Montreal Noir Read online

  By the time I brought them back to the coffee table, I wanted to leave. Billy One-Eye was snoring; Ryan’s head was down and he wasn’t saying anything. I suddenly felt extraordinarily tired, like if I didn’t move soon, it would be too late.

  * * *

  I woke with the feeling, but not the memory, that I’d heard a sound. I was high, and upon opening my eyes in the semidarkness of the candlelight, I sensed the speed with which the universe revolved around me. Had I dreamed it? What have I been dreaming?

  It was an effort to keep my own head still and focus. Ryan was still in the wooden chair, slumped over, and Billy was stiff as a corpse, like he had been when we entered.

  But there—shuffling steps in the kitchen, where the light was still on, and a draft came from the open window.

  Open. I had closed it. Ryan had asked.

  Then I heard the window slowly closing.

  I struggled to clear my head, unsure what to do. But it didn’t matter. I was drugged, I felt as if I were in a cocoon or a womb. I could wriggle and kick and perhaps turn over, but I couldn’t manage to lift myself up and I struggled simply to maintain consciousness.

  A figure filled the kitchen door, a big man blocking the light. He entered the studio and loomed behind Max’s statue. He was almost as big, but soon disappeared in the shadows behind. I heard him stomping around, and then approaching us. He was standing behind the couch I was on, but I couldn’t turn my head to look at him. I was lying on my side, looking across at a passed-out Billy. Ryan was only visible in my peripheral vision.

  As I lay there, trying to get up and keep my eyes open, I saw him lumber out from behind the half-formed statue, almost staggering, leaning on something; it looked like a staff. Or—wait. A cane. Cane Man. He must have followed us.

  I couldn’t sit up to ask Ryan or Billy. Both were snoring, as I had been. I could only watch behind my heavy lids, which opened and closed slowly, as Cane Man approached. He must have stubbed his trailing foot on the sculpture—he swore when it shifted weight and thumped the floor; the couch beneath me swayed like a canoe, and I twitched instinctively, my hand flopping and knocking an empty beer bottle off the coffee table.

  I felt like the ground was gone and I was falling backward, then I got the darkness with the electric sparkles, and suddenly the world was black again.

  * * *

  Billy got up like a dead man. Ryan was dancing around, freaking out, like some animal caught in a trap, swearing spittle across the room in a ragged arc.

  Billy was staggering over, not really conscious, just doing what Ryan was screaming at him, going over to fight with Cane Man.

  He was just standing there, sizing things up. He glanced at me on the couch, then looked away quickly. He brought his attention toward Billy, who was slowly making his way toward him, hunched over and leaning on things as he walked—the arm of the couch, the coffee table, a chair beside it. Cane Man then turned to Ryan and brought his cane high above his head, swinging down on Ryan’s skull with both hands.

  Ryan collapsed and screamed like a girl. Billy roared and straightened up, like a bow unstrung. He rounded his fist and delivered an underhand punch into Cane Man’s left kidney. The guy went down on top of a whimpering Ryan, who yelped upon impact. Billy lost his footing and also fell face-first onto the pile.

  Beyond the statue, the light from the kitchen shone across the end of the room. Everything seemed to glow faintly, and light spilled like fog into the darkness. It seemed almost to pile up at the base of the statue, spilling around it in swirling eddies and shining from within rather than being illuminated from without.

  Then my attention was caught by the Cane Man’s movements, and when I blinked, my eyes were focused on him, down the long trail of the couch with my feet so tiny in the distance, and beside me the stained and crowded wooden coffee table, the empty bottles and cans, towering over the ashtrays, matchbooks, lighters, forks, packs of cigarettes, and other debris like skyscrapers over crowded streets, and I could faintly make out his outline in the darkness behind Ryan, passed out in his chair, head bowed and leaning back into the corner with his palms together under his cheek and his knees drawn up.

  Cane Man seemed to stumble on something in the darkness, maybe even bump into the chair, because I heard a tiny rumbling like thunder down a long tunnel. Ryan squeaked and leaped up off the floor, grabbing hold of the couch to anchor himself.

  Cane Man came into the light, his face a red scowl. Ryan was yelling. Billy roused too, but with lids lying low and bags under his eyes. He grabbed Cane Man’s arm but fell forward at the same time.

  Ryan dodged out of the way; Billy ran forward a few unsteady steps, though he recovered with his arms spread like he was about to rise from the earth. Cane Man fell forward onto the floor where Ryan had just been.

  I saw Billy run out of my vision like an actor dashing into the darkness in the wings of a theater. I saw Cane Man’s big frame scrape the wide wooden planks of the floor, and then from the right side of my peripheral vision, I saw Billy jump back on top of Cane Man, stomping his head and his face, hopping around on one foot.

  A sound like a carbonated waterfall roared in my ears, and the statue, still radiant and diffuse against the darkness, sailed across my vision from the left and dropped upon Cane Man like a lover upon his betrothed, and there was an echoing boom as the great phallus found its mark, the torso smothering the now prone Cane Man, the shoulder popping his skull like a blueberry between your fingers just as Billy, without turning about or flinching a muscle, suddenly bounded backward away from the spread of brains, blood, and eyes trailing connective tissue and nerves like spermatozoa or comets.

  Suddenly there was silence, which either lasted less than a second or an interminably long time, or both. Ryan approached from the left and Billy approached from the right and all I could see beyond my distant and tiny feet was a granite boulder rising to a point like a triangle and then the two of them slowly, and as if on purpose in synchronization, turned their faces toward mine.

  They staggered and climbed over whatever was in their way and it took the two of them to lift me from the couch and drag me, one on either side, to the window. Billy took a handful of snow from the sill and smashed it all over my face, and then Ryan slapped me until I roused enough to help them get me over the sill, out the window, and onto the fire escape.

  We slowly climbed our way down, acutely aware of how high we were, of what had just taken place, and of the need to get away as quickly as possible. We fell and tripped and scraped our way down the iron staircase, making too much noise. But this was Saint-Laurent, where strange noises were normal every night. We didn’t arouse any suspicion.

  Like drunken revelers we climbed up Saint-Urbain’s hill toward Mount Royal, where Ryan and Billy pulled and pushed me up the stairs to my second-floor flat. When we got inside, my girlfriend woke and gave us a stony welcome. She took me from them, angry I’d brought them home—though in truth it was the other way around—and led me to bed. After I stripped out of my clothes and climbed under the sheets, I began to cry uncontrollably, like a child, great sobs blinding me. My girlfriend turned away from me, and left me to cry myself out.

  * * *

  When Max opened the studio door the next day, there was his glorious statue, his ecce homo, pinning the broken rummy to the floor, his phallus up the bum, so to speak. He called the cops, but they never made any arrests. The Gazette reported that a homeless man was tragically killed seeking shelter in the massive blizzard, and the city spent the next week clearing snow and ice from the streets.

  My girlfriend never forgave me for letting Ryan and Billy crash with us that night. Things only got worse between us from there. She went off to Toronto and I stayed home. Ryan and Billy moved into a rooming house, which they could barely afford between their welfare checks, so they supplemented their income by panhandling. Ryan was back across the street outside Schwartz’s, but he could never again stay the night at Max Ygoe’s studio. He tr
ied to sell his drawings; I even gave him ten bucks for one, though I can’t tell what it’s supposed to be. It hangs over the couch he slept on that night he saved me from being found unconscious and surrounded by drug paraphernalia at a murder scene.

  Billy died later that year. He was found among some garbage bins behind the Belgian fries place in the heat of summer, near Duluth, a needle sticking out of his arm. Overdose was the verdict, yet Ryan swore to me that it couldn’t have been an accident—Billy was too experienced and careful for that. According to him it must have been on purpose.

  Later that year a guy started making a film about Ryan, a documentary about his fall from grace and his life on the street. And when it won an Academy Award two years later, Ryan and his buddies were watching the Oscars on the big screen at the Bar Saint-Laurent, so he saw his eventual triumph, and not long after he succumbed to the cancer he’d been ignoring for a couple of years.

  Wild Horses

  by Arjun Basu

  Mile End

  Albertson wakes to the sound of horses galloping. He looks out his window, and yes, there are horses racing down his street. He watches them cross another street and run into the darkness, toward the condo construction site two blocks away. He pinches himself to make sure he’s not dreaming. He can already see himself at work, saying, You know what I saw this morning? He will tell his story unless the media picks it up first, and they are sure to—someone’s probably blogging about it right now. Either way, he’ll still have a story. His story. And women love horses.

  Albertson is the manager of a shoe store downtown, and all of his employees and customers are women. And these women are not the types to drag around their indifferent husbands, the kind of men who show distaste with aggressive boredom. No, Albertson’s shoe store is for women, for girlfriends, the kind of women who will be impressed by horses running down the middle of a city street.

  After a quick scan online and a survey of the local TV networks, Albertson finds no media reports about horses running wild though the city. There are no blogs, no status updates, no photos. The radio is silent on the matter of horses invading Mile End. In both languages.

  Albertson’s blood feels like it’s changed color. Why is no one acknowledging what I have just seen?

  He walks up his street, past the butcher with the grass-fed veal, the boulangerie owned by the tattooed guy, and the ceramics shop with the collection of fine art chopsticks. When he turns the corner, he sees orange-helmeted construction workers standing under the green loft project and condo developments that are surely going to change everything about this place. And then there, just beyond the construction site, is a hole in the ground, where fresh horse shit has been flattened by traffic. The unmistakable smell of horse shit steams from the hole, filling the air. It is obvious.

  Albertson walks up to a hip young man wearing a tartan bowler hat and a skinny blazer, and asks, “Do you smell that?” The man stops and sniffs the air.

  “What?”

  “Do you smell something odd?”

  The man in the bowler hat takes a good deep whiff. Deliberate. He’s polite. “Like out of the ordinary?”

  “You don’t smell it?” Albertson is incredulous.

  The man sniffs the air again and looks at Albertson before walking away, breaking into a trot after several paces.

  Albertson wants to reach down and touch the horse droppings, but he has to get to work. He wants that horse shit to be horse shit, so he walks over to it, looks around, and puts his right shoe in the biggest pile. The give. It goes right through his brown Oxfords, right up to his brain. It registers as horse shit; he smiles triumphantly.

  He returns to his apartment and changes into another pair of brown Oxfords, putting his single shit-encrusted shoe into a plastic bag and into the freezer. He goes to work.

  At work he waits. He waits for one of his employees or a customer, anyone, to bring up the horses. Every time his phone rings, he expects a call about them. He checks the Internet constantly, his social media channels, the news. The city must know there are wild horses about. They are running up our streets at night, shitting near half-finished condos, and running some more. He has proof of these things. He smelled it. He saw the horses. He heard them and then he saw them and then he smelled them. That’s three senses.

  * * *

  Albertson swims through the day and no one brings up the horses. The radio is silent on horses. He googles it, because at the end of day, if it isn’t on Google, it isn’t real. Nothing turns up.

  He begins to entertain the possibility that perhaps there were no horses. He asks about horses on his Facebook page and receives no response. After he closes the store, he races home to inspect his Oxford shoes, and there it is. Horse shit. He has horse shit on his shoe. It wasn’t a dream, it was real. He has a shit-covered shoe in the freezer. It’s his link to an event he knows happened. To a specific reality.

  Albertson goes to the park to investigate. He walks up to a dog owner who is waiting for the inevitable to drop out of her animal’s backside. Albertson approaches the woman and her dog cautiously.

  “Were you out last night?” he asks, which is the wrong way to approach a stranger, he knows, but he can’t take it back.

  “Excuse me?” she replies, looking at her dog as it squats, getting in position. She knows she’s trapped. She can’t get away. Not yet.

  “Sorry,” Albertson says. He stammers a bit and pushes his hair back. “Last night. Here. Did you see them?”

  The woman is distracted by her dog. It’s not doing what it needs to do. The thing is a small mongrel, definitely some type of terrier.

  “The horses,” Albertson clarifies in a soft whisper. He feels like a dissident in Communist Germany. “They galloped down this very street. A herd of them.”

  She smiles sympathetically. “Are you crazy or is this an elaborate pickup line?”

  Her dog has shifted position, walked to another spot a foot away, and is trying again. Albertson can sense its exertion. “I wish,” he says, still whispering.

  “You wish what?” she asks. “You can do it, Bella. Go on.”

  “Early this morning. I saw them. I heard them. I even stepped in their poop.”

  She puts a finger to her lips to shush him. “Don’t say that,” she says, lowering her head. “We’re not supposed to talk about it.”

  Meanwhile, Bella squeezes out a small turd, something small, even for a little dog. She seems satisfied, however, and comes over to sniff Albertson’s pant leg.

  “Good girl!” the woman chirps. Bella looks up and wags her tail.

  “We’re not supposed to talk about what?”

  “There were no horses,” she says, giving Bella’s leash a yank and walking away without bagging her dog’s poop.

  At the other end of the park, Albertson spots another dog walker, an elderly man with a robust German shepherd. The dog takes note of him as he approaches, and sits, alert. Albertson slows his walk.

  “She’s friendly,” the man says, but Albertson decides to stay where he is, twenty feet away.

  “I was wondering if I could ask you a question,” he says to the old man.

  The man pets the dog as it walks in circles, sniffing, completing its picture of the world. “Shoot.”

  “Were you walking your dog this morning?”

  The man’s face freezes. It’s subtle, but Albertson notices. “Do I know you?”

  “I’m wondering if you saw anything odd this morning.”

  “What kind of odd?”

  “Out of the ordinary,” Albertson says. He is sinking into code speak.

  The man’s face hardens. “What are you going on about?”

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” Albertson says, turning to leave. He has to look at his shoes again, in the freezer. He needs to confirm the events. Because now he’s not sure. Again.

  “Sorry I couldn’t help you,” the man calls out.

  Albertson turns back around. “Something odd is happening,�
�� he says.

  The man takes a step toward Albertson and then stops. “Perhaps you need some sleep,” he offers gently.

  “Horses,” Albertson whispers.

  “Horses?”

  “Wild horses. A herd of them. Galloping down the street. Early this morning.” Albertson feels out of breath now.

  “Something like that would have showed up on the news, no?” the old man says, and this triggers in Albertson a kind of low-level panic. He feels his ears get warm, tingling.

  “Y-yes,” he stammers. “You’d think.” Albertson turns and walks away, slowly, back to his apartment. He knows what he saw, but he needs to look at his shoe again.

  Back at home, Albertson opens the freezer. There is his brown Oxford encrusted with horse shit. He opens a beer, sits down on the couch, and turns on the TV. He searches for news of what he saw, for some form of evidence, but finds none. He opens his laptop, scours the Internet, but nothing shows up—his search takes him everywhere but to the place he wants to go. Nothing. Less than that. Disappointment. A feeling that he is not himself, that what he knows is wrong, that everything he thinks about himself, everything he dreams, is all wrong.

  A dream would not have covered his shoe in horse shit. That stuff is real. Everything else isn’t.

  * * *

  Across the street from the shoe store is a lingerie boutique owned by a middle-aged Indian woman. She comes in for shoes every few weeks, and Albertson attends to her personally. Mrs. Sen has large feet and stands a head above Albertson. She often makes a point of noting how rare it is for an Indian woman to be her height. Albertson always feigns surprise, and Mrs. Sen buys her giant shoes—she’s been partial to Mary Janes lately—and returns to her boutique, but sometimes she doesn’t. Sometimes they go out for lunch and talk, and she tells Albertson about her childhood in a village north of Calcutta, and the unfortunate skateboarding accident that killed her first husband, and how her new husband is a judge who has bad breath and always interrupts her, and how she doesn’t know what to do with him, but won’t leave him because they’re invited to all the good parties, and she quite enjoys her new social life.