From the Chrysalis (13 page)

Judging by the unfocused looks in both Alan’s and Paul’s eyes, they were both out of it by 10:00 a.m. on May 10. Or maybe they were just hung over from the night before.
 

May 10. That date was burned forever in Dace’s head.

Alan held out his hand, palm up. “Try some,” he coaxed, letting bits of the drug-soaked blotter paper join the beads on the floor.

“Hey,” Paul protested, fetching a splayed broom from the corner. “You’re wasting good stuff and you’re making a mess.”

“Don’t tell me what to do, you lazy little bitch.”

Aw, Jeez. The boys shuffled their feet, uncomfortable at witnessing the domestic scene. It was worse than watching somebody’s parents fight. Rick blushed to the roots of his rust red hair. “Look, Ozzie and Harriet, we don’t want any,” he said. “Just give us the fucking beer.”

Alan Turbot pursed his lips and raised his eyebrows like he was thinking. “Don’t want to,” he slurred, then collapsed onto his couch. Paul tried to help him up, but he slipped on the beads.

For a moment, Dace and Rick just stared, confused. “Why? What’s wrong with our money? Ain’t it good enough for you?” Rick asked. A wiry, ex-hockey player in the junior league, Rick had no trouble sidestepping the beads.
 

Alan waved them both away with the back of his hand. “Listen, you little pissers,” he said, “I heard what you did to my friend the other night at the bar. Yeah, that’s right. Stan’s a good friend of mine. One of you busted him good in the chopper. He lost a couple of teeth.”

“That old guy?” Rick asked, his hands tightening into fists. “He was bothering a sixteen-year-old girl who was just walking down the street, minding her own business. So Dace and me—”

“Yeah, Jennie from high school. She couldn’t talk for crying,” Dace added.

Alan laughed and started to heave himself onto his feet again. “Well, the way I hear it, she was asking for it, the cheap little tramp, all dressed up in a mini skirt with her tits hanging out to here.”

Dace was pretty sure Jennie had been Rick’s first kiss. His stomach heaved, imagining her with such an old geezer, so Rick was probably feeling a helluva lot worse.“That’s a fucking lie!” Dace shouted, the full weight of his shoulder knocking Alan back onto the couch. “She wasn’t doing nothing.”

 
“Look,” Paul said, fiddling with the buttons on his shirt, “why don’t you guys just leave? I never should have opened the door.”

What the hell, Dace thought. Nobody told him what to do. For one thing, he’d spent too much time with the priests as a boy. For another, he was almost eighteen. Plus, stupid Alan had a job to do and he wasn’t doing it. It bugged him when people didn’t do what they were supposed to. Pissed him off, actually.
 

“We want some beer first,” he said, sotto voiced.

“Well, you ain’t getting any!” Alan roared, rearing up from the couch. His eyes narrowed and he gave Rick a carnal grin. “But maybe if Ricky boy here is real nice to me … I’ve always fancied a redhead, you know. Oh, sure, you’ve got reddish hair too, D’Arcy Devereux, but it’s a little dark for me. Besides, you’re a bit too old. And you’re a real big boy. What are you, eighteen, nineteen?” He pulled a face. “Oh, shit, Paulie, I was just fooling. Don’t be such a silly little Sheila. Put your toy gun away.”

“It’s not a toy,” Paul said, pouting. He removed the safety on what looked like a little black cap gun. A bb gun maybe. He had probably dressed up as a cowboy last Hallowe’en. Tears quivered on his long lashes. “Look, I t-t-told you guys to g-g-get out,” he stammered, unable to steady the gun he waved in the air.

Everybody looked at the gun. Everybody except Alan that is, who kneed Rick in the groin and laughed his head off when Rick doubled over. Oh, he’d got him a good one all right.
 

“C’mon, Paulie,” he grunted. “Don’t you want to see if this boy is red all over?”
 

Dace flew forward, trying to kick Alan in the face, but Rick was in the way, clutching his genitals and making a hideous noise: a cross between a stuck pig and a muzzled woman.
 

“C’mon. Lemme see,” Alan persisted, reaching behind Rick’s back and fondling him between his bent legs. “Let go of my arm, Paul. Ah look, stupid. You’ve gone and dropped the gun. Cool Ass Luke’s got it now.”
 

“It’s not loaded,” Paul bawled, tears streaming down his cheeks, his face in his hands, crying the way only a drunken man can do. “For Christ’s sake, Alan, why can’t I be enough for you?”

Dace raised the gun and pointed it at the wall behind Alan’s head. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d played cowboys and Indians and he didn’t want to now. He didn’t put the gun down, though. He stuck his forefinger through the trigger instead. For a toy, it was a nice fit.
 

“Are you sure it’s not loaded?” he asked, playing for time. With his free hand, he grabbed the back of Rick’s shirt, trying to pull him towards the apartment door. One thing for sure, he was passing on the beer.
 

Rick couldn’t move. Or maybe he just wouldn’t. His throat pulsed and there was a dangerous gleam in his pale green eyes.
If looks could kill,
Dace thought.
 

“C’mon, Rick, let’s go,” he insisted, but Alan made a second drunken lunge and something popped.
 

“What the fuck?” Dace exclaimed, staring at the gun in his hand.
 

“It fired!” Rick crowed.

At first, everything was okay. Alan laughed, holding his left hand over his chest. Even when he slid to the floor in slow motion it looked like he was acting, and doing a pretty poor job at that. Dace stepped back, reluctant to dirty his new clothes.
 

“Get up,” he spat at Alan, his voice choked with contempt. The gun clattered to the floor.

“Blood!” Paul screamed as he ran around the small, cluttered room, his hands fluttering in the air.

Dace forced his eyes down to the floor. Something red was seeping out of Alan’s shoulder, but other than that he looked no worse than usual. The genial grin of a drunkard was still plastered on his face. Dace’s stomach lurched the same way it had when he’d seen a little tiger cat get flattened by a car.

Jesus, they couldn’t just stand around here all day. “Let’s go, man!” he shouted. He had never given any thought to neighbours before, but he did now. My God, what if somebody had heard the gun? “Let them take care of this. We gotta get out of this place.”

In his haste to unlatch the door behind him, he stumbled over the short landing and fell downstairs into an assortment of rubber boots and galoshes in the entrance.
 

He had to get some air or he’d puke. A cool breeze blew through the open front door and up the stairs. They should have been carrying a case of beer out right now, but all he could think about was getting away. Why the hell had they come here anyway? Racing down some cement steps two at a time, he looked back over his shoulder. What the hell was Rick doing? Giving Turbot an extra lick or two? Although he might lack the older man’s size, at least Rick was sober.

As he ran, he thought he heard Alan say, “It feels good,” so maybe it was all right. But then Paul really started keening and a valve shut off in Dace’s ears. Oh God. He had to get the hell out of there before somebody heard.
 

Panicking as he burst onto the busy street, he almost forgot where he’d parked his bike. Then he spotted it in the laneway between the old brewery buildings, its chrome parts shining in the weak spring sun. Rick’s bike was beside his, looking like it always did, like nothing could possibly have gone wrong. Goddamn it. What was keeping Rick? He stared hard at the building, then back at his bike. Nothing—not even a girl with her clothes off—had ever looked so good as that bike did just now.
 

“Rick!” he screamed at the apartment building, no longer caring who the fuck heard. A woman passing by glanced at him curiously. Where the hell was Rick? This was no time to take a leak. They had to get out of here, they
had
to! Wait. Was that a siren? An ambulance might beat the police if Paul had called, but he couldn’t take the chance.
 

“Rick!” he yelled again before he jumped on his bike and kicked the stand free. He turned the key he’d left in the ignition because they hadn’t planned to be gone long, and coaxed his darling, his baby to life. The roar of the bike cut out Rick’s and Paul’s screams.

 
It was a couple of weeks before he found out Rick had tried to staunch the open wound in the dirty fucker’s shoulder with his bare hands, promising him, “You die and get us into trouble and I’ll kill you all over.”
 

Although Turbot didn’t die from the bullet, his heart, already damaged by alcohol, was shocked into slowing down. When he realized what was going on, Rick had wanted to get help, but Paul, silly little Paul, kept sobbing into his hands, “It’s all right! It’s all right! It’s all right!” Alan didn’t want to call an ambulance either, probably because too many drugs were stashed in his rooms. He must have known something was up though, for he sent his boy lover for a glass of water just before he died on the floor. A week later he was identified as a drifter who had drowned his past in a river of booze.
 

“He would have survived if we’d called an ambulance,” Rick said when they met up in court. The police had located Dace in Timmins the same day. Although Rick had spent the past two weeks in local custody and Dace had been on the run, they were both dirty and dishevelled, their eyes blank, their hands cuffed behind their backs. The courtroom was filling with friends and relatives, neighbours and schoolmates, Rick’s blank-faced mother, Dace’s stone-faced Dad.
 

They had fifteen seconds, maybe ten.
 

“The lawyer says to act like I care that he’s dead,” Rick said, adding with a sidelong glance, “But I don’t. He should be dead. He …”

“I know, I know. But I’m the one…”
 

“Ah, c’mon. Don’t wimp out on me! You did a public service, you know you did! Guys like him don’t deserve to live.”

Dace’s throat tightened. Maybe. But what did he really know about Turbot except that he got into a blind rage one day and that he liked young boys? Strange, he thought, how everybody’s a good guy when they’re dead. “My father said you tried to help him, stop the bleeding …”

Rick shuddered and looked down at his hands. “The only reason I tried to help him was because I was scared. I was scared we’d end up here and people would find out. He didn’t touch me there, you know. I know it looked like that, but it’s not like it seemed. You know guys in the locker room. Stuff like that happens all the time. Aw, Jesus, here’s Jennie and my Mom. Don’t tell, don’t tell, Dace.”
 

Their cuffs were unlocked and their keepers stepped back. “I won’t,” Dace whispered out of the side of his mouth. Rick was right. There was no point in telling what the bootlegger had done. All their friends were in the courtroom. Besides, what good would it do? Dead was dead.
 

Both Dace’s and Rick’s families came to court, but nobody showed up for the victim. Somebody said Paul, a young man from Cape Breton, had gone light in the head. Rick’s mother thought that was really sad. The Judge more or less added that the victim was a worthless son-of-a-bitch, but a man just the same.
 

The jury called it manslaughter and Dace was paying the price, the one exacted by the legal system anyway. And life in prison was okay as long as he got some peace and quiet and didn’t think too much. As in, he had to stop asking himself
what if
?
 

What if he had stayed at home in his room, listening to records.
Hiding in my room, safe within my womb/I touch no one and no one touches me.
 

What if he hadn’t taken Rick to the bootlegger’s? It had been his idea, his fault.
 

Or what if they hadn’t liked beer? Yeah, right. Everybody liked a good buzz. Everybody in Maitland, anyway.
 

What if the gun had been a toy? Or not loaded? Or not there at all?