Kicking Tomorrow (16 page)

All in a flurry, then: Ivy screaming, Gaston and his pals going
Har har mon hostie
, the close wail of a siren, Gaston shouting
Les boeufs!
and taking off across the ice. A policeman with cigar breath and a badged Cossack hat, strings hanging down from the ear muffs, closely examining Robbie’s predicament. Robbie feeling more shame than pain, Ivy on his other side saying I told you about those guys you should listen to me next time
OK
. I better go to Pendeli’s for some hot water. Robbie going
elllh
and swivelling his eyeballs like a poor dumb beast. He’s trying to gently peel his tongue from the pipe, but when he does there’s a sensation of deeply embedded needles. And in this winter night air his eyes are very blurry and warm with tears, which at least may melt this terrible ice.

That weekend she took him to her brother Olly’s place (the one
not
in jail, he guessed) on a brand-new development plot in Côte St.-Luc. It was still under construction, all trailers and gouged frozen earth, plywood skeletons and exposed insulation, unshingled walls wrapped with candy-stripe sheathing, each house resembling a child’s sketch of the perfect home, and you counted the fifth salted driveway on the crescent to identify Olly’s. As they got off the bus, Robbie brooded that Ivy hadn’t even asked how he felt.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said, when at last she noticed his long face, “but why should I waste words? You’re obviously happy enough to see me. And you’ve been talking nonstop for the last half-hour, so your tongue’s obviously in working order. What else do you need from me?”

He shrugged and asked her what her brother did.

“Stuff.”

“What kind of stuff, exactly?”

“ – ”

“
K, OK
, I know. Ask you no questions you’ll tell me no lies.”

He’d never live in a suburban nightmare like this, not in a million years. When he got famous he’d buy a Tudor country estate like Keef’s. He’d read about it in Mom’s
House and Garden:
Addams Family style, with spiky trellises on the roof and a spidery weathervane, creepy tangled vegetation flourishing on the grounds, a real garden of delights: Venus flytraps, poison ivy, grotesque warty mushrooms, mammoth hollyhocks, mad Van Gogh sunflowers, and ferns as impenetrable as bales of barbed wire. If Robbie had a garden – not the trimmed rectangle the size of a bridge table that passed for a yard around here – he’d plant all those things too, plus install a moat with an alligator to take care of mailmen, and kids who’d thrown their frisbees wild.

“Oh, hey, don’t point that thing at guests!” Olly’s wife Karen said. “Cissy, I said put that gun
down.”
The two-year-old stood at the front door clutching a dull black pistol in her sticky fists. Robbie pulled a game smile, looked at her fat little legs, the ketchup and the crumbs on her face, the rubber diaper as swollen as a dinghy.

“You’re thinkin these kids have unusual hobbies, eh,” Karen said, smiling back apologetically. “Collectin Nazi memorabilia an nat?”

“No, no,” Robbie said, taking a chair, real casual, at the kitchen table. “Different strokes, right?”

There were two other children, one still an infant in a towering highchair, the other a five-year-old grabbing only at things Cissy had already picked up. And, oh look, Robbie’s Mom was on the television on the counter, turned up loud. She was doing a sunny story on disappearing vacation spots and the
erosion of archaeological treasures by air pollution. Now there was a tug-of-war over the Luger. Karen bent down to separate the babies, and Robbie got a faceful of cellulite – the loose trunks of her thighs, squeezed into an old pair of denim cut-offs, favourites from a slimmer time – crossed with red striations where the seams had bitten in.

“Bendin down like this,” she said, “always makes me think about how the worst part of a prostitute’s job eh, apart from standin in the freezin rain, is bendin down to look in cars. They must have terrible bad backs, specially since they gotta stand fer hours on them stupid heels.”

“That’s not the
worst
part,” Robbie said, but the words came out more tersely than he had intended; he’d figured on starting a cordial conversation, but he now realized what a sour mood Ivy had put him in with her infuriating silences and evasions. And,
Chrissake
, what kind of psycho family was this? His whole body had stiffened with moral rectitude. “I mean, what about the job itself?”

“Aw, who is this guy, Ivy honey?” Karen said, patting Cissy’s diaper and wrinkling her nose.

… and did you know, Mom was saying, your hair dyes are tested on the eyes of rabbits? And how about the expression ‘mad as a hatter’ – hatters used to soften fur with mercury to make felt linings, but now it’s been documented that mercury poisoning will result in shrunken brain cells…

“Way I see it,” Robbie pronounced, taking a righteous slurp of beer, “if they’re not happy they should take a job at the Baron.” Mom was in front of the Great Pyramid of Giza now, and now Big Ben, and said
G’bye World!
Karen switched the
TV
off, and exchanged a glance with Ivy.

“OK
, you guys, I’m just gonna change this little monster. Why doncha play pool if you want?” She laughed and looked
dead at Robbie. “We got a real table, down in the den. Betcha get tired of just playing
pocket
pool, eh, Mr. Big Balls?”

Downstairs Ivy put on a Bones record and racked up, while Robbie snooped, his cheeks still burning. On a desk with a typewriter,
The History of Firearms
. He flipped through it idly. The typewriter, he noticed, sat on a placemat whose rubber bristles made up a Harley-Davidson logo. There were some cheap pool trophies on a shelf, and a heavier-duty one fashioned from a camshaft and mounted on a block of wood with a plaque.

“Oh. Your brother ride a bike?”

“If you say so,” Ivy said. “Your break.”

He inspected a photograph propped against the trophy. There was Karen, and a bunch of guys with heavy beards and filthy jean jackets and keychains and tattoos. Chrissake, Robbie thought. The real McCoy.

He broke, sewered the cue ball. Soon after that, as Ivy hunkered down to pocket her fourth ball in a row, he looked around some more, just to prove how losing didn’t faze him a bit. On one wall hung two Indonesian shadow puppets – two demons, it looked like – on another a Day-Glo poster of a groovy couple fucking against a cosmic backdrop, and on a third a Strolling Bones mirror featuring Keef Richards naked and nailed to a cross backwards, his spine pushing out the flesh like a row of spikes. Into the mirror’s frame was tucked a strip of photos from an automatic photo booth, and there was Spit Swagger grinning darkly and Karen crammed in on his lap, shirtless, braless by the third snap, and laughing by the fourth.

“Wow,” Robbie said. “Does Karen
know
Spit?”

“ – ”

A few feet away from the mirror was a coatstand. Hanging from it was a black shirt. A patch representing a hand of cards had been sewn on the shoulder. Robbie held the sleeve up to get a
better look. Ivy put some wicked English on the cue ball. Five cards sprayed with bullet holes: pair of aces, pair of eights, and one joker skull. “Chrissake,” he said aloud. “Olly’s a Dead Man’s Hand, isn’t he?”

“Chrissake,”
Ivy mimicked. “No, not at all. If you must know, he’s the president.”

“Wow,” Robbie said, gingerly feeling the sore tip of his tongue.

From behind the desk Ivy pulled out a heavy sheaf of papers, fatter than a phone book, bound in a blue file.

“Transcripts, lookit,” she whispered proudly. “This is every phone call made to and from this house for the last two years. Exhibit ‘A’. The
RCMP
says that after the Mafia and the Angels and the Outlaws, they’re the most powerful organized-crime group in the province. They know who Olly is, they’ve been trying to nail him forever, but he’s so incredibly clever nothing sticks. A couple of guys got some time, but not Olly. He’s respectable. He’s rich too: rule of the club is that his salary always matches what the prime minister makes.”

“But, like, I know all about bikers, right,” Robbie said.

“That must be nice for you,” Ivy said, stiffening.

“Yeah,” Robbie said. “Does he have a Filthy Few patch?”

“What, that says he’s killed for the club? Don’t be an idiot. The only thing like that he ever boasted about was the time the neighbour’s cat kept him up meowing all night. He told me he lured the cat in with a kipper, smashed its brains out with a hammer, put it in the deep freeze overnight, and put it back on the doorstep, paws up, with the neighbour’s morning paper in its mouth. Isn’t that incredible?”

Olly Mills arrived home. Robbie had expected him to be at the vanguard of a roaring metal horde, all spit and greasy hair and Nazi helmets, spewing salt and ice behind them, but looking up
through the casement window he could see the wheels of a nice mustard Chevrolet pull up the driveway without so much as a squeal. Olly was taller and leaner than Robbie, his hair was shorter too, and he barely had a beer gut at all. He looked like a dentist, home from Sunday golf.

They sat around the kitchen table, the babies splashing on the floor in an inflatable Scoobie Doo wading pool. Olly was quiet and gracious and Ivy was more alert than Robbie had ever seen her. She asked questions, told him awful stories about school, fetched him beers, gave him a shoulder rub, and explained anything he wanted to know. Robbie sat there like a hairy gargoyle, despising her utterly, and trying to work up the courage to ask Olly if he knew Gaston Goupil and if, by any small chance, he could ask him to lay the fuck off. Olly picked Cissy up and dandled her on his knee, and Robbie thought of all the newspaper stories he had read about how bikers are the scum of the earth, gun runners, extortionists, hired killers, drug dealers, robbers, porn dealers, loan sharks, professional rapists, and lords of the white slave-trade, all in a day’s work. And here he was in the kitchen of Mr. and Mrs. Burb. What outrages had Robbie read about, and registered with a mixture of revulsion and awe? There was that story about a biker’s old lady in St. Jovite who wouldn’t participate in a gang bang, so her old man nailed her to a pine tree – she didn’t scream or even protest, and only went to hospital because the infections in her palms made it impossible to give hand jobs to customers. Then hadn’t three Aces and Eights been fished out of Lake Kilborn just last summer? Cops said it was a gang war because the bloated bodies had been wrapped in sleeping bags and anchored with chains and cinder blocks, which was the Hell’s Angels’ trademark.

An hour later, Robbie was shaking the hand of the president of the Dead Man’s Hands goodbye.

Ivy kissed her brother and said, “I left the batik for you in the living room. See you.”

As they slid around the icy crescent, Robbie was exploding with questions he knew Ivy would never answer. He tried one anyway. “Neat. Olly do batik too?”

“ – ”

They rode the bus home in silence.

LIKE DAD HAD WANTED HIM TO DO SO BAD AT THAT BUMMER
of a Seder, Robbie buzzed off. He got out. He got
way
out – two damp nights on the Coke-skinned floor of the Roxy, and two more chilly ones sitting propped up inside the Westmount Kiosk, with the wind buffeting the wooden walls. Finally Rosie found him in Dominion Square, arguing noisily over a game of chess with Joe Smolij, and took him home for a hot bath – even old Joe, who smelled like a bowl of mouldy polewka, had flared his thistly nostrils when Robbie first put his dollar down. True to her word, meanwhile, she’d spoken to a friend who, luckily, had moved out of her apartment that Labour Day weekend, and needed a new tenant to sublet immediately.

“Sorry I didn’t get a better price for that Bones ticket,” Robbie said, by way of thanking her.

“S
’OK
, Bob,” she replied, kissing him. “I know what it’s like sometimes, not to see the woods for the trees.”

“Mn-hm,” he said doubtfully, hoping that by this sylvan metaphor she did not mean the better aspects of herself. He thought of a Chinese fortune cookie he’d once read:
woman’s heart like hotel – room for everyone
, and
that
was more like Rosie;
her heart was as big as the Holiday Inn at Niagara Falls – way too big for him, too indiscriminately accommodating, with
DOUBLE ROOMS AT CUT-RATE PRICES! –
not his style at all. In fact he felt kind of sorry for her.
K
, it was nice that she was helping him out, just this once, but she’d have to realize that since he was on his own now it would be
unhealthy
for him to lean on his friends too much; put more plainly, she’d just have to stop glomming onto him.

That had been a week ago. Now this cool September morning in the neutral light of dawn, the walls of his mouth numb with bourbon, the stuff of his brain swollen up, he had the experience of swimming over rooftops. Having drunk himself sober and stayed up long enough to overcome fatigue, he was staring out the bedroom window of his new apartment on Berdnikoff Avenue, through its membrane of pale dirt, thinking. Feeling. In jags. The only colour out on the street was a crackling neon billboard displaying the latest in Eccelucci’s famous line of sensuous lingerie. The street was deserted here, under the eastern bluffs of the mountain. Clouds scudded over his new neighbourhood with its spiked iron fences and dusty doilied windowsills and dark apartments. On the sidewalk, a tricycle lay abandoned on its side, its frame wet with morning dew, a piece of bedraggled string trailing from its handlebars. Like a newborn baby bike.