From Vol. 1 No. 4

I was twenty-one and just back from a trip around the world. Well, as far as Istanbul,
where I got some sort of weird flu. So my parents’ graduation present ended with me sitting in Montreal’s new Mirabel airport- so empty after the rest of the world- bent over, holding myself in but not wanting to leave my bags to run to the can.

When my old man found me, I tried to put on my smug act, like I was too cool for words, playing with my new beard with one hand while the other held my stomach. All he could say was, “We’ll fix you up,” which pissed me off to no end. I must have looked like an angry little ghost.
It was nice to be back in my room, though. And when I got better, it was nice to be on the safe little streets of Greenfield Park, which hangs onto the very western tip of the island of Montreal, closer- at least psychologically- to the Ontario border than to St. Laurent Boulevard. It feels like you could just lie right down on the pavement of those streets, and feel safe and sound, though I guess the reality would be you’d get run over by some seventeen year old in his new car. Rich kids, and I was one of them. Aging, though. God, twenty-one, such a doom number.
Maybe that’s why my parents cut off funds. I never asked them, never had to ask them. Both of them individually were always doling out tens and twenties daily like it was running water. And me, hardly peeping, just taking it all in like it was my job. It would be strange to suddenly ask for it. Shameful, embarrassing. I was still keeping up my cool front.
“You look like the Phantom of the Opera without the mask, and he’s grown a beard!” I was walking around with my friend Scott, the same as we did when we were seventeen.
I just mumbled something and ran my hands over my face. I think it disturbed Scott that I seemed to take his comment seriously.
Scott was always bigger than me. Big legs, big shoulders, big chest. He was the first boy that I met that actually had a chest, like a man’s chest, a superhero’s chest. All those years walking around together, with him always bigger than me. Now, I was actually taller, but just this thin wisp. A thin wisp beside a block of cement.
“Bentley’s tonight?”
“Can’t do it. Broke.” I liked the sound of these words. Like arriving at this wall of no cash was something that happened all the time. It helped make me feel a little tougher.
Scott only blinked for a second, and jumped into the game. “Well if you need money,” he said. “I know somebody who’s looking for somebody.”

Lost amid the streets of big, healthy yards, and heavy stone houses was a house older and poorer than all the rest. It was a house my father called the ‘paint sale house.’ Clapboard, with the front a pale green, one side yellow, and the other a fading hot pink. The colour of the back of the house was unknown. “Brings down the look of the neighbourhood” was what my mother said about it, but it was actually an old farm house, was here before all the others. And as a kid I’d always liked it. It looked like candy, candy that had been dropped in the dirt.
“He needs someone to do a few deliveries.”
I wanted to ask, ‘How do you know?’ and ‘What kind of deliveries,’ but just stood there stupidly looking at the peeling paint, the closest I’d ever gotten to the door of this house. That was what was so infuriating about Scott, the way he could pull out these surprises on me. Even now. Even though I’d been to Istanbul.
He rang the bell and said, “I think we should buy something from him first.”
After a few moments, a young, frowning woman holding a baby answered the door. The baby had a large bald head, white, white skin and big blue eyes that stared out at us.
“Raymond.” The word barely leaked out of Scott’s mouth. He seemed to be losing his nerve.
“Raymond’s not in right now,” she said. Then the woman smiled, revealing a couple of missing teeth.
“Will he be back soon?”
“No, he’s out for the day,” she said, but then backed away from the doorway. “Come in and close the door. I can’t have people standing at the door like that.”
In her neat, slanting kitchen we watched the woman, still holding the baby, find and open a small plastic pill bottle.
“How many?”
“Uh.” Scott hesitated as if making up his mind. “Just two.”

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