Kicking Tomorrow (39 page)

There were voices. He was sobbing. He covered his face from shame, and dunked his head between his knees. He was a nerd, he couldn’t fight. This was what the end of the world was like. Robbie became aware of sitting on steps, watching his blood blot the snow. A throng of punks stood around his head, all tattered knees and dangling buckles. There were pigs, and a cruiser flashing crisp blue
light. Brat was saying to Louie Louie, “I tried to help, eh, but it all went by so
fast.”

Robbie raised his head.

“Hey,” Brat said, doing a wobbly boxer’s dance. “Don’t look at me. I could of taken him out with a headbutt, but I figured, why have two of us get slaughtered instead of only one. And what about my suit, no just joshing, fuck. Hey, don’t look at me like that. I didn’t do nothen.”

Officer Gaunt crouched down beside Robbie, rubbing his hands together. Robbie opened his mouth to speak, but the cold air sent a stab of pain up the exposed nerve of his front tooth, an icy skewer jabbed right into his nose. He couldn’t feel his hand at all.

Gaunt winced and said, “Don’t you know those biker boys are out of their skulls. I’m amazed they behaved with such restraint. Often as not, they’d kill you for sneezing in their oxygen.”

“Bikers’ motto,” Robbie replied. “One for all and all on one. Ouch, fuck.”

Gaunt helped Robbie to the cruiser. Louie Louie got in, too. Husker was at the wheel. They headed for the Montreal General, speeding along De Maisonneuve. Robbie’s head lolled on the back seat. High above, the searchlight atop Place Ville-Marie stirred the clouds, just like in the opening skyline sequence on the hockey game. His head spun following it. “Guess what,” Gaunt said. “We know who that kid was, eh – the one who perished.”

“Aw, for Chrissake,” Robbie moaned.

“No, listen. Did you know a tattoo survives a fire? It’s not as colourful as before the body turns to toast, but you can still make it out. Gaston Goupil wore biker colours, so we just checked him against a list of missing members.”

“You’re just trying to snow me. When did you find out?”

“Ohh, close to a year ago, I’d say.”

“Yeah? Well, I happen to know he got his colours skinned.”

“Did he indeed?” Husker called out. “Dead Man’s Hands colours maybe, but when he died he was with the Disciples. We’d been watching him as a matter of fact, and the others – Ivy’s big brother included – for quite some time. We figured you’re such a stupid little dickhead we were bound to stumble onto something with your help. What does it take? Do you know now to keep your fucking nose clean?”

“It’s drug wars these boys are fighting,” Gaunt said. “Or have you already heard? We jumped the gun this summer with Olly, so to speak – we got cocky, too much publicity in advance of the case – and they caught us on a technicality. But, in the long run, all these psychos are on self-destruct. We’re going to just stand by and watch from the sidelines from here on in.”

“Me, all
I
was trying to do was take a whizz,” Robbie said.

From the hospital, Louie Louie and Robbie stopped for one more beer at the Toe Blake. It was the last thing Robbie wanted – his nose was a bloody, tender fruit whose pulsing roots probed painfully about in his head, and his hand throbbed maddeningly inside the fresh cast – but Louie Louie insisted.

“To tell you de truth, it’s for mon vieux père. I’m quit de chickens, too. I ave save lots of cash. In de New Year, I start a store in Chicoutimi.”

There were sixteen glasses of draught on the little round table between them. Robbie had asked for a straw.

“Great,” he said. “Kick a dog when it’s down.”

“Ayy,” Louie Louie said, slapping his arm. “Ça serait beau, peux-tu l’imaginer? A record store. I could give you great discount.”

“Louie, you gotta shoot higher than that, man. Hell’s Yells are gonna get more than a fucken discount.”

“Non non, ç’a pas d’sense. I’m so ugly I coulden get lay in a women’s prison wit a andful of pardon. I’m tirty, right. I fart
aroun for ten year wit my ’arley, living off Suzette, you know –”

“Yeah yeah,” Robbie said. “Giving her great doggies.”

“C’est ça. An now I gotta get serious. In is honour I call de store, Les Disques Beaulieu. E gonna be proud, mon hostie. Hanyow, check dis.” Louie Louie handed him a piece of important-looking stationery. In French it read,
‘According to Article 58 of Bill 101, regarding the language of commerce and business: all signs, posters, and commercial advertising on the premises shall be solely in the official language.’

“So?” Robbie said.

“So dey took my
Bosom Buddies
calendar down from my hoffice. Some broad squeal on me cause it’s Hinglish an bring in de Commission de Surveillance. Shit la marde, Robbie, when hi tink of de Québécois fight for hindependence, quand
Je Me Souviens
, t’sais, dis is not for what hi do it. So now, hi do for me. You wan four more beer?”

The next morning, it sure felt weird waking up in Queenie’s bed. For one thing, it was a lot softer than Robbie was accustomed to – his back and bum were sunk into a hollow that had been made by big Mr. Graves, and for another, there was a little girl at the foot of it wanting her daddy. And Chrissake! Wasn’t he due back today? Robbie’s arm was trapped under Queenie’s head, and he thought of that sick joke guys make, about being with a broad so ugly that chewing your arm off is preferable to waking her. The little girl was rocking the bed by Queenie’s ankle and making the most outraged face at him, and Queenie was roused. She only glanced at him. Her eyes were bloodshot, stained overnight by the red wine they had shared. She pulled on her dressing-gown and hustled the kid out of the room.

Robbie’s nose was so plugged with crusty blood he felt he could snap the whole thing off his face, like plaster. He stood up, saw the room black out in a checkerboard pattern, lost his
balance, sat down again on the bed. When his vision cleared, he crouched over, gingerly, to the vestibule mirror and took a look. Two glorious shiners stared back, dirty yellow, divided by a blackened bridge. The swelling was massive, in spite of the ice compress that now lay in a bowl of water by his pillow. He pulled on his clothes with his left hand, snuck a $20 bill from the night table, tiptoed down the cabbagey corridor, and slipped out as quietly as he could.

By the time he reached the Voyageur station, he had missed the first bus of the day; he went to look for a dépanneur, but when he returned the driver wouldn’t let him on with his beers. He sat in the grimy terminal and drank five in the space of an hour; by the time the third bus arrived, he was stupid and drooling. He staggered to the back, sat next to the latrine. The other passengers, their laps loaded with gifts in jolly wrapping, twisted in their seats to stare at him.

Speeding down the Eastern Townships autoroute now. The snow by the highway fluffed up with earth. The fields lying fallow, and the frost in the furrows. The china-blue dish of sky above. Robbie with the last of the beers between his knees, blasted with all the thoughts of Xmas in Kilborn Bay. How the family will find him changed; how mature, how well balanced, how sharp with knowledge of the real world. Yes, he’s looking forward to home.

Well. How could it be worse than what he’s leaving behind? It’s as if Montreal had been sprung overnight like some intricate booby-trap. He was stunned by how quickly life could seize up on a person. He saw that Ivy was right when she said people are fools to set themselves at the centre of their own life story; stories have a hero and a purpose and a moral, but in reality, life is a series of ever-worsening enstranglements.

Scenes from last night, flipping by: weirdly enough, none of the bikers had even mentioned the subject of dope, or told him
to empty his pockets.
Ivy sez hi
, that’s all. Returning home, he had found Dolores and Rosie gone, and his place trashed to pieces; five cards, aces and eights, had been left on the hallway carpet. His couch was slashed, the contents of the beanbags were scattered like a polystyrene snowstorm. The Dead Man’s Hands had ripped open his books, spilled his records from their sleeves, and torn the guts from his stereo speakers. They had pulled the carpet up and left it in waves. The question Robbie asked himself was, had they trashed the place just to drive home their point about Dolores? Or, if they were looking for drugs, had the dummies not thought to look for drugs in a place as obvious as a
Cocaine
machine? Maybe they weren’t looking. Maybe they didn’t know he had the stuff at all. After what happened in the school fire, only Ivy could have told them – told Olly – how it had come into his possession in the first place. Maybe for once in her life she had kept a secret
for
him, not
from
him.

Anyway, Queenie had waited up. He thought she was holding a present for him, but it was only another care package from Mom, this one marked
URGENT
. He had rolled his eyes, kicked it in a corner.

Queenie was quiet and shy. And had the softest body. Well, she had had children, that’s why. She was like tumbling in baby powder. And that morning, as they lay there, she had smelled to him of the heavy process of living; a sweet-and-sour, inside-out odour, laced with dead perfume. And her dog-tooth dentures in a glass by the bed.

Two old women across the aisle from him are dragging on cigarettes and gabbing. He gives them the Evil Eye. They look so desiccated they can’t just have aged in the regular course of time; the cigarettes they’re sucking on must have dried them out like strips of cod. Their grey hair seems singed to ash, lifting high above their foreheads like smoke on the wind. They’re cooing over a
National Examiner:

All the old, smoked women on this bus have short hair. As if, Robbie thinks, they’ve been shorn to announce the shame of growing old. Clothing stiffens around them like a petrified shell. He looks the other way, presses his boiling forehead to the cool glass, and passes out for the duration of the trip…

At Kilborn Centre, the driver had to carry him off, and dump him on the steps of the station. He had no luggage, just Mom’s unopened package under one arm. Nobody was there to meet him. He hitched the twenty kilometres or so to Kilborn Bay in a farmer’s pickup. The farmer was jovial, but spoke in joual so thick Robbie could barely communicate at all. The day was already falling dark. He looked across the purple snow to a column of silhouetted pines, the bristling guardians of the lake, massed in silence and waiting as he approached.

He decided he would help in the kitchen this year, if you can believe that. Yes, he could really get into preparing the turkey stuffing with Miriam and Barnabus. He liked the feel of the hot and slimy water full of chestnuts, each one’s shell marked X with a knife, and the way your fingers wizen and unpeel too, wherever you’ve been gnawing at your cuticles. He could already smell the pine in the living, room, the port and marbled Stilton, the aroma of the turkey with pepper and garlic and raisins, of glazed ham with burnt sugar and cloves and bourbon peaches, of roast duck with quince, hot stollen, panettone, and mincemeat tartlets with nutmeg, allspice, cinnamon, bourbon, and rum, crowned with sprigs of pine and holly. The farmer was talking, between swigs from a bottle of Molson he kept snug between his legs, but Robbie was in the ruby dining room that’s upside-down in a glass of wine, the trembling liquid light in that truffle pâté’s aspic jelly, the featherlight texture of those gingersnaps, that dark
fruitcake so thick with candied lemon and currants it looked like it’d been cut from an oil painting. And, Jesus Fuck his hand hurts. He remembered how Dad likes to stick bottles of champagne in the snow outside the living-room window and how, when he opened it, the sound of ragtime jazz danced out across the twilit lake, echoing to and fro across the bay, losing its way in the listening, glistening woods, and finally giving up the ghost in the navy blue snow. He thought of Mom, tucking him in tightly and kissing him on his eyelids, her dinner-party jewellery rattling reassuringly above his nose. And, thinking of it, as the moisture of her kiss evaporated in the dark, he felt the way he imagined his soul might feel, if he had one, ascending.

HE SLEPT LATE, IN THE BEDROOM HE ONCE SHARED WITH
Barnabus, overlooking the bay. Lying in this tiny bed, snug as a sardine in its tin, his body was firmly packed in the blankets and sheets and his feet stuck out at the end. He felt too big for this room with the Snoopy poster and the model aircrafts and, by the bed, the patch of fresh wallpaper where once a hide of pick-a-nose had been; and the thought that this single was intended only for
sleeping
, and that his sleeping and waking had been so chaste, made the morning heat of his body seem rude.

From the window, he surveyed the glistening confection of pine trees and snow. Under a navy sky, Kilborn Bay cracked and groaned. Somewhere out there lay Mendoza’s iced bones. Robbie thought of his empty grey apartment in town, that chilly hollow whose rent was still unpaid, smelling of gas, graffiti on its cold walls, and his throat felt soaked with sadness to be in the hug of home again. He wondered how Rosie was doing, down in the empty city core; gathering with the girls and the bouncers for some special matinée performances in that horrible club. And for their Xmas meal: a special Santa’s Helper Take-out Chicken Sleigh. Louie Louie meanwhile in Ste. Agathe, snoring the morning away after midnight Mass with his vieux père. And Baimy, watching Yuletide
TV
with his feet up, indifferent to it all, scheming, pissed, caustic.

Robbie would be nineteen in two weeks, but he still got an Xmas stocking. He ransacked it greedily with his good hand: a Lovely “punker” safety pin, with a notch permitting you to wear it without piercing your cheek, shoe fresheners,
Saturday Night Fever
gum, Walter T. Foster’s
How To Draw The Nude
, gourmet turtle soup.

He also opened that care package he’d carried all the way from Montreal: food, mostly rich stuff, like sweetmeats and shortbread, and a note: