Moody Food (35 page)

I FIXED BECAUSE HE WANTED ME TO. When he took out his kit from the bag that the tapes were in and pulled up his sleeve, he didn't say a word. But I offered him my arm when he was done with his and he tied me off and slapped my forearm to raise a vein and slid the needle in slowly but expertly. By the time I'd barely made it to the bathroom at the end of the hall and vomited and come back, Scotty was gone. Before he left he'd watched us shoot up from his spot at the table. I nodded out on the floor and when I woke up Thomas was gone, too.

But that was all right. He'd be back. In the meantime I'd just keep having this continuous warm jet-stream body-and-soul orgasm I was having and wonder why Thomas hadn't let me in on the wonders of mainlining heroin until now. If acid solved the mind-body problem, heroin eliminated the question. How could something that made you feel truly comfortable in your skin for the first time in your life get such a bad rap, I wondered. I felt good for me but sad for the rest of my fellow human beings struggling day after day to achieve only a fraction of what I was feeling right now every tenderly pulsing second.

I'd nodded off again when Thomas returned, and when I woke up he was tossing slices of liver off the balcony. He had a white plastic bag full of it at his feet and was determined to deposit each and every piece onto the empty street. I joined him outside.

It was the middle of that hour that is the middle of the night and the beginning of day both, still thickly dark but ready to dissolve
into slowly blooming light at any minute. Thomas plopped a bloody piece of meat on the windshield of a brown Ford Fairlane parked underneath us a few feet down. He picked up a fresh slice out of the bag.

“Do you know what I'm holding in my hand right now, Buckskin?”

I looked at the piece of meat for a second like I actually needed time to identify it. “Liver?”

“From what animal?”

“A cow?”

“That's right, from a cow. I have here in my right hand the liver from a cow.” He pulled back his arm and flung the thing as hard as he could, shooting, I think, for the sidewalk across the street. It landed with a sticky slap a couple feet short of its target.

“And do you know what the purpose of a liver is?” he said. “Not just a cow's liver, any liver?”

I'd never really thought about it before. And now—a big beautiful butterfly delicately unfolding its elegantly embroidered wings and readying itself for takeoff in the pit of my stomach—definitely wasn't the time to start. “Um ...”

“That's all right, don't be embarrassed. You'd be surprised at how many people don't.” He seemed undecided about where to direct his next missile; kept tossing it up and down in his hand like a pizza pie while scouting the street. A yellow Volvo went by and tooted its horn. He let it pass.

“The liver performs many essential functions. It regulates blood volume. It stores up all sorts of important things a body needs like copper and iron and vitamin B
¹²
. It metabolizes proteins and carbohydrates and fats and destroys old red blood cells. And”—he reached back and pitched the subject of his anatomy lesson side-armed, farther than the last but still not far enough to make it to the other side—“it also detoxifies foreign substances in
the blood stream.” He wiped his bloody hand on his jeans and looked at me for the first time.

“It keeps a body clean, Buckskin. Without it, there's nothing stopping something—
anything
—from stealing inside and spreading its poison and putting you down for good.” He dipped his hand back in the bag and retrieved the final piece of liver.

This time I thought it was going over to the other side. He screamed and hurled the hunk of meat, and another six inches and it would have made it. It didn't echo, but you could feel Thomas's voice carrying on somewhere in the damp night air. He took in the carnage he'd created below, the thin slices of brown flesh splattered on the street, sidewalk, and dew-topped cars. He lit a cigarette.

“One more thing about the liver?” he said. “About the human liver?”

I nodded.

“The liver is the largest single organ in the human body. Most people, if you ask them, would say it's the heart, but it's not. The heart gets all the songs written about it and it's what everybody talks about, but the liver is the biggest thing in you. So how come you never hear anybody talking about the liver? Where are all the songs written about it?”

THOMAS SENT ME OFF to Kelorn's to let her know that the cops hanging around near the studio that he'd made up and called her about when I'd passed out had gone, but that just to be on the safe side he was staying put for the rest of the night. By the time I was out of Yorkville and on Spadina the night was beginning to do its Houdini thing, and once I hit Harbord, yesterday was just a rumour. I was still high but felt like doing
nothing so much as crying. When I couldn't put my finger on why, I wanted to cry even more. After I tried to and couldn't, I decided to sing.

Which was exactly as far as I got. I opened my mouth but something blocked the signal from my brain to my lips and plugged my vocal cords shut and nothing came out. I felt like I'd stubbed my toe, hard, on the sharp corner of a couch and couldn't scream.

I lowered my head and walked and walked and didn't stop until I found myself an hour and a half later in Etobicoke. When I heard a kid—a paper boy with an empty grey bag slung over his shoulder—kicking a can down the street, the sound of tin grating across concrete scraped my nerves and made me feel like yelling at him to cut it out and I knew I was going to be all right. I sang the first thing that came to mind, the chorus to Merle Haggard's “Sing Me Back Home,” and wanted to run over and tell the kid how much I loved him.

I didn't, though. This was Etobicoke, not Yorkville. I started the long walk back instead and listened to him going his way still kicking his can, me going mine singing my song.

THE NEXT DAY, that day, was hot. I think it was hot. Real warm, anyway. It had to be, it was August. August 20. The day Yorkville decided to strike its blow against the empire and the empire struck back.

Kelorn and Heather were taking tea on the front step when I finally made it to Making Waves. Heather must have stayed up half the night making a sizable dent in the bag of coke Thomas had given her, because it was all I could do to convince her that Thomas was fine and that we'd been up late talking and that he
was probably sleeping and that for her to go by and wake him up wouldn't do anybody any good.

“Is he really okay, Bill?” she asked, pulling at the arm of my sweaty T-shirt.

“Sure he is. The poor guy just needs some sleep. You both do.” I tried to give her my best I-know-of-what-you-sniff look of disapproval, but to no avail. She just kept holding onto my shirt until Kelorn gently put a cup of tea in her hand.

“You look like you could use some sleep yourself,” Kelorn said, handing me another cup.

“I'm okay,” I said, waving away the concern and the offer.

“Take it,” she said.

I took both it and the space she made for me on the step after she sent Heather inside to make another pot. I sipped the hot tea. Chamomile. I immediately felt like curling up on the step like an old cat in the sun.

Looking straight ahead, “Vancouver looks promising,” she said.

“Vancouver?” Maybe I already was asleep.

Kelorn turned to me. “You do remember what we were talking about last night?”

“Yeah, I just ...”

“Yes, I know. There seems to be a lot of that going around.” She returned her gaze to the empty sidewalk.

“I want to hear if Christine came up with anything,” she said,

“but I think the west coast is our best bet. Thomas would just seem like one more draft dodger out there.”

“How long before he goes?”

“Depending upon what Christine has to say, he can and has to go now.”

“What, like this week?”

“Like today.”

“Today?”

She turned to me again.

“It's just that we're not done working on
Moody Food
yet,” I said.

“Bill, do you know what the RCMP will do to Thomas if they get a hold of him?”

“Put him in jail?”

“Put him in jail. Correct. And not for the weekend, either.”

I took another sip of my tea. “I can't imagine Thomas in jail.”

“Exactly,” she said. “Neither can I.”

Heather poked her head out the door.

“What kind of tea should I make?” she said.

“Use the strong black tea, dear,” Kelorn said. “Bill is going to bring Thomas back to us safe and sound. And it looks like he needs all the help he can get.”

ACTUALLY, WHAT BILL needed was to fire up a sizable piece of South American rock just to get his pulse pumping at a normal number of beats per second. But I resisted the desire to take some of Heather's stash with me on the grounds that I'd have Thomas up and around and back at Making Waves and myself horizontal on my cot in my old room by noon. The idea of pulling back the sheets, flicking on my ancient fan, and taking a short vacation from reality seemed as exciting an idea as I could imagine.

But it would be a long time before I got to have that sleep. And when I did, it wouldn't be a short nap. When I finally delivered Thomas where I was supposed to, I'd sleep the sleep of the dead. And there wouldn't be anything in the world of the living loud enough to wake me up again.

“ALL RIGHT, think of it as my send-off into exile, then.”

“I already know what I think of it,” I said. “Have you lost it? A concert? Now? You might as well turn yourself in.”

“I told you, we'll play under cover.”

“Under what kind of cover?”

“I don't know. The International Donald Twayne String Band. Whatever. It's not important. The thing is, we'll tell everybody who's cool what's really going on and perform
Moody Food
from start to finish, the whole thing, exactly in the order it's going to appear on the album.”

“With just the four of us? What about all the outside instruments we've used? Not to mention the studio effects you've—God, I can't believe I'm even talking about this.”

I didn't have to get Thomas up; thanks to the block of coke and handful of reds on the table, he'd never come down. Which had given him plenty of time to plan his very own farewell party. He had his guitar around his neck and was stalking around the room as he spoke. He went to the table and inhaled a line in each nostril standing up and swung an arm around my shoulder.

“It's not about how close we can come to approximating the studio sound of the record,” he said. “I know that's impossible, and that's what we're making the record for. But Thomas realizes now that we've left something out of what we've been doing.”

“Oh, yeah, what's that?”

“Love.”

“And you think that by putting your ass in danger of being incarcerated by playing a two-hour concert we're going to get that now?”

“People have to see what this music means to us, Buckskin. They have to see it up close and personal, in our eyes.” He took hold of my shoulders so I couldn't look away. “Just like I can see it in yours and you in mine.”

I didn't know what he was seeing, but all I saw was a road map of broken blood vessels and two ridiculously dilated pupils. Reasoning with him was useless, so I'd have to outsmart him.

“Okay,” I said. “But this place is just too hot right now. Let's go downstairs and get Slippery and I'll call Christine and we'll all meet up at Kelorn's and work this thing out. But after that we've got to talk about where you and Heather are going to end up. How does Vancouver sound?”

“Vancouver, sure, whatever y'all say.” He strummed his guitar. “But you gather up the girls and meet me back here. Thomas has got us a hiding place the devil himself would never find.”

THOMAS LED US ALL downstairs to the building's basement and stopped before a door marked FURNACE—KEEP OUT. He slipped in a skeleton key and, sure enough, there was the furnace. And, on the other side of the small cobwebby room, another door. He knocked—four times, slowly—and was answered by the door opening up on its own. He stepped aside and with a sweeping gesture bowed for Kelorn to enter first. She hadn't been happy about Thomas insisting on staying here and not at the store, but knew better than to argue. She looked at him and then at me, shook her head, gathered up her dress at her knees, and disappeared down the dark stairs.

“This is so cool,” Heather said, following Kelorn, kissing Thomas on the cheek.

“I better wait upstairs for Christine,” I said. “I left a message for her with one of her roommates. As soon as she gets here we'll come down.”

“You sure you know the knock?”

At first I thought he was kidding. Until my eyes started to
adjust to the dull yellow light coming through the basement window and I saw he wasn't smiling.

“Four knocks, right?” I said.

“Four knocks with one Mississippi steamboat between each knock.”

“Gotcha.”

He handed me the key. “Take this.”

“Right.”

“And this.” He reached inside his Nudie jacket and pulled out a pistol.

“What the hell do you want me to do with that?” I said, staring at the gun.

He slapped it into the palm of my hand. “I don't want you to do anything with it. It's only for using if you have to, you hear me? Only if you absolutely have to.”

“Why would I have to use it?”

Closing the cellar door behind him, “Get your head out of the ground, Buckskin. There's a war on, in case you didn't know.”

I SAT AT THE CARD table with the pistol lying in front of me. The breeze from the balcony was warm, the gun cold and hard. I didn't notice Scotty shuffle into the room until he pulled back a chair and sat down. He rested his violin case and bag of papers on his lap and joined me in staring at the gun.

“I knew you weren't bright, but I never took you for stupid,” he said.

“It's not mine.”

“You think I'm just talking about that thing?”