The High-Rise in Fort Fierce

by Paul Carlucci

  They looked at each other for a second, and Jimmy said, “Just the man I want to see. Heard you were sick.”

  He stepped inside, wiped his snowy boots on the little square rug Percy kept by the front door. Percy returned to the couch, his toes at one end and head at the other, a stack of DVDs piled on the coffee table in front of him, loans from the library. He covered his legs in a blanket and sipped from a steaming mug of tea.

  “Got anything stronger?” Jimmy asked, falling into an armchair and digging into his breast pocket for a single, unpacked cigarette. “Beer at least?”

  “We try and keep that stuff out of the house most times,” Percy said. “It can have a bad effect on people, don’t you think?”

  “Hm.”

  They swivelled their heads to the TV screen: a documentary on resource extraction on Dene land Linda had taken from the library. Percy had been dozing through it, eyes glazing over as he tried to retain a few details to mention to Linda over dinner. But he’d been awake all night coughing and sneezing. He was too tired to follow the narration.

  “Ain’t this typical,” Jimmy scoffed, pointing his cigarette at the screen. “They come in with their machines and their money, rip up the land, and barely a handful of our people get jack shit out of it. Development, they say. Fuck off, what I say, man.”

  Percy glanced at his brother’s tight pinch of a face. There was something borrowed about his performance, this sudden passion for politics. “What brings you by, Jimmy?”

  His brother sucked on the cigarette, an aftermath of ashes leaning precariously toward the floor. He exhaled a rolling cloud toward the TV but couldn’t quite obscure it. He was thinking. Percy could see the effort on his face. He was looking for some kind of excuse, and when he settled on one, he shrugged. “You wanna come to the parking lot for a second, big brother?”

  Uncle Kurt would not have liked what became of his truck. But he hadn’t left it to anyone in particular, so maybe that was his own fault. He’d put his keys in the centre console, common knowledge around the reserve, and Jimmy acted on the information before Percy or anyone else. Now the body of the truck was cratered with dents from pissed-up bush rallies. It looked absurd in the freshly fallen snow, like a dragon in the library. The paint was scratched and rust had begun to spread from the wheel wells. The word thundercrack had been sprayed on the tailgate in drizzling red paint. There was a heavy-duty tool box mounted into the back of the bed, and the same thing had been painted across that, too. The interior was stained, smeared, soiled in spilled coffee, scattered ashes, sticky booze stains all over the dashboard and door panels. Even still, despite the transformation, Percy could almost hear his dad’s body sliding across the bed and thumping against the ground.

  Percy’s pace slowed as they got near it. He shivered. “I ain’t up for any trips, Jimmy.”

  “Can you see me burning through gas all frivolously like that, man?” He hoisted himself into the bed, beer cans clattering as he scrabbled to his feet.

  “What’s with the political thing, Jimmy? How come you get to just change all of a sudden?”

  “Change? All of a sudden? I always been like this, Percy. You just don’t pay real attention to me, that’s all. You gonna come up and see this, or what?”

  “No. Show me from there.”

  Jimmy spat over the side of the truck. He unclipped a bunch of keys from his belt and unlocked the padlock hanging from the toolbox. His fingers were red, but if they were stiff, he didn’t show it. “Creeps me out, you living next to that doped-up psycho.” He whirled around, straining to lower a duffel bag into Percy’s hands. “So I figured you should have this.”

  The bag was heavy and right away Percy knew what it was. He could picture the thing inside, dismantled, serial numbers filed away. “Buffalo season is over, isn’t it?”

  “Shit, big brother. For us, there ain’t no such thing as buffalo season, is there?”

  Percy rolled his eyes. “I was joking. And anyway, what the fuck am I supposed to do with this? Shoot his door down?”

  “Nah.” Jimmy jumped over the tailgate and landed beside him. “You wouldn’t do a thing like that, right? You changed all a sudden, too, right?”

  The bag hung between them, the straps taut in Percy’s hands.

  “How’d you know I was sick, Jimmy?”

  “Linda told me.”

  “What, like, you guys talk on the phone now?”

  Jimmy laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. “No, man. I go to her seminars at the library. You’d know if you even went to one yourself.”

  “You should get a job.”

  “Got one.”

  Percy coughed, spat, took a deep breath. “Come on. Really?”

  “Pro bono, though. Linda’s asked me to redesign that stupid Inukshuk at the entrance to town.”

  They stared at each other until Percy shrugged, turned, and trudged back toward the high-rise.

  VI

  He stepped out of his truck into a foot of water. The whole parking lot was submerged, little oily rainbows spreading out from the sunken bodies of a couple derelict cars left to rust around the high-rise. The river was jammed with ice and spilling itself all over Old Town. The sun was up and beating down across town and melting snow off the rooftops, so that the eavestroughs gushed over and water drizzled from the upper edges of every tree and building.

  In the lobby, the elevator was broken, doors wide open and water slopping against the walls. Percy slogged to the stairs, his pants now soaked to his thighs. He struggled with the stairwell door, sent a wave of water rolling into the lobby when finally he heaved it open. He lifted his feet out of the icy slough, boots cascading water for the first few steps, and slowly he wound his way up six storeys, the flights above spiralling into a dark and narrow channel.

  Outside his apartment, he hesitated, palm hovering over the doorknob, fingers trembling. It occurred to him that winter had finally passed. It was practically summer. There was no such thing as spring up here, only Linda careening from one phase to another, failure, redemption, repeat. He swallowed, twisted the doorknob, was somehow sucked over the threshold.

  “Linda?”

  Beer bottles crowded the coffee table. He half expected to see Jimmy reclined on the couch, his mean, stupid face pinched into an expression of confusion, a cigarette smoking in his tiny mouth. But the couch was empty. The kitchen, too, although it reeked of recent partying: loose tobacco on the table, an empty beer box on the floor, a CD case on the counter covered in a patina of cocaine.

  “Linda?”

  They were in the bathroom. Percy leaned against the door frame and watched their blurry forms behind the cheap, translucent shower curtain. They were fucking, most obscene, the music not so loud in here and Linda moaning, beyond herself, whirling through some grinding euphoria. The sound of their wet bodies slapping together. Occasionally, one of them brushed against the curtain, the plastic clinging and flesh bursting into plain view. In this way, he saw her nipple.

  “Linda.”

  He assembled the shotgun the same day Jimmy dropped it off. Now it was just a matter of crawling under the bed and peeling away the duct tape he’d used to bind it to the bedframe. His nails were long and grease-encrusted and it wasn’t hard for him to pick the threads of the tape and peel it back. The gun was loaded and he walked into the narrow hallway with the barrels pointing straight ahead.

  Monster had not bothered to dry himself. He stepped into the hallway, utterly naked, water dripping from his dick. The gun terrified him. He whipped around, crashed into the drywall with his shoulder. Fine white dust poured onto the floor as he fled down the hall, remarkably fast for such a hulking man. His head exploded and blood spattered the walls. Percy heard the gunshot and his ears shrieked with tinnitus.

  The gun was now hanging at his side. In the bathroom, Linda was frozen, a towel around her head, hickeys vandalizing her neck.

  He saw her lips move: “Percy?”

  “Linda.”

&
nbsp; Anger limped across her face. He could see the day’s drinking settled into her muscles, slack and ugly. “What are you doing, Percy? What the fuck are you doing, Percy?”

  “Where’s my brother?” he asked, distant.

  She reached out and raked him across the face. He felt furrows open on his cheek. She drew her hand back and he actually saw a ribbon of his skin under the nail of her index finger. Almost accidentally, he fired the shotgun into her stomach and like a rag doll she snapped back into the wall next to the tub. Her limbs shook and her face could not believe it.

  There was considerable blood all over everything, even the ceiling. Percy was filthy and he leaned against the door frame, stepped over Linda, ran water into the tub. It was cold. They’d used all the hot. He stripped out of his murder clothes and climbed into the tub, so that he and Linda were close. She was on the floor in a puddle of dark blood. He was in the tub, water pooling around his ass and ankles.

  “Look,” Linda muttered, blood bubbling in the corner of her mouth. “Look at you, Percy.”

  Look at him what? He considered this while she died. When the water touched his elbows, he sank below the surface and held his breath for almost a minute. Not bad for a smoker.

  JOSH’S JOURNAL

  In the photo, she was wearing a blue sundress covered in white flowers and it was caught in the wind as she strolled down the shore and looked over her shoulder, oily skin flashing in the sun, footprints in the wet sand, behind her a huge expanse of bright blue ocean, drooling whitecaps, the streaky specks of birds twisting through the air. She added some text to the bottom of the frame, big red letters, and they spelled the words: See You Real Soon, Right?

  She sent it repeatedly, and each time I got it I wrote back and promised to get there the second I could, by which I was serious, but my soon wasn’t like most people’s. I had Dane to look after, and I wasn’t sure how long that would take, because I had to do it myself, which was fine—his mom was the worst—but the point is my soon was different from the average soon. I always told this to Suzanne, and she always wrote me back and said, “I know that, silly,” which was the best, especially first thing in the morning with a cup of coffee steaming on the table next to my elbow.

  Suzanne lived in Florida. She was a divorcée and a hairdresser and an outfielder in her softball league. One of the first stories she ever told me was about her mother’s funeral, but not a weepy one, like the way some people show their scabs and purse their lips and welcome whatever watery, obligated version of love they get in return. Not Suzanne. Her mother didn’t have insurance, and the funeral was expensive, so she took a second job delousing schoolchildren, and then she got lice, too, so she kept a couple of them in a jar, and when they died she gave them a little funeral, and it was the most affordable loss she’s ever experienced, which story was pretty funny, I thought.

  I’d been writing to Suzanne for just a bit longer than I owned my own computer. It took a while for me to get it together after Dane’s mom left, like years, but finally my buddy Lewis sat me down in his trailer, turned on his computer, and got me to join this dating site, which was sort of a joke, because there were only a few thousand people in Fort Fierce, if you didn’t count the reserve across the river, and all the ones smart enough to have computers were also smart enough to wear wedding rings. “So broaden your search, my son,” said Lewis from the couch, a calloused hand on his belly and a smile behind his thick, blond beard.

  Suzanne was the first and only person to answer one of my yellow, flirty winks, which was a smiley face with sunglasses and cool eyebrows. She sent me this little picture of an umbrella and another one next to it of a margarita. I sent her a diving board. We started to chat a little bit every day, but hanging out at Lewis’s while he smoked dope and read dirt-bike magazines wasn’t especially conducive to that, so I decided to buy my own computer.

  After two years of correspondence, it still took me forever to type a simple message, which was okay, because there was a lot of time up there in the Fort. I’d float my fingers over the keyboard and search out this or that a letter. I’d jab and poke. I told her all about Dane. I told her about the shootings on six and how the thundercracks woke me up from a nap and Dane was standing in the entrance to the living room, pale faced and fifteen and pointing at the ceiling and mashing his jaw, but no words. After a few seconds of that, he shook his head and walked off, the door to his room clicking shut behind him.

  He was a weird kid like that, sometimes fragile and sometimes destructive. Like when he smashed his guitar. I bought it for his birthday some years back, the guitar brand new, and Dane hadn’t taken a single lesson—he just came home drunk, locked himself in his room, and destroyed it.

  My own guitar was chipped and warped and scratched and battered. The strings were caked in a thickness of dead skin. I kept it by the computer. I liked to pick it up, strum a few chords, and wait for Suzanne to get back to me with that picture of some sunny future on a beach down south.

  DANE’S JOURNAL

  Donny had another black eye, his third since summer started. One of them was me, because we were shoving around down by the river, play-boxing, and I slipped in the mud while throwing a jab—paff!

  But that was an accident. I would’ve never punched Donny on purpose.

  We’d been friends since we were little, when my mom and his mom used to hang out on Thursdays and play cards and smoke cigarettes and drink whisky, which back then we sampled and winced and gagged, but we got a little older and started hitting it up at least twice a week, because actually it was fuckin’ awesome.

  We were fifteen that summer of Donny’s black eyes, but when we first decided to get serious about whisky, we were eleven, and we needed Donny’s older brother Mitchell to get us the bottle, which was a good plan because the hot clerk at the liquor store used to babysit them. Plus, Mitchell had darkish hairs on his upper lip and swore he licked her pussy once when they were kids and Donny was bedridden with the flu. Donny said he didn’t know about that last bit, but the babysitting part was true, and once he watched her pee because she left the bathroom door open a crack, so who knows how far Mitchell managed to get.

  But that wasn’t important right then, because Mitchell could buy whisky, but only if we gave him ten bucks for his time, plus the cost of the bottle. We didn’t have any money, and we didn’t have any jobs, so we spent a week walking in and out of the drugstore, shoving magazines down our pants and CDs and razors and shit like that. Then we biked to the high school at lunch and sold the stuff to the older kids, except none of them wanted the razors, so we hung out in the lobby of the high-rise and we were careful who we asked, but eventually we sold them to this loser with a three-legged dog.

  We made forty dollars, more than enough, so we bought some smokes and chips, too. Once we had the booze, I choked up the nerve to ask Amy along, which Donny didn’t really like, because despite what he said about his babysitter pissing, he was still afraid of tits, I could tell, but Amy and I had a history of sour cola keys to revisit, and I liked watching her spin in the parking lot, just twirling in the snow or clouds of pollen that blew through town every summer. She was there when we sold our razors, spinning like a carnival wheel, and even though she was a year older than me, I asked her to come hang out in the bush, because fuck Donny, and she said she’d come meet us.

  So we snuck the bottle into the woods along the river. One time, when I was a kid, my dad took me to sleep in a cabin he shared with his friend Lewis, and down the bluff on the beachhead there was a dead moose with its belly bloated and legs sticking straight out, like something was shoved up its ass. My dad said to stay away from it, because it might’ve died of anthrax, and when we got back to town he called some environmental cops to go torch it.

  So near that cabin, after about a kilometre of bushes and behind a mess of fallen trees, there was another cabin, but way different, like all full of trash and broken glass, and a tiny cot with a blackened mattress, walls all spray-painted wit
h dicks and tits and cunts, and a giant hole smashed into the roof, but not enough ventilation to air out the mouldy stench and hordes of flies. That’s where me and Donny went to get ripped, and it was the weirdest day, not just because of what wound up happening but also because the forest fires down south were nuts that year, just nuts, and the whole town was washed out in smoke and ashes were falling out of the heavens like shit was burning up there, too.

  Donny wouldn’t come inside at first. His fat cheeks were pale and he wouldn’t say anything, not until I cleared a space on one of the counters and lined up the chips and smokes and booze.

  Then I asked him, “What one do you want first?”

  And real quiet, he said, “Chips. How come you didn’t bring your guitar?”

  “I still gotta learn to play it, dude.” I twisted open the whisky and pushed the bottle into his tiny hands. “Let’s party, Donosaurus. Get a rip on before Amy shows up.”

  He gave the bottle a shifty look, squeezed his lips together, and tossed back a glug. Except he wasn’t actually drinking—I could tell—so I gave him a sharp poke in the side, where supposedly his brother had burned him with a clothes iron but to me it always looked like an ugly birthmark. Donny’s mouth opened wide and the whisky poured in and flew through his body like a punch in the face. I laughed and he blinked back tears and passed me the booze, and I just opened my throat and threw that shit back—paff!

  I don’t remember when I went from acting one way to another, like the exact second I transformed, and I’ve never been able to freeze it, that wiggly little second, no matter how many times I go through it, but all I know is the whisky was going down large and I was frustrated waiting for Amy, and then next thing we were tearing the goddamn place apart, like kicking the walls and hurling scraps of furniture into the ceiling and just really stomping the shit out of that fuckin’ place. And I don’t have a full memory of everything that happened, not like this long string of little, pearl-shaped moments all leading one right to the next. Instead, I have a choppy recall, as if the string’s been cut to pieces, but whatever, because everything went in the same direction anyways.