One Hit Wonders Read online

  “I betcha nuns gets some horny.”

  “Ya knows now.”

  They both laugh.

  “But even back then I never really got school, y’know? I always felt like I was missing something. They told me I was there to learn, but I didn’t see the point of learning any of it. They used to laugh at me at home in the morning when I said I wasn’t going anymore. Mom used to peel my fingers off the doorpost where I’d be hanging on. But all that changed in the second grade.”

  “What happened?”

  “Sister Marsupial is what happened. Remember her?”

  “I remember.”

  “Those big brown eyes. Like a harp seal, she was. Her hands were always soft and kind of wet, but nice smelling. I remember looking at her and wondering if what the b’ys said was true. They said women had a pouch in their bellies like a kangaroo and that every now and then a baby came out of it. But nuns were different. Nuns filled up their pouches with holy water, beads, and cotton wool.”

  “Some funny the things ya thinks of at that age.”

  “No funnier than the garbage they tried to make us believe—Michael the Archangel and the Holy Ghost and Jesus rising from the dead. I mean there was Adam and Eve, and Cain and Abel. And Cain killed Abel. But then it turns out there’s a third brother, Seth. Where did he come from? He only showed up after Cain killed Abel. And when you think about it, who did Cain and Seth put the stones to? Where did their women come from? Didn’t make no sense, even then.”

  “Right on.”

  “But now that I’m thinking about it, Snuff, the thing I remembers most about school was my last day there, the day I left and knew I was never going back.”

  “Grade six, right?”

  “Grade six and Brother Anthony up at the board writing up the Ten Commandments. I was reading along, checking them off like answers to a quiz: Broke it—Broke it—Every second word—Not if I can help it —Maybe—People better not piss me off then—Ya, right—Get a grip—etc.”

  Snuffy cackles. “Right on.”

  “I tell you, Snuff, all was revealed in that instant.”

  “Amen.”

  “I started thinking about Moses. Like, what a racket, up that mountain, chisel in hand, chipping out these rules on a couple of slabs of stone that he had his buddy hide up there the week before. Then saying God gave them to him. Those Jews had to be some desperate to buy into his story. But here’s the thing. What I saw that day, what I understood that day was this: if you want to work the other side of the fence, there is one rule, one golden rule.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Never write nothing down. Keep it to yourself.”

  “Don’t say.”

  “If my old man taught me one thing it was this. A straight face will get you through a lot in this life. See, people usually give themselves away. People are so fucking stupid. And that’s not the half of it; the fucking queer thing is that they can’t wait to. People are guilty as fuck. What are they so guilty about? Nothing and everything. Missus on the radio would say it’s a symptom of something else.”

  “What missus on the radio?”

  “The missus who was on a few minutes ago.”

  “Right.”

  “Brother Anthony—back in school— would say guilt is the soul in pain or some crap like that. Come on. In my book, guilt’s the same as being a coward. No different. Most people are soft in the head. They can’t tell what’s real from what’s a dream. Sick animals looking over fences wanting the thing they won’t let themselves have. And the joke is that the fences aren’t even really there. Most of them aren’t anyway. They dream up stuff they know they couldn’t do in a million years and then get themselves drugged up or so loaded they can do what they dreamed up and then they can’t bear the fact they did what they did. Right?”

  “Right. Definitely.”

  “Darryl—remember Darryl?”

  “Rabbittown Darryl?”

  “The same. You should of seen his big sick face on New Year’s Day, ’01, the day after he puts his hand up his wife’s sister’s skirt. Lost as a puppy. Lost because she let him. Lost because he’s been sitting across from Tess at the Christmas dinner table for years dreaming about doing it and now all of a sudden he doesn’t have that to dream about no more.”

  “Like M.L.K.”

  “What?”

  “Martin Luther King.”

  “What’s he got to do with it?”

  “Nothing. Go on.”

  “Lost, he was, because he didn’t find anything up there that his wife didn’t have. Tess even grunted and came the same way his wife did when he gave her the three fingers…”

  “The old tripod. They all loses it.”

  “And here’s what Darryl says when we had our little heart-to-heart, right over there in that window booth, him with the wrap-around shades on, both of us in early for a New Year’s Day burger and hair of the dog. Here’s what he says: he says it was not until he put his fingers up into Tess that he knew he was still in love with his wife and had been all those years he’d been wanting to do it with her sister.”

  “What a maroon.”

  “Now that’s what some people calls making a mistake; that’s what missus on the radio would call an error in judgement, and what those with a bit of therapy under their belts calls being a human being. You know what I calls it?”

  “What?”

  “I calls it being a stunned arse. I saw Tess later on that same day. No give in her at all. You wouldn’t know but she was up at the church saying a novena the night before. She could of been holding a royal flush or nothing and you wouldn’t of been able to tell. I even brought it up that I had something of a heart-to-heart with Darryl earlier on and not even the tiniest blush out of her, just a slight twitch around her eyes. Could have been she was just trying to hold in a fart—you’d never of known. But you’ve got to hand it to her, and to women in general, they plays their cards much tighter to their chests. They don’t give nothing away.”

  “It’s true.”

  “Bullshit is the medium they move in. And they supports each other in it, too. Stick together. You can see it every time they runs into each other on the street, the whoops and hollers out of them, all the compliments flying, all that licking and grinning. Like a pack of beagles chawing down on a fresh kill. Death by greeting, I calls it. It’s all bullshit and they knows it. Like taking arsenic in small amounts over time; over time you builds up an immunity.”

  “I saw that movie.”

  “Then again, there’s another part of me thinks they’re good at bullshit because they really believes it. And they believes it because they think they’re not responsible. Say Tess slipped her hand into Darryl’s pants on New Year’s Eve and jerked him off, she might of felt ashamed of herself the next day. But the way it happened, she could tell herself it was all Darryl’s doing, that nothing would of happened had he not slapped the makes on her, had she not switched to tequila just before midnight. Men being such dogs and all. And never, not in a million years, would she have jammed her cunny down on to Darryl’s fingers if her husband had been paying any kind of attention to her at all. And just like that she’s put a whole bunch of distance between herself and any guilty feelings she might have. Up goes the wall. I tell you: women are a lot like lawyers.”

  “So the way you sees it, the main difference between men and women is that women are better liars.”

  “Thank you, Dr Phil, for that synopsis. Fuck. Look at the time. I got to take a piss. Let’s give our friend a few more minutes.”

  6

  I FEEL DIRTY after that. Break out the Dove soap, the extra-rough loofah. My imagination worked too well one way and not at all in another. It zoned in on the rot and decay, on the stink, immediately went for the dark side. I should have expected it; what other way is there into the minds of men who make a living by taking advantage of other people, who exploit frailty instead of finding sympathy with it. Al Calhoun saw a weakness in Lila and used it to get
into her pants, make her his slut. Picturing them together gives me nightmares; and sometimes, even during daylight hours, interrupts my poise so violently that I overhear myself groan. To think of Al and Lila in that motel or in the back of his car, to think of my Lila willingly giving herself over to a man who wanted only to hurt her, who took what he wanted from her and still wanted more, burns a hole in my gut. He is like the thief who breaks into a house to steal a painting but once inside finds a note saying the owners are away. Naturally, he starts looking for other things to pocket.

  As for his partners, Gosse and Snuffy, a case could be made that those degenerates were just in it for the money. It was a payday as far as they were concerned; nothing more. Perhaps I am letting them off the hook too easily to say they were gormless meat puppets, with a drunken Al Calhoun pulling the strings from somewhere slightly off stage—in this case, from behind a movable partition in the back room of the Harbour Lounge, all three men pouring alcohol into themselves to bolster stripped nerves.

  Small wonder drugs and drink are standard props in the underworld. Intoxicants lubricate loopholes in morality, keep them from closing over. They fortify the will, fashion it into a battering ram so it can crash through taboos. Afterwards, they act as a salve, inducing sleep, soothing troubled consciences, allowing humiliations to be refashioned as heroics. It’s a toxic blend and one that eventually—if the life of crime proves profitable—breeds the delusion that the criminal can operate without fear of being caught.

  I feel dirty after that. And yet my task is to empathise with these characters, walk a mile in their shoes. The trouble is I have trouble with empathy. It seems to sit on the delusional end of the sympathy spectrum, perhaps at the point where sympathy runs out and something darker begins. Empathy is only a confidence trick, a species of legalese, a way of making the afflicted believe you are walking in their shoes. Empathy is the tool that gets you through the door. But who is to say just what you will do once inside?

  Snuffy is milling through one cellophane-tipped toothpick after another. He wants to ask Gosse where the guy is. He wants to ask when the big guy is going to show up, is he ever going to show up, and what kind of an entourage he is likely to have in tow. Snuffy is well on his way to getting drunk. He feels like the kid in the back of the car, on a hot day, as the family makes the long drive to the cabin. He is working hard to get his nerves under control, strike a balance between his need to explode and the cool response the situation seems to call for. He needs to chill out. Not that Gosse is handling the tension any better. He’s wearing his cement face. He’s trying for laid-back, but is throwing off serious vibes, like he’s contemplating violence. Snuffy decides now is not the time to make light. He takes a long pull on his pint. He grits his lips, buttons his teeth, and waits.

  He looks at his friend and tries to remember Gosse when they were both in school, when they sat across from each other, back in the day when Snuffy wondered about the kangaroo pouches nuns had under their habits and Gosse ground his oversized jaw as he watched the second hand on the clock.

  Gosse often showed up for school with a shiner. Watching his damaged eye heal became a class pastime: the red-blue swelling on the first day—Gosse quiet and keeping to himself—the puffiness slowly subsiding, the flesh around his eye turning from black to blue to yellow. And the cornea—equally spectacular in its display—at first like a cherry tomato, then blood-flecked, blood-shot, pink, then jaundiced, as though the white of his eye were a peeled hard-boiled egg with the yolk showing through.

  Sometimes Gosse came to school with a black eye on top of a black eye. There were unexplained limps he tried to conceal by walking around like a saddle-sore cowboy. He would refuse to undress for gym—the one subject he excelled at—and take a suspension when he couldn’t produce a note. He’d flinch when surprised from behind, though soon enough everyone learned not to pull that one. Gosse was stoic: he refused to talk to teachers or anyone else about who was beating him and why. Eventually, even the teachers stopped asking. It was the world’s worst-kept secret. Everyone knew who was doing the damage: Gosse’s contusions, welts and plum-coloured sockets were the handiwork of none other than his older brother, Tom, the man of the house, and the only person in the world Gosse idolized.

  Sometimes Gosse sneaked Snuffy into his older brother’s room, ushered him in as though into a treasure trove. Tom had some cool stuff—a stellar collection of hockey cards, an array of combat knives, John Bonham’s drum kit, not to mention a collector’s collection of pornographic playing cards—but these paled in comparison with the room itself, the way it was decorated. Just walking into that space made the hair on the back of Snuffy’s neck stand up. Gosse seemed to have no idea how strange the room looked to an outsider.

  Tom had painted all the walls and trim black, and he had painted over the bottom pane in the bedroom’s only window. He had taken this swerve toward the gothic in junior high. When asked by his mother—who refused him nothing—why he wanted his room so dark, Tom answered that the sunshine burned the eyes right out of his skull. His answer came as something of a revelation. She clawed her hair back with one hand, half-covering her face with the other. Pictures of Tom’s toddler years flashed through her mind. She recalled the spankings she had given him for crying out, “It burns, it burns,” whenever she sat him on her lap and tried to read to him. The white pages glared. Photosensitivity explained of why he loved stories but hated books. It also explained his poor grades. Tom’s mother took the matter up with his teacher. She referred Tom to the school nurse who prescribed goggles.

  By the time Tom was sixteen, he was known around town for always wearing wrap-around reflective shades. He even wore them at night. After a while, no one questioned him. He was just the dude in the glasses; the guy with the granite fists and the short fuse. People left him alone, which left him free to carry on with the practice that made him paint over the lower half of his window in the first place. He would stand in his room at night, naked from the waist down, and jerk off while ogling the girls who hung around outside the pizzeria.

  His family should have guessed. There was evidence—had they chosen to look—a persistent squeak in the floorboards, buttery stains on the wall and windowsill. Still, hindsight is 20/20, and the squeak could easily have been explained by the heavy power line attached to the front of the house that tugged on the clapboard, even in the slightest breeze. As for the stains, they could have been caused by dampness leaching paste from between layers of wallpaper.

  No explanation was needed because no one suspected anything. Tom’s habit remained a secret even after his arrest for interfering with a teenager behind the beer tent at the Folk Festival. Questioned by the constabulary, he said the girl spotted him watching from his window and gestured for him to come down. The girl confirmed the story, demonstrating to the officers how she enticed him by moving her tongue in a circular motion around the outside of her lips. Tom said she swore she was legal. She showed the police her fake ID. Everyone agreed she looked at least sixteen. It was not obvious to anyone that she was mentally delayed.

  Tom was sent for treatment at the Waterford Hospital, the crumbling complex located across the road from Bowring Park. For three months, he sat in his room, took his medication, listened to the ducks quack. Deemed cured, he was transferred to prison, where he enrolled in a writing program and produced a tell-all manuscript about his tortured sexuality. “Just had to confess, didn’t he? Just had to,” Gosse said, when he heard about it.

  Tom’s arrest and conviction had a singular effect on Gosse. In the months following, he emerged as the toughest kid on the playground, on the block, and pretty soon in the whole downtown. He kicked, punched, and head-butted until he had essentially enforced a gag order among his contemporaries on the subject of Tom being a pervert. Gosse seamlessly slotted into the mold his brother had vacated. He became the guy no one messed with, the guy no one would hang out with, no one, that is, except Snuffy. In those years, Snuffy was his shadow. T
here goes Gosse, the smokers would say, Gosse and his sidekick, snot bag.

  Gosse was opportunistic. He began to see that violence or the threat of it cleared a space that teemed with opportunity. Extorting lunch money proved lucrative, but nowhere near as much as the junior high market for skunk weed. Pretty soon, five-spots and dime bags were for losers. Buying in larger quantities and selling what he couldn’t smoke kept Gosse in gear for free. A business was born.

  Snuffy lifts his pint glass and flips over the cardboard coaster, hoping to find it blank on the reverse side. He has an urge to sketch from memory the view from Gosse’s bedroom window; the folk festival main stage, the audience of fuzzy mouth-breathers, the pointy-topped beer tents, and just to the left, in the shadows, between the edge of the park and the Colonial Building, a wild-eyed girl with her tongue stuck out. But the mat is printed on both sides: crossed hockey sticks and an oblong puck on the front and a Kabuki-looking goalie mask on the back. He twirls the mat around his fingers, like he is practicing for a card trick, glances over at his pale-eyed friend. Gosse is expressionless, unblinking, like an aggressive opossum.

  “What are you sniggering about?”

  “Nothin’.”

  “Your round.” Gosse says.

  Snuffy is about to point out that it isn’t his round when Gosse fixes him with a tractor-beam stare. Held in that empty gaze, Snuffy’s confidence slips—like a foundation crumbling. He is powerless to prevent himself being pulled back to the old baseline, to the place where Gosse is everything and he is less than nothing. No matter how much things have changed between them—and they have changed for the better for Snuffy in recent years—there inevitably comes the moment when Gosse throws down a challenge and dares his friend to rise to it.