Slouched over the bar in the Lumberman’s Club, McCurdy drinks in silence, cocooned in gloom with a grim sense of foreboding, of having made a hash of his life. Where did he go wrong? Which decision put him where he is now? It’s the stuff of sleepless nights and multiple whiskys.
Unlike his forebears, he has no supreme being to appeal to or to blame, having determined that there are many gods, who take turns farting about with the world for their own amusement. So God created man in His own image…
As a child, he loved limericks. He liked to memorize and recite them. He even won a contest in the Toronto Telegram at the age of thirteen—he doesn’t remember what he wrote, but it involved a convenient rhyme for a public figure. By that time he had become an aesthete of the genre. Having tired of Edward Lear’s repetition of the first and last line, he immersed himself in the work of Algernon Swinburne:
There was a young man from Dundee Who buggered an ape in a tree. The results were quite horrid: All arse and no forehead, Three balls and a purple goatee.
At no time did McCurdy envisage himself approaching forty with these childish rhymes a mainstay of his career and that the lowest of literary forms—limericks and muckraking—would be his bread and butter, much less that they would make him a target of snipers and goons.
Imagine, to die over a limerick!
McCurdy sips his drink, idly watching as a rat glides along the baseboard of the wall opposite as though it were on tiny casters, then stops and looks at him sideways. He has heard that when you get a good look at a rat it means that there are a dozen more nearby, and if it doesn’t run for it, you’re infested.
Truman, an experienced bartender, has seen patrons in this mood before and serves the usual without speaking. When a man sinks into a brown study, best keep one’s distance.
By the time McCurdy emerges from the Lumberman’s Club it is supper hour, when citizens have gone home before heading out again for drinks and the movies. As he steps somewhat unsteadily downstairs, Hastings Street is nearly empty of traffic, except for the black McLaughlin ambulance with whitewall tyres now idling by the curb.
As he stops to admire the highly polished machine, the passenger door opens briskly and a cuddlesome nurse in a white uniform climbs out. In her twenties, she has round pink cheeks like a plaster cherub.
Since the war, men have regarded nurses as angels come to earth and McCurdy is no exception. As she moves toward him he feels the urge to put his arms around her, but instead he tips his hat. “How do you do, madam?”
She doesn’t smile or reply. Instead, she reaches toward his face with something in her hand as though about to wipe his nose—and before he has time to properly assess the situation, she pushes what might well be a Kotex pad precisely over his mouth and nose. He smells something sweet and immediately falls backward, to be caught in the arms of two strapping orderlies in white, who bundle him into the rear of the vehicle, hop in behind him and shut the door.
The ambulance pulls away, turns right on Main Street and disappears. The scattering of pedestrians who have stopped to watch, now with nothing more to see, continue on their way.