Knife Fight and Other Struggles Read online

  Thus did Stan’s permanent assignment to the press gallery at City Hall become an inevitability.

  We liked Stan very much from the start. He was soft-spoken in scrums, but attentive. When he did ask a question, it would be the question that pierced the heart of the matter. When he filed his story, it would be the one that, if we were all to be honest, best described the nuance of the issue at hand.

  When he watched something, before too long, he saw what it was about.

  So it was that on the Tuesday after the announcement of the new light rail line to Smelt, he requested a personal, one-on-one interview with the mayor. No one thought he’d receive it. Our mayor, as everyone well knows by now, is not a friend of the media. He prefers to speak to constituents directly, over the public address system on the subway or via skywritten aphorisms—or in person, descending upon the backyard barbecues, garage sales, and weddings of leading citizens for impromptu moments of bonhomie. He does not grant many interviews.

  But he made an exception for Stan. The interview was scheduled for 12:05 p.m. and expected to last fifteen minutes. The subject was to be a retrospective of the mayor’s first hundred days in office. The Mayor’s Office was suspicious, for they had a sense that Stan was up to something. So the mayor didn’t face Stan alone; his second-floor office was crowded with his press secretary, his deputy mayor, and his cousin in the Transportation Department, who had taken a lunch break from road repair to see what Stan Bollixer truly wanted.

  Stan was not dissuaded. He smiled, sat down across the desk from the mayor, and reached into his pocket, as if to produce a digital voice recorder.

  There was no recorder.

  “This can be off the record,” he said, as he flipped open his butterfly knife, turned it so it gleamed in the noonday light, and with a sudden, savage plunge drove its point deep into the mahogany top of the mayor’s desk.

  Tuesday comes but two days before Thursday, and there was much to be done. The mayor’s chief of staff and communications director tried to talk the mayor out of it, but he was determined. So they set about devising political strategies, anticipating the worst possible outcomes. The mayor’s cousin attempted to arrange to have coffee with Stan to see if he might be dissuaded, but Stan refused even to take his calls. Stan meanwhile whispered, to those few of us he’d come to trust, about the thing that he had begun. He spent time in his office, honing his blade with a whetted stone and recalling, again and again, the night in San Salvador—August, hot as a sauna, smelling strangely of cinnamon—when the one-eyed man from the jungle had appeared at his room and tried to kill him.

  One thing he did not do was inform his editor. Neither did any of us.

  Our mayor is a man of chiselled granite. This is not apparent when he appears in public, bedecked in his checkered blazers and generously cut trousers, the novelty ties that light up with strategically placed LEDs. Were his constituents to see him shirtless, the goose fat sliding down his torso in thick rivulets, highlighting tendons and veins and ropey, hard-won scars, they would not recognize him—and, worse, they would no longer recognize themselves. They might recoil, as we did, seeing him step off the elevator in the parking garage reserved for city councillors and senior staff, watching him meet each of our eyes in turn with his hard and fearsome stare.

  The mayor’s cousin allowed three of us to accompany Stan—on the condition that we left all recording devices, including pens and notepads, in a small organic recycling bin left over from the previous administration. The mayor was accompanied by his cousin, and his deputy mayor, and his budget chief. The interim city clerk sat in the passenger seat of his Citroen, an ancient portable typewriter in his lap, a stack of carbon paper by his side.

  The interim clerk squinted at Stan as he came out from the stairwell, and in his lap the typewriter keys began to clack out a description.

  Stan Bollixer glistened. He was stripped naked to the waist, polished with a thin slick of goose fat, which stained the beltline of his old cut-off jeans. His eyes were wide, and seemed a little crazed, and the interim clerk noted for the record that Stan might be under the influence of a performance-enhancing stimulant. This was true, in a way: he had downed a room-temperature extra-large cup of Colombian coffee from the commissary just prior to coming downstairs. The butterfly knife rested, closed, in his left hand as he walked out past the Works Committee chairman’s Harley Davidson, and faced the mayor.

  The rules were read then—the mayor’s cousin declaiming them in a slow drawl that was almost a song. When he finished, “To the victor go the spoils,” the deputy mayor knelt beside his Subaru, lifted the mayor’s knife, and put it in the mayor’s extended hand. Stan made a whiplash motion with his wrist, and the blade of the butterfly knife—less than a quarter the length of the bowie knife—flashed silver in the pallid light of the garage.

  We all withdrew to a more than respectful distance. For the knife fight between Stan Bollixer and the mayor was on—and no one wanted to be caught in the middle of it.

  There are rules for the knife fight, and those are written down. But there are also customs. The mayor knows them instinctively, for many are his own, but most of his opponents do not. We suspect that inwardly the mayor is saddened by these vulgar bumpkins, who enter combat with thin-lipped, badly feigned rage and leap directly for the mayor’s midsection to end things at once with a slash to the nipple or a stab at the collarbone. The mayor finishes these opponents quickly.

  Stan Bollixer was not one of those.

  Eyes never leaving the mayor’s, Stan drew a long, slow circle in the air using the point of his knife; and again, marginally faster—and so on, until he was looking through a circular blur of steel and arm, spinning as fast as a propeller on a biplane. Did we hear the crick-crack of a shoulder dislocating, the creak of sinew bending? Could any of us mark the precise instant that the knife shifted from Stan’s whirling left hand to his right? Did any of us truly see admiration, respect, and perhaps a soupçon of fear, cross the mayor’s implacable brow?

  No, not truly.

  But we did hear the mayor emit a long, low growl—the only appropriate response to such a fundamental challenge . . . an alpha-male warning cry that came from the depths of our ancestry. The mayor bent down, pulled a dollop of goose fat from the fold beneath his arm, and dipped it into the dust of the garage floor. As he stood, he smeared the filthy grease in long black lines under his eyes, and over each brow, and then again at the edge of his jaw. Weapon clutched in his left hand, he raised both arms over his head like wings, the tip of his knife scoring the bottom of the blood-red EXIT sign. The effect was fearsome: no one would leave without going through him.

  Stan flexed his arm and spun the butterfly knife, handle clicking open and closed, and bent his neck first to the left, then the right.

  The mayor drew his breath over his teeth in a serpentine hiss.

  The butterfly knife solidified in Stan’s fist.

  The mayor bellowed, and the knife swung in a crescent of steel that shimmered in the fluorescent afternoon. It might have slashed Stan’s left pectoral in two, but his own blade met the mayor’s as Stan ducked low and drove his opposite shoulder into the mayor’s stomach. Stan let out a cry and drew his blade down in a slice that might, on another day, have relieved the mayor of a kidney. The mayor skipped aside instead, then retreated and swung his free arm contraclockwise to create a deadly momentum. The knife plunged, and Stan shifted, and the blade squealed across the windshield of the mayor’s truck as Stan whirled in a failed attempt to slice a piece from the mayor’s shoulder. It was too much—Stan’s shifting and whirling—and the mayor caught Stan with his free arm, hard in the chest, and Stan doubled over. The butterfly knife would have been airborne had Stan not hooked his pinkie through the handle. The mayor might have had it then—he brought his own knife about, holding it an inch above Stan’s shoulder. It hovered there as Stan wheezed, then withdrew. The mayor stepped back, knife at his s
ide, fixing Stan with an expression that may have been a grin of triumph, or simply a mask of exhaustion. The parking garage fell silent but for the increasingly frenzied clacking of typewriter keys from the Citroen’s front seat.

  By degrees, Stan Bollixer stood. The mayor raised his knife, and pointed it at Stan like a deadly forefinger.

  “Next week. Same time,” he said. “Same place.”

  It is rumoured that one of us—a new reporter with something to prove—filed a news bit about the battle. But her piece never saw print, nor appeared on the internet. Before a week had run out she had been transferred to the radio room where, it was said, she spent her nights listening to the police scanner for word of fires, and crimes, and other nocturnal catastrophes.

  The rest of us kept to the pact, and the mayor kept to a busy public schedule. Stan joined us in following him—how could he do otherwise? Following the mayor through the wards of his city was Stan’s job as much as it was any of ours. When time came for the mayor to declaim, Stan Bolixer’s microphone had its place: in front of the podium.

  Stan was a professional. If his eyes ever met the mayor’s through the scrum, and if he ever felt the mayor taking his measure . . . well, he didn’t let it show. Nor did the mayor. At least not in those moments.

  But we wondered: did the mayor’s frenetic activity that week—shielding him in the midst of the children of the Smelt Community Centre, Pool’s Summer Fun Day Camp, or the Cannery District Seniors Snooker Club—indicate that his nerve was slipping? Or perhaps he was using the business and ceremony of his office as a kind of extended display, a demonstration that he, and not this cocksure pretender, was the leader of this tribe?

  But if he was so shaken, we wondered, why hadn’t he simply ended the knife fight the previous Thursday—taken his slice from Stan Bollixer’s greasy shoulder, and called victory?

  On the following Thursday morning, several of us came in late to work. We’d been called from our beds by frantic city editors to join the night team in covering an atrocity unfolding in the food court at Old Town Abattoir Mall. It was a terrible crime, a tragedy, but so immense that in those early hours—days, really—no one could reliably determine what precisely had happened.

  Early reports indicated a hail of gunfire, erupting from the rendering gallery, perhaps. But injuries did not bear this out, and the theory did not explain the smashed masonry at the base of the fountain, or the size of the holes in the ductwork. Although many had been knocked unconscious in the event, no one was treated for bullet wounds. Descriptions of the perpetrators were similarly vague and contradictory: giant men, possibly of African descent, faces covered in cheap fabric, heads shaven, teeth emerging like tusks from their jaws. . . .

  The Abattoir Atrocity, as our editors dubbed it, was an impossible story to tell; it would not make sense of itself. Those of us called upon to help wrestle it into a narrative came in late, exhausted and dispirited. The only thing that kept us going was the resumption of the struggle between Stan Bollixer and the mayor.

  Although we knew we could never tell it, that was a story that at least we could understand.

  The knives flashed ribbons of steel through the air as the combatants danced across the concrete floor of the garage where it was not smeared with long slides of goose fat and back hair. A fluorescent tube sent a snowfall of shattered glass as the bowie knife cut through it; the director of Community Services spent the second part of the fight huddled behind a Subaru, applying pressure to an accidental slash across his arm from the fine-honed blade of the butterfly knife. Although it was warm in the parking garage, the city clerk rolled up the windows on his Citroen and kept low as he clacked away on the minutes of the second installment of the knife fight.

  This one lasted longer than the first—the mayor’s cousin called it at twenty-seven minutes, fifty-three seconds, standing over the mayor collapsed on his back, while Stan, similarly exhausted, propped himself against a cement pillar. The two may have been invulnerable that afternoon to mere steel—but middle age and the hot, dry, carbon-monoxide-rich air of the VIP parking garage were another matter.

  “Why don’t you call it a draw?” cried the director of Community Services, blood staining his fingers and necktie where he held it against his arm. “Haven’t you proved enough?”

  The mayor drew a wheezing breath and fixed narrow eyes on the bureaucrat, who looked away. The mayor turned back to Stan, who was coming out the other side of a long coughing fit.

  “These are the end times,” the mayor said, and sat still a moment, before gathering himself up and quitting the ring.

  The words were prophetic. The following week’s monthly city council meeting was attended by not only the mayor and all his councillors, but also the senior staff and their assistants, all of us, and delegations from wards across the city. This meeting had been scheduled to go long. Merchants from Abattoir Mall had come with a petition demanding greater police presence and the installation of video cameras. There was to be discussion of a cost overrun on the light rail line into Smelt, and a committee of residents were asking for additional stops to better service the rehabilitation hospital. The city’s poet laureate had composed three new stanzas of an epic retelling of our amalgamation fifteen years ago, and there was to be a presentation no later than three p.m.

  These things, combined with several dozen routine items, ought to have added up to a sometimes vigorous but relatively straightforward session, finishing no later than seven; meetings under the mayor were famous for running with brutal efficiency.

  It was not to be.

  The merchants were joined by a local civil liberties group shouting down the Abattoir Mall manager’s deputation, requiring the services of the City Hall security squad and a recess to clear the chambers and restore calm. The debate continued for three solid hours after that, the matter becoming so confused with amendments that, on the clerk’s advice, council finally deferred the item until the Christmas session.

  Through all this, the denizens of Smelt hovered at the back, stoking their grievances one upon the other until their matter came up, and as a group they demanded that the light rail line be ripped out altogether and the remaining funds be reallocated to the restoration of the Smelt Arms Bijou—a cinema that had been derelict since the war, but held many fond memories for the elder Smelters. Despite vigorous lobbying by the mayor’s staff, council sided with the deputants, and narrowly voted to kill the rail plan.

  The poet laureate, meantime, had grown bored early in the meeting and, as poet laureates do, comforted himself with the contents of his hip flask throughout the afternoon. When his time came, he’d drunk himself into sufficient belligerence to substitute an obscene limerick in place of his more sublime stanzas. While some of us might have commented that the limerick was an improvement overall, the mayor obviously did not agree.

  “This city is swirling into the toilet,” he was heard to mutter, unaware, momentarily, that his microphone was still on.

  The third time nearly finished it.

  Mayor and reporter went at one another savagely from the outset, crashing together, each wrestling the other’s knife-arm with his free hand. The mayor smashed his forehead into Stan’s, twice, and Stan at a point managed to loop his arm between the mayor’s legs and so hoist him above his head, slamming the city’s chief magistrate hard onto the hood of a midsized sedan. Had this been a wrestling match and not a knife fight, Stan would have won it.

  The savagery grew. The parking garage onlookers gasped as one when the mayor missed slashing Stan’s throat by scant inches—and again seconds later, as the tip of Stan’s blade hovered an instant over the mayor’s right eyeball.

  In the third round, it seemed, the knife fight had transformed into a killing fight.

  Yet, for the third time, not a drop of blood was shed.

  On Friday morning, the Doucette Greeting Card Company held a press conference at which their president, Wallace
Doucette, announced that they would be ceasing production by November; by year’s end, they planned to have moved all remaining operations south of the border, where a more favourable tax regime combined with a more eager labour market in a city more attractive to executives and their families would ensure the company’s survival. The workers received their layoff notices at the beginning of the morning shift.

  The mayor spoke to reporters afterward, attempting to downplay the impact of Doucette’s departure and deflect the suggestion that our city was no place an executive would want to raise a family. But he could carry it only so far; the Doucette family was the third-largest employer in the city, and as a boy the mayor had played Lacrosse with Wallace. The betrayal was both civic and personal.

  On the weekend, it rained. The rains started early Saturday, coming down in thick, grey sheets reminiscent of flying knives, and did not relent until early Sunday. Creeks overflowed; storm sewers clogged; and unlucky householders found their basements filling with sludge as the sewer system overflowed. Three footbridges washed away in parks, and a great sinkhole opened at an intersection to the east of the downtown, all but devouring one of the city’s two dozen new ecofriendly buses.

  The mayor did not immediately respond to calls from our weekend reporters.

  How could he? He had other things with which to occupy himself.

  He had to become better.

  On Monday evening, Stan joined us for drinks after deadline. The storm had given way to awful humidity, and so we gathered in the pier district in the back room of a Czech pub well known to reporters.