. It swung open.

  Glass walls on three sides framed a panorama of valley and mountain and lake. An eagle’s nest perspective. No need for art on the walls when you’re the lord of all you survey. The furniture was low, dark, modern, and uncomfortable.

  The only thing out of place was the hospital bed.

  The old man was on a respirator, his nose and mouth plugged into a plastic tube that snaked up from a metal bullet of oxygen on the floor. Swollen ankles puffed out above his too-tight socks, his paunch shrunken to a bib of flab under a sunken chest. The fingers of his right hand were stained yellow but there were no cigarettes, no ashtrays, no hint of smoke in the air, just a faint antiseptic tang. The old man’s fingers fiddled compulsively, grasping at air.

  A plate of scrambled eggs and toast sat on a side table along with a photo of the old man in his younger days, stark as a raven in his judicial robes. A plastic water bottle was tucked into the blankets at his desiccated hip. Simon circled the bed. He p
icked up the bottle and held it out.

  “Your Honour,” Simon said. “It’s been a while.”

  The old man fiddled the bottle with shaking fingers but couldn’t seem to grip it.

  “Not much there anymore.” A woman’s voice. Simon dropped the bottle and turned. She was sharp and sleek as the house.

  “Nothing left of Dad but his habits,” she said.

  “I’m sorry—” Simon said.

  “The fiddling.” She twitched her long fingers, imitating the old man’s gesture. “Watch.”

  The old man stared out the window. He lifted his fingers to his mouth, pursed his lips, sucked on air, and then lowered his hand.

  “I always thought the cigarettes would get him in the end, but it was the drinking instead. Smoking’s not going to hurt him now, but I’m afraid he’ll burn the place down.”

  Simon looked around. “Not much here to burn.”

  “He could burn himself to death. But maybe that would be a better way to go. Liver failure isn’t pretty.”

  “I can see that,” said Simon.

  “Dad went into diapers a year ago. He would rather have died right then.”

  The old man lifted his fingers to his mouth again. His eyes were glazed and unfocused, his jaw slack. A bubble of spittle hovered at the corner of his mouth. Simon walked to the window. “You’ve got quite a view.”

  “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  He didn’t, and that was surprising. She was pretty enough. But when he hadn’t been fighting with her father he’d been trying to save the ferment, practically sleeping with the spectrophotometer. And drinking, of course.