TWENTY
RETURN
Road Trip
Noddy and Milton drove, and Noddy talked, straight through from St. John’s to Montreal in Greg’s 1997 Subaru Forester.
They set off before 8:00 a.m. and Noddy drove the first leg to Gander at about 150 kilometres per hour, turning the ordinarily three-hour-long trip into just over two.
They stopped for a “piss an’ a pop” at the Gander Truck Stop and Milton took over.
Noddy sat in the passenger seat drinking Coors Light, smoking cigarettes, and talking at Milton about the history of the pulp industry in Newfoundland.
“Just another bunch of arseholes from the mainland fuckin’ the arseholes from the island, this time for pulp instead a fish.”
After the bat-out-of-hell sprint to Gander, Milton’s speed limit obedience made it feel like they were going backwards.
“C’mon, b’y, pull da ballast outta your arse.”
As they crept through Grand Falls-Windsor at a sane speed, Noddy grabbed the steering wheel and jerked it towards the ditch. Milton slammed on the brakes and they skidded sideways to a stop in the middle of the busy Trans-Canada Highway.
“Get out. Go on. Get.”
Noddy wouldn’t let Milton drive for the rest of the trip. He sped, drank, smoked, and talked and talked and talked the rest of the way.
“The conditions in them lumber camps, by. Make your pop’s sweaty arsehole seem like the Ritz.”
Of course, neither of them bothered to check the ferry schedule from Port Aux Basques to North Sydney, so they arrived at the ferry terminal just in time to watch the ferry pulling out and had to wait 12 hours for the next crossing.
Noddy made Milton pay for their ferry tickets from his dwindling stockpile of drug money, and they pulled into the front of the line to wait for the next ferry.
Noddy sat on the hood of the Subaru drinking his warm Coors and smoking cigarettes, staring out into the thick fog. Milton tried to recline the passenger seat and get some sleep, but the spectre of assured death and/or true love hanging over their race back to Montreal kept him from sleeping much at all.
Eventually he gave up and joined Noddy in leaving two bum-shaped dents in the hood of Greg’s car. Noddy handed him a warm Coors, and launched into a long, passionate soliloquy about Joey Smallwood walking the Newfoundland railway bed to unionize the island’s railway men.
“They brung his shoes into my school there the once. Holes worn right through.”
Milton didn’t listen, like he never listened. He just lay back on the windshield and stared into the fog.
“Noddy, what’s going to happen? When we get back to Montreal, what’s the plan?”
“Plan? For what? I’m gonna get some good poutine, and maybe find some broads, that’s what.”
“No, you idiot. With Leonard Cohen and all that? How are we going to get out of this? I can’t do this anymore. I need to be able to live my life and my life isn’t in Newfoundland.”
“Ah, go on, b’y. Things are just fine in Newfoundland.”
“I’m sure it is for some people who don’t know any better. But I had a life in Montreal. I had a job, almost had a girl, was making a name for myself with my poetry. Things were starting to happen and then all this happened.”
“B’y, what girl did you almost have? Your job sucked balls, and ya was a joke, b’y. Carmichael didn’t say your poetry was good, he made fun of ya. Even Lenny told ya you suck.”
“Robin.”
“Robin? The bird chick? You still hung up on her? I thought she left.”
“She’s coming back; why do you think I agreed to come on this death march with you?”
“I thought you grew a set, or something, but apparently you need to come so you can collect them from this chick.”
“She’s not a chick! She’s an artist—a filmmaker, a genius, you have no idea.”
“Nah b’y, I have a pretty good idea, remember?”
“Shut up! That was just sex.”
“That wasn’t sex, b’y. That was fuckin’.”
“Gah! Never mind.”
“Don’t go getting all in a sook now. Look, here’s what’s what: how old are ya?”
“Just leave me alone.”
“Nah, b’y. I’m serious. How old are ya?”
“24.”
“Jesus, b’y. You’re a fuckin’ baby.”
“Shut up, Noddy. Just leave me alone. Okay.”
Milton moved to get off the car, Noddy grabbed his arm.
“I’m serious, b’y. You’re 24 and what have you ever done?”
“Let go!”
“Nah, b’y. You’ve done fuck all. Ya just get off your mother’s tit and come to Montreal to live some fantasy dream life like the rest of them spoiled rich pricks in the Plateau.”
“Same as you!”
“I mean it, b’y. What have you ever done before this?”
“Lots!”
“Lots? Like what? Giving handies to dirt farmers in the back of the farm store don’t count. Doing a bullshit diploma at a bullshit school don’t count. You’re a baby, b’y.”
“Shut up.”
“You are. I’m not being an arsehole. It’s the truth. You done nothing at all your whole life, and that’s fine, parents raise pussies nowadays, your mother and father fucked you like that. Ya lived a charmed life. That’s fine, b’y. Nothing wrong with that. But ya come to Montreal with your head so far up your own arse your eyes are going brown...”
“They are brown.”
“…and just like your whole life you’re expecting the entire universe to kiss your arse, and tuck ya in at night. But it ain’t like that, b’y.”
“How would you know about any of it?”
“How would I know?”
. . .
Heart’s Content
“B’y. I grew up poorer than dirt around the Bay in Heart’s Content. We couldn’t afford toys, so my mother just cut holes in our pockets. But it was all we knew. We was poor. My nan and pop were poor before that, their people before that and all the way back to 15-dickity-6. In ’91 I was 14. My father was a fisherman, b’y, but he couldn’t pay his crew no more so my mother pulled me and my brother out of school and made us go to work with me father. There was no fish left on the Grand Banks, where my people had been fishing for centuries, so he gets the old guy next door to sign over his license for the Labrador where there was supposed to be a bit of cod left. It was a three-day steam on me father’s shitty little rig to the Labrador, and we gets there and there ain’t a goddamned fish left in ’er. We caught more fishing gear than fish. So, my father’s fucked good. The bank’s gonna take the boat and the house and the Pontiac, and he loved that Pontiac, b’y. So, he goes below and drinks an entire 40 of rum in one go, like water, and gets belligerent and starts bawling. He digs out some old rabbit hunting rifle he kept on board for security, or whatever, and he starts just going off—‘fuck this boat,’ POW, ‘fuck this radio,’ POW, ‘fuck this rigging,’ POW—shoots up the whole goddamned boat. My brother and me, we’s just stunned. He runs outta bullets and we tries to talk him down, but he cold-cocks me brother with the end of the rifle and takes a swing at me too. Then he digs into his pocket and finds one more bullet and loads it into the rifle and swallows half the goddamned thing and POW. Blows the back of his head to sea and falls over the side after it.”
“Oh my god! I had no idea.”
“Course you didn’t, you think poet is a job, and the worst thing that ever happened to you was you stubbed your toe or some shit. So, my brother and me, we’s in the Labrador, in December, ice is coming in, boat shot full of holes by the old man, radio shot up, whole thing’s right proper fucked. It’s a three-day steam back home and me brother says me father never actually got a license for up the Labrador, so we’re poaching too, and if we gets caught we’re double fucked. So, we head ’er for home and run into some weather around Fogo way and shit gets good and tangly and we head ’er for shore but don’t make ’er and wreck just off Fogo. My brother can’t swim worth a shit, so he’s fuckin’ drowning and bawling like a baby on me, so I grabs him and swim us both to shore, but the arsehole freezes to death on the way anyway, so I’m dragging me dead brother a half mile to shore, and by the time I makes ’er he’s stiff like a fuckin’ board, b’y, but he’s me brother, so I drags him up on the beach and hauls him up on me back and starts walking for a couple miles to the nearest house. And I’m right frozen too, b’y. Can’t feel my arms and my legs, and getting right sleepy, which means I’m about to kick ’er too, and my clothes are frozen stiffer then a Bayman’s prick on check day, but I gets to this old nan’s house and she thaws me out and I gets a ride back home with me brother piled in the pan of some feller’s truck. Then I get blind drunk and been that way pretty much since. A few months later, Ottawa shuts the whole fuckin’ thing down, the Moratorium, and we were all fucked. No money in fishing to begin with, but at least it got ya something to eat. After that we only had our boots to chew on. Four hundred-some-odd years being poor, broke, and stupid, but being able to keep enough food in our bellies to keep from dropping dead, and in one day we were all, an entire island of us, fucked.”
“Yeah, you’ve told me about how tough the moratorium was.”
“Ya don’t know the half of it, b’y. Ya can’t fathom misery at that scale. Forty-some-odd-thousand families lost ’er overnight, and everyone else who relied on them for their own bread followed right behind. And it wasn’t Gerry Butts in Hearts Content who took the fish outta the goddamned sea, it was the trawlers. The Japanese and the Russians and the Portuguese and the Spaniards dragging bottom and sucking every last bit of life outta the richest fishing ground man had ever seen. And the fuckin’ feds did fuck all about it but put a bullet in us all. We was gutted. We was cooked. We was done. That’s it. Ya can’t fathom, b’y. I was there and it still boggles the mind.”
“I’m sorry, Noddy, I really am.”
“What are ya sorry for, b’y? You a Russian trawler? Your pops the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans? What the fuck good is sorry? Everyone’s always sorry, no one ever does a goddamned thing about it. Just let the stupid Newfs starve. So, you goes to town and starts stealing every fuckin’ thing that ain’t bolted down just so you can eat. I lived under the overpass on Water Street for four years, b’y. Everyone else left. Everyone else sold their gear to the government or went on pogey to get enough for a bus ticket out west to find work. I couldn’t afford either, my gear was on da bottom off Fogo. But I gets a woman, Barb, she moved in under the overpass with me. We’d steal gas and thin it out with rainwater and get fucked up on it. I should be dead from that. Killed Barb. She got some diesel out of an old Volvo on Waterford Bridge Road, and that shit will kill ya dead. And it did. And what do ya do with a body when you don’t know her people and live under an overpass? I just left her there. And I loved her too. We talked about getting cleaned up and getting jobs and a real house and getting married and having a batch of kids and growing old together. But I couldn’t live under that overpass no more, so I moved into the ‘rippers. It was the bar open the latest downtown, and where it was easiest to steal liquor. And each night I’d get da shit knocked outta me by the bouncers, and eventually they got tired of it, or their hands got sore, or they found Jesus, and they stopped beating on me and gave me a job as the DJ.”
“Wait, I thought you grew up in Town and worked on the docks when you were a kid.”
“Who told you that?”
“You did, when we were working together.”
“Nah, b’y. I grew up in Hearts Delight.”
“I thought you said Hearts Content.”
“Same shit.”
“I’m pretty sure they are different towns. And that all those little towns hate each other.”
“Well, Hearts Desire can fuck right off, but Hearts Delight is fine.”
“And Sam told me your dad was a politician, and I looked it up and someone named Gerry Butts was Minister of Fisheries for three months in the ’80s.”
“Sam’s full of shit.”
“And Wikipedia?”
“It’s full of shit too.”
“You are full of shit, Noddy. Jesus.”
“That’s no way to talk to a fella who seen his dad kill himself. Hahahahaha!”
“Go to hell.”
“Hahahahaha.”
In lieu of tearing the windshield wiper off Greg’s car and stabbing Noddy to death with it, Milton climbed down off the hood and got back in the passenger seat. Noddy hollered at him through the windshield.
“Aw, c’mon, b’y. Don’t be a sook. I’m just saying life ain’t fair. That’s it. Nobody’s going to give ya nothing. You need to grow a set of balls already and take what you wants from it. Man up, b’y.”
“Shut up!”
Milton shut his eyes and pretended to sleep until he eventually fell asleep.
. . .
Deb
Milton woke up the next morning to Noddy starting the engine to pull onto the ferry. They parked at the front of the ferry on the lowest level and got out of the car and went above deck.
“I’m going to find some pussy at the bar, you coming?”
“No, thanks. I’m good.”
“Suit yourself. Can I borrow a hundy?”
Rather than fighting with Noddy about the futility of trying to pick up women on a ferry, or the absurdity of spending $100 at the ferry bar at 7:00 a.m., Milton dug into his backpack and pulled out a wad of slimy small bills and handed them to Noddy.
He then turned and walked in the opposite direction and found the quietest corner on the boat he could, took a dog-eared, bird-shitty notebook and cheap pen out of his backpack, found a blank page, and began writing. He wrote for six hours straight as his guts bobbed up and down with the sea.
hell
hath no fury
like this mess im in
and im in it gladly to find you
With satan himself guiding me
back to you
hell
hath no fury
like a heart that yearns
like flesh that burns
like a stomach that turns
for you
When the voice came over the intercom telling everyone to return to their cars, Milton packed up his notebook and found his way back down to the car.
As he approached, he noticed something bobbing up and down in the back seat through steamed-up windows. Something light coloured and about the size of Noddy’s ass. Milton got to the car and opened the back door. Noddy was humping someone he’d picked up at the bar.
“Get! Not yet! Go away!”
Milton closed the door and leaned against the hood until the grunting and howling stopped and the car quit rocking. The back door opened, and Noddy tumbled out onto the deck with his pants around his ankles.
He stood up and pulled up his pants.
“Whaddayat, b’y?”
“Are you done?”
“Yeah, fucked right out. This is… uh…”
A woman, readjusting her clothes, clambered out of the car.
“Nice to meet you. I’m Deb.”
Deb stuck out her hand to shake Milton’s, but she had her underwear bunched up in one hand, and her purse in the other. She laughed awkwardly instead, gave Noddy a peck on the cheek, said, “Call me,” and went back towards her car.
“Not bad, eh, b’y? A boat 10.”
. . .
Fries, Dressing, and Gravy
They rolled off the ferry in Cape Breton and Noddy drove the remaining 1,500 kilometres in one shot. It took them less than 12 hours, including three Tim Horton’s drive-thrus, and three roadside “piss stops.”
Noddy didn’t stop talking the entire time.
He went on and on about all the ways the Maritimes and Quebec paled in comparison to Newfoundland. On and on about all the ways that Halifax wished it was St. John’s. On and on about how the accordion is an actual instrument and the fiddle is just “fingernails on the Christly chalkboard.” On and on about how garlic fingers were “just pizza with nothing on it.”
But mostly, he went on and on, at least 10 of those last 12 hours, about the superiority of Newfoundland’s most cherished rotgut midnight snack—fries, dressing, and gravy—compared to the “worst case of actual shit being passed off as food,” the maritime delicacy, the donair.
“FDG is working man’s food: spuds, bit of bread, bit of gravy. Something your nan can make to cure your hangover. It’s deadly, b’y. But donairs? Sweet merciful Christ! Shameful. Some rich capitalist fucks somehow convinced half this goddamned place that turned meat rolled on the floor and covered in a bit of turned Miracle Whip is not just worth eating, but something worth bragging about as if it doesn’t taste and look the spitting image of dog shit. Not fit, b’y. Not fit at all.”
Which led down a long and winding tangent about exploitation of the working class by the “rich capitalist fucks,” and how donairs were the very embodiment of the “true trickle-down economics, a bunch of working folks happily eating leftover dog shit.”
Milton ignored Noddy as best he could and pretended to sleep the entire way.
Having his eyes closed helped, especially when Noddy would pass a string of seven cars going uphill on a solid yellow line with a gas truck coming straight at them.
He did awaken for the brief moment when Noddy passed a couple of dozen cars on the shoulder while they were stopped at a construction site.
He almost took out the flag person, and then proceeded to play a game of chicken with the lane of on-coming traffic. Turns out, there is enough room in a single lane to fit two cars, as long as one of those cars is piloted by a crazy asshole who hits every one of the hundred pylons set out along the centre line.
Milton screamed. Noddy laughed.
“Sorry, Greg. You might be getting a call from the piggies over that one.”
As they approached Montreal, Noddy pulled off at a strip club in a Verdun strip mall.
“Might as well have a last meal, b’y, while we’re still on this side of the dirt.”
Milton rolled his eyes, and followed Noddy through the blacked-out glass door with a tinfoil silhouette of a woman.
Noddy picked a table right near the stage in a half-empty bar with only a smattering of lunchtime patrons—used car salesmen, professional online poker players, stay-at-home dads, and surly mobsters who’d surely recognize both of them and shoot them both in the back on the way out.
Milton shrunk down in his chair and tried not to make eye contact with anyone. They ordered beers and steak-frites, and Noddy passed the time flicking loonies at a dancer halfheartedly wiggling to The Eagles.
“This fuckin’ guy can’t play music worth shit.”
The dance ended when the song ended and a commercial came on for the Aquazilla waterpark, and the new Pontiac Vibe, followed by a traffic report—she was dancing to the radio.
Noddy inhaled his steak and then started stealing pieces off Milton’s plate. When the food was gone, and Noddy had flicked all of their change, Noddy got up from the table and belched loudly.
“Well, b’y. Pay the bill and saddle up. Here goes nothing.”
. . .
Homecoming
They drove back into the city as the sun began to set over the western half of the island and headed straight for de l’Épée.
Even though they had both left town without a word of notice, hadn’t called since, and Georgette was probably pissed they stiffed her on the rent, they weren’t sure where else to go.
They parked up the street and watched the sparse traffic on the tree-lined street until the sun had set completely. They were being careful, as careful as an ignorant fool and a naïve fool can be while trying to outrun the police and the mob.
When the coast seemed clear they snuck into the alley, through the shadows between brick row houses, up the rusty, rickety fire escape, and through the kitchen window of Sept-cent-sept, where Georgette was cooking some rich-smelling French dish in her sweatpants.
“Georgie, you minx, get a look at ya, like an angel from heaven!”
“PUTAIN! NOHDEE ET MILTON!! FUCK YOU COCKSUCKERS!!! TA GUELE!!! PUTAIN!!!”
For a split second, before hugging them, Noddy and Milton weren’t sure if she was going to try to stab them with the kitchen knife she was holding.
“Where did you go? Putain! You leave wit’out saying anyt’ing. I t’ought you died. I called police. Dey didn’t know. Putain!”
“Yah, sorry Georgie, we got into a bit of shit and had to leave town.”
“Well fuck you, connards!”
“Any bad looking guys been poking around for us?”
“Ah, oui, putain! Dis guy with no neck come ’ere asking for you a while ago.”
“What’d you say?”
“Oh... Tu sais. Pas beaucoup.”
A smile grew across Georgette’s face.
“Georgie, did you fuck that meathead?”
“Nohdee! Tu es dégueulasse!”
“Georgie?”
“Peut-être. Un petit peu.”
All three shared a laugh. It was the best they’d probably ever all gotten along.
Georgette explained, in insufficient detail for Noddy’s taste, that the same “meat’ead” had come around a few times a few months ago looking for Noddy, saying he was owed money. Eventually Georgette and the “meat’ead” started dating, but he took offence to Larry and Chris.
“No man will tell me what to do. So, I tell ’im to, ’ow you say, ‘get bent’. ’e cry like baby and go away.”
He go away, but not before he helped Georgette clean out Milton’s and Noddy’s rooms. They found thousands of dollars in either room, Georgette kept a bunch of it for missed rent and “pain and suffering,” and the “meat’ead” kept the rest, said it was “what he was owed,” and it would make Noddy “square.” He hadn’t said anything about Milton.
When the police came by a couple months later, Georgette thought it was just a really slow response to the missing persons reports she’d filed, but they had a warrant for Noddy for his skipping bail.
With that, she was convinced the two of them had gotten into some kind of shit and weren’t coming back, so she put an ad up on Craigslist and got two new roommates that afternoon—Lara, a Comp-lit major at Concordia from Brampton, and Koel, an English major at McGill from Ajax.
Lara was a bit “chiqué,” but she kept to herself, and Koel was fine except when him and Ruddy would get drunk and pester Ava about semiotics.
“Dey won’t shut up about signs et signifiers et… putain!”
All caught up on the news, Noddy helped himself to a large mouthful of whatever Georgette was cooking. It scalded the inside of his mouth, causing him to spit it back into the pot, which drew a slap from Georgette.
They made their way down the hall, where Ruddy and Koel were locked in an intense argument with Ava.
“No, you idiot! You, like, don’t understand! Pierce is absolutely right that every sign is relational and dependent upon an interpretant, and if you take it even further, you start to verge into hermeneutics and the pending weight of history and culture. De Saussure’s notion of the arbitrariness of signs only makes sense in a vacuum. It might be fundamentally important, but it misses that relational aspect that makes it social.”
“No, no, Av, you’re missing the point. It’s like this. Say you’ve got a toaster, everyone knows what a toaster is, you see it sitting there on the counter, it’s obviously a toaster. But there is no natural law that decrees ‘metal box with two slots in it’ is a toaster, per se.”
“Yeah, Av, it’s a convention, but it’s totally arbitrary. Why not call it an umbrella?”
“Because, you idiots, there’s, like, no such thing as a toaster without bread and butter and jam. It’s a product of a society, of a culture, that, like, refines grains to produce flour and make bread, and then slices that bread, and stuffs them into the slots of a hot metal box to change the chemical structure of the bread to make it taste different, and somehow, like, more acceptable to eat in the morning. And all of that is the outcome of a long history of baking and the War and industrialization. Your toaster isn’t anything without any of that, it might as well be an umbrella.”
“Exactly, that’s what I said!”
“No, it’s…”
“All you fuckers are wrong, it was Ruddy’s mom and her sweet, sweet, ass that did it.”
“NODDY! MILTON! OHMYGAWD! George said you were dead.”
The rest of the night was like nothing had changed, except there were two strangers sparring with Ruddy and Ava while being yelled at by Noddy about some slightly derogatory aspect of Canadian history they didn’t know the “real” story about.
Milton sat in the middle of it, like always, and didn’t say a word. He just stared at the QHL game (Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu Home Depot Hammers were getting licked by the Rapide Lube Monstres de Huile de Jonquière) playing at full volume and tried not to breathe in too much second-hand smoke.
Except tonight, his and Noddy’s impending certain death at the hands of Leonard Cohen—singer, songwriter, poet, national treasure, mob boss—hung in the air with all the smoke.
. . .
Kia Ora
The next morning Noddy woke Milton up early and told him to get the gun and the money and come with him.
Milton had slept fitfully on the couch and when he first woke up, thanks to Noddy giving him a Wet Willy, he had forgotten the past year.
Crossing the most dangerous man in the country, stealing pills to sell to the most dangerous man in the country, being on the lam in Newfoundland grad school from the most dangerous man in the country—all of it, hadn’t happened. It didn’t exist. It wasn’t even a bad dream. It was nothing. He was just arriving in Montreal for the first time. About to fulfill his destiny as a world famous poet.
But as Noddy pressed his bare ass into Milton’s drowsy forehead, top secret RCMP plans crinkling, and farted loudly, it all came flooding back.
Milton relived, in split-second high-definition, every mounting misfortune and bad decision. His heart, which through the night had returned to its normal spot in his chest, dropped back down to where it had been clogging his lower intestine for the past year of constipation and terror.
“C’mon, b’y, let’s go.”
Noddy explained, after much begging, pleading, and cajoling from Milton, and between revisionist retellings of the 1959 Badger Riot31 on the walk to the bus to the metro, that his plan, their plan, was to find Sam.
If Leonard Cohen hadn’t killed him after they’d disappeared, Sam would probably be gutting a house in Westmount somewhere. And if he was gutting a house in Westmount somewhere, he’d probably know what had happened to Leonard Cohen, and maybe even know how they could find Leonard Cohen.
Failing that, they’d go into La Baraque and pick a fight with the biggest guy in there, and, assuming they survived, word would get back to Leonard Cohen.
“Can’t we just call Sam?”
“Nah, b’y. That Aussie Pinko don’t believe in phones, and I don’t know about you, but I’d rather not get the shit smacked outta me.”
For an entire day they wandered up and down the streets of Westmount, ducking into any house that looked the least bit under construction, and playing Franglais charades with unimpressed contractors and angry homeowners. But no Sam.
Shortly after 5:00pm, after being threatened with police, mace, and a shotgun—which Noddy swore wasn’t loaded, “You can hear when he cocked it, he was full of shit”—they gave up and walked down into the Atwater Metro station to go back to Sept-cent-sept and drink more of Koel’s beer and work up the courage to go get the shit beat out of them at La Baraque.
Noddy was taking a piss on the wall towards the front end of the crowded rush-hour metro platform and Milton was trying really hard to look as disgusted as the other commuters when he saw Sam standing on the opposite platform, laughing.
“Kia Ora, fuckwits!”
Noddy finished peeing and jumped down on the rails and scampered across to where Sam was standing. Milton, in favour of not getting hit by a train, took the escalator up, walked across the station, and took the escalator back down to find them standing on the platform.
Noddy was grinning ear to ear.
“B’y, you look like shit!”
“Thanks, mate. You two look good. Not like you just crawled out of a tomtit’s asshole at all.”
Noddy kept hugging him and grabbing his face. At one point he gave Sam a kiss on the lips.
They went back upstairs, found a case of Molson Ex in the dep and sat in the mall food court drinking and catching up.
Sam hadn’t seen or heard anything about Leonard Cohen, other than what a thug sent to rough him up told him: that Noddy had fucked over the Godfather and Sam was suspected for being in on it. Sam swore he wasn’t, took his beating honourably, and convinced the thug that he was still loyal to the Godfather.
He was allowed to continue sloppily renovating vast Westmount mansions as a front for laundering millions of dollars in drug money. That was going so well that Sam had several crews working around the city. And he was smart enough to mind his own business and not fuck up the steady flow of work and cash coming his way.
“Talking to you pair of assholes could mean the end of me, but fuck them, mate. The mafia is just another form of government. They just want to run your life and steal your shit.”
“But we need to find that ol’ fart Lenny, b’y.”
“Wish I could help, mate, I’m just his hired monkey. There are about 500 mouth-breathing troglodytes between him and me in the food chain. If ya really need to see him, just go to La Baraque and ask one of them. If they don’t kill ya, word will get back.”
“That was our plan B, thanks for nothing, b’y.”
“No problem, mate, just let me know when ya go, I want to watch.”