Savage Gerry

by John Jantunen

  The RCMP finally raided their main compound, just outside of Thunder Bay, arresting dozens of their members. The Sons’ reaction was swift and calculated: they cut off all supply of Euphoral to the cities above the forty-sixth parallel as a warning to those living down south. And that’s when we learned, the hard way, that the only thing worse than a fucking Euphie was ten thousand of them in withdrawal. And boy did we ever fucking learn that.

  Hearing Jules recounting the epidemic of outrageous violence that had followed immediately called to Gerald’s mind memories of watching The Road Warrior. It was one of several hundred DVDs his grandfather had inherited from his older brother when the latter died, leaving his younger the family farm. Most of the other movies were old westerns and over the years they’d watched the whole collection three or four times after the evening chores, a rare concession to a world the old man no longer seemed to want any part of. Those nights invariably ended with his grandfather falling asleep in his armchair except, that is, when they watched The Road Warrior. Then his grandfather would sit craned forward through to its end, peering in furtive contemplation as the story unfolded. He’d be shaking his head and clucking his teeth, same way he did while he was watching the evening news on their one and only channel, as if the movie was simply the logical extension of what he saw happening there.

  Some said it was maybe even the start of a civil war, Jules said by way of a conclusion. The army was called in but by then Euphies had already burnt Timmins to the ground. The flames spread to the surrounding forest, igniting the largest forest fire in the province’s history. They still haven’t released the death toll from that but it was in the thousands at least.

  Timmins was a city three hundred kilometres north of Sudbury. It too had been designated a northern social service hub and at its mention Gerald remembered that he’d also heard something about what had happened there, not from Millie, who’d been dead two years by then, but from Barry Woods, who everyone in Pod 2 called Zip. He was a skinny little runt with a face that looked like someone had punched it clear through the back of his head. Between his eyes and his mouth there was a mess of scar tissue like lips puckered sour and the skin beneath that receded inwards over toothless gums. He’d got his nickname after he’d tattooed the teeth of a zipper inked in a Y from the crest of each of his cheek bones. Where the two lines came together, roughly at the height of his missing nose, he wore a silver hoop of a kind that might be called a bull ring though it had always reminded Gerald more of a door knocker.

  Gerald had never found out what had brought Zip to Central North nor what had happened to his face. He did know he was a Son, which didn’t come as much of a surprise since Pod 2 was where they kept most of The Sons of Adam at Central North. He’d been the unit’s lugger, prison slang for a person who could procure pretty much anything you wanted inside. He reserved these luxuries for his fellow Sons and his biggest seller was Zip juice, what he called his own special blend of concentrated THC and psilocybin. Once a week he’d drop by the cell to give Orville his allotment and he’d often stick around, sometimes for an hour or more.

  He was a real talker and what he liked to talk about most was his prowess as a hunter. So Gerald and him might have had plenty to talk about except Zip always treated him with a certain diffidence, rarely communicating anything to him besides the odd nod in his direction should they pass in the unit’s common area. It was how most of The Sons treated him, like what he’d done — killing two cops — had earned him their respect or because it was known amongst their ranks that he was a literal son of one of them and that had placed him outside the scorn they reserved for almost anyone who didn’t wear their patch.

  In all the years he’d been dropping by, Zip had never spoken to Gerald, confining his conversation to Orville, whose only reply to his tales of hunting derring-do would be to shake his head and say, Explain to me again, what it is you got against grocery stores? He’d said it so often that Gerald began to suspect it was for his benefit alone that Zip was really telling stories of his prowess as a hunter.

  The only time he could recall Zip deviating from his hunting stories was after a riot had erupted in Pod 5, which everyone called Club Euphie since it was where they kept most of the junkies. Six guards had been killed along with fifty inmates and Zip’d had plenty to say about that.

  You think they’d have learned their lethon after they burned Timminth, he’d opined in his distinct nasal lisp. Only way to deal with them, ith you got to thoot ’em on thight.

  Fuckin-A. Shoot ’em all, Orville had chimed in. Fucking Euphie-fucks.

  Orville, by then, was already six drops into the Zip juice and it was lucky he could even muster that much to say.

  You know I wath born in fucking Timminth, Zip continued with enough scorn in his voice to infer that it was Timmins that had taken his face. I mean Timminth, it’th, it’th fucking Timminth, all right. I ain’t trying to defend Timminth here. Timminth wuth a fucking thit-hole. It wuth a thit-hole when I wuth born, it wuth a thit-hole when I left and if they ever get around to rebuilding it, it’ll thtill be a fucking thit-hole then. Timminth can kith my fucking ath, and you can write that on my tombthtone.

  Fuck Timmins!

  Word man, tha’th the fucking word.

  There was a pause then, long enough for them to have bumped fists.

  Weren’t anyone happier to hear they’d burned fucking Timminth than me. But if they’d jutht thot all them Euphie fuckth right off the bat it never would have happened. And then they got the audathity to blame The Thonth of Adam? That’th fucking bullthit. Half the fucking world going craythee and the other half trying to pretend it’th bith’nith ath uthual. It wuth jutht a matter of time before thump’in had to give. And boy did it ever fucking give in Timminth!

  * * *

  Seeing the patches worn by the barrel-shaped man and the skinny stick figure now, Gerald was thinking that that same something must have given all over.

  A sliver of dread had wormed its way into his gut, tempered only by the sudden wonder he felt peering up into a sky so fraught with a blaze of stars that it seemed they must have somehow stolen every bit of man’s bright. Scanning the horizon and seeing nothing beyond the outline of treetops, dark and ragged, on the far side of the prison fence, recalling how when he’d first come to Central North and couldn’t sleep he’d often stand at the cell’s window, coveting the thin wedge of sky he could see through the bars in the tempered glass. He’d be lucky if he saw a single star prying through the hazy diffusion seeping out of the cities to the south. A hundred million lights (or more) like a slow rolling tide washing over a great black beach and the stars but dulled pieces of quartz encrusted in the sand. Here, now, with only the excavator to challenge the night’s dominion, he knew something truly terrible must have happened.

  The two men commiserating over Orville’s body would have known what that might have been, if anyone did, but whatever that was seemed to have caused them about as much concern as did the fate of their friend.

  And I thought he smelled bad when he was alive, the barrel-chested man was saying and to that the tall man laughed and shook his head.

  I always told him them Jelly Bellies’d be the end of him.

  He’d eat ’em by the pound.

  Shit, he’d eat ’em by the truckload.

  The tall man said something else and the two men laughed again.

  But Gerald was no longer listening. He’d just caught a whiff of cooking meat. It seemed to be coming from around the right side of the building. Jules had smelt it too.

  Smells like … barbecue!

  Their eyes locked for a fleeting instant, registering the significance of that. And then their legs were setting off in a stumbling flurry, chasing over the uneven path churned up in the excavator’s wake as if heaven itself awaited them around the bend.

  5

  When he came around the corner of Pod 2 they were
met with a most curious sight.

  The Central North Correctional Centre was comprised of five hexagonal “pods” and in Gerald’s mind had always looked more like a lunar colony than a prison. The building was buffered on all sides by an expansive lawn and in the middle of the yard between Pod 1 and the perimeter fence there was now a small flatbed trailer wound with Christmas lights and furnished to resemble a parlour. Two men with fiddles lounged on a couch while a third reclined in an easy chair, plucking a banjo. Another stood between them with a stand-up bass, a fifth was seated at a piano and a sixth sat beside him, pounding out the beat to an old-timey country jig on a snare drum and cymbal. The band was whooping and hollering and two old men in prison greys were dancing in circles with interlocked arms in front of a bonfire. Flames lapped in feverish delight and sparks belched from their mire, flickering incandescent against the star-speckled night. A dozen other men ranged around it, some calling out in joyful welcome to the men hobbling away from the prison or locked in the desperate embrace of brothers, or lovers, they feared they’d never see again, others sitting in the grass or squatting on hunched knees drinking from tall cans of beer and bottles of water in between bites out of submarine buns oozing with thick slathers of meat.

  On the far side of this revelry there was another, larger, trailer. It was the one they’d brought the excavator in on and it was from this that the simmer of grilling meat wafted. Five men stood in a queue extending up the rear ramp, all of them wearing the same prison greys, gaunt-faced and with beards as full as Gerald’s, though his was bushier than most and of a redder hue than any. At the front of the line, on the trailer’s platform, there was a fifty-gallon steel drum cut almost in half and filled with freshly stoked charcoal. A fatted hog was roasting on a rotisserie above and every man in line was peering at the bounty with fevered eyes.

  A boy — couldn’t have been older than thirteen — was turning the crank on the rotisserie and a man — seventy if he was a day — was cutting great swathes from the hog with a butcher’s knife. Could have been the former was, like Gerald himself, the son of one of The Sons and had come to help his father with the jail break. He had a shaven head and was wearing a plain black muscle shirt in defiance of the boney ligature to his arms and a fierce scowl belying his tender age. The latter had the familiar tree emblazoned across his back and was clean shaven and naked from the waist up except for an apron that read You Can Kiss The Cook If You Want (But I’d Rather Have A Blow Job). As each of the men shuffled up to the front of the line, he goaded them with the exuberance of a grandfather cooking up a feast for a brood of grandkids he hadn’t seen in years, teasing that they weren’t nothing but damn skeletons as he lathered thick strips of barbecued pork onto the buns and exulting as he handed them over, This’ll put a little meat on your bones!

  As the men exited down the second ramp another boy, as similar to the first that they might have been twins, handed them each a bottle of water and a beer from the two coolers at his feet. Passing them by as they stumbled towards the bonfire, dousing their thirst with the bottles and their hunger with a frantic gnashing of teeth, Gerald could see beads of sweat glistening on the cans’ aluminum. It had been years since he’d had a beer and the thought of downing an ice-cold one had him licking his lips as much as the simmer of grilling meat had his stomach tying itself into knots.

  At the foot of the ramp was a man with a submachine gun slung on a strap low at his waist. He was wearing the same denim vest over a bare chest as the others and was tall and thin, with a cadaverous face dusted with whiskers of the same grey as the long bob of his thinning hair, which was pulled back into a ponytail. As Gerald and Jules approached he affixed them with a stern glare, not unlike the guard who’d provided Gerald with his two one-piece jumpsuits, a bar of soap, a toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste on the day he’d arrived at Central North. That was enough to put a slight hitch in Gerald’s step, such that it was Jules who made the ramp first.

  Where do you think you’re going? the cadaverous man snarled as Jules tried to push past, his eyes locked in a mortal grip on the hog. The man grabbed him by the arm and used his other hand to jam the barrel of his gun into the hollow just below Jules’s ribs, Jules glaring back at him with widening incredulity, the same way his previous self might have gaped at a maître d’ at some fancy restaurant who’d just told him he couldn’t find his reservation.

  What do you mean? he asked. I’m going to get some food.

  Do I know you?

  Jules Blake, he said, holding out his hand as if to shake. Pleased to meet you.

  The man looked at his hand as if it might have been holding a fresh turd.

  I’m going to need to see your invitation, he said.

  My invitation? I don’t—

  Eyes widening further still, head on a drastic swivel, looking past the man at the hog as if it might be able to provide him with a suitable answer. Looking then back at the man and seeing that he’d forsaken the rifle for a large hunting knife, its blade tapering to a fine point just beneath Jules’s right eye.

  Now wait just a—

  Jules made a backwards lunge but the man held his arm in his other hand, locked at the elbow and twisting upwards, causing Jules to emit a sudden squeal.

  Wait, wait! he cried out. I just wanted something to eat. I haven’t eaten in five days!

  But the man wasn’t listening. He’d inverted the knife in his hand and in one downward slash he cut a hole in the jumpsuit from Jules’s chin to his groin. Resheathing the knife, he grabbed at Jules’s shoulder and wrenched the fabric, tearing it over his arms and down to his waist. Giving then a cursory glance at his back and at the sag of his biceps. Seeing only folds of skin hanging in loose flaps over the outline of ribs and shoulder bones, he released Jules, who gasped and buckled over, peering up at the man with ill-contained malice.

  No invitation, no food, the man said.

  Swivelling then towards Gerald, his eyes narrowed to slits of careful scrutiny. Gerald couldn’t think of anything to do except smile wide and so he did that. It seemed to do the trick, for after a moment the man said, I do know you.

  The trace of a smile shortly flickered at the corners of his mouth, the same way the inmates at Central North had so often reacted when they’d recognized Gerald for who he was. Sizing him up and finding him lacking, not just in stature but in the same exaggerated grin he wore now and had been wearing for the past five years as his only defence against trouble, looking ever so much like a simpleton and only exacerbating that by how he’d stick his hand out in formal greeting.

  Gerald Nichols, he’d say to whoever had come over to meet him. How’dya do?

  The other getting the joke or not, either way taking his hand in tenuous embrace, watching him with hovering amusement as Gerald gave it a perfunctory shake, grinning like he was meeting the prime minister. He’d then turn his eyes skyward if they were in the yard, or towards the TV if they were in the common room, and offer, They’s saying it’s going to rain. Don’t much feel like rain, you ask me. But then I didn’t grow up around here. What do you say?

  The simple country courtesy of his upbringing about as out of place at Central North as an evening gown so that more often than not they’d only answer him with a mocking leer and a nod, leaving him to himself thereafter, maybe studying him from a distance for a time, trying to reconcile the man who did what they said he’d done with the man standing over there.

  But Gerald was too tired and hungry to bother with any of that now and let his eyes wander back to the hog. It might as well have been a picture in a magazine for all the good it did him.

  Well go on then, the cadaverous man said.

  Gerald turned abruptly for fear that he was about to repeat the rough treatment he’d visited upon Jules. He’d barely made a step when he felt the sharp censure of the man’s hand on his arm.

  Ain’t you hungry? he asked and Gerald looked back a
t him like he must have been having him on. He found only a thinly veiled delight in the man’s eyes.

  I’m damn near starved.

  Well go on then, the man repeated, get yourself a feed.

  6

  Gerald ate sitting on a flat span of concrete, as big as a queen-sized bed, jutting from within a pile of rubble in front of one of the holes in Pod 1’s wall, all the while trying to ignore Jules, who was standing a ways off, holding the lapels of his slashed jumper sutured with a clenched fist and keeping a rueful sentry on his ex-cellmate like a beat dog waiting on scraps beneath its master’s table.

  Between bites of the sandwich measured with carefully parcelled sips from his bottle of water, Gerald watched the parade of eager inmates lumbering away from the prison in a heady rush to join the party. Other men were walking amongst them, two by two, carrying the bodies of the dead or dying, he couldn’t tell which, and the whole scene recalled to him a similar one he’d seen in one of those old western movies: of soldiers retreating from a battlefield during the Civil War.

  The scene with Jules replayed itself at the trailer a few times, the uninvited sent on their way with slashed jumpers and one who’d protested a trifle too much with a deep gash on his cheek leaking blood between the slits of his fingers, pressed tight, trying to stem the flow as he stumbled off towards the other outcasts. The lion’s share of these were huddled in a small crowd at the western edge of the perimeter fence. To a one their heads bobbled in suspicious backwards glances as if they were engaged in some vengeful plot or perhaps worried that some vengeful plot was being enacted against them. As to what had drawn them to that particular spot, it wasn’t much of a mystery. It was the gaping hole in the fence not twenty paces south from where they’d gathered. The wire mesh had been trampled under the excavator’s tread and all that lay between the yard and the outside world was five men standing at intervals beside an equal number of Harley-Davidson motorcycles of a variety some might have called choppers. All were clad in black leather and had shaven heads and held assault rifles in crooked arms with fingers resolute on their triggers. Four had their backs turned and only the middle one was looking towards the prison’s yard. His face was painted white and within the respiring glow of a cigarette’s cherry Gerald could just decipher the outline of a skeletal grin imprinted over his mouth. If the time he’d spent waiting to die in a cell with a dead man and the manner of his deliverance and the strange celebration under a star-fraught sky which had greeted him in the yard hadn’t been enough to tell him that something had seriously gone wrong with the world outside the prison walls, these grim riders surely were.