LITMIR.BIZ

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is what frosts me—I don’t have AIDS.”

      “You’re frosted because you don’t have AIDS?”

      “You know what I mean.”

      “Albert doesn’t know you don’t have AIDS. Maybe he thinks you’re queer.”

      Young placed his hands palms down on the table. “Do I look queer to you?”

      Trick shrugged. “Okay, so maybe he thinks you’re a drug addict.”

      Young appealed to his daughter. “You’ll listen to reason, I know you will. Your Uncle Artie won’t, because he thinks his purpose in life is to argue with me, but I know you will. Getting a shave at a barbershop—even though it’s not something I regularly do, it’s not something I actually ever do—is as basic a right as ... I don’t know ... as climbing up on a stool at McCully’s and ordering a beer. And now, because of this AIDS crap, I can’t get a shave. I said to Albert, ‘You’ve known me for twenty years, and you won’t give me a shave?’ And he said no.”

      Trick said, “It’s been a while now since barbers have been giving shaves. It’s hardly news.”

      “It’s news to me,” Young said, picking up his fork, “and I don’t like it. It’s just one more thing gone. One more simple pleasure. You can’t walk downtown anymore for fear of getting mugged, you can’t read a newspaper or watch TV without somebody telling you the world is getting more fucked up by the minute. And I can’t get a shave. Well, it makes me mad, goddamn it. Next thing you know, they’ll be making sitcoms about queers.”

      Debi said, “Uncle Artie, who do you like in the first? We’ve gotta get a move on here or we’ll miss the Double.”

      Trick craned his neck over his Form. “I like the seven.”

      “What about the second?”

      “Five.”

      “What about you, Daddy?”

      Young leaned over his Form. “Yeah, I like the seven in the first, but Trick’s full of shit about the second. The five will die by the middle of the lane. You want the four in there.”

      “Fine,” Debi said. “We’ll bet both of them. Give me some money and I’ll go make the bets—seven-five, seven-four—while you two argue about something else.”

      “I want some more of that roast beef,” Trick said, and using the keypad on the left arm of his wheelchair, he backed away from the table, swivelled, and aimed himself at the buffet.

      “Trick,” Young said.

      Trick stopped and turned his head slightly.

      “Bring me back another one of them Yorkshire puddings.”

      Trick had been sitting in his cruiser on Queen Street in October 1992 when he took a bullet in the neck. There was damage to his spine, and he lost the use of his lower body. The extent of his injuries wasn’t known at first because he remained semi-comatose for six weeks after the shooting, and it appeared to Young, and indeed to the doctors who were monitoring his condition, that his biggest challenge was to regain consciousness. Because he was not fully comatose, restraints had to be applied: basically, he had to be belted to his bed. He would twist and turn and lash out with his left arm; his right was rigidly cocked at the elbow, like a man making a muscle—a condition, Young learned, called flexor tension.

      At first, Trick had a number of visitors. His cousin Eartha came up from New York State and stayed for three days. His girlfriend of two weeks, a Japanese-Canadian named Yukio, was so upset by the cards Fortune had dealt her that she disappeared after her first visit to the hospital. Trick’s parents were both dead, he had no brothers or sisters, so it fell to his colleagues to do most of the visiting. Wheeler came often, as did Staff Inspector Bateman and several of the others. But Trick’s most regular visitor was Young, who came daily, rain or shine, often accompanied by Debi. He would talk to Trick, hoping for a reaction, a sign he was in there, that he wasn’t damaged beyond repair. Young talked to him about horse racing, hockey, women, movies, dogs. But mostly he talked to him about baseball.

      And when the Toronto Blue Jays won the 1992 World Series, Young was with Trick in his hospital room. He felt sure that after four or five weeks without improvement, without emerging from his semi-conscious state, this amazing victory with all its noise and celebration—doctors and nurses and patients and orderlies and interns dancing arm in arm through the corridors of the hospital—would snap Trick out of it, would bring him back.

      But it didn’t. He continued to lie on his back in bed, his eyes at half-mast, snot in his moustache. And then even Young gave up. The visits were depressing him to the point that he didn’t want to go anymore. It was like talking to a corpse. Time to move on, he told himself. So he, too, bowed out. He, too, stopped visiting. He took a week off work and flew to Las Vegas. In three or four bourbon-blurred days he lost $3,600 on the slots, then flew home. When he called Debi, she told him there had been some improvement and, cautiously optimistic, Young hurried down to the hospital. There was a new patient in Trick’s room. At the nurses’ station Young asked what was going on. The nurse pointed to the lounge area, and there was Trick sitting in a wheelchair watching a rerun of Hill Street Blues. “Trick!” Young bellowed and rushed over to him, and when Trick turned to face him, one eye was focused, the other lay off to the side. He raised his left hand. His right, Young couldn’t help notice, lay curled in his lap like a fetus. “Hey, man,” Trick said weakly, “where the hell you been?”

      It was only after his return to consciousness that it became apparent that Trick had lost the use of his legs. The way he had thrashed around on his bed made it appear that his legs were active; in fact, they were nothing more than doll’s legs, dragged around by the furious actions of his upper body. Everyone had been fooled.

      Months passed. Hopes of further physical recovery dimmed. There was an operation to correct his vision, which was successful, and several months of physiotherapy, which accomplished little. Then he was sent home.

      Staff Inspector Bateman offered Trick a desk job, but he wouldn’t even consider it, and when the police department presented him with a disability package, he accepted it. He resigned from the Force. He sat in his apartment with the shades drawn. He watched TV. He asked Young to do something about his car, a mint-condition 1968 Cadillac Seville, burgundy with white leather upholstery. “What do you want me to do with it?” Young asked. Trick shook his head. The car had been his pride and joy. Young arranged to have it stored in a remote, unused corner of the police garage. He had one of the mechanics drain the oil, put it up on blocks, and cover it with a tarpaulin.

      Now, almost three years since the shooting, Trick was still bitter. Sometimes, if Young picked him up, Trick would have a beer at McCully’s, but more often than not he refused. “I will not be an object of pity,” he told Young. “Whatever my new role in life may be, it’s not so those fools at the bar can feel superior, it’s not so they can feel lucky they’re not me.” The only public place Trick felt really comfortable was the racetrack. Nobody knew him there. Nobody except Young and Debi. And the other horse-players were too focused on their gambling to pay attention to a cripple.

      “Shorty was always good to me,” Debi said. “That’s all I can say.”

      The third race had just gone, and the money the threesome had won on Harbour Master and Conniving in the Daily Double they had given back on a semi–long shot named Pine Cone.

      “I know some people didn’t like him,” she continued. “They thought he was—I don’t know—untrust-worthy. But he was never anything but good to me.”

      Young said, “Maybe he was afraid of you. You could have flattened him with one punch.”

      “He was little, but he was fearless,” Debi said. “Remember that time he broke Brian Reese’s nose.”

      Young laughed. He turned to Trick. “Reese was the jockey on some horse in the same race Shorty had one in. Shorty’s horse was winning with about fifty yards to go when Reese’s

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