LET US NOW HAVE A MOMENT OF SILENCE TO CONTEMPLATE our reason for being here. And those who wish, please join me in the Serenity Prayer,” said the woman at the head of the table at the AA meeting. The moment of silence stretched into an eternity. Maureen looked across the table at Jack, who, like everybody else at the meeting, had his head bowed.
“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change . . .,” everybody began. Maureen pretended to say the words; it was like pantomiming with the choir. When they finished the prayer, the missus in charge asked if there were any newcomers. A fella, dirty, raggedy—you could almost smell how bad he looked—put up a shaky hand.
“Joseph. Alcoholic,” he said.
“Hi, Joseph,” everybody in the room chimed in together. “Welcome.”
It was like being on Romper Room or something, Maureen thought. She could feel Jack looking at her. When she looked up, he gave her the nod, so she tentatively put up her hand.
“Maureen,” she muttered.
“Hi, Maureen. Welcome.”
Jesus, you’d need a drink after spending a few minutes with these phony bastards and their bullshit smiles and hi’s. The missus in charge asked for topics. Someone smiled in that sickly sweet bogus way at Maureen and said, “Since there’s newcomers, how about staying around the first step and the third tradition.”
“And what about rigorous honesty,” a small voice said. “My name is Verna, an alcoholic, and I’d like to hear people share about rigorous honesty.”
Jack Dunne, or Jack D as he was called at the meeting, was asked to speak first. Maureen could see he didn’t want to—probably because she was there—but he went ahead and spoke anyway.
“I was gonna pass,” Jack said, “but this is my home group, and you know, you never know, maybe I’ll say something that’ll help somebody else or, like what usually happens, maybe I’ll say something that’ll help me.”
“Hi, Jack,” the room chimed in.
“Oh right.” Jack laughed uncomfortably. “Sorry. Sorry. My name is Jack and I am an alcoholic.”
“Hi, Jack,” everyone chimed in again.
Jesus, it was like being in kindergarten. Maureen doubted if she would be able to stand a whole hour of this crap.
“I knew I was an alcoholic, but I never wanted to admit that I was powerless over it. I thought I could control it. I thought I was a tough guy. But the truth is, I wasn’t tough at all. I thought I didn’t need anybody’s help, but I’ve always needed the help of somebody. In fact, I wouldn’t even have made it into this world if it wasn’t for my brother.”
Maureen’s ears pricked up when he mentioned Deucey. How weird. Because Deucey had said basically the same thing the night she’d gone home with him.
“I thought I could beat the liquor by myself. I’ve been in lots of rackets over the years, and, sure, I came out of them in pretty bad shape, but I could always say, ‘You should see the other fella.’ So I figured I could pound the piss out of alcohol too. But it was always me that got the shit-knocking. After every beating, I’d just pick myself up and crawl right back in the ring with the liquor. I was doing the same thing over and over and over again, but I was always expecting different results.”
Boy, thought Maureen, that’s the way she’d always felt about Bo. No matter how many times he beat her down—beat you up, Maureen’s mind added—part of her always thought that if she just kept at it, she could get the better of him, change him, make him see how wrong he was to be doing that to her. If only she could have been nicer, or tougher, or quieter, or louder . . .
“But finally,” Jack was saying, “I had to admit defeat. I had to get out of the ring, walk away and stop fighting it. And about the rigorous honesty thing . . .” Jack darted a quick look over at Maureen.
What in the name of God is he going to say now? Maureen thought. Is it all gonna come out? Just like that?
“Well, I got nothing to say about that right now. I want to wish everyone a good twenty-four hours, and I’ll take one for myself.”
Yea, thought Maureen, I bet you got nothing to say about rigorous honesty, ’cause you wouldn’t know rigorous honesty if it kicked your head off.
Yes, there was that piece of shit, jarred up here with people saying, “Thank you, Jack,” every time he opened his piece-of-shit mouth. Maureen thought of Carleen, about how sweet she was and good, and how she was rotting away in some stink-hole cell in Jamaica right now. Maureen looked up and saw that everyone was staring at her. Oh, Jesus in the breadbox, she hadn’t said that out loud, had she? God, they might as well just lock her away in jail because she wasn’t fit to be out in public.
But it was just that missus who was running the meeting asking her for the second time, apparently, “Would you like to share?”
“Me? Oh no, no, no. I don’t have anything to share really. I just . . . no.”
“You can just pass if you want to,” the missus said, giving Maureen a kind look.
“Yea, yea, that’s what I’ll do, I’ll pass.”
Maureen spent the rest of the meeting burning with shame, thinking that everybody else must be thinking what a moron she was, how stupid she was to not know what to say. She looked around, but no one was looking at her or paying any attention to her at all.
Verna, the “rigorous honesty” woman, was saying, “. . . I was always caught up in what everybody else thought, what they thought of me, how I could make them think better of me. After I got sober, I realized mostly people weren’t thinking about me at all. Mostly they were too busy thinking about themselves.”
How trippy is that? Maureen thought. That missus is saying exactly the same thing that I’m thinking.
“So, I had to start first getting honest with myself. It’s still a struggle,” Verna said, and she wished everyone another twenty-four.
Then some guy said he wanted to “talk about principles before personalities, the part of the tradition that, with anonymity, was the spiritual foundation of all our traditions.”
Anonymity? Maureen thought. God, who wants to be anonymous? I want everyone to know me. I want to be famous or something. I want to. . . Maureen was never quite sure what she wanted, but she knew she wanted something, anything really, that announced to the world that she was a necessary part of it. That because she could do . . . whatever that thing was, that special talent—which was, please God, bound to become apparent any time soon—she would be allowed on the lifeboat and “they” would let her live. Principles before personalities? Who were they trying to kid? Maureen hated those holier-than-thou smug arseholes going around, stuffed up with their own goodness, filled up to the eyeballs, gone rigid with principles. Maureen would always pick personality over principle any day—and so would everybody else, really, if they were telling the truth.
Before Maureen knew it, everyone was on their feet and getting in a circle. Oh my God, she couldn’t believe it: now they were holding hands and saying the Proddy version of the Our Father, the long one: “. . . for Thine is the Kingdom, the power and the glory, world without end, Amen.” Why’d the Prods have to add that on? Made no sense to Maureen, but she didn’t have time to think about that now. She moved quickly and stood in front of Jack, stopping him from getting out the door.
“Thanks for bringing me.”
“Yea, that’s okay.”
“But that whole rigorous honesty thing, that really meant a lot to me. It really got me thinking, so I thought I should tell you.”
Jack was looking uncomfortable. Suddenly, Verna was at Maureen’s shoulder, putting a piece of paper in her hand, saying, “If you feel like picking up a drink, call me. My number’s right there. Call me anyway and we can have a cup of tea or something. I could come over or we could go down to Marty’s—”
“Oh, thank you,” Maureen cut her off. She could see Jack getting away from her. “Thank you, thank you, I just got to . . .” She took off after Jack.
“Jack, Jack!” She stopped him just outside the front door. He was talking to an older guy. They seemed to be caught up in something, but Maureen was desperate. She interrupted. “Jack, when you have a minute, I got something I gotta tell ya.”
“So, who is this, Jacky?” the older fella said, turning toward Maureen. “Aren’t you going to introduce me?”
“Oh yea, yea, right. Maureen, this is my sponsor, Ed, Ed H.”
Ed took Maureen’s hand in one of his enormous paws and shook it, saying, “Welcome aboard, Maureen. Come back to another meeting.” Maureen didn’t want to take her hand back, because it felt so safe wrapped up in his big one.
“I’ll wait for you over there,” Maureen said, finally letting go of Ed’s hand. She walked out toward King’s Bridge Road.
“You go on, Jacky,” Ed said. “It’s not nice to keep a young lady waiting. But you got to start being rigorous. If not, you’re putting your sobriety at risk, and what have you got if you haven’t got that?”
“Yea, thanks, Ed,” Jack said, shaking Ed’s hand. “Thanks. I’ll see you Thursday night down at the Harbour Light.” He walked over to Maureen.
“Jesus, Maureen, what do you want now?”
“Sorry,” she said, “but it’s just that with everybody talking about rigorous honesty, I started to feel bad, real bad. I’ve only been telling the cops the half-truth. I never told them . . .” She paused and couldn’t look at Jack for a moment. “I never told them about how I heard you guys in the apartment when you came lookin’ for your chip that time.”
Jack was taken aback.
“And how I heard you say you were there in the apartment Tuesday with Bo—the last day that Bo was alive. But I got to go down to the cop shop in the morning and, Jack, they think I did it.”
“Well, did ya?” Jack said. He seemed to be honestly asking her.
Weird, said Maureen’s mind, since you did it, Jack, you big bastard.
But Maureen quickly answered, “No, of course I never did it. But like I said to Fox there today”—she shot Jack a look to see if that was having any effect on him—“if I tell the cops how you were the last person to see Bo alive—which I definitely would never do, Jack, you can count on that—but Fox said to me that if the police found that out . . . you know . . . you were the last person to see—”
“Yea, I got it.” Jack stopped Maureen.
“That bit of information could, you know, threaten the whole ‘operation,’ ’cause if the cops came around DAFT and started asking questions about you and Bo, and then asked questions”—she kept her eyes clapped right on Jack—“well, one question, you know, could lead to another, and the next thing you know. . . ” Maureen’s voice was getting very thin. “Well, the whole, you know, Jamaica, Montreal, Colombia . . . connection, well . . .” Maureen knew she was shooting in the dark, but she could tell by the look of rising rage on Jack’s face that she was hitting some targets.
“Get the fuck away from me, Maureen, and stay the fuck away from me. Do you hear me?”
Maureen was terrified, but she wasn’t finished yet. If she could get the DAFT boys to turn on each other, then Jack would surely go down, and the cops would probably never even bother to test Bo for chlordane or any other poison, and she’d be safe, and so would the rest of DAFT. And if the rest of DAFT was safe, Carleen would be safe. She could just sit back then and laugh like Mouse Daley used to do up at Power’s Court at the dances. Mouse would start a racket, hit some buddy from Mundy Pond, and then act like it had been the other buddy from The Brow who’d done it, and then the Mundy Pond buddy would turn on The Brow buddy, and then everyone would join in, and the racket would rise. Mouse would sit back and watch them knock the shit out of each other, and he’d just laugh.
“I just wanted you to know that if, God forbid, the cops ever did come after you, remember it’s not my fault, ’cause the boys, the rest of the boys, they don’t want the cops in sniffing around DAFT, and they might just throw you—and maybe even Deucey—like a bone to the—”
“Shut up, Maureen.” Jack moved closer and said in a quiet voice, “You know, some people, some people are the type, Maureen, that they deserve a beating. It’s just too bad that Bo’s still not here to give you one.”
God, no one had ever actually said that out loud to her before, but that was exactly what Maureen always thought: she was the type that deserved a beating. Hearing it out loud like that made it even more true. She guessed that’s what everyone thought. Her heart was up in her throat and she couldn’t quite catch her breath. Then Jack was gone, getting into his sporty little blue car.
Maureen walked back to George’s, feeling as low as she’d ever felt, as low as she felt when she realized that they had taken her baby. Was this what life was going to be? Just bad and shitty and low, every new day worse than the last, every day further proof that the Sarge had been right all along and that Maureen was “no good for nothing”? She’d been knocked up, beat up, fucked up, and all that was left was to be locked up. And that was coming, Maureen knew it. She walked back to George’s and, though it wasn’t that far, it seemed to take forever.
Despite how she was feeling, she kept her head up and looked straight in front of her. She knew from experience that if you looked down and trudged, just the physical fact of your head hanging down made you even more low-minded than you already were. But she felt like there were weights on her chin, pulling it into her chest, and her feet were like lead. She thought how useless the whole thing was and how very useless she was, and how she couldn’t even get one thing right. She just stumbled from one giant life-destroying mistake into the next, and down and down and down it went.
“YOU DID WHAT!” GEORGE EXPLODED.
“Well, I told Jack that I—”
“It was a rhetorical question, Maureen.”
“Oh.”
“I just can’t believe you would be naive enough to bait criminals.”
“They’re not criminals!”
“They are in every way criminal. They engage in organized crime.”
“Oh, come on, George, you’re the one who told me to rat the boys out to the cops, and it’s only the boys! They’re more like—what do you call it—counterculture hippies than criminals.”
“Yes, just countercultural hippies who happen to run a criminal organization importing illegal drugs.”
“It’s marijuana, George. I mean, it shouldn’t even be illegal.”
“And cocaine. And possibly killing people.”
“Yea, but that’s what people think about me,” she said.
“That you import illegal drugs?”
“No—that I possibly kill people . . . And if we are going to be rigorously honest about it, I did, in fact, try to kill people—well, one person anyway.”
She told him about the small cargo boat the boys had bought.
“Whew,” George said, “they’re taking it up a notch. They’re moving it into the big time.”
“What do you mean?” Maureen said.
“Well, a small cargo boat . . . They’ll sail it into Colombia, fill it up with drugs, come back, land in some small, isolated place, off-load in the dead of night and move the drugs out of here and into the North American market. International drug smuggling, it’s called.”
“You don’t know that for a fact.”
“But it makes sense, Maureen. They’re not going to go back to selling dime bags at the Thompson Student Centre. They’re gonna get bigger. And the bigger they get, the more they have to lose, the more dangerous they become. Boy, Bo . . . he got you in with a nasty crowd.”
There was a long pause, and then George said, in the quietest voice possible, “Why didn’t you just leave him, Maureen?”
“George, why are you asking me that question now?”
He didn’t answer.
So many, many times, Maureen had asked herself the same question. The reason wasn’t financial, because money-wise, she could take care of herself, and they’d had no youngsters, so why hadn’t she just walked out the door? Well, for one thing, of course, she thought she deserved it. And then, because she was so beaten down, so crumbled into pieces, so beaten into bits that she didn’t know how to gather up all the crumbs of herself to do anything. Plus, she’d been afraid. Bo had never directly threatened her that if she left him, he’d kill her. In fact, there was a small part of Maureen that felt Bo would be relieved and glad if she just one day up and disappeared completely. But the bigger part of her knew he was just never going to let her go of her own accord. He was never going to let her act as if she had the power to make decisions for herself.
“I was afraid,” she told George. “I was just afraid. And now I’m afraid again, afraid of having to go to the cops tomorrow.”
“But now,” George said, “after what you did, you have even more reason to be afraid. Because no matter what you say to the cops, if the cops, by happenstance, start nosing around DAFT, Jack and the rest of them will think it’s your fault, because you threatened them.”
“I was trying to get them to turn on each other.”
George looked puzzled.
Maureen explained the whole Mouse Daley scheme. When she had finished, George asked, in that irritating, detached, scholarly way he sometimes had, “And Mouse’s reason for this behaviour?”
“I don’t know. He just did it for laughs, I guess.”
“Are you having a laugh, Maureen?”
“I did it, George, because I thought Fox and them might turn in Jack just to stop the cops from . . . you know . . .”
“Breaking up their criminal organization? That is really—”
“Dumb?”
“Well, it wasn’t smart, was it Moe?”
“Gee, nobody except Carleen ever called me Moe before. And why are you suddenly talking like a normal human being?” She looked down at the beanbag chair and saw the book George was reading: The Reid Technique: A Police Training Manual of Interrogation Tactics.
“Maureen, please,” he begged, “just try to keep your mind on one thing for two minutes. You’re like some kind of flibberty-gibbet.”
“Flibberty-gibbet? Is that what they say in Lethbridge?”
“Coaldale, actually. Eleven miles south of Lethbridge.”
“Sorry, but you know what’s driving me nuts, George? It’s the way your mind just plods along its boring, boring way. Always on the same subject until you’ve worn the fuck right out of that subject and then it’s on to another subject with the intent to stay on that till it’s worn down, beat out and destroyed.”
“Maureen, why are you attacking me right now?”
“Why? I was just defending myself. You were, you know, saying I was . . .”
“A flibberty-gibbet. I know, it was unconscionable of me.”
“It wasn’t just that, George. It was the way you . . . oh . . . I’m . . .” Maureen paused. She didn’t want to start down the “I’m sorry” road, because when you said you were sorry, fellas always used that against you the next time there was an argument.
“George, please, I need you to help me get ready for tomorrow with the cops. What’ll I do? What’ll I say about Bo and Jack and Deucey and all that?”
“Don’t say a word. Avoid all topics. Because once they get you to start talking about any topic whatsoever, it’s easier for them to get you to start talking about other topics.”
“I know, I’m a blabbermouth. I’m an idiot—”
“No, Moe, you’re just the same as everybody else. It’s just human nature. Everybody’s the same. So don’t answer any of their questions—none of them.”
“Well, I mean—”
“No. Don’t even answer ‘How are you?’ ‘Did you have breakfast?’ ‘How do you feel?’”
“Why?”
“Because the cops are trying to establish a baseline. They’re trying to see how you normally respond when you’re answering questions that are no big deal. They’ll be watching your facial expressions, your body language, when you answer those innocent questions, and it’ll give the cops an idea how you look and behave when you are answering a question truthfully.”
“Well, that’s not fair,” Maureen said, thinking, Wow, the new straight-talking George, he’s kind of, if not exactly dead attractive, kind of . . .
George gave her a baleful look. “Then, when they start asking about Bo and what happened, they’ll have some idea if you are telling the truth.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“No, it isn’t bullshit. It’s based on solid evidence, and sometimes, according to what I’ve been reading, they even try something called the ‘neuro-linguistic interviewing technique.’”
“Oh Jesus, I don’t even know what any of that means, so I guess I’m fucked.”
“Not necessarily. As long as you don’t answer anything, you’ll be fine. Because if they ask you something you have to remember, like what you had for dinner last night, they’ll watch where your eyes go as you try to remember. Then they might turn around and ask you something that you have to think through, like two times five equals—”
“Jesus, George, they’re not going to ask me that.”
“Yes, they might, because if you have to think through something, your eyes will probably go to the right, and if you’re just remembering something that actually happened, your eyes naturally go to the left—everybody’s eyes do. So, depending on where your eyes go when they ask about Tuesday night, they’ll have an indication of whether you’re really remembering what actually happened or whether you’re just making up your answer in order to hide the truth. You’ve got to remember to invoke your right to keep silent.”
“But that’ll just make them think that I’m guilty.”
“Let ’em think what they want. If you start talking, they’ll know.”
“That I’m guilty?”
“That you’re hiding something.”
The phone rang. George bawled out, “Maureen, it’s Joyce.”
“Joyce?” She took the receiver. “Hi. Hi, Joyce. What time is it?” Why was Joyce calling her this late?
“I don’t know what time it is, Maureen. I need you to meet me.”
“What?”
“I need you to meet me.”
“When?”
“Right now.”
“Jesus, Joyce, it’s almost twelve o’clock.”
“Meet me down to Mrs. Duff’s.”
“Where?”
“It’s the bar on the other side of the War Memorial from the Black Swan.”
“But—”
“Meet me there in half an hour. It’s important. Don’t be late.”
“But Joyce—”
Joyce had already hung up.
Maureen turned to George. “I’ve got to go.”
“Where?”
“Out.”
“Out where?”
“Out, out.”
“Maureen, I’m not just letting you go out without knowing where you are going. You are at risk. You have knowingly placed yourself at risk.”
“George, I don’t have time to talk right now. I gotta meet someone in half an hour, but just for your information, I have been at risk since that first night Bo threw me down over the stairs. So really, how much more ‘at risk’ am I right now?”
“You’ve threatened criminals. Your life could possibly be in danger.”
“My life has been in danger now for . . . Jesus, I don’t know how long, so really, nothing is any different.”
George stood in front of the door.
“I’m not letting you leave.”