Crying for the Moon, page 11
“Oh, yea,” Maureen interrupted him. “Funny. Where’s the bathroom?”
“Whaddya gonna have a bath?” said Deucey.
“No.”
“Well, whaddya wanna go to the bathroom for?”
Oh God, for such a good-looking guy, Deucey Dunne was a real pain in the hole sometimes, Maureen thought. But at the same time, she was burning with embarrassment that everyone could see what had happened to her. They could just gawk at her bruises and her disgrace. Sure, Deuce was all beat-up too, but Maureen knew in her heart that it was way different for a fella. And then she had to go and top it off by saying “bathroom” instead of “toilet.” She’d rather die than have other people think that she was one of those mealy-mouths who wouldn’t say shit even if their mouth was full of it. From now on, she’d call the bathroom “the head” or maybe even “the shitter.”
“The toilet, I mean, of course. Toilet. Where’s the toilet? Do you know?”
“Yea, just back that way,” Deucey said. “There’s a bath in there too, if you’re feelin’ dirty.” He moved in on her. “Are you feelin’ dirty, Maureen?”
She pushed past him into the bathroom. Jesus, what the fuck was wrong with her? Why would he, out of the blue, come on to her like that? She sat down on the toilet. She was an idiot, nothing but a fucking idiot. She was going to jail and she probably deserved to be locked up. She sat there, her drawers down around her ankle bones, and thought, I could just keep calling myself down to the lowest, just keep the you’re-an-idiot voice going, or I could haul up my drawers, go out there and suck up to Deucey Dunne and see if I can find out anything about what really happened to Bo.
The door opened. Maureen let out a little scream. George was standing there.
“I’ve decided, even if you did do it, I’m personally going to find you not guilty, like Holmes and Watson found Captain Croker in ‘The Adventure of the Abbey Grange’ not guilty.”
“I’m using the bathroom . . .,” Maureen said.
“Bo was a brute who constantly abused you in every conceivable way,” George continued, uninterrupted, “and so for you to take any action to get yourself free from the power of that madman is justifiable. And so, I pronounce myself judge and jury and find you not guilty: vox populi, vox Dei. You are acquitted, Maureen Brennan, and may your future actions justify me and the judgment I have pronounced this night.” Just that day, George had started reading a Sherlock Holmes story called “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange.”
“Shure I’m not guilty,” said Maureen, still on the toilet. “I didn’t do it, or I’m pretty sure I didn’t do it, anyways. You don’t have to pronounce anything, George. Go on! Get out of the bathroom, will ya?”
George walked across the bathroom and hugged Maureen to him. Her face was crushed against his belly while her drawers were still around her ankles. The bathroom door opened again and in walked Deucey Dunne.
“Oh, sorry to interrupt. Geez, b’ys. You don’t have to go at it in the toilet; Booman got three or four bedrooms.”
“You didn’t interrupt anything, except me, desperately trying to have a pee.”
“And you need someone to hold on to you so as you can do that? You’re a big girl now, Maureen. You should be able to manage that on your own.”
“Will you both just get the fuck out?”
“It didn’t take you too long to get a new fella on the go,” Deucey shot back on his way out the door.
“George is not my fella. He’s just a friend!” Maureen yelled.
“I’m not your fella?” George asked, looking all downhearted and droopy as he walked through the door.
“Christ, close the door, will ya . . . Please! . . . I’M ON THE TOILET.”
People at the party turned and looked, Maureen was so loud. Finally, George closed the door.
Maureen stayed another minute on the toilet, thinking that if she could get Deucey to take her home with him, maybe she could get a look around his place and . . . Again, she didn’t know exactly what she might find or even what she was looking for. But there’s always clues, isn’t there? her mind said. Deucey’s bitten ear—that was a clue, a real Bo move. Many times, Bo had been in such a rage and so liquored up and out of it, that he actually bit down on whatever was unlucky enough to be in front of him. Not only had he taken a piece out of Maureen’s ear, but when he was younger, before he’d even started drinking, he took a big chomp out of his sister Sara’s cheek and it got all infected and pus-y and scabby and looked awful for weeks. Sara said they’d thought she might have to get plastic surgery. The human bite is filthy. “Nothing so dirty as the human mouth,” the Sarge always said. Rage-filled biting was Bo’s MO and someone had bitten Deucey.
When she came out of the bathroom, George was standing there waiting, still in full sulk. “Stop being such a sook. What is wrong with you?” Maureen asked him under her breath.
“Nothing.” George didn’t look up.
“Well then, why have you got a face on you like a slapped arse?” said Maureen, channelling the Sarge. “I need you to get lost. I’ve got work to do.”
George’s bottom lip pouted out even further, if that was possible.
Maureen took a deep breath and whispered, “I need to find a way to get to Deucey’s so I can have a look around his place, try to find out what happened. You’ve got to scram, go home. I need you to help me. Remember? That’s why we are here,” she said, setting her face into what she imagined was a simpering-damsel-in-distress look. “I need you to help me by going home now.” She moved in even closer to George. “I’ll meet you back there. Later.”
Maureen looked away and caught Deucey’s eye. She gave George a little push and sailed across the room in Deucey’s direction.
“So, you almost got drafted into hockey, did ya. I heard—”
“No. That was Jack.”
“Oh, I heard that was you.”
“They wanted Jack to play Junior A with the Toronto Oaks, but he wouldn’t go.”
“Wow! Really? Why not?” Maureen asked, already knowing the answer.
“He didn’t want to, I guess. Here, have a toke.”
Maureen did and proceeded to drink a lot of whisky and smoke a lot more dope.
As Deucey got drunker, he started talking more about him and Jack and how close they were. Maureen was jealous that anyone would have someone they felt that much connection with and were that close to. It made Maureen feel even more lonely and lost. She was too busy attending her own private pity party and wasn’t really paying attention when Deuce said, “We shared a single placenta.”
“Well, that would make you close,” Maureen said, trying to stop feeling sorry for herself and start getting the job done.
“One egg,” Deucey said.
“What?”
“One egg. We are just one egg split in two. Me and Jack. Jack and me. Oh yea, it’s all Jack, Jack, Jack with ’em,” he muttered drunkenly, “but he wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for me.”
Maureen wasn’t quite following, but at the end of the night, she went home with him.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
DEUCEY HAD A NICE PLACE ON NUNNERY HILL. IT WAS just a regular-looking row house on the outside, but inside, it was all opened up and gussied up, with huge windows and a great view of the harbour. Deucey had a loft bed. She had to climb up a ladder and Deucey had to help her up because she was so loaded.
“You got a really nice body with your clothes off, which you can’t really tell from lookin’ at you dressed,” Deucey said as Maureen gracelessly crawled around the water bed, trying to find a place to pitch. Despite the mounting nausea caused by the rocking of the water bed, Deucey’s remark made Maureen feel kind of chuffed. No one had ever said anything nice about her body before. She tried to think what Deucey might mean. Bo had scrawled “Tiny Tits” across the inside of her two best bras. Her legs were long and skinny. Her brother Raymond used to say that she had their father’s knobby knees. She was 140 pounds and five-foot-eight, well over what the beautiful girls with the perfect bodies weighed. She had a good forty pounds on Twiggy or The Shrimp, but Deucey thought she had a good body. Oh great, Reenie, her mind said drunkenly. A guy who, for all you know, may have been involved in your ex-boyfriend’s murder gave you a compliment. Just said something nice to you and you’re such a pathetic loser that it’s kinda making you feel a little bit better about yourself.
She pretended to pass out after they did it, just in case he was one of those guys who wanted you to hop the fuck right out of their bed after they screwed you. He did try to wake her up, but she was doing a pretty convincing job of being passed out—so convincing that she actually did fall into a deep, almost comatonic sleep.
The sun was coming up over The Narrows, rising like a big red ball, right up over Cabot Tower, when she finally did come to. Deuce was still snoring. Silently, she threw her clothes over the side of the loft and clambered down the ladder. Tucked underneath the bed loft was what looked like an office: a desk, some metal filing cabinets, stacks of papers and a couple of trophies, one inscribed “Dave Dunne, MVP, 1967,” and the larger one read “The Herder Trophy for the Senior Ice Hockey Champions of Newfoundland, The St. John’s Capitals, 1969.” Despite her deep and abiding contempt for all things sport, Maureen was impressed. Deucey and Jack, they were winners.
Maureen could see bills and receipts, which were probably from the boys’ business. There was even a receipt from Bo, but it was just for $225 for one large crate. She could hear Deucey tossing around in the bed above just as she found a copy of a police report filed by Jack, who was the older brother, having come out of the womb a whole five minutes before Deucey. The report said that Deucey had been missing for over forty-eight hours. In fact, Maureen read, Deucey had been gone for three days, and Jack had searched all the known haunts, had searched everywhere. Maureen figured Jack must have been real worried if he filed a report with the cops, because none of the DAFT boys were what you’d call “cop callers.” Next to the report was some medical stuff. Maureen shuffled through and stopped at a file called “Feto-Fetal Transfusion Syndrome,” but she couldn’t make head nor tail of it. Underneath that was a memorandum of agreement stapled to an original bill of sale for a boat named The Ikaros, described as a hundred-foot Norwegian trader, a cargo vessel registered in Liberia and sold to the Dunne, Albert, Furlong, Tate Alliance Group. Why in the name of God were the boys buying a cargo boat? Maureen knew they were dope dealers, but she didn’t think they were boat-load-of-dope dealers. They weren’t that big.
Just as she found what looked to be a telegram from the Colombia Telegraph Company, Deucey called out, “What’re you at down there, Maureen?”
“Oh, just lookin’ for the bathroom . . . I mean, toilet.” Maureen shoved the papers back into what she thought was the order she’d found them in.
“Yea, we wouldn’t want you takin’ a shit in the bath.”
Maureen got dressed and, without saying another word or even goodbye, got out of there.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE NEXT TIME MAUREEN SAW DEUCEY WAS AT BO’S funeral service. She was sitting up in the front with Mrs. Browne, who seemed even more out of it than usual, and Art, who was sobbing openly. For some odd reason, Sara was sitting in the pew behind, holding up Dicey Doyle, who looked on the point of collapsing from grief. Sam Fleming was there too, on Dicey’s other side. Dicey seemed even more devastated than Mr. Browne. Maureen found that strange, but then again, the whole funeral had an odd, even unreal, feel to it.
Maureen hadn’t seen the Three Musketeers in months. Really, she hadn’t seen anybody for months, because she was either too bruised, too hungover or too drunk, and on top of that, Bo didn’t really want anyone at the house and he didn’t want her hanging out with anybody else. She felt sad seeing them there and missed having friends—if she could ever really call the Musketeers friends. Before she got in tack with Bo, they all used to tool around in Sara’s T-Bird, and because Maureen was Dicey’s friend, Sam and Sara let her hang around with them. They all jammed up together in the front seat, and Maureen sat by herself in the back. They let her know in no uncertain terms that she was not really one of the Three Musketeers. It was “all for one and one for all” but none for Maureen, apparently. She seemed to be the only one who knew that there was actually a fourth Musketeer, the most important Musketeer, the one who actually said “all for one and one for all,” the one all the books were written about: d’Artagnan. Maureen would sit, a little bit smug, in the back seat of the T-Bird, thinking she was d’Artagnan, the most interesting Musketeer, but she was careful to keep that thought to herself. The girls—mostly Sam and Sara—had made it clear how boring they found that kind of talk and that she’d better not interrupt them to go on about books and old nonsense, or she might not even manage to make it into the lousy back seat.
Not just Jack and Deucey, but all the DAFT boys were at the funeral. Deucey winked at Maureen as she walked down the aisle behind the coffin. Dear God, how could he? At a funeral. Maureen blushed with embarrassment. The cops were in the church too. They gave her a hard look as she passed them.
Maureen knew it was a mortal sin to think ill of the dead, but for all that, she couldn’t feel bad that Bo was . . . gone. If he hadn’t been . . . done away with, would she ever have gotten away from him? It struck her that morning that, sooner or later, it probably would have been her there in the box. Maybe he wouldn’t have done it on purpose, but really, how many flights of stairs can you be thrown down over before your neck finally breaks? How many times had he choked her till she almost passed out? Oh, never mind goin’ there now, she thought to herself. For all the crocodile tears I’m going to have to shed here today and for all the bullshit I’m gonna have to spew at the funeral, I will not miss him—not the one little bit.
The night after the funeral, Maureen told George she was going down to the Black Swan Inn to meet up with someone she knew who was home for Christmas. The Black Swan, tucked in on the side of the War Memorial, was tarted up to look like some kind of English pub or something. It was Friday night, so Wally Brownley and his band were playing. They were all Yanks, Wally and them. They had been stationed at Fort Pepperrell during the war and then stayed on in Newfoundland—probably married Newfoundland girls. They played jazz standards and old favourites, and Frankie, who owned the Black Swan, loved them. As the night wore on and Frankie drank more and more, he would try to make everyone get up to slow dance, and then he’d stand in the middle of the dancers and shake Red Roses talcum powder from the tin so that, he explained, the dancers’ feet could move with greater ease. Maureen sat to the bar, and Rita, Lovely Rita Meter Maid—bar maid, actually—was standing there in her glory, because Rita had worked down at the base for the Yanks, and listening to Wally’s band always brought her back to better times. Rita was in such a good mood, she didn’t even bother to ask Maureen for her fake ID; she just asked her what she wanted. Maureen burst into tears.
“I don’t know,” she said.
Rita looked at her with concern but also with irritation. The band was playing “A Sunday Kind of Love,” and buddy on the big xylophone thing was really givin’ ’er.
Maureen didn’t want to keep irritating Rita, so she ordered a beer. “But I don’t really like beer,” she said. “Old bellywash, Dad calls it. But I can’t start right in on the whisky right off the bat, just like that.” She could see she was really getting on Rita’s nerves now. “A jockey club, Rita. That’s what I’ll have, a jockey club.”
Maureen took her first sip and, right away, wished she’d ordered the whisky. She loved that burning, the heat that spread through her chest, and that big letting go she felt after she took her first sip of hard liquor. You’d have to drink a dozen beer to get that, and by the time you choked back a dozen, you’d be bloated up like a big pig and vomiting your guts out somewhere, but really, she couldn’t afford to let go like that, not tonight, because she had thought it all through lying awake next to George last night, her mind going a mile a minute, making it hard to get to sleep. And when she’d thought it through, she realized she was still no further ahead. Shure she’d seen that bill of sale for the boat at Deucey’s—and hadn’t Bo said something about a boat and the DAFT crowd that night he’d been in a rage because they wouldn’t make him a partner? She felt in her heart and soul that she was right on the edge of seeing it all make sense, but she didn’t really have much to go on, did she? She needed to dig deeper. If she could get Deucey to take her home with him again, maybe she could have a better poke around. She’d wait here and if Deucey didn’t show up, she’d go down to Dirty Dick’s and see if he was down there, or he might be down at the Trot ’n’ Pace.
A gaggle of young women came through the door. They were all busy comforting someone in obvious distress. Oh fuck. The one being comforted was Fluff Dawe, Bo’s old girlfriend. Fluff and Bo had gotten together in Grade 8 and had stayed together all through high school and into university and were supposedly just getting back together when Bo got with Maureen. “Juicy Joyce” Maynard, Carleen’s sister, was part of Fluff’s crowd, and she shot Maureen a look of such meanness as they passed that Maureen thought, Jesus, the way she’s lookin’ at me, you’d think I killed Bo. Oh, that’s right, she thought, her heart sinking, maybe I did.
After the girls settled in at their table and ordered drinks and continued to make comforting noises at and around Fluff, Maureen could feel them all looking darts over at her. Fluff’s crowd had always been mad at Maureen because Bo had dumped Fluff for a younger model. Not knowing what gave her the guts, Maureen turned around on her bar stool, intending to stare them down. But by the time she did, they were all looking down at their drinks or at each other, except for Joyce. Joyce just stared back at Maureen. Joyce had never known the back-down. Maureen and Carleen had thought Joyce was so cool, they looked up to her. Seeing Joyce made Maureen feel lonely for Carleen. She figured she must still be up in Montreal, being a secretary/piece of tail for that dirtbag club owner/mail-order porn sleezoid, who Maureen now suspected might be face and eyes in tack with the DAFT crowd. Perry had said that night Fox was working with him, and somehow or other, it must all fit together, but Maureen didn’t know how.
