She did not like to think of Bella going to Peter’s mother’s cramped and painfully quiet little flat. She did not want Peter taking Bella out in that crappy old car, driving so fast. With Bella here, in her own room, Ailsa could keep checking for smudgy marks on Bella’s clothes or on her bedding. She considered the car, thinking of the engine, the underside, the parts that were already grimy, oily; how would one ever notice some small smudgy fingerprints on a vital part, such as a brake cable? If something were to happen, it might be impossible to say exactly how it had occurred.
In the morning, at breakfast, Peter commented on the dark smudges under Ailsa’s eyes. “Did you sleep?” he asked.
“A bit,” said Ailsa. Although she had been up for most of the night, she had slept quite well in the final few hours.
Peter finished his cereal, put his bowl down near the sink and said, “I’ll be back after lunch to take Bella to Mum’s. Get her bag ready. Remember to put in her formula.”
Ailsa nodded. She listened to Peter closing the door behind him. She stood and went to the window and looked down at him getting into his car and driving away. She watched him accelerating into the gloom, heading for the bypass.
She did not hurry to pack up the baby’s things. Instead, while Bella sat in her high chair playing with her first solid food, Ailsa sat down and lit a roll-up. The charcoal-grey ring binder was still on the kitchen table. The pages of careful notes and neat diagrams from the car maintenance class were dirty at the edges. It could go out for the dustmen now.
When her roll-up had almost burnt down to her grubby fingertips, she used the smouldering end to light another one. She might have all day now to sit and think about what to do next.
PIGS DON’T SQUEAL IN TIGERTOWN
Bracken MacLeod
FRIDAY
The muzzle flash lit up Raymond’s mouth and nose like that jack-o’-lantern trick kids play with a lit match behind their teeth. Light spilled out from his lips and nostrils and it all seemed like a joke in the half second between him pulling the trigger and the top of his head spreading against the dusky wallpaper like a red fireworks fountain bought from a plywood shed on the roadside. Except, instead of sparks, his head showered blood and brains and bone around the room. Just like the Fourth of July, the air smelled of smoke and sulphur and the scents of bodies too long in the sun waiting for dusk to come.
The second before Raymond stuck the pistol in his mouth, he said, “Nature don’t give a shit about fairness.” Immediately before that he’d said, “Fuck you and fuck the Dead Soldiers too.” Before Orrin had thought to warn Raymond about watching what he said, his heart skipped a beat and he’d told the man that if he didn’t want to have it shoved up his ass, he needed to put that gun away. And prior to that, he told Raymond that if he thought the motorcycle club was being unfair about his debt, he could take it up with the club president, Bunker. All those seconds in time, from Orrin banging on the door, to the creaking of his Chippewa boots on the steps, and the rumble of his 2,294cc engine at the end of the driveway to Tigertown were gone in silence, as though they never existed—just like the back of Raymond’s head and his memories and all of his dreams. And all that remained was the thrum of Orrin’s heart and the ring of his concussed eardrums.
Before he’d driven his Triumph under the WELCOME TO TIGERTOWN sign hanging from a gallows arm over the access road entrance, he’d read the hand-painted markers along the side of the state highway spaced out like old Burma Shave ads.
Even though he’d seen them on his other visits to Raymond and his old lady, there was something about the visual rhythm of them passing by as he sped up the road, throbbing in his eyes like a dull strobe. They commanded his attention and he read each one of them every single time, as if the visit before and the one before that and the third and second and first didn’t matter. He needed reminding. Yes, this way to Tigertown. The memories will last.
Before he took the turn for Route 30, Orrin glanced at the plywood board affixed with rusted baling wire to the EXIT 42 marker that read:
Before that were the entrance ramp and the city streets in Bannock Falls and the driveway of the Dead Soldiers MC clubhouse. Setting all these future memories in motion was President Bunker sitting on a barstool smoking an American Spirit unfiltered and saying, “You tell him, if he couldn’t afford the interest, he never shoulda taken out the loan.”
The movement of time seemed to still while Orrin existed in a ghost world of memories. If he hadn’t bought his first bike, if he hadn’t met “Demon” Langan in The Rising Phoenix bar, if he hadn’t become a Prospect and earned his rocker patches, if he hadn’t been loyal and dependable and stood for the vote to be Sergeant at Arms, if he hadn’t had the day off of work and gone into the clubhouse for a whiskey and a few laughs, everything might’ve turned out differently.
If.
But none of that had gone differently. These were the choices he’d made. The collection of decisions that brought him to the present moment where he sat in a straight-backed chair in a rundown ex-farmhouse turned roadside attraction halfway to Vulcan Hot Springs trying not to puke at the sight of brains and the smell of blood and gun smoke.
The distant clack of the hand cannon dropping onto the glass table top, and the sharp crack of it giving way and spilling hot steel and shards into the floor below set time moving forward again. Reality surged into motion and flowed around Orrin as his legs spasmed straight, trying to propel him away from the blast that was already long gone. His chair tipped and he went over, falling backwards, sprawling gracelessly on his back as the ancient boxy television on the entertainment centre behind him wobbled and threatened to mash his own brains into the deep-pile carpet.
Orrin scrambled to his feet, his head swimming and lungs struggling for fresh air while all he breathed was the stench of the piss and shit filling Raymond’s Wranglers intermingling with the other odours of squalor. He bent down and put his hands on his knees, panting, trying to slow the beat of his heart. He was fluent in the language of violence—it had been taught to him early—but ever since his fourteenth year when he grew taller than his old man, it had always been uttered in his voice. He guided the hand that determined when and where and how that language was recorded and what message was sent. He’d done terrible things to living men before, but he’d never seen anyone blow his own head off. That troubled him in a deep place he didn’t know existed until now. A place of uncertainty and loss of control. Writ on the wall in front of him was an accusation in someone else’s script, an indictment he couldn’t answer, but one he might be held to account for anyway. His command over the situation had been wrenched away, and he couldn’t see what was coming next any better than Raymond could see anything anymore.
It was time to go.
He tugged his riding gloves up tighter, assuring himself he was still wearing them and didn’t have to wipe any fingerprints off of the chair or the doorknobs. His hearing slowly came back to life and he heard the ambient sounds of a house return. The refrigerator was running. A fan in the window struggled to move the summer heat around. He was repeating, “Aw fuck, aw fuck, aw fuck,” and hadn’t noticed that he’d been speaking until that moment. He backed up and pawed blindly at the door handle, unwilling to turn his back on the corpse, knowing it couldn’t get up to follow him, but still too unnerved to look away. The latch clicked and released and he pulled the door open and pushed against the screen with his ass. The hinges shrieked, and behind him he heard a low huff and growl.