Fit to Die

by Joan Boswell

  We were returned safely to our homes, Mr. Oodles swaddled in a police blanket and myself with a $700 gift certificate from Low-Mart.

  • • •

  I sipped my Pina Colada poolside at the River Grand Country Club. Ms. Leopold was holding a chintz fabric swatch to Mr. Oodles.

  “I do enjoy the red, dear, but it’s just not his colour.” A couple in the hot tub caught her eye. “Well, well.”

  “Who are they?” I knew they must be important for Ms. Leopold to have stopped putting zinc on Mr. Oodles’ nose.

  “She is Dana Swan, the world’s highest paid plus-sized model. She’s on the cover of Mode and In-Style this month.”

  I peered around Ms. Leopolds’s hat-cum-golf umbrella. “And him?” I asked of the handsome silver-haired man fawning over his curvy companion.

  “That, my dear, is Mr. Bretton.”

  I blinked at her. “As in married to Mrs. Bretton, psycho sales cow from hell?”

  “The same.” She fanned Mr. Oodles. “From what I understand, Dana worked at Dairy Dream before her modelling career took off. He always stopped in after his afternoon walk. Then one night, he went out for a scoop of butterscotch swirl, and never came back.”

  Dana Swan emerged from the hot tub. Her string bikini clung to her glistening size 16 frame. Mr. Bretton panted after her.

  “Rumour has it the article in Mode is rather racy.”

  • • •

  Later that week, I took great pleasure using my $700 Low-Mart certificate to buy 100 copies of Mode magazine. I sent them to Mrs. Bretton in care of the womens’ correctional facility. I was careful to dog-ear the feature article: “Sizzling Sex with your Sixty-Something Sweetheart” by Dana Swan.

  VICTORIA MAFFINI Long known to customers at Prime Crime Books as Vic the Chic, Madame Maffini-Dirnberger now inhabits the dangerous world of educational publishing. She lives in Hull, Quebec, with her husband, her dachshund, a pair of squirrels, two lovebirds and a flock of cockatiels. “Down in the Plumps” is her first published short story.

  DOUBLE TROUBLE

  BARBARA FRADKIN

  If it hadn’t been for my brand-new Discount Dan’s hiking boots, I’d never even have met Patrick. I’d spent a long, wet day trying to hitch a ride into the mountains, and I was covered in mud and sweat. No one wanted to pick up a guy who looked like he was on the run from a chain gang, so I had to hoof it about eight kilometres to the next little Welsh town, whose name resembled a bad hand of Scrabble. When I finally hit civilization, it was dark, and I limped to the nearest pub to knock back something cold while I rethought my plans. My feet weren’t going to take me any farther that day.

  Wales was supposed to be a hiker’s paradise, crisscrossed with trails along sea cliffs and over mountaintops steeped in the lore of ancient wars. A far cry from the flat, featureless city of strip-malls I’d left behind in southern Ontario. But it wasn’t turning out quite as I’d planned. Prices were astronomical, and I had wasted half my money before I even got out of London.

  I entered the Trewern Arms and dumped my gear by the bar. The pub owner took his eyes off the rugby match long enough to flick a question at me. I pointed to the nearest draft, hoping it wasn’t that awful tar the Brits drink. Smooth amber liquid foamed into the mug, and I downed half without even taking a breath.

  “Do you know a—” I almost said “cheap”, but stopped myself “—a reasonable place I can stay the night?”

  The pub owner shook his head without missing a second of play. So much for country hospitality. Dead tired, I dropped into a chair in the corner and leaned over to pry my feet out of my boots. I felt, more than heard, a presence above me, glanced up, and there he was. It was almost like looking at myself. Same blonde brush cut, same blue eyes and hatchet face, same six-foot, string-bean body.

  “I don’t mean to intrude,” he said in an accent that sounded like Boston, “but I heard you were looking for a place. I’m just about to go to this small B&B up the road. You’re welcome to come and see if they have any rooms.”

  I took a few seconds to size the guy up, because he was wearing a fancy shirt and Britain seemed to be full of fags. Either that or I was giving off the wrong signals for this side of the ocean.

  The guy’s smile faded, and he backed away. “Just trying to be friendly.”

  I didn’t want to seem too eager, but my feet weren’t up to much hotel hunting. Besides, I’d been in Britain nearly a week without talking to a friendly soul, so I accepted.

  His smile returned. “Do you want to check it out now, or grab a bite to eat first?”

  I didn’t want to admit this place was probably too steep for my budget, so I scanned the blackboard over the bar and saw fish and chips. How expensive could that be?

  He pulled a chair over and stuck out his hand. “I’m Patrick Johannsen.”

  My jaw dropped. “Hello, Patrick Johannsen. I’m Patrick O’Shea.”

  Over fish and chips washed down by the half dozen beers he insisted on buying, we laughed at the coincidence.

  “I was born on St. Patrick’s Day, that’s my only claim to the name,” he said, then nodded to my backpack. “Are you here for the hiking?”

  “If I ever get there.”

  “Where are you headed?”

  “The Brecon Beacons, mountains north of here, with all those ruined Roman castles. What about you?”

  He smiled and inspected his hands, like he was embarrassed. “I’m just going. I don’t know where. I finished university, hopped a plane, bought a car and headed out of London this morning. This is where I was when I got tired.”

  “You’ve got a car!” I thought of my own pathetic stash of pounds. I’d been such an idiot to think three thousand bucks was enough. Of course, if I’d taken any more, my stepfather would have noticed, and this time the bastard would have pressed charges. “I guess you’re in a different league from me.”

  He shrugged. “Depends what you’re measuring. At least you know where you’re going.” He paused to study his hands again. “Maybe we could team up for a while.”

  He seemed a bit nerdy, but it would only be for a few days, and he had a car. So what the hell. We cemented the agreement with a couple more beers, then stumbled out the door, me barefoot with my boots in my hand. Patrick led me over to a silver sports car. I remembered this car; it had passed me in a cloud of spray earlier in the day.

  “This is not just a car! You must have some major bucks,” I exclaimed as I climbed in. The leather felt like a baby’s skin beneath my hand. Things were looking up.

  “I guess.” Patrick shrugged, and I thought, oh-oh, not one of those gloomy drunks. But then he started the car and revved the engine like he was gathering strength. “Okay, to the beginning of a new adventure.”

  “This is going to be fun,” I said. “The two of us walk in the door looking enough alike to be brothers—hello, I’m Patrick and this is Patrick.”

  Patrick chuckled. “We could even switch last names and really confuse them.”

  The little B&B was squeezed in tight among the trees, and as we turned in, Patrick eyed the narrow, cobbled drive worriedly.

  “Here, you sign us in while I make sure I get the car parked safely.”

  I took his wallet and passport and hauled our backpacks out of the car. A doubtful-looking woman greeted me as I hobbled in the door. The house smelled like old socks, but it looked clean. I could see the woman wasn’t impressed with me.

  “Have you got a room for two? My friend’s just parking the Jaguar around back.”

  Her frown cleared like magic, and she stepped brightly over to her desk. “Names?”

  Amazing what the smell of money does, I thought, as I handed over our passports and introduced myself.

  • • •

  Old socks or not, the little inn was too pricey for my wallet, but before I could open my mouth, Patrick paid for three nights in full.

  “As I said, money’s the one thing I do have.” He bent over to heft my backpack o
ver his shoulder. “You’ve been lugging this thing around all day. Christ, what’s in it?”

  “This trip was a spur of the moment thing, and I just threw everything I owned into a bag.” Plus quite a few things my stepdad owned, but I wasn’t going to add that. This guy probably wouldn’t know about deadbeat dads and resentful stepfathers, and about not having a thing to call your own. Anyway, I figured my stepfather would consider the empty safe and the maxed-out credit cards a small price to pay for getting me out of the house.

  Patrick stopped halfway up the stairs. “You mean you’re never going back?”

  “Not if I can help it.” I tried to sound cool, like it was my way of breaking free, but I was thinking of the warrant my stepfather had probably sworn out for my arrest.

  Patrick unlocked the door to a converted attic with two beds and a bathroom the size of a closet. He dropped my bag on the larger bed, then collapsed onto the cot. I was about to protest, because he was paying for the room, but he silenced me with that shrug that was becoming his trademark. Like he was trying to get the world off his shoulders.

  “Don’t you have any family? Any parents?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “But it was time I left.”

  “You won’t miss them?”

  I thought briefly of my half-sisters, who’d always relied on me to lead them in their minor mutinies against Adolf. I’d miss my sisters. I’d even miss my mother, although she’d made it clear where her loyalties lay when she’d dragged me kicking and screaming into that control freak’s life. I’m still young, Patrick, she’d said. I need a life. Needed sex, she meant, although at ten I was too young to know that. Well, I hope the sex was good, because she sure paid for it. Mom called my stepdad Andrew, but Adolf suited me fine. Was I going to miss Adolf?

  In a pig’s eye.

  “I’m twenty-one,” I said as if that were answer enough. “Do you miss your family?”

  He shook his head, then shoved himself off the bed and disappeared into the bathroom. Touchy, I thought. Morose and touchy. Maybe this wasn’t going to work out after all, despite the fancy car and the wallet full of cash.

  • • •

  But the next morning he jumped out of bed, grinning from ear to ear, and announced he was ready to hike a hundred miles. I was trying to cram my feet into my boots and accepted his hiking sandals without protest. Rockports. My blistered skin barely felt the leather.

  The inn boasted what they called a traditional Welsh breakfast, which was the same as the Canadian breakfast my mother served before the Führer took command and instituted a regime of All Bran and brown toast.

  “I’ve been studying my trail map,” Patrick said as our food arrived. “We could pick up a fabulous trail in the Brecon Beacons that goes up over the moors to some Roman ruins. Or there’s this heritage trail that runs all along the southwest coast. We could drive down to the Marloes Peninsula—that’s a wildlife sanctuary for wild ponies and migrant birds—and we could hike around the cliff tops.”

  “Cliff tops?” I stopped with a forkful of scrambled egg halfway to my mouth. “How high?”

  “It varies. Some of them are two hundred feet. The pictures look amazing. Sheer drops down to the foaming surf.”

  I’m not keen on heights. Actually, I turn to jelly when I’m five feet off the ground, but I wasn’t going to admit that to Patrick. Gentle mountain slopes were about all I was ready for. “Well, I really came to Wales for the mountains.”

  “All right, the Beacons it is.”

  The sun had been shining when we woke up, but halfway up into the mountains, a thick white fog rolled in, slicking the windshield and blocking the views I had come to see. Patrick slowed the Jag to a crawl.

  “We’re going to get soaked,” he muttered as we reached the trailhead. “I didn’t bring rain gear.”

  I reached into my backpack and pulled out a windbreaker. “You can wear this; I brought a poncho too.”

  Patrick accepted it with a surly grunt, but once we’d stepped out onto the open moor, he pulled it around himself tightly. We scrabbled up the mossy slope, dodging sheep turds and bowing our heads against the damp. Beyond us, pale mist swallowed everything. I could see Patrick trudging up ahead, and occasionally a sheep appeared out of the fog, but mostly we were in a cocoon. Nothing, not even sound, penetrated. But despite the cold and wet, it felt magical.

  Patrick stopped suddenly, gasping for breath. “O’Shea,” he said, “why are we doing this? We can’t see a damn thing.”

  “It might clear,” I said. “I read the weather changes every hour.”

  “But there’s not another human being for miles, and I’m freezing.”

  I unzipped my backpack and pulled out a sweatshirt which Patrick took with a grudging smile.

  “Do you have two of everything?” he asked.

  “Training from my stepfather. Be prepared, the Führer always told us.”

  He sat down on a rock to put the sweatshirt on. “You don’t like him much, do you?”

  “He had a way of making you feel you were always failing some test.”

  “What about your real Dad?”

  “Well, he did fail every test, including fatherhood,” I said. “Couldn’t get his priorities straight, my mother said. I haven’t seen him in ten years.”

  Patrick unscrewed his water canteen and offered it to me. “It must feel pretty shitty to matter so little to someone.”

  “I went through a stage of that,” I said, wondering why on this gray, empty moor, I was telling a perfect stranger about the part of me that still hurt when touched. “But Dads are highly overrated anyway.”

  “Mine’s dead.”

  He said it so quietly I hardly heard him through the fog. I sat still a moment, wondering what to say. I didn’t want to ask how he died, because I wasn’t keen to stir up Patrick’s gloom.

  “Sorry,” was all I could come up with. “I guess your mother does double duty then.”

  “She’s dead too.”

  I cringed inside. I thought of my own mother, whose favourite saying was “Patrick, don’t make waves.” I’d always thought her worse than useless, even accused her of driving Dad away, but I’d never wanted her dead. The magic of the moor vanished, leaving only bleak, bone-chilling damp. I knew I had to say something helpful now. I couldn’t make a joke or pretend it was no big deal. “That’s rough. Was it an accident?”

  He turned his face away. “Car accident. I might’ve been killed too, if I hadn’t decided to stay on campus a day longer to pack up my things.”

  “How’d you manage?”

  He slitted his eyes against the mist. “After the affairs were settled, I packed all the things I wanted, bought a plane ticket and took off.”

  “Wow.” I fell silent, thinking about what it would be like to have no one. No one telling you it’s time to grow up, no one whining that you should finish university. Or get a job.

  Freedom. Complete, utter freedom.

  “I guess your parents left you pretty well off, eh?”

  “That doesn’t make up for it.”

  “I didn’t mean that, but you can do pretty much anything you want.”

  “I could.” He hunched down into his shoulders. “It just takes time to figure out what that is.”

  “Still, I’m sure you’ve got friends to visit.”

  “I don’t have friends, Patrick. I have drinking buddies and good-time boys who haven’t shown their faces since the funeral.”

  I was failing miserably at yet another test, that of cheering the guy up, so in time-honoured, male-bonding tradition, I reached into my backpack to pull out a couple of beers. Hardly Adolf’s idea of hiking equipment, but they came through in a pinch.

  “Well, my friend,” I said, tapping my beer against his. “Here’s to a new start for both of us.”

  Patrick’s hatchet face worked a moment, then a slow smile transformed it. “Agreed. And tomorrow we’re going to the Pembrokeshire coast to hike along the cliffs. In the sun
.”

  Back inside the B&B, we peeled off our soggy clothes and hit the shower. Since my only pants and sweatshirts were soaked, Patrick offered some of his. I marvelled at the rich materials and expensive labels. Adolf shopped only at Discount Dan’s. Anywhere else, he said, and you’re just putting money in the pockets of the rich. I picked a pair of black Cartier jeans and a Hugo Boss sweatshirt with leather elbow patches. It felt good to be rich. By contrast, Patrick put on his most tattered jeans.

  Again I marvelled at the effect money has. When we returned to the Trewern Arms for dinner, the pub owner was all over me and the waitress who cleared tables was almost slipping in her own drool. With my string-bean physique and gawky lack of class, girls rarely gave me a second glance. This was a change I could get used to. Patrick grinned at my open delight but said it would wear off.

  “I’ve had money all my life. After a while, you think people only like you because of it. No girl’s ever wanted the real me, and my frat buddies liked me only when I was picking up the tab. It leaves you feeling empty.”

  “Well, no girl’s ever wanted the real me either,” I replied, ordering a new round of drafts with a flick of my finger. “At least this gets you something. And when you were growing up, I bet you had a swimming pool, the latest toys and vacations in Hawaii.”

  “All under the watchful eye of nanny. Or rather nannies, because Dad kept trying to screw them and Mom kept firing them.”

  “Better a gorgeous Swedish nanny than the beady eye of an ex-army sergeant with a fetish for All Bran. ‘A cleansed body’s a cleansed mind’, my stepfather always said.”

  “At least he didn’t raise you by proxy, like mine,” Patrick countered. “Kind of like a wholly-owned subsidiary.” He stopped himself just as a scowl was beginning to spread over his face and drained his beer with a quick toss.