Poison Shy

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Poison Shy Page 13

by Stacey Madden


  Without a second thought, I pushed my door open with my foot, crawled out, and took off down the street with my hands cuffed behind me. I stumbled, fell. Got up and continued running, quickly but carefully. I ran like an ostrich, on my toes, with long bounding strides.

  I headed to Bill’s a fugitive.

  People on the streets saw the handcuffed lunatic sprinting by in a puke-stained shirt with blood-crusted hair, but they didn’t say a word. They ignored me. For all they knew, I was homicidal — and I might have been. The truth was that I didn’t know myself anymore, but it was a good feeling, like I’d been suffocating in a shell my whole life and had only now chipped my way out into a realm that was familiar but unpredictable.

  For the first time in my life I knew I was capable of surprising myself.

  I turned onto Bill’s block and stopped to catch my breath. Darvish’s Chrysler was parked across from the apartment building. I walked over and touched my knuckles to the hood. It was still hot.

  The bald guy with the handkerchief and red goatee was still hanging around outside. “Ooh, I love the handcuffs,” he said. “Very kinky. If you’re looking for your boyfriend, he went inside.”

  I was tired as hell of prostitutes. I shot him a fuck-you glare and made for the front door. Turned around and tried to open it with my cuffed hands. No go. Through the glass I could see Darvish walking down the hall to the elevator.

  Mr. Goatee Man approached me. “Need some help there, trooper?”

  He put his bony hand on my shoulder, and as he did so, a scream, hoarse and desperate and female, stabbed through the air like a knife from the rooms upstairs. I looked into Goatee Man’s eyes and saw my fear reflected in them. He opened the door and I ran inside. The elevator doors had just closed with Darvish inside. I took the stairs. When I reached the second floor I stumbled and fell. Someone grabbed the back of my shirt and hauled me up. It was Darvish. His finger was pressed against his lips. I nodded, terrified.

  There was a gun in his hand, a cold black piece of steel. He’d become the Grim Reaper in a sweater vest and chalky slacks. He dug his free hand into his pocket, pulled something out, and yanked me by the collar. For a second I thought he was going to stick me with a sedative; instead he reached down and unlocked my cuffs. Then he turned around and walked slowly in the direction of 210, the apartment from which the scream had come. Bill’s apartment.

  I started to follow, but he stuck his arm out to stop me. Shook his head no without turning around.

  I leaned against the wall and slid into a sitting position. There wasn’t anything to do but wait for death — mine or someone else’s. There was no escaping it. It hung in the air, hot, poisonous, unavoidable. The scary thing was that I wanted to see it happen. I wanted to watch life disappear from someone’s eyes. Did that make me a psychopath?

  Darvish stood flat against the wall outside Bill’s door with his gun in the air. “This is the police,” he said, loudly. “Open the door and put your hands in the air.”

  “Help me!” someone screamed. A girl. “Oh God, please help me!”

  “I’m coming in,” Darvish called.

  He took a step backward and kicked open the door. He ducked right away, aiming his gun where someone’s throat would have been, had anyone been standing there.

  “Oh fuck, help me. He’s hiding somewhere. Help me, please.”

  It was Melanie’s voice. I stood up. Darvish swooped into the room and disappeared. I followed him.

  The place smelled horrible, like rotten onions. It slapped you in the face. I put my hand to my mouth and nose.

  “In here! Help me.”

  I followed Darvish toward Melanie’s voice. He turned on his heels and pointed the gun at my face. “Get the fuck out of here!” he said in a loud whisper.

  I ran past him. He tried to grab my shirt and missed. I stumbled and fell to my knees as I burst through the door at the end of the hall.

  Melanie was strapped to a dirty mattress on the floor, spread-eagle and fully naked, with bear traps clamped to both her ankles, the metal teeth biting deep into her skin. One of her feet was bent to the side. Exposed bone jutted out the side of her ankle like a lamb chop. The other foot was purple with bruises. She was the palest I’d ever seen her; even her freckles had lost their colour.

  She whispered, “Brandon.” It was a foreign word. Everything changes in the face of human viciousness, a close-up view of pure evil. Nothing is ever the same again.

  Darvish rushed into the room behind me. “Oh my God.” He didn’t sound like a cop then. Whatever he’d seen in his years on the beat — and something told me he’d seen a lot — the sight of Melanie shook him. His mouth was open; his gun hung loosely from his hand like a toy.

  “He’s still here,” Melanie said softly, her voice half-dead.

  The words seemed to jolt Darvish back into action. He raised his gun and surveyed the room while I crouched at Melanie’s side and attempted to untie the ropes from her wrists. My hands were shaking. I sobbed and gagged. I thought, for some reason, of my mother in the hospital, and then of Melanie’s parents, whoever they were. The body on the mattress was their little girl.

  From somewhere in the hall came the sound of slow footsteps. We all stopped — moving, breathing, everything. Darvish held his gun in both hands and aimed it at the doorway.

  The steps got closer. Whoever was out there was moaning like a bereaved sea monster. It was the sound of surrender. Of accepting, even embracing, a violent fate.

  Bill walked through the door, naked and shivering, his huge gut eclipsing his penis. There was a corkscrew in his hand. He pointed it feebly at Darvish. The gesture was enough: the cop’s bullet hit him in the chest. Bill Barber took it willingly, almost proudly, before he crumpled to the floor and muttered, “I never did it before.”

  Prison was never an option. Bill Barber had to die.

  I think he wanted to.

  Another day, another hour, and Melanie could have bled out in that room, the walls of which were plastered with pornographic Polaroids that Bill had taken before strapping her to the mattress. The photographs were incredible, artistic in a way that only someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing can achieve, perfectly capturing Melanie’s gruff sensuality. It even looked like she was enjoying herself. I guess she didn’t know what was coming.

  The pictures were spread around in a crude overlapping collage reminiscent of the way Melanie’s own bedroom was decorated. Had Bill been stalking her since day one, as I had? The thought made me feel like an accomplice.

  Still does.

  Melanie was rushed directly to Saint Aiden’s. I was put into the back of Darvish’s Chrysler and left to watch as almost every cop, paramedic, and journalist in Frayne arrived on the scene. Yellow caution tape was unfurled. Photographs were taken. Mr. Goatee was being interviewed by two uniformed officers. It looked like he was crying.

  I was still in the car when Bill’s body was carried out of the building on a stretcher. He was wrapped in a body bag, his gut so big that his corpse might’ve been mistaken for that of a pregnant woman.

  His last words echoed in my brain. I never did it before. Did what, Bill? Kidnapped a young girl, tied her to a filthy mattress, raped her and tortured her? Maybe it was simpler, more pathetic than that. Maybe Bill had been a virgin. There was no way of knowing.

  A few minutes later, Darvish joined me in the back seat of the squad car.

  “You’re a crafty bastard, you know that?” he said. “I could charge you with a whole slew of things if I wanted to. Resisting arrest. Assaulting an officer. Escaping police custody. You’d get years. But you know what? I’m going to forget all that.”

  I stared out the window and didn’t say a word.

  He put his massive hand on my shoulder. “If I were you I’d get out of here. This town, I mean, when this is all over. There’s nothing good here. Trust m
e, I know.”

  “My mother’s in the hospital,” I said. “I’d like to go see her.”

  He laughed. “You want me to let you go?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “All right,” he said, reaching for his keys. “I’ll drive you there.”

  We never got to Saint Aiden’s. It seems inevitable when I think back on it. Somebody else was bound to die.

  We were the only car stopped at the traffic light. The town was eerily deserted. Stores were closed. Lights were off. It was 3:13 p.m.

  Darvish stuck a fingernail between his teeth to dislodge a piece of food. I watched him struggle with it, trying different fingers as he attempted to dig out whatever it was. When I looked out the window, I realized we were just down the street from The Bloody Paw. I looked at the bar and thought of the pictures I’d smashed. I hadn’t been able to hear anything that night. All sound had sunken into the vacuous hum of blood and adrenaline inside my head.

  The light turned green. Darvish put his foot on the gas. Before we’d managed to move more than a few feet, a body smashed through the window of The Bloody Paw, skidding along the sidewalk amidst a shower of sparkling glass.

  “Jesus,” Darvish said as he swerved and stopped.

  A second figure stepped through the broken window, wielding a barstool in both hands like a sledgehammer. It was Viktor. He was decked out in full army gear — camouflage pants and tank top, dog tag and knee-high Doc Marten boots, the works. The rag doll on the sidewalk, scraping to get away, was my half brother.

  Darvish burst out of the car. “Police!” he shouted, running toward them.

  Viktor walked calmly toward Darcy, then hit him as hard as he could with the stool. The seat struck his temple; Darcy’s head snapped violently to one side. Viktor let go of the stool before Darvish tackled him to the ground and cuffed him.

  I got out of the car and ran to Darcy’s side. He was dead, no question about it. There was a crater in his head where he’d been struck, his neck was bent and slightly elongated. He was smiling, though — peacefully, his eyes wide open. There was a chain around his neck, something I’d never seen him wear before, with a crucifix on it. The stem of the cross had swung up and into Darcy’s mouth.

  It was the way he would’ve wanted to go.

  Turns out it was Viktor who’d brought Melanie to Bill’s. He’d had his fun with her at the bar, drugged her, and delivered on a promise he’d made to get his old pal Bill laid before his fiftieth birthday. He figured Melanie was perfect for the job. He thought she might even enjoy it. He claimed not to know what Bill had planned — but whether or not he did didn’t matter. He’d killed Darcy right in front of a cop.

  What happened before we got there, I can only guess — but I know it was all about Melanie. If love was something Darcy was capable of feeling, I believe he felt it for her and her alone. He and Viktor had been battling for her attention long before I got involved with her. Darcy’d gone to confront his rival, and it had ended violently, as things between men often do. Melanie did that to people. Made them lose it. I knew that first hand.

  The reason Viktor gave for killing Darcy was simple, and yet, it wasn’t a reason at all: “The douchebag had it coming.” He wouldn’t say any more. It didn’t matter. Viktor’s days as a civilian were over.

  As for me, I was charged with disturbing the peace for my aggressive redecorating of The Bloody Paw, and slapped on the wrist with a $5,000 fine. Darvish was kind to me. He knew I’d been through my share of hell already.

  end

  There’s a term in the pest control business — poison shy. It refers to when an animal or insect learns to avoid a certain toxic substance after ingesting a sublethal dose. It’s a survival instinct. Nature’s alarm system. It’s the best analogy I have to explain why I didn’t visit Melanie in the hospital.

  I decided to take Darvish’s advice and get out of town, maybe go back to school. I applied to every major university in Canada except for F.U. I ended up getting accepted into the concurrent education program at York University in Toronto. Thought I might try my hand at teaching. It was Darcy who told me that the students who hate school make the best teachers because they actually want to change the system, make it better. I think he was right.

  In the meantime I got a job washing dishes at Parker’s Grill, formerly The Jug. My first night on the job I learned that Gloria had taken a prolonged leave of absence after Darcy’s death. I never worked a single shift with her and never saw her again. It was probably for the best. I saved every cent I made until it was time to leave for school.

  The only person I kept in touch with was Chad, more out of obligation than anything. He and Farah got more serious by the day, building toward a semi-normal small-town life together. I became a story for them to tell other couples, their connection to that famous day of violence in Frayne. Eventually I’d be reduced to a footnote in a dinner party conversation, a side character in a creepy local history that would one day become legend.

  At school I kept my distance from my classmates. I was the loner at the back of the lecture hall, not quite a mature student but too old to get invited to parties. I got the grades I needed to pass and faded into the background. It was my old life all over again. It was the most comfortable I’d felt in a long time.

  On weekends I’d hop on the subway line and explore the city. I appreciated the anonymity. Everyone inwardly plunging into their own secret obsessions and personal nightmares. It was a soothing thought to someone like me. Nobody, except maybe monks and retards, is ever truly happy. The city helped me realize that. I was just another suffering dog.

  One of my ventures took me to Greektown in the east end. I went to a café and did some reading for school, then stopped at one of the dozens of Mediterranean restaurants for lunch. The place was empty. As I perused the menu, the waitress came over to take my drink order. Without looking up, I asked for a Bloody Caesar. The waitress stood there and didn’t respond, and when I looked up at her I realized why. It was Patricia Moreno.

  “I can’t believe it,” she said. “You look exactly the same.”

  I laughed. I didn’t feel exactly the same. As for Patricia, she was fat. She’d always been a bit bulky, but never this big. She didn’t look bad, though. There was still something sexy about her, in a rap music video kind of way.

  “I thought you moved to Montreal,” I said.

  “I was there for a bit,” she said. “I also lived in Calgary, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, and St. John. I moved to Toronto with a guy I was seeing, but it didn’t last. I guess the fat chick thing got old. His loss. And what a loss!”

  I’d forgotten about her self-deprecating sense of humour.

  “Sit down,” I said. “Have lunch with me. Let’s catch up.”

  She looked toward the kitchen. “I better not. My boss is the biggest asshole. I’m off at five, though, if you want to get a drink.”

  I thought it over as I ate my souvlaki. Why shouldn’t I have drinks with Patricia? It didn’t have to mean anything. I just hoped she didn’t want to have sex. I’d been experiencing erectile difficulties since leaving Frayne. I couldn’t even masturbate. Every time I tried, I was flooded with images of Melanie’s bruised and mangled body. The idea of sex had become absurd, devoid of all intimacy and function. It was a kind of violence, degrading and potentially lethal.

  Thank God for Patricia.

  We got hammered at a pub and had a good laugh at Frayne’s expense. We called it a pasture of shite, Satan’s colon, a third-rate trash hole, the incest hub o’ the world. She brought me back to her place and went down on me in her building’s stairwell. I think one of her neighbours saw us.

  My penis worked.

  It was a small miracle.

  I conducted my requisite volunteer hours at an elementary school called Precious Blood. I was placed in Mrs. Thurber’s grade three class. Mrs. Thurber didn’t seem
to want me there. She dominated the classroom with her horn-rimmed glasses and thirty-inch pointer, a threat she’d wield like a fencing blade. She referred to me dismissively as “Brendan” or “Mr. Gilroy.”

  I sat at the back of the classroom in a metal fold-up chair and kept my mouth shut most of the time. The kids seemed terrified of having a strange man who never said a word looming behind them all day. Who could blame them?

  There was one kid, a loner named Justin, who sat in the back corner and paid no attention to Mrs. Thurber or any of his peers. He spent most of the day drawing pictures of robots and monsters in his notebook. He seemed to sense that I was just as bored as he was. One day he started holding up his drawings for me to see. They were done in comic-book style, with an attention to detail that was quite impressive for an eight-year-old.

  I gave him the thumbs up. He smiled and started on a new one.

  It made me feel that my life was moving in the right direction.

  During my second month of school, I got a call from a Dr. Zimmerman from the psych ward at Saint Aiden’s. My mother had passed away in her sleep from what stymied medical professionals refer to as “natural causes.” She was sixty-one years old.

  I took a Greyhound back to Frayne the next weekend, picked up her ashes, and took the next available bus back to York. There was no point in a funeral. Who would have gone?

  It was Patricia who told me to give my mother the send-off she would have wanted.

  “What kind of send-off would she have wanted?” I asked.

  “She was your mother, Brandon. You tell me.”

  I let my mother’s ashes sit on my desk for a week. I thought about the state of constant fear in which she’d lived most of her life, and how that was all over. I thought about the ninety-nine percent of me that didn’t believe in the absurdity of an afterlife, and how the one percent that did hoped there was a place in heaven for people like my mother. Perhaps the simple fact that she no longer existed, and therefore would no longer suffer, was heaven enough.

 

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