When he arrived in Toronto, he was already an adult in body. One Saturday in July he stood on a deserted corner in the downtown strip known as Boys Town. For once he was lucky — in a relative way. The man who stopped his Mercedes to chat up the ungainly teenager with the adult’s body had been kind and not unattractive. He reminded Dan of his grade nine shop teacher, Mr. Dalton, a gruff man with hairy arms and shirtsleeves permanently rolled back. Dalton had been an erotic fixation for Dan, who conjured the man’s image to trigger his masturbatory fantasies.
Dalton’s look-alike invited Dan to his home in Leaside. Dan thought he was talking about a place outside Toronto, but the man assured him it was only a fifteen-minute ride to where they were headed. Money was never discussed. Dan was too nervous to bring it up, and the man had an assuredness that said he knew what he was doing.
As they drove along the tree-lined streets, Dan was struck by how little the neighbourhood offered the casual viewer. He wondered who lived behind the tidy, curtained windows where light spilled over the sills like the first star at twilight. He considered how much you’d have to earn to live there. Certainly more than he’d ever make.
Dan hadn’t minded the sex. The man — Bob Greene — was courteous and hadn’t asked Dan to do anything he wasn’t comfortable with. Afterwards, Dan pocketed the fifty dollars, blushing at Bob’s compliments. It was the first time anyone had made him feel attractive.
Bob was experienced at picking up boys. He knew life on the streets was anything but glamorous, and could be hazardous. He also knew hustlers came in two types: the ones you could trust and the ones you couldn’t. Most fell into the latter category sooner or later. Bob knew Dan was new at the game. But he was polite and eager to please. The next morning, when Dan didn’t seem in a hurry to get back on the streets, Bob invited him to stay for the day.
They spent the morning by the pool. In the afternoon, they walked around the neighbourhood. To Dan, Toronto was Yonge Street — the Eaton Centre and downtown strip with its sex shops, sporting goods chains, and fast food outlets. Beyond that, it seemed to sprawl without boundaries. You could walk all day without reaching the end of it. Here was another gleaming new part of it. With its staid brick homes and sturdy elms, Leaside represented the kind of family environment Dan had never known. It was a world away from the bleak mining town where he’d grown up.
Two months later, Bob picked him up on the same corner. Only this time, Dan didn’t leave again for quite a while. The invitation to live in a place with a pool rather than the over-crowded mission was more than enough of an enticement. He stayed with Bob for three years, finishing high school while they lived together. Bob put Dan in charge of his domestic finances, along with housekeeping duties. They’d been more like a couple than an older man and younger hustler. Even then, Dan hadn’t admitted to being gay. Sharing Bob’s bed for three years hadn’t changed that. It was only when Bob died unexpectedly — an epileptic seizure in the shower one week shy of his fortieth birthday — that Dan realized he’d loved him.
In a way, their last year together had been more like father and son than anything Dan had ever known. It would be another five years before he got up the courage to go home and confront his real father face-to-face. By then he had his own son.
Dan looked over the missing boy’s photograph, scrutinizing the features. He wasn’t attractive, but he wore an air of toughness — probably as a result of the schoolyard bullying — that would go a long way to make up for not being a pretty boy. To survive on the city streets, you needed one or the other.
Dan wondered what the parents were hoping for, information on their son’s whereabouts, a reassurance as to his mental and physical well-being, or the whole Corpus Christi? Usually they wanted their children back, even when it wasn’t in anybody’s best interest. In this case, it was too early to tell.
Teenagers could be surprisingly elusive once they connected with other runaways to help them stay invisible. There was no paper trail of credit card purchases or personal cheques cluttering things up. No Welfare files or ROEs pinning them to specific addresses. Hand-to-mouth was a tough game to play, but it kept them off the radar. Sometimes Dan got lucky when a kid was picked up for shoplifting or vagrancy, though they often lied their way out before he got to them. A twelve-year-old he’d been searching for had stood in a police station two feet from a picture tagging her as a runaway. No one had noticed. Dan found this out later when she turned up half-dead of a drug overdose, alive thanks to emergency resuscitation procedures at the hospital after someone threw her into a cab along with a twenty-dollar bill and closed the door.
He scanned Richard’s photograph into his computer and printed a dozen copies, jamming them into his briefcase. He’d put out a few calls — nothing official, just a guy making inquiries around the gay community. Maybe Family Services or Child Find Canada had come across him, though the police would have contacted the brigades of bespectacled middle-aged women wearing their all-weather skirts, hand-knitted sweaters, and freshwater pearls who tirelessly followed up unlikely leads and telephoned to tell you if they’d heard anything, anything at all. If the kid were still in town, someone would come across him sooner or later. Sooner was always preferable.
He’d take the picture around the bars before going home tonight. The bouncers were scrupulous in keeping out underage kids in the evenings, but it was possible for a kid like Richard — half-man, half-boy — to sneak in undetected in the afternoon, especially if he was looking for a daddy. If he had, the bartenders would have noticed.
The phone rang. It was 55 Division calling to say the coroner’s office had a possible match for one of his cases and could he come down for a look. They all knew him by name, though most of them called him Sharp, never Dan, except for a couple of female constables he suspected of hitting on him.
He was put on hold. One of his co-workers entered and slapped a photo on his desk. He pointed at the subject’s face, an old sharkie they’d been tracing for a dog’s age. The man made a cutting motion across his neck. Dan put a hand over the receiver.
“Confirmed?”
A stiff nod. “Just came in. Nasty stuff — looks like gangland. I’ve got the deets when you want them….”
Fifty-five Division came back on the line. Dan held up a finger while he wrote down the specs. When he turned around, his colleague was gone.
The wall clock crept around to eleven. The numbers swam in his field of vision. It was going to be a long, slow morning. Dan rubbed his eyes. He hadn’t hit forty yet, and genetics said it was only going to get worse. Maybe he should stop while he was ahead. Take up a kinder, gentler career. Whatever that might be.
Bob had left Dan enough money to finish university, but Dan balked when it came time to choose. He’d wanted a career that sounded impressive and might be helpful to others. But what was that? Bob had listened thoughtfully while Dan ran through the possibilities: doctor, lawyer, maybe even a minister. But, as Bob pointed out, Dan got faint at the sight of blood, hated debates, and didn’t believe in the existence of anything that could vaguely be construed as God-like. That seemed to cancel out his hopes in those areas.
“Go for the money,” Bob advised, “but make sure it’s something you enjoy. Forty years is a long time to do something you don’t like.”
Bob tried to steer him toward a vocation where he had aptitude as well as interest, but this proved elusive. Dan had mechanical skills, but the usual choices — plumbing and engineering — held little appeal. And while he had a love of cultural things, music in particular, he had no real artistic inclinations. What Dan knew and seemed to grasp instinctively was other human beings — how they interacted, what motivated and intrigued them. Human resources could always use good people, Bob argued, but discouraged Dan from a career that would cement him in the business world. He was too bright and restless to get bogged down in the corporate mentality.
At the time, it made sense for Dan to attend the University of Toronto and stay with Bob. But then Bob died and his nieces and nephews sold the house. His future uncertain, Dan enrolled in a smattering