MARRY, BANG, KILL

by Andrew Battershill

  Also by Andrew Battershill

  Pillow

  Copyright © 2018 by Andrew Battershill.

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.

  Edited by Bethany Gibson.

  Cover and page design by Julie Scriver.

  HVD Rowdy font (title) and Nail Scratch font (author) by Eduardo Recife,

  a.k.a. Misprinted Type.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Battershill, Andrew, 1988-, author

  Marry, bang, kill / Andrew Battershill.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77310-002-9 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-77310-003-6 (EPUB).--

  ISBN 978-1-77310-004-3 (KINDLE)

  I. Title.

  PS8603.A876M37 2018 C813’.6C2017-906121-6

  C2017-906122-4

  We acknowledge the generous support of the Government of Canada,

  the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Government of New Brunswick.

  Goose Lane Editions

  500 Beaverbrook Court, Suite 330

  Fredericton, New Brunswick

  CANADA E3B 5X4

  www.gooselane.com

  1 Victoria, British Columbia

  Tommy Marlo was about this smart: if on a random Saturday night at the sketchiest nightclub in Montreal a stranger offered him drugs, Tommy would quickly size the stranger up to figure out whether the stranger was trying to roofie him. If he thought the guy was trying to drug and roll him in the alley out back later, he would fake-swallow and pocket the pills then surprise and roll the guy in the alley before the guy could roll him. This way, nobody else at the club would get roofied, and Tommy would have some loose cash for himself.

  Tommy was also exactly this smart: he’d forget the pills in his pocket for about three weeks, pop one, say, while he was getting drunk at a bowling alley then have an incredibly weird night that he was lucky to escape without kidney damage.

  So as he watched the teenage girl pack her MacBook Pro into her very large, very possibly real Gucci purse from across the street, he did a number of things that were halfway stupid and the rest of the way clever.

  Having lost the holster, Tommy had to situate the hunting knife in his pocket so that he’d be able to pull it without cutting himself or accidentally slicing through the entire pocket of his sweatpants again. He scanned the street behind him and began moving towards the coffee shop at the perfect pace to intercept her at the perfect spot as she exited: far enough from the door of the coffee shop that she’d be hidden by the hedge of the patio, and far enough from the bus stop that nobody would recognize what was happening.

  He also removed his glasses, an action for which smart and stupid were irrelevant judgments, since it was a thing he had to do. For Tommy, it was only possible to rob someone when they appeared to him a blurry, Caucasian shape rather than a living, 3-D teenage girl whose life was just as unique and special-feeling to her as his was to him.

  His bad eyes were a big reason Tommy had gotten into mugging, as opposed to any other kind of theft, since it was the kind that didn’t necessarily involve night vision. The kind where somebody with experience will tell you your first time: just close your eyes and do it. For Tommy, that was perfect, since he could stare people in the eye like a wild dog, and just be seeing what most people see when they relax their whole eyeballs.

  Tommy wasn’t sure what the exact definition of legally blind was, but he felt confident it would be insensitive to call himself that. He’d had too many prescriptions to keep track of, and none had fixed his vision all the way. Most helped most of the way, got him seeing straight with his glasses on or his contacts in, getting by, driving a car. But he never got the perfect pair — his vision always stayed that little bit askew, tilting off into swirls and vagueness. So he was not, probably, legally blind. Just very, very shitty at seeing things within twenty feet.

  He’d prepared for the girl to be a bit of a tough nut, thirteen years old, bright blond hair and dark black eyebrows, leaving her crumbs on the table, shoving her way out the door and scowling into the welcoming brightness of the late afternoon. Already looking mean enough to teach middle school, let alone be in it. He reached her in perfect stride, at the perfect spot, and slid an arm over her shoulders, subtly twisting his body around to block her (and the fact that he was covering her mouth) from the street. She immediately bit his hand, and Tommy sucked in breath quickly, removing the knife from his pocket and directing her eyes towards it with his own.

  “Okay, Bitch Face, give up the bag. Give it up. Give it up. I will stab you if you scream.”

  He retracted the hand and wiped it on his shirt, only succeeding in spreading her thick spit further across his hand.

  The girl didn’t look even a little scared, just grudging. She probably reacted the same way to movie theatre ads about turning off her cellphone. Her demeanour bluntly depressed Tommy. If he couldn’t even put a scare into a thirteen-year-old girl, it really was time to get out of the game. She sullenly dropped the bag to the ground, and Tommy scooped it up with one hand, replacing the knife in his pocket with the other.

  “It’s not even my computer. You smell like onions.”

  What a little shit, Tommy thought, everyone smells like onions — calling people out on it was breaking the agreement we all make with each other each day. He turned to go.

  “And I know I have a bitch face. People don’t need to keep telling me.”

  This stopped Tommy, and he turned back to her. “How many people have called you a bitch face? I was just doing a thing here.”

  There are two personality traits required to stay in action as a street mugger for as long as Tommy had. The first is the one most people would think of: being careless or vicious or callous enough to threaten people with a knife and rob them. The second is just as important but more counterintuitive: being nice and easygoing enough to make and keep friends who are willing to help sell what one steals, and not dime one out if they get pinched.

  These two traits exist on a spectrum, and Tommy was about as far as one could functionally be to the likeable side. He would have absolutely no problem fencing this computer and having a pleasant, personally meaningful afternoon with Bill, his computer guy. He would also, it was starting to seem, have trouble leaving Bitch Face without feeling bad about himself.

  She toed the ground and tossed a heavy, limp chunk of hair over her shoulder. “But it was the first thing you thought of, right? Like, randomly, it popped in your head. Everyone calls me a bitch face. Or says I have one.”

  Tommy was spending much too long in the open here, but something about Bitch Face’s prematurely jaded manner tugged at him. He scanned the street, and finding it empty, he looked her in the face, a vague chinook of paternal warmth wafting weakly through him. “You’re young. Just . . . uh . . . it’s also a posture thing. Like, hold your shoulders differently, maybe.”

  Bitch Face narrowed her eyes at him. “Fuck you, you greasy retard. Do you know who my dad is?”

  Tommy turned his back on her and started hustling to his car. He felt stupid for hanging around too long and for not trusting his instincts about how good at hurting people’s feelings Bitch Face would be.

  “You’re in big fucking trouble. You don’t even know you’re in big fucking trouble.”

  Tommy set off at a run, wanting to turn the corner, start his car, and get out of there. At that pace, th
e canopy of the trees melted into a mass of vague illuminated green. A blurry leaf-sky.

  Bitch Face’s voice, steady as a countertop behind him. A calm, penetrating shout. “They’ll kill your whole family and throw them in a ditch in Delta. Watch the news.” Tommy heard her through the breath in his ears, just as he hit the corner and turned it, the beige blobby blur of his car floating into view: “My dad will cut your feet off and throw them in the ocean. Don’t you read Twitter?”

  And Tommy Marlo was also this smart: he knew when a threat was specific enough to be terrifying.

  2 Quadra Island, British Columbia

  “Nobody cares. Trust me, I know you asked, you did ask, but I know better. I know in my soul that nobody cares. It isn’t possible.”

  Grace nodded along. “Mousey, you’re probably right about that.”

  Alan Mouse was balancing an empty highball glass on top of his head. He casually and carefully tipped his head over, reached out with one hand, and caught the glass. Mousey spoke with a vague but somehow harsh Middle American accent: a sort of slurred, directionless twang. If you found his corpse headless, but still with the jean cut-offs and white T-shirt on, you’d guess he was twenty-three years old; if you found the head, you’d say fifty. “Thank you.”

  Grace was in her early sixties, with tightly curly hair that stood in a short, straight column, black with a long streak of white through it. She always wore one of three loose, floral tunics. She weighed over two hundred pounds and had the most beautiful singing voice Mousey had heard in real life, concerts included. She drummed her fingers across the table in that smooth way people who have played thousands of hours of piano do, then she lifted all of her fingers to wag one in Mousey’s face. “But that doesn’t answer my question. Hey, you’re going to tell me something I don’t really care about, right? Fine. I’ll hear a thing I don’t care about from you. That’s fine with me, and it sure never stopped you before. That’s for damn sure.”

  Someone who has earned a sad, small fortune as a corrupt cop and mid-level functionary in a poisonous and entrenched system of structural racism will tend not to want a whole lot of attention drawn to it, especially not when they’re trying to maintain a somewhat new black friend. So Mousey was avoiding Grace’s question about what his job had been. Also, he was avoiding the question because he had, over the years, evolved into that specific kind of friendly asshole.

  “The past’s the past. Here’s a thing I’ve decided about society: I’m committing to thinking about the twelve or however many corporate oligarchs — who already own the world and control all the information and money on the ­planet — as everyone’s dads. Like dads are when you’re eight. They might be mean dads or nice dads, but it don’t really matter either way, because you’re eight, and they’re grown-ass men. They’re wearing polo shirts tucked into their shorts and compression socks because their legs are balding, but they don’t give two shits tied together. They’re driving.”

  “What about the moms?”

  “To me, the corporate oligarchs are dads. Moms take you to the place you’re going, y’know? It’s a more inclusive vibe. The dads drive you. We’re being driven, not taken. Society, I mean.”

  Grace had already signalled the bartender to settle the bill. It was her turn to pick it up. Their arrangement was this: they’d hang out at the Heriot Bay Inn drinking and talking, and when they were done, whether that was at the end of the night or the middle of the afternoon, he would help her with the stairs and walk her to her car. Once there, she would offer to drive him home, and Mousey would dither a bit before accepting. It was the sort of arrangement that people make who live on a huge, sparsely populated chunk of rainforest in the sea.

  The Heriot Bay Inn was a bar inside the oldest hotel — and building — on Quadra Island. Various discarded pieces of boating equipment and an old British Columbia flag hung from the rafters. The shelves studding the walls were filled with trophies, more boat paraphernalia, and a coat of arms with a pig touching hands with an armoured knight and the phrase in vino veritas written below; across from the pig hung two replica fishes wearing tutus. There was a stage at the end of the bar, where local and travelling bands played and where the prizes for Rock and Roll Bingo Night were displayed. On the wall behind Grace was a framed, blown-up photograph of a man playing the piano, a young boy singing from a book of music, and a young girl playing the violin in that very building about a century prior. On the wall behind Mousey was another photograph, this one a smiling man in overalls who’d probably been dead since the 1930s, driving a train full of logs across tracks made mostly of other logs.

  Mousey took a last hit of ice cubes and thunked the glass back down, letting his head hang. The tug of it felt nice on his neck. His breath came out ice-cube cold as he talked. “So now I’m just relaxing. The dad says he’s driving us to the pool. I’m going with it. I’m getting in that minivan, I’m sitting low in the back seat, staring out the window, hoping to see a deer or a car accident or a pretty girl. Running it over in my head, y’know? What swimming’s going to be like.”

  Grace sleepily considered her change on the bar-top before shrugging and turning back to Mousey. “You realize that driving-to-the-pool business started with me asking about your occupation, right? Like, a simple question. A census question. That’s what I asked you. Someday your sweet flat little ass is going to tell me what you did to get here. That house.”

  “Is it really that flat?” Mousey craned to look over his shoulder and down his backside. The movement sent his bar stool off balance and clattering to the floor. He got one foot half under himself as Grace caught him firmly under the armpit. Mousey stood straight and bowed his head slightly at first, deepening the bow gradually as he bent over to pick up the stool. Grace smacked his rear so hard that he tipped forward and nudged the bar with his head. Behind them, a leathery kayak guide whooped encouragingly.

  “Shit, son, you can’t even sit on that thing. It’s like a sheet of parchment. Swedish folks would wrap up a chunk of fish with that ass.”

  Mousey stood up smiling and rubbing the beginnings of a bump on his forehead. “I didn’t even realize that one could sit on an ass. Did not know that until I was a good, say, twenty-four years old. I was watching an episode of Roseanne, and all of sudden I was like: ‘Holy cow, you can sit on an ass, like it’s a cushion.’ Wild stuff. Really sit on it, y’know?”

  Grace glanced behind herself now, with considerably more control than Mousey had. “Umm. Yeah, motherfucker, I’m familiar with the concept. Let’s go. I’ll drive you home.”

  “You’ll drive nothing.”

  Grace reached over and slapped him across the belly. “Shhhhh. We both know I will. What did you do for a living? C’mon.”

  “You’ve never told me what you did. Why I gotta answer?”

  “Who cares? I want you to tell me.”

  Mousey moved his arms professorially, in an expansive and entirely pointless motion, bringing them to rest back in front of him. “I am not a man to live in the fleeting radiance of a time that is passed. Tonight I told you something relevant, something of the moment. A taste of me as me now. Under the glow of this night’s moon.”

  Grace turned around and grabbed him by the elbow, gesturing gently at the door. “For somebody who hates people so much, you sure do like to talk.”

  “Don’t be stupid.” Mousey tilted his empty glass to check for more ice, then placed it back down noisily, spinning on his heel towards the door. “Talking doesn’t have shit to do with other people.”

  Mousey looked back across the room as they left. He saw a woman reaching across a table, twisting one of someone else’s dreadlocks, a long, fluorescent fishing lure dangling just above their table. He saw a skiff of napkin shreddings caught by a breath.

  3 Victoria, British Columbia

  Tommy realized relatively early in his career that ­mugging people on the street was a dying trade and that it was because of the internet. All he’d had to do was buy one bas
ketball on Amazon to know people were going to be carrying less and less cash. And because he was exactly this smart, and no smarter, his solution hadn’t been to find another trade but rather to start mugging people for their computers.

  It had initially been a pretty successful strategy. He’d hit on the idea in Montreal, when he’d been hanging around selling coke to Concordia students. These kids all went to coffee shops, and they all brought their computers. They’d walk out of the cafés and the libraries with their attention occupied, laptops bulging teasingly against the sides of their bags. None of these kids had ever had a knife put to them.

  The computer itself was an incredibly high-profit mugging, right off the bat, and after Tommy made friends with a few hackers, he was also able to get a solid cut of the cyber-theft: bank account access, credit cards, social insurance numbers. It was all there: passwords saved right on the browsers and all.

  Cities got hot pretty fast for Tommy this way. Focusing on college towns, he’d hit a few coffee shops and a library or two over about six months, and then he’d skip to the next place. From Montreal he’d headed to Halifax, and from there he’d worked his way west, leapfrogging fences and connections from one place to the next. He was back in Victoria now, where he’d grown up, and was dismayed to have run out of west (not to mention money).

  In his salad days of mugging people for their computers, Tommy had actually made a pretty legitimate income, but times had changed; now it was maybe a one-in-six shot to have saved passwords and no kill-switch or tracking apps on the laptops. For a while there, Tommy had been doing four thousand a month; now he wasn’t even making enough to pay his expenses from city to city, reliant on small loans, big favours, and medium goodwill.

  As was his standard practice, Tommy waited barely long enough to vacate the scene of the crime and get readjusted to having his glasses on to call the man who actually knew how to do anything with the computer Tommy’d just stolen.