The Man Who Killed by Fraser Nixon

just might end up in a whorehouse on Bullion like Mr. Babe Ruth.
    IN THE TAVERN my Frankfurter indigested so I ordered a Vichy water. A dwarf sang in Italian to a fat man beside him. The record was turned and the machine let out jazz, Roxy and His Gang, hometown boys like the Guybourg All-Stars. I started to think about Jack, and Laura.
    He’d introduced me to her back in ’24. Jack was being political on campus and she was bucking patrimony, seemingly. Laura Dunphy, the devoted only daughter of Sir Lionel Dunphy, Q.C., Privy Council, past president of the Liberal Party, a real tyee. Jack had played Pied Piper and led a group of us to a Bolshevist meeting soon after Lenin’s death. An incomprehensible Glaswegian gave a report on factory conditions in the Ukraine and glorious future prospects for same. In attendance were myself, Jack, Laura, her inevitable plain friend Margery, Smiler, that prick Jerome Martel, and some clinging dishrag girls. Jack and Laura, a pair of redheads, strange portent. After the lecture a firebrand gave a stemwinder of revolutionary oration, and at its end we were all communists, marching out onto the street dead earnest, singing “The Internationale.” In a café the collective solved the world’s problems over egg creams and french fries. As we broke up for the night Laura put her arm through mine, announcing that I would be the one to escort her home. The look on Jack’s face was difficult to read, that secret amusement. Jerome Martel’s feelings were plain as day, and I gloated as I carried Laura off. I was done, easy as that. She had me by the time I walked her up the steps of her father’s mansion on the hill, still humming “The Internationale,” what the dwarf was trilling to the fat man at the end of the bar right now.
    I gave them a mock salute with my seltzer and said: “Viva d’Annunzio.” It shut the little man up. He turned to his comrade and they looked daggers at me. I could just as easily have toasted Mussolini. That would’ve been splendid, fighting a midget. A long way from sparring with Jack when we were young. He’d fought in the army, taking an inter-regimental belt at Valcartier before being shipped to Europe. We’d even picked it up again as recently as last year before once more drifting apart. Jack an irregular comet. Where’d he been since then? Where was he now? Sizing myself up in the mirror, dark and different, my reflection hydrocephalic and clouded in the glass, I had to ask: Where was I?
    From the bar I bought a pack of Consuls and wanted whiskey but the law allowed only beer and wine unless you knew where to look. At least this province was better than the rest of the country, dry for most of a decade. I’d hunt up a government licence tomorrow for something stronger. The record stopped playing, the beer arrived flat, and I began to fill with regret. My mind turned to bygone failures, weakness, a misspent past, the decay of my medical studies, Laura lost forever, Jack maybe dead. The Pater, polishing his barometer and returning to his desk to read Scripture. The dwarf and his partner left. A new record played an Irish lament, “Turn Ye to Me,” sung by John McCormack. Tired-looking whores sat at a table for a warm up, on a break from working the Sabbath. Near nine I made my sortie, dumping silver and ashes on the bartop.
    Outside, it was raining. I turned my collar up against the elements. Old newspapers clogged the gutters. Crowded trolleys glowed by, windows steamed with human exhalation. Neon reflected off the empty wet pavement. My boots filled with icewater, my bare head soaked. I’ll catch pneumonia and die, came the thought. A right on Metcalfe to the Dominion, which was closed. Damnation. All lights out, the dark window advertising a plate supper of pork knuckles for a quarter-dollar. I pounded on the door. A black figure came towards me. Through the pane I heard: