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  “No, I don’t remember.”

  “Well that’s too bad. Because he remembers you.” The guy came right up and put his hands on the counter.

  “Listen, Tidecaster. I’m going to tell you something. Every piece of chicken comes with a price. It’s not just chicken any more either. Get me? You’re up to your neck in pulled pork, buddy, you understand. You’re not back east either, you get that? This ain’t some overweight biker selling pills from a strip joint bathroom. We’re talking about Mr. Stanley Leggit. He’s global, buddy. Global chicken. He’s trending. He’s in your phone. Do you understand? He’s in your chicken. He is your chicken.”

  By now I was getting sick of hearing it. So what I wasn’t in Ham-Town? So what if it was just Vancouver? Backwater or not, it was still Canada. I knew my rights.

  “Get out of here. Get the hell out of here. I’ll call the bouncer.”

  He shook his head. “You’re not too bright, are you, Jack?” he said, and walked out.

  THREE DAYS LATER I was getting ready for the Kotchee thing. I could barely eat breakfast. I went down behind the desk and read as much of the paper as I could stomach. The world had taken another shit-kicking: death, destruction, sentimental poetry, the whole wretched business. The planet was being overrun by celebrity babies, priests with boners, and promises of fibre optic fried chicken that flew straight through your window and landed on the kitchen table. It was getting ugly out there. On page three the daughter of a pig-iron magnate had driven her Hummer backwards into a crowd outside a club and killed sixteen people. Witnesses said she was breaking up with her boyfriend on a cellphone and giving the finger to the doorman who was trying to flag her down.

  When I finished the newspaper I checked the mail. There was a postcard in from Pete already. Hey Jack. Great to be back home. Things are hopping, I’m finally getting my book published, a memoir thingy, it’s called (get this) Ten Thousand Busted Chunks: The Life of Petronius Totem. Also getting a little catering-type business off the ground, very high-tech and world-altering etc., all thanks to you. You’re the MAN. Say hello to Kotchee. If anyone from the Leggit corporation comes looking for me, tell them I’m dead. Thanks. The postcard said, HAMILTON, ONT, and there was a grizzly bear on the front: just the sort of grizzly bear you see in downtown Hamilton on a Wednesday afternoon.

  I took the postcard and went into the lounge to talk to Kotchee. Dinner, I was thinking, a movie, or maybe go for a walk in the rain and smoke some weed.

  I was early and there was hardly anyone in yet, just an old man with the shakes. Gus, the sleepy-looking guy, was tending bar.

  “Kotchee not in yet?”

  “She’s not coming in.”

  “She sick?”

  “No, she’s not sick. She’s fine. Why should she be sick? She quit. She’s working somewhere else, that’s all. The Bourbon Street Cellar. We should all be so lucky. It’s a steak joint, real steak, quality Alberta beef, marbled to perfection, flash seared both sides. You blame her? A joint like this?”

  “She quit?”

  The eroded face of the bartender made me think of bowling lanes and parking lots that stretch out in front of bowling lanes, and crushed packs of cigarettes that skid across the pavement of parking lots when the wind blows. While I was thinking that the drunk lifted his head off the table, and repeated, in a gnarly voice, the phrase that drunks are destined to say to me.

  “Today’s my goddamn birthday is what it is! Just got out of the hospital! Pablo’s my name. Joe. You can call me Pete. Mike, Fred, really. Just got out of the hospital. Richard’s the name. William!”

  He moaned, and lowered his ruined face into his hands and began to sob.

  3.2

  HOMEBOUND: ENCOUNTER WITH A POSTMODERN ASSASSIN

  SO THAT WAS IT. I bought a bus ticket and went straight home to face the Wrath of Elaine (WOE). I climbed into the crowded interior of Greyhound Coach 197 Express to Hamilton and wedged my way into a window seat, and off we went. For hundreds of miles I stared off into the dark where the deep eyes of women were shining. I saw women coming out of the shower with hair still damp; I saw them going into the shower with hair not yet damp. I saw them with hair in varying degrees of dampness or dryness, wrapping towels around their hair, walking on the street, emerging from cars, pushing baby strollers, and attending to the needs of small children and grown men.

  After many hours a bleary sun heaved from the dark and in front stretched a wide boulevard without trees or people, just several fat, strutting pigeons and brickwork the colour of skin. I slept again and when I woke up it was Winnipeg of the crenellated rooftops and the Army-Navy sell-off stores. “Chicago Style Blues,” said a sign. “Who put the win in Winnipeg?” According to family legend it was here my namesake, Jack Vesoovian, by the miracle of Bird’s Custard powder, survived the winter of 1903, when the snow came down blue and cattle froze where they stood. Having survived the great winter, Uncle Jack got himself killed in a bar fight with a Sarcee chieftain who gutted him with a broken beer bottle.

  For fifteen hours I watched as the bleached Canadian plains gave way to Canadian rock and Canadian trees and the moss and sphagnum that covers the rocks. Fast-food joints shot by in various stages of decay and hopefulness, as did emergency doughnut places, and stands for foot-long homemade hot dogs. The coach raced on and I longed for the bosomy comfort of Elaine with her meatloaf recipe, her cold-water pastry, even the rescued starlings. At a lonely intersection the bus stopped; several people got on, a few got off. A stout woman of no discernible age or function made apologetic harrumphs indicating she intended to occupy the seat next to me. With ill grace I removed a copy of the Times Literary Supplement that I had folded there in an attempt to prevent large, talky people sitting next to me.

  Noisily she removed a gnarl of knitting from a paper bag and clacked the needles together. “You have a son?” she asked accusingly.

  I was caught off guard. I’m frequently caught off guard by questions of a personal nature.

  “No.” My voice rang out Judas-like, denying the existence of the boy who at this very moment was likely immersed in a game of Constant Brutal Death.

  “Well I got a son, and let me tell you something —”

  I tried rattling a dense fifteen thousand word article on secular graffiti in Quatrocenti Turin and its impact on the New York school of subway spray painters in her face, but to no effect —

  “Last night that no-good shitbox come home with his head kicked in. So I say, ‘you ought to get yourself into the fucken hospital.’ Fuck you he said. Yessir that’s the way he speaks to his own mother. Ought to be in hospital on account of that infernal bleeding of the brain. Do you think he’s in hospital? No sir. He’s out getting drunk. You watch, he’ll get himself killed. One night someone’ll cut that boy open with a beer bottle in a Winnipeg tavern. Yessir.”

  She knitted ferociously knit purl knit purl knit … the needles clacked and cleaved the air like locusts. “Getting cut open’s something I know all about on account of my husband. Wally. That’s what happened to him. Broken beer bottle up the back end. One of those Frenchies did it, half-breed, jabbed him up the back end with a busted beer bottle, pierced his kidney, five days later he’s dead. It was the infection what got him. The infection.” She nodded meaningfully. “I’m not one of those racists you know? Or whatever they’re called. I was married to an Indian and I was married to a Frenchie and I was married to Wally which was worster than the other two put together. But let me tell you, when it comes to fighting with a broken beer bottle, those half-breed Frenchies’ll stick you worster than anyone.”

  Clacking her needles, she seemed to dare me to say otherwise, which I didn’t. Instead I thought of poor uncle Jack Vesoovian, gutted like Wally in the doorway of some lonely tavern. Decisively I rattled the ivory pages of the Times Literary Supplement in her face and erected a defensive posture behind a deconstruction of Goethe as a prototype of Whitmanesque male bonding. At that point she stopped knitting, peered her
head closer to the page, and started to cluck.

  “Look at that,” she squinted over her needles reading, as far as I could tell, upside down. “Finally, someone has the guts to postulate that Mary Brunton was a legitimate rival to the novels of Jane Austen. About time, isn’t it? Who else do you know from that age who extended the internal viewpoint to characters both major and minor and at the same time managed to apply an intense interiority that fluently merges with a faith-based moral seriousness that in the hands of a lesser writer would be reduced to a heap of post-graduate thesis topics? Cowper was right, wasn’t he? Our warfare is within.”

  The last thing I wanted to do was to go mano a mano, so to speak, with a ball-busting, bingo-playing, needle-packing, overweight prairie girl with an unfinished doctoral thesis in French critical theory. The bingo halls of western Canada are awash with women like her, and they can be dangerous with their swishy ways, their hegemonic discourses, and their ability to drive large farm equipment. This one in particular, with her heavy, informal breasts, the hair that appeared to be in curlers even when it wasn’t, and the vinyl purse bursting with bingo chips, was bad news from the beginning.

  I eyed her suspiciously. “Surely in terms of the English canon you’re not suggesting we replace Jane Austen with Mary Brunton?”

  “Why not? Listen pal, there are a million parallel universes, both literary and non. Why not allow Mary Brunton to stand in for an entire class of non-canonical but potentially intriguing auteurs. Really, why not? Fuck ’em, that’s what I say.” She sank into her knitting, which had taken the form of a multicoloured condom: a gift for Wally’s replacement. Size large.

  I stared out the window. How come no one had ever knitted me a giant wool condom? Had Elaine ever knitted me a giant wool condom? Or even an average-sized one? No. Elaine didn’t even knit. Elaine didn’t know a stitch from a hemistich. I calmed myself. It was no time to go off on Elaine.

  An illuminated billboard with the logo of a headless chicken clutching a lightning bolt flashed by. “Leggit’s Let Me At It Chicken: Eat all ya want fer ten lousy bucks then Re-Boot for more.” Then a remarkable thing happened. Reflected in the window I saw the woman discreetly lift her needles, twinning them in her right hand before closing her fingers into a fist, or a talon or whatever. There it was, the black and yellow Leggit Industries logo, the headless chicken with the thunderbolt embossed on the end of her knitting needles. Slowly she drew them up behind her ear. Her eyes had transformed into snakey slits.

  “Mr. Leggit asked me to pass on a little message.” She fired her arm downward, attempting to stab me in the left thigh. Without thinking I executed a perfect outer forearm block that caught her mid-strike. The needles were barely in me, a half inch at most. She leant on top of them, all three hundred pounds of her, pushing directly downward, like a prairie oil rig.

  “Japanese karate,” she hissed, “Shotokan school. It is time for you to learn from the master.” She was close enough for me to smell every French theorist rotting on her relativist breath.

  “Oh yeah?” I hissed back. “Literary artist, Hamilton School. Prepare to die.”

  I forced her fleshy arm, centimetre by centimetre, back to where it came from. “Lacanian bitch. Why don’t you tell me about what Julia Kristeva has to say about the Deconstructionist distrust of narrative reliability?” With one quick back fist I put her out of her postmodern consciousness, and helped her settle into her seat. She sat as heavy and lumpy as a bag of Prince Edward Island potatoes and stayed that way until we rolled into the Thunder Bay Bus Terminal.

  I got off, transferred my ticket to the next Hamilton Express, and spent the two-hour wait watching ravens circle the earth.

  3.3

  WOE: WRATH OF ELAINE (BIG TIME)

  AS YOU MIGHT HAVE GUESSED, my reunion with Elaine was not a success, at least not initially. I had entered Hamilton like a thief, my left thigh bandaged with a sanitary napkin swindled from a dispenser in the bathroom on the bus. Outside the terminal several black birds swooped through the sky, dropping out of the low clouds and giving off the screech of industrialized raptors. They swept boulevards of parked cars, coming down low enough for me to make out their greasy underbellies.

  In the dark I made my way back to what had been my home, that two-storey apartment on Aberdeen rented to us by a cheerful German war veteran named Hans who lived next door and maintained a concealed chicken pen in his backyard. The lights were on. I tried my key. The key didn’t fit. The locks had been changed. I saw also that Elaine’s Ford Sable had undergone extensive bodywork since the previous season when I’d rolled it off the Skyway overpass and landed on a hot dog concession. Failing with the key, I knocked. I beat a calypso rhythm on the door with both fists. No answer. I tried more of a Caribbean thing, heavy on the backbeat, with the same result.

  Failing to receive an appropriate answer to my knock, or any answer at all, I kicked the door in. It came off swiftly as it had not been hung properly after the last time I kicked it in. There before the snug hearth of my home, or at least the home in which I had been freeloading for some time, lay Elaine. She sprawled on the sofa watching an Oprah rerun and with some reluctance managed to direct her green and lovely eyes from the television.

  “Look at who it is,” she sneered. “And you’re shot. Isn’t that great! You’re always coming home shot. Do you think it’s some kind of macho badge? Do you think it impresses me? I’m sick of you being shot. I’m sick of you period. If you think I’m going to be one of those model housewives who sits around every night waiting for her husband to come home shot, you can forget it. You’re not even my husband.” I could tell she was upset.

  “Nor am I exactly shot.” I deliberately employed that smooth single malt voice that’s become the hallmark of my public readings.

  “Look at you!”

  When I glanced down at myself I discovered that from thigh to toe I was drenched in blood; even my shoes were scarlet and leaving impressive bloody footprints on her antique Persian rug. To top it off the bottom half of a red-soaked sanitary napkin was peeking through the bottom of my left pant leg.

  “I wasn’t shot, honey. Honest. I was attacked by a three-hundred-pound Lacanian who tried to deconstruct me with a pair of knitting needles. I’m hurt.”

  I was careful to strike the right note between boyish self-pity and manly indifference.

  Elaine, it was clear, had grown hard in my absence and neither my boyish self-pity nor manly indifference was about to get her maternal motors revving.

  “You’re hurt? I’ll show you hurt.” She flew out of the room and returned with a large calibre rifle.

  While she was preparing to shoot me Alex entered the room in his pyjamas, clutching a hand-held video game in one hand and a jam sandwich in the other. I noticed, with mixed feelings, that he now possessed an earring.

  “Hi Dad,” he said, without glancing up from either the sandwich or the video game.

  It is a charming affectation of Alex’s that he calls me Dad even though he is not my son in any seminal sense of that word. Right then in that moment I could not deny the heartfelt tug of home and family. What else did I have except that? Really? What does anyone ever have? Where else would I shelve my books? There, not for the first time, was Elaine shouldering a large calibre rifle and preparing to shoot me. There on the TV was an American woman interviewing another teenage bulimic cross-dressing sex addict former prostitute incest survivor and recording star with a gambling problem who had just written a bestselling book that was about to be turned into a movie starring someone famous, and there was my son, or at least the boy who would have been my son had he not been someone else’s son. All that was missing was Bing Crosby and the roasted chestnuts.

  “I’m going to shoot you,” said Elaine, with a matronly pioneer earnestness, laying her head to one side of the rifle and squinting her right eye.

  She squeezed off a single shot that winged me on the left thigh. The bullet razored a slot across my pants, took ou
t a fingernail’s worth of flesh and buried itself in the wall.

  “Honey!”

  “You have lost the privilege of calling me that,” she said coldly and attempted to put the second shot between my eyes. As she did that a low, continuous buzzing noise flooded the room and a moment later the bay window blew into fragments, scattering a cascade of jewelled bits across the carpet. A large bird, black in colour, cawed indignantly and flopped into the living room.

  Elaine fired.

  The bullet entered the creature’s left optical unit, exited the right, and fell dramatically onto the floor like a tooth. The thing, whatever it was, dropped down next to the bullet, writhing and spewing a suspicious mix of machine oil and what looked like leftover restaurant ketchup over Elaine’s carpet.

  “Whoa,” said Alex.

  “Christ,” said Elaine.

  Maddy, thank God, was upstairs fast asleep. She didn’t need to see this.

  The thing smouldered, wheezing and dying on the carpet. A scattering of slick grey bones and fractured motherboards littered the spot where it landed, and the singed feathers smoked pungently on the carpet. Copper wire showed through the carcass. The whole mess gave off the dismal smell of burnt mozzarella and bad science.

  I tested the perimeter of the thing with my left toe, pushing my bloodied sneaker into a small dripping mound of techno-goo.

  “That is one ugly crow,” I said. Of course it wasn’t a crow, I knew that. It was one of Leggit’s cyber-optic fast-food experiments gone horribly wrong. One of those ugly messes that science washes its hands of in the name of progress, and increasingly end up writhing on the carpet of a house in which the TV blares from the corner, and the kids dissolve in front of video machines. It was a mess alright. The sort of thing an intelligent man or even a stupid one pretends isn’t there.