Property Values

by Charles Demers

  The hummus shot out of Scott’s throat and onto the carpet at the mention of the Underground Riders. Mike was disgusted.

  “Fucking bitch,” he said, standing up and kicking Scott lightly in the stomach. “I should rub your fucking nose in it.”

  Scott struggled to sit up, trying to catch his breath as he leaned against the wall underneath the hole that had been made with his face, his body feeling like it was about to fall apart into its constitutive parts.

  “Just tell me what it is. I know you’re not growing down here, and there’s no lab. You running bitches? A fucking card game?”

  Scott shook his head. He tried to formulate the words to explain the real estate plan, but his synapses were splayed apart, each turned away from the others.

  “We did it, we did it …” was all he could manage.

  Mike crouched in front of Scott, his face impassive, and slapped him hard.

  “You work this block, whatever it is you’re doing, you work for the Riders. It’s what—it’s Thursday. I’m going to be back on Sunday for your rent on whatever the shit it is you’ve got going, Scott. Five thousand bucks, we’ll start.”

  “But it was just my friends who—”

  Mike slapped him again, this time with his fist half-closed.

  “Don’t be a fucking tattle-tale, Scott.”

  “No! No, I wasn’t. We were together. We did it—”

  “It’s nice being back in the old neighbourhood. I’ll see you Sunday.”

  7

  “Bro, this is …” Pardeep trailed off. “You don’t look good, Scott.”

  Scott moaned on the couch as he held the frozen ćevapčići to the side of his head, then, when his ribs got jealous of the cold, to his side. As he brought the sausages back up to his cheek, he could feel them softening slightly, thought he could smell them, and he thought of his mother.

  Josiah came back to the couch with a look of concern on his face, wiping the freshly rinsed metal mixing bowl dry with a dishcloth.

  “I don’t like it, Scotty. I think we should take you to the hospital.”

  “I’m fine,” he answered, in the precise voice of someone who wasn’t. The words came through his fat lips smeared; he could taste the acid in every corner of his mouth.

  “You take any kind of blow to the head, they say if you puke, you gotta go to the ER.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “It could be a concussion.”

  “Sidney Crosby’s had fifty fucking concussions, and he’s still won a million Stanley Cups even though Sidney Crosby’s had fifty fucking concussions.”

  “Buddy, Joe’s right, let’s just pop down to the emergency room. Won’t take more than a few hours.”

  “Look, check my eyes. Flash the phone.”

  “You’re not even making any sense, Scotty.”

  “Goddamn it, the phone, the light—flash the phone light into my eyes, see if they dilate right. If they do, it’s not a concussion. Wait, let me get them big.”

  Scott dropped the ćevapčići and covered his eyes with both hands, creating an artificial darkness while Pardeep and Josiah waited, sighing, hands on hips.

  “Scott, buddy.”

  “Just let me—” Scott was cut off by the puke, his throat somehow wringing more from his stomach, somehow finding something left to heave after all these times. His hands dropped from his eyes as Josiah positioned the bowl under his chin.

  “Come on, man, let’s take you down to Eagle Ridge.”

  “I’m telling you, we’ll sit there for six hours, and at the end of it they’ll just tell you guys to wake me up every four hours tonight.”

  “Is that true?” Pardeep asked Josiah.

  “I think he might be right. Unless his brain is bleeding, I think? But yeah, if it’s a concussion,” he said, then turned, speaking angrily toward Scott, “and it’s definitely a concussion, there’s not a ton they can do.”

  Pardeep and Josiah looked at each other.

  “You stay with him,” Josiah managed, a half second before Pardeep, who threw his hands up in surrender. Without thinking, Josiah began to smirk at his minor victory, until the sobbing started.

  Scott was crying, his shoulders shuddering, a look of absolute confusion and surrender on his face.

  “He’s coming back,” he said, rasping simultaneously at both ends of the register, low and high, resigned and shrill. “He’s coming back in three days for five thousand dollars.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Fuck.”

  “He’s going to come back, and when I don’t have the money, he’s going to what? He’s going to kill me.”

  “Did he say he was going to kill you?”

  “I don’t know. I think it was implied.”

  “Scott,” said Josiah, “I think it’s time to call the cops.”

  “I don’t—I’m not sure that’s the right move, Joe.” Josiah looked at Pardeep with as much confusion as frustration.

  “Jesus Christ, Par, I can understand Scott losing his mind on this shit, but you are really starting to piss me off. If you’d had your head on earlier, you could have helped me talk him out of even starting this shit.”

  “You pulled the trigger, asshole!”

  Josiah threw the dish towel onto the floor.

  “Besides,” Pardeep continued, “you’re talking about ratting on the Underground Riders. That would be an iffy proposition even if the cops liked Scott, which they now have no reason to. The cops they don’t own have no power to stop them.”

  “We don’t need any of your father’s conspiracy theories, Pardeep!”

  “Now who’s being naive!?” Pardeep screamed.

  Scott’s crying dropped the low end and took off into a high, sobbing shriek. Pardeep sat next to him on the couch and took his head onto his chest. The young men had never been physically affectionate with each other, and the embrace was awkward, and Josiah watched it with curiosity and a gruffly-conceded admiration, wondering if that’s how he would have hugged Scott if he’d had to.

  “Scott, what kind of cash do you have on hand?” Pardeep asked. “I think we give him the money on Sunday, I don’t see any way out of that. And it’s a token, it’s a gesture of whatever. Good fate.”

  “Faith,” said Josiah.

  “You’ll give him an envelope with the money he asked for, and then you can explain that the shooting was a set-up. That there was nothing really going on. He’s up five grand, no harm, no foul.”

  Scott ran his fingers over the goose egg growing from his head as he tried to sort out this particular usage of no foul.

  “I don’t have five thousand dollars, Par.”

  “What do you have?”

  “Nothing.”

  The men sat in silence for a few seconds. Josiah made pleading eye contact with Pardeep, who shook his head with gentle helplessness.

  “I just bought plane tickets for my mom. India, at Christmastime. I’m tapped.”

  Josiah shrugged preemptively.

  “I literally haven’t had a savings account since I started my master’s.”

  For a moment, the acute panic of their immediate circumstances gave way to a general mourning of their long-term predicament, as three purportedly middle-class men in their early thirties who, between them, had nothing close to five thousand dollars. Mike may as well have been coming back for a bag of rubies.

  Pardeep had planned to sleep next to Scott in his parents’ old queen-size bed, setting two alarms four hours apart from each other, but when the time came he couldn’t close his eyes. As Scott snored gently, punctuated by an occasional moan, Pardeep tried to keep himself busy, looking for books or magazines, finding one of Scott’s father’s religious pamphlets instead, and sitting with it for a few minutes.

  We are each of us Sinners, and in that Sin we are BELOVED

  Beneath the banner was a pixelated reproduction of a painting of three hillside crosses, captioned Christ and the two Thieves.

  Pardeep smiled condescendingly. H
e wasn’t particularly religious himself, but found Christianity’s meekness to be especially, endearingly odd. He thought about the physical courage embodied in Sikhism, how much it had appealed to him and to the other young boys at the Gurdwara when he was growing up, and he wondered what little Christian boys thrilled to, fantasized about. He wondered if that was why they had grown up to be such assholes all over the world, as compensation. He thought about the naughty jokes that Bojana had made about the Pope while they were growing up, how she would make them giggle conspiratorially and how much they all liked to watch her laugh, how her eyes would close and her chest would shake, and how the former offered a teenaged boy the chance to appreciate the latter. One night, during a sleepover, when Scott had left the room to find chips, Pardeep, Josiah, and Adnan had quickly and quietly confided in each other their shared admiration of Bojana Clark, and Pardeep had gone to bed laughing silently but woke in horror to a stickiness inside the sleeping bag he had borrowed from his host. After encouraging the other boys to go ahead to breakfast without him, that he would lazily make his way down, he had run to the bathroom for a towel and was crouched over the sleeping bag on the floor of Scott’s room trying desperately and unsuccessfully to wipe it, to prevent the spreading stain from attaining any greater visibility than it already had on the bright blue nylon, when Bojana had walked in.

  “Pardeep, you eat enough of my food that you can start doing chores. This is not Yugoslavia. Here, everyone has to actually earn their stay. Take those sleeping bags down to the laundry and put them in the washer, will you?” She had asked loudly enough that even in the kitchen, the other boys could hear.

  Pardeep had thought that he’d won the lottery; that he was the luckiest kid in Coquitlam. It wasn’t until years later, when all four members of the Non-Aligned Movement were going for their post-graduation hunting trip, that he understood what had actually happened. Bojana and Peter had been kind to the boys, not pointing out that an all-male camping trip was so evidently a nerd’s way out of not having been invited to any of the sex-riddled graduation parties that would be happening in town. Bojana had allowed herself just one ironic remark while the boys were loading the van.

  “Oh, Scott—are you sure you want Pardeep using your sleeping bag?”

  No one else had noticed, but Pardeep, his cheeks mauve, had whipped up to see Bojana looking at him, the olive flesh in the vee of her black sweater dimpled and soft, and she winked. Pardeep giggled as he realized that not only had Bojana known exactly what was going on, not only had she saved him his dignity without missing a beat or making a big deal of it—he also became convinced, against all reason and common sense, that she’d known he was dreaming about her.

  Pardeep’s cellphone began clanging on the nightstand, and he reached over to turn it off before looking at Scott, looking at the pamphlet, and doing one last equation in his head. He shook his friend on the shoulder.

  “Scotty? Scotty?”

  Scott sat up in slow motion.

  “Yeah?”

  “You still alive, gora?”

  “I gotta go to the bathroom.”

  Pardeep didn’t smile as he watched Scott leave the room, heard him make his way down the hallway to the bathroom, heard him take a short piss and, without flushing, run the sink only long enough to fill a glass of water. Pardeep shook his head, preemptively regretting his own decision.

  Scott walked back into the bedroom.

  “I feel better. Do I look any better?”

  “No, Scott. You look like a plate of moussaka.”

  “At least it’s better than lasagne.”

  “Scott, I—” Pardeep bit his lip, then sucked his teeth. “I think I know where you can get your hands on the cash for Sunday.”

  “What? Where?” Scott said, the first notes of hope entering his voice since the beating.

  The hope went out of his face as Pardeep outlined the ways in which his father’s suspicion of credit and debit cards would leave the till at Polis flush with cash every week, and the back room too, with tabs from Thursday, Friday, and then Saturday nights. He shook his head in refusal as Pardeep explained that his parents had left for Harrison Hot Springs for the weekend, that he would be managing the restaurant Saturday night and so no one would be traumatized; that in a few months, they could return the loan without any big fanfare.

  “Par, I can’t do that. I love your parents. I love Polis.”

  “That’s fine. And my parents, and Polis, are going to be okay. There will be several thousand dollars for the taking, and nobody will be hurt. Scott, Joe was right—I should’ve helped him talk you out of all this. I got sentimental about this place, though, just like you. And so now I got to help get you out of it.”

  “We could—”

  “What?”

  “I mean, I’m just thinking. If we do the robbery, we could say it was the Non-Aligned Movement. Spread the rumour. Help bolster the story. Unless—your dad doesn’t know about NAM, does he?”

  “Not a thing. I did 14-1-13, remember?”

  “That’s right. Okay. But what if we get caught?”

  “Who’s going to catch you? I’m the one being robbed. I mean, my dad’s got webcams behind the counter, so you couldn’t show your faces. But there’s no sound, though, just pictures. We should be fine.”

  “Pardeep, I can’t. I mean—couldn’t we just ask your parents? If the money’s there?”

  Pardeep dropped his head. “I can’t explain this to them over the phone. Besides, man, you know my dad—if we take this to him before it’s solved, he’ll want to put himself in the middle of it. Big tough guy, take all those bikers down single-handed.”

  Scott shook his head. “I can’t ask you to do this to your family.”

  Pardeep looked at Scott, angry that he was forcing him into a position of sentimentality.

  “You’re family too, you dumb gora.”

  8

  The Canadian spoke with a sort of hybridized accent such that the British could never place him regionally or socio-economically, and so none of them were ever comfortable with him off the bat. He was from all over the place, which meant in a way that he was from nowhere, or at least that he wasn’t from any place which they knew instinctively was better, or worse, than where they were from. He never talked politics or religion with anyone, never talked football, and so the many people that the Canadian did business with had learned not to try to make small talk.

  The truck driver was fine with that; if he wanted to bullshit with co-workers he could have taken a job in a call centre or a pub. He appreciated that he and the Canadian could share quick, terse nods as he came around from the cab, having backed into the loading bay of the Canadian’s warehouse in the middle of the night. He was alone, standing on the lip of the empty loading dock, next to the one that they were using, wearing the three-piece suit of a CIA funeral director, only cut perfectly.

  The driver said “You’re all right?” and the man nodded, eyes closed briefly, as though he were embarrassed that they had to waste their time even with that. The driver broke the seal, hoisting open the back of the trailer, and to his credit, as he always did, the Canadian came in with him and rolled the racks out.

  “Mind if I use the toilet while you count?”

  The Canadian nodded, his finger already crooked and pecking through the air, taking inventory.

  It was a long piss; the driver had been in the cab since the dock, just after nightfall, and would now be turning right back around. When he came out of the toilet, the Canadian had finished his count, and had the usual two bags ready for him—one large, one small.

  “Ta,” said the driver.

  “No, thank you.”

  The Canadian winced as the truck pulled off noisily into the cool summer darkness, shutting each of the loading bay doors remotely as he headed back to the new racks, taking the end of a sleeve between his thumb and forefinger. It looked exactly right. Poring over them, he could see that they all did. He allowed himself a smile.<
br />
  The racks were filled with strong, dark, solid colours, but each rack also held three pinstriped suits, spaced out among the others. He took one of these, now, at the shoulder, and ran his hand up the lining.

  The Canadian smiled.

  Angelique Bryan was nearing the end of her day at the Vancouver Star offices and hadn’t yet had time to go over the international wire stories. She checked the clock and wondered if she could put it off until tomorrow. Angelique had seen more than half of her co-workers over the years marched out of the death-rattling newspaper with buy-outs in hand, and it always meant that there was that much more to do, in an office that was that much less fun to be in. The glamour of the office had been in decline for decades, but in the rearview mirror, the Golden Age kept getting paradoxically closer. Five years ago, things had felt austere—but today, five years ago seemed like Old Hollywood, with unlimited budgets and bacchanalian Christmas parties, not to mention city council coverage and a theatre reviewer. Nowadays, Angelique was not only responsible for investigating and reporting her own local crime stories and posting at least one Blotter blog entry per day, but they also wanted a law-and-order column every two weeks, along with profile-raising panel appearances and interviews on local television and radio news broadcasts, which were as awkward as they were unpaid, which was to say entirely—and now, on top of all that, she was also meant to troll the waters of international crime stories, looking for the weird or salacious, rewriting whenever possible with a local hook, however it could be crammed in. She had too much pride to do the jobs poorly and was now averaging a seventy-hour week. Her ex-husband had gone back to Toronto.

  Cecil had never understood how she could stand to live in a city so white.

  “It’s not white,” she’d say. “It’s just, I don’t know, not Black.”

  “Exactly what I said.”

  Cecil had tried for years to get her to move with him to Toronto, where there was a community, he pleaded—where there were entire blocks and entire streets where they could breathe easier. Shit, even his landlord was Black back home. They could have ackee and saltfish without having to plan a special trip to the suburbs.