Flam Grub. Dan Dowhal

      To Anna and Oleksa

      who gave me mine.

      Chapter 1

      If Flam Grub had been able to regress beyond conscious memory and go back to the very beginning, it would not have surprised him to learn the pain caused by his name had started while he was still floating in the womb. There, the briny serenity had been disturbed by regular shouting and sporadic violence between his parents, with the words “Flam Grub” serving as a soundtrack to the upheavals, transmitted to the fetal Flam through his mother’s belly.

      Flam’s parents had met at work. His mother, Mary Flam, was the office manager for the modest-sized trucking firm of Wheeler Cartage. Barely in her twenties, Mary was a tall, fair-skinned, red-headed beauty, with a nebula of freckles across the bridge of her nose, and green, otherworldly cat eyes that had a penetrating effect on anyone who fell into their orbit. Although she tried to hide it beneath a wardrobe of modest, almost dowdy dresses, her firm, lithe body would attract the attention of men wherever she went.

      In the year and a half that she had been working for Wheeler, Mary had never given any of the truckers or dock workers a second glance, although she was fully aware of the lustful stares that tracked her like radar each time her heels were heard clicking on the stairs leading up to the office.

      Mary had always been grateful her boss preferred to deal with the men directly, which allowed her to minimize her contact with the rough and greasy hirelings. That left her free to concentrate on the only man she was really interested in. Despite her relatively young age, Mary was expecting to become engaged shortly to Gerald Strait, a pharmacist she knew through her devotions at St. Ernest’s Church, in whose flock Mary was one of the most pious of lambs.

      A decade older than Mary, Gerald had an established business and a sober disposition on which a girl’s future could be safely built. It had taken Mary months to orchestrate enough casual and seemingly chance encounters for Gerald to grow comfortable in her presence, and an even longer period of subtle encouragement to stoke his ardour to a potentially matrimonial temperature. As far as her own inner coolness went, Mary presumed that passion was something meant for the saints, and it was better to take care of her daily bread first.

      Everything changed the day Mary’s eyes fell on Steve Grub, newly hired by Wheeler to help with a large new delivery contract. Steve was dark-haired and handsome, with soft, seductive brown eyes and a square-jawed, flawless face. He had a mouthful of straight, glimmering white teeth, which he flashed often, for he was a glib, smooth talker, with a seemingly endless repertoire of bon mots and amusing stories. But it was Steve’s body that cemented Mary’s downfall. The sinewy splendour that rippled from beneath a permanently unbuttoned shirt was a living incarnation of Jesus’ own lean physique, which Mary had guiltily contemplated over the years on crucifixes, statues, and icons with a fervour that sometimes strayed beyond religious.

      She simply couldn’t keep her eyes off Steve. Even without admitting it to herself, Mary started fabricating excuses to interact with him. The first time their fingers touched across a rush delivery order, she felt like a high-voltage jolt had passed through her entire body, before finally settling as a permanent electrical charge in her loins. They flirted over paycheques, courted over waybills, snatched their first kiss in the bathroom, and first groped each other in the rear of Steve’s truck. Finally, on the Friday night of a Labour Day weekend, when everyone else had rushed off to start their holiday and Wheeler had left her to lock up, they consummated their lust in a secluded corner of the warehouse.

      And so Flam was conceived, on a pallet of flattened cardboard, quickly stained by semen and virginal blood, with Mary profaning the names of her beloved saints as her long legs repeatedly pulled Steve’s dimpled buttocks down onto herself.

      The fighting started soon thereafter. They fought about the news of Mary’s pregnancy, and whose fault it was. They fought about Steve’s suggestion that they abort the fetus. They fought about Mary’s demand that they should be married. They fought about the abysmal state of Steve’s finances, and the gambling, drinking, and womanizing that had dragged him into indebtedness. They fought about the tiny, grimy flat, located above an old bookstore in the seedier part of town, which was all they could afford.

      The biggest fight of all, as it turned out, was over Mary changing her surname. An only child, she was determined to keep the family name alive. Throughout Mary’s whole life, she had been steeped in the family history and mythology of the Flams, a small clan of poor but stubbornly proud Irish peasants. For centuries, Mary’s ancestors had steadfastly clung to the Flam name, despite being mocked for it, along with a tiny impoverished parcel of County Sligo soil.

      Eventually, like so many others, the family was forced to emigrate by the Great Potato Famine. However, the displaced Flams never fully tore themselves free from their ancient roots, like ghosts unable to accept the fact of their own deaths. A century and a half later, they had failed to prosper in the New World, as some calamity after another managed to keep them pegged down in working-class purgatory. Still, no matter what other failures sucked their spirit or amputated their meagre fortune, the ancestral pride and family lore were fiercely instilled in each subsequent generation of New World Flams. So they had found their way to Mary, the sole offspring of a luckless cab driver and his bankrupt widow, and the last vestige of the Flam name. She could live with her latest misfortune, no matter what dreams she may have harboured, for it somehow seemed the familial fate, but she was horrified at the thought of being the final extinguisher of the Flam name. She prayed for guidance on the matter, interpreting God’s silence as assent of her desire, and was grateful that Steve, who was not big on details or discussion anyway, never brought up the subject of names.

      A few days after their hastily arranged wedding, which was attended mostly by Steve’s cronies in hopes of a free drunk-up afterwards, and conducted out of shame in a parish where no one knew her, Mary dropped the dinner dishes in the sink and turned to face her husband.

      “I’m keeping my name,” she announced.

      Steve, who had quietly been working on his fifth beer, almost fell off his chair.

      “Like hell you are!” he shouted as he leapt to his feet. “You’re my wife now, and you’ll damned well take my name!”

      Mary went on like she hadn’t heard him. “What’s more, my child will be christened a Flam too,” she told him, her emerald gaze piercing his own dark-eyed disbelief.

      “You goddamned ball-cutting bitch! You’re the one who wanted to get married,” he screamed. “Now you won’t even take my name! Do you want people to think the kid’s not mine? Are you trying to make a fool of me in front of my friends?”

      “Ha! Like I care one bit about those drunken losers you call friends. The Flam name’s a good name . . . a proud name . . . and that’s what I’m keeping for me and my children.” Here she played a trump by picking on Steve, who had been abandoned at birth and raised in institutional foster homes: “I can trace my family back a dozen generations. You . . . you don’t