he’d gotten into dealing was so he could afford his own habit. He tried to counterbalance his weed habit with a regime of weight-training, but Kevin figured he only did the weight-training because it involved a lot of sitting still. Kanga was an optimist, a hopelessly amiable leader – if you could call anyone leader who could hardly keep a toe on the earth. He was trim and fit and didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about the future.
Leon Rutkowski was a reformed speed freak with a reputation for an extremely unpredictable temper. Except for the incident in the Chinook, Kevin had never seen it personally, but he had heard things: one story concerning a man who ended up in hospital, another involving a baseball bat. Leon was all for making lots of money. In fact, Kanga had once said he would never have gotten into the heroin trade if Leon hadn’t bugged him about it so much. They were already well into it when Kevin joined up. Leon was stringy, but with a pot belly that hung over the belt of his jeans owing to the junk food he was so fond of. Kevin wasn’t sure why, but Leon seemed a good deal calmer since Red Bear had come on the scene, healthier too, putting more thought into what he ate. And he’d stopped complaining about not getting laid. Every now and again Red Bear would bring babes up from Toronto, hookers no doubt, and share them with Leon.
Then there was Toof. His real name was Morris Tilley, but everyone called him Toof because of the extra incisor that pushed its way to the front of his unruly dentition. That, along with his floppy hair and the droopy way he held his head, combined to give him a doglike air, which was quite appropriate because he was really more of a mascot than a serious member of the outfit. Toof talked a lot and, owing to the fact that he was a hopeless pothead, what he said did not always make sense. And he had an absolute genius for getting lost – not easy to do in a place the size of Algonquin Bay – but Toof seemed to have lost the inner positioning device that allows most human beings to leave home in the morning with a reasonable expectation of finding their way back.
Red Bear had come along at the lowest point in their fortunes. The Viking Riders had become more aggressive, consolidating their grip on the whole northern territory. Suddenly they seemed to be moving tons more dope, and there was precious little Kanga and his boys could do about it. Kevin had been reduced to skulking along Oak Street hoping that some of his old clientele would remain loyal enough to buy the odd dime of smack. A few of them did, but not enough. Everyone was afraid of the Viking Riders.
Kanga had decided it was time to have a ‘sit-down’ with the bikers. See, that was the kind of blue-sky optimist Kanga was. You have a problem with bikers, you take over a bag of Sensimilla and smoke a peace pipe with them. The bikers agreed to the sit-down, but it hadn’t gone well at all. The gang told him, over-explicitly in Kanga’s view, to cease and desist operating in their territory. Otherwise they would introduce him to a world of pain. To emphasize the point, one of the bikers – a big mother named Wombat – had pissed on him. Literally.
First their customers, then their suppliers dried up; nobody wanted them as subcontractors. Everybody had to deal exclusively with the Riders or risk being put out of business, to use the polite term. In desperation, Kanga had ventured further afield for product, driving as far as Montreal to round up first-class narcotics.
‘You’re out of your mind,’ Kevin had told him. ‘There’s no way we’re going to be able to move that stuff without the Riders going berserk.’
They were in Kanga’s basement apartment. Kanga was on his back at his universal gym, smoking a joint. He took a hit, offered it to Kevin, who declined, and set it in the ashtray.
Kanga smiled and pressed another one-fifty. He held the weight and released the smoke through his teeth. ‘That’s the beauty part,’ he said, his voice all gaspy from the weed. ‘I’m not gonna go into competition with them. I’m going to set us up as their suppliers.’
‘Don’t do it, man. Don’t even think that. They’ll just rip you off. They’re already moving so much dope, you’re not going to be able to beat whatever price they’re getting.’
‘Leave it to me, man. I know what I’m doing.’
‘You going to wear a wet suit this time?’
‘Hey, fuck you, man. That was just one goon.’ Kanga set down the weight and took another hit off the joint. His words emerged smokily between clenched teeth. ‘The other guys were actually kind of apologetic about it.’
And so Kanga had set up another meeting with the Viking Riders. Kevin and Leon and Toof had never seen him again.
Without Kanga, the group had rapidly gone to hell. Kevin made regular trips to Toronto and brought back small amounts of speed and heroin by train. But it didn’t add up to a paying proposition. What with all the stress of their misfortunes, he found himself once again with a needle in his arm. It had taken all his strength to quit again, methadone, twelve-step, the whole pathetic cabaret. By then, he had been barely able to make the rent on his miserable little apartment.
‘The thing to do,’ Leon had mused one day, ‘instead of buying from the Viking Riders, or trying to buy around them – what we should do is take over their import business.’
They were sitting in the sun on a rock cut near the railway tracks, watching the French girls heading down Front Street to the Ecole Secondaire.
‘Somehow they’re bringing the stuff in from the States,’ Leon went on, ‘and now they’re shipping it across the goddam country. If we could take over that end of things they’d be forced to deal with us.’
‘Yeah,’ Toof had said, wheezing through a plume of pot smoke. ‘That sounds good. Why don’t we do that?’
‘Because Kanga had the same idea,’ Kevin said. ‘And Kanga never came back.’
So there they were: Leon a talker, not a leader; Kevin with no ambition whatsoever to run things, and Toof out of the question. It was on to this bleak stage that Red Bear had first strode, promising them magic and riches. How was a junkie to resist?
Red Bear rapidly made Algonquin Bay his own, using little more than his good looks and a deck of cards. He could often be found at Everett’s Coffee Bar on Sumner, the last of the independent coffee joints. Red Bear would sit at a corner table with his deck of cards, and after a while people just came to him. Everett’s didn’t mind; he brought people in. They’d buy a coffee and go over to Red Bear and he’d read their cards. They knew he was good, Kevin figured, because he charged so much: seventy-five bucks a pop, thank you very much. He also did astrology charts, which cost twice as much.
It was difficult to have a conversation with him, because people were always coming over to the table to get a reading. Kevin didn’t know how much he earned doing this, but it had to be substantial, and naturally tax-free. And it gave him an in with all sorts of people: the local musicians started going to him, and once he’d got a couple of hair-stylists among his clientele they spread the word. He claimed to have done some modelling in Toronto – he was certainly handsome enough – but Kevin figured he had to have some other source of income.
When he wasn’t reading cards, Red Bear went out of his way to befriend Kevin and Leon. He gave them samples of the best pot either of them had ever tried, he took them to the movies a couple of times, and he was always buying drinks for them, although he didn’t drink much himself. He didn’t even seem to mind Toof. Like the other two, Kevin was flattered by the attention, even if he remained a little suspicious of it.
Over the next few months Red Bear became a major part of their lives. Eventually he revealed his other business to them, which was shipping medium-size packets of cocaine and heroin cross-country.
‘You’d better watch out for the Viking Riders,’ Kevin warned him. ‘We told you what happened to Kanga.’
‘I am not worried about the Riders,’ Red Bear said. ‘I am protected.’
‘Protected?’
By way of answer, Red Bear had just pointed to the sky.
One chilly spring night – it must have been late April, early May, before the flies were out – they were all down at the beach.