“Do I have sconces?”
“Don’t you?”
“I thought sconces was when a light was fixed to the side of a wall. All the lights in my hallways are in the ceilings.”
“I thought ‘sconce’ was the name for, like, the molding that runs along where the wall meets the ceiling?”
“No. That’s just called molding.”
Josiah furrowed his brow, then released it. “Anyway, it’s all crazy.”
“Or, like, you think about a burglar—some guy breaks into a house, and the house is worth a million and a half dollars. And while he’s inside it, it’s his, I mean, effectively. He commands it. Million and a half bucks. But he can’t move it around, he can’t sell it. He’s gotta content himself to grab a TV, maybe some jewels, whatever, worth not even the beginnings of a percentage of what he’s leaving behind.”
“Like a bank robber having to throw away the rubber bands around a stack of bills, only the bands are worth a thousand times what the bills are.”
Scott smiled, then frowned. “Should these be in rubber bands, you think?”
Josiah cocked his head, giving an indifferent pout. “I don’t think it’s necessary. Probably an envelope, though—that seems to be pretty consistent in all the shows. Do you have an envelope?”
“I have no idea. Can you check the junk drawer?”
Josiah stirred his hand around the drawer before producing a squarish, card-shaped envelope wreathed in illustrated Christmas holly. Scott winced.
“That looks kind of effeminate, I hand it to him in that, doesn’t it?”
“It’s not ideal.” Josiah looked back down. “There is a rubber band in here.”
“Let’s just do that.”
Josiah watched as Scott arranged the bills carefully into a stack, then struggled to fit them with the thick, blue rubber band.
“I think this was from, like, on broccoli.”
“Have you thought about how to broach it yet?”
“What do you mean?”
“The Rider. Mike? What you’re going to tell him so that he doesn’t come back next week?”
Scott raised his palms, then dropped them. He ran his thumb nervously up and down the side of his cheek, then through his hair, then exhaled loudly as he leaned his head back into his hands.
“Did Par ever text you back?” he asked, changing the subject.
“No.”
“I’m starting to get worried. I haven’t heard from him since right after.”
“Do you think …” Josiah began, before stopping nervously.
“What?”
“Do you think, maybe … I had never planned to shoot the gun, you know?”
Scott dropped his eyes. “Yeah, I sort of—I thought that was a little weird.”
“What? Fuck you!”
“What are you telling me ‘fuck you’ for? I’m just saying I agree with you!”
“The two of you were laughing like fucking idiots, so I panicked! I’m not a hardened criminal, Scott—I’ve never done a goddamn hold-up before. Twice now I’ve shot a gun in the past week, and both times it was to save your dumb white ass!”
“Jesus, Joe, just calm down, all right? You’re the one who brought it up, okay? I was just saying, that, like, yeah—it was a little weird or whatever. Or just, I don’t know. Unexpected.”
“Do you think it traumatized him?”
“No. No, I’m sure …”
“I didn’t mean to scare him. I just wish he would call.”
Josiah paced the length of the kitchen, and Scott followed his movements in anxious empathy until finally he texted Pardeep again.
par, j’s starting 2 panic bad. U ok? plz shoot a quick message
Almost immediately, he regretted having said “shoot,” just as the rumbling of Mike’s Harley-Davidson shook through the nearly million and a half dollars of the house.
“Damn it. It’s him. What do I tell him?”
“Scott, it’s time to wrap this shit up. Enough now. Just tell him the truth.”
“How, though? It’s too complicated. It sounds too stupid when I say it out loud. He’s not going to buy it.”
“What other option do you have, though, Scotty? You just gotta try to tell him, and hope he does.”
“And if Angelique runs something about me, the hold-up, the Non-Aligned Movement? What happens then?”
Josiah raised his shoulders helplessly.
“Don’t borrow trouble, Scotty. Cross that bridge when we get to it. She hasn’t run anything yet—from here, it looks like you somehow stumbled upon a reporter who wants a few supporting facts before running a story.”
“She’s a special lady.”
Josiah twisted his face in mild confusion at the turn in the conversation, as Scott nodded solemnly, then stood while trying to decide if he should have the money with him when he answered the door, or whether that was overdoing his submission. He watched through the window as Mike lifted himself off the bike, removing the small helmet that fit his skull like a swimming cap before rolling his arms and shoulders in the same thick-knotted display of musculature that Scott and Michelle had always joked about. Scott’s phone dinged.
Pardeep had texted: Scott we are fucked.
Mike pounded on the door.
“It’s Pardeep. He says we’re fucked. What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. I think you should answer the door, though.”
“But what does ‘Scott we are fucked’ mean?”
Mike pounded again.
Par what do you mean. r u okay?
“Scott, please—answer the door.”
“Do I bring the money with me?”
The pounding sped up.
“Just open the fucking door!”
Scott’s phone pinged again: I’m coming over.
Scott stared at the screen, then started for the door.
Mike was seething behind a pair of horn-rimmed tortoise-shell sunglasses when Scott greeted him. He smiled with a kind of battery acid sarcasm for a moment, before pushing his way into the house, his hand gripping Scott’s throat, slamming his back into the wall.
“I knock once next time,” he said, pointing with the index finger of his free hand, then slapping Scott, then pointing again. “One time, every time.”
“Hey,” said Josiah gently, drawing Mike’s slightly stunned attention away in the manner of the world’s calmest rodeo clown. “Let’s all, just—relax, okay?”
“Who the fuck is this?” Mike demanded of Scott, jerking his head toward the end of the hall, where Josiah stood with his palms open, trying to calm Mike as though he were a ghost or a bear. “You trying to ambush me, you little bitch?”
“Look,” said Josiah, “there’s no reason for anybody to get worked up here, okay? We’re just—”
Josiah choked just from the shock of it. The side of Scott’s forearm had crashed into the crook of Mike’s arm, knocking the hand away from his throat, but the terror made it feel like it had landed on Josiah’s. Just as he became convinced that he must have imagined it—that Scott’s thrashing back, physically, at this walking, talking sports utility vehicle in an Ed Hardy shirt had to have been a hallucination—he watched dumbfounded as his friend launched forward from the wall and shoved the Rider with the brute force of a chimpanzee trying to convince everyone in the room to share the fiction that he could fight back.
It was impossible to read Mike’s eyes through the shades, but Josiah could see that he cocked his fist before releasing it, possibly because of the head count he’d done in the split second since the shove, or possibly because Scott had somehow established a baseline respectability with his assertion of dignity in miniature.
“Little spark, huh? Some balls? You get cute like that again I’m going to put you in the dirt, boy.”
The adrenaline was very nearly crackling out of the tips of Scott’s fingers, but he kept his breathing even, his posture and his gaze straight, and nodded slightly, submissively; even he could tell
that Mike was calming down.
“That’s my associate, okay? That’s my buddy.” Scott drew a deep breath, looking at Josiah, then back at Mike. “This is who shot up my house.”
Mike took off his sunglasses.
“Lovers’ quarrel?”
Scott tried to calibrate his response; if he accepted the homophobic jibe, did it show that he was chill? Or did it show him rolling over? Mike had seemed to respond well to the pushback, but would he take any further such displays as kindly? Or more likely, was he simultaneously easing the tension while reminding them all who was in charge? While Scott was pondering the sociology of the gay joke, Josiah had been running a different, more productive set of equations.
“Insurance,” he answered. Scott could have kissed him.
Judging from the way his face began relaxing, Mike was figuring it all out just a few seconds behind Scott.
“That’s what I was trying to explain to you the other day, Mike. I swear to God, we’re not running girls, or cards, or drugs, or anything out of here. It wasn’t a hit, it was a set-up. It was an insurance scam and it didn’t even work. We got in over our heads, that’s all. It was a one-time thing.”
Scott and Josiah watched as Mike took them both in, took in the house, gnawed his lip in frustration and resignation, reluctantly coming around to the fact that this explanation made more sense than anything else he’d figured on. Scott felt the softness coming into the room and allowed himself to hope.
“I thought you said this was your associate? Are you guys a crew or not?”
Scott shook his head dismissively, buying himself time to think of the most productive answer. “I would barely even call it that. Loose, low shit, Mike. Nothing of any interest up the food chain.”
“You know who fucking decides what’s of interest on the food chain?”
Scott and Josiah shook their heads.
“Fucking lions, bro.”
Scott nodded ingratiatingly “Listen, if this is a UR block—”
“It is.”
“No, that’s what I mean. This is a UR block. You guys are still owed a taste. The frigging scam didn’t score us anything, but as a show of good faith, I have the money you asked for.” Mike arched his eyebrow appreciatively. “Joe, grab the stack.”
Josiah nodded, disappearing for a moment before returning with the five thousand dollars folded like a soft taco in the thick blue band, which Mike ripped apart with his finger before counting through the bills. He looked up at the two of them.
“This is good. This means at least you didn’t waste my time.”
“You don’t need to come back next week,” ventured Scott. The adrenaline was flagging now, his voice catching. As the tense energy shook out of his body, he was afraid that he would cry. “There would be nothing to collect on.”
Mike sized the two men up a final time as Josiah nodded. It looked to Scott as though he were trying to suppress a smile before sliding his shades back onto his head.
“You two girls ever go into business again, you put some away for the tax man. I mean anything at all, I’m collecting on it.”
They nodded.
“You know Espresso Calabria on Hastings? You can find me there a lot of evenings, or else you can ask to see me. You tell me if there’s anything I need to collect on. Or I can pop in here, sniff around. You’ll prefer to come to me.”
Scott and Josiah nodded quickly, trying not to giggle or bawl just from relief, trying to signal that they were not nothing at all, but also not worthy of anyone’s attention—that they weren’t mere citizens, but that they weren’t big enough fish to get a skillet out for.
They watched as Mike climbed back onto the motorcycle, gingerly walking it backwards out of the driveway before gunning it to life and tearing through the cul-de-sac. Now Scott didn’t bother to keep from crying. Now he was safe.
The Dhaliwals sat silently hunched over the blond pine table that Manjot’s father had built himself in the late 1960s, working in the tradition of the family’s relationship with West Coast wood. Like most of the earlier Punjabi settlers in the area, Pardeep’s great-great-grandfather had worked in the sawmills, churning the swathe of the British Empire closest to sunset into piles of furniture, paper, timber. Coquitlam was proudly home to a neighbourhood called Mallairdville, the first Francophone settlement in the area—but the pride didn’t extend to its reason for being there, namely as a sop to turn-of-the-last-century racists. When a suburban mill employing Sikh lumbermen was targeted with angry demands to replace their tanned workforce with a pastier proletariat of European ancestry, the owners fired their Sikhs and sought out a group of employees pale enough to appease xenophobes but benighted enough to pay poorly. Luckily, His Majesty’s realm contained subject peoples in all hues, and Vancouver’s first French-Canadian settlement was born.
The fact that the family had never left the Coquitlam area was a mark of almost unfathomable social stasis; that they had never gathered the necessary capital to pick up stakes and move further west, into the greater desirability of the city, ever closer to the ocean, nor had they ever been broken down to the point of being pushed east, the invariable direction of Lower Mainland failure, was almost impossible to explain. But the rangy area pulling up from the Fraser on one side, the Burrard Inlet on the other, as though for some reason squeamish of water, had been home to the Dhaliwal family on a scale of time that was unimaginable for nearly anyone in the area besides the people from whom it had been stolen.
Pardeep searched his father’s face now for the sarcasm or the defiance, the coolness that defined him, but he was just grey, his cheeks and jaw pocked with black stubble, resting on splayed fingers bearing the weight of his head and neck. Manjot was staring at Gurdeep uncannily; intimately, but with very close to nothing in her eyes: no reproach, no solidarity, no anger, no understanding. She had known, too. They’d both told him, but somehow it was clear that it came back to Gurdeep.
“Dad?”
Gurdeep swivelled his cradled chin in his palm, lifting watery eyes up at his son, and raised his shoulders.
“This is life, beyta. This is how it works.”
When Pardeep arrived, the front door was still open, and the last bottle of rakia that Bojana Clark had ever purchased had been two-thirds emptied into two of the young men she had left behind. Pardeep ran his hands over his ashen face; he was one day unshaven, which put him just past where Scott would have been at three days unshaven, and Josiah at a week and a half.
“Boys?” he said.
Scott whooped from the sofa where he was lying with his feet up, his cheeks the colour of tart plums.
“Pardeep!”
“Mera bhara!” yelled Josiah.
“We’re in here, bro!”
Although Scott had never asked him to, Pardeep pulled his shoes off as he did every time, for Bojana, pulling the heels down with his toes and kicking his runners into the alcove next to the front door. He closed it behind him and locked it, and made his way into the living room where the Renoir print, a clean line breaking its way down the length of the glass, had been leaned precariously back up against the wall atop the fireplace mantle.
“Buddy,” Scott said, smiling, standing to envelop his friend in his arms. “We did it. He’s gone. We did it.”
Josiah nodded, uncharacteristically optimistic, pumping his fist as he once again refilled his small glass with the sweet brandy that would be kicking in the sides of his head like an unplacated biker the next morning.
“Yup,” he added.
“Par, it’s rakia time, brother. Grab a drink. And you thought we were fucked!”
“Scott, we are,” said Pardeep.
“Is this about getting your parents their money back? It’s my number-one priority, Par, I promise. I’ll sell the Jetta.”
“Probably want to replace the rear window first, gangsta,” said Josiah, and Scott laughed.
“Bro, that’s part of NAM history! That’d be like sewing Dillinger’s suit back toget
her.”
“You don’t owe my parents anything, Scott.”
“No, now, stop it,” Scott said, sobering slightly. “I’m not hearing that, man; we are paying them back. I can send the first two grand back home with you tonight, in fact.”
Josiah nodded.
“No, Scott. You’re not listening to me. You don’t owe my parents anything because you didn’t take their money.”
“I don’t get what you’re trying to say. Whose money did I take?”
“The Da Silva Brothers’.”
This time it was Josiah who threw up; a perfect pouch of amber, slightly foaming fruit brandy dropped soundlessly from his mouth down the front of his shirt, and Scott dropped onto the couch, unable to trust his knees.
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither did I,” Pardeep said, pouring himself a shot of the drink in Scott’s glass. He swallowed quickly, screwing his face up against the burning sweetness, then poured another. Then Pardeep began to cry. Scott rubbed his back while Josiah, now very nearly entirely sober, took off his shirt.
“I’ve never seen my dad like this,” Pardeep continued. “Ashamed, like. Scared.”
“But, Par, why?”
“That shit with the cards? The conspiracy theories about Visa and Mastercard? All of it was bullshit. He doesn’t believe in conspiracies.”
“So he does think Bin Laden did 9/11?” asked Josiah, with the tiny sliver of his mind that was still drunk. Pardeep shook his head.
“I just mean the credit cards. It had nothing to do with that thieves in the night shit. He stayed cash only because he’s been washing money for the Da Silvas for years.” Pardeep looked to his friends, reading their faces for judgment and, seeing none, carried on. “The way he laid it out, it was all so simple and straightforward. He said nobody at the tax office knows how many cans of chickpeas a Greek restaurant needs for a week’s worth of hummus. Maybe it’s ten large cans, maybe it’s fifty. He said that’s how they laid it out to him.”
“Who?”
“Nicky and Danny Da Silva.”
“Jesus.”
“Jesus.”
“That’s what I said. I don’t—” Pardeep started, trailing off and starting again with his voice raised. “I said ‘Dad, why? Did you owe them something? Did they threaten you?’ And then—I’ve never seen his face like this, not even when his sister died. It’s like he wasn’t even sad, he was broken. My mom left the room. He just shook his head. He shrugged at me. He fucking shrugged! My dad. He said they came in one day, asked him was he interested in making an extra few grand a month, without any new risk. No shake down, no threats. Just a business offer that made no sense to pass up. Pass thirty grand a month through the restaurant, keep three of it.”
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