The Orphans of the Creek

By Richard S. Todd

Whiteboy is Scanlon Creek's top disc jockey. He's handsome, drives a convertible, and is ready to start a family with Juniper, his beautiful girlfriend. He's also a rising star in the Creek's drug-dealing underworld, where he and his best friend, Joey, are ready to make a killing with a new designer drug that's sure to take the Creek's nightclub scene to new heights.

But it all starts to crumble when Whiteboy's father, absent twenty years since he ran off to follow a mysterious preacher known only as "John Doe", contacts Whiteboy and entices him into a final visit. In a strange castle in northern Ontario, Whiteboy bids his father farewell and scatters his ashes, only to find that the ashes don't want to be scattered. They want to stay. They want to live.

Since then, nothing has been the same for Whiteboy and a violent cloud seems to be gathering over Scanlon Creek. Suddenly, the Creek's seedy side--along with decades of shameful secrets starts boiling out of the shadows. And everything those shadows touch, they cling to. Forever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard S. Todd
• Release date: May 9, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311493965

Richard S. Todd

Richard S. Todd is a Toronto-born author of Canadian fiction. From the critically-praised novel 'Raincloud' to the newly-released "The Orphans of the Creek", Mr. Todd has entertained his denizens of readers with crisp, exciting, character-driven literature. His short story 'Clive' has been published in the 'Brainstorms' anthology and NoD Magazine #15, and is being produced for film in 2014. Todd also serves as President of The Editor's Desk, serving writers of all genres at www.editorsdesk.net. Visit Richard S. Todd online at www.richard-todd.com.

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The Orphans of the Creek

The Second Novel by

Richard S. Todd

Sky Lake Publishing, Toronto

To the Pain I Feel

Whenever You Dance Across my Heart

Prologue

Wyam

Joey’s headlights cut through the fog as I speed back down Middletown Road. His car isn’t as fast as mine, never was, but at least it’s still in one piece and can take me somewhere. When I last saw my own car it was a burning glob of metal. It’s how it had to be though. How else would people believe that Whiteboy was dead?

My eyes dart from the windshield, to the speedometer, to the rearview mirror. I catch sight of my red-rimmed eyes and spiked hair, now sporting a gray or two among the brown. Out front, the yellow lines come at me like neon darts and disappear under the hood of the Cavalier. There are no other cars on the road. By now the cops in Scanlon Creek have probably blocked the entrance into town. They won’t be able handle this sort of catastrophe; they’ll call every emergency vehicle from the surrounding communities and they’ll all come screaming. What a goddamn mess. Those cookie-cutters will never be the same.

I keep the car humming between the limit and about seven kilometres over. Even though every cop is probably at the centre of town I’m still fearful of speed traps. After all, this is Joey’s car and I didn’t have time to clean it. God knows what he’s got stashed that some nosey cop would be overjoyed to find.

But that wouldn’t be the worst thing. I just don’t think I could take the sight of the flashing red-white-blue lights in the rearview mirror right now. That would just about drive me mad.

Those needles again, poking at my insides. I reach beside me for Juniper’s hand but of course it’s not there.

Silas Greene

I feel her near me, like I used to years before when the leaves were just buds on long-ago young saplings. When we would walk together in the garden and smell the gentle lilac that tickled my senses. Those were my happiest days, and even though I’ve accomplished much, I can never forget those nights of madness we shared sequestered in my room. I’ve longed for her ever since, yearned to be with her again, if not to love her then to destroy her.

Soon, my darling. Soon.

Anne Bush

My arms are over my face but still I smell oil and dirty shoes. The stink is so strong that it coats my tongue and I smack my dry lips to moisten them and rid them of the foul taste. But the odour is overpowering, so I concentrate on trying to move to a more comfortable position. The space is too small, however, and I’m forced to endure these cramped conditions.

It’s dark and I’m tired but I feel exhilarated, so giddy that I don’t even feel fear. I actually feel free, unfettered by the bonds that were worth killing for. I gave everything to protect the life that until recently felt safe, perfect. People loved and respected me. Some even feared me, including my own two daughters. My son never had the chance. They have no idea what I’ve had to do to get here. Was it all worth it? I’m hardly in the state of mind to think about that; I have no idea what that bastard slipped me.

I think of the irony and began to giggle again before punching the walls of my prison, ignoring the sharp pain shooting through my aging bones.

Juniper Bush

All white. No sensation.

Part One

Early That Night

1

Wyam

If you were to ask me what I remember most about the Town Pump, it would be the lights.

Every Friday night for the past nine years I had watched those lights wash over the gyrating multitudes in neon hues like an ominous rainbow, their tangling beams of colour rolling through the smoky darkness in an orgy of spectral elegance over the Pump’s dance floor. Sometimes the lights moved with the beat of the music; other times they spun to their own rhythm. Either way, they never stopped moving until the final song was played and the last call for love rang its final note.

In the meantime, strobes flashed like exploding stars, temporarily blinding the drunken mass underneath, revealing the sins and desires of Scanlon Creek’s youth, their deepest inhibitions broken down for a few short hours.

The lights revealed young men in tight T-shirts that showed every last sinew of every last muscle, knocking shoulders with others in an invitation to battle. Pushing, shoving, slapping, punching, these circuses of bravado appeared like stop-motion animation under the violently flashing strobes. The young women, poured into their tube tops and shorts, cheered from the sidelines as a swarm of blackshirts swooped in like hunting locusts and rushed the offenders through the ocean of sweaty bodies and out of sight. The excitement of battle was then quickly forgotten and I, Whiteboy, their DJ, was once again in control.

The lights never stopped moving through whatever scene of love or war played out before me. They were as much a part of the experience as the music and the drinks and the drugs. Their warm textures brought me comfort. But lately one sweeping spotlight had caused me concern, causing me to wince as its dull fury enveloped me. It was an odd colour for a club, crimson red like Silas Green’s eyes. My whole world changed under the glare of this single light, replacing reality with a nightmarish vision that I found almost beautiful in its primal glory. People weren’t singing or talking or dancing with joyous glee anymore. They were screaming in terror as unimaginable horrors played out in their minds like a scene from a spectral Hell.

Young girls were covered in blood, oozing buckets of it from the canyon-like gouges in their heads. The glasses that once held their liberating elixirs had exploded in their hands. They shoved the broken pieces of glass into their eyes, bringing a shower of eye fluid to mix with the blood now cascading down their once pretty faces, creating an ever-expanding pool on the metal dance floor.

I watched as the men cut themselves with the glass through their shirts, torturing their bodies, slicing their genitals. The Pump was suddenly a den of inhumanity; screaming, soulless beings without hope, without parentage, damning themselves for sins that lay buried within their hearts.

And deep inside I wanted to be with them. Deep inside I knew I should be.

Deserved to be. I was just as guilty as they were. But instead I stood on my stage alone, with no company or direction, watching the spectacle that, to me, was raw beauty.

Then suddenly it was gone. The red light snuffed itself out and all returned to normal. I was Whiteboy once again, working the tables and rockin’ the mike, all the while scouring the crowd for the next young thing to shag behind the rows of coats in the checkroom or have pray to me in the booth while I was beat-mixing. There was nothing like having a nineteen-year-old trying to prove her mettle as a big girl on the club scene. I could forget all about the crimson light and the aching, painful needles it brought for a little while.

When I was still Whiteboy, the blackshirts took their job accompanying me to the booth quite seriously, somewhat akin to the Secret Service protecting an important dignitary. And I was glad for them. Before they started escorting me, it would take forever to get to my sanctuary, with all the greetings and requests I got along the way. Now it was like being in a bubble filled with sweaty, sticky air meant to keep me safe. Sometimes an eager hand pushed between the strong shoulders of the blackshirts, or a blurred face would pop up, screaming my name, and then suddenly disappear. The black wall could have easily imploded on me at any moment from the pushing and shoving, crushing me with not only its own weight but that of all the unseen invaders that sought to penetrate my cocoon. There was a time when I fed off the adulation like a leech that could never fatten itself enough as they groped and grabbed at my body. But since the light started speaking to me I’d been filled with dread, my soul like the hull of a dead ship floating through a fog.

When we arrived at the booth the blackshirts would part a path before me as clear and dry as the Red Sea and I would once again be exposed to a world full of colour, dazzling and blinding, revealing everything but showing nothing. It was a vacuum of shallow luminescence.

Those torturous needles poked beneath my skin. But after that night I hoped I would never suffer from them again.

2

Whiteboy

Sometimes it’s hard to believe that I survived there as long as I did. For the first several years I viewed the tapestry of the Pump as the backdrop to a passive power struggle, the seemingly unending quest of the clubbers to achieve inner peace through domination of others. No matter which side of the struggle one found themselves on, music was the one central force, the common thread defining the moment and refining the sensation countless times. It created the perfect balance of their desires and their tolerances. And as the catalyst that weaved the tapestry, I was the benefactor of their mostly anonymous gratitude.

This gratitude did not come overnight. The first three or four years served as a sort of probationary period, where I learned to balance the demands of the multitude (play one’s requests before anyone else’s) with the expectations of Pump management (keep them dancing, keep them drinking).

The Pump was run by twin brothers Vic and Vince Baschetti. Vince, the younger, was the friendlier of the pair and a DJ himself. Older brother Vic was more serious and business-minded. He once stole an idea from Northern Fried Chicken and installed a fan right above the deep fryer where the Pump’s Buffalo wings were cooked. We went home with the smell of barbeque sauce stuck in our nostrils and on our clothes but the Pump’s snack bar doubled its business.

I DJ’d the typically slow weeknights, with Vince taking on the weekends. After a while I developed a following and those weeknights began to pick up. When I started working full-time at the local Northern Hardware, I told the brothers I was going to quit, thinking I would be unable to handle the strain of two full-time jobs. But they weren’t ready to let me go and so offered to take me off the weekday shifts and permanently ensconce me in the Friday night spot. I took the position and, to the chagrin of Vince Baschetti who kept Saturdays, Friday became their hottest night.

The DJ booth was located behind the chestnut bar where Jamie Meadow worked every Friday. But that night she wasn’t there. Li was working in her place.

She greeted me as she always did, with a squeal and a hug, filling my nostrils with the almond smell of her strawberry blonde hair. Her Asian eyes were adorned with blue contact lenses, usually drawing me in when they smiled at me. On that last night however, I just couldn’t smile back.

Hey Whiteboy, honey, she said, her bottom lip swollen into a pout. She didn’t know about my new identity and there was no sense in telling her. Aren’t you happy to see me?

Sure I am, I replied, and followed up with the most innocent tone I could muster. Has anyone heard from Jamie?

No, Li said. "No one has seen her since her shift last Friday night. She’s gone poof! Her voice became concerned. I just hope she’s okay."

Me too. But I knew Jamie wasn’t okay. Whatever was left of her body hadn’t been found yet. And after tonight, no one would even be thinking about her.

You’re sweet, Li said, planting a kiss behind my jaw. I smelled her hair again; this time the almond was replaced with just a sense of her dry scalp. She was different somehow, yet clearer, more defined. Any other time her embrace would have brought a swell to my groin but now nothing arose.

She pulled away. Let’s drink to Jamie, she said. We’ll have a couple of milky Polar Bears! Li turned away to grab two shot glasses and her assortment of potions.

I watched her grab a liquor bottle by the neck. Drink our problems away, that’s what it was all about. Phony platitudes that disappeared once I played the last song. The music was all that mattered. And the alcohol. And to forget.

They have no idea what’s coming.

Li was once again by my side holding two shot glasses. We toasted Jamie, an act that brought me no sense of irony, even though I was the one that last saw her alive. We clinked glasses and each swallowed our shot, sending the warm, sharply mint drink down our throats. She wiped the corners of her mouth slowly with her forefinger and thumb, tracing her sensuous mouth teasingly, invitingly. That was the part of her I’d enjoyed only once before, one cold night some time ago. She began to giggle and, for that quiet moment she offered, I loved her. It was a love tinged with melancholy sadness and foreboding regret, but it was love nonetheless. I pulled myself through the trap door into the DJ booth and blocked her from my mind.

The Pump was already filling up, with the many eyes on me in anticipation of the orgy of music to come. The young white girls were usually there first, dressed to emulate the erotic pop diva of the day, looking like little children playing with their mother’s makeup. Hey Whiteboy! some screamed. Don’t call me that. They clumsily pushed themselves over the bar to show more than a hint of unhampered cleavage, their nipples pushing the fabric to its limit while they screeched their requests. Usually they were looking for Top 40. If I could remember what song they always asked for before they asked, the girls would scoot behind the bar for a quick kiss. The deep bass sent them to the dance floor, squealing with delight.

Yeah, yeah, yeah! I called into the mike as I did every night. Welcome to the Friday Night Ultimate Party at the Town Pump! People cheered.

I wanna see a drink in your hands! I wanna see a drink in your hands!

Keep them drinking. Keep them dancing. Keep them dying.

The writhing female bodies, still holding their drinks, were singing along with the lyrics of the song and rubbing up against each other as if in some playground courtship ritual. Some usually wound up kissing each other as the evening progressed, not so much in full feminine desire as in lustful curiosity and sense of sexual adventure without commitment, unlike going around kissing the boys, which would no doubt attract unwanted expectations.

Many of the boys weren’t to be trifled with either. Some of those white kids were extreme weightlifters in tight shirts and jeans, living paradoxes who enjoyed hip-hop music while espousing racist epithets against the farmhands imported from the Dominican Republic who also frequented the Pump on Fridays.

The farmhands usually asked for dance hall or Latin music, much to the delight of the Portuguese men that lined the bar. They dressed in torn blue jeans and white sneakers and tried to run their hands over the young girls as they glided by. Unless, of course, one of those girls belonged to the bikers that hung out by the pool tables at the back of the Pump, far away from the dance floor. The bikers were big, mean, and after multiple jugs of beer, their large numbers could intimidate even the blackshirts who tried as diplomatically as possible to keep them under control.

But keeping the bikers’ racial taunts against the Asian kids wasn’t possible and the blackshirts didn’t even try. The Asian girls dyed their hair blonde or fiery red and dressed in shorts and halter tops, proudly displaying their flat bellies as they swayed hypnotically to their R&B requests. The boys, decked out in blazers and dress shoes, rarely spoke, but rather whispered to each other about the weightlifters, who eyed them back with suspicion as if allied with the bikers.

And in recent weeks, the drug dealers floated in between them.

Pin, a balding marshmallow of a man from Trailer Court who always dressed in white, was one of the two main players. Sometimes between transactions he would launch into his gorilla-like dance moves in an attempt to impress the ladies. Usually they would just laugh at him, especially when he would drop a five dollar bill on the bar in front of them saying, in his squeaky, helium-like voice, Why don’t you buy yourself a drink?

Pin worked for my best friend, Joey Hollow, who was about half a foot shorter and usually dressed in various solid colour T-shirts to show off his tattooed muscles. Joey worked at Papa Mario’s Pizza when he wasn’t selling dope to his friends, but he had recently created a brand new designer drug he called Sandstorm.

Joey had come a long way with Sandstorm. Just a few months earlier he was a sorry nobody that no one cared about. Now he was powerful enough to have the Baschettis, the blackshirts, a sociopathic cop, and an influential local businessman behind him. Instead of selling weed in the shadows of the local library he was now able to pass little vials of his new mind-bending psychedelic from his smooth hand to the sweaty palm of the customer. And no one could do anything about it.

But everyone was going to be disappointed that night. I had already saved Joey and Pin. And there were others that were going to be saved as well.

My mind blanked out for a moment as I squeezed weeks of reflection into a single thought.

Part Two

Before it All

3

Whiteboy

Joey’s apartment was usually a hell of a mess. Sometimes I had to manoeuvre around stacks of old newspapers and piles of dirty clothes and full ashtrays to get anywhere. More than once I’d been barred entry by pizza boxes piled behind the front door. I always thought it was strange for a guy who spent a lot of his waking hours around the doughy pies to eat so many of them.

But Chuck, Pin, and I never cared about all the junk that kept the true colour of his carpet hidden. During those good times we still met him there every Saturday night to smoke cigars and play poker under his dining room chandelier that hung from a ceiling yellow-brown from nicotine. The tips of Joey’s fingers had the same hue against the blue background of the cards he was holding.

Chuck sat back in his chair, smiling, munching on pretzels while observing his cards and making like he was playing it cool. Despite his poor hygiene, he was a harmless small-town type of guy. He was on his seventh beer, causing his stale, acrid breath to waft towards me across the table. I was glad I sat farthest from him. When he played poker his red-rimmed eyes were alive but calm under the brim of his cap, trying not to give anything away, and I have to admit he usually did a pretty good job of it.

On the other hand, Pin was always easy to read. He had started sitting in on our poker hands when the drug business in Trailer Court had started to grow. In the Creek we called the people in Trailer Court ‘Wicks’. We weren’t sure why; the term had been around for a while and had become part of the local lexicon. Wicks weren’t usually welcome in the Creek (and vice versa) but we tolerated Pin because he was such a soft touch at poker: quiet when he had a good hand and chatty when it stank. That night was no exception.

There’s this word that women don’t like, Pin said. You can’t say it around them. They can say it to each other to describe a third woman they hate, but guys can’t say it to them.

What’s that? Joey asked, drawing on his cigar.

Pin looked around, as if unconvinced that we were the only ones in the room, and then muttered, Cunt.

Joey regarded him momentarily and then looked back at his cards. No, you can’t say that around women.

Why not? Pin asked.

You just can’t. Joey didn’t look up that time, as if the matter was closed.

But why not? Pin pressed him. It’s just a word. What’s wrong with saying ‘cunt’?

You just can’t say it, Joey told him again. He looked at me. Are you in or not? I was holding three fives and threw ten cigarettes into the kitty. The pile was big