“To hell with it all,” Jack said, and drank.
I looked moodily into my sludgy glass, divining nothing. Perhaps Jack was a blind prophet. In the drinkery a deep burnt-oil smell pervaded and I drank more of the rotten stuff, choking it back.
“We’d better go and wind up that motor,” I said.
“Now you’re cooking with gas,” went my Tiresias.
ON DORCHESTER WE caught a ’cab and took it to the street where the Auburn sat parked. While walking to it I heard hot jazz in my head, as though a record was spinning within, like a movie house pianist accompanying my actions. Someday they’ll play recorded music at the cinema like a radio play and make a talking picture, with coloured film for verisimilitude. It’ll be closer to real life, like now. Look at the purple grease on the windscreen of the motor, the curled rusty leaves, the indigo sky. The music continued to play in my mind’s ear, as it were: “Hot Potato.” Jack got behind the wheel.
“Shame they can’t shoehorn a wireless into a ’car,” I said. “A body could listen to music while driving.”
“Distracting,” Jack said.
He motioned for the keys and we swung away. The evening sun crept down near the mountain. By taking side streets and quiet lanes we slotted the motor in an unmemorable siding. It was suppertime. Around the block at a dry-goods merchant we each purchased a bottle of medicinal ginger wine, neither Jack nor I in an aquabibulous frame of mind. The bottles held a nerve tonic and stomach settler. The storekeep uncorked one and its contents tasted of Angostura Bitters laced with rancid sugar. We left to tread down empty redolent alleyways leading away from the river, industry winding down at this hour in our obscure corner of the Empire.
What did we talk of? Jack reminisced and we laughed as the tonic made us merry. I put away my shallow resentments and entered the absurd spirit of the thing. The past was ephemeral and faintly ridiculous, a series of harebrained scrapes and foolish amours. As dusk thickened we evoked our lost world of the West: the taste of raw Walla Walla onions big as baseballs, pickled herring, and Indian candy from Ship’s Point on Vancouver Island where Cook had anchored near heaps of oyster shells. Finishing the medicine Jack dropped the corked empty bottle in the drink and the river’s current pulled it away to join flotsam clinging ’round a rowboat tied up near a small freighter. Ship’s rope groaned as Jack discreetly checked his weapon. I did likewise and spun the cylinder of my Mark IV. It was the same sidearm make I’d been issued with my pip. Jack stuck his in his belt under a buttoned jacket and unbelted overcoat. I kept mine safe in an outer pocket. Jack spat in the oily water. There wasn’t a soul about, though I heard a faint shouting from some streets behind us. My nine hundred dollars and change was safe upon me so I lit a cigaret and Jack’s with the same lucifer.
“Never three to a match,” Jack said. “First one the sniper spots, the second he aims, the third he fires.”
“Did you see it happen?”
“One of those bits of advice that travelled up and down the line. You heard it alclass="underline" crucifixions in No Man’s Land, ghosts and the Angels of Mons. Dammit, though, it was impossible to tell truth from fiction there, the whole thing was too bloody unreal. Whole world went down the fucking rabbit hole and where it’s going now I don’t like to think.”
Jack looked at his ring awhile and then said: “There’ll be another war.”
“They’ll fight it with Zeppelins and heat-rays,” I said.
“Damn me I don’t know.”
“We’ll be gone before it starts anyhow.”
“Speak for yourself,” Jack said, and spat again.
That was him all over. One minute careless and blithe, then queerly sober. He checked his wristwatch.
“Waiting to go over was the worst of it,” he said, “waiting for the whistle.”
I yawned, cracking my temporomandibular joint loudly.
“No rest for the wicked,” continued Jack.
“Sleep in heaven,” I said.
“Or the other place.”
We completed a circuit and I looked into the dirty water. Gulls circled and dove. No river is the same river, so sayeth Heraclitus. The St. Lawrence poured towards the sea, thalassa, thalassa. Jack checked the time again.
“He’s late, the bastard.”
“Alors,” I said.
“Wait a minute.”
A ’car careened into the crossing near the jetty, the rendezvous between Duke and Nazareth by the train tracks. It was a fawn Oldsmobile that swerved to intersect with us. Jack held up his hand like a traffic cop and Bob braked to a clumsy halt. He rolled down the window and grinned sloppily.
“Goddammit man, you’re drunk,” Jack said.
“Ain’t you?” asked Bob.
“Get out and take some air.”
“Oke.”
Bob dismounted. To open my bottle of ginger wine I pushed the cork down its neck out of ugly necessity, then took a long swig of the restorative. I handed it to Jack, who pulled and passed the bottle to Bob. Bob looked at me a moment with no expression and I was dead certain he knew nothing of my attachment to Laura. I tamped down a panicky sort of anger. I didn’t like him, how he’d touched the love of my life. For the life I couldn’t figure why Jack wanted his help. Bob had caused that fracas in the whorehouse. He was unstable. I wanted to smash his pretty face in.
“Sláinte,” Bob said, passing the bottle back to me.
“Guid forder,” said I, and drank.
Dammitdammitgoddamnationchristinheavensaveus. Breathe. Maintain an outward mien of calm and spit away your corruption. George V is your liege and lord by the Orange Lodge and the Law of this Dominion, so fuck the Pope.
A ragged dog came out from behind a rubbish tip and coughed at us as we waited hidden in deep shadow. I made up my face into a rueful, close-lipped smile as the bottle did another round. When I went to light a fresh cigaret I found one burning in my hand. Time slowed with the universe, entropic. Birds flew southeasterly towards St. Helen’s Island. An old lamplighter came our way, the antique figure out of Cruikshank’s etchings for Dickens. His toil gave the streets a bluish tint as night fell completely. Jack handed me keys and nodded to Bob. The two drove the Olds to another position. I finished the wine and carefully placed the bottle on a rotten turnbuckle before walking to the Auburn, then made to check my pocketwatch before recalling how I’d failed to redeem it from hock. No matter. There was no music playing in my head now. I felt drained of life. As I sat behind the wheel I listened to my breath and the dull rhythm of my heartbeat. At least the medulla oblongata continued to function. Along my arm came the familiar ache.
Talk about slowness, those days strung out along the opaque dragon’s tail, lost in morphia. The endless dreams, the fading to lonely worlds, a glacial death often punctuated by restless strength and creative activity. That was the drug’s Janus effect, withering the body and feeding the mind. Nothing on earth had been worse than the panic I’d felt when my supply had been exhausted. Periodic opium raids in Chinatown had pushed me into a corner and the McGill beaks came ever so damned close to catching me out at the Royal Victoria red-handed.
The last visit to the hospital before brokering my departure from the school had been an off-chance of lax security. There were new locks on the door and Smiler was with Jacques Price, the pair dissecting a beggar in the downstairs morgue. Smiler and Price’s scalpelwork was no patch on my own, I was pleased to note. Jack and I’d butchered enough deer and moose in our youth to make us old hands at vivisection. Once the Pater had potted a bear out by Yale and brought most of it back to our house in the West End. He’d skinned it for a rug and I remembered finding a tin rubbish bin in the yard with its lid held down by a brick. Inside had been the animal’s head, alive with writhing white maggots stripping the flesh off the trophy. Later the amah’d boiled the skull clean and the Pater’d mounted it on a wall near my bedroom.