The Higher the Monkey Climbs Read online

  Louise was a small, swollen woman, looking much older than I would have expected. When Tony and I were in high school, unlike a lot of other moms, she was still young and, well, kind of sexy, too. She liked drinking and smoking weed and on summer days, she wore tight, colourful, low-cut t-shirts with suggestive iron-on slogans like Foxy Lady or You can look but you can’t TOUCH. In winter, she sported high-heeled boots and short jackets cut from rabbit fur. She dyed her hair blonde and wore the kind of lipstick that stays wet all day. Though I never knew him, I could see how my uncle would have gone for her in a wild and unheeding way and at the same time why my father, fifteen years his senior, already established in the city, had disapproved of their match.

  But now, half blind, prematurely overtaken by age, I saw none of that. Her faded housecoat hung limp on rounded shoulders and ended in waves of loosened hems and stray threads. Her shapeless, child-sized feet were stuffed into open slippers, the toes cresting into uneven bumps. Her skin was spotty, hued yellow and her silver hair thinned in uneven patches. When she spoke, her voice sounded like a broken instrument. The woman was worn out, as an old chesterfield in need of re-upholstering.

  “You look well, Aunt Louise.”

  “I take care of myself,” she said. “Someone has to.” And with that, she turned on a surprisingly nimble heel and into the living room and whatever she’d been doing before I arrived.

  I stepped lightly towards the kitchen. There was a time in my life I treated this house as a second home, put my feet up on the coffee table or went into the refrigerator uninvited. Now I covered the distance to the kitchen cautiously, even nervously, as one would enter a dentist’s office for a long-overdue overhaul. The room was as I remembered but older and in greater disrepair. Blue and orange-stripped wallpaper peeled from an upper corner and bubbled in a spot between the light switch and a framed picture showing three kittens in a knitting basket. Cracks in the floor tiles, blackened with caked-in dirt, made me think of aerial photos and polluted river systems. A bungee cord held the refrigerator door shut, one end hooked to the handle, the other on the rear grill, the metal pieces rattling every time the fridge clicked on. The oven door was a different colour than the rest of the unit. A clothes pin took the place of a broken knob.

  And yet, something somehow cheered me about the place and I felt a familiarity I hadn’t felt in the couple of hours since I’d arrived back in the city. Settling into the vinyl kitchen chair, I sensed a kind of viscous, warm nostalgia flowing into spaces that, in recent years, had felt unfilled.

  Tony offered me a drink. This time I accepted the glass of rye.

  “You want something to mix it with? Cream soda okay?”

  “I can’t imagine how bad that would taste.”

  “Coming from a guy who used to mix Tang crystals with vodka.”

  “I never did that,” I said.

  “Sure you did. In the Shelby. In the tunnel. Remember? When we were stuck down there—”

  “I really don’t.”

  “I bet you do.”

  “Nope. I think I’d remember mixing Tang with vodka,” I said sharply. “Can we please talk about why you think what you’re thinking?”

  Tony sat down. He wiped his mouth with the side of his finger, licked his pink lips wet again. He leaned forward in the chair and exhaled, folded his big hands on the table top, and exhaled. “Alright, here’s the first reason,” he said. “The investigation into the accident was botched.”

  “The brakes on the bus failed.”

  “I’ve worked in the auto industry my whole life. Brakes hardly ever fail and never on city buses. Think about it. If an automaker’s going to get one thing right, it’s the brakes. Otherwise, they’d be sued to shit. You can cut corners pretty much everywhere else but the brakes. Brake failure? That’s just Hollywood bullshit.”

  “But it’s why the bus inspector lost his job.”

  “He swore on the Bible—and he was a Christian man, too—that there was nothing wrong with the brakes when he inspected them. But he wasn’t allowed to get near the bus after the ­accident.”

  “Why would he be?”

  “Listen to me: the bus driver ran the light on purpose. Alistair Forzante paid him to do it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “After the investigation, the driver quit his job at the bus company.”

  “Haunted by the memory,” I said. “Understandably.”

  “But only two weeks later he’s on the line at Krulls at twice the pay. What does that tell you?”

  “Nothing. Krulls was booming then. They couldn’t make cars fast enough in those days.”

  “Think about it: A guy kills your supposed best friend and the next thing you do is give him a job?”

  “Maybe they hired him without Forzante’s permission.”

  “Now you’re being stupid.”

  That was true. In those days at least, no one got hired at Krulls without Forzante’s nod. “It’s still not evidence,” I said.

  “How about this: less than a year later, same guy goes to Australia, gets shot and killed outside a bar in Sydney.”

  “I never heard that.”

  “Well now that you have, what does that tell you?”

  “Be careful where you drink in Sydney.”

  “You see how it works? They were shutting him up. They gave him a job, paid him enough so he can retire early if he wants. Instead, he takes a showy vacation half way around the world. They stop trusting him. Boom. He’s dead. We have to find the proof. Account statements. Or bank records. Stuff. Something. It’s the beginning of a chain,” he said, linking his two index fingers together to illustrate.

  “Tony, I’m telling you: They were best friends. Even after Gord died, Forzante used to buy me birthday presents.”

  “To keep you off his tail!”

  “Is there anyone else who even suspects that it was anything but an accident?”

  “That’s the reason I need you.”

  “I thought you needed me to be your lawyer. For the arson charge.”

  Tony was calm again. He looked into his glass and then out the window into the back yard and a thatch of barren tree branches. “Shit, Tricky. You’re an immigration lawyer. I’m ­facing jail time. I need a criminal lawyer for that. No offence. He took a long taste of his cocktail. Besides, the WAW covers my legal needs.”

  “You’re WAW now?” Turncoat. Traitor. In the business of organized labour, the WAW was the UCF’s hated rival.

  “You know we don’t get to choose. Fabrivida went WAW even before I was hired on there.”

  “So why did you call me then?”

  “I needed you to come down and I knew you would need a good reason, so . . .”

  “Aren’t you clever.”

  “Yeah, well, I took some continuing education classes. Listen, I need you to help me find the proof that Forzante ordered Gord killed. The kind of stuff that stands up with the courts. I was getting close, but now? They’re watching me.” He was talking faster. He held the pop can in one hand, squeezing. “The UCF added extra security, which is great because it costs Forzante money but it’s no good for us. The evidence we need is all there in that building. Maybe it’s in his house.”

  “You going to blow up his house, too?”

  “One or the other. It exists. But now I can’t get in. You saw the squad car.”

  I considered what he was saying but all I could think to do at that time was resist, to shut it all out, the way creationists refuse to listen when their beliefs in Adam and Eve and the rest of it are questioned. So I stuck with the official line.

  “It was an accident, Tony.”

  He looked away, then pointed to his bruised cheek. “Like my face was an accident?”

  “I’m sorry about your face,” I said. “It’s a rotten thing to have happened. But think about what
you’re saying, Tony. This is Allistair Forzante! Best friends, Tony.”

  “Friendship means nothing to Forzante. He set the whole thing up.”

  I took off my glasses and pinched my brow and then rubbed the short hairs at the back of my head. “Alright. Let me at least ask you this: Why would Al Forzante want Gord dead?”

  Tony raised his glass to his lips, tipping to get the last drops. He pulled a cigarette pack from his pocket and then put it back. Then, he told me everything, his sentences piling atop my objections.

  “The way it all happened was that Gord was looking to take over the UCF, to get rid of Forzante.”

  “Oh that’s just stupid. No one would ever believe—”

  “They wouldn’t want to. But they’d have to. Eventually. Uncle Gord knew that Forzante was no good. Forzante’s corrupt, always has been. He doesn’t care—”

  “What corruption? Give me specific instances.”

  “Kickbacks. Insurance scams.”

  “If you have proof, you should take it to the police.”

  “In Wanstead? Man, have you forgotten everything? Look at my face.”

  “Okay, then. The RCMP.”

  “Who’s saying they don’t already know about it? Who’s saying they’re not in on it too? Did you hear about the birthday party he’s throwing for himself? You know how much that’s going to cost the union?”

  “None of what you’re saying proves a thing.”

  “We’ve got eighteen percent unemployment in this city and he’s throwing a party for himself. Like Nero playing the fiddle while Rome burns. It kills me. ”

  “It still doesn’t prove anything. Maybe he’s got some misplaced priorities. That’s all.” I dumped a whiskey-flavoured cube of ice into my mouth and started crunching. And yet, I recognized my tone. It was the kind I used to take on when I got into arguments in law school with smarter students I didn’t like. My motive in those debates was never to reach a higher truth, merely to defeat the other and claim superiority. Except I liked Tony. At least I was supposed to.

  “Forget the party. He’s crooked. And always has been. Gord was talking with some other UCF directors to take over and reform the place. To put things right. You can plug your ears all you like, it doesn’t change what I’m saying.”

  “There were never any talks. Never any murder. An accident. Tony.”

  “I know it’s a hard one to take.”

  “What’s there to take? If you weren’t my cousin, I’d be offended. But there’s nothing here to ‘take’.”

  “You keep looking at the bottle.”

  “So what?” I said. “I have to drive anyway. I should probably be going.”

  “You haven’t heard the end of it.”

  “Yes I have.” I stood up, knocking the chair against the wall, and began to put on my coat. It’s probably going to snow. I have to get the car back by five. Fucking Toronto traffic, too.”

  Tony persisted. “It makes sense. Gord would have been union president and Forzante would have been out on his ass. But he found out about what your father was planning. And that’s why he fixed it for that bus to ram his car.”

  We were silent again. Standing, I found my scarf in my coat pocket and wrapped it three times around my neck. I walked out the side door, Tony following. When I got to the car, I turned and offered my hand.

  “If you need any help with the arson thing, let me know,” I said.

  I pushed the button on the key chain and with a beep and a flash, the door locks clicked open.

  Tony paused before reaching for the handle. “This is a nice car,” he said.

  “Yeah, well, the rental company overbooked,” I said. “So I had to take a downgrade.”

  5

  Something probably worth mentioning: Back in his mother’s kitchen I told Tony that I never mixed Tang crystals with vodka. That was a lie. I not only concocted that awful mix but, worse yet, I clearly remember the events of the night I did it. And yet, the vodka plus Tang was the very least of the reasons I had pretended to forget.

  It was a Friday in the late spring of Grade 13 and I was in the worst of my post-Gord assholery. He had been dead about six months by then and (I know now) I was using mischief and meanness to mask my unyielding, incomprehensible anger and pain. Earlier that very week, for example, I’d got myself in trouble with Sally Eisenstein’s older brother when I wrote ‘I KiLLED JeSUS’ in indelible black marker on her green locker door. Jacob Eisenstein and two of his friends, calling themselves the Wanstead Horsemen, came looking to punish me. After school the next day, a bright, newly warm day that brings on lassitude and impatience and clears the school soon after the bell, they cornered me in a hidden corner of the parking lot. There were a few minutes of parley. Then Jacob called me a Nazi and gave me a sharp, two-handed shove that sent me clattering against the door of a van. The others chewed gum and looked for teachers. Then my cousin Tony arrived on the scene.

  “Let’s not have this,” he said, pulling Jacob off me with a tug that didn’t look all that sharp, but sent Jacob stumbling. I stepped away from the van. The Horsemen slouched off.

  It hadn’t been the first time in those plagued months that I’d needed his protection and I had started to wonder if I would ­continue to push in my insidious way against the unmarked boundaries of civil behaviour until—what? Until something happened to stop me for good, I suppose.

  As a result of Tony’s interventions, I felt some small obligation towards him. I didn’t like the feeling. It didn’t suit my ­tendency to detach myself from everything that smacked of humanity. I don’t think it sat well with Tony, either. Having Gord’s son owe him something made him feel dishonourable, dirty, maybe a little usurious. Especially when you consider the nature of the obligation, and how difficult it was to measure my deficit. It would have been much easier for him if I had actually wrecked his car or done something that could be more easily translated into a cash repayment. Nevertheless, I wanted to cancel my debt without seeming like I was doing so and when Allistair Forzante offered me four tickets from the UCF block for a playoff hockey game across the river, I immediately called Tony, selling the fourth ticket to buy booze, and offering the third to Drew Herringer, his girlfriend.

  On the day of the game, I skipped my afternoon classes and started drinking at TC’s. Located next to Ferguson Wheel, it was one of a few working man’s bars in Wanstead that depended on the UCF for so much of its patronage that when I went in mid-afternoon on a weekday, no one behind the bar questioned either my truancy or my age. About an hour before the puck was set to drop, Tony picked me up in his Shelby. The foundations of my buzz firmly in place, I sat in the back seat with Drew.

  (And yes, as we tore towards the tunnel, I shook orange Tang crystals from a hole in its foil packet into a mickey of vodka, shaking to mix, and drinking in tiny, retching sips.)

  Once in the tunnel, traffic in our single lane slowed. Florescent lighting bounced from grimy tiles and flashed through the car windows like the light of a broken television screen. The cars ahead of us stopped in the dead air, trapping us between cars and wall and roof and fifty feet of dark, polluted, ice-clogged river. Tony hit the brakes and swore. Drew asked to see my hand. I shoved my jean jacket’s sleeve up my arm and offered it to her, palm up.

  “You will lead a long life. That’s what this means,” Drew said, tracing the line with the unpainted tip of her fingernail.

  “Just my luck,” I said.

  I kicked at the cloth backing of the driver’s seat and demanded that Tony find a way through. “I have to piss.”

  Tony threw up his arms. “What do you want me to do?”

  “And there’s this,” Drew continued, squeezing my palm to regain my attention. “This means something, too.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “What do you mean you don’t rememb
er?”

  “I have to look it up. I’m just learning this stuff. But see? I have it too.” She showed the white-pink palm of her soft hand and as I took hold I was moved by the desire to lean down and take a bite. Instead, I brought it close to my eyes, trying to focus in the uneven lighting.

  “So whatever else happens, we’ve got that in common,” she said and smiled. I smelled the perfume she had touched to her wrist earlier. She wore a white blouse, the buttons fastened to the neck. A gold pendant dangled under the collar, a floating heart I think it was. Drew had the habit of putting the pendant in her mouth in idle moments. She was a pretty girl, a few years younger than Tony and me. Her teeth were straight and glistened white with no gaps or uneven ridges. Her father owned a pile of real estate downtown and her mother was openly hostile to Tony; more than once she had referred to him as ‘the bastard’. Drew’s preppy friends didn’t much approve of Tony either; I always considered it to her credit that she had the poise and confidence to ignore them.

  By the time the Shelby emerged on the other side of the tunnel my bladder felt ready to blow. I released Drew’s hand.

  “You know what your problem is, Drew? Your name. You’ve got a boy’s name.”

  She laughed. “Tell me about it. When Tony told his mother he was dating someone named Drew, she thought he was telling her that he was a fag.”

  “Tony is a fag!” I said and laughed a punctuated ‘HA!’

  The line for customs curved in a long half-arch, each car taking more time to pass than normal. We were hardly moving at all. The pressure in my bladder continued to grow. Each tiny lurch forward made it worse.

  “Easy on the brakes!” I cried. Tony ignored me.

  “Use the bottle,” Drew said.

  “And waste all the vodka?”

  But I had to do something. “Let me out, man.” I said, shoving the back of his seat.