Terminally Ill Read online

  Archer laughed and reported, “He says, ‘Is that all you’re going to give me?’”

  Meh. But a good chunk of the crowd laughed.

  The body builder made a great show of fingering the chain. He nodded, but signalled that he wanted more.

  Lucia widened her eyes and checked with Elvis, and then Archer, before she let him pull an arm’s length of chain and inspect it, holding it up to the light, testing its weight, and yanking the chain links apart suddenly to see if it gave way.

  It didn’t.

  Tucker grinned as he filmed that. He’d already taken his camera back to continue recording, which was just as well. I had no idea what each little button did, especially with the camera covered in a translucent plastic bag.

  The bodybuilder signalled for more chain. I had to admit, he was playing so much to the crowd, I wondered if he was a plant.

  Lucia held up her arms, offering the chains. She couldn’t move that much, with an arm load of chains, but the well-developed muscles in her arms flexed and, of course, my eyes dropped to her cleavage again.

  The bodybuilder stretched out another foot of chain. He yanked it again. He wrapped it around his own wrist. Then he unwrapped it and held it up to his face, eyeballing it again, before he brought it up to his mouth and tried to bite it.

  Some of the crowd laughed, but most of us were getting antsy.

  “Is he crazy?”

  “Must be a friend of theirs.”

  “Get off the stage!”

  Archer stepped forward. “Let’s give a big hand to—” The bodybuilder said something, and Archer added, “Mr. Leo Karpinsky!”

  We applauded. A few people whistled. Leo Karpinsky waved at the still-thickening crowd of maybe a thousand people, clearly relishing his fifteen seconds of fame, before he finally headed back into the crowd.

  A saxophone broke out of the speakers in a funny, familiar riff. Elvis stepped up front and centre and danced around Lucia, placing his hands on her shoulders.

  When it got to the chorus, “Return to Sender,” he peeled one arm out of his black jean jacket, swiftly followed by the other arm. He whipped the jacket like a helicopter blade before he let it fly in the truck’s general direction.

  The McGill girls—and the rest of us—screeched our approval of the striptease, even though he didn’t reveal a lot of skin, but the top half of a wetsuit. It turned out that the black and white horizontally striped shirt underneath his jacket was actually part of the wetsuit.

  Now that I thought about it, he’d get mighty drenched breaking out of a coffin underwater. And the St. Lawrence was bound to be chilly on the last day of October. Elvis had planned ahead.

  Elvis danced around Lucia, pretending to write a letter and trying to hand it to her. When the chorus restarted, with “Return to sender,” he ripped off his jeans with a flourish. They were tearaway pants and came right off.

  Now we were really hooting and hollering. A woman screeched, “Come to mama!”

  I had a good laugh, but could hardly even hear myself because of all the cheering.

  Elvis now wore just a wetsuit and slim-fitting black boots. He ceremoniously whipped off his sunglasses, provoking another round of screams. One woman pounded her chest like a gorilla.

  Archer passed him a pair of gloves, which Elvis drew on to his hands, wiggling his fingers lasciviously, like a reverse striptease.

  On the last beat of the song, Archer handed him a pair of goggles, which Elvis drew over the top half of his face, along with some sort of wetsuit hoodie to cover the top of his head and neck.

  The goggles kind of ruined the look, but Elvis did a couple more hip thrusts, and we all yelled our approval even before horns, bass, a piano, and drums blasted out of the speakers for the next song.

  The McGill girls began to dance, and Archer started winding the chain around Elvis’s right ankle. One of the news camera guys ran in front of us for a close up, and Tucker changed his angle, trying to maintain a good view.

  Asher moved on to the left ankle while Elvis sang a song I didn’t know, but seemed to be called “Shake, Rattle and Roll.” A great song for wrapping a guy up in chains.

  Asher drew the chain up in a single length between Elvis’s legs before wrapping his right wrist and his left wrist. Elvis had stopped dancing, but the girls around me were still making up for it, pouting and strutting and shaking their boot-ay.

  Asher looped the chain around Elvis’s neck before securing it all with a small padlock. He didn’t ask anyone to check it first. I didn’t know if that was because it was a trick lock or because Mr. Leo Karpinski had been a bust. Or maybe it was just that they were running out of time. A quick glance at the clock showed only 19 minutes and 15 seconds before they had to get Elvis in the river.

  With her hands freed of chains, the bikini girl made horrified faces and posed with her hands around her mouth. This made her breasts stand out even more. I glanced at Tucker, but he was mostly filming Elvis.

  It started to rain harder. I glanced upward, but the bikini girl kept smiling, even though the raindrops dappled her mega-sprayed blondish hair.

  When the song died down, Archer called, “Could I have another volunteer to check the padlock?”

  Tucker elbowed me in the ribs, none too gently, but I shook my head and let the brunette McGill girl tug on the lock. She tried using both hands before she gave up, shook her head and laughed. She ran back to her friends, still laughing.

  “Sheena, was that really real?” one of them called.

  “Yeah, totally.”

  “They didn’t ask you before?”

  Someone else interrupted. “How could they? She was with us the whole time.”

  “I got here late—”

  “You’re always late.”

  “Well, excuuuuuuse me.”

  They all laughed. I smiled to myself. I remembered saying, “Well, excuuuuuse me!” when I was a kid, too.

  Archer had already moved to the coffin that had been lying behind Elvis. He paused behind it. The bikini girl wrang her hands, forming her lips into a giant O, before another muscular guy helped Archer unhook the coffin from the crane and lower it to the ground.

  The speakers started playing a drum roll.

  Archer threw the coffin lid open.

  Elvis shuffled toward the coffin, a little awkward in the chains. He gathered the vertical chains in his hands and slowly lowered his body into the coffin. He half-sat up, adjusting the chains, before he made himself lie vertically in the coffin.

  Archer and the muscle guy fitted the lid over the coffin. Then Archer pulled a one-inch silver nail out of his pocket and flashed it at us. The muscle guy pulled a hammer off his tool belt and handed it to Archer. Archer and the muscle guy began hammering nails into the edges of the coffin.

  I twitched uneasily. Even if you’re not claustrophobic, a coffin is a small space. Imagine getting nailed inside, while chained up, with a mask over your face.

  The speakers started playing “Hound Dog,” which got the crowd moving again while Archer and the muscle guy finished nailing all the way around. I couldn’t figure out what “Hound Dog” had to do with anything, and I thought it kind of wrecked the spooky mood.

  Archer stood up with the hammer in his hand. He held one nail in his left hand. “We now need a volunteer to help place the final nail into Elvis’s coffin.”

  Talk about bad juju. My Chinese grandmothers would disapprove. Ryan’s grandmother would, too. I wondered how she was doing.

  Tucker nudged me.

  I muttered, “First, do no harm,” the opening of the Hippocratic Oath we took in medical school.

  Tucker whispered, “You’re not harming him! You’re helping him! You’re giving him good publicity. He wants a pretty girl to help nail him in.”

  I gave him the evil eye, but he grabbed my hand and held it aloft. For whatever reason, Archer pointed at me. “We have a volunteer in a blue raincoat!”

  I made my way beside Archer, wondering if I sh
ould pull my hood off in order to make better TV. He’d probably have been better off choosing one of the other McGill girls. (Technically, I was a McGill girl, too, but my main connection to the university was just paying tuition for the privilege of working my ass off as a resident.) But at least I could wield a hammer. Ryan had helped me reinforce my previous apartment.

  Up close, I could see the wrinkles around Archer’s eyes, and he smelled like Axe body spray. He smiled at me reassuringly and handed me the nail. I held it in my fingers, rolling it a little. It sure felt real to me.

  Tucker had his camera glued to his face, but I could see him smiling under the camera body.

  “Does the nail feel real to you, lady?”

  I nodded. “Too real.”

  Archer laughed and repeated that to the audience, earning a small laugh.

  I didn’t bother biting the nail, or pantomiming horror, but I smiled widely for the many cameras. Then I took the hammer in my right fist and placed the nail at the top of the coffin, where Archer discreetly pointed. The nails were spaced about six inches apart, and I could see where they’d sunk into the edges of wood. It looked genuine to me.

  I tapped the nail head with the hammer, driving its point into the wood, making sure it stood upright. Then I drove it home with a single good blow.

  The crowd cheered. Archer smiled and took the hammer from me. I pretended to curtsey and made my way back to the audience while the truck backed up the wharf toward us. The muscle guy killed the engine and emerged from the driver’s seat with two concrete blocks. The bikini girl popped out of the passenger seat holding another armload of chains.

  Safely behind the fence again, I watched them attach chains over the coffin, one big chain lengthwise and four chains looped horizontally. Plus they attached two concrete blocks each on two of those horizontal chains, weighing the coffin down, not to mention making those chains harder to open.

  I licked my lips. Elvis kept adding more layers of danger, when my instinct was more like, Stay home! Read a good book! Brush your teeth! Wear your seatbelt!

  Tucker was still grinning, but sometimes I thought Tucker had a screw loose.

  Archer and the muscle guy finished hooking the coffin on to the end of the crane’s hook. The hook pulley’s case was covered in yellow and black diagonal stripes. For a crazy second, I thought they should have gotten black and white horizontal stripes to match Elvis’s “Jailhouse Rock” wetsuit.

  The bikini girl posed with her hands to her mouth and her hip cocked to one side, like an old-fashioned pin-up ad miming horror.

  And the muscle guy climbed into the cab of the crane. The crane’s engine rumbled and coughed exhaust.

  Elvis Presley started up one more time, but even though the tune was as bouncy as ever, he sang more seriously, the lyrics basically saying, Stop. Don’t do this.

  My heart beat in my throat. Even Elvis Presley voted against the daredeviling. Okay, that was their job, to scare some of us, inspire some of us, and thrill us all. It was like a car accident, I guess. I couldn’t look away, but I didn’t want to look.

  The coffin rose slowly in the air, high above our heads. The wind picked up, but the coffin hardly swayed, weighed down by the concrete blocks.

  “Maudite…”

  “You think he’s going to be okay?”

  “He’s gotta be okay! It’s Elvis!”

  “Yeah, but the other Elvis is dead.”

  “No, he’s alive. Elvis lives, remember?”

  “He’s alive in the Sookie Stackhouse books, anyway.”

  “Yeah, but he’s not in True Blood. That sucks.”

  “What about the figure skater, Elvis Stojko? He’s still alive.”

  “I love Elvis Stojko! You remember his martial arts routine?”

  “Right on!”

  A woman started singing along with the Elvis Presley song in a high, thin voice. Apparently, it was called “Witchcraft.” If nothing else, I’d learned a bunch of new Elvis songs this afternoon. Still, I thought it was disrespectful that they weren’t even paying attention to the Elvis in front of them until the crane’s engine rumbled and its arm swung toward the river, almost gracefully suspending the coffin above the waves.

  I heard the breath catch in Tucker’s throat. He kept filming.

  The crane slowly lowered the coffin into the river. The bikini girl jumped up and down, pointing to the flat screen TV. I was momentarily mesmerized by her bouncing attributes, but the rest of the crowd cued in to the clock countdown and started counting in English.

  “Ten.”

  “Nine.”

  “Eight.”

  The coffin disappeared from our sight, but we could watch it on the monitor. I felt like grabbing on to something like Tucker’s hand, but he was still filming away, although he was grimacing. I glanced at his screen and noticed the battery icon flashing.

  “Three.”

  “TWO.”

  “ONE.”

  I heard, or imagined I heard, the splash as the coffin disappeared under the waves.

  Chapter 5

  “He’s got four minutes to survive,” Archer reminded us. “Only four minutes before he runs out of oxygen.”

  The bikini girl held up four fingers. At least she could count.

  The spooky Twilight Zone theme started up.

  Tucker called, “Hope, could you hold the camera? I gotta grab my spare battery. Keep filming, okay?”

  “No problem.” I took the camera in my hands while he kept it more or less steady. I tried to overlap my right thumb with his over the record button, and pushed down firmly when Tucker let go, but of course, it stopped recording. The camera screen blinked, showing an icon of a battery red-lining, and turned itself off.

  Tucker swore. I held on to the camera while he yanked a black case out of his backpack.

  The McGill girls chattered away. “He’s gonna get out any second.”

  “No, he’s not! He’s gotta make it last, make us sweat.”

  “If I were him, I’d bust out of there right away! I can’t stand elevators, even. Can you imagine a coffin?”

  We watched on-screen, but the surface of the river appeared undisturbed. Archer said, “Elvis lives, live in Montreal, in honour of the one, the great, the only Mr. Harry Houdini.”

  We clapped. Some people whistled.

  “El-vis! El-vis!”

  The clock in the corner had changed over from a countdown to a timer of how long Elvis had been underwater. So far, it had only been a minute and 47 forty-seven seconds.

  More weird music filled the air with uneasy, dissonant sounds.

  Tucker grabbed the camera back and fumbled inside the plastic rain covering, Uh oh. I wanted Elvis to break out, but not before Tucker captured it on film.

  I watched the screen. No sign of Elvis.

  “This music is whacked.”

  “I think it’s ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind.’”

  “I thought that was noo-nu-noo-nu, noo-nu-noo-nu.”

  “No, dummy, that’s the Twilight Zone. They just played it.”

  I heard a click, and Tucker turned his camera back on. “Yes!” And he was filming again.

  Okay. Now Elvis could break out.

  Only he wasn’t.

  “Two minutes,” said the announcer. “We’re at the halfway mark. Will he make it? They say the Mounties always get their man. Elvis, too, has a perfect record. He has escaped fire. He has dodged a car crusher with seconds to spare. He has gone skydiving and opened his parachute only sixty seconds before smashing to the ground. But can he escape the death force of Mother Nature at her worst, the cold and treacherous waters of the St. Lawrence River, on the anniversary of his master’s death?”

  I stood on my toes, trying to peek at any evidence of activity in the coffin below the water’s surface. I hadn’t realized I’d moved too close until another woman elbowed me back from the fence.

  Two minutes and 42 seconds.

  “I don’t like this,” I muttered, even
though Tucker was too busy filming to pay attention to me.

  To my surprise, Tucker answered, even though he never took his eyes away from his camera screen. “This is getting long,” he admitted, “but it’s part of Elvis’s showmanship. When he escaped the car crusher, it was only seconds away from crushing him.”

  I didn’t want to think about the car crusher. I was trying not to chew on my lower lip, which was already cracked and dry.

  Three minutes.

  Archer cleared his throat. “Come on, Elvis. You can do it. Let’s give him some encouragement, people!”

  We yelled and stomped our feet.

  I was watching Archer. He kept checking the clock and the monitor, his eyes darting back and forth, showing the whites a little more than usual. He’d started pacing before he forced himself to stop and smile at the audience.

  I’d heard that Harry Houdini would escape underwater and cling to the underside of a dock until people thought for sure he’d drowned. But Archer didn’t strike me as that great an actor, and he looked worried.

  Had they somehow rigged up a two-way microphone? That way, Archer would be able to hear Elvis in the coffin even as Archer called out to the crowd. “Elvis. Calling Elvis. Paging Elvis, the Escape Master, the Man of Mystery. We need you now. We need you here, Elvis. Don’t leave us.”

  Three minutes and eleven seconds.

  Horns blared out of the speakers, followed by some weird tweets. I was seriously hating the music. Or maybe it was just my own uneasiness.

  “Bring back Elvis!” a man shouted. A few people whistled and cheered. I wasn’t sure if he meant Elvis Serratore or Presley or both, but I clapped my approval. If he only had four minutes to get out, and he still had to break the coffin, it hardly left any seconds to spare.

  Still no sign of wood breaking up, or a hand emerging from the water.

  Archer turned away from the crowd. I thought for sure he was talking into a microphone this time.

  The bikini girl stood frozen with her hands together, not posing, for once.

  The crane started lifting the coffin out of the water, but its pace seemed agonizingly slow. The coffin had tilted toward the foot side and water was sluicing out of the small gaps between the coffin boards, but the coffin was still intact.