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EXCERPT 10

The next day a biting Alberta Clipper roared into town, dropping three inches of dry snow followed by a blast of arctic air. I was in no shape to wrestle with the beast of winter. It was shut down dead stop, grinding to a halt cold. The kind of cold where the car exhaust lays down low to the ground and the wind is all the time trying to get inside your face and rip your eyes out. The sun has no warmth and cars don’t start. Furnaces break down and water pipes burst. You can feel the cold pinching in through the windows and underneath the doors. You need some kind of routine to get you through, something solid in your life to hang onto. Me, I had myself a motto: Do what you have to do and stay drunk the rest of the time.

Fate seemed to have it in for me and I didn’t have a lot to be thankful for except that liquor was cheap in Bay City—real cheap. That helped, being I was off the coke. In my own way, I was going through rehab. I provided the castigation.

Slowly my obsession with cocaine was beginning to lift. The drug makes you selfish and greedy and all you care about is drugs and money and sex. After being off the shit for a while, I started thinking about others again, like my wife and son.

Poor Loraine was getting fat and so was little Mike and I blamed her. If only I could’ve seen the kid more often I could’ve straightened him out.  But Loraine told him I was a no good character and that made it hard, if you know what I mean. Then she moved back in with her Jesus-freak parents and I only got to see the kid when she brought him to the bowling alley with her. And I hate bowling. Truly, I hate bowling. Bowling alleys aren’t so bad, but all Mike and I used to do there was eat greasy food and he was beginning to look like a pregnant seal. Made me think of a seal because of the way Loraine slicked his black hair down and this sound he made that annoyed me. I guess eight-year-old kids do that sort of thing but sometimes I think she put him up to it. It was also pretty tough because I was living in Bay City and he was across the water in Zenith City. It wasn’t that far but I only spent time in Zenith when I was driving cab or working at the porno store and those are no places for a kid.

It’s important that you know about the divorce because it was, I think, one big reason I got deeper involved with the Cross brothers. After the break-up, things started going downhill for me in a gravity-fueled spiral.  Success was failure and failure was success and who could tell the difference?

Then on one hung-over February afternoon I was sitting in the living room reading the morning paper in the waning light of a bitter day. The Gong Show was on the tube. Chuck Barris was clowning in a floppy hat and giving away trips to Bulgaria. My roommate Mickey was bartending at the High Times. Dishes were stacked up in the kitchen and my room was piled-high with dirty clothes. Worse, all the beer was gone and I was getting thirsty.

MAN FOUND MURDERED IN BAY CITY MUNICIPAL FOREST  

The headline jumped out at me. It was the lead story of the day and told the sad tale of a Caucasian male found face down in the snow: Shoulder-length light brown hair, five front teeth missing and two large bullet holes in the back of his head. Harvey Dornan. Alleged police informant, it said in black and white right there in front of me. Body partially eaten by wolves was also there.

Harvey had finally pissed off the wrong people in his short miserable life. Maybe if someone had fixed the kid’s teeth a long time ago, things would’ve turned out different for him. It was only two weeks since I’d seen him running out the back of the Castaway with thugs in pursuit. I didn’t do a thing to help him then—but you never can with guys like that.

Now all these bad premonitions and free-floating anxieties were swarming inside me like a cloud of locusts. Did I mention before that I get flashes from the future? Mostly bad premonitions like when you feel something horseshit is going to happen and then it does. And the more I dwelled on it the worse it got. But later that night after a few drinks I started feeling better, you know how it is.

Then things went routinely for a while. Days of high snow banks and nights of low life. I made enough money to get by but not enough to make any progress on my debt. The only lesson learned: time passes quickly when you dread the rising sun.

(To be continued)