We'll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night Read online

  Outside on the street, in the blistering rain, Shiner takes Johnny by the hand and offers a sweaty, pathetic shake that to Johnny sums up all the contradictions and duplicity of the total charade of their association. There, fuck ya. But, for all that, Johnny feels suddenly protective of Shiner, and cant say goodbye, turns and saunters down the hill in the rain and drops his eyes to the pavement as he scuffs past the red glowing window frames of his cozy upright neighbours, his dopey brain feebly tussling with the notion that by knowing something he shouldnt know he’s let down his only halfways real friend on the planet. Ah fuck off Johnny.

  Three to five, three to five, federal. This spinning in Johnny’s head as he tucks himself into the far corner of his single cot to avoid the drip, drip, dripping splash from the paint can he’s set on the opposite corner of his mattress. He sits up once more to make sure his alarm is set. When he slumps his head on his ratty yellow pillow he can feel each drop in the can pounding through his skull like a stubborn four-inch nail. He looks across the room and his slitty eyes latch on to a warped and water-stained framed pic of Jesus with his open hands and bleeding sacred heart, and for the first time in years Johnny makes the sign of the cross and clasps his hands together and closes his eyes and offers up a feeble hello to the Big Man upstairs. Johnny knows it’s all a bit pathetic, yeah. But what have we got, any of us?

  God, it’s me, Johnny. I knows things must look rough. I knows I aint been one of the good guys, not lately, and not for a long, long time I spose. But I can change all that. I can. I can find a way to make good. I dont know where to start or how to go about it, but if you turns one of them knobs up there, if you finds it in yourself to maybe shift things around a little and help me out of this situation, then I’ll make good. You look down at me here now and you knows I never done nothing bad enough to be going down federal. Things got fucked up, things got shagged up, but I was trying, I was. You saw me, you had to see me runnin into that house and you knows I didnt give a fuck. I mean, yes I was already . . . but what difference? Even before all that, I was tryna be in the world, I tried to be one of them types. Maybe I wasnt ready for it, maybe I didnt clip along fast enough. And I’m not sayin she brought it out in me. But she did. I mean, no, she never. It was me. I slipped back. I did. I knows I did. I got up to the old ways. I’ll admit that. But if you can, like I said, put the brakes on and kinda rethink this for a second and let me walk out of that courtroom tomorrow a free man . . . well, I can make good. I’ll try. I’ll try. I’ll try . . .

  By this time Johnny’s vaguely aware that he’s bawling his face off and he passes out like that, still sobbing, with three more perks melting in his stomach and holding on for dear life to the little blue bag. Almost immediately he slips into a barren dream that he’s drifting a hundred miles from shore and suddenly latches on to the slimy, rotted end of a rogue anchor’s rope that he knows by no means will keep him afloat, but he’s got nothing else to keep ahold of, and at least if he hangs on tight he’ll keep from washing farther away and might stay in the same place, for a time.

  4

  It aint a long trek from the Hood to the courthouse, and Johnny’s been up early, scratching and tossing and scrubbing the stink of sweat off in the busted rusty sink in his room. He wont miss that pissy shower down the hall. There’s lots he wont miss. He packs a few pairs of socks and some drawers and tee-shirts and a pair of jogging pants and a hoodie and his old grey boots in a black duffle bag. There’s nothing else in his room that he ever wants, or expects, to see again. The blankets were here, the pillows, the clock radio. He wolfs back the last of Shiner’s perks and he’s out the door by half past eight, in his only pair of jeans and sneakers and a ragged wool sweater over the light blue collared shirt that Madonna always said brought out the light in his eyes. Black denim jacket. Not necessarily courtroom attire, but what good is a suit and tie now Johnny? What good is it now?

  The rain musta let up sometime around daybreak. The street’s got a sweet, fresh tang going on. Johnny stands at the crossroads at Cabot and Lime and looks down over the harbour, hears the gulls, thinks about Pius’s old twenty-two, nods at one-lung Tom who’s feeding the pigeons near Leonard’s Convenience. He walks on down the hill and breathes deep passing by his and Madonna’s old dwelling. The old pad. Nice that was man, for while it lasted. Sitting down at a table and eating something that you cooked yourself, or she cooked for you. Matching pillowcases. Fuck.

  Crossing up Central towards Livingstone he takes a shortcut down through the housing units. He tromps down over the steps where he first met Madonna, and he tries not to conjure up the memory of that strange ghostly pull, that brawny tug, that otherworldly drawing in he felt that morning nearly two years ago. She was sitting on this step where Johnny’s standin now. It was dawn, with the first of a new day edging up over the Narrows, and Johnny’d been out, and free, for over a month and he’d been down at a late-night bar and drank himself sober and left, like a good lad, when the bartender said so. And when he stepped out onto Queen Street his feet started moving up towards New Gower even though he lived way up on the west end of Water Street near the Station Lounge, and he felt his eyes clear up with every step, watched, from some great height, his legs dash across the road by city hall and felt that rising sense of anticipation like that feeling youd get when youre after gettin some long-awaited care package from the outside world and it’s left back on your bunk, waiting to be opened. Like walkin home with the dope in your pocket, knowin youre gonna be fried for the rest of the night. Kinda like that feeling, only tenfold. Like one of them kids in some wholesome holiday movie who’s lying in bed on Christmas morning before anyone else in the house is awake. Whatever that feels like. Only a thousand times that. Something is happening, something is comin your way, something good, something you needs and wants. Something that’s gonna change everything. Johnny stoppin outside a mirrored shop window to check his look, fix his drink-battered hair, tuck his shirt in, zip his coat, take a slug from the flask he’d been hoardin in his inside pocket all night. His heart is pounding and some part of him knows why, but the conscious part of him has no clue. He picks up his pace and almost sprints up through Carter’s Hill Place. He sees the graffiti-marred concrete steps leading up onto Livingstone but he knows he’s meant to turn left and carry on through the courtyard behind the housing units. By the time he makes it to the last set of steps he’s winded and his stomach is burning and there’s sweat dripping into his eyes, and when he sees her sitting there so casually, with her hands clasped around a forty of white wine and the thin tie-dyed hippie scarf wrapped around her head like some unruly Virgin Mary, and one of her bare knees skinned so bad the blood’s trickled down into her skimpy canvas shoes . . . When he sees her there like this . . . well it’s like . . . he feels . . . more acutely than ever in his life his limited vocabulary. He feels his face flush red. Like he’s been caught out. Fucken jailhouse stench rising off his skin. But a real stirring in his pants too, for the first time in what seems like months. And he wants to speak, he wants to sing, he wants to lunge, he wants to lie down and howl at the coming daylight.

  But he throws up instead.

  She pulls her feet out of the way and nudges his shoulder with the wine bottle and lets out a tiny giggle that seems to Johnny to cut itself short before it’s finished, like she’s almost giving something away and then checks herself. She sits quietly sipping from her bottle, and when it seems Johnny is finally finished choking and sobbing and drying his eyes and sucking on his teeth she offers up that half giggle again and asks him if he feels better now. And Johnny looks at her long and hard and says Yes, yes I fucken do. And she stands and screws the cap back on her wine bottle and takes Johnny by the arm and leads him up over the steps and says Alright then, lets get you to bed. He brushes his teeth while she sits on the edge of the bathtub cleaning the blood from her knee, and he’s got his mouth between her legs before she even asks him his name.

  On Water Street Johnny stands in the alle
yway across from the steps to Atlantic Place and watches his lawyer, Reeves, toss his head back and laugh rowdily at something the Crown prosecutor is sayin. Oh Johnny knows em all. And they all knows each other. And they all knows Johnny. The early-morning sun glinting off the fresh-polished toes of Reeves’s brown leather shoes. How far removed, hey Johnny? A couple of motorcycles rip past, drowning out everything in their wake, and Johnny watches them weave up the length of Water Street, and when he cant see them anymore he can still hear them in the distance roaring through the gears and maybe taking the turn onto the arterial, and from there, who the fuck knows? Maybe BC or California. Maybe New York City. Johnny squeezes his eyes shut and tries to imagine his hands gripped to them handlebars, burning into NYC full throttle in the rain with all kinds of money in his pockets, fated for some cheap motel on the outskirts with a dollhouse on one side and a liquor store on the other, and he feels that thick dull lump of pain welling up in the back of his throat, and when he opens his eyes again he sees his arresting officer scooting up the steps behind Reeves and even though there’s no grand guffaws between them, there is a nod that only Johnny would have reason to take offence to.

  Johnny knows it’s time to cross the street, but his legs are a frozen, trembling, jellied mess and there’s an icy sweat on his spine, a tight fluttering burn in the pit of his stomach, and he thinks if he takes one more step that his knees wont do their job but could very well snap back the wrong way and he’ll hit the pavement, writhing and gasping his last breath while his guts come streaming out the leg of his pants, and, hey Johnny, that wouldnt be so bad anyways, considering. No? He keeps waiting to see her face. He takes a few wobbly steps, then leans his head against the coffee shop and finds some comfort in the idea that if he wanted to, right this instant, he could smash his face off the gravelly brick wall, over and over until he split his skull in half and there was nothing left of his life but a splatter of grey brain matter and his filthy broken-down frame. Ten-minute cleanup job for some poor City fucker. He squints up to the open sky and has a vague recollection of the pitiable bargain he tried to strike up with the Big Man the night before. What’s that they say about prayer and the doomed man? Fuck sakes Johnny.

  A plaid, greying man in his late forties holds open the door to the coffee shop for his perky teenage daughter and when she passes through the doorway Johnny hears her say Well then, if not there Daddy, how about my bellybutton? Just fucken kill me. Or give me something innocent to destroy. Johnny eyes the brick wall again, gives his cheek a little squeeze, realizes the skin on his face is as numb and dead and useless as his legs, realizes he’s well stoned out of his gourd, and feels better straight away.

  Johnny straightens his spine, belches out a terse laugh or moan and flicks what might be his last cigarette for a while into the bowels of a grimy manhole, takes a deep breath, shoulders his bag and strolls out into the fuming morning traffic, and there, waiting on the steps of Atlantic Place, shifting the bloated shell of herself from foot to foot and chomping down on the top end of a chocolate muffin, is Johnny’s older sister. Johnny’s mother. Johnny’s sister. His mother. The woman he called Tanya for the first sixteen years of his life. Until the day he didnt know what to call her anymore, or how to look her in the eye. The day everything made sense, finally, and nothing did. The day his father became Pius and his mother became . . . fucken . . . Pius’s missus. And Tanya, big sister Tan, became nothing more to Johnny than another ignorant, craven slob.

  Not to dwell, hey Johnny?

  And not to come down too hard on her either, cause fuck knows when you gives the situation a good sizing up, well, she was raised under the same fucken roof as Johnny, wasnt she? Not like she had it any better.

  But you know now, you hear these stories of this one or that one finding out they were adopted or whatever the case might be, finding out that the ones who brought em up are not their real folks, right, and so they hits an age and tracks down their real mother, or their blood father, whatever, and finds em living alongside a swimming pool somewhere, doing alright for themselves, halfways waiting for the day when their long-lost child takes it upon themselves to come sniffin em out, lookin for answers, connection. And how it turns out life was hard back then and there was no choice in the matter. But they’ve pined after you and thought about you all these years, hoping you were safe and living good. And welcome home and lets get to know each other. You hear them kinds of stories, right?

  Yeah.

  But no.

  That’s not the way it went for young John-John.

  Johnny stops dead in the middle of Water Street before Tanya registers his presence. He stares across at her dumpy rolls, the way she slams the bottom of the muffin into her gob. The dancing, cornered-animal eyes. Empty barrel of a Bic pen twisting her greasy hair into a bun. Folded under her arm is a cheap mouldering garment bag with the tip of a coat hanger jutting out through a busted zipper.

  Tanya suddenly notices Johnny and gives a frenzied flap of her arm without moving her shoulder. The left lens of her dated egg-shaped glasses slanted towards her eyebrow. He swallows back the rigid edge of an ancient rage as he steps up onto the curb beside her.

  Waft of deep-fried something or other.

  Johnny cannot believe he slid from this woman’s womb.

  Please Christ dont try to hug me.

  By way of greeting Tanya sighs and unzips the musty garment bag and inside it there’s a beige suit that Johnny recognizes as Pius’s Sunday best. Tanya says she’s had it taken in a little, and cuffed. Johnny keeps staring at her, waiting for her to meet his eye, but she wont.

  Christ, that’s . . . does Pius know you took his suit?

  Tanya pops a cough drop into her mouth and holds the suit out by the hanger.

  Pius dont know nothing much about nothing much these days John-John.

  She still wont meet Johnny’s eye.

  Here, take it John-John, fuck sakes. Dont be so stubborn. God knows, it might do a bit of good. You knows what that crowd are like, lawyers and them.

  Johnny spies the thin, patterned silk tie poking out of the pocket of the nicotined shirt and remembers the long-ago afternoon of some Kinsmen’s banquet when Pius had the very suit on. There was a creepy, grainy cartoon on the old TV about a smiling spider that ran a hotel for flies who meets his match when he ensnares the innocent bride of a burly fly with a faint Irish accent. Johnny’s heart pounding, not knowing whether to root for the spider or the fly. Pius jangling his keys, leaning on the counter lookin out over the harbour, grumbling under his breath about Mart Roach’s new truck and slamming back a double shot of Crown Royal. Never went far without his Crown Royal did Pius. God love the old sleeveen. He opens the front porch door and as an afterthought he turns and bawls at Johnny to turn that goddamn shit down. But Johnny doesnt move quick enough and suddenly Pius is across the room towering over him.

  Is there something wrong with your fucken ears? Are you deaf? Are you fucken stupid? What? Come here, bastard . . .

  He lifts Johnny off the floor by the shirt collar, drags him, kicking and wailing, to the crumbling wood shack behind the house. Johnny begs and pleads and frantically tries to cover his legs and backside all at once, hunching his shoulders, making himself as small and tight as possible while he’s whipped and lashed and battered with the busted cord from a power drill until Pius’s curses give over to a low, dry gravelly grunt and the sweat runs oily down his forehead. Johnny snivelling in a pool of his own piss with his pants down around his ankles and not knowing why or what it’s all about until Pius clears his throat and says:

  That’s so you wont act up while I’m out. So you wont crucify your mother. Now pull up your fucken trousers.

  And when Pius is gone and Johnny’s managed to pull his pissy wet pants up over his red, burning, welted backside, he sees the half-full flask of Crown Royal in the sawdust beneath the wheelbarrow where it must have fallen from Pius’s pocket. Johnny waits until he hears Pius’s truck make the turn at the end
of the lane, picks up the flask, brings it to his nose for a stately moment, then drains it. The heat rushing to his knees. Lungs heaving with the hunger for authority. Any trace of self-pity nipped dead in its tracks. And the rest of the day is foggy, confused, a muddy shitstorm of skinned knuckles and bloody noses in the west meadow and Mikey’s mother screamin across the lane that Johnny is some kind of dirty bastard that belongs in the boys’ home.

  Fuck it, listen. What odds is any of it? No complaints. You make the most of it, no? You make the best play with the cards youre dealt.

  Johnny takes the suit from Tanya’s hand and folds it over his arm and they stand there, not speaking, until Johnny nods towards the mirrored glass entrance doors to Atlantic Place.

  Well you knows I cant come in John-John. You knows I cant watch all that. I wanted to see you off, is all, and to say . . .

  But she cant finish her sentence. It rises up in him to let her know that it’s all a fucken farce anyhow, all a big load of slurried bullshit, whatever slant Pius likely put on it: Didnt I always say? That whatever she’s heard, whatever she mighta read, some skewed clip in the newspaper, well, cant she see what a trumped-up pile of pathetic shit it is? Ah but fuck it. What difference now? All the cards are marked already and Johnny’s been guilty until proven guilty more than once in his day, make no mistake.

  We were all some proud to read that story about the old couple and the fire. We were some proud then. That’s our John-John, I said, I always knew you had . . .

  Yeah, well, thanks for the suit Tanya. Say hello to your mother for me.

  John-John . . .

  Johnny notes the watery swell in her eyes, the quiver in her nostrils, and gives her a look that tells her to not say one more fucken word, which she doesnt. He spits into the street, grunts and winks at her—his sister, his mother—as he lurches up the steps to his imminent slaughter.