I sat in the Volks, sipped the milk, and tried to pin down the flavour of the butter tarts. Band-Aids. The tarts tasted like Band-Aids.
An hour after the driver entered Jerry’s, he exited. He stood on the sidewalk and belched. I noted two fresh pieces of information. His T-shirt wasn’t all black. It had Duran Duran printed on the front in faded white lettering. At his right hip, hooked on a belt loop, he wore a ring of many keys. It looked heavy. If I carried a load like that on my belt loop, my pants would fall around my ankles.
The driver climbed into his cab and drove north on Leslie. I did likewise.
Duran Duran. Was that the name of the guy or of the band? You didn’t run into such conundrums in my kind of music. Stan Getz was the guy. The Stan Getz Quartet was the name of the band.
The truck drove straight across the city to a residential street in the Annex district near Bathurst and Bloor. A triplex was going up on a lot between two Victorian houses. The driver dumped the empty bin from the truck on the front lawn and scooped up another binful of construction trash. All as before.
What wasn’t usual was that a short, heavy man in green pants counted off several bills from a fat roll in his pocket and handed them to the driver. It was the first time all day I’d seen money change hands.
The truck went north on Bathurst Street. Bathurst is long and narrow, and as you get farther north, apartment buildings line the street. Out of polite earshot, some Torontonians call it the Gaza Strip. It’s a middle-class Jewish neighbourhood peopled by families who have moved up the immigrant corridor of Bathurst Street from the earlier ghettos downtown.
North of Steeles Avenue, about the time I began to ponder the question of our destination, the high-rises peter out. Rural Ontario breathes a few defiant last gasps, maple trees, oaks, and elms. Housing developments would take care of them in another half-generation. The truck caught the orange light at Highway 7. I pressed the accelerator and hung on its tail.
Past Royal Downs Golf Club, the truck turned left on to a dirt road. The driver hadn’t signalled for the turn. My tires squealed when I followed him in. I didn’t follow him far. He stopped twenty yards down the dirt road. By the time I braked, the driver was jumping down from his cab.
He waddled in my direction. His hands were hitching up his pants and he was speaking to me.
“Hey, you, shit-face,” he said.
It wasn’t going to be an invitation for drinks at the Park Plaza.
The dirt road was too narrow to turn the Volks around, and accelerating backwards on to Bathurst seemed more chancy than a confrontation with fatso. I got out of the car and watched the driver come the rest of the way toward me. The waddle had been upgraded to a swagger.
“All day I look in the rearview, I see you, turd,” the driver said. He was near enough that I could smell Jerry’s beer.
“Tenacious son of a gun, aren’t I,” I said.
“You and that fag car.”
“Steady,” I said, “let’s leave the vehicle out of it.”
Up close, with all the gut and beard and black T-shirt, the driver had a tendency to loom. He weighed about two-fifty, but he looked as fit as Oliver Hardy. That might help my cause if it came to fisticuffs. I didn’t want it to come to fisticuffs. One of us would get hurt. Probably me.
“You got a smart mouth, asshole,” the driver said.
His punch began below his belt line, somewhere behind the ring of keys. He might as well have winged it in by way of Pearson International Airport, I had so much time to move my head and left shoulder inside the swing of the punch. His forearm landed on the back of my neck. It made a loud, slapping noise and rocked me forward. The slap was worse than the rock.
He’d already launched another arcing shot with his left fist. Didn’t this guy watch the Saturday-afternoon fights on ABC-TV? Didn’t he know rainbows like he was throwing were what Marvelous Marvin Hagler had for lunch? I kept my arms high, and his punches thudded onto my elbows and shoulders. The punches didn’t have much steam, but they kept me swaying back and forth on my feet. Professional boxers call it rolling with the punches. I called it making the best of a bad situation.
Every time the driver swung his arms, his black T-shirt pulled up over his belt and showed a strip of hairy gut. I opted for a display of offence. I dropped my right shoulder and aimed a fist at his bare belly button. It seemed an efficient punch, straight, hard, and not more than a foot. It made no impression on his stomach. Either I was power-deficient or the gut was all muscle.
While my right hand was down and going about its useless manoeuvre, he landed one of his roundhouses. It hit hard on my ear. The inside of my head turned red. I staggered a couple of feet to my left and bumped up against the Volks. It didn’t have as much give as bouncing off the ropes in a ring.
I squared around and faced my worthy opponent. He had a small, mean grin on his face, and his right hand was cocked over his shoulder. He was measuring me.
The redness had gone from behind my eyes. I shot out two fast left jabs. It was a reflex move inspired by fear and desperation. Both jabs landed on the driver’s nose. He looked surprised. I felt surprised. He hadn’t thrown his right hand.
I was the first to recover from our mutual amazement and hit the driver with two more left jabs. His head popped back. I hit him with a right to the beard. It was like punching a porcupine. He made an oomph noise and sat down in the dirt road. The man with the gut of iron had a glass jaw.
My right ear was ringing. I touched it and it felt hot. The driver climbed up from the dirt. He crouched over and rushed at me. His arms were reaching out in front of his body. If he got the arms around me, his weight would give him a large edge. I was faster on my feet than he was. But he had the bulk.
I got up on the balls of my feet and danced out of the path of the first rush. He turned and rushed again. I danced to the side. It couldn’t last much longer, him charging, me making like Manolete. Fatigue was catching up to my legs.
On his third rush, I planted my feet and timed a right-hand upper cut. Now or never. The punch caught him under the jaw at the point where his beard stopped and his throat was exposed. He straightened out of his crouch. I hit his cheek with a left hook. He fell over backwards. He raised his head. I kicked it. Too bad it wasn’t winter. I might have had my Grebs on.
I turned and opened the door of the Volks. The guy in the black T-shirt was pushing himself up with his arms. I got behind the steering wheel and started the engine. The guy fell over on his side. I drove out the dirt road and turned south on Bathurst toward the city.
My right ear hurt like hell.
7
WHEN I GOT THERE, the door to Annie’s apartment was open and she was in it. She reached her hands up to my shoulders, stood on tiptoe, and touched my lips with hers. She made me feel like we were a couple of kids. Skipping across the meadow. Picking up lots of forget-me-nots.
Annie is in her mid-thirties. She is five feet tall and has fine bones and not enough muscle on them to nudge her much past one hundred pounds. Her hair is the colour of Mr. Poe’s raven, and she wears it short and flat and pulled back behind her ears. Her cheekbones are high and her chin has a slight forward thrust. The combination gives her a feisty look about which she displays no self-consciousness.
She had on beige trousers with legs that narrowed and tightened until they stopped six inches above her ankles. They went with low-heeled white leather shoes and a white silk shirt that had billowy sleeves and was unbuttoned to the space between her breasts. The first time I met Annie, I said she looked Parisian. She said other men before me had told her the same thing. I said I’d see them at dawn with pistols. She said she grew up in a village northwest of Toronto called Palgrave. So much for the male powers of observation.
Annie had a Kir going. She went into the kitchen and made me a vodka martini on the rocks according to my favourite mix. Hold the vermouth, hold the olive, hold the twist.