“That little Frenchwoman called the bellman and together they loaded Jack Burns on a luggage cart—they wheeled him off to his room like a baby in a stroller!” McSwiney was saying. The two men laughed but the women didn’t; the women were tense and watchful.
When Jack put his hand on the back of McSwiney’s neck and gently pushed the big, shaggy head in the direction of the fat man’s dinner plate, he already knew that McSwiney was the stronger of the two. Jack was prepared for the big man to place both hands on the table and push himself to his feet. Jack never expected to hold McSwiney down with one hand; Jack just wanted McSwiney to spread his arms and brace himself against the table, because that made it easier for Jack to slap the full nelson on him before McSwiney could stand up.
Jack overlapped one hand with the other on the back of McSwiney’s neck and drove the writer’s face into his paella, up to his ears; Jack could feel the warm food on his wrists. An errant shrimp, coated with saffron-colored rice, flew off the plate—also a sausage. McSwiney rooted around in the paella, trying to clear some space to breathe.
In wrestling, there’s more than one reason why a full nelson is illegal. Yes, you can break someone’s neck with the hold, but—from a wrestling point of view—that’s not the only thing wrong with it. It’s nearly impossible to pin someone with a full nelson—unless you break your opponent’s neck in the process. And the hold is very hard to get out of; in addition to a full nelson being dangerous, it’s also a stalling tactic.
McSwiney wasn’t going anywhere; he had no leverage, especially sitting in a chair. Jack kept pushing McSwiney into the paella. The fur-faced writer’s forehead was pressed against the bottom of the plate; from the sound of him, he must have gotten some rice up his nose. McSwiney’s two male friends weren’t smirking now; Jack never took his eyes off them. If one of them had stood up, Jack would have changed the full nelson to a chicken-wing, with which he would have driven McSwiney’s right elbow past his right ear—in all likelihood breaking the collarbone but almost certainly separating McSwiney’s right shoulder. Then Jack would have gone after one of the other two guys, starting with the tougher-looking one.
But Jack could see that there wasn’t going to be any trouble; the two men just sat there. McSwiney was bigger than both of them together, and they could observe for themselves that their friend wasn’t doing too well. The women were more fidgety than the men. They exchanged glances with one another, and they kept looking at Jack’s face—not at McSwiney’s head in the paella.
McSwiney sounded as if he were still eating, but there was something more nasal than eating involved. If the big man had started to choke, Jack would have tipped him out of his chair and put a gut-wrench on him until McSwiney threw up on the floor. But that wasn’t necessary; the writer was breathing okay, just noisily. A fat man doesn’t breathe too comfortably with his chin on his chest, even without the paella factor.
“Writers!” Jack said, more to McSwiney’s friends than to McSwiney. “They can’t even eat without saying too much.”
One of the women smiled, which may or may not have eliminated her as the woman who was with McSwiney.
Jack ground his chin into the top of McSwiney’s head; he wanted to be sure that McSwiney could hear him. “There’s another thing about your screenplay,” Jack told him. “Just what do you think would have happened to a transvestite prostitute in a town full of sailors in 1917? Some sailor would have killed him—long before the Halifax Explosion could have done the job. The story isn’t only prurient and banal—it’s also unbelievable.”
Jack could tell that McSwiney was trying to say something, but Jack wasn’t about to let the overweight author wriggle out of his paella. The woman who’d smiled at Jack spoke for McSwiney.
“I think Dougie is trying to say that we’re all dying to hear about Lucy,” the woman said. Jack guessed that she probably was the woman with McSwiney, if not his wife. She was about the writer’s age, which Jack estimated to be late forties—maybe early fifties.
“Well, Lucy is a lot younger than anyone at this table—better tits, and everything,” Jack told them—the way Billy Rainbow would have said it. No one was smiling now.
“Please don’t hurt him,” the woman said.
“That’s all anyone ever had to say,” Jack told them. He lightened up on the full nelson. “I hope you know that I could have hurt you,” Jack said to McSwiney, who tried to nod.
Jack let him go and stepped away from their table. He half expected McSwiney to stagger to his feet and come at him, swinging. But the fat man just sat there, looking more subdued than combative.
The woman who’d spoken to Jack wet her napkin in her water glass and began to fuss over McSwiney. She picked the rice out of his hair and beard, finding a shrimp or two and some sausage—also a piece of chicken. She cleaned him up as best she could, but there was nothing she could do about the saffron; the writer’s beard and forehead were stained a pumpkin-orange color.
A waiter who’d been watching the whole time kept his eye on Jack, who returned to his table but sat with his back to the window, facing McSwiney’s party. Jack didn’t look at any of them directly, but he wanted to see McSwiney coming if the big man came at him. The woman who’d asked him not to hurt McSwiney looked at Jack from time to time, with no discernible expression.
Jack waved the waiter over and told him: “If they’re staying, please offer Mr. McSwiney another paella. I’ll pay for it.”
“They’re not staying,” the waiter said. “Mr. McSwiney is experiencing chest pains—that’s why they’re leaving.”
It would be bad luck to have contributed to the death of the drunken lout—the overweight writer was a blustering god of Canadian letters. The autopsy might reveal that McSwiney had rice in his lungs. He’d been murdered with food; the murder weapon had been the paella! Eulogies would abound, nationwide; a voice blowing over the Canadian landscape like a gale-force wind had been silenced. Worst of all would be the lengthy quotations from McSwiney’s prose, gargantuan descriptions of rocks and trees and seagulls in Quill & Quire.
“Would you know if Mr. McSwiney has experienced chest pains before?” Jack asked the troubled-looking waiter.
“Oh, all the time,” the waiter said. “He has terrible heartburn.”
Jack ordered a beer. He hadn’t had one since the Heineken he’d had at that party in the Polo Lounge after the Academy Awards. He noticed that a large gob of McSwiney’s paella had landed on his pants; he’d been busy and had somehow missed seeing it. The shrimp coated with saffron-colored rice, the sticky sausage—Jack wiped off the mess with a napkin, but (like McSwiney) there was nothing he could do about the saffron stain.
Whenever he saw the troubled-looking waiter, Jack was distracted by his thoughts of McSwiney’s chest pains. He sincerely hoped it was just heartburn. McSwiney was an asshole, but he was too young to die. Jack had restrained himself from hurting the bastard; it would have been too cruel for it to turn out that Jack had had even an inadvertent hand in killing Doug McSwiney!
And that was Halifax. Jack would beg Dr. García to allow him to tell her a little bit about what happened there. (After all, it might be a year or more before Jack got around to that part of his life story in chronological order.) Because his psychiatrist could see that Jack was agitated, and because she’d already talked to Lucy and Lucy’s mother about the Lucy business, Dr. García indulged him. She at least let him tell her the part about Doug McSwiney.