Blind Luck

by Scott Carter

  The doorbell cut through the silence again. Ding-dong. The sound was far too friendly a noise for someone at the door at six minutes after two. The bell sent shivers down every limb. He considered staying put and hoped to avoid going to the door, but there was no way it was a salesperson at two a.m., so he decided he had to answer. Someone might be lost or hurt.

  But then it occurred to him that maybe the person was checking to see if anyone was home. At that moment, he decided it was better to answer the ring than to wait and see if the next step was for someone to break into the house.

  A quick glance through the door’s half-moon of small windows revealed that the porch light was out. His mother never turned the porch light off until daylight, so he flicked the switch up and down a few times, but still no light. Ding-dong. The sound made his fingers tingle. Fear made his hands stiff, but he didn’t want his mother to deal with whoever stood on the other side of the door, so he turned the deadbolt fast, and the loud click of metal on metal broke through the silence.

  He could hear the sound of shoes or boots moving on the porch, so he grabbed the doorknob and pulled in one motion the way people remove band-aids to get the pain over with. A rush of cold air came through the gap between the door opening and the safety chain, and his heart pounded harder than he ever imagined possible as he peered into the darkness, until a face appeared in the gap. He drew his head back. Reaction told him to scream, but no sound came out.

  “Relax,” the face said. “I’m a friend of your father’s. Is he home?”

  Dave looked at the stubbly face. The man’s eyes were a striking hazel that looked too soft for the shaved scalp and stubble they centred. Dave shook his head.

  “He’s not home?”

  Dave shook his head again. His dad hadn’t been home for two days. His mom said he was at his friend Craig’s, but he knew better than to offer that information.

  “I need you to open the door for me, kid.”

  Dave saw another man beside the first. This guy was shorter, and parts of his blond hair showed beneath the toque fitting tightly on his head. Dave smelled something like smoke wafting from the men, only sweeter. The smell made Dave think of incense.

  “Are you listening to me, kid? I need you to open the door.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  Dave’s words sparked the man with the toque. He positioned himself in front of the gap so that Dave could see him from the waist up and lifted his jacket to reveal a gun tucked into his pants.

  “Do you see this? This will he in your mouth if you don’t open that door.”

  The other man pushed the man with the toque to the side, saying, “Are you retarded? Put your fucking jacket down and lower your voice.” He turned back to Dave. “I understand why you don’t want to let us in, but you’ve got to understand, your father owes me money. Money he hasn’t paid me, and I need to clear that up.”

  “My dad’s not home.”

  “I understand that. And I know your mom probably is, and I know that scares you, so I’ll let you know up front that we’re not here for her. Now you’ve got two choices here, kid. You either let me in, I’m gone in fifteen minutes, and your mother never has to see me, or I kick in the door, wake your mother, and things might get a lot crazier. That make sense to you?”

  Dave nodded. He lifted the chain and waited for the door to burst open, but that didn’t happen. The man gave Dave a moment to step back before coming inside.

  Both men wore dark jackets and jeans. The man who did most of the talking maintained eye contact with Dave while the other one lit a cigarette.

  “Here’s how it’s going to work. Your father, the piece of shit that he is, owes me two thousand dollars. Two thousand that he refuses to pay me, so I’m going to take two thousand dollars worth of stuff out of his home. Now, you’re a good kid. You’ve got spunk, and this isn’t your fault. If someone came into my home and did this to my kid. I’d kill them, but where’s your dad? Hiding out somewhere over two grand while his kid has to deal with this. This isn’t your fault, so I’m going to do you a favour. I’m going to let you choose two things in here that you don’t want me to take.”

  Dave wanted to cry. He could feel his eyes squinting, his lips pouting, but nothing ran wet. He thought of his baseball glove, the T.V., and his hockey equipment. Then he thought of his mom’s jewellery box, the ring she’d showed him that her mother had given her and the copper brooch that had been in the family for over a hundred years.

  “Anything on the first floor. Just please don’t go upstairs, I don’t want my mom to see this.”

  The man looked at him before turning to his partner. “Looks a lot like Terry, doesn’t he?”

  “Fucker could be his brother,” the man with the toque said as a cloud of smoke drifted from his mouth. He walked to the T.V., unplugged it and picked it up with a groan.

  Dave didn’t look, he just sat at the foot of the stairs.

  The man who did the talking pointed to the T.V. “Do you have another T.V. anywhere?”

  Dave shook his head. The man gestured to his partner, who struggled with the T.V.’s weight.

  “Leave the T.V.”

  “What?”

  “Put the T.V. back.”

  “Oh, fuck you.”

  “I’m serious. Put the T.V. back.”

  “You’re telling me because this little shit looks like your son, you’re going to leave a T.V. like this?”

  The nicer man’s eyes burned so intensely that he didn’t have to respond, and fifteen minutes later they were gone, just as he’d promised. Dave checked on his mother, and it was clear she had no idea what had happened. He wondered whether or not some of the noises had penetrated her psyche and caused a nightmare, or if she had simply slept the dead sleep of pills.

  Dave didn’t go back to sleep that night. He just pulled the covers over his head, thankful to lose only the stereo, a crystal lamp, a leather chair and a set of golf clubs. If he’d had red hair instead of brown, or blue eyes instead of hazel, the house would have lost a lot more. If he didn’t look so much like the man’s son, his mother could have been hurt. But he did, and even though he spent the rest of the night awake from the adrenaline flowing through him, he did so grateful for his brown hair and hazel eyes.

  Nine

  Dave checked his voicemail for the first time in days to find a reminder about overdue movies he’d rented, two pre-recorded sales pitches for a chance to win a cruise, and a message that actually caught his attention. Hello, I’m calling for Dave Bolden. My name is Phil Bryer. I’m Mr. Richter’s attorney. Please call me at your earliest convenience. My number is…

  Dave didn’t listen past “attorney”. Attorney meant an insurance claim or a lawsuit, and he didn’t want any part of having to rehash the details of that morning. What he wanted was to visit Otto and use his new-found money to put a dent in the money he owed the man for payments on Twenty-Nine Palson. Otto expected an installment at the end of the month, and it felt good to know that now he could pay the debt outright.

  Dave had first met Otto Anderson in the second grade. Even at that age, Otto was bigger than everyone else. The two of them had become friends when their mothers started working together. Otto’s mother brought him to the Boldens’ during her visits, and Dave had introduced him to most of the kids on the street. The better friends their mothers became, the more they saw of each other. Otto’s mother talked openly about how she wanted him to be more like Dave. She wanted Otto to be more presentable, more respectful and more responsible. She even signed Otto up for Dave’s baseball team, where he was an all- star catcher until the seventh grade, when playing video games and smoking cigarettes took precedence over athletics.

  Otto didn’t suit being a kid anyway. A part of him had seemed grown-up to Dave since the day they’d met. He was taller than everyone, the first to kiss a girl, the first to smoke; he’d fought a high school kid when he was in Grade Seven. He was out of high school and working full time by sixteen, a
nd he’d slept with a thirty-year-old woman when he was seventeen. Moments blended into each other like that for Otto.

  He didn’t see another day every morning when his eyes opened, he saw an opportunity, which is why while most of the guys he’d grown up with sat through math lessons dry enough to make their eyes bleed, he cleared three hundred a week bussing tables.

  Dave hadn’t seen Otto as much as they’d gotten older, but they shared the two most important building blocks of any friendship—mutual respect and a shared history. Both of their mothers had developed cancer around the same time, and they’d spent a period drinking beer together. Long after everyone else at the party or bar went home, they still drank and talked about what the hell their mothers had done to deserve cancer. The more they drank, the more they hated the doctors for not curing their mothers. Otto’s had died six weeks after Dave’s mom was deemed cancer-free. Dave didn’t see Otto for a long time after that. Dave got deeper into his university studies, and Otto got deeper into being Otto, until one night while Dave was cramming for a mid-term, there was a frantic knock at the door.

  “I need five hundred dollars,” Otto said with bugged eyes. “Don’t ask me why, just tell me whether you can do it or not, and I promise I’ll pay you back.”

  Dave gave him the money, folly expecting never to see it again. Two weeks later, Otto returned to give Dave two thousand dollars in hundred dollar bills. Now you don’t give someone twenty hundred dollar bills unless you’re trying to make a statement, and Otto’s was that he wasn’t the borrower any more.

  The night Dave had found out his dad needed to be in a nursing home, he’d immediately thought of Otto. He needed access to monthly money he didn’t have, and there was simply nowhere else to go. Otto gave him the first six thousand interest-free, and the next day Dave put first and last down on 29 Palson Avenue.

  Since the day Jack had moved into Palson Avenue, Dave had taken him to a baseball diamond a block over from home at least once a week, and the outings proved even more important to his dad than bringing the sports section.

  Dave reared back and fired a fastball at a piece of plywood substituting for a catcher. He was bending down to pick up another ball from a bagful at his feet when his dad extended one from a pile in his lap. Jack sat in his wheelchair a few feet to Dave’s right with a baseball gripped tight in his hand and an oxygen mask dangling from his neck.

  “You pitch like a poet,” he said. He held his hand up limply at the wrist. “All wrist.”

  Dave smiled. “I could take you back to the home if you’d like that better.”

  “My son could show you something about pitching. He had the best curveball in the city for a kid so lazy.”

  “I am your son, Pop.”

  Dave fired another pitch, and his plant leg exploded so hard that it caused a cloud of dust to rise from the asphalt. His dad looked unimpressed.

  “Keep your head up, for chrissake.”

  Dave grabbed another ball. “Do you ever remember me being particularly lucky?”

  His dad stared at the baseball he clutched. “I hear something funny.”

  “What?”

  “I hear something funny.”

  “It’s probably your oxygen tank.”

  “I hear something.”

  “I know, but I’m asking you something. Do you ever remember me being lucky?”

  “You’re a bookie, luck’s your pimp.”

  Dave took the baseball from his dad’s hand, which secured his attention. “I’m your son, Dave. Do you ever remember Dave being lucky?”

  “If I was pitching, I’d keep my head up.”

  “I’m sure you would, Pop, but I’m not asking you that, I’m asking you if you remember your son, Dave, me, as lucky?”

  “I’m his father, aren’t I?”

  Dave nodded and couldn’t help but smile at the wit. “Yeah, yeah, you are. And that’s definitely lucky, but what about in other ways?”

  “I wouldn’t know. You’ve got to take chances to test luck, and I never saw him do that.”

  Dave stared at him. It was the first honest exchange they’d had in years, and the words made his question seem completely insignificant.

  “Pitch another ball, would you? It’s not like I can do it for myself.”

  Dave looked over at his dad for a moment before pivoting to fire another fastball at the plywood. “We’ve got to get going, Pop. I have a meeting I need to go to.”

  His dad cocked his head, and his lips formed a mischievous grin. “Why don’t you just say it?”

  “Say what?”

  “You have a meeting with a woman.”

  Dave began pushing the wheelchair. “It’s not like that.”

  “Sure it is. If it wasn’t like that, you would’ve just said it’s time to go like you do every week. You mentioned it for a reason.”

  “I haven’t even met the woman, it’s business.”

  “Liar.”

  The word choice amused Dave during the cab ride to his destination. For a man who’d spent his life in denial, a life layered with lies, the word came off his father’s tongue surprisingly easily. The irony made Dave think of all the times he had heard problem drinkers call people at parties drunks.

  He stepped out of the cab and walked up the front steps of a duplex with the address Grayson had given him in hand. He wished it were a date—someone he’d met at a bar, a friend of a friend, or a prostitute. The specifics didn’t matter to him. What he needed was someone to invoke a passion that would help him forget. Instead he waited to be presented as a good luck charm, and the absurdity made the truck crashing through his work window more real than the moment it’d happened.

  A blond man watched Dave as he approached the address Grayson had given him. The man pretended to stretch, but Dave felt his watching eyes. With a creaseless track suit and shoes that looked brand new, he was the type that spent more time shopping for a gym outfit than actually exercising. Dave guessed they were about the same age.

  He turned to the man to catch him staring, before glancing down at a piece of paper with the address to double check that he was at the right door. He rang the bell once with a heavy finger. Grayson opened the door a moment later.

  “Good, welcome. Come in,” he said, nodding approvingly.

  While Grayson talked, Dave noticed Amy sitting on a couch across the room.

  She looked to be in her early thirties and was naturally beautiful, except for pained eyes that were red around the rims, and dark bags that weighed on her face. A blue knit sweater hung baggily on her frame, as did a pair of khakis at least a size too big. Press-wood tables, a bland navy blue sofa too skinny to be comfortable, and aqua light stands made her apartment a B-version of generic IKEA.

  Grayson handed Dave an envelope, which he slid into the closest jacket pocket. Grayson broke the seal on a bottle of scotch he’d brought over.

  “Can I make you a drink?”

  “No thanks.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay.”

  Grayson poured himself a shot and drank it before leading Dave into the living room. Amy stood, and her arms went from her sides to crossed and back to her sides. Grayson rubbed her closest shoulder.

  “Dave, this is my sister, Amy.”

  Dave extended his hand, and Amy moved forward until Grayson stepped between them. He grabbed Dave’s arm with a firm grip.

  “Forget hand-shaking, hug.”

  Amy pivoted towards him, with a look that only a sister can give her brother and whispered, “Grayson.” She shook Dave’s now limp hand to be polite. “I’m sorry my brother made you come.”

  “He didn’t make me come.”

  “Then I’m sorry he bought you.”

  Grayson put his coat on by the door. “I’m going to leave now.”

  Amy turned to him, and her eyes looked defeated, like a kid being left at a new school for the first time. “What?”

  Grayson ignored her in favour
of addressing Dave. “I’ll see you outside when you two are done.” He buttoned the top button on his coat and walked out the door.

  Amy flushed. She scratched at a red blotch on the side of her neck while pacing a small runway. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know he was going to leave.”

  “Neither did I.”

  She sat on the couch, and Dave chose a wooden chair to the side. They sat in silence for a moment while Dave tried to think of something to say and Amy struggled to stay still, until the agony of two strangers’ silence compelled her to straighten an armchair cover that was already in place.

  Dave walked over to a series of bookshelves that had been adjusted to fit records. He guessed that there were a thousand records on the shelves. He removed an album randomly and flipped it over to see that it was The Kensington Market. He had never heard of the band, and the ignorance left him with a curious combination of admiration and jealousy.

  “This is a serious collection,” he said, holding up the record.

  “I have over five thousand. I’d fill a house with them if I could spare the space, but most of them are in storage.”

  “I’ve got about three hundred in storage myself.” His eyes locked on a Crowbar twelve-inch, ‘Too True Mama’. My mother used to play that song all the time. I haven’t been able to find this anywhere. Where did you get it?”

  “Grayson bought it a few years back. He gets me a lot of my records.”

  “Play something for me.”

  “What are you in the mood for?”

  “I want it to be your choice.”

  She walked to the shelf closest to the window, pulled a record from the second shelf and turned to a vintage Garrard RC1 player.

  Dave took a seat in the armchair. “If you play the Monkees, we’re going to have a problem.”

  She set the needle on the record, and it popped twice before finding the groove. Raw vocals growled through the speakers, setting off an explosion of pre-punk-fuelled guitar as “Kick Out the Jams” filled the room.