Smoke (21 page)

“The place is cookin',” Buster says, surveying the room.

“Yeah.” Donny taps his foot to the music. “This one's snappy.” He sets his cup down on the counter of the bar beside his cigarettes and matches and is gone.

Jelly Bean notices that Donny's cup is half-full; its rich brown liquid inviting. She tasted alcohol only once before, when she was clearing the table after one of her mother's dinner parties. Her parents had retired to another room and left her to the dishes and she noticed that her father's wine glass hadn't been touched. She lifted the dark red potion to her lips and allowed it to paint the back of her throat. The taste was bitter and dry, and the strength of the flavour didn't fully hit her until she swallowed. She coughed and sputtered and chased it with water. The wine sickened her but she was drawn to it precisely because she wasn't supposed to have it. She lifted the bottle from the centre of the table and drank what was left, swallowing in gulps as if it were grape juice. Washing up that night she was slow and methodical, used both her hands to transfer the plates and cups and good serving dish from the soapy suds in the sink to the clean rinsing water, to the dish rack, without letting anything slip. She was tipsy, she remembers, and enjoyed the warm, fuzzy sensation. Now she lifts Donny's cup and drinks from it. Then she sets the cup back and fumbles to light a cigarette, nervously dropping the matchbox onto the bar top. She manages to open the box and lift out a small stick, but she can't seem to inhale
and
light the cigarette at the same time. Buster is watching her.

“Strike the cruddy thing and get it over with.”

“Here. You do it.” She passes him the cigarette and match.

His fingers, stiff from the damp night air, are reluctant and tremble when he lifts the stick, flicks its red-capped tip. The sound is grating. A flash sparks up before his eyes. He slams them shut but it's still there, full force, coming at him from all sides. He hears wood scraping wood and a jagged, raggedy-hot explosion. He shakes his head to knock off the smell of sulphur and skin, a bright red light, like blood, still lingering after all this time.

“Buster?”

His head throbs. He opens his eyes. The match remains unlit. His chest twists into a tight ball of elastic bands. A Purple could do it, he chastises himself. Ray Bernstein would be able to stare directly into the face of danger and not even blink. He pulls another stick from the box and once more tries to light it, this time with every bit of determination he can muster, but he accidentally snaps the match in two and, frustrated, tosses the wooden box into the air. Small weapons spill out on the bar top and the carpet like deadly pick-up sticks. He tosses the cigarette across the bar, away with all good intentions, and stuffs his trembling and bloodless hands deep into his pockets. The smell of stale tobacco surrounds him. He doesn't move, not even a shudder. Not even a shudder. “I can't,” he finally admits. He feels like a deflated rubber tire. Anger rises in his bones. “Anyway, girls don't smoke.”

Jelly Bean reaches for a match and another cigarette from Donny's package, and easily lights one now. She lifts the thin stick to her lips, takes her first drag. Inhales. It's a nutty flavour. Smoke fills her throat and she washes the tobacco down with a gulp of whiskey. It's stronger than wine. The taste is heady and sweet but mostly antiseptic. It tastes as she imagines bleach might. “Girls shouldn't do a lot of things,” she says. “We shouldn't sneak out of the house. We shouldn't date boys our mothers don't approve of.” She is already feeling disreputable simply by being at the party. She raises her eyes and bends her head back and there hanging above them is a tiny green sprig with small white berries. “We shouldn't kiss under the mistletoe.”

Buster looks up and falls silent.

A moment later Susan appears wearing a white dress, white sweater, and white stockings which she adjusts as she enters the living room. “I didn't know you two were coming.” The way she says this it's understood that she means she hadn't known Buster and Jelly Bean would be coming
together
. Jelly Bean balances on the edges of her saddle shoes, glances at Buster nervously. She's in Susan's territory and there's no telling what Susan might say or do next. The only wise course of action is to be friendly and placate her.

“I'm not trying out for Miss Tobacco Queen,” she says.

“You're not?”

“Nope. Mother will be signing girls up though, if you're interested. Hey, great party. Don't your parents mind?”

Susan turns her back to the dance floor and to her brother who appears there. When she looks at Jelly Bean her eyes are dead colourless beads. “They don't know,” she says. “They never know what Ivan's up to.”

H
ANK STEPS INTO THE HOUSE
as a cuckoo clock on the foyer wall sings eleven times. He tosses his coat across the banister. He is going to make his big move tonight, buoyed by Susan's recent flirtatiousness. No more pussy-footing around. A new year is upon them and he's made his resolution. He's just been over to George Walker's place talking to George about the possibility of part-time work. George is raising two hundred and fifty hogs this year, carrying most of the work himself. He could use help with fixing up the rail fence, filling troughs and shovelling out the pens.

“Hey lard ass.” Hank finds his brother in the living room. “What're you doing so far from home?” He gives Buster a playful shove.

“Keepin' an eye on you.”

Hank looks beyond Buster and Jelly Bean to Susan who stands like a silent white cloud. Like a bride, he thinks. He smiles at her.

Susan has never seen Hank this cleaned up, including the night he took her out. She notices his hands and decides that he must have scrubbed them raw for there isn't a hint of dirt caked under his nails. She smiles back.

Donny returns out of breath and pours himself a fresh drink. “Guess what, Buster? The kid working the counter at the dairy bar on the day it was hit up is over there.”

“Really?”

“Uh-huh. He says one minute he was alone and the next he knew had a gun at his back.”

“Did he see anything?”

“Don't think so. No one did on account of the scouts riding through town. Folks are getting pretty frosted.”

“I bet they'll never catch him.”

“Oh he'll be spotted one day.” Donny watches for Buster's reaction. “Everyone's on the lookout now.”

Jelly Bean holds her own cup out for a refill and uses the conversation as an excuse to move closer to Buster. “Just thinking about it makes me nervous.”

Buster grins like a wide-smiling huckster. A Purple would get away with it, he knows. A Purple would be high off the challenge, already casing around for the next hold-up, ready to make a grab for every last penny. Yeah, if this local bandit has an ounce of the true criminal in him, he'll be back. Maybe he never left. Buster imagines gambling debts, cross-border boozing and the terrifying reality of men with nothing left to lose. In his mind he hears a twelve-gauge Winchester pump-gun firing fast and an expensive grey sedan with revolving licence plates squealing away from local police. He smells fear on the victims—especially that. He can practically taste revenge. He watches his brother take Susan in his arms on the dance floor. “Don't worry,” he says, gently nudging Jelly Bean. “You're safe with me.”

At a quarter of midnight Doc John stands inside the small water closet off to one side of his office. The door is closed and locked behind him, the key on the side of the enamel sink basin, although he knows no one is likely to walk in for there is only him and Alice in the house and she is upstairs turning the bed down. He can hear her slippers shuffling across the floor above like soft, reassuring whispers. He faces the door, stares into a small round mirror hanging on the back by a single nail. Only his face is visible, distorted by the warped mercury glass. A sharp burning pain attacks him and he doubles over, catches his breath. He coughs, this time coughing blood into the sink. It streaks down the white enamel and into the drain as red as any ambulance siren. He runs the tap to wash the blood away, swirls the water around the sink and remembers how the Detroit River circled and swirled in small currents, how it was a dark green, near brown body of water on the day he left, wet but not glassy, cold but not nearly so cold that he would have frozen falling in. He walked across the Ambassador Bridge with its thick metal beams underfoot, his suitcase in hand, a medical diploma and someone else's birth certificate and identity papers taken for his own, including the altered name and dates. It was July 20, 1932.

The bridge arched like a steely rainbow, wire and the beginnings of rust stretching from one world to the next, joining two places that time and history divided arbitrarily; a river with a French name mispronounced that had once been the pride of Chief Tecumseh. Most people on either side forgot they ever knew. He smelled the water mossy and sour and looked down at its still, sinister flow. So many had jumped or fallen or were disposed of there; or such was the lore. Even the fish were in danger of drowning. The air carried more than its scent of carp and worms and automotive plants that day. It was foul with the odour of shift work and kick backs and mob rule.

Night turned to dawn and time evaporated into one precious hope. The city of music and motors fell back and disappeared into a steel curve while its twin of salt mines and roses came more clearly into focus. Grey smoke trailed from one side of the river to the other, blowing its poisons across to Canada and leading the way forward above barges and fish and garbage floating below. Smoke billowed black and sooty, mingled with fresh air and a whispering sunrise that was getting ready to shout. Detroit slumbered while Windsor sat flickering ahead, ready to rise to the occasion. At least that's how he felt at the time. That's how he remembers it.

It took less than half an hour to cross, even with fear getting in his way like a wall of fists. One foot at a time, he told himself. One foot and then another, like a soldier marching into unknown territory. He walked with a stride that might easily have belonged to another man, the one who'd gripped his left arm, struggled to speak, and collapsed across the table in that dingy back room on the Lower East Side. Their features were similar, their colouring and height close enough. The man was his mentor, his father. How then had he done it? He'd moved fast. Not stopped to consider the consequences. Stolen papers and clothes, and in a matter of minutes abandoned a fledgling practice and the rest of the family without leaving a trace. What gave him the strength? Ah, but it wasn't strength, he knows. It was necessity—the selfish human drive that keeps us all alive. Self-preservation. He'd been dreaming his own departure for too many years, flirting with the fantasy but never really believing it would come true, and then suddenly, in an instant, opportunity opened a door. He'd thought of the gallant ones with lives cut short, those who were swallowed whole by the lure and devastation of war or of a gang—or by their own gaping desires. It wasn't going to be him. He was fed up with an existence he hadn't chosen, one he never would have chosen, and so when his father collapsed on the examination table, murdered for his refusal to continue to treat the mob, and with no one else around to witness it, a real possibility to escape into a new life finally presented itself and he leapt. Dodge expectation, he told himself on his last day in Michigan. And maybe, just maybe, you'll have a chance to flame.

At the halfway point where borders were indistinguishable he stopped, leaned over the side of the bridge, felt the breeze caress the short hair on his newly shaven neck and took one last look at the shore, so familiar. East to Belle Isle and beyond to Grosse Pointe Park where his unknowing mother, now a widow, lay sleeping in a four-poster bed. His lungs twisted into airless knots inside his chest. There would be no more lines drawn from there to here or beyond. Never again. He wouldn't enjoy the comfort of being known from beginning to end. Crossing meant fragments and scatterlings, meant being flung into the atmosphere like a dandelion spore for the rest of his days. Crossing deprived him of background, of history, and he would not be free to speak of his family or friends or even of his childhood home. He'd never call; hear his mother's voice, although in time he would come to write. His life was dividing into drawers as he walked, or pockets, of which he alone would ever know the full contents. Did I choose this, he thought, looking directly ahead in the distance at the customs booth. Or did this choose me?

The Union Jack with its red, white and blue, and crosses plain and simple, flapped overhead like a soothing round of applause. One more step and he'd be on the other side, the Canadian side, safe. He stood very still and listened until no more cars passed. Confident that traffic had lulled, he quickly undressed and dressed once more in his new suit and tie. He tossed his old clothes over the side, underwear and all, and watched them tumble and fall—the royal blue material of his coat puffing open like a parachute or a bell, gliding and swaying, tolling mute on the wind and sinking under with all the other bodies buried there. Through squinted eyes he observed what felt like a ghost of himself contort and float off down the river. A shadow, a ghost, a blue shell meant for someone else. He was destined, he knew then, to remain as elusive as a cloud of smoke. Hidden. Camouflaged for the balance of his life inside shades of grey.