Poison Shy (14 page)

The light turned green. Darvish put his foot on the gas. Before we'd managed to move more than a few feet, a body smashed through the window of The Bloody Paw, skidding along the sidewalk amidst a shower of sparkling glass.

“Jesus,” Darvish said as he swerved and stopped.

A second figure stepped through the broken window, wielding a barstool in both hands like a sledgehammer. It was Viktor. He was decked out in full army gear — camouflage pants and tank top, dog tag and knee-high Doc Marten boots, the works. The rag doll on the sidewalk, scraping to get away, was my half brother.

Darvish burst out of the car. “Police!” he shouted, running toward them.

Viktor walked calmly toward Darcy, then hit him as hard as he could with the stool. The seat struck his temple; Darcy's head snapped violently to one side. Viktor let go of the stool before Darvish tackled him to the ground and cuffed him.

I got out of the car and ran to Darcy's side. He was dead, no question about it. There was a crater in his head where he'd been struck, his neck was bent and slightly elongated. He was smiling, though — peacefully, his eyes wide open. There was a chain around his neck, something I'd never seen him wear before, with a crucifix on it. The stem of the cross had swung up and into Darcy's mouth.

It was the way he would've wanted to go.

Turns out it was Viktor who'd brought Melanie to Bill's. He'd had his fun with her at the bar, drugged her, and delivered on a promise he'd made to get his old pal Bill laid before his fiftieth birthday. He figured Melanie was perfect for the job. He thought she might even enjoy it. He claimed not to know what Bill had planned — but whether or not he did didn't matter. He'd killed Darcy right in front of a cop.

What happened before we got there, I can only guess — but I know it was all about Melanie. If love was something Darcy was capable of feeling, I believe he felt it for her and her alone. He and Viktor had been battling for her attention long before I got involved with her. Darcy'd gone to confront his rival, and it had ended violently, as things between men often do. Melanie did that to people. Made them lose it. I knew that first hand.

The reason Viktor gave for killing Darcy was simple, and yet, it wasn't a reason at all: “The douchebag had it coming.” He wouldn't say any more. It didn't matter. Viktor's days as a civilian were over.

As for me, I was charged with disturbing the peace for my aggressive redecorating of The Bloody Paw, and slapped on the wrist with a $5,000 fine. Darvish was kind to me. He knew I'd been through my share of hell already.

There's a term in the pest control business — poison shy. It refers to when an animal or insect learns to avoid a certain toxic substance after ingesting a sublethal dose. It's a survival instinct. Nature's alarm system. It's the best analogy I have to explain why I didn't visit Melanie in the hospital.

I decided to take Darvish's advice and get out of town, maybe go back to school. I applied to every major university in Canada except for F.U. I ended up getting accepted into the concurrent education program at York University in Toronto. Thought I might try my hand at teaching. It was Darcy who told me that the students who hate school make the best teachers because they actually want to change the system, make it better. I think he was right.

In the meantime I got a job washing dishes at Parker's Grill, formerly The Jug. My first night on the job I learned that Gloria had taken a prolonged leave of absence after Darcy's death. I never worked a single shift with her and never saw her again. It was probably for the best. I saved every cent I made until it was time to leave for school.

The only person I kept in touch with was Chad, more out of obligation than anything. He and Farah got more serious by the day, building toward a semi-normal small-town life together. I became a story for them to tell other couples, their connection to that famous day of violence in Frayne. Eventually I'd be reduced to a footnote in a dinner party conversation, a side character in a creepy local history that would one day become legend.

At school I kept my distance from my classmates. I was the loner at the back of the lecture hall, not quite a mature student but too old to get invited to parties. I got the grades I needed to pass and faded into the background. It was my old life all over again. It was the most comfortable I'd felt in a long time.

On weekends I'd hop on the subway line and explore the city. I appreciated the anonymity. Everyone inwardly plunging into their own secret obsessions and personal nightmares. It was a soothing thought to someone like me. Nobody, except maybe monks and retards, is ever truly happy. The city helped me realize that. I was just another suffering dog.

One of my ventures took me to Greektown in the east end. I went to a café and did some reading for school, then stopped at one of the dozens of Mediterranean restaurants for lunch. The place was empty. As I perused the menu, the waitress came over to take my drink order. Without looking up, I asked for a Bloody Caesar. The waitress stood there and didn't respond, and when I looked up at her I realized why. It was Patricia Moreno.

“I can't believe it,” she said. “You look exactly the same.”

I laughed. I didn't
feel
exactly the same. As for Patricia, she was fat. She'd always been a bit bulky, but never this big. She didn't look bad, though. There was still something sexy about her, in a rap music video kind of way.

“I thought you moved to Montreal,” I said.

“I was there for a bit,” she said. “I also lived in Calgary, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, and St. John. I moved to Toronto with a guy I was seeing, but it didn't last. I guess the fat chick thing got old. His loss. And
what
a loss!”

I'd forgotten about her self-deprecating sense of humour.

“Sit down,” I said. “Have lunch with me. Let's catch up.”

She looked toward the kitchen. “I better not. My boss is the biggest asshole. I'm off at five, though, if you want to get a drink.”

I thought it over as I ate my souvlaki. Why shouldn't I have drinks with Patricia? It didn't have to mean anything. I just hoped she didn't want to have sex. I'd been experiencing erectile difficulties since leaving Frayne. I couldn't even masturbate. Every time I tried, I was flooded with images of Melanie's bruised and mangled body. The idea of sex had become absurd, devoid of all intimacy and function. It was a kind of violence, degrading and potentially lethal.

Thank God for Patricia.

We got hammered at a pub and had a good laugh at Frayne's expense. We called it a pasture of shite, Satan's colon, a third-rate trash hole, the incest hub o' the world. She brought me back to her place and went down on me in her building's stairwell. I think one of her neighbours saw us.

My penis worked.

It was a small miracle.

I conducted my requisite volunteer hours at an elementary school called Precious Blood. I was placed in Mrs. Thurber's grade three class. Mrs. Thurber didn't seem to want me there. She dominated the classroom with her horn-rimmed glasses and thirty-inch pointer, a threat she'd wield like a fencing blade. She referred to me dismissively as “Brendan” or “Mr. Gilroy.”

I sat at the back of the classroom in a metal fold-up chair and kept my mouth shut most of the time. The kids seemed terrified of having a strange man who never said a word looming behind them all day. Who could blame them?

There was one kid, a loner named Justin, who sat in the back corner and paid no attention to Mrs. Thurber or any of his peers. He spent most of the day drawing pictures of robots and monsters in his notebook. He seemed to sense that I was just as bored as he was. One day he started holding up his drawings for me to see. They were done in comic-book style, with an attention to detail that was quite impressive for an eight-year-old.

I gave him the thumbs up. He smiled and started on a new one.

It made me feel that my life was moving in the right direction.

During my second month of school, I got a call from a Dr. Zimmerman from the psych ward at Saint Aiden's. My mother had passed away in her sleep from what stymied medical professionals refer to as “natural causes.” She was sixty-one years old.

I took a Greyhound back to Frayne the next weekend, picked up her ashes, and took the next available bus back to York. There was no point in a funeral. Who would have gone?

It was Patricia who told me to give my mother the send-off she would have wanted.

“What kind of send-off would she have wanted?” I asked.

“She was your mother, Brandon. You tell me.”

I let my mother's ashes sit on my desk for a week. I thought about the state of constant fear in which she'd lived most of her life, and how that was all over. I thought about the ninety-nine percent of me that didn't believe in the absurdity of an afterlife, and how the one percent that did hoped there was a place in heaven for people like my mother. Perhaps the simple fact that she no longer existed, and therefore would no longer suffer, was heaven enough.

I took a bus back to Frayne. Booked a room in a motel, a brand new Super 8 that had been under construction when I'd left. The room smelled like fresh paint.

On Friday night I prowled the graveyard and visited Darcy's headstone. The inscription was the same as what he'd scrawled on his bedroom door in permanent marker: the Oscar Wilde quip, “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” I placed two twigs over his grave and made a crucifix out of them, then stomped on it with my heel, crunching it into bits. A crude cross shape remained. It seemed like the kind of thing Darcy would have appreciated.

On Saturday I went to church. I brought my mother's urn with me.

The pews were mostly empty save a few lonely worshippers, all of them women. I went up to the balcony and looked at the stained-glass windows, then down at the deserted altar. The building hummed. One of the worshippers lit a candle in front of a statue of Mary and left.

I looked up at the ceiling. Six or seven giant fans hung from the rafters, spinning silently as though propelled by sacred air.

I took the lid off my mother's urn and stood up. There was one person left in the church, a middle-aged woman in the second row. I held my breath and flung my mother's ashes upward into the swirl of the fans, again and again, until the urn was empty. A cloud of black dust spread and fell among the pews. The woman did nothing and continued to pray as if all was well. As if, in a world presided over by God, a shower of ashes was a blessing to be ignored.

My bus back to Toronto was leaving on Sunday morning. I didn't feel like sitting around my motel room and coating my lungs with paint fumes, so I decided to take a walk around town, revisit some old haunts.

I felt good, like I'd really accomplished something meaningful at the church, though I didn't fully understand why.

There was a cop car parked in the lot outside Darryl's Doughnuts. I went inside, thinking I might find Darvish or one of his lackeys. It turned out to be a fat patrolman who looked exactly like Bill Barber. I ordered a coffee and a Boston cream doughnut and stared at Bill's lookalike as I ate and drank. He didn't look at me once, just chatted with the teenaged girl behind the counter. She kept asking to see his badge like she didn't believe he was a real cop. I wasn't sure I believed him either.

Afterwards I went to visit my old apartment. I stood on the street outside and stared up at the window above the laundromat. The new tenant had put up leopard-print curtains, and there was a half-drunk bottle of gin on the windowsill. For some reason it occurred to me that a prostitute might live there. I hoped it wasn't Melanie. I didn't press the buzzer to find out.

The windows of The Bloody Paw were covered in newsprint. The place had been shut down. I tried to peek through a torn piece of newspaper, but I couldn't see anything. It was black inside. An abyss. I wondered what had become of all the hunting pictures, the ones I hadn't managed to destroy.

I remembered reading in the
Toronto Star
that Viktor Lozowsky, kidnapper and murderer, had been transferred to Kingston Penitentiary, a maximum security prison in Ontario. He'd probably be back on the streets in a couple of years — if he survived being sodomized on a nightly basis by a six-foot-eight goliath I hoped was named Darcy.

The last place I went to was my mother's old building. I wondered if Red Hot was somewhere inside. Perhaps it had found its way to some kid's equipment bag, some future pro-leaguer who would use it to hit his first home run.

In the distance I saw someone with blazing red hair on a bench outside a bus stop, feeding bread crumbs to a flock of pigeons. It was Melanie. There were two forearm crutches propped against the bench beside her. I could hear the pigeons cooing from where I stood: a warbling chorus of hungry birds.

I looked at her for a long time. She seemed like a different person than the wildcat I'd known. She wasn't just some girl — she was a woman, a real woman, and here she was, very much alive, feeding birds and smiling down at them, because there was still beauty in the world despite all the bad things that can happen, and
she
was a part of that beauty.

After a while, she stood up and fastened the crutches to her arms. The pigeons waddled around her feet like a single entity, some of them fluttering a few feet off the ground before landing again.

She threw one last handful of crumbs in the air. The pigeons burst after them like a feathered wave. She hobbled down the street, away from me, in the direction of my mother's old building. I wanted to run after her. I wanted to look at her face and see forgiveness in it. I wanted her to know that she'd changed my life forever.

But I didn't follow her. Not this time.