“I grew up in Vancouver,” she would tell him. “We have a community out here.”
“You and a painting of Jimi Hendrix—that’s not a community, girl. And the rest of the world says Jimi’s from Seattle.” Angelique had loved his soft Jamaican accent—her own roots were Grenadan and Haitian, but she had grown up on music from Jamaica—and was willing to forgive even this blasphemy about Hendrix.
“He’s from both. A man can be from more than one place.”
But as the newsroom thinned and Angelique’s workweek bloated, the pressures of a damp and beige city compounded the strain, and now she was alone again. Forty-seven years old, and though she had no worries about her face or her body—no problems at all making a good impression, even on the very young men she caught looking or asking her out over Twitter, boys of all colours—there wasn’t much a woman could do with half an hour a week not spent working or sleeping.
Angelique sighed long, officially excusing herself from the wire stories until tomorrow. She should, though, follow up on the weird email, even if it was foolishness. Nothing about it worked: for starters, who in the hell was ConcernedCitizen12? Why was their email so strangely worded? If this Scott Clark was gang-affiliated, how had she never heard of him? The yearbook story, at least, checked out. Angelique had convinced a tanned and reluctant principal to let her into the school, for now emptied by the season, to retrieve a copy of the annual. Clark had named the NAM in his graduation write-up; there’d been one other boy, too—an Adnan abd-Husseini, whom she couldn’t find anything about online, but who didn’t look any more crooked than Clark. They seemed like sweet, nerdy boys. But his house had been shot up, and she had received a tip, and even though dinner time was ninety minutes ago, Angelique supposed that she had to make an effort to follow up, and that now was just as good a time as any other, which would also be terrible.
The only number she had was for the landline associated with the address. She dialled, hoping that she wouldn’t have to have the conversation as she heard the fourth ring, but then, like so many women before her, her hopes for a relaxing evening were dashed by the sound of a man’s voice.
“Hello?”
“Hello, is this Mr Scott Clark?”
“Speaking.”
Angelique thought he sounded shaky, maybe sick.
“Mr Clark, this is Angelique Bryan, from the Vancouver Star. I was wondering if we might talk for a minute?”
He took a few seconds, and then: “Yeah. Yeah, for sure.”
He sounded better now, very suddenly; Angelique was fairly certain that she could hear him smiling.
“I was hoping to speak to you about the shooting at your home, Mr Clark, and what it might relate to.”
“Yeah. Absolutely.”
“… And, so?”
“Oh, sorry. You mean now?”
“Would there be a better time?”
Now she could hear him thinking; when he came back on the line, he had shaken the boyish enthusiasm from his voice. He had hardened.
“I’m not going on the record. I can’t give you anything, for, uh … like, a quote …”
“Attribution?”
“Yeah, I can’t say anything for attribution. I have business relationships and business arrangements that would be very sensitive to attribution.”
“I see.”
“And I don’t really feel comfortable doing this on the phone.”
Angelique immediately began running a host of mental calculations, taking measurements and making odds, sussing out the level of risk posed by Scott Clark. She had a strong instinct that he wasn’t for real, but anything was possible in this town, and there were a great many men from the Vancouver underworld who would appreciate a crack at Angelique Bryan in a position of vulnerability.
“What do you have in mind then?” she asked finally.
“Could you—meet me at Rocky Point Park, over by the kids’ playground, Sunday afternoon? Say, three o’clock?”
Good God Almighty, Angelique thought has she shook her head in resignation, watching the last little bit of her week break off into the ocean like an irretrievable piece of the Antarctic.
“Yes, I can do that, that’s fine. If anything comes up before then, is this the best number to reach you at?”
“Actually, no. This was my parents’ line. I really don’t use it.”
“Your parents?”
“This used to be their house. Let me give you my cell?”
Angelique took down the number in the corner of her notebook.
“How will I know you?” she asked. The boy would be thirteen years off his grade twelve yearbook photo.
“I’ll know you,” he said, then took a deep breath. “You’re very … you’re quite stunning, Ms Bryan. Your picture in the paper, what do you call that, the like, pencil drawing of you?”
“It’s called a hedcut,” she said, pointedly not thanking him for the compliment. “I’ll see you Sunday.”
9
“Have you noticed how there’s been a slippage, lately, in the use of the term ‘single parent’?”
“What?”
“‘Single parent,’ I’ve just—you hear it a lot now, and people just use it to mean they’re divorced.”
“So what?”
“I mean, that’s ‘co-parenting,’ isn’t it? For me, ‘single parent’ means the other parent is out of the picture entirely; either they’re dead or they’ve abandoned the situation somehow. Jail maybe—the other parent’s in jail. But calling yourself a ‘single parent’ if you get every other weekend off, couple evenings free every week—I just, I don’t know—that seems self-congratulatory to me.”
“Scott, nobody fucking gives a shit. It doesn’t matter.”
“Jesus, sorry. I was just making an observation, man.”
“No, what you’re trying to do is to pretend that this is a normal, alright thing. That this is just us, doing something. And it isn’t. This is fucked up to all hell.”
Polis had been the only thing they’d had as teenagers, the only bit of social capital that they’d been able to cling to in an impossible high school ecosystem of ego, hormones, cruelty, and non-stop eating. Just off of North Road, in the neighbourhood of Burquitlam—perhaps the ugliest neologism in the annals of global city planning; a portmanteau of “Burnaby” and “Coquitlam” so simple and grotesque as to suggest that it had been named by someone in the midst of having a stroke—the restaurant drew the kids from their school like insecure, impossibly judgmental flies, and the claim that the NAM boys had to the place made them visible in a way that they never were in class or in the hallways. Pardeep, as the sole front-of-house staff during non-school hours, ran Polis like a seigneurie, assigning tables, determining whether it was the swaggering boys from the football team or the regal boys from the golf team who got to sit near the group of cheerleaders sharing a plate of chicken souvlaki; it was Pardeep who determined who got prime real estate next to the windows where they could be seen at the centre of the action, and who sat next to the bathroom where legumes and semi-exotic spices were processed by immature gastrointestinal tracts. And if Scott, Josiah, and Adnan were nobodies in the Charles Best cafeteria, at Polis they were three Ray Liottas as three Henry Hills, escorted lovingly to the best seats in the house.
The four of them had celebrated Josiah’s sixteenth birthday after hours at the empty bar, making their way through an entire bottle of ouzo stolen from the glass shelf filled with liquor bottles. Adnan had been particularly eager to prove that Muslims could drink, guzzling straight from the bottle while the boys sang “Ouzo like Sunday morning …” until he blacked out in one of the booths. All four of them had been so galactically sick the next day, and Gurdeep so infuriated about the theft, that although he himself had long since vowed never to raise his hands against his son, he drove Pardeep to the home of his grandfather, Bahadur, who had no such compunction, and who delivered several quick slaps and boxings about the ears.
But tonight, it was a
s though Scott were seeing Polis for the very first time, as a new and strange place. As a party of three laughing, middle-aged women carrying already-greasy leftover boxes left through the front door, Pardeep had extinguished the orange-and-blue of the neon OPEN sign, which was the agreed-upon signal that the last of the patrons in the dining area and the last family members in the kitchen had finally gone home, leaving him alone with the money, vulnerable to brigands. The large sign over the awning—polis: AN AUTHENTIC HELLENIC DINING EXPERIENCE—had always made the boys laugh, especially the way that Gurdeep would try half-heartedly to defend its honesty, smirking only a little as he explained that Alexander the Great had made it all the way to India, that it was a shared heritage, if only tenuously.
Tonight the sign looked dingy, somehow unreal. Having passed underneath it an impossible number of times, tonight Scott found it to be unfamiliar.
More familiar, though, was Darryl Chong’s name flashing up, again, on his phone. Scott sighed, staring for another moment out the window, before finally giving Darryl something.
Darryl I’m sorry. I can’t talk now but promise to reach out soon. I am okay. The house is going to be okay. I promise to call when I can.
“Are you ready?” Josiah was seething, and Scott could neither blame nor comfort him. He did his best to telegraph contrition and gratitude, but his face still badly bruised and swollen, he had no sense of what he looked like and whether or not the emotions were getting across.
“Josiah—”
“Can we just do it? Can we just fucking get this over with so I can put this gun down and never pick it up again?” Josiah had been vociferously opposed to the plan from the moment Pardeep presented it, but he had also been hurt by Pardeep’s suggestion that it was none of his business, ultimately, and he seemed legitimately heartbroken by Scott’s insistence that, if necessary, he would do the stick-up by himself.
“It’s not really a stick-up, just remember that,” Scott said, as much picking up the thread of his own private thoughts as he was reassuring Josiah. “The show is just for the webcams, nobody is in there who’s gonna be scared. I’ll sell the Jetta, I’ll do something—in a couple weeks I’ll get the Dhaliwals their money back. Joe, I promise. This is the end of it.”
Scott’s phone buzzed back:
???
Josiah shook his head and spat, wordlessly throwing a balaclava into Scott’s chest, and they both pulled them on.
As though he were doing commedia dell’arte, the mask transformed Josiah’s mood and character completely, and suddenly he was giddy, barely able to contain himself. The two friends stood giggling idiotically at each other over the open trunk, hugging each other before Josiah hoisted the rifle for the last time and nodded.
A trill of anonymity shot through every part of Scott as he entered the space a stranger now, Pardeep convincingly throwing his hands up in brilliant terror, a performance that spurred a new commitment to realism from Josiah and Scott.
“Grab a fucking paper bag and empty the till, motherfucker!” Scott shouted, feeling the artificial fibres of the balaclava rubbing against his open wounds in a slight chemical throb. His hands were empty, so he clenched and unclenched his fists, grabbing a napkin dispenser and hurling it against the wall. Pardeep’s eyes followed the napkins to the wall, and his response was the worst one imaginable.
He began to laugh.
Pardeep looked at Scott and Josiah helplessly, tears of laughter streaming down his face, desperately trying to signal them that he couldn’t stop. Scott felt a swell of laughter bubbling up in his own throat, tried desperately to swallow it. The webcams wouldn’t be able to hear Pardeep’s giggling—they might see his shoulders shaking, but he could always pass that off as crying, if he had to, though he’d likely never live that down with Gurdeep. If Scott broke up, though, then the Dhaliwals would be able to tell something was going on. But he couldn’t help it. Here was one of his two best friends in the world, whom he’d known for as long as anyone could, and they were pantomiming this cops-and-robbers ridiculousness and the love and the nerves were too much, and he covered his mouth.
Few things shut down a fit of laughter more viciously than a rifle shot.
The bottles behind Pardeep’s head exploded, and he and Scott turned to Josiah in genuine terror.
“You fuckers got me into this, and you’re not going to fuck it up giggling like a couple of stupid kids. Empty the fucking till and take us into the back for more. Move.”
Pardeep nodded, filled with a rush of shamed solemnity, filling a paper bag with everything in the till. Josiah moved to a position at the door to the kitchen, staying within view of the webcam, letting Scott follow Pardeep back to where the rest of the money was. Nearly seven thousand dollars—it was more than even Pardeep had been expecting.
“I only need five.”
“Scott, would you think for ten seconds? How am I going to explain to them that you didn’t take it all?”
Scott nodded, stupidly, hoisting two large, brown take-out bags full of cash under his arms. He backed out of the kitchen, past Josiah, who backed out in his turn, lowering the gun as he left through the front door, and running with Scott toward the car.
Pardeep breathed deeply, poured himself a cup of tea, and waited until he could hear the car start and pull away before he called 9-1-1, asked for police, reported that there had been a robbery, that he wasn’t injured, and that yes, he would wait until officers and paramedics arrived. Then he called his father’s phone.
“Hanji?”
“Daddyji? We’ve been robbed.”
Pardeep could hear his father drop the phone for a second, swearing quietly, desperately.
“Dad? Did you hear what I said? We’ve been robbed.”
“No,” Gurdeep said. “We haven’t.”
Eclipse Billiards in West Burnaby sounded identical to half the pool halls in the world, and fairly similar to the other half. There are only two ways that a pool hall can sound: either it was just the pearly crack of the balls colliding on felt—paradoxically fragile and solid in a way that made it somehow surprising that they weren’t chipped or filled with divots afterwards—coupled with the murmurs of men assenting to or dissenting from the quality of shots; or else, on the other hand, it was all those sounds over a bed of aesthetically unchallenging music. Tonight at Eclipse, there was a CD of Billy Joel’s Greatest Hits, celebrating the oeuvre of an artist suited almost perfectly to the greatest hits album as an artistic form. Wayne Brosh, Underground Riders associate, tried to find a mental air pocket of nostalgia in the lyrics to “The River of Dreams” as he pulled his cue back and snapped it forward into the break, sinking two solids and, unfortunately, a stripe. There was no avoiding collateral damage.
Wayne’s father, Don, had started taking him to play pool when he was about seven years old, a series of Saturday afternoons that had felt like a tradition at the time but probably didn’t last more than a few months altogether. Don was proud of how old-school it was, the way it brushed the Brosh boys up against an unseemly social element for a few controlled hours—“There’s plenty of greasers in there, but we don’t mind. We just play pool,” Don had explained to his in-laws at a family gathering, bragging about Wayne’s preternatural ability. A few years later, Wayne and Don would argue about whether or not the family should get their own table, for downstairs. By that time, Don had stopped bragging to anyone about Wayne. He never wondered if the proximity to greasers on those consecutive Saturday afternoons had turned his son into what he’d become; instead, he bitterly searched the mental archives of his wife’s parenting, sometimes even his own, looking for what had to be the singular explanation for his son’s turn to thuggery.
Nevertheless, Wayne, who was not typically described as being a grateful man, was at some brooding, silent level of the cul-de-sac nihilism of his personality, thankful that Don had taught him the basics. There were various endeavours—sports, games, skills—at which masculine accomplishment was judged on the spot, ac
ross the full spectrum of mannish social behaviour: sexless geeks cared about how you played chess; if you couldn’t play cards, a guy from Hong Kong wouldn’t consider you for a second; and tough white men expected you to be able to chase balls into pockets, with no recourse to bitch-sticks or asses on the tables.
Wayne had played all through high school; they’d started bringing girls at one point, and they’d giggled like bubbling poison when Eric Lapointe had tried to convince Allison Foner, with that universally coveted bum and those jeans without pockets, that the proper shooting position was practically folded over the side of the table. Eric was in Regina now, a city something like the suburbs where they’d grown up, in that it was somehow boring and menacing at the same time.
Wayne sank the four-ball in the side pocket, and Paul “Frenchie” Mouffe—who was full-patch, and so who couldn’t be mocked either for losing or for being named “Mouffe”—let a bicultural “Calice fuck” hiss out through his teeth. Wayne smiled with his chin, halfway apologizing for his skill, chalked his cue, then drew a line of blue chalk from the end of the stick onto the space between his thumb and his index finger. This last step marked too much preparation for Frenchie’s liking.
“Away, sacrément,” said Frenchie. “Quit covering your goddamn hands like a savage. Stop wasting time! You get chalk all over your hand, and your balls will be blue when you fuck it, tapette.”
One of the other Riders had told Wayne that “tapette” was Québec for “faggot,” and so now he had to hold himself up against it in just such a way that showed sufficient respect for the patch without offering his belly to the insult.
“I don’t play that tapette shit, Frenchie.”
“Ah, oui?” Frenchie smiled.
“I sink balls in just two places: in gash and on felt.” He knocked the two-ball into the corner. “I learned how to do both in basements.”
Frenchie smiled contritely, and the green light in front of his face burst to pieces.
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