The Higher the Monkey Climbs Read online

  “You can’t go here,” he said.

  “I’m serious. Move up.”

  “No way.”

  “Just hold on, Tricky. It won’t be long,” Drew said.

  But I couldn’t wait. Leaning forward, I yanked at the sunroof’s covering and then, pushing Drew aside, put one foot on the armrest and climbed to the car’s roof. I balanced there, tall and steady, my breath steamy in the wintery red and white glare of exhaust and headlights. Relief was imminent. Atop the low-riding Shelby, waiting for entry into the United States, I felt bigger, more important, more powerful than everyone else waiting in line. And when I unzipped and started to piss on the asphalt and also on the panels of the Crown Victoria beside us, I made the statement that if I wasn’t bigger, more important, and more powerful than everyone else, well then, I fucking oughta be.

  In seconds, half a dozen customs officers had the Shelby surrounded. They wore their dark hats low on their foreheads. One of them tapped the hood with his club and pointed back to the tunnel while the others watched in their short winter jackets, grim-faced, square-shouldered, hands resting on holstered pistols. Tony shrugged and mouthed contrition. The officer seemed to understand that Tony wasn’t the problem and that, with his ability to ferry me out of their country, he was actually also their best solution.

  A few hours later, the game now over, the three of us sat on the cement steps that made up the stoop of St. Andrew’s Church Hall, bottles of fresh booze open and half-chugged. Of the conversation, all I remember is complaining about my mother, her unpredictable moods, her arbitrary rule-making, our growing indifference to each other at a time when, given the mutual need, we ought to have been sticking together and growing closer.

  “She never leaves the house and then won’t let me take the car anywhere,” I said. “She’s paranoid.” I grunted and let my head swing back towards Drew, pinching my eyes to focus on the tiny reflected light in her irises.

  “That must be frustrating for you,” Drew said. From her position snuggled against Tony, she reached across and touched the curve of my elbow and I once again smelled her perfume.

  For a girl of fifteen, Drew Herringer showed unusual ­understanding. Not so much in the specifics, but in the whole, multi-layered effect Gord’s death was having on me. I know now that for my mother, it was all part of the unfathomable weirdness that comes after someone you love is suddenly taken away and my complaints were little more than immature expressions of the same. But at the time, I was moved by her perceptiveness and insight and I felt instantly obliged. I wanted to kiss her. I wanted her to kiss me. But more than that, what I really wanted to do at that moment of stark honesty was to drop my head into her tender lap and cry until my tears had soaked her jeans as she passed her perfumed hand again and again over my troubled head.

  Instead, I drank from whatever we had bought while on the top step opposite me, Drew and Tony started to make out.

  An hour later, I was still reclining against the church hall’s chipped wooden doors, fifteen cement steps above the ground, shitfaced. The wind had stiffened, delivering Wanstead’s industry air, smoky and chemical. Steel pounded in a nearby foundry and all around us was the hum of cars, the constant, dull murmur of tires rolling on asphalt. I folded my arms against the chill. Dampness from the concrete seeped cold through the seat of my pants. Drifting on the booze, I imagined columns of worms crawling into my ass, dining on my pickled organs, consuming me flesh and bone from the inside out. The noise from the foundry settled into a disturbed ­cardiac rhythm, a resonating lub to mold the rough shape, a weaker dub to refine the details.

  Then I heard a dry, shuffling sound. When I looked up, I saw that a crow had landed on the baluster above Drew and Tony’s head.

  “Holy shit, guys! Move!”

  They separated. Drew bit her lip. Tony looked at the crow, who was unmoved by my shouting. Its black eyes and black bill remained straight and pointed forward. Its feathers dully reflected yellow light.

  Drew asked what it was doing.

  “It’s dead,” I said. The bird’s eye blinked.

  “Maybe it’s hurt,” Tony said.

  “It’s bad,” Drew said. “A crow means something. Something really bad.”

  There we were, three teenagers on the top steps of St. Andrew’s Church Hall, staring at the crow, trying to suss the omen, even trying to decide if omens were real and worth bothering about.

  “Let’s get rid of it,” I said and took hold of our bottle.

  “We should leave it,” Tony said.

  But I protested. “It’s evil. Drew said so.”

  “I really think the proper course of action is to leave it,” Tony said. There it was again, the voice of Gord delivered in unsteady imitation, as though my father (the director) had died mid-rehearsal and Tony (the actor) was left to figure out the rest of the play for himself.

  I shifted my grip on the glass bottle so that I was holding it like a club and moved towards the bird. Tony stepped forward. I stopped.

  “I’d be doing it a favour, putting it out of its misery,” I said. “It’s the humane thing to do.”

  “Don’t,” Tony said. “I’m being serious here.”

  “Guys, let’s just go home. I’m getting cold,” Drew said. She placed the heart pendant in her mouth.

  “Why don’t you go home, Drew?”

  “Quit being an asshole, Tricky.”

  “You go home too, then. I’ll take care of the bird.” Of course, I would do no such thing. If they had left, I’d have followed. But by that moment, I couldn’t say so at all.

  “Leave the bird alone. Let’s go.”

  I didn’t move. With Tony growing more decisive, more ­certain of his own righteousness and less patient with me, I ­wondered now if we were going to fight. I was not so drunk to realize that I would lose that fight and lose it badly. And yet—and I know this now—there was a part of me that wanted the pummelling, to test the limits of my powers and Tony’s indulgence, like a big puppy strapped into a choke chain, pulling away until a searing tug reminds him of his place.

  “What do you care?” I said.

  “There’s no reason to kill it,” Tony said.

  “It’s creepy! Didn’t you hear Drew?”

  “I really don’t mind,” Drew said. “Why don’t we just go now?”

  “Why don’t you listen to your girlfriend?” I said.

  “Tricky, please,” Drew said.

  “Why don’t you take a step back,” Tony said.

  “Tony, listen,” Drew said.

  “Why don’t you fuck yourself?” I swung my right arm back.

  “Please don’t!” Drew was crying now, tears and snot ­spraying.

  I tried to throw the first punch. It never hit its target. Tony brushed aside my left and had his hand in position to block the next attempt by grabbing my wrist. He twisted my skin as though tightening a difficult bolt.

  “Stop it!” Drew screamed.

  With his thick arms, Tony pushed me backwards. Hell, he could have tossed me down the steps like a bag of soiled sheets. And maybe he was itching for it; it had been several months since that last time in the boxing ring and I was giving him ample reason. But instead he shoved me in short, forceful, oddly protective steps against the door. The hinges rattled. Once more, Drew demanded we stop, her voice heaving, pleading. I struggled to get an arm free, hoping to get at least one blow in before I was pounded. Something that would leave a mark on Tony, maybe to the eyes or mouth.

  Tony told me to calm the fuck down.

  I told Tony to fuck himself.

  Tony said he was warning me.

  “Warn away, assface.”

  With my arm thrashing, useless against Tony’s grip, I instead kicked for the shin, which only annoyed him more. He released one arm to wrap his hand around my neck.

  Drew clutched th
e sides of her face, her whole body shaking, begging us to stop. She tried to speak, demanding our attention with a string of blurted, stunted sounds. Tony and I continued our standoff, his forearm closing tighter around my throat.

  And then, when it looked like she might vomit from the stress, Drew made a great effort and gathered herself, ceased her miniature convulsions, and gained enough control of her lips, tongue, and throat to announce—to Tony and me and that damn crow that still would not leave—that she was pregnant.

  That she was going to have a baby.

  Which, as it turned out, was a pretty good way to halt a fist fight between two cousins.

  .

  6

  It seemed remarkable to me, as I drove through Wanstead back to the Toronto-bound highway, that Tony would remember that particular detail on a night that was memorable for so many others. But yes, it was true: I had mixed Tang crystals with vodka. I turned onto O’Neil Street, once the shopping strip of a proud neighbourhood, one that supported independent appliance, clothing, and jewelry shops, multi-generational family businesses, dentist offices, the first music store in Canada to carry Elvis records. Now, their concrete and granite facades had been dismantled and replaced by garish display windows at the Bargain Shop, Dollarama, and Loonie Toonie, showing bulk packs of double-A batteries and CD-ROMs, trees of reading glasses, T-shirts three for ten dollars. The Polish deli had disappeared, along with the bakery and the butcher shop where each year Mr. Duff prepared our Christmas roast. Gone now, all of them, and replaced by yellow and red outlets of Tim Horton’s, Subway, and Coffee Time. I knew that this kind of indifference afflicted other cities and neighbourhoods across the country, rich and poor cities alike. Yet even as a kid I had the impression that I had missed Wanstead’s best days by decades, that something proud and ­perhaps glorious had been here well before me, a period of prosperity and strength that had run out of steam before I was born.

  Stopped at a red light, I dialled the office. Outside, snowflakes melted on the car’s hood. Lydia answered after three rings.

  “You got a call this morning. A possible client.”

  “Another arsonist? Is my reputation spreading?”

  “Sorry. It sounds like a standard immigration thing. Want me to set up a meeting?”

  I could have taken it but I had no spirit for new cases. “Think we can give it to someone else?”

  “The junior?”

  “Not to the junior,” I said. If I gave it to the junior and the thing got screwed up, I would have to take the blame and, as I may have mentioned, I was becoming pretty wary of setting things up so that I’d be well clear of the fallout when something went wrong.

  “Can Amanda handle it?” I trusted Amanda Lu. We came aboard in the same year and I soon developed a deep, unrequited crush on her that only grew deeper after Amanda’s billings quickly outpaced mine, speeding her ascent to partner, and even more unrequited after I learned she was a lesbian. Anyway, while I dealt with Tony, Amanda could handle the file and if she wanted to pass it along to a junior, then anything that went wrong was on her.

  I drove from the city with a heavy foot, accelerating through yellow lights, merging directly into the left lane when I reached the highway. In fact, I was driving unusually fast and only slowed once I reached the Corridor of Death, a stretch of highway about half an hour from the city where, some years ago, a horrible accident made national news after a sudden thick fog dropped, robbing drivers of visibility, leading to a horrific accident. Dozens of cars and trucks were involved, including a tanker which flipped and slid and burst into flames. There were people trapped and burned alive in their cars.

  That same evening, Inés, Sagipa, and I watched the reports on television, sickened by the footage taken from hovering helicopters. For a few years, I had been suggesting a weekend in Wanstead wishing to show off my home town, but seeing what lay between there and us, Inés squashed the idea.

  “You can never go back,” she said. “You’re done with that city.”

  Inés was fond of those kinds of dramatic, finalizing statements. It was part of what made her such a popular poet in Colombia, what had earned her a string of prizes after her first collection, Mesa para una, was published at age 19. She won a major national award and when the critic at El Tiempo called the collection ‘sublime’ and ‘possibly genius’, she seemed headed for a successful literary career in a country where literature is taken seriously.

  Then she fell in love with one of the leaders of the FFLC, the country’s second largest active guerrilla army.

  The affair was brief, she assured me. “An irrational, feverish, mad, idiotic, ill-considered impulse of youth,” she said. It only lasted until they were photographed together kissing on a safe-house balcony. After that, everyone watched her: the press, the government, the police, the army. “Non-stop harassment,” she said. Literary critics reexamined her work, looking for subtexts sympathetic to the guerrilla cause. Even the FFLC’s internal intelligence unit, wary of destructive forces that lurk within any love affair, never felt comfortable with a public figure and youthful sentimentalist like Inés sharing a bed with the man whose leadership required the strictest, coldest discipline. Together with the government, they made things difficult for her.

  “It was then that I realized that the most basic function of human beings is to inflict misery on each other,” she explained.

  Inés split with the guerrilla fighter before she discovered she was pregnant with Sagipa. With the Colombian government still on her for information about her (now) ex-boyfriend, she decided it was time to leave. Visiting the American embassy first, she found a three-day queue. The line at the Canadian legation was blessedly shorter and there, she applied for residency. When they called her for an interview, she was only in her third month, not yet showing. The immigration officer gave her more bad news.

  “We just don’t have much need for poets in Canada,” he said.

  “Nonsense,” Inés said. “A country can never have too many poets. Look at the Iceland.”

  “Well, apparently, you can have too many poets. And we do.”

  “Can you name one for me?”

  The immigration officer lowered his head, cleared his throat, moved one piece of paper from right to left. He replaced the cap on his pen.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” he said. “We have our priorities.”

  Inés crossed one leg over the other, pointing her toe to the floor.

  “What is it you’re looking for?”

  The officer found a brochure among a pile of papers and flipped to the English side. He sighed and started to read from a crowded list.

  “Radiation technicians, emergency room nurses, fruit pickers, exotic dancers, aeronautical engineers, agronomists, supply chain managers—”

  “That’s it,” Inés said. “I’m an exotic dancer.”

  “I thought you were a poet.”

  Inés straightened in her chair, gripped the armrests and said: “You’ve obviously never been to any of my readings.”

  Sweet, sweet Inés.

  We met during my second year as an associate when I processed her permanent residency papers for The Belle’s Peel, a strip club my firm acted for at the time. At a reception to welcome the club’s newest employees that quickly evolved into a boozy party, Inés and I disappeared into a closet, me practicing my Spanish, she practicing her English, the two of us making sloppy love between a cashmere overcoat and a four-button suit still wrapped in dry cleaner’s plastic. She had dark hair, dark eyes, dark nipples, and a dark disposition I found irresistible. With her predictions of disaster, her cloud-covered outlook, she was the only woman who had ever made me feel like an optimist. When it was over in the closet, sticky and oxygen deprived, my lower lip bleeding from two slivery incisor cuts, I felt like a king of a country of no diplomatic importance. She turned and asked me to zip and by the time the tab had tr
avelled from the top of her buttocks to its proper place at the slender nape of her lovely neck, I had decided that she was the most fascinating woman I had ever been with. It was all I could do to not spend the rest of that party with my arms raised as a boxing champion and looking at her again and slipping my hand into hers while we slaked our thirst with the firm’s chilled Chablis, I thought that that was what I wanted for the rest of my life. I was thirty-six years old and it seemed like the right time to be making those kinds of decisions.

  I did my best to make a strong impression. I spent every pay cheque on new clothes and accessories: platinum cufflinks, a soft leather briefcase, designer boxers from Harry Rosen. We took taxis everywhere and dined at the high-end hot spots—Canoe, Avalon, Centro—tipping generously, charging everything to a credit card whose balance I figured I’d pay off once I made partner. And when my own future grandeur failed to impress her, we climbed to the rooftop of my office building with a bottle of Malbec (Reserva) and a hunk of manchego (12 month) and sat close, our fingers touching, and I would entertain her with tales of Gord and the contained little universe he governed for us in Wanstead.

  How, for example, our low-traffic street was always among the first to be cleared after it snowed. How, even during municipal strikes, our garbage was always collected. How Gord always had baseball and hockey tickets, good ones too. Or how, picking up the upstairs telephone extension one evening, I listened to my father chew out the commander of the local RCMP branch after one of his officers chose the wrong drunk for a recreational beating.

  “Look here, Morris,” Gord began. “Who is this Harchuk?”

  “Good man. Arrived just last week from B.C. Excellent record. Popular in the community. Is there a problem?”

  “He beat up one of my boys last night.”

  “What was your boy doing?”

  “What possible difference could that make?”

  The following week, the Echo reported that Constable Harchuk, late of the Wanstead detachment, would be leaving the city but was looking forward to serving and protecting the good citizens of Iqaluit.