Last Call (14 page)

* * *

At 9:00 o’clock on the morning of August 10th, six weeks to the day following his admission to Webbwood, Jim Gamble sat across from Dr. Langtree with his hands folded in his lap and a knapsack containing his few belongings resting on the floor between his feet. Unlike his initial visit to the doctor’s office, the blinds were wide open today and the room was filled with morning sunshine. There was no silent nurse sitting in the corner with a clipboard on her knees, and Jim felt better than he had in decades.

Smiling, Langtree said, “Well, Jim, how does it feel to be leaving?”

“Scary as hell.”

The doctor laughed. “That’s a pretty normal reaction. It’ll pass. All set up at the halfway house?”

“Yep. Got a room with a view.”

“Job search pan out?”

“No, nothing yet.”

Nodding, Langtree said, “All in due course,” and got to his feet. Jim followed suit, slinging the knapsack over his shoulder.

“You’ve done well here, Jim,” Langtree said. “But a word of caution. Outside, there’ll be no one looking over your shoulder. No one to hold you accountable. So use what you’ve learned in Program. Go to meetings, as many as you can. Use your sponsor; Dean’s a good kid who’s successfully tackling a brutal addiction. Read your Big Book—and don’t take that first drink. You can do it, Jim. One day at a time, you can do it.”

Langtree came around the desk and the men shook hands.

“Thanks, Doctor Langtree,” Jim said. “Thanks for everything.”

Feeling absurdly like he was being thrown to the wolves, Jim left the office and exited the building by the main entrance, digging his bus pass out of his pocket and wondering what he should do next. Surprising him, Trish and Dean popped up all smiles from behind a bordering hedge. With tears in his eyes Jim accepted their congratulatory hugs and remembered something Langtree had told him that first day in his office:
You are not alone
.

Grinning, Jim said, “Alright, who wants to go drinkin’?” and they all shared a good laugh.

“Okay,” Dean said, taking Trish’s hand. “Let’s go check out your new crib.”

* * *

One late night in the last week of October, Sally West came out of the Radisson Hotel at the end of her shift and stood on the sidewalk in the autumn chill, shivering and thinking she could use a drink. There was a perfectly nice bar in the hotel, but she’d just spent the past twelve hours working her tail off in there and decided she’d had enough of the place for one day. She could go home and get a glow on in comfort—run a hot bath, float a nice Merlot in the water with her and sip it straight out of the bottle—but the thought of spending another night alone in that house was just too depressing.

She stepped off the curb and headed for the parking lot, checking her watch as she went: 12:01 A.M. on a Friday night.
Huh.
Pushing forty, all dressed up in her work clothes smelling of hotel confections, and no place to go.

She missed Trish very much.

But the kid was doing great down in Guelph, managing the hefty course load like a pro, working weekends in Sadie’s shop and gabbing with her old lady every night on the phone. She hadn’t been home for a visit yet, but Sally understood; it was a four-and-a-half hour drive, gas was expensive, and she had to grab as much study time as she could.

Sally got in the car, keyed the ignition and belted herself in—then she fished the cell phone out of her purse and turned it on, scrolling through her contacts to Trish’s number. She didn’t have anything to say, really, she just wanted to hear the kid’s voice; right now, she wanted that more than anything else in the world.

She touched the screen, making the connection—then cut it off before it had a chance to ring. It was after midnight and Trish would be sleeping, Sadie expecting her in the shop before 8:00 A.M. on Saturdays.

Sally returned the phone to her purse and started crying, just like that, the tears coming quick and hot and insistent. She hated behaving like this, had always seen it as a sign of weakness; but whatever this was, it was clear she was just going to have to ride it out.

She turned on the radio and snatched a wad of Kleenex out of the glove box, Q92 playing some bluesy oldies tonight as she dabbed her eyes, Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” sliding smoothly into “Desperado,” by the Eagles.

The song reminded her of her gigging days and how much she’d loved that feeling, getting up on stage wearing sassy-ass shit she’d never have been caught dead in anywhere else, using her sexuality and her passion for the music to knock the audience members right the fuck
out
. Bad ’n Rude. It was Gamble who’d come up with that name, and it had fit them like a glove. They’d done mostly classic rock covers in their live show, and “Desperado” had been one of Sally’s favorites, but the Linda Rondstat version, not The Eagles’. In those days reviewers had compared her to Rondstat, calling her a refreshing cross between Linda and k.d. lang, with a pinch of Joplin thrown in for good measure. Man, did she miss those times.

Sally thought,
Shit
, the tears coming even harder now,
this isn’t helping
, and she shut the radio off. Then she dried her eyes, put the car in gear and got the hell out of the parking lot.

She got stuck at a red light on Paris Street downtown, a thin drizzle falling now, and absently noticed a bright yellow 60s-style poster taped to a light stanchion on the median—Open Mic Night at The Townhouse, Midnight to 2 A.M.—with today’s date on it. By the time the light turned green, the information had left her mind; but two blocks later she turned right onto Elgin Street and found a parking spot directly in front of the bar.

She got out in the rain in her square business-woman’s suit and went inside like she belonged there, drawing looks from the youthful patrons as she strode to the edge of the stage and caught the bass player’s attention. She shouted her request to the guy—there was a heavily-tattooed girl of about Trish’s age at the mic now, performing some kind of death metal massacre on a Michael Jackson tune—and the bass player nodded gratefully and turned to the band, abruptly ending the song. The screamo kid gave Sally a dirty look, her mousy face so full of piercings it looked like an open tackle box, then stormed off to the ladies’ room.

Before she could stop herself, Sally stepped onto the low stage and stood at the mic, undoing the top two buttons of her sensible blouse. Now the bass player—a very tall, very thin guy in his mid-thirties with gentle eyes and a ready smile—said, “Shall we call you ‘Supervisor’ or do you have a name?” Smiling, Sally glanced at the embroidered title on her breast pocket and slipped the jacket off, letting it puddle on the stage in front of the bass drum. She said, “Call me ‘Sal’.” Then: “Do you guys know “Desperado”?” and the bass player nodded, saying, “I’m guessing the Rondstat version?” and Sally said, “The very one.”

She faced the crowd as the bass player introduced her and the drummer counted it in. And when the keyboard player struck those first sweet chords, Sally felt the tears coming again...but she closed her eyes and locked that sadness in, slipping a harness over it, waiting for her cue.

She hadn’t sung a note in over a decade.

But when that exquisite moment of pause came, the last note of the intro fading into the expectant silence, Sally opened her mouth and sang those four iconic syllables as if her last gig had been only yesterday. And although she couldn’t hear it, she could
feel
the room gasp—the hip kids in the audience, the waitresses and the barkeep, the musicians behind her—every last one of them with their eyes on her now, and Sally felt the excitement effervesce out of the domes of her shoulders into the back of her neck and she knew, just
knew
, that everyone else did, too.

She sang the song with everything she was and everything she’d ever been, and when the tears got away on her again she failed to notice. She plucked the mic off the stand and simply stood there, letting it come in the effortless way it always had, making eye contact with everyone in turn.

When she was done there was only silence, and Sally got the shrinking feeling she’d bombed and that she’d best just go home, drink herself to sleep in the tub and pray for a peaceful drowning.

Then the place erupted in applause, and the thirty or so kids at the tables got to their feet and started chanting,
“Do one more, do one more,”
and Sally dried her eyes on her sleeve and asked the band if they knew “Whole Lotta Love”.

* * *

On the afternoon the first snowflakes sifted out of the November overcast, Bobcat moved the camper into the barn for the season, parking it over the hole in the ground—empty now, the last of his guests dispatched—and covering it with a huge tarpaulin. Winters up here were long and harsh, and something about that kind of weather soured his taste for the hunt. He’d use his old Chevy pickup until spring, when the urge would surface again and he’d return to his usual haunts.

For now, though, he had enough raw materials to carry him through the season, and sufficient pre-orders to keep the bills paid and the pantry well stocked. And if he did run out, well, bovine teeth would do in a pinch, and there were cattle farms all over the place around here. A rip-off, granted—there was just something about the texture of human dentition that made it ideally suited to the craft—but sometimes you just did what you had to do. The dogs he’d feed the big ten-point buck he’d shot out of season, the animal already butchered and stored in the two big freezers in the summer kitchen, along with the remains of a pregnant moose he’d found dead on the side of the highway, clipped by a passing trucker. And if that wasn’t enough for the yappy fuckers, they could starve to death.

He was almost ready to settle in. Hibernate like the big ol’ bear that he was. The thought made him grin. He backed the Chevy out of the barn and climbed down to check the tread on the snow tires.

Until six years ago, when his ma died and he got the Rotties, Bobcat had packed up the camper and headed south for the winter, spending those five long months back home on the bayou outside of St. Francisville, Louisiana. He still owned the property down there—under his real name, Anatole Amos Polk—but without his ma there to take care of the place it was just a shack, and it could burn to the ground for all he cared. He hadn’t been back since the funeral, and reckoned the place was probably overrun with rats and coons by now. Or maybe one of the beer-gutted redneck swampers his ma used to entertain had turned it into a whorehouse. Either way, he could give a shit. Nothing but bad memories back there, people calling him a freak on account of his malformed ears and some of his toes being fused, calling him a snaggle-toothed tree monkey, every ugly thing they could think of.

And the worst of them was his own ma, the sow, nothing ever good enough. He could only remember her ever hugging him once in his lifetime, the day he killed the copperhead that got into her shower stall, chopping it’s head off with a garden hoe. And even that felt more like he was just something handy to grab hold of than it did a hug. That last winter he’d spent with her down there he’d pretty much decided that if she was still alive the following year, he’d slit her wattled throat just like he had his daddy’s and sink her next to that mean old fucker in the swamp.

Bobcat drove the pickup into the backyard and parked it by the kennel, feeling bitter now, these unbidden thoughts of his dark days back home making him want to kill something. Compounding his misery, the molar that had been giving him grief was starting to act up again.

When he got out of the truck, one of the Rotties—the big alpha male with the star-shaped marking on its chest—gave him a dirty look, trying to stare him down, and Bobcat thought,
I’m gonna blow your brains out and feed your balls to your cellmates
, but by the time he got to the closet where he kept the rifle it was the toothache that had his full attention. Forgoing the gun, he dug the whisky out of the pantry, the forceps and the Krazy Glue off the workbench and settled in for the task at hand. He hoped he had a decent match in his collection.

It was going to be a long damn winter.

* * *

On the evening of Monday, February sixteenth, Jim and Dean attended an A.A. meeting together, then drove to Dean’s apartment. It was Trish’s twenty-first birthday and they wanted to surprise her with a Skype call, the two of them donning pointy party hats and clamping dollar-store blowouts between their teeth, ready to blast them at the screen when Trish came online. They knew that her mother had driven down from Sudbury to spend the weekend with her, and that she was supposed to have left yesterday afternoon, but at the last minute Jim decided to stay out of sight until they were certain Sally was gone. Trish hadn’t told her about him yet, and he didn’t want to blow it for her by getting caught on her computer screen.

When Trish came online, Dean said, “Are you alone?” and when she said, “Yes,” both men stuck their faces into the screen and honked their blowouts, having a sword fight with them now and acting the fool, then they sang “Happy Birthday” to her. Trish smiled and said, “It’s about time you guys called; I was beginning to think you’d forgotten.” Playful, but letting them know it mattered.

They chatted for a while about life and school and the many wonders of Kraft Dinner, then Jim told Trish he had a job interview coming up later in the week, an opportunity Dean had found for him with the support staff at TGH. Trish said that was great and wished him luck, then told them about a little confession her mother had made during her birthday visit.

“She’s in a band now,” Trish said and Jim laughed, saying, “Man, that’s great,” genuinely pleased for her. Trish said, “It’s a group of young Laurentian University professors,” and told them how Sally had inadvertently auditioned for the lead singer slot back in October. She said, “They call themselves ‘Summa cum Loudly’,” and Dean chuckled at the academic pun. “Weekend warriors, Mom calls them. But they’re really talented, and Mom sounds amazing. I’ll send you a link to a Youtube video somebody posted.” Trish giggled. “Wait’ll you see what she’s wearing; very cheeky. I asked her why she waited so long to tell me about it and she said she didn’t want to bring it up until she was sure she wanted to go through with it. They’re just playing the club scene right now, but Mom says they’ve got enough original material for an EP, so they’re going to launch a Kickstarter campaign in the spring and see what happens.”