Kanga had decided it was time to have a “sit-down” with the bikers. See, that was the kind of blue-sky optimist Kanga was. You have a problem with bikers, you take over a bag of sensimilla and smoke a peace pipe with them. The bikers had agreed to the sit-down, but it hadn’t gone well at all. The gang told Kanga, overexplicitly in his view, to cease and desist operating in their territory. Otherwise, they would introduce him to a world of pain. To emphasize the point, one of the bikers—a big mother named Wombat—had pissed on him. Literally.
First their customers, then their suppliers dried up; they didn’t want Kanga’s group as subcontractors. Everybody had to deal exclusively with the Riders or risk being put out of business, to use the polite term. In desperation, Kanga had ventured further afield for product, driving as far as Montreal to round up first-class narcotics.
“You’re out of your mind,” Kevin had told him. “There’s no way we’re going to be able to move that stuff without the Riders going berserk.”
They were in Kanga’s basement apartment. Kanga was on his back at his Universal gym, smoking a joint. He took a hit, offered it to Kevin, who declined, and set it in the ashtray.
Kanga smiled and pressed another one-fifty. He held the weight and released smoke through his teeth. “That’s the beauty part,” he said, his voice all gaspy from the weed. “I’m not gonna go into competition with them. I’m going to set us up as their suppliers.”
“Don’t do it, man. Don’t even think that. They’ll just rip you off. They’re already moving so much dope, you’re not going to be able to beat whatever price they’re getting.”
“Leave it to me, man. I know what I’m doing.”
“You going to wear a wetsuit this time?”
“Hey, fuck you, man. That was just one goon.” Kanga set down the weight and took another hit off the joint. His words emerged smokily between clenched teeth. “The other guys were actually kind of apologetic about it.”
And so Kanga had set up another meeting with the Viking Riders. Kevin and Leon and Toof had never seen him again.
Without Kanga, the group had rapidly gone to hell. Kevin had made regular trips to Toronto and brought back small amounts of speed and heroin by train. But it didn’t add up to a paying proposition. What with all the stress of their misfortunes, he’d found himself once again with a needle in his arm. It had taken all his strength to quit again: methadone, twelve-step, the whole pathetic cabaret. By then, he had been barely able to make the rent on his miserable little apartment.
“The thing to do,” Leon had mused one day. “Instead of buying from the Viking Riders, or trying to buy around them—what we should do is take over their import business.”
They were sitting in the sun on a rock cut near the railway tracks, watching the French girls heading down Front Street to the École Secondaire.
“Somehow they’re bringing the stuff in from the States,” Leon went on, “and now they’re shipping it across the goddamn country. If we could somehow take over that end of things they’d be forced to deal with us.”
“Yeah,” Toof said, wheezing through a plume of pot smoke. “That sounds good. Why don’t we do that?”
“Because Kanga had the same idea,” Kevin said. “And Kanga never came back.”
So there they had been: Leon a talker, not a leader; Kevin with no ambition whatsoever to run things; and Toof out of the question. It was onto this bleak stage that Red Bear had first strode, promising them magic and riches. How could a junkie resist?
Red Bear rapidly made Algonquin Bay his own, using little more than his good looks and a deck of cards. He could often be found at Everett’s Coffee Bar on Sumner, the last of the independent coffee joints. He would sit at a corner table with his deck of cards, and after a while people just came to him. Everett’s didn’t mind; Red Bear brought people in. They’d buy a coffee and go over to him and he’d read their cards. They knew he was good, Kevin figured, because he charged so much: seventy-five bucks a pop, thank you very much. He also did astrology charts, which cost twice as much.
It was difficult to have a conversation with him, because people were always coming over to the table to get a reading. Kevin didn’t know how much he earned doing this, but it had to be substantial, and naturally tax-free. And it gave him an in with all sorts of people: The local musicians started going to him, and once he’d got a couple of hairstylists among his clientele, they spread the word. He claimed to have done some modelling in Toronto—he was certainly handsome enough—but Kevin figured he had to have some other source of income. But whatever it was, Red Bear kept it pretty much under wraps. Certainly he never attracted any police attention.
When he wasn’t reading cards, Red Bear went out of his way to befriend Kevin and Leon. He gave them samples of the best pot either of them had ever tried, he took them to the movies a couple of times and he was always buying them drinks, although he didn’t drink much himself. He didn’t even seem to mind Toof. Like the other two, Kevin was flattered by the attention, even if he remained a little suspicious of it.
Over the next few months, Red Bear became a major part of their lives. Eventually he revealed his other business to them, which was shipping medium-sized packets of cocaine and heroin cross-country. He did this from a location just outside Algonquin Bay. He wouldn’t say where.
“You’d better watch out for the Viking Riders,” Kevin warned him. “We told you what happened to Kanga.”
“I am not worried about the Riders,” Red Bear said. “I am protected.”
“Protected?”
By way of answer, Red Bear had just pointed to the sky.
One chilly spring night—it must have been late April, early May, before the flies were out—they were all down at the beach. Red Bear had constructed a beautiful fire—an altar fire, he called it—that burned slow and steady for hours. Leon and Toof were there, the sky was all Milky Way and a breeze blew in off the lake. Waves slapped quietly on the shore; from further down the beach came the noises of a party in progress, but the mood among the four had been contemplative, even solemn.
Red Bear had asked about their life stories. Leon poked thoughtfully at the treads of his hiking boots with a stick, cleaning the mud off them, while he talked about his past. He was the only child of two drunkards, one of whom had killed the other when Leon was sixteen and would probably never get out of prison. He got the scar on his forehead when his mother had thrown a toaster at him. Toof stared into the flames, firelight flickering in his eyes, as he told Red Bear he was the youngest of seven, raised by a widowed mom who worked three jobs and never knew which of her sons would end up in the nick next. Kevin didn’t say too much. Parents died when he was ten years old. Fell in love with poetry. Dropped out of college after second year. Got wired to smack. Kicked it. He didn’t mention that he was skin-popping again; no need to burden the others with too much information.
The three of them looked at Red Bear. So far, they knew nothing about him, other than that he came from a reserve somewhere up north.
He smiled, those perfect teeth gleaming in the firelight. “You want to know about me? I will tell you. This, of course, is the first thing you have to know.” He pulled out his wallet and snapped a card on the table.