Black Fly Season (9 page)

‘Not me, man. Broke up with one about six months ago, and now I’m as single as they come.’

‘I didn’t say a lover. I said you had a lady in your life. A good woman who loves you. But this habit or addiction is a problem between you.’

Well, all right. That could be Terri. Once you have an addiction, a lot of stuff follows. Call it a lucky guess followed by common sense.

Snap, snap, snap. King, ace, king.

‘Oh, you are easy to read, my friend. A pleasure, too.’

‘Why’s that?’

Red Bear tapped the cards - strong finger, manicured nail - ‘The kings, my friend. The kings. You are going to be rich.’

Kevin had laughed out loud at that one.

Red Bear leaned forward, squinted at the air around him. ‘I’m seeing a lot of odd shapes around you. T shapes. This lady of yours, is her name Tammy? Something like that?’

‘There’s someone named Terri,’ Kevin said. ‘But she’s not my lady.’

‘Really? I see a strong connection there.’

Red Bear finished his lemonade and got up. Somehow he could drink a lemonade and make it seem serious as bourbon. He signalled to the black car parked across the street. The car started up and

made a U-turn, stopping right in front of the cafe.

‘If I see you again, my friend, maybe you’ll tell me how you plan to make all that money.’

‘You’re the one who sees the future.You’re going to have to tell me.’

Red Bear had grinned - teeth by Paramount Pictures - and opened the car door.

Kevin rubbed the bite on his neck and stared at the rough wood of the cabin ceiling. He heard another car drive up and a couple of shouts. That would be Leon back from town; he always made a racket when he rolled up. He’d be knocking on Kevin’s door any minute, wanting to shoot the breeze. Big talker, Leon, but a little too prone to violence for Kevin’s peace of mind. And his talk was getting strange since they’d taken up with Red Bear. Spooky, even.

Although Kevin didn’t believe in astrology or card reading or any of that paranormal blather, Red Bear had been close enough on a couple of counts that a tiny vibration of fear had started up in the pit of his stomach. And even though Red Bear treated him pretty well, that fear had never really quit; it hung on like a low-grade fever.

There had been four of them in Kevin’s outfit back before Red Bear arrived on the scene. Kanga was ostensibly their leader - basically because he owned the only car that could be trusted to make the trip down to Toronto and back to pick up the dope. Kanga was a serious pothead who smoked the stuff all day long. He’d once told Kevin that the only reason he’d gotten

into dealing was so he could afford his own habit. He tried to counterbalance his weed habit with a regime of weight-training, but Kevin figured he only did the weight-training because it involved a lot of sitting still. Kanga was an optimist, a hopelessly amiable leader - if you could call anyone leader who could hardly keep a toe on the earth. He was trim and fit and didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about the future.

Leon Rutkowski was a reformed speed freak with a reputation for an extremely unpredictable temper. Except for the incident in the Chinook, Kevin had never seen it personally, but he had heard things: one story concerning a man who ended up in hospital, another involving a baseball bat. Leon was all for making lots of money. In fact, Kanga had once said he would never have gotten into the heroin trade if Leon hadn’t bugged him about it so much. They were already well into it when Kevin joined up. Leon was stringy, but with a pot belly that hung over the belt of his jeans owing to the junk food he was so fond of. Kevin wasn’t sure why, but Leon seemed a good deal calmer since Red Bear had come on the scene, healthier too, putting more thought into what he ate. And he’d stopped complaining about not getting laid. Every now and again Red Bear Would bring babes up from Toronto, hookers no doubt, and share them with Leon. Then there was Toof. His real name was Morris

Tilley, but everyone called him Toof because of

the extra incisor that pushed its way to the front of his unruly dentition. That, along with his floppy hair and the droopy way he held his head, combined to give him a dog like air, which was quite appropriate because he was really more of a mascot than a serious member of the outfit. Toof talked a lot and, owing to the fact that he was a hopeless pothead, what he said did not always make sense. And he had an absolute genius for getting lost - not easy to do in a place the size of Algonquin Bay - but Toof seemed to have lost the inner positioning device that allows most human beings to leave home in the morning with a reasonable expectation of finding their way back.

Red Bear had come along at the lowest point in their fortunes. The Viking Riders had become more aggressive, consolidating their grip on the whole northern territory. Suddenly they seemed to be moving tons more dope, and there was precious little Kanga and his boys could do about it. Kevin had been reduced to skulking along Oak Street hoping that some of his old clientele would remain loyal enough to buy the odd dime of smack. A few of them did, but not enough. Everyone was afraid of the Viking Riders.

Kanga had decided it was time to have a ‘sit down’ with the bikers. See, that was the kind of blue-sky optimist Kanga was. You have a problem with bikers, you take over a bag of Sensimilla and smoke a peace pipe with them. The bikers agreed

to the sit-down, but it hadn’t gone well at all. The gang told him, over-explicitly in Kanga’s view, to cease and desist operating in their territory. Otherwise they would introduce him to a world of pain. To emphasize the point, one of the bikers - a big mother named Wombat - had pissed on him. Literally.

First their customers, then their suppliers dried up; nobody didn’t want them as subcontractors. Everybody had to deal exclusively with the Riders or risk being put out of business, to use the polite term. In desperation, Kanga had ventured further afield for product, driving as far as Montreal to round up first-class narcotics.

‘You’re out of your mind,’ Kevin had told him. ‘There’s no way we’re going to be able to move that stuff without the Riders going berserk.’

They were in Kanga’s basement apartment. Kanga was on his back at his universal gym, smoking a joint. He took a hit, offered it to Kevin, who declined, and set it in the ashtray.

Kanga smiled and pressed another one-fifty. He held the weight and released the smoke through his teeth. ‘That’s the beauty part,’ he said, his voice all gaspy from the weed. ‘I’m not gonna go into competition with them. I’m going to set us up as their suppliers.’

‘Don’t do it, man. Don’t even think that. They’ll Just rip you off. They’re already moving so much dope, you’re not going to be able to beat whatever

price they’re getting.’

‘Leave it to me, man. I know what I’m doing.’

‘You going to wear a wet suit this time?’

‘Hey, fuck you, man. That was just one goon.’ Kanga set down the weight and took another hit off the joint. His words emerged smokily between clenched teeth. ‘The other guys were actually kind of apologetic about it.’

And so Kanga had set up another meeting with the Viking Riders. Kevin and Leon and Toof had never seen him again.

Without Kanga, the group had rapidly gone to hell. Kevin made regular trips to Toronto and brought back small amounts of speed and heroin by train. But it didn’t add up to a paying proposition. What with all the stress of their misfortunes, he found himself once again with a needle in his arm. It had taken all his strength to quit again, methadone, twelve-step, the whole pathetic cabaret. By then, he had been barely able to make the rent on his miserable little apartment.

‘The thing to do,’ Leon had mused one day, ‘instead of buying from the Viking Riders, or trying to buy around them - what we should do is take over their import business.’

They were sitting in the sun on a rock cut near the railway tracks, watching the French girls heading down Front Street to the Ecole Secondaire.

‘Somehow they’re bringing the stuff in from the States,’ Leon went on, ‘and now they’re shipping it across the goddam country. If we could take

over that end of things they’d be forced to deal with us.’

‘Yeah,’ Toof had said, wheezing through a plume of pot smoke. ‘That sounds good. Why don’t we do that?’

‘Because Kanga had the same idea,’ Kevin said. ‘And Kanga never came back.’

So there they were: Leon a talker, not a leader; Kevin with no ambition whatsoever to run things, and Toof out of the question. It was on to this bleak stage that Red Bear had first strode, promising them magic and riches. How was a junkie to resist?

Red Bear rapidly made Algonquin Bay his own, using little more than his good looks and a deck of cards. He could often be found at Everett’s Coffee Bar on Sumner, the last of the independent coffee joints. Red Bear would sit at a corner table with his deck of cards, and after a while people just came to him. Everett’s didn’t mind; he brought people in. They’d buy a coffee and go over to Red Bear and he’d read their cards. They knew he was good, Kevin figured, because he charged so much: seventy-five bucks a pop, thank you very much. He also did astrology charts, which cost twice as much.

It was difficult to have a conversation with him, because people were always coming over to the table to get a reading. Kevin didn’t know how much earned doing this, but it had to be substantial,

and naturally tax-free. And it gave him an in with all sorts of people: the local musicians started going to him, and once he’d got a couple of hairstylists among his clientele they spread the word. He claimed to have done some modelling in Toronto - he was certainly handsome enough - but Kevin figured he had to have some other source of income.

When he wasn’t reading cards, Red Bear went out of his way to befriend Kevin and Leon. He gave them samples of the best pot either of them had ever tried, he took them to the movies a couple of times, and he was always buying drinks for them, although he didn’t drink much himself. He didn’t even seem to mind Toof. Like the other two, Kevin was flattered by the attention, even if he remained a little suspicious of it.

Over the next few months Red Bear became a major part of their lives. Eventually he revealed his other business to them, which was shipping medium-size packets of cocaine and heroin cross-country.

‘You’d better watch out for the Viking Riders,’ Kevin warned him. ‘We told you what happened to Kanga.’

‘I am not worried about the Riders,’ Red Bear said. ‘I am protected.’

‘Protected?’

By way of answer, Red Bear had just pointed to the sky.

One chilly spring night - it must have been late

April, early May, before the flies were out - they were all down at the beach. Red Bear had constructed a beautiful fire - an altar fire, he called it - that burned slow and steady for hours. Leon and Toof were there, the sky was all Milky Way, and a breeze blew in off the lake. Waves slapped quietly on the shore; from further down the beach came the noises of a party in progress, but the mood among the four young men had been contemplative, even solemn.

They had traded life stories. Leon poked thoughtfully at the treads of his hiking boots with a stick, cleaning the mud off them, while he told them about his past. He was the only child of two drunkards, one of whom had killed the other when Leon was sixteen and would probably never get out of prison. He got the scar on his forehead when his mother had thrown a toaster at him. Toof stared into the flames, firelight flickering in his eyes, as he told them he was the youngest of seven, raised by a widowed mom who worked three jobs and never knew which of her sons would end up in the nick next. Kevin didn’t tell them too much. Parents died when he was ten years old. Fell in love with poetry. Dropped out of college after second year. Got wired to smack. Kicked it. He didn’t mention that he was skinpopping again; no need to burden the others with too much information.

The three of them looked at Red Bear. So far, they knew nothing about him, other than that he came from a reserve somewhere up north.

He smiled, those perfect teeth gleaming in the firelight. ‘You want to know about me? I will tell you. This, of course, is the first thing you have to know.’ He pulled out his wallet and snapped a card on the table.

Kevin picked it up. It was a status card issued by the Department of Indian Affairs, confirming that Raymond Red Bear was a member of the Chippewa First Nation at Red Lake, which was located beyond the northern shores of Lake Superior and boasted a climate that made Algonquin Bay look like Florida.

Firelight flickered on Red Bear’s face like a stage effect. His voice was soft, all but inaudible above the lapping waves.

‘Life on the reserve,’ he told them, ‘was cold. Hard. Our house never had enough heat. There was never enough food in the refrigerator. Every morning the frost formed patterns on the bedroom window.’

Red Bear fell silent, staring into the fire. No one said anything for a while.

Finally, Leon said. ‘Are you going to tell us more?’

Red Bear shook his head. ‘I would like to. I trust you. I trust all of you.’ He looked at them: Leon, Kevin, and Toof, one after another. ‘But there are things of which I cannot speak. And other things which you are just not ready to know. There is certain knowledge only a few must have.’

Kevin wanted to get out of there and get to bed and just sleep. The mood was getting too weird.

Red Bear smiled. ‘Don’t worry.’ he said. ‘In a week or two, I will make a sacrifice and then we will know exactly how to turn our fortunes around.’

‘Sacrifice?’ Kevin said.

‘Don’t say anything more just now, Kevin. You will see soon enough what I mean.’

Leon flicked his cigarette butt into the fire. ‘Does this sacrifice mean I get to walk down Main Street again without worrying I’m going to get seriously fucked up by bikers?’

‘Oh, yes. I guarantee it. If things go the way I expect them to, six months from now the Viking Riders will tremble when you approach.’