Pumpkin Eater. Jeffrey Round

Dan, as slim as it might seem, was that Darlene’s brother was an occasional dope smoker. She’d admitted that after much hesitation, seeming to think it a grievous liability. “It’s not that unusual,” he reassured her.

      Finding the drug dealers in any given neighbourhood was a shell game. Ask the right questions at the right time and you’d hit a mainline of information. The wrong questions asked of the wrong person on the wrong day, and you were almost guaranteed to see everybody’s heads disappear, like a beach full of crabs at low tide. Lots of holes, but nothing showing aboveground. Once they got spooked, they could stay that way for months. Nobody forced these small-time dealers to sell their wares. For most of them, it was part-time work you did on top of your regular job as an underpaid garage mechanic or counter clerk at a late-night donut shop. A little moolah to ease the pain of whatever life didn’t provide naturally. Selling crack to pay off the Mafia or to fund your own addiction was another matter, of course. There was often urgency there, but Dan doubted he was chasing that kind of animal.

      “Darryl’s a gentle man,” his sister insisted.

      A guitar player and a poet, as it turned out. In other words, the kind of guy who picked up a little weed in the neighbourhood then came home and smoked it in the solitude of his garage, with nobody the wiser. Only in this case it seemed he’d somehow got mixed up with the wrong crowd.

      Darryl Hillary was beginning to sound a little weird. He was also one of the most reclusive, introverted young men in the city. According to his sister, almost no one knew of his existence. But even poets must have friends, Dan thought. And apparently an enemy or two, as well. Then again, weren’t writers and journalists the first to be silenced? An uncensored poet could be a dangerous thing indeed. But in that case, if the body turned out to be his, why cut off an ear? Why not a tongue instead?

      Dan sent in the usual requests for background checks. Nothing arrived on Friday and everything slowed down by the weekend. It was now going on sixty hours since the call with Hillary’s sister. In that time, Dan had managed to find the local pusher, the one who supplied the neighbourhood weed. He repaired motors at a small appliance store. No glamour there. Clearly not a big-time dealer. The man was wary when Dan approached, no doubt worried about a bust. He loosened up when Dan flashed the picture and explained why he was looking for Darryl, while assuring him he wasn’t a cop. The man admitted to knowing Darryl — Dan was careful not to ask in what context — but sounded convincing when he said he hadn’t seen him in several months. Which likely meant that Hillary had scored big the last time they’d been in contact, though he wasn’t about to ask for details of the transaction or to wonder if he was keeping proper sales tax records. Dan left his card and a request to be in touch if Darryl contacted him.

      Heading downtown now, he wondered if it was this contact that had netted the call from the fast food outlet earlier in the evening. Dan was even reasonably sure which diner it was — there was only one open late in that neighbourhood, at the corner of Lansdowne and St. Clair, not far from the former abattoir. If he drove past now it would still be open, though his anonymous caller would long since have wolfed down an order of fries and a burger and bolted.

      He turned south and headed east on College Street, past Yonge and over to Church. Despite the hour, the hookers were still on their corners, long-legged and ever optimistic that Daddy Warbucks would be cruising in their direction any minute. Got the time? Your place or mine? It was more than two decades since Dan had seen anything from that side of the fence, but there was a period in his teenage years when he’d needed to support himself. He’d done that by standing on a downtown corner until he met the man who would take him away from all that, briefly, before getting onto the straight-and-somewhat-narrow in his early twenties after finding himself the father of a young boy.

      At seventeen, however, Dan had been desperate to escape his claustrophobic, dysfunctional background and his abusive, barely communicative father. He’d left the old man to drink himself to death, a task Stuart Sharp had accomplished quickly and efficiently once he got down to the business at hand, one of the few successes in his otherwise un-noteworthy life. Dan’s mother’s early death due to pneumonia was something he preferred not to dwell on, if he could avoid it.

      In fact, when he considered his beginnings, Dan felt he’d been lucky overall. Life had its surprising twists and turns, but somehow his had turned out all right, where other people’s hadn’t. He was never more aware of this than when sitting down with clients to discuss the loved ones who’d disappeared — some after fights, some after disappointments, while others simply vanished without leaving a clue as to where they’d gone. Or why. He’d become expert at ferreting out the signs, following them like a trail of breadcrumbs to learn how and why people reinvented themselves. Assuming they were lucky enough to be given a choice and a second chance, that is. He became adept at sniffing the air, picking up the scent of one life and following it to where it morphed into another, the mismatched remnants of a shattered vessel pieced together into something that resembled a whole again. Those were the relatively lucky ones, Dan knew. Then there were the thousands who approached some kind of vanishing point and were never heard from again, donning a cloak of invisibility. Who knew, but some of them could be standing on a nearby street corner right now, having joined the ranks of the Girls of the Night.

      Dan’s stomach growled: it was payback time for staying up late. He swung south and headed down to the lake, following the concrete trail beneath the Gardiner Expressway, past the film studios and dockyard canals. A burger and fries combo from Wendy’s was uppermost on his mind. He stopped at the Leslie Street outlet, the one with the friendly Jamaican woman who was there every night, no matter what time he turned up. He imagined she had kids to support, debts to pay off. Otherwise, why would she be there grinning like a madwoman at 3:18 in the morning?

      He handed over his change and silently wished her a better future, whatever it might be, while wondering if Darryl Hillary liked Wendy’s combos. Dan gratefully accepted the pungent-smelling bag of carbs and grease and a large Frosty before driving on. With one hand plunged into the paper to draw out a fistful of stringy fries, he passed the turn-off that would have led home. Instead, seemingly of its own accord, the car turned left on Queen Street, heading back over the Don Valley until it reached a cul-de-sac with a thicket of townhouses springing up like mushrooms. He stopped in front of a tall grey unit in a row of five. This place would soon have his name on it. His and Trevor’s, if things turned out. Kedrick’s, too, but that would be temporary now that Ked was nearing the end of high school and starting to think about university. And so the page turned, Dan mused.

      His new neighbourhood was Corktown, a roughly triangular area bounded on the south and east by the Don River where it fed into Lake Ontario. To the north, Regent Park’s housing projects were jammed together with the privileged gentrification of Cabbagetown, while poor, unfashionable Moss Park and its homeless shelters lay to the west. With Dan’s rag-tag background, he could rightly claim to belong to all of these groups, and none.

      Some declared that Corktown got its name from the wave of Irish immigrants arriving in the early-nineteenth century, though Dan preferred the local legend that it was due to the many breweries and a cork manufacturer that once employed a good number of the area’s residents. In any case, it was a decidedly old world slice of Toronto’s past containing the city’s first Catholic parish. Somewhere beneath a current-day schoolyard, an unmarked graveyard held the remains of those parishioners, fleeing poverty and famine in the old world only to find death in the new one. Poor Protestants who couldn’t afford the pew fees at nearby St. James Anglican Cathedral eventually erected their own place of worship, Little Trinity, the city’s oldest surviving church. A Tudor Gothic structure built “for all people,” it was set smack on King Street, the new arrivals seemingly unable to shake off the aristocratic shadows of the Dominion even here.

      This would be Dan’s second house in the city. Fifteen years earlier, he had bought his current home at the foot of Leslieville during a slump in the market. It had cost considerably less than expected, but he’d taken his good fortune in stride and made the best of it. Now, with the anticipated addition — meaning Trevor — his domestic arrangements needed expanding. He’d bid on the current property and paid dearly for it, gratefully accepting Trevor’s offer to remake the interior and oversee the project’s completion. It