Janine Armin - Toronto Noir

Come one special April dawn, Scalpel, the dark-haired, bespectacled, and solidly huge (but not fat) man, was padding along the sidewalk of Monarch Park, heading home from the Coxwell subway station, when he saw Diva, winsome in sneakers and womanish short skirt, stepping nonchalantly in his direction. His heart howled such thunder he was sure she would hear it and denounce him as a deviant. But no, she glanced at him, pursed her lips as she blew and cracked a bubblegum dirigible, smiled wanly, and said, “Hi.” She was the epitome of curves. Scalpel could only mumble, or nearly moan, his reply. Immediately after she passed, he turned around and was greeted with the sweet vision of her plaid skirt swishing across her scrumptious derriere.

Thus, his surreptitious flirtation continued. Even Scalpel’s two eighteen-wheeler mates, Bruno and Pete, were ignorant of his lurid, selfish panting after Diva, this angel goddess who commandeered his fantasies. And life went on.

Then struck calamity: Diva, the immortally beautiful (and probably virginal) woman was felled in the middle of a game by an uplifted field hockey stick that hit in pure, malicious chance against her skull. The blow had enough force to kill her instantly, but somehow not enough to scar or bruise her soft tender skin; Diva had dropped where she stood, in the exact instant of an additional triumph, in her sneakers, red-and-green plaid skirt, and white knee socks.

The death of the athlete, only eighteen (her whole life and its eventual decline now void), became principal news on TV, radio, the Internet, and even on the front page of the Toronto Star . East York Holy Angels High School announced a full day of mourning presided over by grief counselors, who would painstakingly explain that death could befall even a popular, good-hearted, and good-looking athlete — even a teenage one. Yes, no one was safe.

But Scalpel was personally broken. Not decimated, devastated. He felt he’d given his granite heart to Diva, and now she was gone, and he’d never touched her, never felt her. He’d merely breathed in her direction, and, at that moment, he’d been breathless.

Pete and Bruno found Scalpel in the dark apartment, a bottle of Tito’s Hand-Made Vodka handily half-empty and their buddy slobbering, slurring his words, reducing them to spit. He was moaning, moaning, “Diva was really, really, really unique.”

They wondered who this mystery lady was, this inspiration for their pal’s epic drunk. Scalpel drooled out his explanation, and his mates became intrigued. They too had noticed, now and then, the high school gal’s succinct skirts that didn’t so much cover anything as hover tantalizingly about. And they had also noticed Diva’s extraordinary features and had, quite involuntarily, grunted inside their own minds. Being white-bread boys, they mused normally about the pale, anorexic waitresses and big-mouthed, big-assed, whey-faced whores and the wholesome, buxom, pie-faced cashiers at Tim’s. Usually, they only vaguely appreciated the hot, ice cream — like colors of the “foreign hers.”

But Scalpel’s grief brought them, not to tears, but to lust for the dead neighbor, the Cinnamon Virgin of the Spice Isles. What could she have been like?

Pete studied the cute face in the obituary section. Diva did not belong among all the black-and-white oldsters slain by one casual cancer after another, whose mourning relatives (publishers in this case) all forbade flowers, desiring that sorrow be totaled in the form of a tax-deductible donation to a medical research charity. Diva glowed in full color, brilliant enough that her face seemed to lift from the drab newsprint and illuminate the room. Pete felt moisture in his long dried-up tear ducts. It was hard for him to believe that this fresh-faced chippie was lying waxen and cold in a mahogany chest in the Toronto East Funeral Chapel. Yet there were younger faces on the page too, and there was even a write-up about an unfortunate infant.

As Scalpel rocked and sobbed and wept into Bruno’s chest, Pete opened the cold beer and began to gulp it down. What was to be done?

He was not moved by altruism. When charities knocked on the apartment door, seeking money to stop the polar ice caps from melting, or to buy polar bears better food, Pete enjoyed lecturing the do-gooders with this tale:

“A woman’s German shepherd expired, and she wanted to take the corpse to the SPCA for disposal, but she didn’t have a car. She called every cab company in the city to find a driver to take her and her dead dog to the pound. But every cab company — all of them superstitious — refused, often rudely, to help. The poor lady had to sacrifice her best suitcase, cram her dead dog Daisy inside, and take the subway over to Yonge and Queen. Climbing up the stairs to the street level, she was huffing and puffing and sweating like she was raining. A man approached her and offered to help her upstairs with the case. She smiled and accepted. After hefting the suitcase up one flight of stairs, the man stopped and exclaimed, ‘Hey, lady! This suitcase is real heavy. What you got in here?’ She didn’t dare admit that it was a dog, so she lied: ‘Oh, just my old computer.’ The man grinned, and with instant vigor, bolted up the last several steps and ran off with his imagined booty.”

After concluding this saga, Pete would swing the door shut in the faces of the Latter-day Saints, the Witnesses, the Greenpeaceniks, and even the collectors of money for Little League baseball uniforms. What he’d never say was that he was the man who’d stolen the useless corpse of a dog. He was no charitable son of a bitch. But Scalpel was his friend. And the dead girl was, well, a tartlet, who would now be devoured by worms, a most criminal and dismal rape. Simple, crude animals would munch all her loveliness, snacking on eyes, ass, everything soft and vulnerable. This truth seemed to Pete suddenly intolerable and royally vile. He had seen her once, up close, her long black hair cascading over a white blouse, and he had felt lust polysyllabically sully his heart. How could this beauty be permitted to break down into loathsome slime? The strange impudence of maggots should not prevail where a man can frustrate their insults. Innocence topples to the tomb as easily as vice — this was a truth as unpleasant as a dirty rag. Something had to be done .

Pete felt repulsed by Scalpel’s panting, his tearful ejaculations, his blunt weeping, his vodka-addled fanaticisms, his clumsy hysterics. His friend’s liquored-up agony required a succession of vodka shots — but also a deed so nude in meaning as to be unprintable. Pete planned a Gothic and gay catharsis to mollify Scalpel’s drunken grimness. He felt a twinge of revulsion at his own idea, thinking, I am a bad man. I am the wrong man. I am a natural man — the worst type. Pete then communicated his scary amusement to Bruno, his shoulder wet with Scalpel’s tears and snot: Time for relief from (and for) their sad-sack pal. The trio could have a riot...

The entry was not fastidious. The three men were burly, and Pete’s practiced crowbar jimmied open a basement window as easily as giving a teat to a baby. And just like they suspected, the sign in the window advertising The Police Alarm Company was fake — i.e., a lie. Not even a Toronto funeral home feared robbery.

Worried about a potential guard dog, Bruno took the crowbar and he swung it a few times, just for the feel of how it might waste a violent canine. But no saber-toothed poodle showed up.

Pete’s flashlight transformed the trio into three ghouls, but soon they had ascended from the musty basement — the warehouse of caskets, including some needing repair — and broken out onto the main floor. They made their way carefully to the viewing rooms and began cracking open the coffins, one by one, to see where Diva lay. The blubbering Scalpel got sick, throwing up vodka-scented spit over the plushly carpeted floor and onto the cuffs of Bruno’s pants. The big man wanted to slug Scalpel, but he simply snarled, “You’re such a fuckin’ slug.”