One Hit Wonders Read online

  “Well, in that case, I will leave you and Gosse here to figure out the details. The less I know about your end, the better. Where can I drop you guys?”

  “Drop us at Fiddler’s Green,” Gosse says.

  “Fiddler’s Green it is.”

  12

  THERE’S A BLOOD spatter on the door of Fiddler’s Green. Below it, on the doorstep, is an ovoid gob of limey phlegm shot through with streaks of red. It’s about the size of a songbird’s egg and sits neatly on a cushion of beige-coloured dust. The sidewalk is littered with glass shards and what looks like strips torn off a denim jacket. Almost redundant is the note stapled to the doorframe that says, “Closed until further notice.”

  Both Gosse and Snuffy shrug. Without saying a thing, they turn right and right again onto George Street. They stop into one of the hole-in-the-wall bars that seem to open and shut before anyone has a chance to even learn their names.

  The bar has a maritime theme. It’s the kind of place where tourists line up at night to drink a tot of rum, kiss a codfish on the lips, and recite some ridiculous oath that will make them honorary Newfoundlanders. The bar counter is a sheet of polyurethane embedded with plastic seahorses, starfish and sea urchins. There is a porthole in the kitchen door. A wooden trident, spray painted silver, hangs over the bar. A toy puffin wearing a yellow raincoat and matching sou’wester stands on the cash register. Static hiss rolls in waves from stereo speakers hanging from the ceiling in fishing net hammocks. Snuffy stares up at them, trying to decide if the effect is intentional or if the bartender has forgotten to change the tape.

  Gosse orders beer and the two men make their way to the farthest corner of the almost empty room. The only other people in the bar are playing the VLTs.

  “Jesus, man, this is a lot to take in,” says Snuffy. “Think Al is on the up and up?”

  “Pretty sure he is.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “His arm.”

  “What about his arm?”

  “His left arm—notice it?”

  “No.”

  “The way it hangs by his side; he hardly moves it and when he does, it has this shake in it, right?”

  “Didn’t notice that. What I noticed is that he walks kind of funny, like he’s always about to break into a gallop.”

  “That’s right. And the way he stares. All the fucking time staring. And there’s that fake Southern accent. The guy’s from Ottawa.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No lie. First I thought he was a narc trying to throw everyone off the scent. But now I reckon he puts on that drawl to hide the slur in his speech.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying old Al could be my Uncle Marty.”

  “Shaky M?”

  “Ya.”

  “Shit. You mean Al has…What do you call it again?”

  “Parkinson’s. Changes things a little bit.”

  “Sure does. How so?”

  “He’s a golfer. And he’s all washed up. He needs a big score fast, needs the cash.”

  “Kind of makes him on the up and up.”

  “Makes him our bitch.”

  “Exactly. We’re the ones pulling this thing off. We’re the ones who will have the money. There is no way he can rip us off.”

  “Shit. We could rub out the two of them. Take it all.”

  “C’mon, b’y. Get fucking serious.”

  “Five hundred grand. Jesus. And it’s just there for the taking.”

  “Sounds easy, right. But that means we have to be extra careful. We need to plan this thing right down to the last detail.”

  “Right on, like what kind of masks do we wear? I can’t see myself wearing one of those Planet of the Apes jobs. Rubber masks break me out in a rash. I say we go with stockings. That way you can wear it under your hat and pull it down when the time comes. Or if you’re wearing a hoodie you can wear the stocking on the back of your head and just pull it down when you needs it, right? What do you think: stocking-with-toque or stocking-with-hood?”

  Gosse covers his face with his hands.

  “I say toque,” says Snuffy, “And I’ll tell you why. Because a hat moves with your head but a hood don’t. Last winter I had this great Canadiens toque until I went on the beer one night and lost it. Next day was freezing so I put on my Rams hoodie and went to walk back to the bar to see if they found my wallet. What can I say? It was a large night. Anyway, what I noticed was this: crossing the road is not so easy when you’re wearing a hoodie. Go to turn your head and the hood don’t turn with you. Your head kind of turns into the hood. You get blinded in one eye. If you wants to see with both eyes you have to twist your whole upper body, not just turn your head. That could be real bad for you, my son—you with your bulging disk. You with your bad back. You with your lumbar number…What?”

  Gosse groans. “Snuff, b’y, just shut up. Just shut the fuck up. The fucking head gear is the least of it.”

  “No, b’y, the head gear’s important. We don’t want Freddy to ID us. He’ll recognize us for sure.”

  “What do you mean he’ll recognize us? What are you talking about?”

  “Freddy, buddy in the picture, is the same guy who used to buy dimes from us up at the Circle. I nearly blurted it out when Al showed us the photo.”

  “That’s not the same buddy.”

  “Is, too. Remember he used to walk in, never had a car.”

  “No it isn’t. That kid’s name was Freddy alright but he was a different kid. That Freddy had some kind of a funny lip, like he maybe had a hare lip fixed.”

  “Maybe it was only half-fixed and now it’s fully fixed.”

  “No way. There would still be scarring. The other thing is, the Freddy we used to meet was a long streak of misery. Had a real smart mouth on him. This Freddy—Freddy with the cash—is a short-arsed little runt. Can’t imagine him climbing up on that big beautiful woman—be like a Yorkshire Terrier humping a Lab.”

  “She’s a dish, no-bout-a-doubt-it. Fuck—I was sure it was the same old Freddy. You sure it isn’t?”

  “One hundred percent.”

  “So how do you know cash-Freddy is a short arse?”

  “Me and Al followed him last week. He goes walking around the city all the time, talks to himself like he’s half-cracked, stops sometimes to write in a notebook.”

  “How come I haven’t seen him?”

  “You probably have. That’s probably why you felt sure you knew him, only your retarded brain made the wrong connection.”

  “Shit. So you were driving around with Al checking it all out? You two have this whole thing figured? Makes me think—what do you need me for? If I was the paranoid type, I’d think you were setting me up. You’re not setting me up, Gosse? You’re not. Right?”

  “C’mon, Snuff. I had to spend time with the guy. How the fuck else do you think all this came together? It started with him buying a few grams off me out at the golf course. Then he came back from a trip somewhere and sold me a few ounces of—you remember that blow we had around Halloween? That was his gear.”

  “How could I forget?”

  “I have pictures on my phone in case you ever do.”

  “Ya, right.”

  “Look. Al ran something else by me the other day. He said to wait and see if you agreed to Plan A before I ran it by you. There’s a Plan B, too. Or Al would like there to be a Part B.”

  “You said Part B. Is it Plan A, Part B, or Plan A and Plan B?”

  “What difference does it make? Look, I wasn’t even going to mention it. I was just going to tell him no. But I’ll tell you about it just to prove to you—you suspicious fuck—that it’s still you and me, buddy. And this Plan B is another reason I think Al is on the up and up. Five hundred grand isn’t enough for him. After we pull off the job, he wants to head down to Mexico—taking chickee-poo with him—and turn his half of the cash into blow. He says he can quadruple his money that way. And he says so can we if we want to throw in wi
th him.”

  Snuffy clenches his tongue between his teeth and counts on his fingers: “Holy shit, man. That’s two…That’s a million each.”

  “It would be. But we’re not doing it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it turns a low-risk investment into a high-risk investment. We have to trust him to take all the money, turn it into weasel dust and bring it back. There’s two million things that could go wrong. So forget it. We have enough to do to figure out Plan A.”

  “I likes how you put that: low-risk investment. And I wants you to know I’m one-hundred percent on board with Plan A. Plan B sounds like sucker bait.”

  “Exactly. So can we get back to working through what has to be worked through?”

  “Right on. So who stays with the girl and who goes to the bank?” Snuffy asks, doing his best to sound upbeat but suddenly feeling anything but. He’s crashing; the bath is draining fast.

  “I’ll do the bank. You stay with the girl.”

  Snuffy thinks about the picture of Lila. The more he focusses on thoughts of being alone with this beautiful woman, the more it consoles the part of his imagination that had briefly entertained the prospect of one million dollars. What a bump that had been. Made his cut from Plan A—two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand—seem like chicken feed.

  13

  AL CHECKS THE rearview as he pulls away from Fiddler’s Green. His eyes immediately lock on Gosse’s, which are focussed exactly where the mirror would be if Gosse could actually see through the tinted glass. Psych. Al gives a little shudder, curses under his breath. As if he needed more proof that his new partner was no one to mess with. He looks away, checking for oncoming traffic. There is a steady stream. He flicks on his signal light, glances behind once more. Gosse is now giving full attention to Snuffy who is gesturing with a sharp movement of his head towards George Street. Behind them, in the near distance, the neon silhouette of a naked woman lights up the doorway to a club. Beside it, in flashing red, is the next-to-penultimate letter of the alphabet in triplicate. Another sign offers all-you-can-eat chicken wings and a bucket of beer for $19.99. Al is suddenly hungry.

  He drives slowly along Water Street West, passing docklands and cheaply refurbished buildings. He passes the ramp to Pitt’s Memorial, the first section of the Trans-Canada Highway, a place where drunks cluster every day to drink sweet sherry mixed with Lysol poured from the perforated bottoms of aerosol cans. Nearby, three high-rises are under construction. Further up the road, billboards announce new condominium developments. The city is on the cusp of change. Newfoundland reminds him of the South, particularly Kentucky, where coal money had such an impact. Only here, the change is coming on a wave of oil. The stakes are about to get higher. Life is about to become more exaggerated, the pain sharper, the pleasure more annihilating; desire is about to drive its ice-cream truck through the hardening arteries of this boomtown.

  Five minutes later, his guts rumbling, he turns into the almost empty underground lot of his condominium. As he passes through the automatic doors, the engine noise amplifies, echoing around the enclosed space. Every time this happens—which is every time he drives into the lot—he thinks of the movies, a stakeout scene coming to an end, special agents in unmarked cars blocking all avenues of escape. He checks his mirrors, reaches his arm around the back of the passenger seat, and looks back as he parks.

  Near the stairwell, he notices that a damp stain he has been monitoring all month has sprouted a new rust freckle. Soon it will grow a calcium beard, the kind that warriors wore in ancient Assyrian bas-relief sculptures. He presses the up arrow on the elevator and waits.

  His illness has shifted Al’s centre of gravity. Within the space of a few months, he’s gone from being stable on his pins to being a guy who falls flat on his back for no obvious reason.

  The first time it happened, he was in the bar of the Delta Hotel. He had been acting drunk, playing along with a bunch of investors, when he suddenly lost balance and toppled backwards. Luckily for him, two men standing behind him blocked his fall. “Shit,” said Al, “and I heard they water down the drinks in here.”

  The second time, he was in the shower, conditioning his hair when he tipped—“arse over kettle,” as the locals say. His fall knocked out the fixed side of the glass door which shattered. It wasn’t supposed to. It was supposed to be immovable and unbreakable. When the warranty people came to replace the unit—free of charge—Al had them install a handle on the shower wall. If any of his lady friends asked, he would say it was standard equipment in a condominium where many of the target buyers were seniors.

  He soon learned he could correct this tendency to fall backwards by walking forward on the balls of his feet. The technique worked on a level surface or on a slight incline. It didn’t work on stairs. It was a problem with depth perception, and it explained his troubles with golf these days. His long game had become erratic: he overshot the greens or dropped the ball way short. At such times, he would joke with his playing partner that he needed a new eyewear prescription. Once or twice he let himself be seen swigging liberally from the mickey he kept stashed in his golf bag. The more strait-laced types thought he was playing badly on purpose. There were so many ways to conceal the truth.

  Al steps into the closet-sized elevator. Two years old and the elevator already smells musty. The brass doors and plates around the buttons are thumb-smeared and tarnished. The walls are some kind of thin-sliced graveyard granite that show him an unrecognizable reflection. He bounces once or twice and the whole elevator jangles in the shaft, like a skeleton on a key chain. Shit. Every time he does this he tells himself not to do it again.

  Stepping out on the sixth floor, he runs into Mrs. McCurdy, a bitter, whiskery woman about his own age but who looks a decade older. She is wearing a wax jacket and a leopard-print skirt.

  “I see you are on your own this evening,” she says, with a roll of her eyes.

  Al wonders if she is angling for an invitation. He tries to imagine her naked, picturing a hang of pizza dough covered in white flour.

  “Well, you’re looking mighty fine today, Maeve. Heading out on the town?”

  The woman scowls, brushes past him.

  Al stops before door 668. Something about the lighting in the hall reminds him of the entranceway to his doctor’s office, the wall sconces, maybe: clam shells conspicuously devoid of any Titian-haired Venus.

  He slips his key into the deadbolt. Inserting a key into a keyhole, using a mouse pad, texting, tasks that demanded fine motor skills had all been tricky at first, until Dr. Mason—with his no-nonsense style—remarked that Al’s difficulties doing these things were not related to his condition at all. Psych. It was his nerves. Mason was right. Al soon learned that tasks requiring concentration could make his tremors disappear. He shook more when he tried to relax, sit still.

  As much as Al liked Mason, he felt obliged to ask for a second opinion. The doctor was happy to refer him to a neurologist.

  “Dr. Dixon is the best we have locally.”

  “Next to you, you mean.”

  “Nice of you to say that.”

  “But Dr. Dixon. You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “No. Are you acquainted?”

  “No. We haven’t met.”

  “What then?”

  “Oh, nothing.”

  Al was prepared not to like Dr. Dixon and it turned out he did not have to work hard at it. Tall and limp, the doctor wore a starched white coat and thick square-frame glasses. In contrast to the old-school style of Dr. Mason, Dr. Dixon was touchy-feely, all head nods, soft hands and doe eyes, like he was getting ready to audition for some regular spot on a daytime talk show. The man’s empathy gland was in a permanent state of tumescence.

  While the neurologist performed the physical, Al shared his opinion that the tremor in his left arm had been caused by a bad swing of the club that was exaggerated by a sudden and violent cross wind. He’d just gone that extra click around the horn. He could have sworn
he felt something ping or rip or stretch and not go back. He cursed that charity match and the business gorillas who had kept him late at the bar the night before.

  “Yes, I see,” Dr. Mason repeated every time Al stopped for breath.

  It wasn’t as though Al didn’t want to know the truth; he just wanted it minus the hand-wringing and counselling. Not that he necessarily believed what Dr. Dixon had to say. The fact that the neurologist corroborated Dr. Mason’s diagnosis could have been a sign that incompetence was rampant in the profession. Hadn’t the latter labelled Al’s habit of rolling the tip of his index finger and his thumb together (as though he were shaping a recent deep nose pick in preparation for flicking) a symptom? Mason was wrong about that one. His Aunt Ivy had done the same thing all her life. It was a family trait. From this, Al concluded that some of what afflicted him probably wasn’t his illness at all. Some of it could simply be ordinary signs of aging.

  He wants a third opinion. He wants pills, preferably washed down with a glass of vodka. Medication will slow the progress of the illness. Herbal remedies will help—black seed oil and vitamin B-12—and the stuff he can get over the Internet. He knows the natives have some ancient remedies. He’ll check on that the next time he’s down south. And there has been news of a breakthrough with stem cells. He has time.

  So what if his days of threading a needle are over. Is that a tragedy? So what if his days of pouring a perfect B-52 blindfolded are at an end. No more will he spend the evening hours quietly building castles from playing cards. Gone are the happy hours spent with nephews and nieces playing that surgical game where you have to remove the bones from the clown without making its nose light up. As if he had done any of these things. Ever. He can live with his current symptoms. Most of them, he can ignore. He isn’t about to get all palsy-walsy with his palsy.

  Al unlocks his apartment door and hangs his keys on the miniature lawn jockey. He picked up the little statue at a Kmart liquidation sale. It’s the first thing people see when they come into his home. Lets them know from the get-go that they can be themselves. The jockey has a private meaning for Al: it reminds him of Meth, his friend and caddy of twenty-five years, who died three years earlier from emphysema. Meth had never been a smoker, but he drank bourbon every day Al had known him. His emphysema was caused by inhaling the liquor fumes he constantly burped up. Truth was stranger than fiction.