Blackfly Season

16

MARTIN AMIS SET ASIDE his notepad and took a swig of beer. He was wearing blue jeans that looked just the right degree of lived in, and a cool white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. It had been Kevin’s idea to do the interview at the Gladstone Hotel. He wanted the famous novelist to realize that Toronto was just as hip as London or New York. Hipper.

“Tell us about your working habits. Assuming you have some.” Martin’s tone was easygoing, but the Oxford baritone, not to mention his own literary achievements, gave his every utterance weight. “By which I mean, you make it look easy. One imagines Kevin Tait scribbling lines of verse on airplane napkins and parking tickets.”

“Well, there’s some truth in that,” Kevin said. “I have been known to scribble down an idea or two on a napkin. But you have to have discipline. You have to be willing to put in the time to make something work. I try to be at my desk anywhere from six to eight hours a day.”

“That sounds more like a novelist’s schedule than a poet’s.”

“That’s the way it is, Martin. I put in the hours like anybody else.” A little common touch, there. Never hurt anyone.

“But I heard—and tell me if this is just legend—that you don’t even own a desk.”

“My desk is wherever I put pen to paper. Doesn’t matter if it’s a table in Starbucks or a tree stump in a field.”

“Sorry, mate. Six hours at a tree stump sounds uncomfortable. Six hours at a tree stump sounds crippling”

Kevin took a sip of his single malt. Amis had assured him Vanity Fair would be picking up the tab.

“You can write in a hurricane if it’s going well. Sometimes, it’s like the poem is just flowing in your veins. I’ll tell you, one time I made my morning coffee and I sat down at the kitchen table and started to write. I was working on ‘Needle’—lots of stanzas—and the words were just flowing. And then the light dimmed and I thought the bulb must have burned out. I got up to change it, and I realized there wasn’t any problem with the bulb. It was night.”

“You’d worked through the entire day without realizing it? God, I wish that happened to me. I’d like to write for one minute and not realize it. One nanosecond. You have that sort of experience a lot?”

“Once in a while. Not often enough.”

Amis drank some more of his ale, set his glass aside and leaned forward. “Listen to me,” he said. This delivered sotto voce, a fellow conspirator. “The brutal truth of the matter is you haven’t finished a poem in six months, right?”

“Things are a bit slow just now, that’s true, but—”

“You’ve chased off the one person who truly loves you, who really cares about your talent, who really wants you to do well, in a fit of righteous idiocy. And you’re rotting in some kind of defunct summer camp with a couple of drug dealers any sane person would flee at warp speed.”

Maybe Martin Amis wasn’t the best choice for an interviewer. Maybe he should have held out for Larry King. Someone a little less … prickly.

“I’ll tell you what I think, sunshine,” Amis went on. “I think you’re in way over your head, looking at a sentence of eternity if convicted of trafficking, and by way of medication for the anxiety you’ve been skin-popping morning, noon and night. It looks to me, Kevin, that you’re caught between the mother of all rocks and the daddy of all hard places, because you don’t really—not really, deep down in your wholesome colonial heart—want to be a drug dealer at all. But you just can’t stand to be parted from your supply. You’re a stone junkie, Tait. It’s heroin running through your veins, not poetry, and the chances of you ever writing a single line worth reading are receding by the minute.”

The reverie popped, and Kevin was once again staring at the rough, grubby wood of his cabin wall. The yellow legal pad under his forearm bore the crossed-out attempts at new verses for his ballad.

Well, that moved along all right. It was the next line, The border guards who killed him, that really stumped him. The border guards killed him and then what? And how can they kill a ghost? Maybe I’m too literal-minded to write poetry. The impasse had sent him veering off into another interview. And Amis had been getting pretty hostile there.

Okay, Red Bear and Leon were unnerving, to say the least; there was no denying that biker had turned up dead. Red Bear swore he’d had nothing to do with it, that it was some bad blood among the Riders themselves, but Kevin wasn’t sure he believed him. In any case, just one or two more serious deals and then he’d be free. Bye-bye, Red Bear. Bye-bye, Leon. Another couple of weeks and he’d fly to Tangiers and write poems that would put poetry back on the map.

In the meantime, he would have to exercise what Keats called negative capability. He had to be able to hold two contradictory ideas in his mind at once: the idea that he was associating with possible killers who scared the shit out of him, and the idea that he was a poet trying to scrape the money together to finance his art.

Certainly, the money was rolling in. Red Bear had some serious connections in western Canada, and now they had the goods to sell them—at a magnificent profit. Red Bear didn’t let Kevin or any of the others keep more than tiny amounts—just enough to make a little extra money in town—and he made them account for every ounce. But he paid them well. He kept most of the money himself, of course, but no one had a problem with that. After all, he was the man with the ideas and the contacts.

One day—it was late in the afternoon, and they were just sitting around over coffee at the Rosebud—Red Bear came in and told them all to head back to the camp and get dressed up. “I want you to look like gentlemen,” he said.

He drove them to the most expensive restaurant in the area, the Trianon, where they drank fine wine with dinner and finished off with cognac. Kevin would have preferred beer, but he had to admit the steak was the best he had ever tasted.

“We are at the beginning of a long run of good luck,” Red Bear told them when the brandies came. “Even the spirits are excited about it and, believe me, they don’t get excited about just anything.”

The liveried waiters, the white table linens, the gleaming silver spoke of wealth and plenitude, like a crisp, new thousand-dollar bill. We could be a group of successful young businessmen, Kevin thought, except that none of us has ever had anything to do with legitimate business. And one of us dances around dead pigs. And one of us is dumb as a streetcar. What the hell am I doing here?

“My children,” Red Bear said.

Children? Kevin nearly snorted into his wineglass. Now we’re his children?

“I want us to be successful for a very long time. And that is going to require three things.” Red Bear gave them that look, reflections of candles and wineglasses sparkling in his strange, pale eyes.

“The first requirement is hard work,” he said. “We have to find more contacts, move more product, make more sales. I will be dividing these burdens among you. Possibly there will be some travel involved. In particular, we have to make more inroads into the prairie provinces. B.C. I have locked up, but Alberta and Saskatchewan are still to be conquered.

“The second requirement—and it’s so obvious I shouldn’t have to talk about it—is discretion. You can never talk about what we do. Never. To no one. Think of it like the Secret Service or whatever you want, but you can never tell anyone—and I mean anyone—what you do for a living.”

“Not even family?” Toof said. “I got a bunch of brothers I talk to once in a while.”

Red Bear grabbed his wrist, and a shadow of fear crossed Toof’s open features.

“We are your family,” Red Bear said. “Don’t you ever forget that.”

“What’s the third thing?” Kevin said, trying to take the heat off Toof. “You said success was going to require three things.”

Those husky’s eyes on him.

“The third thing, my friend, is abstinence. Nobody at this table is ever to touch the product. Ever. You can smoke all the dope you want, I don’t care. You can sell your private stashes in town for extra cash, I don’t care about that, either. But if I find one of you has used so much as a microgram from our shipments, I will kill you. I am not joking.”

“Don’t you think that’s a little extreme?” Kevin said. “We’re living with a lot of temptation here. Human beings are fallible.”

“I’m telling you the way it is, Kevin. If you don’t like it, you’re free to work for someone else. Maybe the Viking Riders would be interested.”

Leon laughed, and nearly choked on his brandy.