Montreal Noir Read online

  “You going to move?”

  “Oh, sure.”

  He stepped to the side, then swayed into me, knocking my glass to the floor. The gin spread across the dirty linoleum. “Oopsie,” he said, grabbing a cloth off the front of the stove and leaning down. “I’ll clean it up. You take that drink out to your grandmother.”

  “Let me make another first.”

  “Just leave it, I’ll make you another one. A better one.”

  I nodded. As I stepped over him, some of my grandmother’s drink sloshed against the side of the glass and landed on my hand. I raised it to my lips to siphon it off. God, it tasted awful, way worse than I remembered. Bitter, and not just from the tonic.

  Oh my god. Oh no, no, no.

  My mind flew past the present to the many conversations I’d had, years ago, with my father about difficult-to-trace poisons. He had an obsessive personality, and at one point in time, when I was a teenager, that’s what his brain got stuck on. He’d made it into a bit of a game: what was the best way to hide a slow-acting poison so you could administer it without the victim knowing?

  My hands were shaking as I walked into the hall and put the glass down on a table. I found my phone in my purse and started an Internet search.

  My eyes raced past the symptoms: Thinning skin . . . Blood clots . . . Stroke . . .

  Oh, Grandpa, I thought. You were right.

  Coyote

  by Brad Smith

  Westmount

  They gathered at the Sunflower Diner in the mornings, never before ten because they weren’t the kind to get out of bed early, even to go kill something. The core group was generally the same, a dozen or so men most days, although the number could double, depending on who was working what shift where. They’d have breakfast before heading out, slopping up egg yolks with Wonder Bread toast, and calling for more coffee, those bottomless cups.

  They were older, the majority of them, half-assed farmers who called themselves retired even though they had never worked full time, having years ago rented out the acreage they’d inherited from their fathers to the big US cash croppers. They still called themselves farmers, living on the fat of the land rather than off it, but most had worked other jobs sporadically over the years, and nearly all of them had wives who worked. The men drove big pickup trucks that served no practical purpose other than a participation in some vehicular pissing contest. Splattered with mud, like some badge of honor, the trucks had loud diesel engines and tires the size of Volkswagens.

  From time to time, Joanna would see some of their working wives in town, driving their husband’s trucks. They practically needed stepladders to climb in and out of the monstrosities.

  Breakfast was leisurely and long, the conversation revolving around sports—the Maple Leafs, the Canadiens, and sometimes the NFL. The weather, if commented upon at all, was quickly determined to be fucked up. They didn’t need to talk politics; they all voted the same way so there was nothing to discuss. Some days it would be close to noon before they left the diner, Ben Dubois deciding when it was time to go. Anybody walking into the diner wouldn’t exactly pin Dubois as the leader, and the other guys wouldn’t readily admit it, but he was certainly their captain.

  He would sit in the same corner booth as always, not saying much, too busy concentrating on his eggs, pancakes, and sausages, cleaning up his own plate before helping himself to the scraps on someone else’s. He would then sit back, toothpick in his mouth, a slight look of contempt on his face, some undisclosed disdain for his surrondings. He couldn’t care less about hockey or football, and the weather was going to do whatever it wanted. But Dubois held himself in such a way that suggested he knew more about the matters at hand than the rest of them put together, and if someone came up with an inordinately stupid statement, all eyes would turn to his reaction, even if it was nothing more than a condescending smirk.

  Leaving, they’d stand in the parking lot for a few minutes, light the cigarettes they weren’t allowed to smoke in the diner, and watch the sky, deciding what concession to hit first, rifles in the racks, whiskey in flasks tucked into their hip pockets.

  * * *

  The hunting had started just a few years earlier, so Joanna had never known about it. She had come home in the spring, and didn’t notice the bunch until late fall, when the crops were off the fields, the leaves off the trees. One afternoon, washing dishes in the kitchen sink, she spotted trucks parked alongside the road, north of the farm, exhaust pipes puffing smoke rings into the cold November air. Homer was just two days quit of the latest round of his chemo, and was in the front room by the fire, trying to stay warm and positive, his skin as gray as day.

  “What’s with the trucks on the side of the road, Dad?”

  He didn’t look away from the flames. “Dubois and that bunch.”

  “What are they doing?”

  “Coyote hunting.”

  It was pure serendipity that Joanna was even there, in the house, her marriage having finally collapsed at roughly the same time that Homer’s cancer came back. The disease thrived as the marriage had not. Her leaving had been anticlimactic, and Richard had said as much on their final night together. He compared their relationship to a baseball player batting .180 over the course of his final season, with everybody, including the player, knowing it was over.

  Joanna hated sports metaphors, and that this was the best he could come up with after fourteen years made her resent him even more than she already did.

  They’d spent some time in counseling, even changing therapists twice, as if the therapist might somehow be the problem. The last one was a sunny blond woman named Nathalie. She had a degree from McGill, and legs like a Vogue model. She brought things to a close when she called Joanna at work to tell her that Richard had sent her a text asking if she wanted to get a drink. It was the first time Joanna had ever heard of a marriage counselor advising a client to run for the hills.

  Which is precisely what Joanna did, although the hills turned out to be the fields of her youth, less than an hour south of Montreal, in Howick. She took a leave of absence from her job at Dawson College. Her father’s illness provided a convenient excuse, although most of her colleagues were aware of her domestic situation. Who knows—maybe a few of them received a text from Richard too. Maybe a few even responded.

  She came home to her old bedroom, to the familiar smell of the house and the barn and the land. She cooked for her father, drove him to Montreal for his treatments, and in between, she frantically cleaned a house that hadn’t seen much more than the occasional pass of a corn broom since her mother died seven years earlier. In what even she recognized as a cathartic state, she suggested painting, papering, and installing new flooring. Homer would have none of it. He wanted things to be as they’d always been—his walls and his floors and his health.

  Joanna should have known better. She had tried a similar tactic when Richard began his wayward drift, spending less and less time at home, showing houses to prospective clients in the evening instead of the day, attending real estate conferences he’d eschewed in the past. Meanwhile, Joanna renovated and redecorated the house, knocking down the wall between the kitchen and dining room, making an en suite bath and walk-in closet in the bedroom for the kids they’d never have. The renovations had been expensive, even for Westmount, but money was never the problem.

  By early December, Homer felt well enough to wander around outside for a couple hours every day, looking for jobs to do. One sunny morning, Joanna found him on an extension ladder, cleaning leaves from the eave above the front porch. She’d made him climb down, to his disgust. Since then, he’d reluctantly confined himself to whatever chores he could find at ground level.

  * * *

  One gray afternoon, Homer was changing the oil in his pickup truck when Ben Dubois rolled into the driveway. Joanna was in the kitchen making soup from the carcass of a chicken she and Homer had eaten over the weekend. When she heard the rumble of the exhaust, she saw Dubois sliding his girt
h out from behind the wheel. Ralph Acton emerged from the passenger side, shoulders slumped, head hanging down like a cartoon character. Homer straightened and wiped his hands on a rag he drew from his coveralls. Joanna could tell by his step that he was not happy with the interruption.

  The three men were standing by the tailgate when Joanna came out of the house wearing Homer’s old wool jacket, which he’d once worn when doing his evening chores. Ralph Acton nodded as she approached, but looked away quickly so he wouldn’t know if Joanna nodded back.

  Inside Dubois’s truck bed were three dead coyotes, two of them small and brown, the third large and yellow. Their hides were thickly matted where they had bled out, their eyes glassy, tongues swollen. Dubois glanced at Joanna as if she were a child interrupting the grown-ups, and then didn’t look at her again.

  “The big one near got away,” he said. “We ran him around the beehive bush and he went through a culvert on Mill Road. Billy Logan just pulled up to the intersection there, got out with his .222, and put a slug through his hindquarters.” Dubois pointed to the shattered hip of the dead coyote. “Spun him around like a whirligig. Son of a bitch kept going, though, just his front legs working. Made the mistake of crossing my path, so I hit him in the ribs with my rifle. He was done like dinner. Lookit the size of him, Homer.”

  Homer nodded. It seemed to Joanna that he was trying to muster some enthusiasm for the matter at hand, but couldn’t quite do it. Changing the oil in his pickup was the job at hand. The cancer had made him more focused, she’d noticed, whether he was cutting the grass or clearing the vegetable garden—whatever the task of the day was, he did it relentlessly, distractions be damned.

  “What do you do with them?” Joanna asked.

  Dubois, looking at Homer, smiled, making a point of not acknowledging the question or the woman who’d asked it.

  Ralph watched Dubois, needing direction, then reluctantly took it upon himself to reply: “We dump ’em at the landfill.”

  Joanna kept her eyes on Dubois. If he wouldn’t look at her, she wouldn’t stop looking at him. “You’re not serious,” she said.

  “Girls,” Ralph chided, “always against us boys and our hunting.”

  “Right,” Joanna said. “Except I was shooting and skinning out rabbits and ducks when you were still shitting your pants, Ralph. We ate what we shot.”

  “I ain’t going to eat no coyote,” Ralph said.

  “A little bit of the city come home to roost, I see, Homer,” Dubois said.

  “You don’t sell the hides or anything?” Joanna persisted.

  “Ain’t worth nothing.” Ralph again.

  Now Joanna turned to him. “Then why shoot them?”

  Ralph grinned. “Just what we do. Right, Dubois?”

  Dubois stepped to the tailgate, lifted the front quarters of the large coyote, and stared straight into the dead glassy eyes. “That’s right. It’s what we do. And we do what we want.” He dropped the carcass carelessly, the animal’s head banging onto the metal of the tailgate, and turned to Homer. “We’ll let you get back to your truck, Homer. Got a feeling you’ll be getting an earful over supper tonight.”

  Joanna waited until the vehicle was out of the driveway before turning to her father. “They ask your permission to hunt here?”

  “Yeah,” Homer answered, slowly adding new oil to his engine.

  “You approve of it?”

  “I guess I don’t disapprove of it.”

  Joanna stared hard at her dying father.

  * * *

  It wasn’t until breakfast the next morning that the subject came up again. It seemed Homer had been thinking it over.

  “A coyote will kill young calves and lambs,” he said, having finished his single piece of toast, both hands on the coffee cup before him. “Helps out the farmers, keeping their numbers down.”

  “Except these days you can drive fifty kilometers in any direction and not see a single cow,” Joanna countered. “And when was the last time anybody in this county raised sheep?”

  When Homer took a sip of coffee, his watch slid halfway up his wrist. His forearms had once been like fence posts. “They’re just a nuisance.”

  “So are telemarketers,” Joanna said. “We don’t shoot them and toss them in a landfill.”

  Homer smiled. “It’s an idea though.”

  Joanna stood and cleared the table. “I’m not opposed to hunting. But these guys aren’t doing it for meat. It’s nothing more than blood sport. Sitting in their goddamn trucks along the road with the heaters going. Ralph Acton smelled like a distillery yesterday. Dubois too.”

  Homer got to his feet. “I guess it’s become a bit of a hobby with them. I told them years ago they could hunt here.” He grabbed his jacket from a hook on the door. “Hard to untell them now.”

  * * *

  Five or six years into Joanna and Richard’s marriage, Joanna had lunch one afternoon with a colleague from the college. They went to a newly opened café a few blocks away on Sherbrooke Street, near Atwater. Joanna’s mother was in failing health at the time, and the woman told her that she’d lost both her parents in the past couple of years. The woman had inherited her parents’ house, an old-style ranch on three acres at the city’s edge. A young man and his wife had approached the woman immediately after her widowed mother died. They impressed her with a story of how they were about to get married, looking for the perfect place to start a family. The woman had sold the house to them without putting it on the market. The couple immediately sold the property to a city realtor, who promptly turned the three acres into a subdivision. The realtor was Richard. Joanna hadn’t taken Richard’s last name, so the woman did not know he was her husband.

  Joanna kept the story to herself for a long time, not knowing how to bring it up, and not knowing if she wanted to. She deliberately avoided becoming better friends with the woman, fearful that the truth would eventually come out. Of course, when Joanna finally broached the matter with Richard, she did so during a late-night argument, the details of which she couldn’t remember. When she had accused him of screwing over her friend, Richard mocked her. If the woman had done due diligence, he said, she would have known that subdividing was not only possible but quite likely. Besides, if Richard hadn’t moved on the property, somebody else would have. He told her this in his usual forceful manner, silencing her with his tone.

  * * *

  The trucks continued to appear throughout the winter. Joanna occasionally heard gunshots in the distance. There were days when she saw the trucks but didn’t hear shooting; those days were rare. Neither Ben Dubois nor any of the others pulled into their driveway again to show off their kills. That might have been because Homer was rarely outside anymore, the combination of sickness and cold weather keeping him housebound.

  Joanna did have an encounter with Dubois in town one day, in the parking lot of the food market on Bridge Street. In a town of less than a thousand people, it was inevitable that they would see each other eventually. It was late in the afternoon when Joanna walked out of the store, carrying her heavy grocery bags, and spotted Dubois talking to another man in the lot. His truck was parked next to Joanna’s Honda—not coincidentally, she guessed. He watched her as she approached, his face red with drink, his tiny eyes narrowing. The other man sulked off the moment Dubois diverted his attention, like he had been waiting for a chance to take his leave.

  “There’s the girl,” Dubois said. “How’s Homer?” It was more of a demand than a question.

  “Getting by.” Joanna opened the hatch and started to place the groceries inside. Dubois drew near; without turning, she smelled the whiskey on his breath.

  “Some of us been thinking we’d like to come see him. Thing is, we don’t feel all that welcome.”

  “Why not?”

  “Makes you feel that way, being judged.” Dubois paused but couldn’t help himself. “Especially by the likes of you.”

  Now she turned on him. “I beg your pardon?”

&nb
sp; “You heard me. You’re from here, same as the rest of us. Don’t matter if you go off and live in the city awhile, until you figure out you can’t hold onto a man and you come running back. You’re still from here. But all of a sudden, you act like we’re beneath you.”

  It surprised her how angry she became. There was something about him, some inborn visceral hatred, that she recognized, and it was the recognition that bothered her, more than Dubois himself. It was as if she wanted the concept of someone like him to be completely alien to her.

  “Nothing is beneath me,” she said. “I’m talking to you, aren’t I?”

  And then she was in the car, pulling away, not looking over to where he stood, legs spread, his mouth slack with liquor, an ever-present grin on his face.

  * * *

  Christmas came, and then New Year’s, neither day delivering anything remotely festive. Joanna cooked, but Homer had no appetite, so she ended up eating too much and tossing things out.

  In late January, the doctors decided that further treatment would be pointless. Homer passed his days in the front room by the fire, first in his leather recliner and lastly in a bed the hospital brought over. He read mostly nonfiction books, and watched movies Joanna got from the library in Ormstown. He said he wanted to make it until spring; he died the day after Easter Sunday.

  The funeral was on that Wednesday. They filled a little church with friends and neighbors, mostly people Homer’s age, some still upright and relatively strong, but most bent and worn, leaning on canes or walkers. Homer’s last surviving sibling, Doug, didn’t make the trip from Victoria.

  Richard wasn’t at the funeral either. For that Joanna was mostly grateful. She didn’t want to see him at a time when she was so emotionally fragile, but his absence clarified his incredible selfishness. He knew her father had died—she had left him a message on his cell, and had regretted the call immediately after she put the phone back in its cradle.

  * * *

  Richard did show up six weeks later, pulling into the driveway in a black BMW Roadster Joanna had not seen before. She was planting string beans in Homer’s vegetable garden along the south wall of the barn. When she saw him, she moved the sticks and twine over a row, running the corner of the hoe to cut a valley in the fresh-tilled dirt. As he approached, he made no comment about what she was doing. If someone were to ask him about it later, Joanna would bet that he wouldn’t remember what she was doing when he saw her. He said hello and got to it.