Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [84]
“Barney, you’re a mess. Drinking the way you do at your age. Pretending that Miriam will come back.”
“And what about you? After all these years you still haven’t thrown out Roger’s clothes. That’s sick, you know.”
“Chantal says your behaviour in the office is more objectionable than ever. People dread the days you turn up. And Barney,” she said, reaching for my lizardy hand, “you’re coming to a time of life when it could be dangerous for you to be living alone.”
“What’s eating you, Solange? Spit it out.”
“Chantal says that last Thursday you dictated a letter to be sent to Amigos Three and when you came in on Monday you dictated the same letter all over again.”
“So I was forgetful once. I was probably hung over.”
“More than once.”
“Morty Herscovitch checks me out once a year. I’m shrinking, he says. If I live to be ninety, you’ll be able to carry me around in your handbag.”
“Chantal and I have talked it over, and should your health deteriorate you can always move in with us. We’ll close off a section of the apartment with a steel mesh fence, the way people do for pet dogs they carry in the back of their station wagons. And we’ll throw you the occasional latke.”
“I’ll move in with Kate first.”
“Don’t you dare even think of that, you bastard. She’s had her troubles and now she’s happily married. The last thing in the world she needs is you.”
“It would be foolish of you to vote Yes. I don’t want you to do it.”
“You don’t want me to? How dare you! What would you do if you were young and French Canadian?”
“Why, I’d vote Yes, of course. But neither of us is young and stupid any more.”
When I dropped her off at her apartment on Côte-des-Neiges, Solange lingered at the car door. “Please don’t carry on drinking now. Go straight home to bed.”
“That’s exactly what I’m going to do.”
“Oh, sure, and you’re willing to swear to it on the heads of your grandchildren.”
“Honestly, Solange.”
But, unable to face my empty apartment, my bed without Miriam, I drove on to Jumbo’s, hoping to run into Maître John Hughes-McNoughton, or Zack. Instead, I was lumbered with Sean O’Hearne, who settled heavily on to the bar stool next to mine, his eyes bright with drunken malice. “Bring Mr. P. a drink,” he said, between wheezes.
“You know something, Sean? I’ve been looking for you. Got something that might interest you.”
“Yeah yeah yeah.”
“Your guys dug up my garden, you sent divers down into the lake again and again, you took samples of everything in the cottage, looking for traces of blood, just like you’d seen cops do on TV. But, dimwit that you are, you never asked how come my chainsaw was missing.”
“Bullshit. You never had one, Mr. P. Because if there was any hard labour to be done on your estate, you hired goys like me to do it. That’s how it’s always been with your lot.”
“Then how come there was an empty hook on my garage wall?”
“Empty hook, my ass. You can’t take the piss out of me, Mr. P.”
“What if I told you I went through a trunk of old tax papers in the cottage last weekend and found a bill for one chainsaw, dated July 4, 1959?”
“I’d say you were a fucken liar.”
The others in the bar were watching the late news on TV. The daily referendum round-up. They guffawed when The Weasel filled the screen, indulging in death-rattle jokes that were now the common lot of Anglophones.
“So where is that chainsaw now?”
“Where I dropped it. Four hundred feet deep somewhere, rusting, and of no use to you after all these years.”
“You trying to tell me you had the guts to cut him up?”
“Sean, now that you’re so thick with The Second Mrs. Panofsky, why don’t you marry her? I’ll continue the alimony payments. I’m even willing to provide a dowry.”
“No way a guy like you could butcher a man. And there was no blood anywhere. So stop fucking with me, asshole.”
“Sure there was no blood, because I could have butchered him far out in the woods. Don’t forget I had a day alone at the cottage before you pricks had the good sense to charge me.”
“You’ve got a sick sense of humour, you know that, Mr. P.? Hey, look, there he is. Their fucken saviour.