Slush Pile

It’s mid-afternoon, Modine’s napping on the sofa, dreaming of Elanor, of the good times, when he’s roused by a ruckus in the yard. He pokes his nose through the venetian blinds just as Ed Scott’s clambering onto the hood of a Toyota Camry, his behind centimetres beyond Bailey’s snapping fangs. Holy fucking moly! thinks Modine. Ed is the letter carrier, and Bailey one of those Rottweilers that goes mental at the sight of a uniform. The dog belongs to Alvin Dark, two doors down, who’d promised the pooch wouldn’t step unleashed beyond the property line.

     Next on scene is Miranda, Alvin’s busty wife. “Goddamn you, Bailey!” she hollers, all shoulder-length shag and flopping udders tramping across the Nickersons’ precious lawn. One glance at her and the hound abandons the hunt, plopping, tail a-wagging, onto its belly. Miranda takes hold of the collar and hauls off the fugitive beast.

     He helps retrieve the mail scattered in flight.

     “That’s the third time this month,” Ed says. His hands are trembling. “Somebody should poison the mutt.”

     “I’ll donate the ground beef,” Modine says.

      He chucks a fundraising flyer into the recycling bag and pries open the only letter. It’s from a publisher, and says, “After a careful read of your manuscript, That Night on Ibiza: Love, Deception & Betrayal, the editorial board regrets…”

     Fuck you, you fucking fuckers!

     He prints the rejection and thumb-tacks it to the wall of his study, alongside the others.

—

Every town the size of Broadmoor could use a Waffles. He’s the man to call when you need a last-minute house-sitter. He’ll mow your lawn, pick up a prescription, deliver the egg foo young when the New Moon Panda is short-staffed. Or maybe you left the stove on. 

     If he had a resumé, it would include the following: Delvin McKracken and spouse Cookie were at the airport when they realized they’d left the passports on a dresser. Bali was their first overseas vacation, both had the yips; each blamed the other, as even happy couples do. Waffles squeezed in through the bathroom window left open a pinch due to the feculence of Delvin’s morning stool. Slapped the documents into sweaty palms minutes before the couple jetted into the wild, blue yonder.

     And this: Mattie Haybottom, who lives in the first trailer east of the Mill Pond Bridge, had a debilitating skin condition that flared unpredictably. It delivered an itch, she told the gals on cribbage night, “that’ll have ya yankin’ out your effin’ fingernails.” For years husband Ben nursed the affliction with creams and lotions promoted on the shopping channel, but he up and did what we all do eventually, “one of them melanomas.” Solution? Waffles.

     Modine had been the seniors’ English teacher at Broadmoor High when Waffles was in the class for the academically challenged, so any communication between them was restricted to a passing nod. The relationship was nurtured after he’d retired, and Waffles had given up on school.

     He knew that during the winter months, which in that part of the country would begin at several degrees below freezing, Waffles stayed at the shelter, in the rec centre, but had recently been living under the stairs at city hall. As a former councillor and unsuccessful mayoralty candidate, Modine knew the space had been used to store unused office equipment, and that a new slate of electors auctioned everything off, with proceeds turned over to Parks. The newly vacated room had an electrical outlet and after-hours access to a washroom for anyone slight enough to squeeze through a vent.

     By the time his residency was discovered, Waffles had cleared the cobwebs and added household essentials. The outside entrance was hidden from the street by a head-high cedar hedge, but questions were raised soon enough about the propriety of a homeless man setting up a pied-à-terre on civic property.

     Visiting dignitaries will talk, went one objection, causing Waffles, when the remark reached him, to snort, “Most of us wouldn’t recognize a visiting dignitary if he was wearing a Santa suit.” Staffers agreed, and why wouldn’t they? Who, but a Waffles, will rise at any hour for any reason, and for whatever sum is offered?

—

He slips in behind the hedge and raps on the door just as the town’s streetlamps are activated. The square fronting the vintage chambers glows warmly in the incandescence.

     “Identify yourself!” Waffles shouts above Armadillo Road’s “Pour Me A Double,” blaring from a CD player. Canned ravioli warms on the camp stove.

     “Mr. Modine! I’ve got something for you!”

     Former students who’d volunteered on his political campaigns still address him by the honorific. He tried disabusing them of the formality, but to no avail. Mr. Modine, he realized, it shall forever be.

     Waffles toes an overturned plastic pail across the floor.

     “You’ll stay for tea?”

     Over the years he’d hired Waffles to shovel the snow from his walkway and maintain Elanor’s flower beds, as she’d wearied of gardening just as she had of tennis, photography, and hot yoga—and, too, of the hairstyles and outfits required to properly enjoy those amusements.

     Following the divorce, his back acting up, Modine employed Waffles for other labours as well, and he’d once testified as a character witness when Waffles had been detained for disturbing the peace. “A weirdo,” he recalled a fellow teacher opining, “but harmless.” At school he’d been accused of looking up adolescent dresses, but nothing came of it. Said phys ed teacher Ron Jennings one night over a guys-only beer, “Who here hasn’t?”

     After his parents passed, Waffles found his way to the streets. There were siblings, but none close by. The liquor store and a former showgirl took care of what was left of his inheritance.     Sipping Earl Grey from a mayonnaise jar, Modine realizes the year or so he hasn’t seen him has taken a toll. The blond mane that once tumbled to his shoulders now coils lank and greasy around sand dollar ears. The hint of a beer paunch dips over his belt.

     “Gonna run again, Mr. Modine? You almost beat Swartz last time.”

     Graham Swartz managed a string of family owned fast-food restaurants across the southeast. His father had been a prominent developer and shameless self-booster. Ads aired on the Swartz-owned radio station branded Modine “a school teacher socialist who’d double our taxes.” Though he hadn’t proposed such a measure, or even considered doing so, he lost the count by a few hundred votes. Swartz has ruled Broadmoor ever since.

     “The election’s still a few months away,” Waffles says. “If you change your mind, I know the old gang will support you.”

     “I’ve had my kick at the can, thanks.”

     He provides an outline of the job. “It should take two days, three at the most.” He doesn’t mention the possibility of the mission going sideways.

—

The van’s a Chevie Astro. Its passenger seat had been removed by the previous owner, so Waffles is consigned to the back, slamming like a racketball into one wall or the other at every sharp turn. They are soon deep into farm country, bounded by wheat and corn fields, barley and canola to the horizon. The road is straight and narrow, traffic sparse—as good a time as any to give detail to the assignment.

     Elanor, he explains, was barren, which had caused them both much grief. Two weeks after returning from a holiday with girlfriends on the Spanish island of Ibiza, she asked for a divorce. “She said she wanted to go in a different direction, but eventually admitted she hadn’t been with the girls. She’d hooked up with a tech exec she’d been romancing online.”

     Elanor’s shacked up with a dentist now, he says. “Hers.”

     “Women,” Waffles sympathizes.

     Modine reaches into his briefcase, passes back the manuscript.

     “My novel. I’ve been working on it for years. I sent it to several publishers, but haven’t got a bite. We’re going to pay a visit to one of them.”

     Waffles appraises the tomb as he might a block of hashish. He fans the pages.

     “I’m not much of a reader, Mr. Modine. What’s it about?”

     “Love, deception, and betrayal. I took a writing class at the college.”

     “Any good?”

     “Readers decide.”

     “I like TV myself. Tractor pulls. Cage fighting. The search for sunken treasure.”

     “A man of the world,” says Modine.

     “I guess.”

     They pull into a truck stop an hour east of Bellview. Waffles makes for the grocery store, returning with a load of salty junk food and a sack of no-name beer. As Modine’s soaping the windshield, a scuffle breaks out behind the diner—a biker slapping around a girl. Beefy truckers intervene, the damsel flees.  Minutes later she’s pounding on the van’s passenger door.

     “Can you give me a lift, mister? It’s a 911 kind of thing.”

     Waffles monitors the scene from the rear window.

     “The dude’s walking this way. Looks pissed.”

     She appears to be in her late twenties, early thirties. Cheeks sooty with dripping eyeliner, reeks of incense. A nugget of  costume jewellery stabs the bruised lower lip. She’s poured like pancake mix into skillfully mutilated jeans. The patch brands her a Satan’s Disciple.

     He waves her into the back and speeds off.

     “Pleased to meet ya, fellas,” she says. “I’m Queenie.”

     “Is your boyfriend going to give us trouble?” Modine asks.

     “We’re trying to make an important meeting,” says Waffles.

     “I’d floor it. Norm’s whacko.”

     He turns down the radio to better hear the approach of a pursuing Harley Davidson. He imagines himself being dragged from the van and stomped. Isn’t that what bikers do, stomp? Waffles applies ice from the cooler to the girl’s lip.

     When it’s apparent they’ve escaped retribution, he slows down, and light chatter ensues. Waffles boasts about his city hall digs, deleting reference of the subterranean particulars. Modine mentions the novel. “There’s a printout in the back somewhere if you care to have a look.”

     Queenie, when it’s her turn, narrates episodes from an unhappy life: a teenage abortion, punchy boyfriends. “I came west for a fresh start.”

     And hooked up with Satan—atta girl!

     Just when she’s about done with the autobiog, Queenie segues to her “philosophy of life.” She believes aliens are amongst us, and that the Holocaust never happened. The moon landing was faked, and Princess D’s death no accident. He’s not surprised, as conspiracies ripen in clusters, that she’s concluded the Covid vaccine is a hoax, and the restrictions put in place across the country illegal. “I’m really careful,” she says, “about what I put into my body.”

     He normally enjoys a spirited exchange, but the reality distortion field sweeping across the southern border in regards to all matters factual makes rational discussion unlikely. He grits his teeth and concentrates on the road.

     “I agree with everything you’re saying,” Waffles says, but Modine believes it more likely his assistant doesn’t know what she’s talking about, but sniffs the possibility of some hanky-panky. He wonders if what they say about biker gangs is true, that the male membership shares its women like reefer. If so, how might that square with what Queenie green lights into her body? 

—

In amongst the lodgepole pine of the foothills, fatigue catches up with him. He swaps places with Waffles, stretches out in the back. Queenie’s hunched over a funnel of cellphone light aimed at the double-spaced pages of That Night on Ibiza.

     “I’m digging this so far, Mr. Modine,” she says. “Not a lot of big words, but plenty of big thoughts.”

     “Deception, betrayal, and love!” shouts Waffles. “Isn’t that right, Mr. Modine?”

     “Close enough, Waff.”

     As he drifts off to sleep, Waffles finger-drumming on the steering wheel to the headphone melody of the Austin Lounge Lizards, Queenie reads on. When he wakes an hour or so later, a stack of pages has been set aside.

     She says, “I’m at the part where the older woman is giving divorce advice to the younger one.”

     “Refresh my memory,” he says.

     Queenie searches for the passage: “Don’t waste your time getting even,” she quotes. “Get a good lawyer, and get everything.”    

—

Google Maps directs them to a split-level outside the ski resort town of Harkney.It’s set back from the road, behind dense shrubbery; the closest neighbour is several kilometres away. A muddy Ford SUV is parked in the driveway. Moths swarm the porch light. 

     They crouch on the deck around back, peek through the kitchen window. “If there’s a dog,” whispers Waffles, “it would’ve barked by now.” He opens the sliding door with a single snap of the Chevie’s tire iron.

     “You didn’t learn that at Broadmoor High,” Modine says.

     “CSI:Vegas.”

     Queenie opens the fridge, checks the expiry date on some luncheon meat, makes a face. She finds a couple of bottled beers, and opens one with her teeth.

     They split up: Waffles and Queenie take the basement, Modine the main floor.

     “Back here in five,” he says.

     Waffles and Queenie find nothing of interest downstairs and return to the kitchen. “This place is a pigsty,” she says. “Like it’s already been turned.”

     They’re about to search for Modine when he comes down the hall pushing before him a pudgy, patchy-bearded man in a T-shirt and sagging underpants. His hands are secured with electrician’s tape.

     “He was under the bed,” Modine says. “Had to be restrained.”

     “Bet you didn’t do so good at hide-and-seek,” says Waffles.

     “Are you Edward Belanger?” Modine asks. “Page Count Press?”

     “What if I am?”

     “I sent you my novel more than a year ago.”

     “Ever heard of email? The telephone?”

     “Should I smack him?” says Waffles.

     “Maybe later.”

     “What’s your novel about?” Belanger asks.

     “Love, deception, and betrayal,” Queenie replies.

     “I get hundreds of submissions a year. If I don’t get a money-maker soon, I’ll have to shutter the place.”

     Modine globs onto his T-shirt. “You have an office, I presume.”

     Waffles and Queenie retire to the living room. He ignites the gas fireplace, she forages. There’s a decent sound system, dozens of CDs. In a den off the hallway he finds the liquor cabinet and a baggie with a couple of fatties prepped. He sparks one up, she mixes the drinks. The first bars of a jaunty number by Slim Dime and the Prairie Kings crackles through the speakers. They dance.

—

The office is lined with bookshelves. The desk supports a laptop, a printer, a hooded lamp, several bubble envelopes, and a trail of moist mouse shit. Boxes of new books are scattered about, a whiff of printer’s ink hangs in the stuffy air. A message board features photos of a youthful Belanger mugging with authors. Empty and half-empty glasses, some having doubled as ashtrays, occupy every ledge. A lone window looks out over a yard framed by a listing picket fence. The stem of a push mower pokes up through the dandelions.

     Modine drops Belanger into the desk chair. He binds his legs before removing the wrist restraints.

     “Better?”

     “Than what? A beating from your Neanderthal?”

     “You owe me a reply.”

     The publisher points to an unsteady column of manuscripts stacked to the ceiling. Several have slipped from the top and lie splayed on the floor.

      “Yours is probably in there somewhere.”

     “The slush pile?”

     “So it’s been called.”

     “I sent a stamped, self-addressed envelope. There’s a postal box at the end of your street.”

     “A home invasion over a couple of stamps? Our grant never came through, the co-publisher went back to school, and my girlfriend took off. I can only read so much crap in a day.”

     “Don’t you have some kind of selection criteria?”

     “Sure, but some days I just roll the billiard balls across the table and see where they end up.”

      “If I knew you were this cynical, I wouldn’t have bothered.”

     “And I’d still be sleeping.”

     Belanger stinks. With that pallor, the eyes closed, he could be mistaken for a corpse.

     “You—”

     “I’m not saying another word until I’ve had a drink. Bottom drawer.”

     He finds a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label.

     “Glasses?”

     “The only thing I’ve got more of is rodents. Little fuckers are everywhere.”

     He finds two mugs. Pries them lose from their surface. Gives each a cursory rinse at the washtub out back. A few snorts of the grog and Belanger comes to life. Colour floods his patchy skin.    

     Modine isn’t much of a drinker. One glass of the stuff and he’s thinking of Haley, who he hasn’t seen in years. She sat across from him in the writing class. A chapbook of her poetry had been published by a women’s’ collective, making her an instant celebrity with the group’s aspiring rhymesters. She sold about a dozen copies to family and friends—“pity purchases,” she called them—but most were stashed in the closet, collecting dust. After class they’d race back to her condo. When the bedsprings stopped squeaking, her cats would gather like a lynch mob outside the bedroom door.

     He returns to the present, to Belanger and a blur of scruffy fur scooting across the floor, diving into the slush pile.   

     “What’s it going to take for you to read my book?”

     “Fuck off, never come back.”

     “Maybe you’ve been releasing the wrong titles. Some of yours are…a bit opaque.”

     “I’ve been at this for thirty-odd years. What do you suggest, rookie?”

     “Mine: That Night on Ibiza.”

     “You may not be aware that grants haven’t kept up with costs, and that revenues are down across the board. Even the top commercial houses are sacking editors. People are avoiding the self-reflection needed for serious reading. Most people are into sports and celebrity gossip, maybe a beach whodunit. They’re glued like zombies to their cellphones or streaming The Whorish Housewives of Wherever—”

     The conversation is interrupted by breaking glass and laughter. Belanger glances at the ceiling, rolls bloodshot eyes. He extends his empty goblet.

     “Fill ’er up or I clam up. Don’t be stingy.”

     “You’re a very angry man.”

     “Looked at a newspaper recently?”

     Something large is overturned, the walls vibrate. The fridge? A body-slam? Belanger doesn’t seem to notice. He says, “Don’t misunderstand me: There are still readers who crave printed self-expression, the magic of words hop-scotching across a page, a rollicking yarn, but sales receipts don’t lie. How do we market a book available free of charge from a library? I’ve known plenty of talented writers in my day. The lucky ones are competing for jobs teaching others what they themselves can’t make a living at.”

     “How do you cope?”         

     Belanger leans forward. The eyes bulge.

     “Drugs and alcohol. Stray tail when I can get it.”

     “I see suicide in your future.”

     “It’s always an option.”

     “Would I be correct assuming you were once an aspiring writer? Had your heart broken?”

      His reply is drowned out by a thunderous clamour. Modine glances out the window. Motorcycles, and plenty of them. The big kind.

—

He remembers reading an article about biker gangs. How they appeared in several countries simultaneously after the Second World War, all those untethered ex-servicemen. How The Wild One, the early Fifties flick starring the heartthrob Marlon Brando, birthed the cycle genre. He remembered the posters for Born Losers and The Girls from Thunder Strip. Cycle Savages and Leather Boys. Westerns played out on wheels rather than stallions. Bad Boys, not Good Guys. And there was the documentary about the Hells Angels, the notorious California-based club. The filmmaker asking a scowling “associate” about the missing apostrophe in the gang’s name, and his response. “It’s you who miss it,” he’d spat. “We don’t.”

     Before Queenie, Modine had never met a biker. As he and Belanger are downstairs awaiting their fate, the main floor is being ransacked by Satan’s little helpers. It occurs to him that those he’d seen being arrested on the news over the years looked similarly contemptuous. Faces marred by skin conditions, many of them, limbs and necks festooned with daggers and skulls and dripping blood. Born losers all.

     The arrival of Waffles and Queenie interrupts his musing. They’re blotto.

     “You guys have a visitor” she says. “Norm.”

     “I don’t know a Norm,” Modine says.

     “My old man.”

     “The author of your fat lip?”

     “In my world, it’s a love tap.”    

     Into the publisher’s cluttered office, trailed by a clutch of wasted clowns in full costume, bounds the aforementioned. He’s wearing the obligatory vestments, heavy boots and a jean jacket emblazoned with the Disciple crest, road-dusty trousers and a funky T-shirt. A flap of greasy hair slouches on his scalp like a frayed door mat, deep lines parenthesize the unsmiling mouth.

     “Are these the assholes?” Norm says.

     “Chubby here qualifies,” Queenie says. “Mr. Modine’s a good shit.”

     “You got any more pot?” Norm asks. “My guys are running low.”

     Waffles tells him to look inside the Chinese vase on the nightstand in Belanger’s bedroom. “There’s pills, too.” Off, happily, skips the gang leader.

     Alone again, Modine removes Belanger’s constraints and the two of them are left sitting in the dark as the party upstairs drags on throughout the afternoon and into the evening. The living room window shatters. A brawl breaks out. Somebody’s dry heaving.

     “Way to go douchebag,” says Belanger. “How did this go from book chat to zombie invasion?”

    “We gave her a lift. How would I know Norm planted a tracker on her?”

     Early the next morning, the gang sleeping off their excess, Queenie returns. She’s made coffee.

     “I’ve been talking to Norm,” she says.

     “I’ll bet that’s not all your mouth has been doing,” says Belanger.

      “One of the boys, Sparky, has a thing about fires, and he’s got this look in his eyes,” she replies, “so you might want to zipper that pie hole.”

      Despite her poor taste in men, and her weakness for conspiracies, his opinion of Queenie has evolved. This is one book he may have prejudged by its cover, because the girl he’d minimized and stereotyped liked Ibiza. She gets it—she gets me!

     “You’re every bit the dipshit you try to be,” she addresses Belanger, “but Waffles and me didn’t want this to happen, and neither did Mr. Modine. I understand that if you don’t turn things around, you might lose everything.”

     “What’s that to you? Your primitives are trashing my house.”

     She squats. “Listen: Norman has been around bikers all his life. He was a biker baby. His parents were bikers, his brothers, too, and so were his aunts and uncles. When I told him you were a book publisher, I could see he got to thinkin.’ I’ve never done it with a guy who’s had such a huge need for attention.”

     “And I should give a damn because…”

     “Because if ya keep that mouth shut and do as I say, we might give this story a happy ending.”

—   

It’s mid-week, almost midnight, the road rain-slicked. Traffic is light. Waffles and Queenie are passed out in the back. His showdown with Belanger has left him despondent. The encounter has him questioning the years he’s laboured over Ibiza. He slips on Waffles’ headphones. A catchy ditty by Terry Allen and the Panhandle Mystery Band delivers some succour.

     At dawn the skyline of Broadmoor swells on the horizon. Motorists taking the turnoff into town are met by a campaign billboard for the incumbent mayor. That air-brushed profile with its phony smile. The stupid slogan used in all Swartz campaigns, If it’s not broken, don’t change it!

     The shift buzzer at the rendering plant wakes the lovebirds.

     “Everybody alive back there?”

     “Hunky-dory.” Waffles, his voice raspy.

     “Tickety-boo.” Queenie. And hers.

     “Norm and the boys cleared out quick.”

     “Some of ’em have real jobs,” Queenie says.

     “I was surprised he let you go.”

     “He’s got others.”

     “Where can I drop you guys?”

     “City hall.” Waffles.

     “Both of you?”

     Pause.

     “Yup.” Queenie.”

—

 He carries an espresso out to the patio, opens his laptop. The flower garden is abuzz with pollinating honey bees and monarch butterflies. The pink hyacinths and bell-shaped snowdrops are at their royal best. He’s scrolling through his emails when he’s interrupted by a commotion out front. Coming around the side of the house, he finds Ed Scott on the landing, his mailbag the last defence against death-by-Rottweiler. Miranda Dark appears. She whips the hound and drags it home.

     Ed sits on the top stair. Catches his breath, mops a sopping brow.

     “Is Bailey the only canine that doesn’t care for you, Ed?”

     “On this block, yes, but my day isn’t finished.”

     He returns to the patio, to his emails. There’s a message from Manchester Wrigglesworth, a commercial publisher with international reach. He knew it was a long shot, but he’d sent along an early draft anyways. 

     “Our editorial board has read That Night on Ibiza,” it begins…

     Motherfuck—

     “…and the delight with your narrative was unanimous. Should the novel still be available, we advise that you secure the services of an agent, as we are also interested in the movie rights for Vroom! Vroom, A Leader of the Pack Tells All, your award-winning bestseller from Page Count Press.”

Don McLellan has worked as a journalist in Canada, South Korea, and Hong Kong. He has published three story collections and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, a ReLit Award, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and the Whistler Independent Book Award. More info at donmclellan.com