by Daniel Perry
Giffen looked up and flashed a shit-eating grin.
“Blueballs,” he said to Moore. “What the fuck?”
With my fist I cracked Giffen on the back of his head, and when I gave him the opportunity to stay silent he said, “It’ll never stick.”
“Fucker’s right,” Moore muttered. He leaned in beside me and stood Giffen up. “We can make it stick, Reggie,” he said, dangling the key to the handcuffs. “Or you can tell us something we want to know.”
“Bob, Jesus,” I said. “What are you doing?”
Giffen laughed.
“I know what you want to know,” he said. He tilted his head toward the strip club. “Trisha’s on tonight.”
Moore smiled and said, “Take me in, then.”
Onstage the women were in their forties and fifties, stringy and saggy as those working the floor, though behind a narrow door beside the DJ booth was one exception. Giffen tugged the knob and revealed a swimsuit model blonde. Her hard-to-notice implants were barely covered by a Heads vest, black with the blue shark patch on the back. She knelt before Johnny Ragozzi (“Rags”) who was long-haired, naked and filthy.
“Shit,” she said. “Come back later.”
Ragozzi pulled up his jeans and left the little room dangling a black T-shirt. Trisha took off the colours and tossed them to him before looking at Moore and cooing, “Hey, baby,” reaching for his thigh without getting up. They shut the door from inside and left me beside the stage, alone in a peeler bar in uniform like an idiot. The bikers, easily ten of them, encircled me. A couple held pool cues higher than their heads. The music stopped, and so did the dancers. I held my breath and noticed Giffen practically salivating as he watched me sweat until the little door swung open again. Moore stepped out, flush-faced and tucking in his shirt. The bikers roared their approval.
“Giffen, you got fuckin’ lucky,” Moore said, pointing a finger but unable to hide the smile. “I’m coming back next week, and you’re gonna tell me everything.” The bar erupted in laughter. I wasn’t in on the joke. We left and drove to the station, up Adelaide where drunks dotted the sidewalks. Our cruiser was the only car. It was one a.m., our shift was over. I started to ask but Moore hit the siren and floored the gas to run a red. When he turned it off I spat out, “What the hell just happened?”
He laughed.
“Arresting these little shit bikers is like Russian roulette,” he said. “One in six goes off and you end up with your brains blown out.” He flipped on his signal and turned into the parking lot. “Giffen’s not the one,” he said, killing the engine. “Scare him, make him think you’ll take him down, then collect your blowjob and go home.” He darkened the headlights and opened his door, letting in the cool night air. “Forget about it,” he said, and the slam’s echo enveloped me in the car. I sat and watched his outline all the way to his vintage Dodge Dart. The yellow beast snarled awake and Moore gunned its V8 in the street.
It could have waited till morning but I wanted my report over with, so I entered the empty station and wrote down that we had stopped at Brutus’s. I listed those known to police we had seen and stared a while at the remaining white space before adding the final line: Nothing to report. I locked up my gun and badge, went for a leak, and then I walked to my grumpy old Nova and drove home.
All those years ago, when the Heads cut him loose, Giffen was twenty. He was an outlaw, not to mention a full-on nutbar, but he wasn’t a brother. They told him that if he knew what was good for him, he’d never go near the Heads again. Moore was wrong about him, though. Giffen was the one, and the killing was his Hail Mary: the hope against hope the Heads would finally let him in.
I used to wonder why Giffen’s kind took exile in Currie Township, but it’s been clearer since Sheehan bought it: the place is perfect for a dead man. When Vice finally storms the farm — and they will, they’re still pissed they lost a good snitch — the psycho will sing like a canary about me and Moore and Brutus’s, and Moore will show them the trail back to my lie. Yeah, Moore lied, too, but like I said, shit runs downhill. He’ll get a slap on the wrist, maybe a transfer back into the field. If I may, I’d like to suggest he replace me in Currie Township. It’s a great place to retire.
Sheehan’s death is on my head, I accept responsibility. There goes my pension, there goes my everything. But the service revolver beside my typewriter makes me smile. We’ve had nine-mils for years, but us older guys still call them revolvers — never mind that the mag is spring-loaded and goes off every time. It’s a shame, really. Not so long ago, I was looking forward to running out the clock with Elsa.
Elsa.
I’m so sorry Elsa.
I CLUTCH THE papers to my chest. Claire wipes a tear and exhales through a slight smile. “An apology from Tom Burford,” she says. “Maybe it does belong in the museum.”
“We could donate it.”
She shakes her head.
“Mom would be humiliated.”
“It already covers half the crime wall,” I say. “It was national news — ”
“No way,” Claire says. “This isn’t important, even out here — it’s just a family secret, and it’s bad enough that we’ve seen it. Mom said to not even read it.” She walks to the hole in the floor and starts down the ladder. Without looking up, she adds, “We should destroy it.”
I stare after the top of her head and finally say, “You’re right.” I look around the attic at the countless yellowed bundles and pick one of the same thickness. Claire’s old school assignments, Grade Five or so — who knows why Mom kept them. I swap them for Dad’s papers before descending. At the bottom. Claire produces a barbecue lighter.
“Found it in the third drawer,” she says.
I laugh.
“When in doubt ...” I begin, and she smiles. Drawer Number Three is where Mom’s first collections began: broken trinkets she promised to repair one day; too-short birthday candles; buttons that fell off shirts but were never sewn back on. We pass through the den toward the backyard patio. Claire slides the glass door and I walk through first. We step down from the wooden deck onto the grass.
I muster a pleading look.
“This is harder for me,” I say. “It will mean more if I do it.”
“If you think so.” Claire hands me the lighter. I hold the sheets face down in front of me and bring the metal tip to them. I pull the trigger. Nothing.
Click.
Nothing.
Again.
Again.
On the fifth pull, it lights.
Respect
DAD AND I were on Highway 2, a relic of a road that detours and twists all the way from Windsor to Montreal. We were in the eastbound lane, toward London in the Buick. It was autumn, and I was eight, so he was twenty-eight.
Two’s a busy road in the mornings and evenings, when those who fear the freeway drive to work in the city. You still see the odd Greyhound, but no one gets off. The company calls farm towns like Waubnakee “flag stops”: if no one flags the driver, he keeps right on going.
Speed limit signs suggest ninety, to keep everyone under one-twenty, but on this Saturday afternoon the most excitement we could expect would be pulling two wheels onto the shoulder to avoid a passing combine.
Dad and I wore baseball caps, mesh-backed, consistent with local uniform. His bore a seed company logo and ensured the kids at school would keep calling my Blue Jays one a farmer hat.
Near Pierre, once a town but now just the intersection with River Road, a row of cars filled the other lane. It was half police cruisers and led by a long, low-riding black station wagon on its way to the boarded-up church and overgrowing cemetery.
Dad removed his hat and set it on the dashboard. On the horizon, one car after another materialized until the chain made the flat road appear to run downhill. He slowed the Buick a little. The hearse and the first few cop cars passed.
“It’s a parade!” I said.
Dad looked away from the road.
“Get that ha
t off your head!”
He snatched at the peak and flung the cap into the windshield. I stared at my shoes and pretended I didn’t hear the peak hit the dash with a hollow click.
I had missed my cue, and worse, I had embarrassed him, the stupid kid riding shotgun who undermined John Carrion’s grand gesture.
The cap remained untouched while the entire procession passed. I didn’t reach for it until Dad put his back on. He made sure to nod at me first.
I cautiously tucked my bangs under my brim.
“Always take your hat off to a hearse,” he said. “To pay your respects.”
I stared out the window, too scared to face him.
“But why?” I asked, so softly he didn’t hear. “We’re driving so fast they can’t see us.”
Big Man
THE ALARM WAS set for five a.m., which was fine with Dad. He’d gotten up this early five days a week, twentysix weeks a year, for three years on the swing shift at the Ritter Pulley plant. This week was one of the other twentysix, though, and he was on the afternoon shift. After washing up and driving home to Waubnakee from Currie it was midnight before he reheated his dinner in the oven, and later yet when he wound down for bed.
Mom had waited up, which was unusual for her. She was expected at Vaughan’s Bakery by seven but, unable to sleep, she told Dad what had happened that day, tiring herself out by talking. Now, it was two o’clock, and Dad’s turn to lay awake and stare at the dark ceiling, wondering what to do.
It wasn’t the worst problem our family had faced. My younger sister, Nancy, had earned that distinction by spending the first four days of her life feverish while our parents waited and prayed, afraid to this day that brain damage would show itself. And though my cognitive abilities had never similarly been in doubt — I learned to read before I started school — my decision-making skills were at the heart of this matter.
In my eight-year-old brilliance, I had brought a rock aboard the school bus that morning, and as Dad had taught me, planted my foot and thrown a rope to first base — one that thankfully soared high and wide of the driver, Jim Crawford, before it shattered the windshield. It forced the bus to pull off the road and made the thirty-four kids from Currie Township an hour late to our eponymous P.S. after waiting for the replacement bus to drop its teenage cargo at the high school. These were the only two buses allocated to the township, and now the damaged one sat outside Mueller’s Garage, where it would wait the next week for new glass. Bus windshields weren’t something Herm and his son Hank usually kept in stock.
In the interim, carpools were being set up, and we received a call from Ellen Andrews, the tobacco farm magnate’s wife who was a few names above us on the phone tree and in other pecking orders. Mom listened but she declined the offer. The Carrions would deal with their own children, thank you very much. We had had enough humiliation for one day, and Mom had already bawled me out for it, slapping me a few times, which she’s told me since, she regretted doing every time she did it. She finished the lecture with, “How would you like walking to school?” and this is what she recounted to Dad.
When she began to snore lightly, he set the alarm.
I MURMURED WHEN I felt the rough hands on me. It was late April, and daylight was still more than an hour away. I was sluggish and squinting in the lamplight but I noticed the heavy bags under Dad’s eyes.
“Come on,” he said. “We don’t have much time.”
“Is there a fire?”
“No. Just get ready for school.”
“It’s so early,” I whined.
Dad smirked.
“It’s a long walk.”
He packed us bagged lunches — bagged breakfasts — while I put on my clothes, and we opened the door quietly, to not wake Mom or Nancy. Outside, the moon hovered low on the horizon, shimmering over just-planted soybeans in flat dark fields and carving out blocky bush outlines in the distance. Dad led with a brisk stride on the gravel shoulder while I trailed after in the ditch, kicking at the long grass. There were no cars on the county road this early, and after leaving Waubnakee’s one stop sign and its blinking red eye behind, we walked in silence. My legs burned for what I now figure was ten minutes before I spoke.
“How far is it?”
“Four miles.”
“Why are we doing this?”
“You know.”
I met Dad’s eyes.
“How much longer?”
“Depends how fast you walk.”
I quickened my pace. It might have lasted five minutes.
“How many more miles?” I whined next.
“About three.” Dad looked at his watch. “Time for breakfast?” I nodded and he took two peanut butter sandwiches from the paper bag. Neither of us stopped walking while he handed me one. I took a giant first bite. When we finished he fell into step behind me and unzipped my knapsack, dropping the crumpled bag and plastic wrap inside. We continued another few minutes in silence.
“Are we lost?” I asked.
Dad shook his head.
“It’s a straight line. You know that. You take this road every day.”
“It seems a lot shorter on the bus.”
Dad smiled.
“Yeah, it does, doesn’t it?”
As we walked on, pink slowly streaked the road’s vanishing point, defining the contours of the woods in the distance.
“Wow,” I said. “I’ve never seen the sun rise.”
“You’ve got to get up pretty early,” Dad said.
“DAD? I’M TIRED,” I said.
“It’s not far now.”
“You said that twenty minutes ago.”
“It wasn’t twenty minutes,” Dad said. He checked his watch again. “It was five,” he lied.
“Feels like forever,” I said.
We were halfway there and it was nearly seven. Dad knew a man could walk a mile in less than twenty minutes, and because I was younger with energy to burn, he must have counted the same for me. After all, he’d done it often in his teens, walking home from Currie’s pool hall when he ran out of quarters, regardless of the hour of day or night, from the time Grandpa Ralph learned Dad wasn’t on the volleyball team until the day Dad got his driver’s licence. It was a young Jim Crawford that had gotten Dad his ride every morning, though, and when he stopped the bus at the high school, he would say to Dad, “Make sure you go inside today.” Dad would agree, but as the bus smoked away he’d survey the parking lot for someone he could challenge to cut class and play nineball against him for cigarettes.
It was daylight now, and I was still complaining. Dad lit his first of the day.
“Don’t tell your mother,” he said.
I FELT THE burning in my legs first, and next in my back. We’d been walking two hours, and now in the cerulean sky Currie’s flour mill and its one apartment tower had come into silhouette.
“Look, Dad! Look!”
“Yep. Gettin’ close.”
“How much longer now?”
The burning climbed into my lungs.
“A few more minutes. Just keep walking.”
“I can’t,” I said, and I plopped down on my seat in the damp grass.
“What do you mean? We’re almost there.”
On the county road, more cars headed out of Currie toward London, speeding up near the town limit sign and forming a rapid river. Commuters had whizzed by indifferent to us the dark, but in daylight now some rubbernecked to our standoff in the ditch. Vehicles going the same direction as us passed less often, mostly pickups with a few tractors mixed in, but all had room for two more passengers and so did Curt Andrews, the baron himself. He pulled over and idled his Cadillac.
“John Carrion!” he shouted out the window. “You boys need a ride?”
I jumped up.
Dad shook his head.
“We’re walking today.”
Andrews laughed and said, “Suit yourselves,” pushing the switch. His window slid shut and I watched him drive away until he turned onto Main St
reet. I climbed out of the ditch and walked to the rusty wire fence, where I sat with my back against it and began to cry.
“Stop that!” Dad yelled. “You’re a big man now.”
“I’m only eight!” I blubbered. I wiped tears with my cuff. “I’m not, Dad. I’m not a big man.”
“You thought you were when you threw that rock.”
“But I didn’t do it! Patrick Andrews did!”
I put my hand to my mouth, too late to catch the words.
“What?” Dad said.
I covered my eyes and cried louder.
“He said he’d beat me up if I told.”
Dad’s brow furrowed. He sat down beside me. Above us, two buzzards circled and cawed.
Dad said, “Something must have died here.” He stood and looked left. Looked right. Down the fenceline, in the ditch, was a raccoon killed by a car. I rose and followed as Dad approached the carcass, its sides split, spilling organs. A white bone jutted out, picked clean.
“Do you know where our name comes from?” Dad asked.
“It’s French.”
“But do you know what it means in English?”
“Carry on?” I asked.
Dad looked up from the roadkill. The school was ten minutes yet, even with me in tow.
“Sure,” he said.
I sniffed. The tears had stopped.
Dad squatted and put his hands on my shoulders.
“You ready, big man?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Let’s go,” he said.
Bondo
THE NAVY CHEV pickup waited on Ed Donlon’s lawn on the concession road under a cream-coloured topper with short, wide windows. Rust blisters had broken all around the wheel wells, and elsewhere more bubbled beneath the paint. The black sign in the windshield read FOR SALE in orange, with $1,000 markered beneath.