Lump Sum

The Queen streetcar eastbound, a hot Thursday afternoon, 2 p.m. Every window is open to its full extent to compensate for broken air conditioning. Traffic is stop and start, push and pull, lurch and grind. The man on his cellphone sweats madly, like the rest of us.

 

Yeah, I’m out. 

 

White, early 40s, maybe, though it’s difficult to tell. He could be a young man who’s lived a hard life. He’s skinny and muscular with a shaved head and tattooed arms and deep grooves either side of his mouth; he looks drawn and exhausted and he gives off a dangerous heat, an air of unpredictability that makes us nervous. His voice is loud as he rocks forward and back, biceps flexing. The woman beside him has squeezed herself close to the window in an effort to open as much space as possible between her body and his.

 

You got my fifty bucks?

 

When, then? 

 

OK, OK, but you better have it then. I’m gonna go by Lou’s, see what he has for me.

 

Yeah. Right. 

 

It was OK. Nothing special. Hey, you know who was in with me? Lump Sum. 

 

Yeah. Six months. 

 

Yeah. Couldn’t believe it when I seen him. “Lump Sum!” I said. “I thought it was you.”

 

Yeah. Long time. Didn’t say much. 

 

Billy’s, that’s where I seen him last. Ten years ago, gotta be. 

 

I can’t. Conditions. I gotta see my parole officer this week.

 

The woman gets smaller still and he frowns and hunches away from her and into the aisle, can’t contain his restless energy, suddenly bounces up to standing, grips the metal pole and clamps the phone between his ear and neck while he digs in his pocket for a cigarette. Getting off soon, then, but not yet, and he’s still looming in the aisle. Her entire body is a held-in sigh waiting to be released.

 

Yeah, Lump Sum. Haven’t seen him in…OK. OK. I’ll let you go. You’ll have it by Thursday, right? 

 

You better. Remember who….fuck. The phone goes into his other pocket.

 

Stubble glints on his scalp, iron filings in the sun. Lump Sum, he says again, but quietly, to himself. His stop arrives and he swings gracefully forward, off the steps through the open door and into the street. Smoke from his cigarette drifts back inside, his trace, sharp but soon gone.

 

Lump Sum, though. Debt collector? Bone breaker? Bruise maker?

 

No, that’s not it. 

 

His name is Frank. In 1987 he’s thirteen years old, living on Blackburn with his mother Eileen. One of a gang of six or seven neighbourhood kids. Not an official street gang but a group of friends who hang out and commit petty crimes together. When they get stopped by the police each boy gives his address as 550 Gerrard East. The Don Jail. Comedians, the cops say. Or fortune-tellers: most of them will know the inside of The Don at some point. Frank won’t have far to go, he can see the jail from his front steps: guards catching a smoke, orange-suited inmates on garbage duty, the Court Services van, the line of visitors that skirts the railing by the outside wall in all weathers. Naturally, it’s the pretty girls who interest him the most. Tank tops in summer; parkas or thin coats with the collars up, arms hugged close to the body in winter. Cigarettes year-round. Some jiggle strollers while they wait. As habituated (though not as orderly, nor as defeated) as the line of mothers outside the Lubyanka.

 

There’s an innocence to Frank’s boyhood delinquency. Almost idyllic. Skipping off school to swim the filthy river, looting condemned houses, stealing pop and cigarettes from the Seven Eleven. They jump out the window of an abandoned house when the police arrive, give bogus IDs, though the cops know them all by name; where they live, who with. Keep going like this and you won’t be lying, the cops say, not so amused any more. Gateway crimes are like gateway drugs, is the implication. Trivial at first, leading you ever further down the wrong road.

 

Frank’s mother Eileen works at St. Mike’s in food services. His father, Frank Sr., was a baker until the day of his heart attack; he dropped to his knees between the ovens and a trolley of loaves cooling on their trays, right hand clamped to left arm, trying to squeeze the pain away. A second attack, minutes later waiting for the ambulance, killed him. Frank, son of Frank, is well loved. Not a promising student, but not a lost cause either. He likes Math and English. Is good at baseball and plays in an inner city league. There are free summer programs, plus a swimming pool at the north end of the park. Part-time jobs, too, aren’t hard to come by. He stacks trays in the bakery, learns how to make bread, a skill he retains along with his resilience to heat.

 

He loves dogs, but they don’t like him. Their ears flatten at his approach. At best they’re indifferent, which is a disappointment, because he longs for one of his own. He loves their rank, damp wool smell, their liquid eyes, the nonchalant way unfixed males lick their balls and strut. It’s the female dogs, though, that nip at his heart. 

 

He quits the bakery. Gets a job with his friend Marco, roofing; a side gig going into houses in the upscale parts of town where Russian businessmen are buying real estate. Wide lots whose dowdy Victorians and fake Tudors are being torn down to make room for monster homes: pink granite behemoths. It’s high-end salvage, what they do. With Marco and the others he strips the old fittings, anything of value, down to the baseboards. Light fixtures, wood trim, moldings, medallions prised from the ceilings with infinite care; staircases, anything copper. Anything antique. The Russians have no interest in any of it, they want it all new. Marco resells what they salvage to antique dealers and scrap yards. Sometimes he gets the contract to roof the new house. 

 

A new man, Billy, joins their crew. From Nova Scotia, short legs like a terrier, strong as fuck. A small-time dealer on the side. He watches Frank, sees the way he doesn’t complain when the temperature climbs to 37 and above, just ties a wet t-shirt round his head and keeps working while his shoulders burn to polished teak. Billy brings his dog, Murphy, a mutt whose muzzle is salted with flecks of white. She leans against Frank’s legs and licks his hand, looks up at him like a long-lost child. When he moves, she goes with him, as if she’s a sheep dog and he one of her lambs. Will you look at that, Billy says. She’s never done that with me. Frank’s eyes smart. He stands still, waiting for her to come to her senses, but she just leans in harder and he rubs her head, fingers the satin flap of her ear. Gently. He’s in love.

 

From that day on, though he doesn’t know it yet, Frank is tethered to Billy. Billy sells weed and some pills, some prescription drugs. Nothing stronger, no heroin, no crack, because that’s where the serious jail time comes in and besides, it’s sewn up by bikers and gangsters, backed up by guns smuggled across the border. Frank does the pick-ups with Billy from a couple of Angels in East York. They pay up front, always, a lump sum. One of them slaps the name on Frank as a joke. Billy likes it and it sticks. Billy’s clients are word of mouth, musicians and lawyers and white collar workers who got the habit in high school and who want their connection to be someone they can like, cool but not too threatening. They are kept off-balance by Lump Sum, whose shyness they misinterpret to Billy’s advantage. They laugh at Billy’s jokes but Lump Sum is the one they watch, sidewise, though he never threatens anyone—he wouldn’t, it’s not in him. Nonetheless they stand back from him like nervous dogs.

 

Murphy leads him to her: Rose. An old fashioned name, even then. A party on Cherry Beach, beer and vodka coolers, weed and a lot of other drugs. Is that your dog? He looks around for Billy, sees that he can’t hear them. Yes, he says. Frank does acid for the one and only time in his life. Trails effervesce from the tips of Rose’s fingers, she’s a mermaid (those are pearls that be her eyes, he remembers). They sit on a rock and watch the bonfire until the cops arrive. In the chaos he grabs Rose’s hand and they run fast up the beach, into darkness, Murphy lolloping behind them, up through sloped streets and past houses with balconies and wide steps that remind of him of old movies. Frank is determined not to be caught. He won’t have Rose hear a list of his petty crimes. Murphy’s tongue hangs, her eyes roll. He scoops her up and carries her, though she weighs as much as a chunky toddler. Rose is choking with laughter. Stop! Die another day, she gasps, bent over her knees. 

 

They stay up all night that night; in the morning they go sunbathing near the old power station. Everything is hyper-etched, as if traces of the acid he took have seeped into his cells and settled there. Scorched grass, milk chocolate freckles on Rose’s collar bone, the sky chlorine-pale. The lake’s too cold to swim, but they splash and chase each other, bruising the soles of their feet on the rocks. Murphy churns lake water, paddling with her chin up like an old lady with a new perm. He whistles her out and towels her off. She’s truly his now, by default.

 

Billy fronts him some weed to sell on his own. Try summer school, he says, when they come out after class. Not too much, just enough to make an inroad. The kids flirt with him: hey Lump Sum, man, let me owe you? They laugh when he shakes his head. He’s arrested. Lucky to have only a trace amount on him, so they can’t stick him with intent to sell, but the bust is tacked on to the list of his small-time arrests. It’s starting to add up. Rose doesn’t mind too much, she says, but he does. 

 

Another arrest. She waits in the line that he used to watch. She tells him about Murphy, who pines for him and won’t eat her food. It’s only a short time, he says. My lawyer says it won’t go to trial. I love that dog to death, she tells him. If we break up, it’s shared custody, you know that, right? He gets a suspended sentence but people have seen him near the school, which his lawyer tells him has raised suspicion. He’ll be watched. His probation conditions are strict. 

 

He does alright, they do alright together. Rose gets pregnant. Murphy dies. He does not tell anyone, not even Rose, that he believes some aspect of Murphy’s soul transmigrates to their baby girl, Annette. He does a first-time father’s besotted catalogue of Annette’s perfections: toes and fingers, scrunched-up eyes, tiny nose fashioned by Nature to fit neatly under her mother’s breast. (And as she grows her nose will change, become her own distinctive feature—though like Rose’s he hopes, not his). Rose cares, now, what he gets up to. She doesn’t need to tell him. But anyway Billy has gone back east, for a long while, gone, almost forgotten. Now there’s only Frank. 

 

Some people won’t leave you. You know the ones. You half love them, half dread seeing them. They show up when you’re not expecting, talk you into things you’re not intending (have told yourself you won’t do again). Not to hurt you, just because that’s the way they are and the way you are is to go along because you owe them for their faith in you (for Murphy, too). And there you are, before you know it, waiting in a parking lot for a transaction that fucks up, goes wrong, gets twisted; you run but you’re slower now, weighed down by everything you have to carry; then Billy’s gone again but you, you’re stuck. Back to court, then back to the old address—550—and on your way to more permanent accommodation. And back to being Lump Sum.