The Liquor Vicar

by Vince R. Ditrich

  “Uhh, yeah, I just can’t keep a group together. No one will commit and take it to the next level. People just don’t get it.”

  She nodded sympathetically but didn’t really relate. Even a complete fool would have given up such fantastic pipe dreams twenty-five years ago. It was suddenly a drab line of discussion.

  ---

  Vicar looked at her and said, “Didn’t you say you did some dancing to put yourself through school?”

  “I was a stripper,” she said, not obscuring the job description with any fancy wordplay.

  “Really? And you put yourself through school that way?”

  “The money was pretty good. I took classes all day and danced three nights a week at Beaver Fever in Victoria. I did this sixties Jackie thing — Coco Chanel outfit with the pillbox hat and the long white gloves. Classy. Vintage.” She glanced at his pinups on the wall. “Like that.” She pointed at a nude shot of Marilyn Monroe poolside.

  Vicar looked at her for a few seconds, trying to conjure the scenario. It was a complete cliché, impossible to believe.

  “And you became a crusading lawyer, now offering services pro bono to the starving and huddled masses,” he quipped.

  “No, you rude bastard,” she shot back, laughing. “I was taking psychology.”

  At that his face screwed up in a comedic grimace. “Cake Decorating 101.”

  She frowned. “I quit after my third year. It was kinda pointless. I was treading water. I’ll go back and finish someday, but the world doesn’t need an exotic-dancing psychologist.” She realized she was justifying her educational inadequacies to a greying, barely employed man who got excited about tribute bands.

  Vicar, switching unpredictably back to being intelligent and thoughtful, asked, “Are you sure about that? It would give you a lot of street cred.” He mentally listed all the regular, not particularly sophisticated people he knew who could use a down-to-earth, sympathetic ear from someone who’d tasted life on the edgier side. “Some people won’t get counselling because they think their problems would never be understood by some highfalutin shrink in a cardigan.”

  He thought about it for a second and knew he would have sought help if he had ever gotten in over his head. He was sure of it, even though he wasn’t mushy, didn’t enjoy talking about feelings, and had never had much luck with girlfriends because he always seemed to pick the ones who preferred to bathe in a pool of undirected emotion. He thought about the one who had broken out in a two-day crying jag over onion rings versus French fries. He’d said to her, “You can’t win an argument with logic, so you’re left with weeping and manipulation.” And that was it. She’d chucked him out, and he’d departed with barely disguised delight.

  Jacquie stayed quiet and thoughtful. Vicar was looking more toward her than at her, but even so, he could see a kindness, a warm, suffusing aura that belied the tattooed epigram on her mons veneris and which put her in electric bas-relief like he was seeing her through an old View-Master. There’s something about this one, he thought. He changed the subject.

  “You want a glass of wine and some tunes?” He turned to the sideboard, which contained bottles with surprisingly high-quality labels.

  “Sure,” she said agreeably.

  “What would you like to listen to?” The question was only perfunctory. He didn’t give a shit what civilians listened to.

  “Something with a cool mood. Do you have any Lil Wayne?”

  Deadpan, he replied, “Yes. I have a great version of ‘Danke Schoen, Live at the Sands,’” His wisecrack was lost on her.

  He struck a match to a large scented candle, then picked up the remote control and started a track. He ceremoniously passed Jacquie a glass of red wine and lowered himself almost reverently into his big chair as Tommy Banks’s piano began “My Old Flame.” It drifted soothingly toward him; hearing it was like being plunged into a hot massaging spa after spending two days shovelling gravel. Vicar felt a little catch in his throat when the martini-dry tone of PJ Perry’s alto sax entered at the top of the verse. Ahh, he exulted, the sound of true masters.

  Jacquie listened to all of fifteen seconds of the track. “This is boring,” she said dismissively.

  Vicar’s head snapped left, and he cartoonishly widened his eyes. “Shut that cakehole and listen.”

  She jumped back, shocked, though he knew she could tell he was only joking. After a moment he struck a new tone.

  “You’re a dancer. Visualize this as a dance. The alto sax is some romantic reliving a memory.”

  She looked doubtful, but curious.

  “Close your eyes, take a breath, and let go.”

  She did as instructed.

  After a minute he asked, “What do you see?”

  “I see the figure of a man wearing white tails and spectator shoes. I can’t see his face. He’s moving with the melody, almost flying. Who is the piano?” she asked softly now, getting into it.

  “You decide.”

  “I decide?” She exhaled slowly.

  At the end of the phrase, the sax played a little fill, just a bit of air fah-fah-fuffing gently out of the mouthpiece. Zoh doh du bee-ahh. Wordlessly, the sweet, reedy voice confided; Vicar heard its wistful longing.

  “I see a nighttime skyline, the silhouette of a dancer gliding in front of it, soft lighting.”

  He grinned. Another convert, he thought. Jacquie seemed to be thrilled with the visions, as though he’d just reached over and plugged in a light within her brain. She was so excited she let out a little squeak.

  ---

  Dinner options were severely limited. Next to a gas station currently out of business and the local sex shop, Sir Vic’s, there was the pancake house, which had used to be the Dominion Luncheonette. That wasn’t gonna cut it.

  They rattled down the road in Vicar’s red car, which was proudly bedecked with the garland and tinfoil halo; it had been lovingly affixed with gaff tape and a heavy magnet.

  He screwed up his face as he mused about the limited dining options. Jacquie cheerfully offered, “There’s a new place called Buffet Delirante right by the chiropractor. Let’s give that a try. It’s fusion cuisine.”

  He began to regret their choice the instant they left the gravel plaza and entered the premises. All the surfaces were white, shiny, and hard. The lighting and echo and stainless-steel tubes supporting everything made the place feel like a laboratory, or an operating theatre. It was fusion, all right — a marriage of sterile and unwelcoming. It had all the warmth of a North Korean prison cafeteria, and the sight of a muddy pickup truck out the front window was jarring. It was as if they’d suddenly been abducted by aliens hovering over a rock quarry and beamed into their saucer.

  They stood in the entrance for several long moments, being ignored in a restaurant completely bereft of customers apart from them. Vicar’s hackles were starting to rise when a young woman finally strolled to the hostess desk.

  Her voice came smack dab out of the dead centre of the millennial generational shift. Her vocal fry was so pronounced that Vicar was sure she had swallowed a kazoo. She glanced down at her reservations screen, then looked at them, seemingly inconvenienced. “Zzzxxx, zzzxxxkkkarrrgh?”

  Vicar looked at Jacquie and then back at the young woman. “I’m sorry?” he asked, genuinely at a loss as to what she had just hacked up at him.

  Her head made a little twist of impatience, and she repeated, “Zzzxxx, zzzxxxkkkarrrgh?” This time the uptalk at the end made it clear that she’d asked a question.

  Vicar paused for several moments with his mouth slightly open. “Would you like a lozenge?”

  With that, Jacquie stepped in and started frying up some variety of verbal concoction herself. Vicar watched and listened, befuddled, as Jacquie gargled her words just like the hostess. They might as well have been speaking Low Dutch during a root canal. The two women appeared to achieve a kind of concordance.

  After they were seated, Vicar looked around at the clinical décor and said dryly, “Wel
l, isn’t this cozy? What language was that you were speaking, by the way?”

  “This is going to be a rough dinner, isn’t it?” Jacquie asked.

  “No, no.” Vicar told himself to turn the page. “Now that we’re here, let’s have something delicious.”

  Jacquie looked at him, probing his eyes. “Yes, yes, I peeked at the menu — looks good. I wonder if they have any specials?”

  “You know, ol’ Ross really lit up when he saw all that equipment working as advertised. You did a helluva job, Jacquie.”

  Her eyes twinkled as she looked up. “You’re welcome, Tony. It’s nice getting to know you.”

  If this was turning out to be a courtship, they were going about it bass-ackwards, Vicar realized — sex first, dinner second.

  Something in his mind suddenly said The Ipcress File. He craned his neck around and was rewarded with the sight of Michael Caine’s eyeglasses from said film adorning a twit who must have stolen his baby brother’s pants and then waded through a lake. He held huge menus before him as if they were holy tablets, brought down from on high. The tendrils of his foot-long beard could have won a topiary trophy at the Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival.

  Vicar forced a smile and dutifully followed along while the waiter made his pitch. The menu was covered in exotic descriptors gratuitously diacritical and absent of meaning. Since when did potato need an umlaut? He started losing interest quickly.

  Oblivious, Michael Caine’s eyewear stunt double went on at some length about the carte du jour and how to read it, with the implication that what he grandly called the “menu-browsing experience” would forever change their expectations of life and give them a newfound reverence for “curated cheeses.”

  Jacquie listened with a pleasant smile, oohing and ahhing at the appropriate junctures. Vicar let it ride because this was meant to be a thank-you for all her work, but honestly, he was beginning to crawl out of his skin.

  At the end of his five-minute-long spiel, topped by the ridiculous suggestion that they should text him at any time for drinks or unleavened bread, the waiter took a breath and began, “For you vegans …”

  “We are not vegans,” Vicar broke in starkly, spinning his index finger in a circle, suddenly not giving a shit what Jacquie’s food preferences were. If she was a vegan, she could go on a dinner date with some dweeb like this, who would probably threaten to tweet human resources during his own murder.

  Vicar had hoped his rudeness would encourage this gasbag to move it along, tout suite, but instead Pompous Hipster went on to the next item on his list, blinking and squinting spasmodically now, as if in a fugue state. “Mmm. Mmm. Mmm. Mmm. If you have gluten intolerance …”

  Vicar interrupted again, now fully annoyed. “Do you use regular water for food preparation? Because we prefer holy water.”

  The waiter had no quick response.

  “Don’t worry if you don’t have a supply on hand. I’m a man of the cloth, as you can tell by my popemobile.” Vicar pointed at the haloed Peugeot in the parking lot. “So just bring me a bucketful from the toilet and stand back.”

  The waiter rocked back on his heels for a second, shocked. “Uhhh.”

  “Look,” Vicar levelled, “can you tell us what dishes you offer that don’t require a special political allegiance or imaginary allergy?” He glared at the waiter with a piercing look, unaware of colour rising in Jacquie’s face.

  The waiter pointed to a section of the menu with the end of his pen and nervously said, “Here.”

  Vicar looked at it for all of two seconds and said, “Pici polpette: glorified spaghetti and meatballs. That.”

  Still unwilling to go off-script, the waiter asked, “Whole wheat or semolina pasta?”

  Vicar looked like a serial killer about to strike.

  The waiter lowered his head and said, “Riiight.”

  Eleven / The Moment

  “Stop fooling around! You’re going too fast!”

  “The fastest car in the world is a borrowed one,” the young man crowed with gleeful abandon. It was a beautiful, clear evening on an empty country road near the ocean. Not another car in sight and two days into a vacation. They’d had to get out of that damn house. Mother was driving him stark raving mad. They’d grabbed his dad’s new SUV and taken off for a burn.

  His fiancée kept screaming every time he sped up, so he made a game of it, punching the accelerator for a sharp reaction. She was slapping his arm and fairly screeching now as he thundered up the rural lane at Autobahn speeds.

  As they crested the hill at an ungodly clip, a group of four deer appeared directly in front of them. The fiancée screamed. The young man slammed on the brakes and lost control as they piled head on into the cluster of animals. He tensed up as the windshield ruptured, his fiancée howled, and the vehicle rolled and began to disintegrate. Then everything was black.

  ---

  Driving slowly down the road back to Tyee Lagoon, Vicar turned to Jacquie in the passenger seat. “You’re very quiet.” She looked at him but didn’t answer. “What’s wrong?”

  “Thanks for dinner, but that sucked.”

  “You didn’t like your food?”

  “No, I didn’t like the company. You were an asshole to one and all.”

  Completely shocked, Vicar blurted, “What are you talking about?”

  “I’ve never seen such rudeness in a public place, and I used to be a stripper.”

  He paused for a moment and flashed back on his mounting aggravation throughout the evening. Smouldering, he said quietly, “You know that some children in this world live on top of garbage dumps? Heirloom tomatoes aren’t high on their priority list. Who are those people? What are they thinking of, opening a place like that twenty feet from the bush? If one of them ever got lost on the way to the shithouse, they’d end up on the menu as free-range idiot, served inside out, nestled on a bed of Vancouver Island moss.” He made cougar ears with his fingers while he steered with his knees.

  Before Jacquie could respond, they were confronted by an alarming sight. The entire rise ahead was a field of automobile wreckage. An explosive car accident had occurred, and parts were strewn across the road, having been thrown a great distance. An SUV was overturned, crushed, and terribly disfigured. Curving skid marks led to its large mechanical carcass in the oncoming ditch. On the opposite side of the road, at least 150 feet closer to Vicar’s approaching vehicle, were the remains of a deer — possibly several deer, a shocking charnel house of them.

  Judging by how it was positioned, the vehicle had not only rolled over, but might also have flipped end over end. Vicar thought he saw a deep gash where the bumper had connected with the ground and lofted the rear end high into the air. The driver must have been going at a wild speed. Deer blood, tissue, guts and imported SUV parts were everywhere. The vehicle was smoking. This must have happened mere moments ago.

  Vicar sized up the situation in a glance and seized his phone. He chucked it in Jacquie’s lap as he wrenched the vehicle to an emergency stop on the other shoulder and put on his flashers.

  “Call 911,” he said tersely, not realizing she was already on her own phone, craning her neck around to find a landmark so she could give accurate directions.

  Vicar plunged through the tall meadow grass on the verge and climbed down to the SUV’s driver-side window. In the dimming evening light, he saw a man and a woman upside down, hanging from their seat belts. There was blood everywhere. The airbags had gone off. The driver was motionless; his arms hung, limp, as if he was reaching toward the upturned roof.

  Vicar rapped sharply on the window and yelled, “Are you all right? We’re going to try to get you out. Help is on the way.”

  There was no response from the driver, but the passenger moved her head, which was bleeding badly; blood dripped gorily down her face into her long hair, hanging straight down like a macabre fright wig. At least she’s alive, thought Vicar. The driver might be out cold, or he might be a goner.

  He realized th
at there was no way to open the driver’s door with the vehicle upside down and the door wedged shut against the dirt embankment. He raced to the other side and discovered that the passenger-side door was accessible. The window was even open a bit. He wiggled his fingers in the crack and yanked the window with all his might. With a single pull, the glass blew into dramatic shards.

  He pushed his head into the vehicle. “Can you hear me? Can you speak to me?” He grabbed the hanging woman’s hand and felt for a pulse. She gurgled and moaned the slightest bit. Vicar tried to open the door. It opened a mere crack, but the angle of the vehicle made this difficult; the door refused to stay open. Before he could even yell for help, Jacquie materialized before him with an old blanket in her arms.

  “Help me with the door. I’ve got to try to get her out.”

  “Jesus, Tony, don’t mess around. She might have a neck injury. Wait for the ambulance.”

  Vicar paused for the blink of an eye and thought about it. Jacquie was right. Without help, he would probably do more harm than good when he unclasped the seat belt.

  He looked at her with intense concern. “How long?”

  “They didn’t say. Can she manage a couple more minutes?”

  “I don’t know. I wanna get her right side up, but if she’s hurt her spine …” An instant later came a distant siren. Some emergency responders must have been at the nearby Timmy’s when the call came in.

  He lunged back into the overturned truck and grabbed the dangling wrist of the driver, feeling for a pulse, looking for twitching eyelids or any sign of respiration. But he could find no signs of life. Refusing to believe what his senses were telling him, Vicar kept grasping at the man’s arm in the hope that he was still alive. But still Vicar could not find a pulse. The man was not breathing. No spark, no fire. Gone.

  Numb shock overcame Vicar. “He didn’t make it,” he called back to Jacquie. Contorting his body to the left, he looked back at her and asked urgently, “Can you see if she’s breathing? I think she’s still breathing.”