The Liquor Vicar Read online

  He realized there was someone in bed with him. He saw brunette hair poking out from under the covers, and everything clicked. The bartender — Jenny? Josie? Jeannie? She’d liked the Elvis bit and clearly hadn’t gotten wind of the encore. He had been drunk as a skunk, over the deep end with cynicism and black, rock-bottom gallows humour. His spirits had been in the dumper; he’d honestly no longer given even one solitary fuck. As for her, she must have been sampling her own wares. Surely, she was fifteen years younger than he, yet she had bought in. He vaguely recalled that something furtive and squishy had occurred.

  Nervously scanning the unfamiliar room, he saw a white wicker table with photos on it and a dresser awash with ribbons and knick-knacks. Amongst the clutter were a pillbox hat and long white gloves. He dredged his foggy memory to haul up a conversational snippet. What was it? Jackie O with a Q. That was it: Jacquie. She stirred. He froze.

  She rolled over and cracked her eyes a bit, mumbling vaguely in a croaky voice. Vicar looked at her and remembered that she was indeed quite lovely. Eyes set wide apart, high cheekbones, chestnut hair cut high at the back and longer in front, framing her chin and jaw perfectly. She looked remarkably like the real Jackie O, but with a streetwise look in her eye. He noticed her tattoos, too. Down the back, over the shoulder and upper arm, trailing off just above the elbow. Roses, birds, crests — he couldn’t tell what the pattern was. Generally, he thought tattoos were deep regret waiting to happen, but he had to admit that hers did look awfully sexy.

  Jacquie cleared her throat a couple of times and groaned. “Oh, my God! Did we really drink that much last night?”

  Vicar responded dully, “Yes. I fear, yes.” As his mind flashed back through the events of the night that he could recall, his face twitched with shame.

  She let out a loud bark of laughter. “You scared everyone away. I’ve never seen anything like it. Awesome. They just didn’t get it.” At least she could appreciate the absurd.

  He shifted his gaze away from her eyes and focused on the middle distance for a moment. “Yeah, they just didn’t get it.” I am not sure I get it, either, he thought.

  “They thought it was going to be some stupid Elvis thing, but it was ironic Elvis. So cool. You were playing right over their heads!” Her loud laughter turned into a cough. She was awfully enthusiastic for someone who had just woken up, hungover, hard by a strange half-naked man.

  He reflected briefly, feeling all the pieces in his mind rearrange to resonate with her interpretation. Geez, maybe she’s right. Then he remembered the diarrhea attack and collapsed back to reality, feeling exactly like the old twenty-six-inch Magnavox he and his buddy had once heaved off a roof.

  She rolled out of bed, revealing a figure that was knockout by anyone’s standards. Really shapely and fit, with quite a bit of ink. Vicar blinked a couple of times, kicking himself that he’d bedded such a hottie but had no recollection of it. There were numerous tattoos and nuts and bolts sticking out of her in odd places, yet her demeanour was wholesome and cheerful — or at least it was first thing in the morning. He’d had no awareness of her piercings during the dark of night. Under the quilt he gently felt around to see if he had any lacerations.

  She opened the venetian blinds and slid the window open, and as she turned, he saw yet another tattoo just below her bikini line: words inside a winged crest. Latin? Italian?

  Conspicuously keeping his attention sharply focused on the words and not the surrounding area, he squinted and asked, “What does your tattoo say?”

  She paused melodramatically and then fired back, her eyes glinting mischievously, “Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here.”

  Three / A Sign from Above

  Vicar knew it was a walk of shame, but at least it possessed the charm of being a bizarre one. He plodded up the long rise on the road home that overlooked the Strait of Georgia, still Elvis, but minus the wig and the belt. Those were in a plastic grocery bag taken from Jacquie’s kitchen drawer, dangling limply from his fingers. The hard glare of the morning sun made the water glint and the nearby islands stand out in stark relief. There were a few small craft flitting about, and one sailboat was into the wind, making good headway. It felt calm where he stood, but he saw some chop in the skinny. Probably a little bumpy. He crossed to the other shoulder to be that much closer to the beautiful view and felt his fuzzy brain clearing.

  As he trudged up to the hill’s crest, costumed as history’s least successful hitchhiker, he was beginning the day already completely spent. He absently rummaged in the pocket of his preposterous trousers to be sure he had his phone. He longed for a good nap, maybe a snooze on the hillside.

  A huge car appeared, rudely interrupting his tired, scratchy musings, veering recklessly into the oncoming lane, coming right at him. It was colossal and moving fast, on a direct course for him. He was a goner. Checkmate. Just like that, buh-bye. He couldn’t even ditch to save himself; there was no foxhole, just a guardrail fencing off a sharp cliff with a twenty-foot drop down to the rocks.

  With no other option apparent, he tensed up for his mortal end. Then the car, screeching, veered precipitously back to its proper lane. He perceived it in slow motion, mentally capturing the incident in black and white, like the snowy surveillance footage of a back-alley murder.

  Shock and confusion swept over him as the car whizzed past, an arm’s length away. The rogue car was empty, driverless, with no one visible inside it. It was something straight out of Kolchak: The Night Stalker. It was a stampeding horse, panicked, aimless, deadly, terrifying. Perhaps it had just rolled down the road, away from its parking spot?

  He had been inches from certain death.

  Vicar’s head swivelled to follow the out-of-control monster, sure that it was about to plunge over the embankment to the rocky shore below. But, just then, he spied a tuft of white hair poking over the top of the seat. There was someone in the car. A person was behind the wheel and doing a very bad job indeed of helming the deadly black juggernaut.

  In the pregnant seconds after the crisis, a cyclist cheerily glided over the hill and was confronted with the odd vision of Elvis, jaw agape, clutching a wig-stuffed grocery bag and gawking dumbly at a huge Fleetwood Brougham tacking into the distance. It was as if the car were a time machine that had just ejected its surprised emissary into this unlikely seaside location, far from the safety of Graceland.

  The bicycle swished past as Vicar muttered, “Oh, my God. The King nearly flattened by a Cadillac. That has got to be a sign.”

  Four / Rah Rah Ross Poutine

  “Jesus Christ!” he barked at the traffic before him. There was always some dumb sonofabitch who felt he had to slow way down and swing wide into the right shoulder before making a left turn. “Whaddya pulling, a wagon?” he growled.

  When the aimless beige Camry ahead of him finally cleared the shoulder, Ross Poutine put his foot to the floorboard, and the classic but showroom-shiny ’66 Chevelle lit up instantly, ass drifting sharply, billowing smoke, chirping aggressively into second gear. By the time Mr. Geriatric Camry could even check his rear-view mirror, Poutine was far down the road and up to a hundred clicks. That’s what 385 ponies will do for you, he thought smugly.

  He let off the gas and coasted down the hill to the little plaza where Liquor sat, the engine idling with a sound like shoes in a dryer. With a large arm crank he steered the expensive antique into the “reserved parking” stall and got out.

  Before he could even get his key in the door, he had customers wanting booze at 9:30 in the morning. One of them was a regular, Mrs. Frankie Hall. She had painstakingly manoeuvred her car, which had been the pride and joy of her dearly departed husband, as close to the front door as she could get, then gotten her walker out of the cavernous back seat. Poutine looked at the wispy, birdlike woman standing next to the archaic, twenty-foot-long behemoth. She had a basket on her walker, and when she left it’d be full of wine. She was probably a hundred years old. She usually came in before noon on a Monday. It was v
ery unusual for her to come on a Sunday, and so early in the day.

  “Hello, there,” she cackled, grinning at Poutine with the broad, old-timey charm of the Bowery Boys. With that, his earlier abrasive mood evaporated.

  “Ready to tank up, Frankie?” he asked with affection.

  “You betcha,” she croaked. “Now, gimme some of the good stuff.”

  Poutine reached over to a rack and grabbed a huge box of wine. It was an astringent, cranky potion best consigned to a cauldron surrounded by witches with pricking thumbs, but it was cheap, and the box was an attractive fuchsia on black. He looked over his readers and asked, “Pinot, right?”

  “That’s what I’ve been missin’,” Frankie yelled, grimacing as she futzed with her hearing aid. “Damn thing!” she cursed. “I can’t hear a damn thing.”

  Poutine commiserated with a sympathetic cluck, laughed, and put the huge crate of cheap hooch into Frankie’s little basket. He held the front door open as she trundled out to her enormous Caddy, crinkling with amusement as he imagined the ninety-pound, hundred-year-old woman skippering that land yacht — that gigantic symbol of wealth and sophistication from another era — only to go home and crack into an economy box of cheap porch climber.

  The locals knew Poutine through the shop windows; he was immediately recognizable even from a remarkable distance. There was really nobody else around who looked anything like him. You’d have had to go back at least forty years to find a suitable stand-in. His silhouette was era specific, and his was not the current era. It was not even three current eras ago, set end to end.

  Like most of his ilk, somewhere around Grade 11 he’d found a look that was just rockin’, and had stayed with it well into his fifties. The same look, no doubt, would accompany himto the grave: boot-cut Levi’s jeans, matching Levi’s jacket, denim shirt, black leather fanny pack. For fancy, he used a frilly tux shirt that he’d bought at Army & Navy in Gastown back in 1980. If it was good enough for Meat Loaf, it was good enough for him. He was a rebel, after all, presuming rebels grumbled about noise and watched Wheel of Fortune.

  There was nothing either French or Russian about Poutine, but he sported a scraggly Irish wolfhound beard and ghastly, neglected Aqualung hair that had given genesis to his wry nickname. Born in Montreal, but resident on Vancouver Island for decades, he was a town fixture that some wit years ago had dubbed Ross Poutine. And, like his mystic Russian Orthodox namesake, he was known, jarringly, to smell like a goat, but no one could confirm if he owned one or it was just abysmal hygiene. His real name was McFaddish, Ross Fergus McFaddish, though faddish he most assuredly was not.

  At first the young McFaddish had come out to the Island to be a logger, to chop down trees and make big money working for a big company that had big trucks. Ten hard years and two broken legs later, he’d gotten laid off, had gone on unemployment, then tried his hand at fishing. After his first paycheque, he’d seen pretty clearly that he was never going to get rich being a deckhand. He didn’t know the first thing about boats, nor did he care to. He suffered terribly from what his ol’ mum called mal de mer.

  He liked cars. Muscle cars. Wide-tracked Pontiacs, six-packed Chryslers, steroidal Fords. But in his heart of hearts, he was a Chevy man. He’d never owned anything else, never even entertained the notion. His grandfather had been a Chevy man starting in 1927. His father was a Chevy man. He was a Chevy man. He’d driven west in 1972 in a ’63 Impala, 283, 3-on-the-tree. Best car he’d ever owned. He winced at the thought of how he’d lost her.

  He’d eventually tried selling cars, and for a season he ran the store down at the Tully Point dock. He’d even done a stint in the Hudson’s Bay furniture department way down in Nanaimo. That had lasted about three months. None of the senior citizens wanted to buy their new chesterfield from a guy who smelled like he’d been fished out of a cesspool with a coat hanger, despite swinging past the men’s cologne counter every morning to douse himself in Drakkar Noir.

  Eventually, he opened Tyee Lagoon’s only liquor store. He named it with the lone word Liquor after spending two weeks grinding his hardtack imagination to come up with a more colourful option. He’d thought You Liquor, You Brought Her was great, but his mother had been horrified when he told her. Not that he’d really given a shit what anyone thought, but a sign that long would have been expensive.

  Liquor was the only place in walking distance to get booze. This was important because people always run out before they’re satisfactorily pissed. Poutine appreciated drinking for the living it gave him. He adored driving for the pleasure it gave him. But even this self-appointed Rebel Without a Barber knew the stupidity in mixing the two. He’d learned it the hard way from the incident with his late Impala. Luckily, the only fatality had been a large Doug fir in the bush, and by the time he’d called a tow truck it was the next afternoon, after a nice nap and some bacon and eggs. To prevent that from happening way out here in Tyee Lagoon, he offered a booze delivery service to trusted customers. They ordered on the phone and he dropped it off. He’d made the judgment that it was better to fetch it to them than have them swerving all over fuck to come to his shop. Plus, drunk people tipped like sailors.

  Five / Enter Liquor

  Painters knew it as Capri blue, but the Vancouver Island sky above Tony Vicar was the same gorgeous cerulean he’d seen a thousand times before, and never once in the Mediterranean. It had a calming effect, giving him a feeling of comfort that soothed his unsettled mind and distracted him from the spectre of defeat that had lately hung over him. This year’s warm season wasn’t yet old enough to instill the sense of urgency he always felt in summer that he had to get to the beach now, because the good weather couldn’t possibly last. No, not today. The shadows were just short enough to impart optimism for new undertakings and to foreshadow the dog days to come, or so he hoped.

  As Vicar approached Liquor, he could see Ross Poutine inside, chatting with a poodle-haired customer who looked, Vicar thought, like a bloated Peter Frampton gone to seed. The door made a loud creak when he pulled it open. Poutine looked up, gave a tight smile, and nodded as the customer spoke.

  “It was prolly forty pounds. Big fucker. Barely fit in my boat, dude.”

  “Mm-hmm,” Poutine replied noncommittally. He had surely heard every bullshit fishing story ever told. Forty pounds meant ten pounds, and the guy had probably been afraid of it when he’d landed the damned thing. And the lying bastard drove a powder-blue Hyundai, to boot. Ee-yuck.

  “Anywayzz,” he said, “I see yuz got customers. It’s been a slice, brah. I’ll catch ya on the flip-flop.”

  Hearing this, Vicar grimaced and felt his shoulders go up. Slice? Flip-flop? What the hell? Why didn’t he just put on a straw skimmer and say 23 skidoo? Vicar’s revulsion of this guy was instinctive, yet he felt a moment of embarrassment as he caught Poutine noticing his response. As Poodle Hair turned to leave, Poutine looked again at Vicar, this time rolling his eyes.

  As neutrally as he could, Vicar opened the conversation. “Telling you a few tall tales?” He expected Poutine to comment on the customer’s buffoonish slang, but instead, he glanced out to the parking lot and replied, “Randy, dere? His boat. Ha, ha. He’s homeless without a girlfriend.”

  Vicar wondered dryly if one could find girlfriends “on the flip-flop.”

  Poutine turned his attention to Vicar. “What can I do ya for?”

  Vicar stated his case with clarity. “I need a job, and I’d like to apply for one here, if you have any openings.”

  Poutine’s brow furrowed as he appraised Vicar. “You live round here. I seen you in here lotsa times.”

  “Yeah, I’m just down the road a little bit,” Vicar replied agreeably. He held out his hand. “Tony Vicar.”

  “They call me Ross Poutine,” he said, though every living soul in Tyee Lagoon knew his nickname. His hand was rough, dry, and powerful. “You got a driver’s licence?”

  “Yes,” Vicar replied.

  “Can you drive stick?”
r />   “Yes.”

  “You gotta car?”

  “Yes, I do.” Keep it simple.

  “What kinda car?”

  “A Peugeot.”

  Poutine’s head twisted away as he barked, “Ewww, fuck. A Poo-Joe? Seriously?”

  Vicar looked at him with a mixture of disbelief and amusement. “Yeah, seriously. It’s been a great car.”

  Poutine bent over and pretended to retch into the trash can. “What’s it made of? Heineken cans?”

  Hoping to moot the peripheral line of discussion, Vicar looked at him without expression and said, “Heineken is Dutch.”

  As if confessing from the depths of his heart, Poutine levelled, “I don’t, ahh, like the Dutch cars, dere.”

  Vicar realized there could be no unknotting of the multiple skeins of cryptic illogic. “But you do have an opening?”

  Poutine’s tone softened, and he looked appraisingly at Vicar. A series of thoughts seemed to crawl across his face before he pivoted the conversation. “You look a little wrong in the tooth, dere.”

  Long. Long in the tooth. Vicar mentally corrected Poutine at the same instant that he felt the truthful sting of the observation.

  “It’s true. I am not a kid,” he replied guardedly.

  “Whaddaya, going through some stuff?” Poutine asked, suddenly solicitous, tender, disarming.

  Vicar paused a moment, then dropped his guard a little. “Yes, it has been a challenging time,” he admitted.

  Poutine stroked his ghastly beard thoughtfully. Vicar looked closely at him and was hit by the stark contrast between his appalling appearance and the vibe of gentle concern that emanated from some unknown part of him. He was also hit by the dank tang of quadruped drifting from Poutine’s direction.

  “Well, one of the kids who was helping me is leavin’ end of next week. I can’t be here all the time, but the store’s gotta be open irregardless.”