Chasing China White by Allan Leverone (best time to read books TXT) 📗

back for my razor-sharp wit was a blank stare. Fair enough. Brains and brawn didn’t necessarily have to travel on the same ticket.

When the door to the tavern shut behind me, I didn’t exactly run but I didn’t dilly-dally either. I fast walked down Bathurst to the end of the block, crossed the street, hopped a fence and cut across a deserted lot where only the crabgrass and broken bottles lay, seeking the safety of a network of alleys and back routes leading to the collection of tar paper shacks and hobo tents I called home sweet home. I climbed out the other side of the lot, stopped and put my back against the nearest wall, peering around the corner of the brick building. Nothing to see. So I seemed to be in the clear: no sign of an irate Wendell looking for the asshole that ripped him off for two bucks worth of nickels. Fat city.

The nickels still felt warm from the palm of his sucker punch hand. I dropped the roll in my shirt pocket and began to whistle. No bird song, but as I’d recently graduated from forcing air between pursed lips only to get nothing but a “pfft” sound I enjoyed the few notes I was able to produce. I’d gone into the bar to drink away my last dimes and ended up making two bucks, even if it wasn’t completely on the up and up. But neither was slugging a guy in the gut with a roll of nickels.

My “this day really turned itself around” feeling lasted about thirty seconds. Because that was when I heard it: the whistling. Not like my whistling, no, of course not. That wouldn’t do. Not for him. He could whistle like a cat could meow. And then there he was, casually leaning in the alcove of a warehouse doorway up the alley from me. Hopping down, still whistling, and approaching with a wolf-like gait, a predator’s lope. Only a sniff of prey. Not hunting, not yet. The whistling stopped. He smiled big.

“Mr. Carnegie Fitch, old buddy, old pal, fate has seen fit to once again intertwine our paths,” he said, opening his arms like we were long lost friends. Only we were neither.

“Hey, Janssen,” I said.

Copernicus Janssen was his handle, the defrocked dentist from Halifax, Nova Scotia. He’d also, apparently, spent some time in Kingston because some of the Ontario guys called him the “Kingston Kook,” though not to his face. Back east, on the coast, story was he’d been chased out of town for being more interested getting blitzed on his own laughing gas supply, especially while patients were in the chair with their pie-holes hanging open. And he’d get his fingers all in their mouths and then begin one of his fiery longwinded rants about whatever was bothering him that day. The man could lay down the ol’ talky talk, no doubt. Plus, he could forge a hell of a scrip and knew the good drugs so a lot of my fellow drifters really liked to have him around. Bennies and devils never did it for me—I was more a caffeine and whisky kind of guy.

Janssen got right up to me, like he was apt to do, a professional invader of personal spaces. A few hairs shorter than me, he looked up and grabbed me around the shoulders and kneaded the flesh with powerful fingers in what was probably supposed to be a comforting embrace. It wasn’t. Also jarring was his breath. Here we were, living on the edge, in the muck, and he had the nerve to have fresh breath. But it was disturbingly fresh, a cloying peppermint scent that practically seared the inside of my nostrils.

“A splendid morning brings splendid company. Smell that beautiful air, my dear Fitch. Why, there’s a butterfly! Good day to you, too!” He removed his hands from my shoulders and crossed one over the other at the thumbs and mimicked a flying butterfly. Same with his breath, no matter how low down he got, and he’d been burrowing down into the soil for several years now, his fingernails were always in perfect condition. Not a hangnail or a dirty, unclipped pinky among them.

“What do you want, Janssen?”

“Want? What should I want, other than to take in this fine morning air, walk this fine Earth and pass the time with fine conversation?”

Right. It was Janssen’s world and we were all the players, the saps, the dumb rubes to his slick carny. And “fine conversation” always meant “captive audience for my lengthy, spirited diatribe about the blah blah blah and did I tell you about the blah blah blah.” “Uh, no thanks,” I said. “Gotta go.”

“Excellent, I understand completely. Places to go and people to see.”

“Yeah, exactly.”

“But it is such a fine morning so why don’t I walk with you?” Janssen was determined not to take a hint. I shrugged and walked on. He kept pace. A few weeks back, he’d attached himself to me for a whole day, like a shadow in the desert sun and nowhere to find shade. “So exactly where are we going?”

Bluff called, I had to produce. Think, Fitch, think. Okay, I knew how to scare him off. I put on my best serious face and said, “To look for a job.”

He didn’t recoil in horror like I’d hoped. “Oh? I thought you’d already taken a position. Why, didn’t you storm out of camp a few days ago calling us all degenerate lowlifes and vowing to ‘start over,’ ‘get it right this time’ and ‘live a normal life?’”

He had me there, I did. Every blue moon the shroud of have-a-career-get-a-bank-account-take-some-responsibility would settle over me and I’d comb the job ads for a suitable opening, vowing to clean up my act once and for all. And I had a gift of the gab when it suited me and could often talk myself up in an interview, enough to get the job anyway. Maintaining it was another thing altogether.