The High-Rise in Fort Fierce Read online

  Also by Paul Carlucci:

  A Plea for Constant Motion (2013)

  The Secret Life of Fission (2017)

  THE HIGH-RISE

  IN FORT FIERCE

  PAUL CARLUCCI

  Copyright © 2018 by Paul Carlucci.

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.

  Edited by Bethany Gibson.

  Cover design by Chris Tompkins, christompkinsdesign.com.

  Page design by Jaye Haworth, jayedesign.com.

  Printed in Canada.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Carlucci, Paul, author

  The high-rise in Fort Fierce / Paul Carlucci.

  Short stories.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77310-026-5 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-77310-027-2 (EPUB).

  --ISBN 978-1-77310-028-9 (Kindle)

  I. Title.

  PS8605.A7556H54 2018 C813’.6 C2018-901155-6

  C2018-901156-4

  We acknowledge the generous support of the Government of Canada,

  the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Government of New Brunswick.

  Goose Lane Editions

  500 Beaverbrook Court, Suite 330

  Fredericton, New Brunswick

  CANADA E3B 5X4

  www.gooselane.com

  To the memory of Larry Frolick.

  To his family and many friends.

  CONTENTS

  The High-Rise in Fort Fierce

  Wood Toad

  Horses in Circles

  There Goes the Dog Star

  The Summer I Learned to Fish

  Forty-Two Taxi

  Look at You, Percy

  Florida Is a Beach Real Soon

  As of Right Now

  I

  Norman sucked cold coffee out of his moustache and blinked at Sergeant Morris, who loomed in the door frame like one of those seen-it-all TV cops from the nineties, a straight-up hard case who didn’t give a shit about nothing, no way. His thick fingers dwarfed a notebook. His eyes were cold and appraising and his face had nothing of the pitying smile he offered Norman after last month’s sixth-floor double homicide.

  Back then, Norman was just a simple source of information. He was the landlord at Franklin Place, the building manager and the repairman, too. His family had owned the whole works since they were thrown up in the late sixties. He knew all the tenants, the crazy and the calm and the people afraid of both. He had their details. First names and last. Social insurance numbers. Banking info. He was also the guy who cleaned up the mess, all that blood on the floor and those bone fragments in the drywall, and last month wasn’t the first time, no way, but it didn’t matter to a relative newcomer like Morris. He’d been in the Northwest Territories for over five years, first in Yellowknife and then a transfer to Fort Fierce, but he still got worked up over everything, just couldn’t help himself.

  This morning, the sergeant arrived at Norman’s top-floor apartment with a new set of questions. He stepped inside, uninvited, and Norman immediately cleared the door frame, coughing without covering his mouth. Morris made a slow and deliberate note and then started talking about what he and the other cops had found behind the bullet-blasted walls in apartment 608: mould.

  “It was disgusting, Norman. There was hair on some of it. Like fungal hair. Like the kind of thing you might see around the nose of a pig. You know?”

  Norman opened his mouth, but the sergeant raised a finger and hushed him. He said he had a hunch the whole building was rotten with the stuff. He wanted to see maintenance records, and furthermore, he’d been interviewing tenants, just routine police work, and while Morris had always known Norman was a little off, a little weird, fact was most residents of Franklin Place thought he was extremely off, and extremely weird. The shooting loosened their tongues. It wasn’t the first time, no way, but people wanted it to be the last, so they told a lot of stories, most of which involved Norman, and those that didn’t involved his dad. Morris had heard a lot of these before, during other investigations in the building or just around town. But a new story had come up, a bad story, and here, with a swallow, Norman summoned the courage to interject.

  “No one likes their landlord, Sergeant.” He sniffled and sneezed and wiped his nose with his bare wrist, and when he pulled it away his skin was wet and streaky. “Tenants, they got different ideas on how to live, you know? Different than their landlords. They get angry and they talk behind your back, and that’s all that is.”

  Morris shook his head like he’d been asked a stupid question. “How well did you know that guy, Norman? Monster. Retarded nickname, I think. Was he just a tenant? That’s all? Not an acquaintance? Something like that?”

  Norman nodded at every question, but he didn’t answer them. He didn’t confess. He endured the pressure-cooker silence by studying his own warped reflection in Morris’s RCMP shield: thin hair parted to the left, full and black around the ears; days-old stubble on his cheeks like swipes of motor oil; grey T-shirt clinging to his gut, a size too small, paint spattered all over the chest.

  He lived up there alone, always alone. He never entertained sexual prospects—women—at least not in his apartment. Norman was intensely private. He could barely suffer Morris’s shadow in his door frame, could not imagine a lover getting up in the middle of the night, unaccompanied, padding down his hallway and into his bathroom, sounding off on the porcelain and leafing through his reading material: old TV guides from the eighties and nineties, procured online and stuffed inside a wooden basket bequeathed by his grandmother.

  “I think it’s best if I go ahead and call in some building inspectors to poke around your place here,” said Morris, stepping back into the hallway and giving Norman a final, salivating once-over. “As for the rest of it, we’ll be in touch.”

  Morris rapped his knuckles against the door jamb, turned his back, and walked toward the elevators, leaving a muddy mess on the threshold and tracks down the hall, but at least those didn’t matter so much thanks to the black, zero-pattern carpets Norman had put down throughout the building after his dad died. He swallowed again, hard. His sock feet thumped the floor as he hurried to the kitchen to soak some paper towel. It was raining outside, a windy day in late spring, ditches overflowing with dead leaves soaked almost into a paste.

  He crouched to dab up the mud from Morris’s boots. He heard the elevator door slide open, then closed, and he exhaled long and heavy. He locked the apartment door, all its chains and bolts, and then he poured his third cup of coffee. He walked into the living room and sank, eyes clenched, into the couch. He could feel the underground sixteen storeys below. He imagined Morris down there, poking around and scribbling notes, handcuffs clinking against the small of his back. Would it be so bad if he found what he was looking for? Because what did it matter if Monster was dead? Someone else would take his place, or something else, and Norman had long grown tired of taking money from people like that, of giving a home to their misery, cultivating it, cutting off pieces and stashing them underground.

  He sucked another load of coffee out of his moustache and blinked at the floor. On the windowsill behind his elbow was an Inukshuk, a novelty version of the huge old thing at the entrance to town. Over the winter, someone spray-painted the real version black. They sent an anonymous letter to the local paper and s
aid the Inukshuk was an Inuit symbol, not Dene. It was inappropriate. It was offensive. At the time, Norman thought about asking some of the Indians who rented on six what they thought of it, because his mother’s father had been Cree. Or something. He wasn’t sure. But the man had been some kind of Indian, and so maybe Norman could’ve knocked on a door or two, asked around a little. But then there was the shooting, and he was glad he didn’t, because those people could be dangerous.

  But even if they weren’t, what would they have talked about? He didn’t hate the real Inukshuk. He hated his mini version, but he wasn’t going to paint it black or throw it out. He kept it because it’d been in his family since his grandfather cut the ribbon on the building decades earlier, and Norman had once taken it very seriously, had seen it as one of the few necessary objects in his life, and it was hard to destroy something like that, or even explain it.

  He wiped his palm across the top of his head and managed a tiny, relieved smile. Morris was right. Norman Franklin was guilty. But it wasn’t his fault.

  II

  Summer time, a sticky day in late July, all the townspeople cranked and groggy from half a season of sunny midnights. Tommy Franklin cut the loose red ribbon slung across the front door of the building that bore his family name in stone above the entrance. Not far below his feet was the Maxim gun he’d snuck underground the night before, and also the narrow, sagging cot he planned to sleep on before flying home the following day.

  The local paper’s lone photographer flashed off a dozen photos: Tommy with a pair of novelty scissors, Tommy shaking hands with the mayor, Tommy throwing wide the doors, Tommy waving in the crowd. Franklin Place was the tallest building for miles, thrusting sky-high in a region of two-storey structures. Its opening day would merit a photo spread, no question.

  But his smile was fake and tight. He didn’t like all this exposure, the pounding sun and onlooking droves. He tried to visualize his son playing with toy cars in front of the hearth of their home in Forest Hill. A merciful breeze swept up the walkway, caught the ribbon ends, and gave them a festive rustle. Tommy’s smile relaxed and he greeted people as they drifted inside.

  Along came middle and upper management from the fish plant and diamond mines, all moustaches and sideburns, wives and children impressed by the sparkling lobby floors and elevators with mirrors on the doors. Along came senior bureaucrats on contract for two years apiece, free flights home for Christmas, cufflinks and fountain pens: I’ll take one with a view of the lake. Some people were transferred from Toronto or Montreal to manage the banks. Others owned the local taverns and were too hip and young to buy houses and cut the grass or shovel the driveway. They had designs on a minibar in the corner of the room, next to the balcony door, scotch whisky, and they’d sip it neat as they took in the view, the smattering of buildings way below, the sometimes choppy lake and the river flowing south into the forest. There were waterfalls half a day’s hike away, just perfect for a picnic. Tommy’s team leased half the units by noon, the rest by the end of the month.

  That first night, Tommy lay in his underwear on top of a yellow wool blanket, the cot sagging under his weight. His suit hung from a clothing rack across the room. His eyes fretted shapes in the shadows. He laced his fingers over his stomach and counted through a sequence of deep breathing.

  It was midnight, blazing bright outside, but down in the underground, the only light came from a single bulb hung from a thin white string in the centre of the room. The walls were concrete, painted the colour of gun smoke, and Tommy wished he could stand up and slide between the paint and the wall, vanish once and for all. But he couldn’t do that, even if it were possible. He had his family to look after. He owed them a little bravery.

  That was the thing about his underground. It was inherently defensive, and yet not without offensive features too. He’d spent huge reserves of his fortune jackhammering shields of rock and permafrost so he could pour concrete into a small subsurface apartment, complete with a bathroom, the whole thing no bigger than a one-bedroom apartment in the building proper. He directed his architect to omit the rooms from the blueprints. He brought his builders in from out of town and told them not to start the laborious dig until they’d erected the outside walls of the superstructure. He’d paid generously for everyone’s silence, and all throughout the operation he prayed no one would strike a deposit of gold or diamonds or anything else his hush money couldn’t compete against. Every dollar had been lovingly spent, and now, for the first time, he could sleep in the chambers of his strategy.

  Tommy had no intention of ever using the Maxim gun. It was only a symbol. Counting through another series of sharp exhalations, he allowed his eyes to move from the shadows to the foreleg of the gun’s tripod, which emerged from the darkness and caught the yellow glow of the light bulb. The gun was from Paris, purchased from an antique arms dealer who assured him it was found in an abandoned Nazi weapons cache.

  Tommy had gone to war when he was nineteen. His chain-smoking father had taken over the family shipping business a few years before. The man was a distinguished veteran of the Great War and felt Tommy was too soft to one day assume the corporate helm, so he pressed him into the service. Tommy was lucky enough to survive the Normandy invasion. He climbed a cliff out of the ocean, saw horrendous things, and performed without distinction of any kind. He’d come across a few gun dumps himself, and maybe, he liked to think, he’d even seen this very weapon in the centre of a kindergarten classroom, dust-filled sunlight reaching through the venetian blinds and a wedding ring on the floor next to a table leg, everything ruined and then renewed and soon to be ruined again.

  He wasn’t scared back then. Not like now. The fear had come on slowly. He’d skipped duty in the Korean War, opting to stay home and learn the minutiae of northern shipping routes, where the company aspired to expand. He chased a girl he’d known since college, and in a warm and easy way they progressed first to marriage, then to pregnancy, and then into the home in Forest Hill, only a few blocks from his parents. Like everyone else, he’d watched the news about Sputnik and was amazed the Americans hadn’t made it to space first. A few days later, his car radio started acting up. He thought he could hear someone talking under the static, but it only lasted for an afternoon and he figured he was just exhausted. There’d been long hours and endless meetings about the potential takeover of a tugboat company that shipped goods the length of the Mackenzie River. To prepare for these, Tommy stayed up most nights researching isolated communities in the Northwest Territories: what were their needs and would the government one day build a highway that might make a tugboat venture costly and superfluous?

  His father started forgetting things not long after William was born. Simple things at first, like meetings and phone calls. But then bigger things, like how to get from Forest Hill to the office. A year later, Tommy went to his parents’ house for a late evening meeting, and he found his dad standing naked in the backyard with a dinner roll. The family doctor diagnosed his father with Alzheimer’s, said it was unusual to strike a man younger than sixty-five, but there was nothing else it could be.

  A year after that, his dad had a massive heart attack in the shower. His mother was almost sixty by then. Her bones started to hurt. Her joints and her muscles. She said she’d seen this same thing happen to her parents at the end of their lives, the death of one and the fatal devastation of the other. She thought she’d be prepared, but there was nothing she could do. Grief just smothered her. Her depression got progressively worse, her medications progressively stronger, and then one day Tommy found her dead on the living room couch, arm dangling, coffee cup overturned on the floor. Police said it looked like an accident because there was no suicide note, but he had his doubts.

  He was lost without his parents, a duck blown out of the sky, spiralling to the hounds. He kept this from Emily and didn’t betray the slightest anxiety to William, but then Khrushchev outfitted the Cubans with a nuclear arsenal and the whole world seemed to flip ove
r in space. He’d never forget the night Kennedy ordered the naval quarantine. He crept around the house until early morning, turning on the radios, listening with his ear up to the speaker, standing up and peering out the windows into the thick black sky then crouching in front of the radio again. He locked himself in the bathroom and cried for an hour, and after that he got in his car and drove to work, radio on, radio off, his finger hovering over the dial, radio on.

  At work, he cancelled his meetings and assigned the company’s daily operations to his vice-president. Then he devoted himself to the design, financing, and construction of Franklin Place, and now, ensconced in the underground almost eight years later, he could admit that, yes, he did plan to use the guns in the next room. They were Heckler & Koch, all of them: a submachine gun, a sniper rifle, and a light support machine gun. For his wife and son, he had two machine pistols, semi-automatic but with three-round automatic bursts. Tommy thought William might be able to handle one of the larger weapons by his thirteenth birthday, but that was still a few years away, so hopefully they wouldn’t be needed before then. Maybe, if things seemed stable, they’d never be needed. But if they were, if things truly did collapse, Emily wouldn’t be able to handle a high-powered firearm. The kickback alone would mash her chest to putty. And anyway, she would have trouble aiming the pistols. Her tremors wouldn’t allow it. But that was perfectly acceptable as long as she stayed with Tommy and William, because they would fire a fusillade.

  The breathing exercises eventually worked, and Tommy’s eyelids grew thick and leaden. His last thoughts before sleep were dedicated to the symmetry of things. He marvelled at the layers of events and the mobility of objects, at how he now prepared for a Russian invasion with German hardware, even while, in the same room, he maintained a trophy of war waged against the latter nation. The Maxim gun had abetted the expansion of the British Empire, and now, in charcoal across his eyelids, he saw thin, proper men squinting beneath Stanley caps as they rolled, on wagon wheels, early models into the theatre of war. It could happen again, that sort of warfare, but this time it would be the Soviets, and it was unlikely they’d invade the west, rather just bombard it with intercontinental ballistic missiles, which meant survival was a question of lying low in the remote north, well-armed in the event of social collapse.