a wizened little monkey face, lips screwed up, his rock & roll all pain and attitude. Her: hair fringed like a sixties hippie, eyes staring from some forgotten acid trip, like she’s haunted by a memory fixed in her brain that won’t let go. Still, she’s neatly put together: white blouse belted on over tight black jeans, Nancy Sinatra boots, good cleavage even in the light. She’s over fifty, but then he might be nearly twice that.
One of the sure signs of being an alcoholic is when your three best friends are bartenders. These two had friends in spades, while all around them sat the tired faces of the hard-working men and women who looked like little more than deflated balloons and empty overcoats draped over chairs. What they all had in common was the uncelebrated lot of the working man and woman.
The singer sent the notes skyward with a particularly inventive phrasing to his rendition. “Go, Georgie!” some die-hard rock & roller called out, with Grace cheering him on. Made for each other, the pair was. She put her hand on the inside of his thigh, let it creep upwards with a raucous laugh, like it was an old joke they were sharing. The tune turned and he began to crow like a rooster, quenching thirst and drowning troubles as one. A covering of chartreuse over iodine: “The Green, Green Grass of Home” had never sounded so agonizingly verdant.
Dan reeled into his pocket and pulled out a mash of bills, peeled two off and slapped them onto the table. Maggie Smith came over and snapped them up, teeth stained chromium yellow like unpolished silverware.
Over by the door, a stain seemed to be trying to ooze into the shag without much success. Dan sidestepped it and staggered from the bar to stand breathing in the night air. That good clean Sudbury air, bought and paid for by the generosity of Inco.
Mist hissed from the sewer grates where shadows huddled against the cold, home to the unlucky and unloved. The cityscape faded into grey over the disembodied forms of a pair of unhappy wraiths. They glanced up at his passing. Purple hair and nose rings. Where did they get the money? Nifty hair and piercings didn’t come cheap.
Dan walked on, trying to imagine his life if he’d stayed. Where would he be now if he hadn’t taken that first step onto the tarmac of the 69, never lifted his thumb, opened the cab of the truck and said with stunning alacrity as though he’d done the same thing a million times before, “I’m heading for TO”? Stacking empties at the LCBO, probably, or driving a cab or even working as a clerk at the gleaming new taxation centre. Or maybe he would have died, one fistfight too many, the blinding flash of a brain hemorrhage followed by everlasting blackness. A line on a tombstone to indicate his whereabouts underground. But he would never, ever be working underground. Not for Inco. Not for Falconbridge Mines. Not for anybody.
Maybe he’d be the older man groping the teenaged striplings with their nervous eyes and taut tummies, jeans sloping down to reveal, pinked and toned, those smooth, muted buttocks, watching with quiet patience, one hand on his rod, while the trestle trembled and a boy timed his ejaculations to spew over his fist at the shriek of a train passing overhead in the dull monotony of a summer’s afternoon, as the brooding older man with the scar on his right temple tried to recollect the shape of the future. His future. While the dark, mutinous side of him tried, and failed, to imagine the rest of his life.
Dan shook off the image. Memory’s way was perilous.
He hadn’t gone a block before his bladder nagged him to stop and take care of business. He looked around and stepped inside a cul-de-sac, like ducking into a darkened church, standing a few feet out of sight from the road while he fumbled with his fly and relieved himself. He looked down and laughed: You’re pretty sizeable. He thought of the shocked look on the cyclist’s face as he pushed him against the fence. He sprayed a box labelled with a brand of tissue papers, the drops splattering back at him, managing to wet his fingers in the draw. This, he knew, was the prelude to sloppy drunk. He was halfway through his meditations when he heard the voices. He swayed toward the dark and hoped he’d finish before they appeared or else that they would pass quickly and not look into the alley’s dim depths and see him at prayer.
Shadows appeared over his shoulder, thrown long by the street lamps. From the sound of their footsteps he knew they’d turned down the entrance to the alley. He still had the presence of mind to feel embarrassed at being caught. He shook himself and zipped up before turning, ready to smile and laugh at his predicament.
At first he took them for an older couple. They looked burnt-out wisps of human beings. She appeared to be arguing, stumbling while leaning against him as they moved closer. Then he recognized them as the forms huddled on the sewer grates.
She looked him up and down, sizing him up for something. A coffin, maybe. “What are you doing, fuckhead? You fucking pissing in the street?”
A part of his brain considered this: not the nicest of greetings. Certainly not words to cheer you at two in the morning in a back alley. They continued toward him with their jerky, spastic walk, propping each other up like badly conjoined twins. Purple hair glinted in the moonlight. She wore a tight clingy skirt and leopard print leotards. The boy was in jeans with a black T. A tattooed dragon clawed its way up his throat and wrapped itself around his neck. Both had on pricey leather jackets. Between them they had enough piercings to fill a small jewellery box. Must’ve been hell getting through airport security.
“Did you hear me? I said what are you doing?” She snarled like a Ringwraith. There should have been smoke wreathing from her lips. “I want money, you cocksucker!” Her arm clutched a purse in a ridiculous parody of a woman. “How much you got, fuckin’ dickhead?”
“Yeah!” said the guy. “We want your money. How much you got?” He laughed and rattled a chain wrapped around his fist. They were close enough for Dan to see their faces. The flat-eyed, no-mind stare of heroin addicts doing their diddly dance. Sid and Nancy in On The Town.
“Scum,” Dan mumbled.
The chain quivered in quick junkie twitches. “You talkin’ to me?” the boy demanded. Make that Sid and Nancy in Taxi Driver. The perfect couple. She had a cunt for a mouth; he had an arsehole for a brain.
Behind him, a fire escape traced a route to the roof, but it was blocked above the first floor. The only way out of the alley lay behind this highly colourful odd couple. At least Sally would be impressed. Dan reasoned he could bluff his way out or, if it came to it, he could manage the two of them without much trouble. They weren’t big and they were addicts. They were probably used to rolling drunks who couldn’t put up much of a fight. Then again, he was drunk.
They moved faster than he expected. She swung the purse, clipping Dan on the bridge of the nose with a wallop. His hands went up to his face as his throat constricted in rage. The sky pitched, shrank, then resumed normal proportions above. The brick had found its mark.
Sid raised an arm to follow up with the chain. Fuelled by anger and pain, Dan booted him in the balls. The boy staggered and fell to the sidewalk, the slither of leather on concrete. Through his outraged howl, Dan heard the click. Something glinted. Metal. Longer and sharper than a piercing. Nancy came at him, blade in hand, suddenly looking more than capable as Sid writhed on the ground. She would have at him for her man. Adrenaline surged like lightning. With no time for niceties, Dan kicked her in the stomach and sent her and her purple hair reeling.
He watched, awed by the slow-motion trajectory as she flipped and rolled and landed against the curb. Her head hit, making an ugly, disturbing sound like the clack of false teeth. She lay still. Was she breathing? In that light, it was impossible to tell. If anyone came around the corner, they’d be calling him the assailant. The boy would claim he’d attacked them. That he’d been bigger and faster — maybe fast enough to kill a teenaged girl. Self-defence had brought out the knife.
Over
