MARRY, BANG, KILL

by Andrew Battershill

  Mousey held her gaze and didn’t notice much. Finally, he broke the eye contact and picked up a rook, carried it diagonally across the board, and squeezed it onto the same square as her bishop. He opened both hands at her to show it was her turn. She nodded seriously and then looked at the board to consider her move while distractedly spinning a huge, flat ring around her middle finger. Finally, she moved her knight up to share a spot with one of his pawns, its grey, faded horse face almost reaching down to kiss the blank, tarnished nub of the pawn’s head.

  They went back and forth like that, each seriously considering moves that didn’t exist or make any sense at all, until the pieces were spread randomly over the board, each sharing their tile with a mismatched piece of the other colour.

  After placing the last piece, the woman flipped her bangs up and rested her drink upside down on top of the pointy tip of the bishop’s head. Mousey kicked his king over.

  “You win.”

  For the first time she laughed, and smiled with huge, beautiful, French-actress teeth. “Good game, sir.” She threw him a wink and clicked her mouth noisily as she turned to leave.

  Mousey watched her as she reached a black Lexus and pulled open the driver’s side. Before she ducked in, he spoke over to her. “You want to grab a drink with me?”

  She stopped moving and peered over at him quizzically. “No. That’s a thing you want me to do.”

  Without another word she dropped into the car, peeled out of her spot wide and fast, and quickly, loosely, and dangerously swung around the corner and out of the parking lot.

  In sharper times, Mousey might have been aroused.

  21

  Sometime in the last few years, Glass Jar’s body weight had dropped to a point where it became insignificant in comparison with the musculature of his upper body. This change had come upon him suddenly, and seemingly in an instant, Glass Jar had gone from being a feeble man to — in his estimation — a strong, wiry specimen capable of doing forty-five kipping pull-ups no problem. The reality was that he was still a feeble man, now simply lighter than he was weak.

  But as usual, the harsh reality of his situation had no effect on Glass Jar. The perception of strength had emboldened him in his physical endeavours, which were now more impressive than they’d ever been.

  He’d climbed to his favourite spot, straight up the tree beside his shack, and was still resting there, looking only a little ways up at the hawks spreading their wings with effortless softness, allowing themselves to be blown to their tree homes. Glass Jar maintained as firm a grip as the weathered nerves of his fingers could maintain on the branch above him, careful to keep some of his always limited balance.

  He took pride in the fact that he hadn’t had the flu since he was thirteen. It was one of the things he bragged about sometimes at a bar, or a trap house, or a buy in someone’s car; the person he was speaking to would shift a little to miss his gaze and tepidly agree that it was impressive. People he talked to always seemed like they knew something that made what he was saying sad or wrong, but never just came out and said it. That look was one of the main reasons Glass Jar had taken to solitude in the last few years.

  What everyone but Glass Jar knew is that fever is relative, it requires context. In order to feel like you have the flu, your body temperature has to, at some point, drop below that fever level. And so, as Glass Jar sat and bragged about his health, his interlocutors would disappear quietly into their own discomfort, trying to avoid looking at his red, sweating face, and his bluish, quivering half lips.

  Sitting in his precarious and lovely tree seat, Glass Jar was beginning to wonder if that boast might, finally, have to be put to rest. It was just possible, even though his head still felt the same temperature, that given the shivering, dizziness, and even more intense congestion than usual, he was finally getting sick again.

  Glass Jar didn’t know how much phlegm a normal person made, but he was sure he had the world record for the last decade. Lately it seemed like every breath was just one more mouthful of snot, or throat junk, or the deeper, darker lung stuff. It made him sad in an unusually abstract way, how much of life was just lubing up. Spit, wax, pus, snot, tears, pre-cum, actual cum, grease, sweat, blood. All of it trying to keep you wet, frictionless. To keep your joints smooth, able to touch each other without rubbing, to keep your mouth wet to soften everything coming in. Always, your body was trying to smooth it out with slime, and always there was too much of it. You coughed, spit, drained, wiped it away. You built it up and got rid of it and still felt dry. At the end of the day, it’s always bone on bone, smoke on lung, food on throat, germs on blood, but your body will go on tricking itself until it can’t anymore. Until you’ve worn down all the cartilage, all the enamel, until you’ve hacked out all the phlegm, cum, piss, sweat, snot, and you’re finally you, the raw dog, the real deal. Bone on bone on bone on concrete. Dry enough to rub together, make a fire.

  Glass Jar had been in a lot of intense kinds of physical discomfort — withdrawals and toxicities, seizures and tiny comas and trench foot — but this was a new one. He was so dry and he wanted to drink so badly, but he just couldn’t make himself down a glass of water somehow.

  It was unusual for Glass Jar to even think about drinking water; usually he let himself naturally get hydrated over the day, with showers and sodas and the rain and so forth, but in the last day his throat had started bothering him, thirst making itself heard even in the din of his lifelong thrash-metal concert of dehydration. He’d been worrying about being sick, and because he still remembered the news report he’d seen a while back, he’d been worrying that it was the worrying making him sick. A symptom of our fast-paced modern society.

  For just a second, Glass Jar let his tingling hands release their tenuous grip on the branch, and he let himself relax into the emptiness of the air behind him, let his head tip back and the top section of his spine unfurl to join it. Glass Jar felt the wind, and the pull of the ground, and with his eyes closed he saw the ground speed up to meet him, all in that little half a second of space before he caught the branch again, pulled himself back up, straight and steady. Glass Jar took a deep, calming breath, which went just that little bit too far and caught in one of his beleaguered bronchi and caused him to launch one more ball of waste into the still, open sky then down onto the bare, stripped mud of his lawn.

  22

  “So explain to me, exactly explain to me” — Reubens craned forward in his chair, across the edge of the desk, looming into Mike’s space, the corner of the desk pressing graphically into a section of exposed belly skin between his shirt buttons — “how, exactly, a branch can fall off a tree.”

  Mike waited for Reubens to relax back into his seat. “With all due respect, sir, what aspect of that would you like me to explain? What was wrong with the tree? Gravity?”

  “Listen, Mike, there’s no need for you to be disrespectful to a senior officer, I could write that, remember, I can write you. No, what I want you to explain to me, exactly, is how I have gone fifty-one years as a man and twenty-three years as a police officer and have never, not once, seen a branch fall off a tree onto a moving car, and you, who has been a person for a second and a half, have not only seen a branch fall off a tree but have had it fall right on your vehicle. How exactly do you account for that?

  “It was an accident. That’s all I can say.”

  Reubens nodded like a dog nods at its own vomit, with the comfort of knowing where the next meal is and where last one came from. “Exactly. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  “So you’re saying it’s okay?”

  “When has an accident ever been okay, Mike? That’s, that’s the problem, kids your age, Mike, no. You’re responsible, and there’s going to have be paper on this. There’s going to be some paper, I’m afraid. I mean, I know you have your ambitions, you’ve made that clear, but there’s going to be some paper. It’s . . . windshields aren’t cheap, Mike. And the taxpayers are paying, in case you forgot. In
case you forgot the taxpayers.”

  “But you just said it was an accident.”

  “Exactly. An accident you are solely responsible for. Who do you want to write up, Mike? The tree? You want me to put some paper on the tree? I can’t do that, Mike. I’m not the sergeant of the forest, am I?”

  Mike stayed quiet but Reubens bulged his eyes out, demanding an answer. “No, sir, you aren’t the sergeant of the forest.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So do you want me to file the report?”

  Reubens stood laboriously and patted Mike on the shoulder. “Nah, you go home, I’d better write this one up myself, get it . . .”

  Sometimes, as it road-tripped across the desert of expression, the engine of Reubens’s thought would seize up, dying and burning the whole car down, leaving nothing but a dark patch of asphalt beside the road. Mike couldn’t let these pauses play themselves out. He always had to finish the sentence, which was another thing Reubens hated about him, and another thing he absolutely couldn’t help. “Get it right.”

  “Exactly. Exactly right.”

  23

  Weather permitting, a couple mornings a week Mousey would head to Morte Lake to run the trail. He would scramble at top speed up the hills and over the rocks, jumping over tree roots, slowing to a brisk, cautious walk in the pricklier sections. He believed it to be a better workout than either traditional jogging or hiking.

  Three-quarters of the way through, he would peel off the trail to change into his bathing suit, smoke a small joint, and swim in the lake. Every time he would move smoothly through the water until he got to the deepest section, and then he would swim straight down as far as he could and stop. He’d open his eyes and look at the murky bottom, the forgotten, algae-covered wood that used to be trees, and he would go totally slack, just let the water take him back to the surface. Once there he would hack for air and float in the early-morning sun until he’d regained enough breath to return to shore.

  He’d been restless in the days since the whistling lesson. He didn’t mind giving away the money, not at all, but he did mind a little how Grace might have felt about taking it. There’s a certain amount of money that’s wrong to just give to someone, an amount that implies a debt even if you don’t mean it to, and Mousey knew he’d exceeded it. On top of that, he had Mike Richmond on him now, looking to be a hero.

  Mousey knew the type, not a bad kid, but annoying, a self-serving young man in what ought to be the most servile business in the world. Mike was ambitious and weak. He would be persistent, as long as persistence wasn’t too un-comfortable.

  Mousey was troubled. The chess girl and her cool jacket and exit line should really have lifted his spirits, but she wouldn’t stay in his mind. He kept going back to his awkward misstep with Grace, and Richmond’s millennial death rattle.

  Ultimately Mousey was a practical man, or at least a man who’d had practicality beaten into him for a couple straight decades, and he figured his malaise out: he needed a hard run. Get the blood moving. So, having spent most of the last couple days cooking weird meals and smoking joints in his window nook, desultorily playing Open-Face Chinese Poker on his iPad in view of the resplendent Pacific panorama, Mousey hit the trail at a speed and intensity that was unusual for him, at an exact time when his body was least prepared for it. Less than halfway along the trail he had to stop and rest. He keeled over against a huge, mossy rock, looking up at the fractured sunshine through the canopy of leaves and needles. He covered the sun with his thumb and breathed, took a water bottle out of his backpack.

  A tiny bright yellow bird flitted into the tree a foot to his left. It stayed there a minute then jumped to the branches across the path. The bird rested for a while, its head twitching complacently from side to side. Mousey dared not move in case he upset the bird, which seemed skittish, if temporarily unaware of its surroundings. Eventually, after a long, pleasant time watching the bird innocently peck at the leaves, Mousey shattered the relative peace of the forest trail with a long, shouted cough. The bird flitted instantly away, and the detective was left to stare glumly at his lungs’ waste trickling slowly, frothily down a series of fern leaves.

  Every state of being, no matter how transient or undesirable, has some legitimate and unique benefits. One of the chief advantages of being temporarily depressed and grossed out by your own wretched, aged, and abused body is that it allows you to hear the movements of others very clearly and to disguise your knowledge in the show of staring blankly. Mousey had always been able to find and exploit advantages where they presented themselves. After hearing the twig snap behind him, he kept staring ahead, pretending to be zoned out, and as the person sneaking up on him continued walking, trudging may be the better word for it, the detective reached subtly to his side and wrapped his fingers around a thick stick.

  He waited, listening to the sound of dirt being stepped on by an idiot.

  24

  Tommy had been hiding in the bushes around Morte Lake for just over twenty-six hours, but the long, cold night beside the groomed trail had already exhausted the full extent of his outdoor survival skills.

  His hopes for his Quadra Island time had not included mugging a hiker for trail mix and stealing his or her car, but real life had so rarely matched up to Tommy’s hopes that he was less discouraged than others might have been.

  At the heart of Tommy’s failure as an outdoorsperson were three assumptions he’d been super-sure about, which had each turned out to be exactly wrong. The first was that there would be tons of cookable animals to hunt, the second was that he would be able to start a fire on which to cook the hunted animals with no lighter or matches, the third was that even if he did finally happen to see a deer blinking at him aimlessly and unafraid not six feet away (for instance) he would be able to actually catch and kill it with just his legs and hands and knife. Tommy had spent much of the sleepless, buggy night cursing the misnomer of his “hunting knife.”

  The hiking trail was so beautiful and inspiring and made-up-magical-kingdom-seeming that Tommy was surprised no hikers had come by since he’d returned to the groomed path, not fully realizing how early the sun rose on Quadra in August, or how long the night seems when you sleep for zero hours, or how slowly the morning passes when you’ve eaten two meals in three days. Tommy was unaware that it was only a few minutes after seven.

  The guy he saw coming up the path wasn’t Tommy’s idea of an ideal mugging victim. For starters, he was an adult man. Just right off the bat, a bad start. Worse still, the adult man seemed a little bit insane, sprinting and scrambling up the trail like he was being chased. The crazed hiker seemed small, smaller than Tommy at least, but not tiny or skinny, reasonably broad across the shoulders, and probably in good shape, the way he was hustling. Abruptly the man stopped his psycho-run and leaned against a rock, wheezing, sweating, and fishing around in his bag for something, hopefully water. Tommy felt that things were looking up. As he inched closer, Tommy could see that the guy was staring at something in the trees; then the guy let out a real champion effort of a smoker’s cough. Tommy sprinted ahead as the adult man hacked, taking the opportunity to close the distance. Then the hiker settled down and got really still, just staring into space. Tommy withdrew his knife and silently wished for a protein bar, maybe a Vitamin Water. He hoped hard enough to disperse his attention from the task at hand, and he stepped on a thick, dry twig, snapping it loudly.

  He froze in place for at least a hundred heartbeats. Being neither a trained nor an intuitively acute strategist, Tommy closed his eyes to hope harder that he wouldn’t be seen. Then he opened them and watched the trees sway hard in the wind, threatening to kiss at their tops. His hoping successful, he looked back at the hiker still staring into space, water bottle dangling by his side. Tommy needed to get to him before he drained it. He removed his glasses and kept walking, faster than he had before, even; if the guy didn’t notice the twig, he must be dead to the world.

  Tommy was now exultant in his rel
ief. This guy was practically already robbed; he might be so easy Tommy could kidnap him, as long as he was careful not to kill him. If the guy needed to get away so badly that he’d make Tommy kill him, Tommy would just let him go, simple as that. As long as he got some food and a car and some water right now, he’d be fine. But Tommy felt confident about the kidnapping, sure in his logic and abilities. He felt it now as a certainty: he and this crazed hiker would hole up in the hiker’s hotel room or house, eating fresh seafood together and becoming friends, even after their rough start. The man would give him money.

  This hazy, hunger- and insomnia-influenced thought process led to Tommy walking up in a much too upright and relaxed posture. His voice came out chipper and out of line with his words: “Hey, shit-fucker, gimme your . . .” Tommy barely saw the hiker spring off the rock, barely had time to process the thick, knotty piece of tree branch as it swung swiftly into his crotch. Instantly blinded by the pain, Tommy dropped his knife and staggered face first into an ivy bush. Disoriented by the bush and the intense, visceral worry about and pain in his testicles, he was doubly hurt by the second stick-strike to the sternum, which dropped him and turned his blinded vision from an angry red to a blanketing, vacant white. Tommy dropped to his hands and knees, feeling paralyzed from the waist down, and was unable to move or defend himself as the hiker stomped viciously on his kidney, dropping him all the way to the dirt. After that, the entire forest went silent for a long time.

  Eventually, Tommy curled sideways into a fetal position and vomited the contents of his empty stomach into the soft, nutrient-rich soil. Then he whimpered inconsolably and drooled bile for several minutes. Finally, when he recovered a couple of his senses, he opened his eyes and saw the shape of the hiker leaning back against his rock, unlit joint dangling from his lips, Tommy’s own knife pointed casually at him.