Savage Gerry

by John Jantunen

  If they was gonna let us out, they’d’ve done it by now.

  So they’re just going to let us fucking die in here?

  They already have.

  Jules must have been thinking about that for it was a moment before he spoke again.

  How long do you think it’ll be? he asked.

  A couple more days, like I said.

  I can’t do two more fucking days of this.

  Ain’t much I can do about that.

  You could kill me.

  How’s that?

  I said, you could kill me.

  I ain’t going to kill you.

  It’d be easy. You could smother me with my pillow.

  I ain’t smothering you with a pillow.

  But why not? You killed three men already, haven’t you? What’s one more?

  Gerald opened his mouth about to say, That was different, they deserved it, but bit his lip before the words could form.

  Truth was, Jules deserved it as much as any of the men Gerald had killed. He’d been an investment broker in his previous life and had swindled the savings out from under his nearest and dearest — his friends and family. His skin was the colour of wet clay except for the flays of red like volcanic rivers carving tributaries through the dull pallor of his cheeks and those had told Gerald he’d spent a good deal of his previous life raising toasts to his good fortune. He’d often kept Gerald up all night crying over the two men — one his own brother — who’d taken their lives when they found out they were broke, and he’d never once looked either of his cellmates straight in the eye. If he hadn’t ended up as the third man in a cell built for two he wouldn’t likely have wasted even a single breath on such a lowly creature as Gerald knew himself to be.

  But none of that was why Gerald wouldn’t do him this simple mercy, though it went a good way to accounting for why he didn’t feel overly compelled to explain to Jules why that might have been.

  You could tie my sheet into a rope, Jules was saying. Strangle me.

  My killing days are long past, Gerald answered in a sharp tone that he hoped would put an end to the matter.

  It didn’t.

  Please. I can’t— I can’t take it anymore.

  A desperate whine had crept into Jules’s tone and Gerald felt the familiar surge of anger welling in his chest as it often did when he spoke to his cellmate.

  Won’t you just kill me? Get it over with. Please, please. I’m begging you.

  Gerald rolled back over, burying his face again in his pillow and muttering under his breath, more to himself than to Jules,

  You keep it up, I just might.

  3

  You hear that?

  Gerald was lying on his back, half dozing. Jules’s voice rose as a tremulous whisper, no more than a ghost might have made. Beyond that Gerald could hear a distant rumbling.

  Sounds like thunder, he said.

  It doesn’t sound like any thunder I ever heard. It sounds like—

  Before Jules could finish, a splash of light blanched the ceiling’s grey — a sudden intrusion more like one cast by a passing car than a bolt of lightning. In its bright Gerald could see that Jules was standing beside the bunk, one hand grappling with the frame for support. His head swivelled, tracing after the fleeing luminescence, probing of its glare as if trying to make sense of where it might have come from. All reason was then lost to a vociferous crunching given over to the dull clatter of buckling concrete and the sharp ping! of rebar snapping.

  Jules stumbled back as the wall crumbled inwards, smothering Orville’s deflated hump. The cell’s inner dark was vanquished by an outer bright casting Gerald in shadow against the far wall, his hands in a desperate clutch at the bed’s frame as if he expected, at any moment, to be washed away by a sudden deluge. It was a fleeting thought dispelled by the guttural roar of an engine and the sudden waft of air pungent with diesel fumes and cement dust.

  Shrouding his eyes with a visored hand, he turned towards the chasm opened out of the toppling wall. There was a giant hand raking its rubble, and Orville too, in one outward sweep. It was ringed with an aura of almost otherworldly light and Jules stood with mouth agape like maybe he was waiting to hear the voice of God calling out to him in its rapture. But the hand departed having uttered nothing but the hiss of its hydraulics, and the light departed shortly thereafter.

  Gerald’s eyes hadn’t yet adjusted from their slumber and all he could see in its wake was a blur of yellow streaking past the hole. It was accompanied by a lumberous creak and he’d just got in mind what that might have meant when there appeared another light, no more than a spot, prying through the haze. All of this so far away and so much like a dream that Gerald froze stock still, afraid that if he dared move or breathe he’d awake again, alone in the dark, perhaps terminally this time. Every tha-rump of his heart thereafter served to shatter the illusion but even when a barrel-shaped man appeared scrambling over the rubble the excavator had left behind, he still couldn’t conjure the will to more than peer back at him.

  Orville, you in there? the barrel-shaped man called out.

  Through the dust and the flicker of flies, his flashlight found Jules coughing into his arm.

  You ain’t Orville.

  No, Jules choked out. I’m—

  But he was cut off by the man before he could continue.

  God, don’t it reek in here!

  Gerald could see that the barrel-shaped man was short, shorter even than his own five foot eight, and wore a beard a shade longer, its brackish curls straggling over a belly so big and round it’d be a miracle if he could touch the pads of his fingers together in front of him. He had one arm crooked over his mouth to guard against the stench and all Gerald could see of his face were his eyes, black pits blinking against the dust.

  Smells like something died, the barrel-shaped man was saying and that snapped Gerald out of his daze.

  That’d be Orville, he said.

  The moment he spoke the flashlight searched him out, striking upon what must have appeared to the other a strange and gnomic cave-dwelling creature cowering on the top bunk and squinting against its glower.

  What’d you say?

  I said, That’d be Orville.

  He’s dead?

  Five days now.

  You kill him?

  There was a hint of accusation in his voice and that and the way the man’s free hand had searched out the stock of the automatic pistol slung on a strap over his shoulder had Gerald vigorously shaking his head.

  No, he said. They never came by with his shot.

  The flashlight had taken to darting about the cell, chasing the dark out of its corners. Finding no evidence of Orville’s remains, it again sought out Gerald.

  What’d you do, eat him?

  Last I saw he was lying on the floor, about where you’re standing now.

  The barrel-shaped man looked down to his feet. The flashlight lit over a stain the colour of motor oil. He seemed to get the point and turned back to the gaping hole in the wall. The beam scanned over the pile of rubble a few yards beyond and the man was just moving after it when Jules finally found the will to speak again.

  You want to tell us what the fuck’s going on? he asked.

  Well, what do you think? the barrel-shaped man said, turning back and flashing them an impish sort of grin.

  It’s a goddamn jail break!

  4

  Gerald and Jules emerged from the hole, clutching each other around the waist and gulping great mouthfuls of air laced with diesel fumes, heaven-sent compared to the cell’s putridity.

  The excavator had moved on and was launching a fresh assault on the wall twenty paces hence. In the peripheral glow of its headlights Gerald could see the barrel-shaped man talking with a tall stick-like figure. The both of them were staring dolefully at the bloated arm jutting fr
om the pile of rubble that had been his cell’s outer wall. Each was wearing a matching denim vest over a bare chest and on their backs was embroidered the picture of a hilltop tree cast against the setting sun. Beneath its billow of leaves, from the lowest branch, there hung a singular reddish globe — what looked to be an apple but what Gerald knew to be a drop of blood.

  He’d seen the picture plenty of times before.

  A good number of the prisoners had it tattooed on their arms and back, Orville included, but even before he’d come to Central North, Gerald would have had to have been living on the moon not to have known it was the insignia of The Sons of Adam Motorcycle Club. They’d had a compound in Chelmsford, a small town less than a half hour from Capreol, where he’d lived with his grandfather. Both Chemmie, as the locals called it, and Capreol had been amalgamated into the City of Greater Sudbury long before Gerald was born. The Sons’ colours were outlawed there but they defied the spirit, if not the exact letter, of the law by wearing cuts embroidered with the tree, and sometimes brazenly displaying a standard with the same affixed to the back of their bikes as they cruised the network of country highways connecting the half dozen communities on the outskirts of the city proper.

  Whenever he and his grandfather were out on an errand in the old man’s antiquated Ford F-150 and a group of them approached, his grandfather’s hands would tighten on the wheel, his teeth would clench and his eyes would narrow to slits. For a moment it would seem to Gerald that his grandfather was fighting a life-and-death battle to keep himself from swerving into the oncoming lane, run the whole damn lot of them under his bumper, his ill will towards them not so much a result of the thirty-odd years he’d spent with the RCMP as it was because he blamed them for the death of his only daughter, Gerald’s mother.

  His grandfather never spoke of them otherwise, a towering silence that led Gerald to suspect he blamed himself for what had happened to her as much as he did The Sons. It wouldn’t be until he was well into the fifth year of his incarceration that Gerald would discover that his mother’s death was the least of their crimes.

  It had been Jules who’d filled him in.

  The Sons had dragged the investment banker out of his cell one evening, his third at Central North. When he’d returned, some hours later, his head had been shaved, which The Sons did with any prisoner they’d claimed as their property. A stubbling of nicks leaked blood from his bald crown so it was clear that whoever had done it must have used a dull blade, and Jules was walking with a lopsided hobble so Gerald knew they’d also branded their tree on his ass. Orville hadn’t returned until just after the horn had sounded lights off, at eleven, and Gerald had been left alone with Jules in the cell, listening to him crying and cursing, Fucking animals, evil motherfuckers, into his pillow.

  He’d been at it for what seemed like hours before Gerald had finally told him to shut up, he was trying to sleep.

  You shut the fuck up, Jules had spat back at him with the petulance of a bratty child.

  Boy, you sure do swear a lot for an investment banker, Gerald had replied, thinking if he wasn’t going to get any sleep, the least he could do was have a little fun.

  They fucking branded me, Jules whimpered. Fucking animals. Evil motherfuckers.

  They never bothered me none.

  Never bothered you— What the fuck does that have to do with anything?

  I’m just saying.

  You’re just saying?

  Live and let live I always say, Gerald added, which seemed a sensible way to go about his day-to-day, in prison or otherwise.

  Live and let live? Jules blurted, aghast. After what they did? The whole fucking lot of them should be rounded up and shot.

  I wouldn’t know about that.

  You wouldn’t know about what?

  Gerald was regretting having said anything and clamped his mouth shut.

  You’d have to have been living on the fucking moon not to know what those evil motherfuckers did.

  Well, maybe I was.

  You really never— I mean—

  Jules was plainly exasperated dealing with such an imbecile as his new cellmate was proving himself to be. On any other day Gerald would have relished befuddling Jules but the mention of being branded had recalled to Gerald how his own mother had proudly worn the same brand behind her left ear. He hadn’t thought about her in years. Now, against his will, he found himself remembering the time when he was seven and he’d been awoken in the middle of the night by the sound of smashing glass. When he’d come into the kitchen his mother was doing a little remodelling with a baseball bat. There were broken dishes all over the floor and as he stood in the door, wiping the sleep out of his eyes, his mother was launching an attack on the stove. Her feet were all torn up and there were deep slashes up and down her arm, maybe from the paring knife sitting in a pool of blood on the table. He’d seen his mother freak out before and did what he’d always done: run back to his room to hide in the closet, wait for her to wear herself out.

  But on that night, she never did.

  One of the neighbours must have called the cops because soon he heard sirens growing louder. A few seconds after they’d quieted in front of his house, someone was pounding on the front door and a man’s voice was calling out, Is everything all right in there, ma’am?

  There was a moment of silence and then Gerald had heard a wailing shriek, his mother perhaps, and then someone, a woman this time, was yelling, She’s got a knife!

  She’d barely spoken when five gunshots rang out: Bang! Bang! BangBangBang!

  Forcing that memory from his mind, trying to concentrate on what Jules was saying now about The Sons and only catching parcelled bits, the majority of which had to do with their involvement in the spread of a drug called Euphoral.

  You’ve heard of Euphoral, haven’t you? Jules asked when he first mentioned it.

  Gerald grunted, giving no indication either way, but the truth was he really would have had to be living on the moon — or at least somewhere other than Central North — not to have heard of Euphoral. Half the inmates were there on charges related to the drug, the latest escalation in the opioid pandemic sweeping the planet. Its high promised the user euphoria and its low a violent psychosis, the only cure for which they’d found so far being death. Speculation on the range as to its origins was split between those who blamed the Chinese for creating it, to control their excess population after automation put a half billion of their people out of work, and those who blamed the Americans, who’d possibly developed it as a means of destabilizing foreign countries prior to attack. The only thing both sides agreed upon was that it was developed in secret and that it was a secret that didn’t last long. Its dissemination was rapid and cataclysmic. Within a few short years Euphoral had become so widespread that when Gerald was growing up he’d often heard his grandfather say that it posed more of a threat to global stability than climate change. Gerald had long suspected that it was the main reason the old man had kept him sequestered from the rest of the world and also why the one time he’d asked his grandfather why he didn’t have internet, he’d answered, Bad enough the world’s going to hell without me having to hear about it every damned second of the day.

  Any of this ringing a bell? Jules had asked after providing Gerald with a rough précis of the same.

  Ding, ding.

  But maybe what you don’t know, Jules said, is it was The Sons who brought it to Ontario. They’d started off cutting it into whatever other drugs they were selling, getting people hooked. There was some even said they were making it themselves and just giving it away for free. That they knew what would happen and that was their plan all along. That they were a bunch of fucking religious nuts, a doomsday cult stockpiling weapons in secret compounds spread throughout the north, and that Euphoral was their means to bring about The End.

  Now there’s some who’d blame the government, he continued. T
hat it was Nora that caused all the problems.

  Nora? Gerald asked. Who’s that?

  Not a who, a what. You know, N-O-R-A. The Northern Ontario Repopulation Act?

  He had heard of that. It was the reason Millie had always given him why she’d come to Capreol. She too had been born in Sudbury, or rather Scuzzbury as she always called it, most often hocking a spit at the ground right after as if its mere mention left a bad taste in her mouth. She was eighteen when she’d finally fled to Capreol, first living in the basement of the bungalow her sister owned with her husband up on Beech Crescent, and then with Gerald on the farm at the end of Stull after she’d followed him home from the Legion that one night and had never left. Over the years she’d relayed to him parcelled bits of information about the city of both their births and so he’d come to know that long before he was born, the automation of Sudbury’s only real industry of merit — mining — had devastated the local economy. It would have dealt it a death blow too if it hadn’t been, in Millie’s words, someone’s “bright idea” to repurpose the city as one of four northern social services hubs for the growing masses of unemployables residing in the cities to the south.

  NORA, as Jules called it, offered substantial relocation incentives to anyone on social assistance and expanded the province’s vagrancy laws, allocating municipal councils sweeping powers to round up anyone unfortunate enough to find themselves living on the street for immediate transport up north. By the time Millie had fled to Capreol, five years later, Sudbury’s population had swelled from just under a hundred thousand people to over three, thus providing, if Jules was to be believed, The Sons with an ever-expanding pool of the down-and-out from which to draw converts to their cause.

  But it wasn’t the government’s fault, Jules contested. They were trying to help those people. Give them a place to go, get their lives together. It was the fucking Sons who preyed upon them, exploited their weakness. Got them hooked on Euphoral. Some even said they’d put it in the fucking water and hell, I wouldn’t put it past them. Those evil sons of bitches.