“I hear Crates is out of our hair, too,” Jack said.
I nodded.
“What was it he did? Cut bike spokes or something? Freaking nuts.”
“He thought it was a big joke, too. You should have seen him laughing.”
“You were there?”
“It was a Saturday. After the matinee. Hard to miss.”
“And Bonnie Priddy—what’d she ever do to him?”
“She was lucky. Lost a few teeth. Broken wrist. But Vito, they say he’s still learning to walk and talk again—smashed his head so hard. He’s why Crates ended up in adult court. Be a long while before we see him again.”
“Crates was always scary, but never thought he had that in him.”
“A couple of summers ago, I was riding my bike down Division. He comes out of nowhere, flashes a switchblade, and pushes me in front of a train.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“You should’ve seen my bike.”
Think whatever you want. Crates deserved what he got. Look at the stuff he’d gotten away with over the years. Pulling Double Al’s strings. Collecting taxes from good kids. He was going to cut my ears off, don’t forget. Justice is justice. Any which way it’s served. And there was no dismissing Creighton Farms. No telling how big a hand he’d had in that.
I told Jack about the footbridge collapse, Mrs. Campbell and her dog, the two other guys.
“My dad only said they were building a new one, nothing about an accident. So it goes, huh? The past never more than five minutes old.”
“And the dogs—you must have heard about them, the baby?”
Again, he had not.
“On Tompkins Street,” I said.
“Where Iris Lebel lives.”
“Yup.” And I brought him up to date on my chat with her, too—how she’d been tight-lipped on the lady in black, gaga over triangles. “If she was cuckoo before, she’s cuckoo and bananas now.”
“My mom, she had an aunt who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire—1911, I think.”
“But in New York, not here.”
“Right, that is weird. Before she was born, too, eh? And then, later, the circus fire. What if—Jesus!—what if it’s her who started the fires?”
“Wow. Like a firestarter even from inside her mother?”
12:00 11 PYRO . . . THE THING WITHOUT A FACE—Horror
Barry Sullivan is out to kill Martha Hyer, his beautiful ex-mistress who torched his house with his wife and daughter inside.
“She said something about bad things coming in threes. What if she plans to set another?”
“Or what if she’s been setting the fires all along?”
We added the footbridge and baby-munching dogs to the list. Felt like old times. And God, I was torn. The work I’d put in, building my walls, warehousing my antipathy. As much as I wanted it to be over, I couldn’t let it go without a bit more fight. “Your dad’s been sleeping with my mom,” I blurted.
The old, matter-of-fact Jack replied. “Yeah, he told me.”
“He did?”
“And my mom’s been sleeping with my judo teacher. Sensei Sol.”
“Holy cow.”
“At least Mom and Dad don’t yell at each other anymore. There’s the bonus.”
“That’s good.”
“We’re almost brothers, now, Gus. That’s good, too.”
“I like your dad. He’s really nice to me.”
“That’s his problem. He’s nice to everybody. Anyways, I always liked your mom. She still as pretty as ever?”
Weak is what I was. Worn out and worn down. Sick of the isolation. Sick of fuelling my rage. Sick of reminding myself what the hell my rage was about.
We waited the whole day for Clyde Neil. He never showed. But Annie did.
Three
The best single moment of my life
Annie arrived at the tiller of a small wooden outboard, puttering in from her family’s cottage at Barcovan Beach.
I toed the line between preoccupied and distracted as Jack greeted her at the dock. I hated how she pecked him on the cheek, how her hand lingered in his. And then she spotted me and her Ellie-May-Clampett smile faded to caution. She looked to Jack before approaching, tentative and coy, in blue jeans, orange-striped T, and black Top-Siders. “Good to see you, Gus,” she said, daring me to disagree. “Friends?”
My victories have been few and, in their limited wake, any satisfaction fleeting. The hug she gave me remains the best single moment of my life. And as her tears wet my cheek, I convinced myself they meant far more than the measly kiss accorded Jack.
She was the Annie I’d ached for, though not the Annie I’d left behind. A new Annie. A lithe and loving Annie who’d climbed down from a movie screen to melt into my arms. I’d changed, of course, during my exile; but I’d never thought in terms of Annie changing, too. Sure, I’d seen her often enough at school and wherever, but only out the corner of my eye, and quick to look the other way. And now I didn’t want our hug to end. Wanted to tell her how stupid I’d been. Wanted to confess how much she meant to me.
“I’ve missed your gloom,” she said, dimples deep and plunging deeper.
I tread my emotions, lips stitched to silence.
I do not sentimentalize Annie Barker. I do not idealize her. She is the only girl I forever strive to remember as she was in reality and not in my imagination. The catch in her voice. The bounty in her laughter. Her long brown hair, her bangs. Her ponytail. God, I loved her ponytail days. Her eyes, the displays of happiness and hurt, anger and forgiving—the steely glare she’d use to put me in my place, to save me from myself. Her fears and her faith. Her knowledge and her knowing.
The longing never leaves me.
How beautiful she was. How beautiful she would have been.
The Hardy Boys and Iola Morton were back in business.
You’ll never know how light a body can feel until you’ve shed three years of fury. Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows— that was us, all right. The Athos, Porthos, and Aramis of a Lesley Gore anthem.
Four
Boys of summer
The learning curve for the job was low. Good thing, because teaching wasn’t Clyde Neil’s métier. He turned up a day late, a cockamamie excuse on his tongue and paranoia in his eyeballs. “Greenwich Mean Time. Since the war, throws ’em off.” He opened his arms to embrace the watery horizon. “Landing craft. You never know. Nazis, boys. Japs, ’42, hunter pal of mine shoots five on our shores. On our shores. Hushed-hushed and covered up. Keep your eyes peeled, boys.”
Clyde owned Clyde’s Auto Body on Water Street. The Town, after routine elimination of all qualified candidates, named Clyde the wharfinger. Bert Levin was the first to make mention of the title. I’d thought he was talking about the sequel to Goldfinger.
Wharfinger was a fancy word for dock manager. Not that Clyde did any managing. Five seconds into showing us the ropes, he was sweaty, winded, and ready for a nap, then spent the next two hours downing Cokes, guzzling from his silver flask, chain-smoking Export “A,” and guffawing over how much he hated water, how he swam like a tire iron, how he couldn’t tell a yawtch from a cata-meringue, how his folks got vapourized in the big tanker truck smash-up of 1948, how his grandpa dropped the O’ from O’Neil to speed the spelling, how he wished he’d had a penis that swelled up and stuck—“You know, like a collie’s. Wouldn’t that be the cat’s meow!”—and how he hoped we’d be good boys, wouldn’t cause him grief.
Jack was in top form. Missed nothing. “Tanker truck smash-up? What was that?” he said to Clyde.
“That punk Jim Geary, murderin’ chiselin’ bastard, haulin’ for Supertest, comes round the bend out by Marmora, and ba-ba-boom!” Clyde swallowed hard, head flung to the sky, as if God had drained him sober. Got to his feet, almost pitched over, and staggered to his pickup.
“But Mr. Clyde . . .”
“C’mon now, don’t go girly on me. You twos will do jim-dandy.” He floored the truck, whipped
off the dock hell-bent for leather, through the stop sign at Dundas, horns slamming his intrusion.
“Tanker truck explosion,” I said to Jack.
“Check,” he answered. It was music to our ears.
We saw Clyde irregularly after our training session, which was the only way to see him. He’d beep his arrival, call us over to his truck, and hand over our pay. “Everything on the up and up?” he’d ask, and never once hung around to hear if everything was.
Jack and I were on our own from sunrise to after sunset, seven days a week, and that was fine by us.
“Raquel Welch or Brigitte Bardot?”
“Brigitte speaks English, right?”
“Like it’d matter?”
We’d berth the boats, the ritzy and the dinky, pump gas, haul ice, grill hot dogs, toast up frozen pizza and, when Annie wasn’t around, flirt like mad with the girls who’d come sailing in—a good many fresh out of a Beach Boys song. Jens and Patties and Candies and Sandies and Lauras and Lindas and Cathies and Connies from Rochester and Syracuse and Toronto and Cornwall and Buffalo and Alexandria Bay. And, jeez, the moms, too. Some days we’d swear Ursula Andress herself, curves and white-bikini-hot, had quit on James Bond to hook up with Trenton’s boys of summer. “Are you guys brothers?” they’d ask, and Jack and me, we’d grin, no desire to clarify. Brothers worked in our favour, though neither Jack nor I could fathom why. And just about everyone chatted up Jack, like in the Marquee, minus the revelations. “Mostly it’s about the boat they had before and the one they’re gonna buy next. Stinkpotters knocking blowboaters, blowboaters knocking stinkpotters.”
One Sunday afternoon a Chinese river junk rippled onto the horizon, sails furling and the engine kicking in as the thirty-footer navigated the buoys. We’d seen nothing like it and we weren’t alone. Sailors watched from their decks, passersby from the bridge and shore.
“This ought to be good,” Jack said.
There had been a certain sameness to the yachts and crews to date, girls and bikinis notwithstanding. Not that we were complaining. But the junk conjured adventure on the exotic side, until the fucktub pulled astern.
Pharmasea
Trenton, Ontario
At the helm was Pecker himself—fucking Charles Dahl-Packer in white pants, blue blazer, and captain’s hat—and tossing the lines to Jack and me from starboard were his fucking mom, his fucking dad.
I kept my head down, willed myself to be one with the concrete, as I tied the lines to the cleats.
Pecker had shot up in height, Plastic Man stretched two ways from the middle. He was now taller than either Jack and me, though nothing you’d call improved.
“Well, look what the tide washed up!” Mrs. Dahl-Packer announced, and while I hoped she didn’t mean me, I knew she did.
“Hi,” I said meekly, bygones and all that. “Nice boat.”
Pecker pranced ashore, motioning me to keep my distance. “Do you think for one moment we’d trust the likes of you?” He knelt by the cleats, untied and retied my hitches. His Mom elbowed his dad, and Mr. Packer carbon-copied his misbegotten scion in the make-work.
“Are you going to stand there all day? Make yourselves useful.” Pecker clapped his hands. “A block of ice. Chop-chop.”
Jack inserted himself between me and the Dahl-Packers, backing me toward the neutral corner of the canteen. But I shoved him out of the way, grabbed Pecker by the throat and his dad by the hair and smashed their heads together, dumped the dazed fuckers into the bay. And then I grabbed a line, jumped aboard the Pharmasea, and strung Mrs. Dahl-Packer up from the yardarm, whatever the hell a yardarm was.
Tell me you wouldn’t have wanted to do the same.
Jack inserted himself between me and the Dahl-Packers, backing me toward the neutral corner of the canteen. “Yes, sir. Right away, sir,” he said.
After counting sixty-five cents into Jack’s hand for the block of ice, Pecker tossed him an extra nickel and winked.
Jack bowed. “Hop Sing thanks you humbly, Master Cartwright.”
“It’s Packer,” Pecker corrected. “Dahl-Packer. And you are most welcome.”
The Pharmasea would come and go, the Dahl-Packers thorns in our sides for the season. But we had plenty of good going on, too. Days earlier, our first Monday on the job, Mr. Blackhurst had cruised in from his house across the bay.
Five
Beluga
“Great to see you, sir,” Jack said, and together we hoisted the dry cleaner dockside. A beluga would have been less unwieldy. Mr. Blackhurst had put on a few pounds, his butt as flopsy-dropsy as elephant ears.
Mr. Blackhurst tucked in his shirt, adjusted his tie. He nodded to each of us in turn, though the specifics of his acknowledgement were typically sketchy. I was accustomed to it. But Jack—the Jack Levin whose ear he’d bent a hundred times and, last I heard, was eager to bend again—it was like he’d never seen him before.
Blackhurst wobbled, palmed our shoulders to steady himself. “Now, lads, take note. I prefer not to chew my cabbage twice,” he said, his jowls flouncing. “Longevity of marriage is more often evidence of not happiness—rather complacency.”
Blackhurst could’ve given Chairman Mao and his Little Red Book a run for his money had I been prescient, capable of seeing his non sequiturs as anything other than screwy.
Jack took the Earth-to-Blackhurst approach. “Remember me, sir? Jack Levin. Bert Levin’s son. The Marquee. You and me, we used to—”
“My dog, it should be sizzling by now.” He shifted his attention to the canteen and his amphibious girth followed in ponderous sway, his belly essential to the locomotion.
And thus the morning ritual was begun, Blackhurst’s words of wisdom a pillar.
Crack of dawn, five days a week, we’d hear the engine sputter to life, the drone carrying from across the bay. Jack and I would drop whatever we were doing. One of us would throw a hotdog onto the grill while the other headed down to dockside. Right on schedule, Mr. Blackhurst and Evie III would come splashing into view, the nineteen-foot Chris Craft at once elegant and arrogant as it spanked the early morning waters. She was a pampered beauty, that runabout, lacquered mahogany and polished chrome, with red vinyl seats that put shame to leather. If ever a boat was a woman . . . Or vice versa.
There’s this Little Rascals episode where rich twit Waldo steals the affection of Darla from Alfalfa, impressing the fickle little vamp with his kid-sized yacht. “She’s a very trim craft,” he tells her, and Darla asks why he calls his boat a she. And Waldo, over the top on the pomposity meter, sends her swooning with his reply: “Things of beauty, grace, and speed are usually referred to in the feminine gender.” Evie III was all of this and more.
Mr. Blackhurst could’ve been Waldo all grown-up, commodore’s cap and ascot. As a movie director, if his claim was true, he could have pulled off jodhpurs, boots, and beret with equal aplomb. In the years I’d known him, however, his attire never varied: white shirt, paisley tie, suspenders, brown trousers with double pleats and two-inch cuffs. His socks were uniformly brown. (“A man who purchases socks of the same style and colour will eliminate a year, at minimum, of superfluous decision-making from his life.” —Chairman Blackhurst)
The canteen was set back from the dock, diagonally opposite the gas pump, under a buggy willow and up against a high grey fence built to conceal the backside of the Chinese restaurant on the main street. The structure was ten by five, at most, a clapboard and tin affair—the tin generously provided by tobacco and soda pop companies to advertise their wares.
Player’s Please.
Pall Mall – Outstanding . . . and They are Mild!
Canada Dry – Let’s have a picnic!
RC Cola – The Fresher Refresher
A padlocked chest freezer—Ice Blocks & Bags—braced the short end of the canteen. The picnic table creaked out front.
A hotdog was Mr. Blackhurst’s standing order. “My breakfast chaser,” he’d say with a gravelly chuckle, and a healthy sprinkling of sheepis
h. Three quick bites, never varied.
He’d hitch up his trousers till foiled by overhang, and with a snap of his suspenders propel himself in the direction of King Street and his day of dry cleaning ahead.
Never once did he acknowledge Jack as Bert Levin’s boy or me as the kid who had brought him the intertitles. Forget movie-making or Hollywood North.
I pushed Jack to go for it. “You got your brown belt. What are you afraid of? Let’s get him talking again.”
“It’s been what—a week? We don’t want to scare him off.”
“At this rate, he’ll be dead and buried before we get any answers. He likes talking to you.”
“And what answers do you expect, Gus? So he tells us more about Hollywood North. So what? As long as no else buys into the story, it rings as true as Goldilocks or Peter Pan.”
“It can’t hurt to try. We’d know. At least.”
“Know what? What more do you think there is? If they really did make movies in Trenton, that’s great. History. Case closed. And if they didn’t, if it’s all bullshit, tell me one thing that changes. The mystery is not Hollywood North, Gus. The mystery is why this town knows nothing, remembers nothing, cares about nothing.”
“Donkey Baseball brings out the crowds,” I said.
Jack’s laugh was bleak. “I stand corrected.”
“Thing is, Jack, what if Hollywood North is a symptom of the same disease? Same as Creighton Farms or dogs running wild and eating babies? Solving any one mystery could unlock all the other mysteries. The bad stuff. The crazy stuff.”
Hollywood North: A Novel in Six Reels Page 26