The High-Rise in Fort Fierce Page 17

  Good lord.

  I slug my beer. Number four in forty minutes. It’s just me and Rick and I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t come. I don’t bother to remark on his shirt. Fuck his shirt. That moment has come and gone, like everything else. But just like everything else, part of it hangs back and makes us both uncomfortable. A silence sits between us. Our throats bob as we swallow. We tap the table with our thumbs, eyes on the floor. I belch and rub my gut.

  Under the table, my feet are burning from athlete’s foot. Itching, but in a smouldering way I can’t really describe. If I start scratching now, I’ll never be able to stop. I’ll claw through my shoes and socks and into my bones, oh yeah. I’ll have to skip out on the rest of the party, my feet shredded to ribbons. Which isn’t a bad idea.

  I’m about to ask for different music when sirens squawk in the parking lot: whoop whoop! Both our heads jerk toward the window, his faster than mine. He even springs a little, bonks the table with his knee and stabs a hand out to steady his beer. Poised.

  But it’s only Gagnon fucking around. He throws open the door without knocking, slams it shut behind him, and tracks mud through the foyer into the kitchen. “Well, well,” he says, and it’s obvious he’s just experienced an incident: something feral all over his lean, stubbled face, and a very faint sheen of sweat on his forehead, wiped away a few times but pushing ever on through, the way it insists on doing when you’re really and truly exhausted. “Sergeant Roger Morris joins the masses. Is that the reason for tonight’s pig roast?”

  The fridge door gasps as he opens it, bottles of beer and a jar of pickles rattling in the door. Gagnon grabs one and chews the cap off, spits it into the sink: tlink! He sits down at the table and chuckles at Rick, his beer foaming idly as he tosses his chin in my direction.

  “Morris,” he says. “Did you tell him?”

  “Steve.”

  “Morris here shoulda told you about our Faggoty Shirt Rule.” Gagnon wipes what remains of the sweat from his forehead. “It’s a simple rule, Rick, even for new fellers like yourself.”

  Rick mans up with a grin, deflects the joust and rushes at the intrigue, giving me a side-peek as he unloads: “What’s with the sweat, Sarg? You just come from dinner?”

  Gagnon snorts, slumps in his chair, sighs. He looks blotchy surrounded by all these jaundiced walls and matching furniture, vinyl tiles on the floor like smokers’ teeth. He’s got grey hair now, a thin peninsula jutting out onto his forehead, strands combed back to join the rest. He shakes his head, like he’s got water in his ears. He looks old.

  “Ah, fuck,” he says, waving his hand. “Fuckin’ little park shits, eh, Morris?”

  I roll my eyes. He comes out with this story about a foot chase down a melting Ski-Doo trail. Kid was throwing ice at cars. Gagnon saw him dart out of the woods and take out the taillight of a sedan. Had to give chase, sped right up to the trail in his cruiser, yanked the keys out of the ignition and leapt out of the vehicle—one smooth move. He tramped down the trail at a canter, listening for cracking sticks, splashing puddles, heaving lungs.

  “And then I just fuckin’ fell down,” he says, smacks his palms together for emphasis. “Plop. Like a turd in a toilet.”

  Rick slaps the table and starts cackling, his shirt glistening as he moves. Audacity on this kid. Weighs a ton. Gagnon just stares at him, which probably looks like more hard-ass shit to Rick, but I can clearly see the humiliated pride. Ol’ guy fell down!

  “That’s what I’m up against here?” Rick’s trying to chew back his laughter, maybe realizing he’s crossed a line.

  Now it’s Gagnon’s turn to laugh. “Fuck, my son, that ain’t shit. Is it, Morris?”

  “Steve,” I point out, and this concludes the first hour of my retirement party.

  II

  Norman Franklin vanished after they condemned the high-rise. Just for a little while, mind you, and I remember when they found him. Everyone in Fort Fierce remembers that. It’s like one of those shared memories, like 9/11 or the moon landing or some shit.

  It was uncanny, all those people booted into the streets, not enough vacant units in town to accommodate everyone. Half the Natives went back to the reserve across the river, which good riddance. No offense. The volunteers and transients, they all went back to wherever they came from: Europe; down south. Everyone else I guess piled in with family, pressed themselves into the couch cushions, waited for a cheap shot at the trailer parks. They all came sloping out the front doors, duffel bags and suitcases on squeaky wheels, tattered couches between them, coffee tables. Bunch of refugees. But no sign of Norman.

  The boys used dynamite to drop the high-rise. Dust blew through town like some goliath sneezing. Took them forever to clean the site up, too. Just this eyesore in the middle of Old Town: twisted rebar, crumbling concrete, pipes pointing in a thousand directions. After that, the surrounding neighbourhoods went even more to shit. The two corner stores closed. The grocery store relocated across town, and they say the elementary school’s up next.

  Once all the building debris was cleaned up, the underground came yawning at us like a weary secret. Talk about eccentric. A kind of two-bedroom apartment, one room full of 1970s firearms and an antique Gatling gun, and the next room full of Norman Franklin’s broken, bloody pieces surrounded by mountains of cash.

  Shot himself in the face. His body was months old, skin tight and all kinds of rotten colours, but mostly black, like the mould I saw behind the walls on six. His face had collapsed into a half-wink around the entry wound. The back of his head was obliterated. Norman was like a Halloween decoration, so gory it was almost stupid.

  Safest for everyone.

  Hadn’t I said that?

  No one likes their landlord, Sergeant.

  That was his defence, right? Social isolation?

  III

  My pub is called On Ice, and, yes, it’s in Old Town, because the rent’s cheap, that’s why. I dreamt it up on patrol, one of those nights of heavy darkness, neither stars nor aurora, but blankets of snow commanding a silence from the town, and me idling in front of the high-rise, listening to the radio, volume soft, watching the building.

  I don’t have much in the way of savings. I’ll be honest here. I’ve robbed drug dealers. We all do it once in a while is what Gagnon told me, hands up like, oops, fuck, oh well. But this is a small market, and even though dope is more expensive here than down south, there’s never that much cash on hand. So I borrowed as well, from the bank, and from Marly.

  I’m all in On Ice is what I’m saying.

  I remember the nightlife heyday when I first moved to Fort Fierce. I remember a number of pubs in operation, both in New Town and Old. Four in all, one for every thousand or so folks in the Fort, each one stuffed with men and women and Natives and whites, managers and labourers, teachers, town councillors, and technicians. Lotta drinking.

  But then, sometimes, Fort Fierce just shuts down. The money disappears. The economy slumps. People get drunk in their living rooms instead. That’s a bit of what’s happening right now, I think. And here’s me, opening a pub to remake myself.

  As of right now, I’ve been retired for three weeks. I got this building off the Mackenzie Highway and I’m open for business. I have three TVs over the bar. Flat screens: hockey, boxing, Deer Hunter with the sound off. I’ve got a stereo playing classic rock and country. There are booths and a pool table. There’s ambient lighting.

  “Sergeant Morris.”

  It takes me a second. This old man with thick grey hair and freckles on his cheeks. He’s trim, but not in a healthy way. He’s got dark, heavy eyelids that are somehow bereaved. His cheeks are trying to disappear into his mouth.

  This is Dylan Perrin’s father, must be over eighty years old. Out for a drink at the new pub. A social call.

  “Please, Mr. Perrin,” I say, trying to be genial. “Call me Steve.”

  “Rum and ginger. Double.” He sits at the bar and reaches for a newspaper. “On the house, Sergeant. Just
this once.”

  Dylan Perrin was before my time. Gagnon’s, too. But stories of the guy echoed down the line. He wasn’t like the other dealers in Fort Fierce. Most of them kept a low profile, made their money on the hush, and stuck to the high-rise or took off into the bush to celebrate, maybe a flight to Edmonton or Yellowknife to cause shit in those bars.

  But Perrin declared himself. Once he walked down Main Street at two a.m. in the summertime, shirt off, tattoos on his ribs unrecognizable, discharging a .22 at the sunny horizon. Cop drove behind him, two clicks an hour, service weapon pointed out the window at his head, waiting for him to level the gun and take a shot from the hip. But in the parking lot at Franklin Place, Perrin chucked the rifle in the dumpster. He kneeled on the asphalt and interlaced his fingers on the back of his shorn head. He got six months in the correctional centre, which time he spent beading sheaths for cigarette lighters. Came out with a big, red beard. Completely ludicrous, you ask me.

  Dylan probably would’ve endured a long life of such follies, probably would’ve graduated to medium-security prison sentences. Maybe a rough experience in the showers: not rape, but violence. Maybe his liver would’ve quit or his heart would’ve stopped. Maybe he would’ve had kids and turned his life around. Won the lottery. But Dylan Perrin disappeared before anything like that could happen. There were a lot of rumours. Maybe half-truths. We were told his woman took him out, but it just didn’t seem likely. She was too small for a job like that. Apparently there’d be little traces of her in the high-rise, here and there. Someone knocked her up. She had the baby in Edmonton. Better hospitals. Then she quit town a few months later. The investigation was a lost cause. We didn’t put in the legwork. We didn’t really care.

  And now this old man, assuming free drinks, like every ex-cop owes him a debt.

  Marly finally shows up. An hour late. The door slams behind her—tunk!—and she comes waddling up to the bar, her thin lips moving: Sorry, Steve! She throws a spring jacket behind the bar, does a round of the room, makes sure everyone has their drinks, my opening night clientele of a half a dozen patrons.

  “Readings,” she explains when she lumbers behind the bar to pull a pint. “I had four tonight. Can you believe it? But sorry, I’m late.”

  “No problem,” I say, standing behind the bar like I’m lost back there, no clue how I managed to serve the few people already here. Ice melts in the sink, naturally, and it occurs to me that the air is causing this change of state. It’s not the water all by itself.

  I’m not especially hot for Marly, but we hook up often enough. She used to date this oddball photographer from down south, one of those losers with familial roots in the north, but he couldn’t make do wherever he was brought up, so he came north full of romantic bullshit, thought he’d find himself, find his art. They dated for a few years. He even had a little exhibition of his photos at the library. Marly had her picture in the paper standing beside him. And then one day he had a nervous breakdown, couldn’t make do up here either, and now he sells mattresses in a department store in Calgary.

  That’s the rumour, anyway. But there are lots of rumours where Marly’s concerned. She pretty much invites speculation, innuendo. Scorn. It’s all that fortune-teller shit she’s into. Of course, once she just came out with it, started telling people about her supposed powers, divination and the kind of thing from TV, wouldn’t you know there’s a bunch of losers in town who want to be just like her, same deal. Best thing that’s ever happened, as far as she’s concerned. Acceptance, right here at home.

  I guess the main thing is I’m not into big girls. No offence. I’m just not, and it can’t be helped. I’m big myself, and bald, too, so I know what it’s like to carry the burden. But really I guess it’s just Marly’s availability that I like.

  I’ll be honest here, as of right now, the only thing that gets me going when Marly and I fool around is grainy, slide-projector-type memories of when we found that twelve-year-old girl rotting upriver like lettuce in the forest. A Native girl, long hair and pit-black eyes. We found her with candy bar wrappers in her pockets, Snickers or something, and a cigarette lighter clenched in one of her devastated hands, fingernails torn away, defensive wounds.

  It’s not the girl I’m into, don’t get me wrong, just this weird little detail, somehow separate from the carnage all around: a hot-pink and black polka-dot brassiere dangling from a tree above the body, and all around little puffs of pollen blowing, like snowflakes maybe. Or ashes, I don’t know. Point is, the image comes to mind, unbidden, when I lay down with Marly. It fires me up, guess you could say.

  That’s probably damage from the job, I think. It does havoc to your mind, twists it in ways you don’t expect, and trust me, man, racism isn’t half as dark as it gets. No way.

  IV

  I’m lying on the ground outside my pub, three in the morning and the sky overcast but bright. Got my cheek plastered to the asphalt. Got blood trickling down the pitch of my scalp, into the chute of my neck. My head’s thumping like a colt, and in between the beats my feet are burning with mould. Behind me, the door window is busted. Some fucker robbed me, I guess.

  There’s an awful lot of violence around here, when you think about it. We found Dylan Perrin’s bones piled inside a wooden chest stashed in a deep-woods hunting cabin. That was my first week on the job in Fierce. The cabin was derelict, a place for kids to meet up on ATVs and dirt bikes, get drunk and screw each other all weekend. One of them made a call. Said his buddy had swung an axe into the box, imagined it full of money, gasped and ran away from the heap of bones. There were grooves in the limbs, the coroner said, probably from a saw. And his skull had been caved in like an eggshell. Blunt-force trauma.

  Mine too, feels like.

  V

  The sun’s getting to Rick. He’s sitting at his desk in the detachment, yawning and rubbing his eyes. I know how it goes: you can’t sleep when you’re supposed to, can’t stay awake when you’re not. He’s got a couple empty cups of gas-station coffee on his desk, a few more in the metal trash can by his feet. Tacked into his cubicle wall is a picture of a cherry basket, overflowing with fresh fruit. Forlorn with insomnia, he’s staring at it when I slouch into the station.

  “Rick,” I say, leaning against his desk, studying the cherries. “Didn’t know you were so into fruits.”

  It’s a stupid joke. He doesn’t even get it, turns his head slowly away and meets my eyes. He musters a tiny, insincere smile, dredges his throat, and slurps his coffee.

  “Morris,” he says, gesturing absently for me to sit in a chair that isn’t actually nearby.

  “Steve,” I remind him. “I’m okay to stand.”

  He shows me some intake pictures of a dumb-faced Native kid, maybe twenty-eight, name of Jimmy Buggins, has feral front teeth separating his lips and his eyes a bit too far apart. Shaved head. Acne scars like plague. Mother probably drank.

  “We picked him up yesterday swiping gin and whisky from the liquor store,” Rick says, tapping the photo with uncut fingernails. “Kid was pickled,” he adds, even though they’re probably the same age.

  “I know him,” I mutter. “Say, let me sit down a second.”

  Rick squishes his face up, like standing on my account is some quaint old bullshit he can’t abide. I move for the chair anyway, angle my considerable ass toward its cushion, and he decants out the side like a bucket of mop water spilling across the floor. My feet are throbbing and I kick off my sneakers to scratch them. I don’t care how it looks.

  “Well,” says Rick, pretending not to notice, “he confessed to the robbery at your place when we caught him for the bottles. Little pussy started sobbing in the back of the prowler. And then threw up. We put him in the tank and he couldn’t remember fuck all the next morning, just lay on the floor visibly trembling. No control, a lot of these people, eh?”

  I remember this: Jimmy threw a rock at me once. Not a very big one, and anyway I don’t hold a grudge. But I remember clearly: Gagnon laughing, givin
g the kid a thumbs-up, contempt coming off him like a heat wave. Flood water in the parking lot nearly up to our knees that spring, and a few nosey neighbours gathered outside the front doors of the high-rise, standing in the water like shit-stained flamingoes, trash floating along the surface as we escorted Percy Buggins to our little police boat—perp walk, is what we usually call that little parade, but more like a perp swim that year—and me still blaring adrenaline from the scene up on six: a love triangle all gored up, the lady’s face creampale and all the blood drained out of her stomach, tits blown away, a pool of blood on the bathroom floor, her drug-slinging lover face down in the hallway, shot through the back of the head, pellet holes in the metal wall-studs, a thicket of mould speckled with blood. There’s Percy naked in the tub and me with my gun on him and telling him to get up real slow, and he touches the girl’s face on his way up, like there, there, the worst is over, and he puts his bloody clothes on and seems to move for the shotgun, and we’ve both got our weapons on him and we’re bellowing threats, and he looks so completely resigned in his bloody clothes, coveralls from the town’s operations department, and he just shrugs and kisses the lady on her pasty, dead cheeks, whispers something in her ear. Downstairs, Jimmy throws the rock and it cuts across my jaw, leaves a thin white scar, and he screams, Don’t touch my brother, you fuckin’ pig!

  “Drop the charges,” I say, wriggling my foot back into my shoe. “For my bar, anyway. Kid’s got enough problems, don’t you think?”

  Rick blows his lips out, little trumpet of scorn. “Really? You don’t want your money back? I thought it was the deposit for your opening night.”

  I don’t answer and he sniggers.

  “I guess you’re hoping business picks up, eh, buddy?”