“Hey Brandon, what’s up, bro? It’s Chad. Listen. Give me a call if you’re up for coming out tonight. Farah and I were thinking about hitting up The Bleeding Bear, or whatever it is. Apparently it’s half-price wings on Saturdays. What what!”
I hit erase and sat in front of my computer. I hadn’t used it in months. I wrote my initials into the dust on the screen as I waited for it to start up. An alert informed me that my hard drive was riddled with viruses. I closed the warning, along with a few pop-up ads for penis enlargement and debt consolidation, and signed into the Kill ’Em All email account I never had reason to use. The only message in my inbox was a memo about Ansel’s farewell party from the previous year.
I pulled out Melanie’s email address.
Identity:
[email protected]
To:
[email protected]
Cc:
Bcc:
Subject:
hey
Hey Melanie. It’s Brandon (aka Mr. Exterminator) from the library. How’s it going? I’d like to take you up on your offer to have a drink but I just wanted to ask — are you single? Awkward question, I know, but I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes. If you are, I’d LOVE to get together. Let me know. Brandon.
PS: You looked great the other day!
I made a turkey sandwich and had a shower. When I came back to the computer there was a message in my inbox.
Identity:
[email protected]
To:
[email protected]
Cc:
Bcc:
Subject:
re: hey
No boyfriend. Chillax, dude. Are you free Thursday night? No class on Fridays, woohoo! I plan on getting smashed. You should join me. Bloody Paw, 10 pm. Be there or be retarded. Mel.
ps: yur gay
I zeroed in on “No boyfriend.” Had I imagined Darcy’s hand in Melanie’s back pocket? It didn’t necessarily mean anything. Maybe it had been a projection of my own cheek-palming desires. In any case, her email invigorated me. I gave Chad a call and let him know I was up for coming out. He told me to be at “The Injured Grizzly” at nine.
“So glad you decided to join us, buddy!” Chad shouted over the way-too-loud indie rock. He poured me a glass of beer from one of the three pitchers on the table.
“Yeah, it’s nice to finally get to talk to you,” Farah added. She was wearing a breast-spilling top and a skirt so short it was more like a thick belt. Despite the attire she seemed nice enough. “Chad has told me so many stories already.”
“Nothing too bad I hope,” I said, because that’s what you’re supposed to say.
“Not yet. So I hear you’re an exterminator.”
I sipped my beer. “That’s right.”
“That’s so interesting!” She put her chin in her hands. “You must have seen some pretty nasty things. Got any horror stories?”
“Tell her about the hospital,” Chad said.
“Oh no! A hospital? You’re kidding.”
I cleared my throat. “You know how everybody wants to ‘go green’ these days? I mean, take this place for example. Save the bears, animal cruelty, all that shit. A few months back, some hospital administrator has this genius idea to implement a composting plan for getting rid of food waste. They bring in these massive composting bins and plop them on a small patch of grass out back. Start putting all the leftover scraps from the cafeteria inside. Next thing you know, thousands, I’m talking thousands of rats are hanging around. Feasting. Screwing. Breeding. Sneaking inside through the air vents, making lab rats out of themselves. We found a whole pile of them dead near some boxes of insulin in one of the storage rooms.”
“Oh my God. Did you get rid of them?”
“Hey,” Chad said. “This is my man we’re talking about.”
“We think we did. It’s hard to know for sure, especially with rats.”
“Which hospital was it?”
I shrugged. “Sorry. I signed a confidentiality agreement.”
“Jesus.” Farah bit her nails.
“Who wants another round?” Chad asked.
I was about to offer to pay when a hand gripped my shoulder from behind. A gravelly voice said, “Excuse me?”
I spun around and looked directly into Darcy Sands’ yellow eyeballs.
“I thought that was you. The Kill ’Em All guy, right?”
“Yeah, that’s right. Do I . . . ?”
“You fumigated my place last week. Really fucked me up for a philosophy essay.”
“Oh yeah. I remember. Sorry about that.”
He stared into my face without blinking. I waited for him to speak but he didn’t.
After a moment I said, “So. How’s it going?”
“Hunky-dory, my friend! You don’t mind if I call you friend, do you?”
Chad sat up straight. “What do you want, buddy?”
Darcy scratched the sparse whiskers on his chin. “I want to buy this man here a drink.” He slapped me hard on the back.
I looked at Chad. He shrugged. Farah put her hand to her chest in what I assumed was an attempt to hide her cleavage from the greasy stranger hanging over our table.
I stood up. I was a good four or five inches taller than Darcy. His matted hair smelled of gravy and hairspray.
“What’s your poison?” he asked as we walked to the bar.
“Just a beer, thanks.”
He sucked his teeth. “You sure? My man Viktor makes one hell of a Bloody Paw Caesar.”
“Beer’s fine.”
We sat down. Viktor Lozowsky, the owner, was shaking up a martini behind the bar, his thick-rimmed glasses bouncing up and down on his nose.
“Hey Vik!” Darcy shouted. “Can we get a beer down here? Your cheapest brand, please.” He turned to me. “I’m a firm believer that someone’s choice of drink says more about them than anything else. You know what beer says? Boring.”
“Listen, man,” I said. “If you brought me over here to be ridiculed, I’d just as soon go back to my friends.”
“You’re seeing Mel on Thursday.”
“Huh?”
“Huh?” he said, imitating me, his pale tongue hanging out. “You’re meeting her here on Thursday.”
“That’s right. So what?”
We were interrupted by Viktor. He plunked a foamy pint in front of me. “One boring beer for Mr. Excitement. Anything else?”
“The usual for me,” Darcy said.
“‘The usual’?” I asked him. “What’s that?”
He counted the ingredients off on his fingers: “Shot of tequila. Shot of vodka. Shot of gin. Shot of rum. Fill the rest of the glass with root beer and you’ve got an Adios Motherfucker.”
“And what’s that supposed to say about you?”
His yellow eyes seemed to flash. “No fucking fear.”
Viktor returned and placed a soupy mixture in front of Darcy. “You puke, you mop.”
Darcy took a sip and swallowed noisily. “Sanguinis Christi,” he said. “Back to Mel. And you. And Thursday.”
I sipped my beer and waited.
“So it’s like this,” he went on. “She’s my best friend. I look out for her, make sure she doesn’t get mixed up with assholes — especially assholes who refer to themselves as Mr. Exterminator. Or are you going by Mr. Excitement now?”
I didn’t know what to say.
“Yeah.” He raised his eyebrows. “You don’t think I know her email password?” He lea
ned back and sipped his concoction. There was a whitehead on his neck that could have exploded at any moment.
I wanted to tell the dirtbag that it was Melanie who’d given me the name, but what good would it have done? I didn’t need to tell him shit.
“What do you want from me?”
He chugged his drink and slammed the mug down onto the counter. “I want you guys to have a good time,” he said, foam dripping from the sides of his mouth. “And if you hurt her, I’ll fucking kill you.”
It was the first time I’d been threatened with death. I won’t lie — it scared the shit out of me. But I didn’t want to give Darcy the satisfaction. I stonily downed the last of my beer. “Fair enough. We done?”
He turned to face the bar. “You betcha.”
“What was that about?” Farah asked when I returned to the table. Chad looked up from his basket of wings.
“Just some asshole,” I said. “You guys save some for me, or what?”
5
The following Monday, Bill and I were sent to an old textile warehouse on the west side. They were experiencing the second coming of a pharaoh ant problem that our competition, Eco-Zap, had fucked up royally. The thing about pharaoh ants is, if you don’t eliminate every last one, the colony will split and multiply. Sprays don’t cut it, either. You have to use insecticide baits, and you’ve got to put them everywhere.
I got to work right away while Bill sat on a pile of bricks with his thermos of coffee and a copy of The Frayne Exchange. “Listen to this,” he said. “‘Councillor proposes Sweep the Streets campaign in effort to reduce prostitution, STD infection.’”
I was down on my hands and knees, attempting to slide an ant trap into a crack in the wall. “Sounds like they’re talking about small-scale genocide.”
“We should be so lucky,” he said. “Says here they want to feed and house the freaks. Offer them counselling paid for with your tax dollars. Jeez Louise.”
It was a good half hour before Bill decided to join me. He farted as he squatted to remove the plastic cover on an electrical outlet. I turned to comment and got an eyeful. “You know, Bill, you would have made a good plumber.”
He responded with another crackling gust.
“Christ, Bill.”
“Sorry, kid — why don’t you do us both a favour and get some more coffee? You’ve been working hard, and I’ve been shitting my pants all morning.”
“Sure. You want anything else?”
He struggled to pluck the mini screwdriver out of his Swiss army knife. “No, just a coffee. Lotsa cream, lotsa sugar.”
I hurried to fetch the coffees from a Tim Hortons across the road, and was almost run over by a minivan on the way back. I lingered outside the warehouse and caught my breath.
There was something in my back pocket. I reached inside and pulled out the crumpled photograph I’d taken from Melanie’s apartment. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen in it. Drinking vodka. Screaming. Looking at it made me feel like a criminal.
Bill had done a decent amount of work while I was gone. He’d finished putting traps in the walls and was up on a ladder removing some of the ceiling tiles.
“Is it safe to enter?” I asked.
“All clear. But things could change after lunch.”
We spent the rest of the morning stuffing the place with ant traps. We left no floorboard unturned or wall crack unpoisoned. Bill offered to buy lunch, and brought back two ham and Swiss baguettes from Tim Hortons.
“The price of a sandwich, Jesus,” he said.
We sat down cross-legged on a small patch of grass outside the building like a couple of kids at a picnic. Bill’s legs cracked as he made himself comfortable. His round, red face smiled at me and then he dug in. He was unmarried and overweight, with IBS and a nose mutilated by too many years of hard Canadian rye. I thought he must be lonely. It struck me that I didn’t know much about Bill. I knew he liked the Maple Leafs. I knew he owned a cottage up north that had been passed down through his family over generations, and that he stayed there when he wanted to do some deer or bear hunting. I knew he didn’t like vegetables unless they were deep fried or sprinkled over nachos. For the most part he was nothing more than my jolly supervisor, as much a mystery to me as any middle-aged stranger I passed on the street. Who was I to assume Bill was lonely? He probably had things figured out far better than I did.
“Before I forget,” he said, wiping his mouth with his sandwich wrapper. “I wasn’t supposed to say anything, but I’d feel like an asshole if I didn’t.”
“Oh?” I thought he might be joking. He was almost always joking.
He took a deep breath. “Dick asked me to keep an eye on you.”
Dick was our boss, the head honcho at Kill ’Em All. The guy who’d hired me on a whim. I kept quiet and fidgeted with my sandwich wrapper, tore it into smaller and smaller bits.
“He said he’s worried you might be involved in some kind of funny business, calling in sick a lot lately and stuff. He thinks your life outside the company might be interfering with your work. I told him not to worry. I said, Brandon’s a good worker. A no-bullshit kind of guy.”
“Thanks, Bill. I appreciate it.” I held up my sandwich to him in salute.
“You got it.”
We sat in silence for a moment, then Bill said, “Everything is okay with you, though, right? No problems at home? I don’t mean to be a jerk but I gotta ask.”
“No, everything’s fine.” I mustered a thin smile. It seemed to satisfy him.
“Great.” He clapped his hands together and grunted as he wobbled to his feet. “Now, give me ten minutes to empty my guts and we can get back to work.”
Bill wheezed on his way to the porta-potty. I tossed my half-eaten sandwich into a nearby garbage can and watched as a halo of flies claimed it for their own.
The days came and went. When I got home from work on Thursday, I checked myself out in the mirror. My skin was yellow-grey, almost translucent. I looked like a fucking zombie. What did I expect? I probably inhaled more poison in a single day than most people are exposed to in a year.
I got in the shower and scrubbed my whole body twice over. Shaved my face and coated it with aloe. Dug the dirt out from under my nails and trimmed my pubes with a stubby pair of Ninja Turtles scissors I’d had since childhood.
I lay down for a nap and dreamed I was digging a grave that kept refilling itself. I had to double my efforts if I wanted to make any progress with the ditch. At one point my shovel struck something hard. I jabbed at the thing, hoping to break through whatever it was. When I scraped the dirt away I saw that what I’d struck was a face — Melanie’s — pulped and lacerated from my shovel thrusts. I woke with a ringing in my ears, my heart beating fast.
I nuked a frozen Salisbury steak and ate it slowly, choking it down.
After my meal I put on my best pair of jeans and a green and black argyle sweater, then sat down on my pullout and stared at the red glow of my alarm clock. 9:13.
I closed my eyes and counted to ten. Opened them. 9:13.
I poured myself a glass of red wine, some inexpensive merlot a client had sent to Kill ’Em All as a thank-you gift. Somehow I’d ended up with the bottle. I bounced my knee anxiously up and down and waited for the clock to change. The wine whirlpooled in the glass. How the hell was it still 9:13?
My hands were slimy with sweat. I stood up and wiped them on the ass pockets of my jeans. Looked at myself in the mirror.
“Relax, pussy,” I said. “What’s your problem? Chill . . . the fuck . . . out.”
I wanted my reflection to open its mouth and speak, or psychically burn words of wisdom into my brain. Instead I noticed a nose hair curling sharply out of my left nostril.
I went to the bathroom and plucked the bad boy out. When I checked the time again it was 9:20. If I walked slowly to The Bloody Paw I�
�d arrive just before ten, with enough time to down a shot of liquid courage before Melanie showed up.
The night was breezy. The wind whispered through the trees like a scheming god. Discarded food wrappers cackled along the pavement. Cab drivers prowled the streets and hollered at girls in skirts too short for the weather and heels too high for the uneven sidewalk. A bus zoomed past as I stood waiting to cross the street. Its momentum almost pulled me onto the road.
As I neared the string of campus bars, someone behind me shouted, “Brandon Galloway eats dick!”
I spun around and saw Chad, his arm wrapped around Farah’s gourd-like waist. The top four buttons on his shirt were undone, exposing a mass of wiry chest hair. Farah smelled as though she’d just taken a bath in Chanel No. 5.
Chad cocked his head at me. “Hot date?” He turned to Farah. “What’d I tell you? The guy’s a Casanova.”
“I’m meeting Melanie, actually.”
Chad lowered his eyebrows and pursed his lips. He looked like an ape. “Melanie . . .”
“The redhead.”
“Oh! Right on. We’re hitting up Shock for martinis.” He leaned toward me and mock-whispered, “I’m gonna get her smashed!”
Farah whacked him playfully on the shoulder.
“All right, we better get going,” Chad said. “I want to make sure we get the loveseat by the fireplace.”
They started down the street, Chad’s right hand clinging firmly to Farah’s backside. As I waited to cross the road, Chad shouted, “Hey Brandon! Don’t forget to equip your little soldier before you send him into battle! You can never be too careful!” He threw back his head and laughed.
I zigzagged through a gathering of future lung cancer patients outside The Bloody Paw and found a seat at the bar. Melanie wasn’t there. Viktor Lozowsky stood behind the beer taps, setting shots on fire. When he finished, he handed the flaming glasses to a white girl with dreadlocks and her purple-haired boyfriend. They blew out their drinks and gulped them down in unison. The boyfriend let out a whoop and wiped his eyes, while the girl thumped her chest with a toddler-sized fist.
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