MARRY, BANG, KILL

by Andrew Battershill

  “Okay, scary man, that might all be true tomorrow, but how about you try to keep in mind that right this very moment you’re talking to a person with the means to take whatever scraps of flesh you’ve got in that skull of yours out and spray them anywhere she chooses. And with that in your little mind, you turn on your cute boot-heel and ride that toy motorcycle on home.”

  Darillo nodded, smiled creepily, and finally straightened his pants as he walked away.

  13 Quadra Island, British Columbia

  Glass Jar left his meeting with Mousey in unusually high spirits. His bankroll as flush as it had been in weeks, nothing could spoil Glass Jar’s mood, not even the obvious fact that he would have no further income until at least next month and had exhausted his supply of meth fixings.

  He knew the Mousey’s type, “functioning” junkies with slight hand tremors and a serious look down their noses at him, and knew from this last meeting that the guy would only be calling him more often and for more product from now on.

  He decided to stay out, drive around, and look at the water for a while. Glass Jar’s preferred point of view on the Pacific Ocean was from the familiar vantage of his truck, so he drove straight down an abandoned boat launch and parked. Glass Jar marvelled at the dark, sun-soaked richness of the ocean’s blue through the thick, forgotten streaks of dirt and bug guts his never-before-cleaned-or-attended-to wipers had spread across the windshield.

  Whether he knew it or not, Glass Jar was a person who, in spite of his almost limitless free time, was parched for quiet and reflective moments. And just as the clean, cold water of thought had started to wet his dry, frothing mental palate, the thick bile of a not-swallowed-soon-enough belchpuke choked him in the form of his ringing cellphone.

  Glass Jar hated and cursed his phone, which was now just as it had come to him, but with a thick layer of congealed dirt spread over it. He had been a relatively early and extremely grudging cellphone owner, his trade necessitating it years ago, but he had never, in all the years he’d owned one, opened the settings menu. When a phone inevitably malfunctioned, or was not loud enough (the wax that had clogged Glass Jar’s ears since late adolescence was by now visible to the naked eye of anyone who passed within a few feet and chanced to look directly at him), he became unreasonably filled with rage, and without thinking about it further or consulting anyone for help, he would buy a new one.

  He’d never owned anything other than a Motorola flip phone, and had never adjusted the default ringer. Sometimes a brief spark of curiosity would throw itself vainly against the brick wall of his thoughts when he heard another person’s ringtone. These tones were inevitably less offensive to him than his own, but the spark would flash only briefly before falling dead to the cold, dusty floor of reality. So it was not unusual for Glass Jar to curse loudly and smack the headrest next to him, as he did now, when his phone rang. It was also not particularly unusual for him to answer the phone abruptly and viciously, not having taken enough time to compose himself.

  “What in fuck do you want?”

  The man on the other end of the line used a satellite spinning through the infinity of space to transmit the coldness of his silence to Glass Jar for several long seconds. “I’m going to go ahead and assume you’re still too stupid to have caller ID working on your phone. I’m going to do you that favour, Glass Jar.”

  Darillo had known Glass Jar in their younger days in Vancouver, and had not a soft spot but a remotely flexible spot for Glass Jar in his heart. It was Darillo who had, in exchange for a little taste of whatever Glass Jar earned for the rest of his life, allowed Glass Jar to operate on Quadra Island and hooked him up with the fish farmers.

  “Oh shit, sorry, Jay, sorry I . . .”

  “Shut the fuck up and don’t say any more names, for the last fuckin’ time in your life. Okay?”

  “Yeah. Yeahshitsorry.”

  “Okay, fuckskull” — it had long been Darillo’s assertion that to call Glass Jar fuckhead was to do him the overly generous compliment of assuming he had the component parts of a human head — “listen up and don’t fuckin’ talk. So there’s some heavy shit going down here. There’s a professional person with a temper coming to where you’re at, you get me?”

  “Yeah, I —”

  “Did I say you could talk yet? Shut your cunt lips, fuckskull. Sew them fuckin’ shut if you have to. This person with a temper, this professional person, they’re coming to your spot, and they can’t have any attention, anything going on, got it? That means stay in your house. That means, if you have to, holding your fuckin’ breath until I tell you it’s all right to sigh. You hear me?”

  “Yeah, I —”

  “If you say one more word, I swear to fuckin’ Christ, Glass Jar, I will feed you your own hamstrings like they’re fuckin’ pork chops. Shut up. I’m telling you not to earn, not to use outside your house, not to fuckin’ piss in the woods without permission. This is very serious. Do you understand?”

  Glass Jar silently glowered at the tree-studded mountains in the distance. After a few seconds, Darillo’s voice boomed back on the line.

  “Holy shit, he proves he’s as smart as a fuckin’ British bulldog who managed not to roll over her puppies in the night. Good. Wait for me to call, all right. You can get back to whatever it is you do to earn the twenty-eight fuckin’ cents you earn up on that fuckin’ backwater.”

  Glass Jar kept the receiver of his phone, gummily, against his ear for several seconds, listening to the dial tone. As an avid evening news watcher and a slightly higher form of sentience than he was commonly believed to be, Glass Jar knew this was about the guy who’d ripped off the club’s gas station in Victoria, some half-assed shootout behind it. The kid was coming to Quadra and they had a hitter en route. That kind of daytime robbery — Bonnie and Clyde shit — had never been Glass Jar’s scene, not even when he’d been young and relatively functional, so he resigned himself to a trip to the grocery store for supplies and a super-marathon of booze or meth-fuelled cable television viewing. He took a look back at the ocean, sighed, and reversed his truck up the launch with unusual caution, then he drove the speed limit to the store.

  Six boxes of Pizza Pops, a huge plastic tub of wasabi peas, three chicken pot pies, and two bottles of Russian Prince Vodka cost more than Glass Jar had anticipated, and he had to dig back into his roll and count twice before he managed to hit the number.

  There was a little girl wearing a green cape in the lineup behind him, and Glass Jar could feel her judgey look. She was no superhero, she wasn’t even a person yet (not really), she had no right to look down on him. He felt angry and feverish and disoriented. As he struggled his bags into the crooks of his elbows, he turned and walked backwards a couple steps, baring the bareness of his gums at the little girl, who ducked defensively behind her mother’s leg.

  Glass Jar did not usually feel upset about his station in life, or resentful of the man who bullied him and took his money, until he had contact with the general public. But as soon as he’d been in a citizen’s gaze for few seconds, the injustice of it, where he had ended up after all the work he’d done, would reach a critical mass in his chest.

  Glass Jar put his bags in the back seat, slammed the door, and glowered at the empty nets and buckets in the bed of his truck. Without thinking about it too long, he opened the back door of his truck, and in full view of the largest parking lot on the island, took a huge belt off the Prince. He rolled the jutting bones of his spine pleasantly against the frame of the door, slumped into the driver’s seat, and peeled out of the parking lot towards the scallop farm. He allowed the wind to slam the tiny back door of his truck closed for him.

  14

  Once he was out on the road doing it, Mike never minded the patrols. He was very easily made motion-sick as a passenger in the car, and especially on the boat, so driving himself was the only way to get through a patrol without feeling like he needed to lie down and just watch sports. The problem with doing the patrols solo was that
Reubens was making him do it. Had his boss not made it so obvious that this was a punishment for being an insufficiently “straight shooter,” Mike probably would have asked for it.

  As he listened to a motivational book on tape about the equity potential and deep spiritual rewards inherent to a Zen Buddhist approach to stock trading, Mike coasted his truck up the swaying, unpaved road overlooking Rebecca Spit, glancing into driveways and wondering casually what exactly he was ever looking for.

  As he slowed to check out the We Wai Kai scallop bed, Mike recognized Glass Jar’s tattoo. The band’s harvesting area was explicitly not any of Mike’s business, but somebody had been stealing scallops from the farm, and the RCMP had been asked to keep an eye out. Now there was Glass Jar, hoisting a large net full of shells into the back of his truck; his shirt off, his pants hanging off him as if he was an ankle and they were a tube sock with a broken elastic. Mike pulled his truck off to the side of the road and got out, then he crept over and hid behind a tree.

  Having stashed his rowboat on the beach and loaded a pearl net full of scallops into his truck, Glass Jar was just now rewarding his hard work with a sustained belt off a bottle of Russian Prince. Glass Jar finished the drink and chucked the plastic two-six into the bed of the truck, then he leaned deeply back towards the ocean, pressing the small of his back firmly in the other direction, his methy ribs looking ready to poke through skin.

  Mike returned to his car and peeled quickly and quietly away. Glass Jar must be heading back to his place, since he couldn’t take the five o’clock ferry, easily the most crowded of the day, with an open truck full of stolen scallops. As he drove, Mike pumped his fist twice, felt lame even though he was alone, and then contented himself with banging the steering wheel with an open palm. This was it. His. Reubens would be off shift, so he wouldn’t come even if Mike did radio it in. He was alone.

  His plan was to beat Glass Jar home, hide his car up the road, and take him as he unloaded the scallops. If he collared him getting out of the car, he could book him for the scallops and a DUI, and he’d get to search the car, where he was sure he’d find a felony drug charge. And it would all be his, no Reubens taking credit; it would be Mike’s. At the very least they’d tie Glass Jar up for a year; there was no way he could make bail.

  Mike spied Glass Jar’s horrible little home, a one-room aluminum-sided hovel in the middle of an empty forest. He bumped his car further up the road, pulled it a short distance into the trees, and sat a minute to compose himself. He breathed deeply and unevenly, pulled his service weapon, checked and re-holstered it. Then he looked himself in the eyes in the mirror and set out towards the house.

  The cop settled himself behind a thick arbutus tree and watched the road. Eventually, Glass Jar’s truck turned the corner, its engine labouring as it sluggishly listed towards the shoulder. Glass Jar over-adjusted on his steering, and after almost dumping his car in the ditch on his right, narrowly grazed the lip of the ditch on the left before swinging the truck around in a long and surprisingly fluid arc into his driveway.

  Mike took off running up the road, stretching his long, always almost cramping legs to their full stride. As is common to men of his size, once Mike had a full head of steam going it was easier to run through an object than around it, so as he reached the driveway Mike simply dipped his shoulder and plowed bluntly through Glass Jar’s swaying reclaimed-wooden-plank address sign.

  The two men caught sight of each other at roughly the same time, as Mike’s vision cleared from the collision, and as Glass Jar’s customarily dulled reaction time at length alerted him to the sounds of a 235-pound police officer barrelling through signage.

  Glass Jar was mid-hoist on his third attempt to pull the scallops out of the bed of his truck. The first two had seen the net flirt with the lip of the truck bed before landing back in the bottom when he lost his grip on the wet ropes. By the time he saw Richmond, Glass Jar was just about ready to give up on his task anyway, so he dropped the net, raised his hands casually above his head, and drifted a few feet away from the car.

  Richmond skidded to stop, spraying loose gravel and dust. A few of the pebbles shot towards Glass Jar’s feet, and the junkie began a loose-limbed jig. Mike’s summoned enough heaving breath to shout at Glass Jar.

  “HANDS UP RIGHT NOW!”

  Glass Jar straightened his elbows above his head but kept his feet bouncing in a stilted rhythm. “They don’t go much upper than this, boss.”

  Mike took a breath through his nose. “Stop dancing.”

  Glass Jar stilled his feet, then he tried to rub a scab off his face with his shoulder as Mike caught more of his breath. “I’d turn myself around, boss, but then you might think I was doing the hor-key por-key.” Glass Jar’s entire rib cage rippled with mirth. Then he snorted deeply, considered spitting, swallowed, and looked back at Mike.

  “Turn around, and drop to your knees.” Mike was coming back to himself now, his right hand hovering over his holster, his left twisted out involuntarily towards Glass Jar in a Bela Lugosi vampiric-spell-casting sort of way.

  Glass Jar’s gums grinned, abscessedly, at the cop. “And that’s what it’s all about. Do do do doo do.”

  “On your stomach, and shut up about the hokey-pokey.”

  Glass Jar keeled straight over sideways, landing with a hollow thud in the grass and rolling onto his belly. “Make sure you cinch those cuffs up tight, boss. My weight’s been losing itself.”

  By the time Mike was done searching the truck, Glass Jar had gotten upright and picked the small patch of his lawn behind his back bare. While Glass Jar had sobered sufficiently to begin worrying, Mike had relaxed. Since he enjoyed organizing things, Mike laid out the objects he’d found on the gravel in front of Glass Jar in an ascending order of the severity of charges they represented.

  Mike dropped to a crouch. Feeling the tug in his knees, he stood back up. “Okay, Glass Jar, it’s time do some counting. We have open liquor in a motor vehicle, plus a huge Dee Wee, plus theft, plus simple possession of stolen prescription narcotics, with the labels on, plus possession with intent on the bagged-up meth. How’s your math? That equals a year and change for you, and a nice note in the service record for me, by my count.”

  Glass Jar bit his lip back into his mouth, folding it briefly into the pocket between his teeth and gums. “My math says you don’t waste time on a show unless you want something from me. Your fuckin’ problem is you don’t even know what that is. Only I know. So book me or shut that face-hole, swole-chest motherfucker.”

  Mike looked all the way down at Glass Jar sitting at his feet, his cuffed hands canted against the dead grass, and a long-forgotten feeling surged through him.

  That feeling was middle-school basketball.

  By the age of twelve, Mike had already developed the height and musculature of a mediocre varsity athlete. Playing on eight-foot nets, and with prepubescent boys, Mike had been such a dominant hard-court force that the league had been forced to change its rules, banning dunking and restricting a player’s minutes to less than half of the total game time.

  Mike smiled and leaned heavily against the truck. “Swing away, Glass Jar. But you’re the one that needs to give me some felony skinny, and I’m the one sitting on a clean shit-head arrest. You’re a big shit-head fish in a tiny shit-head pond, bud. The community will love me. Hell, I might even get a free flax seed bread at the Saturday market for running you out of town. You’re not popular.”

  There was a reason Glass Jar lived in a Quadra Island shack. A few years back, he’d been an Andegg Brothers hangaround in Vancouver. Not high level, but up there enough to know a lot of people. He did a few border runs, but mostly he cooked decent meth and helped run bets. Around the time that whole gang went down, Glass Jar got caught when his boat ran out of gas crossing the border with sixteen kilos of coke. He’d actually played it pretty smart, snitching half a dozen guys who were probably going down anyway, making it out alive and (rumour had it) with a shoebox full o
f cash, bets he’d been holding for one of the bookies he’d ratted. So Glass Jar was being given a pass; he’d waited out most of the gang purges that went down in the early teens, and kept to himself. The word on him now was that once in a while the club chapter from Vancouver Island would throw him a bone in the form of some pot and pills to sell, or take meth off his hands when he got himself together enough to cook a decent batch.

  The point, from Mike’s career’s perspective, was that Glass Jar knew how to do business and would have about six shank-free minutes in jail.

  Glass Jar’s face contorted, as if he was staring at an unexpected hydro bill. “All right, all right, all right. Few things I’ve heard. I’ll give you two cookhouses, one in Campbell River, the other in Comox. They’re small, but I know the people, and I can give you easy PC to search ’em. I can’t testify, though. I can’t do that again.”

  “That’s a start. Keep it running.”

  Glass Jar looked up at Mike and rolled his eyes, yellowly, at the cop. “They don’t tell me shit, man.” Glass Jar tilted his head to the side in even-handed consideration. “Guess they’re right not to, hey, boss?”

  “Gimme some details on the cooks and I’ll kick you on the driving and crank. I still have to run you in on the theft and the scripts, though.”

  “Come on, man. I . . . That’s what I got.”

  “Then I guess you’re going for the whole biscuit. I’m not kicking you outright for a couple of kitchen meth cooks.” Mike raised his hand sympathetically, savouring the moment. “What can I do?”

  For a long time after that the two men remained silent as Mike watched huge trees swaying slightly and firmly in the wind and Glass Jar aggressively scratched the top of his chest using his chin. After a few seconds, he straightened his neck and spoke to the side of his truck.

  “You remember sugar. Like, as a kid, you remember sugar?”