Seven Floors Down, page 1
SEVEN FLOORS DOWN
ALSO BY TREVOR CLARK
Born To Lose
Dragging The River
Love On The Killing Floor
Escape and Other Stories
Hair-Trigger
Damaged at Daybreak
SEVEN FLOORS DOWN
& Two Stories
TREVOR CLARK
Copyright © 2020 by Trevor Clark
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Seven Floors Down & Two Stories / Trevor Clark.
Names: Clark, Trevor, 1955–2019, author.
ISBN 9781989689004 (softcover)
Printed and bound in Canada on 100% recycled paper.
eBook: tikaebooks.com
Now Or Never Publishing
901, 163 Street
Surrey, British Columbia
Canada V4A 9T8
nonpublishing.com
Fighting Words.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for our publishing program.
For Jade
CONTENTS
Seven Floors Down
Where Judas Lost His Boots
Wasted Tears
“He didn’t know how it happened, exactly—lack of foresight on his part, lack of caring, planning, holding something back for a rainy day—but in rapid succession he lost his job, his girlfriend and the roof over his head, waking up one morning to find himself sprawled out on the sidewalk in front of the post office.”
~ T.C. Boyle, “Here Comes”, Tooth And Claw
“A tramp who feels shame is a bad one.”
~ Homer, Odyssey
SEVEN FLOORS DOWN
PART 1
When Ryder wandered out to Lyle Kendall’s living room in his underwear for a drink to try and get back to sleep, he found his burly friend tippling in the semi-darkness with the TV on low. He was sitting on the couch wrapped in a beach towel, tangled hair hanging into his beard, a cigarette between his fingers.
Ryder took a chair that hadn’t been urinated on, shifting a take-out box with the toe of his ankle boot as he sat on some magazines. He hadn’t walked barefoot since coming across broken glass in the carpet. When he switched on the lamp it cast light on his faded ink and the greying hair that had come loose from his ponytail.
After a pause, Kendall said, “So, Billy. Must have been hard doing four years. The longest I was ever in jail was seventeen days. They were going to charge me with attempted murder, but the District Attorney dropped it for lack of evidence.”
Ryder tapped out a cigarette.
“I was living with Gladys in North Hollywood and had a band. This guy Dutch was the drummer, and I played bass. He had a bunch of pot plants growing in his backyard and somehow got it into his head that I’d ripped him off, and came in my door with a two by four. I told him to hold on, I didn’t want the house getting busted up, and had a chance to grab my .22 long rifle. I could have put a bullet in his eye but just aimed at his arm. I called the cops and told them that I’d shot a guy breaking into my house, and they fucking arrested me.
“There are places in the LA County Jail that are so gang-controlled that the guards won’t walk through more than once every few days. Even though they confiscate your money when you go in, two black guys tried to rip me off for any cash I had. There were no beds, so I was lying on the floor when one of them threatened to hit me and started taking off my shoes. I said, ‘What, you want my shoes?’ and he said no, they wanted my money. ‘I don’t have any money!’ He actually put my shoes back on, which I thought was kind.
“I said to the cops, ‘Look, if I wanted to kill the guy he’d be dead,’ and my lawyer told me to shut up. ‘I will speak for my client.’”
Outside the window the sky was growing lighter. Ryder blew a smoke ring and picked up his glass. “So did you take the plants?”
“No, but I know who did. I always remembered one of the cops telling me, ‘There are citizens and there are assholes. You are not an asshole.’”
Kendall at forty-seven was five years younger than Ryder, but his appearance evinced a derelict existence. Recurring sties behind his smudged glasses complemented a missing tooth that he’d somehow knocked out on the water faucet. His ribs were healing from a fall against the coffee table. Tattoos on his arms were marred by contusions, his thighs were black and blue, and there was a massive yellow bruise on his chest. He insisted his lack of balance was symptomatic of Multiple Sclerosis, and had cancelled three appointments to see a doctor about a hernia that was pushing out from inside his gut.
Despite his heavyset outlaw look, he was shaky and had to support himself when he walked, often complaining that he couldn’t feel his legs. He’d decided the numbness and partial hearing loss were the result of a stroke, which was consistent with his self-diagnosed MS. He used to work for newspapers and was the one of the smartest people Ryder knew, being able to talk about magnetic forces and historic war strategies in a measured tone of voice, barely slurring, but was drunk ninety-nine percent of the time from regular deliveries of Absolut vodka and extra-strength beer.
Kendall drew on his cigarette and flicked the ash as he exhaled. “Another time I went over to this dealer’s house to buy an ounce. He was a real rip-off artist, but I was doing a favour for a friend who was sitting in a restaurant across the street where they made the most incredible fucking salsa. For some reason I turned my back, and happened to see the dealer’s reflection in the picture window. He had a crowbar and was going to smash me in the head. We had this drag-out fight, and at some point I managed to get the crowbar off him and hit him in the skull a couple of times with it.
“He called me from the hospital and said that I should have finished him off because he was hiring someone to do me in. I said, ‘You don’t even know where I live. Fuck you and anyone who looks like you.’ After that a cop phoned me up and said that he’d been around to see this guy who said I’d tried to kill him, so I told him exactly what happened. The cop asked me to come into the station, and I said, ‘If I do you’ll arrest me, right?’ He said yeah, so I told him that I had to go to court the next day for something else, and would it be all right if I straightened it out there? I’m trying to remember . . . Yeah, the court clerk called him, and I was released on my own recognizance. The charge ended up being reduced to ‘Disturbing The Peace’.”
Five weeks earlier when William Ryder had shown up at the upscale high-rise where Kendall had moved back in with his mother, the bathtub was heaped with discarded beer cans, and the kitchen sink with dirty dishes and rotting Chow Mein. Through the mustiness there had been an overriding fragrance of urine which Ryder had sprayed away with Febreze, unless he’d just got used to it.
Kendell said he’d put his mother—or Gladys, as he liked to refer to her—in a nursing home. He’d had no choice after she’d broken her back in a fall and become a paraplegic. Given that the living room was stacked with what looked like a decade of debris, it was hard to believe she hadn’t been gone longer than a matter of months. Kendall had joined her four years earlier after a common law relationship had broken up, and was now living on income derived from forging her name and drawing from US and Canadian pension cheques. With her apparent permission and access code, he said he’d been doing her banking for years, and claimed to be receiving a regular payout from Reuters wire service who had laid him off as an online copy editor.
Ryder had taken the lavatory next to the mother’s room where he’d been offered her bed, cleared out the beer cans, and used her shampoo and Lady Speed Stick. Kendall never had a bath as he said he feared not being able to get out of the tub, and claimed he sponged himself off in his own washroom, which was so filthy that Ryder had suggested cordoning it off with police tape. Still, he seemed clean enough. The carpet around the stained toilet was encrusted, and the dead cat’s used litter box was still on the floor. The light switch engaged a transistor radio.
He’d offered to pay two hundred dollars to stay for a month while he regrouped after Millhaven, but Kendall told him not to worry about it since it wouldn’t have come close to covering half the eighteen hundred rent anyway.
Ryder shared the old woman’s car with an ex-cop named Darryl Hunt, who lived directly above them and drove it to work every evening. Hunt was reputed to have made and lost a lot of money in numerous schemes after being fired and narrowly escaping charges over missing evidence, and now operated a forklift in a dairy on the night shift. Though they were supposedly friends, he was into Kendall for about four grand from a combination of loans and shady deals that looked like an ongoing rip off. It was hard for Ryder to understand, having known Kendall when he’d been at the top of his game and more than a little unscrupulous himself.
He had come to see that while his friend’s bluster had always been tempered by sentimentality, he was now reduced to drunken tears by songs, movies on tape, and
Kendall liked to reminisce about his poker playing days and a period when he was fucking two women at once. Some of his tales didn’t add up and might have been dreams he’d actually come to believe. Nonetheless, he remained a keen observer of the American political scene, and usually had CNN on while at his desk downloading porn or machine gunning enemies in video games. He could routinely be heard bellowing at the TV.
Ryder was glad he could delay trying to find a job, having a record for aggravated assault, unlawful possession of a hand gun, and cocaine possession. He’d been coasting and watching TV, going to bars and driving Kendall around, who’d lost his license and rarely went out alone anymore.
It seemed to be coming to an end, however. There were debts that looked insurmountable unless Kendall convinced his mother to sign over Power Of Attorney so that he could apply for a fifty thousand dollar loan. He’d already presented the bank with a temporary Letter of Direction that he’d forged on her behalf to unfreeze her account so that he could deposit her pension cheques and withdraw money, but there were warning notes about the rent and letters from the nursing home lawyers. He owed a barrister five hundred dollars for a failed attempt to get her signature for a POA a couple of months earlier, and was overdue on a four hundred dollar bill from a vet for putting down his sick cat.
When Kendall had last had access to fifteen hundred dollars, Ryder had offered to make up the difference for the rent, but his host was in arrears with his alcohol delivery service and felt it more important to take care of the cable, hydro and cell phone bills. He also liked to have enough cash around for fifty buck take-out orders. Ryder had paid for groceries and usually turned his liquor over when Kendall’s ran out, but with three grand socked away and no money coming in, he figured that investing in a room somewhere would be cheaper than splitting the rent. His host, meanwhile, was expecting Darryl Hunt to come through with at least two thousand of the money he was owed.
Kendall looked over. “You knew my old man was a cop. Did I tell you why he quit the force? He quit one night after he’d picked up a couple of twelve or thirteen-year-olds for shoplifting. He talked his partner into letting them go, and then quit the department. He said to my mother, ‘What’s it all about? I’m a cop and I’m driving crying kids around. I can’t handle it.’” Kendall paused and gave him a meaningful look. “I like to think I inherited something from him.”
“You mean you don’t want to work either.”
He seemed taken aback, almost offended. “Fuck you, pal. All right, well, smart guy, you’ll find this funny. Listen to this. One night I was drinking in a parking lot near some railway tracks at Summerhill, and I passed out. Some people must have told the police or something, because a cruiser pulled up. As the cops were helping me to my feet, one of them said, ‘We’re not going to arrest you. We’re just taking you to the hospital.’ I was bleeding from a cut on my forehead. When we were in the car, I said, ‘My father used to do this.’ One of them asked, ‘What—drink until he passed out?’ ‘No! He used to be a police officer.’”
Ryder laughed.
“He died when I was three from lung cancer. Thirty-eight years old. He smoked like a fucking chimney and would have already been dead nine years by the time he was my age now. He was a motorcycle courier in World War Two, and landed at Juno Beach in Normandy on D-Day. Well no, not D-Day, but D-Day plus two. Everybody said he was a great guy. He was only fifteen when he went into the army after talking his mother into falsifying his identification . . .”
Around them in the living room were bureaus and china cabinets with figurines, plates and crystal, a roll top desk, period furniture and scenic paintings. A plastic bush stood in the corner. The coffee table was covered in books, CDs, video cassettes, papers, cigarettes and used glasses. By the dining room table there was an old TV with a broken VHS player, a dusty computer monitor, and a large Toshiba television carton on top of which were stacked Vanity Fair and USA Today magazines, boxes, trays, and miscellaneous items.
Ryder crossed his legs. “The war ended a few months before my father reached draft age. His older brother was in the air force. There was a story where my uncle was flying back from a mission when a German plane came up beside them out of nowhere. They were scrambling for their guns when the other pilot pointed at the nude woman painted on the side of their plane and gave them a thumbs-up. Then raised his wing and flew off.”
“Jesus, that’s great.”
“Well, if it’s true. I saw my uncle as this tall swashbuckler with a plane, antique cars, a motorcycle, sailboat, and a long-term girlfriend he didn’t marry until he had terminal cancer. He and the old man didn’t get along too well, though they rode motorcycles through the States together when they were young. He had the charisma but there was some overbearing bullshit too. I remember him telling me when I was about twelve that I was going to be fat when I grew up because my old man was my size when he was my age, and look at him now.” Ryder took a drink and chuckled. “I should have pointed out that my mother was thin, and fuck you.”
“Why didn’t they like each other?”
“I don’t know how far back it went. The old man made us go to church and live by the rules, so we weren’t on the same side either. Every now and then I’d catch him sneering about his brother’s lack of responsibility, house, family, the fact that he used to idolize John Wayne . . . He’d said my uncle had been their parents’ favourite, and was convinced his mother had tried to drown him at the beach when he was a kid.”
“Goddamn. So what movie stars did he like?”
“He approved of the good girls like Doris Day and Mary Tyler Moore. Catherine Deneuve was a ‘tramp’. He liked Sinatra when he was young, before the Las Vegas Rat Pack period, but mostly listened to Glen Miller, classical, choir music . . .”
“You said he used to beat you?”
“Well, clouted me around.”
“Did he hit your mother?”
“No, but my sister says he tried to brain her with a chair once when she got home late.”
“I’m suspicious of anybody who’s religious,” Kendall said, “whether they’re Muslim or Catholic or . . . who are the ones who don’t believe in transfusions? Jehovah’s Witnesses. I once saw this sign outside a Kingdom Hall that said, ‘We Help Burn Children.’ One of their big things is helping children in burn units, so it should have been ‘Burned Children’.” He laughed. “Those guys are spooky fuckers.”
Ryder snorted. “Once I was walking through the record department of a store with my father, and they were playing ‘Gimme Some Lovin’. I said, ‘Hey, listen—this is my favourite song,’ and he said, ‘Why would I want to hear a bunch of Negroes caterwauling?’ I didn’t bother telling him they were white. About ten years ago I met Steve Winwood in a bar when he was in town playing at Wonderland, but he was more interested in talking to women, so I didn’t get around to mentioning the Negro thing.”
“He probably would have taken it as a compliment.” Kendall’s towel fell open as he leaned forward to butt his cigarette, exposing his hernia. Ryder looked away from the gruesome purple protuberance.
After he’d heard about the cancelled doctor appointments, he’d driven Kendall to the Mt. Sinai emergency ward and waited until he was in an examination room before leaving the hospital. He’d expected him to be admitted for an operation or to have the thing drained, since a doctor by the reception desk seemed concerned about infection, but Kendall took a cab back to the apartment with a tube of ointment and instructions to contact his own MD. He would then be referred to a surgeon. As far as Ryder knew, he’d applied the medicine a few times but never called a doctor.
