The Antagonist

6


06/08/09, 7:06 p.m.


I JUST REMEMBERED I didn’t tell you what the Mounties actually said when they showed up at ID a few hours after Gord flew at Croft. And I should, because it kind of began there.

They arrived just as Gord and I were closing up, so Gord invited them in and we all sat across from one another in a booth like four kids on a double date.

There was this one cop called Hamm. The best way I can describe him is rectangular — the guy was all corners. Even his moustache was a rectangle. If it had been any smaller, he’d have looked like Hitler.

Hamm’s partner was one of those cops whose job it was to be unobtrusive. To just sit there recording everything, saving it for later, and fade into the background meanwhile. Therefore, I can’t tell you much about him, but the way I just described him reminds me of a certain someone. So let’s call him Constable Adams, in homage.

Gord had learned somewhere, at some point, that Constable Hamm’s first name was Bill and kept referring to him by it. By his full name, that is — Bill Hamm. I had no idea why. Gord was the kind of guy who did this sort of thing sometimes — resorted to random rhetorical flourishes.

“I’ll tellya something right now, Bill Hamm,” he began before we had even quite settled into the booth. “If I’d managed to get my hands around that little Christer’s neck you’d be drawing a chalk outline over by the counter, there, rather than having this nice little talk with me.”

I threw my head back and stared at the ceiling. We were going to jail.

But Hamm chuckled. “Now, Gordon,” he said. “You can’t —”

“You explain to me what I done wrong, Bill Hamm. Explain it to me right now.”

“You can’t attack —”

“Why is it a load of drug-dealing little shits are permitted to come into my place, sit back there using bad language and stinking of dope, and I’m not allowed to do a goddamn thing about it?”

“Gordon, you have every right to —”

“Then! The minute I try to defend myself. The minute I assert my rights, you a*sholes — pardon my French, Bill Hamm — you fellas, you show up here —”

“Gordon,” said Hamm. “Let’s step back. Let’s not get angry. We’re just here to find out what happened. We got a report of a disturbance. We just want your side of the story.”

“When you should be out there arresting every last one of those little bastards! Not here harassing me and my boy.”

Hamm and I sighed simultaneously.

“You should be thanking this boy,” added Gord, taking the opportunity to thwack me in the sternum with the back of his hand. “This son of a bitch right here, Bill Hamm.”

“And why is that?” said Hamm, eyeing me, abruptly deciding to let Gord take the conversational lead.

“He’s the only thing kept me from ripping the little bastard’s head off. He’s the law and order around here.”

I met Hamm’s gaze and tried to get some ESP going between us. Don’t worry, I transmitted. Sanity exists here at Icy Dream. No teenage heads will be torn asunder.

But Hamm didn’t look reassured. In fact the amused indulgence that had been dancing in his eyes while dealing with Gord dropped out of them completely when they met up with mine.

“You know, Gordon,” he said, sitting back. “That’s not actually what I hear.”

Gord was as surprised by this as I was. That anyone could hear anything but good about his boy.

“What’s that supposed to mean? What do you mean that’s not what you hear?”

“What I hear is that the boy starts fights in the parking lot is what I hear.”

Gord and I looked at each other, both astounded and both of us realizing simultaneously, I think, that, strictly speaking — keeping within the letter of the law — it was true.

Gord’s reply, therefore, was entirely predictable.

“Horseshit! That’s goddamn horseshit is what that is, Bill Hamm!”

After all, I was there to bust punks’ skulls. Gord had made that clear from the moment I started working with him. And it’s not that I literally busted anyone’s skull exactly, it’s just that I threatened to do this to some random punk pretty much every weekend and — yes — I even got into a tussle or two. The thing is, there were a lot of little shits of the Mick Croft mould who knew Gord couldn’t stand the sight of them and who would therefore get liquored up and wander in around closing time precisely for the sport of it.

They had been banned from the restaurant, which of course my father had every right to do. So Gord could have easily called the cops to get them kicked out of there. But Gord didn’t want to do that. He liked to handle these things, he said, “himself.” Meaning getting me to handle them.

So my job was to take off my hat (my own stipulation), stalk over to wherever the punks happened to be seated, and growl at them to vacate the premises immediately. If they didn’t, I was within my rights (according to Gord) to wrestle them out the door — but I rarely had to do this. What happened more often than not was that the punks would tell me: Fine. We’ll just be in the parking lot then.

The parking lot, I’d say, is our property, and we want you off it.

You got it, man, they’d say. And go wait for me in the parking lot. They’d smile and wave at me through the window if I didn’t go out right away. Or sometimes they would be in the Legion parking lot, immediately next door. The two parking lots were separated only by a sign and a concrete rail — it was easy to get them confused.

That, apparently, was what constituted me “starting fights.”

But Gord was all over the situation before I could even draw a breath in my own defence. He leaned forward as far as he could in the booth so that the table between us and the cops cut into his scrawny chest.

“You listen here, Bill Hamm. Let me tell you about this boy. This boy is at the top of his class at school [this was not strictly the case]. This boy is here, working at his dad’s business four nights a week. I don’t let him work any more than that because he has to do his school work. We’re saving to send him to a good college when he graduates [if this was true, it was the first I’d heard of it]. This boy can do anything he wants with his time, but what does he want to do? He wants to help his old man.”

Constable Hamm was holding up his hands and opening and closing his mouth, desperate to get a word in, because it was clear Gord was only getting warmed up.

“And I’ll tell you. When I see drug-addled little shits like Mick Croft staggering around town, Bill Hamm, it makes me sick. But you know what else it does? It makes me weep. I weep for those boys, Bill Hamm. Because what do they have going for them? Do they have two stable parents who look after them? Do they have a family business to help run that keeps em off the streets at night? Do they have anywhere near the gifts or advantages of this little bastard right here? [Another thwack in the sternum.] No! They don’t! And so I weep! I weep for them! But I’ll tell you something else! This boy works his ass off four nights a week to help me run a clean, decent business. When those lousy punks wander in here cursing and pouring booze into their Cokes and lighting up joints in the back of my restaurant, you’re goddamn right he’s gonna kick their asses. He’s gonna kick their asses right out of here! He’s gonna kick their asses all over the goddamn parking lot if he has to. And do you know why?”

“Gordon,” said Bill Hamm.

“Do you know why? Because his father told him to, that’s why.”

With that, Gord slapped his palms down onto the table between us and sat there panting with righteousness. Constable Adams, I noticed, was scribbling furiously into his book.

“Gordon,” said Bill Hamm again, once he could be certain he wouldn’t be interrupted. “I only want to say this to you once. You call us. You don’t sic the boy on them. I know what you’re doing — you think you’ve got a secret weapon here. He’s under eighteen and a minor so the rules don’t apply. You think you’ve got a one-man vigilante force.”

I glanced over at Gord, surprised that the cop would give him so much credit. It was far too calculated. Gord had no master plan: he just wanted punks’ skulls busted and was thrilled to have someone around who could capably get the job done. It never occurred to me that he might be taking the legality of the situation into account when he sent me out into the parking lot. And by the way, had the cops entirely missed the fact that it was Gord who had nearly throttled Croft this evening, and me who held him back? I felt myself getting angry at approximately everyone present.

“Excuse me,” I interrupted. “I was trying to stop it. I didn’t want anyone to get hurt. I was trying to calm Gord, um, Dad, down.”

“That’s right!” exclaimed Gord. “Like I said, I was ready to castrate the little bastard. If this boy hadn’t held me back . . .”

“I don’t particularly believe that,” remarked Constable Hamm, stunning us both into silence. He sniffed, then, causing his rectangular moustache to bounce around a little. “What I believe, Gordon, is that you let these kids provoke you. You enjoy it. If you didn’t enjoy it, you wouldn’t be sending the tank here after them every weekend — and believe me, we hear about it when you do. The boys over at the Legion think it’s better than TV. If you didn’t enjoy it, you’d be calling us, and we’d take care of it.”

A thoughtful stillness, entirely uncharacteristic, came over my father.

“And what would you do?” he sneered after a moment — the famous Rankin Sr. sneer. “You said yourself, these are kids. You people can’t do a goddamn thing but shoo them off home.”

“We come over, we tell them to leave, they leave,” replied Hamm. “It’s boring, for us and for them. After a while, they find something else to do, and you don’t have to worry about them anymore. But you don’t want that. You want your showdown in the parking lot. You want your dogfight.”

Dogfight. I thought about the handful of standoffs in the parking lot, Gord’s face on the other side of the restaurant window. Safe behind glass, miming punches, cheering me on.

At that moment, my father seemed to lose interest in the conversation. “Ah — bullshit,” he muttered.

“Anyway,” said Hamm, standing up. Adams followed him out of the booth as if they were conjoined. A second later Gord and I stood too. “That’s all we wanted to say tonight, Gordon. We wanted to let you know that we’re keeping an eye, and we’re happy to drop in anytime you need us. You just give us a call next time.”

“Wonderful,” said Gord, shaking Hamm’s extended hand so fast it was like he was wiping his hand on a dishtowel. “My Christ — haven’t we all just accomplished so much.” And with that, he turned away and disappeared into the kitchen, leaving me to show the policemen out.

That’s when Constable Bill Hamm turned to me and said something I never forgot. It was only the second time he’d looked at me, and for the second time in our conversation, the fake-friendly light he’d held in his eye while talking to Gord flickered into nothing.

“I know you,” he said then. “Understand that, Mr. Rankin. I see exactly where you’re headed, son.”

I stared back at him for a moment, making no sound because inside my head I was sputtering at the injustice of these words. “What?” I managed to sputter out loud, at last, to the cop. I wasn’t asking him to repeat himself, I didn’t say it like “Pardon?” I spread my hands as if to gesture to everything — the entire world surrounding me. It was my “I just want another hot dog” gesture. I’m only a kid, is what I was trying to transmit to Constable Hamm. It’s not my fault you have to tilt your chin upward to fix me with that null-eyed stare of yours. I’ve only been on this earth for fifteen years. Please don’t say this kind of thing to me.

“What,” repeated Constable Hamm. “You know what. We both know what.”

He turned his back — no handshake, nothing.

And that was my second big hint.

It wasn’t fair, but it was — it turned out — true. That’s what made Bill Hamm a kind of oracle. He wasn’t talking about right or wrong, good or evil, justice or injustice. He was a man plugged into the cosmos, a moustachioed fortune teller, just talking about the way life was — the way it was going to be. He was talking about fate. Fate’s representative stood in the Icy Dream that day like it was the temple at Delphi — and duly he pronounced.

Not bad for a university dropout, eh? I remember almost nothing from my undergraduate career, but I do remember the stuff you and I talked about, the classes we took together. You were studying English — very unoriginal, Adam — and you’ll recall that I was doing a basic humanities mishmash in the hope of discovering an aptitude for something other than skating at high speed directly into other versions of myself. Is it any surprise the stuff from Classical Lit would stick with me all this time? If you’re going to believe in one or more gods, I remember thinking, the gang from Mount Olympus made a lot more sense than the guy I’d been hearing about most of my life up until that point. Who are you going to believe runs the show if you are a citizen of Planet Earth with any kind of awareness as to what’s going on around you? Are you going to buy into the story about this great guy, who is actually somehow three guys, one-third human, and he loves everybody equally, and all he wants is for everyone to behave themselves? (But, oh yeah, sometimes tsunamis at Christmastime. Sometimes bombs on civilian populations. Sometimes mothers dying horribly.) Or do you believe in this self-absorbed pack of loons who couldn’t give a shit what happens on earth but just for fun decide to come down every once in a while to screw with us?

At nineteen years of age, three years following the extinguishment of Sylvia LeBlanc Rankin, glimmer of pure light, I remember feeling like I’d found a new religion. This was something I could believe in. It didn’t require me to feel bad, to do penance, to confess or be contrite. It required nothing. This cosmology fully expected and understood my exasperation with what the universe had inflicted on me thus far — and didn’t care. The gods were dicks — end of story. They had all the power, and guys like Homer and Hesiod and Ovid were damned if they were going to let them off the hook for their dickish behaviour. Not like us Judeo-Christians. Not like we do with our own white-bearded f*cker-in-the-sky. (And if that sounds harsh remember I do have some experience with this. I served on Our Lord’s custodial staff as an enthusiastic whitewasher of His mysterious ways for longer than I care to admit. In the hope that He’d return the favour.)

So that was good, that helped me for a while. Oh, I thought, Oh! You don’t care. That’s right, the cosmos patiently affirmed. You’re not punishing me, I gradually figured out; you don’t hate me. Hate you? Har, har, chortled the universe. Dude! You see a parade of ants trucking along and you cut off the route with a bunch of rocks or something just to watch them run in circles. As flies to wanton boys and all that.

It was weirdly reassuring. I was an ant — I was a fly. Sylvie was just another bug to them. So was Gord. So had been Ghandi, Saddam Hussein and Princess Di. All of us specks. Nothing personal. That felt good. I could deal with that.

Except of course you will recall what happened next — in what direction this new religion ended up taking me.