Savage Gerry

by John Jantunen

  Of all the guards in Pod 2, it was Foley — the very last guard he’d ever see — who’d always been the friendliest. He was also the slightest, which was maybe why he always treated the prisoners on his watch with the utmost deference — his brain’s attempt to ward off any trouble down the line that his lack of brawn couldn’t handle. Gerald had felt plenty uneasy taking advantage of Foley’s good nature but resolved that it couldn’t be helped.

  One morning when Foley was delivering his breakfast, he commented, Shoot, that’s what I need.

  And what’s that? Foley had answered.

  Gerald pointed to the laminated badge with the guard’s picture and number pinned to the chest of his uniform. When Foley registered what he meant he smirked like it was Gerald’s idea of a joke.

  Well, it’s not for sale, he’d said.

  Not the badge. The laminate. They do that here or they send them badges out?

  Foley smirked again, trying to figure out what game Gerald was playing at. The slack to Gerald’s jaw and the vacuous sheen to his gaze must have told him it couldn’t have been much of one.

  After a moment he answered, They got a machine up in the office.

  A laminator?

  I guess that’s what they call it. Why do you ask?

  I got this picture of my son, Gerald answered. I keep it under my pillow, but it’s got all wrinkled. Lucky it lasts out the year much less three consecutive life sentences. If I could laminate it …

  The laminator is for official prison business.

  Shoot, I figured as much. No harm in asking though.

  That afternoon Foley had searched out Gerald while he was mopping the unit’s common area. He told him that he’d got the okay to laminate the picture for him, which is how Gerald had laid even odds it’d play out. He fetched the photo, which he really did keep under his pillow, that much was true. He handed it to Foley and the guard didn’t cast more than a cursory glance at the front before flipping it over.

  What’s this on the back? he asked, though it sounded more like an accusation than a question.

  A piece of cardboard, Gerald answered, though it seemed obvious. I glued it there to keep it from getting any worse.

  Foley picked at the corrugated sheet in a few spots, finding the cardboard well affixed, and then told Gerald he’d have it back to him the next day.

  That had been two years ago and he’d worn it around his neck ever since though it’d be six months before he felt comfortable enough to cut a hole in the laminate big enough to worm his blade in under the cardboard. He added to that a single wooden match, which he’d sliced in half to keep the bulge from looking too suspicious. He’d sealed it with a strip of clear packing tape he’d also swiped from the shop. In the face of any real trouble, the match and the blade wouldn’t have amounted to more than two grains of sand but it made him feel better just knowing they were there — a little part of himself he kept hidden from everyone else.

  And it was with lingering thoughts of this in mind that he’d sent Clayton to fetch some tinder before taking the photograph from around his neck. He flipped it over now, scratching his thumbnail at the tape along its bottom edge and peeling it back. He then bent the photo between his thumb and forefinger, widening the hole and using his index finger to jimmy first the match and then the blade into the palm of his hand. He was using the bit of tape to glue the match back together when he heard the irregular pad of footsteps that told him Clayton was heading back.

  I got five strips of the bark, he said, dropping them and an armful of branches at Gerald’s feet. The branches are from a tree that was on the ground. They’s good and dry.

  Gerald stuck the match behind his ear and took the largest sheet of bark, setting it before him on the hard-packed earth and peeling the paper-thin outer layer of white from all four of the other strips, crumbling them like paper.

  Ain’t never ate dog before, Clayton said as Gerald piled twigs over the bark. He was looking down at the German shepherd, clicking his teeth together as if getting them used to the idea. What do you think it’ll taste like?

  Gerald had retrieved the match from behind his ear and was foraging about the ground, feeling for a rough stone upon which to strike it.

  I guess we’re about to find out.

  11

  Gutting, skinning and slicing the meat from the dog had dulled the blade. After he’d made a spit on which to roast the strips of meat, Gerald idled his time sitting on the bench and whetting its edge on one of the bench’s steel legs.

  Clayton sat beside him tending to his wound. In the orange glow from the fire his calf looked like it had been run through a thresher. Clayton had torn a two-inch-wide strip from his undershirt and was winding it around the bloody gash.

  You’re going to want to disinfect it first, Gerald said.

  And how am I supposed to do that?

  My gramps once told me urine is a disinfectant, on account of the ammonia.

  You’re saying I should piss on my leg?

  I’m just telling you what my gramps told me.

  Clayton thought about that.

  I don’t think I could manage more than a few drips.

  You asking me to piss on your leg?

  If it’s all the same, I’d rather you not.

  At least make sure you get all the pieces of pant out of the wound. Else it’ll definitely get infected.

  Clayton spent the next few minutes picking bits of cloth out of the gash. When he was done he wound the dressing around his leg and tied it off in a double knot then stood, taking a few cautious steps to test it. His expression had turned dour and Gerald thought he was worried about the leg.

  He wasn’t.

  God, he said, I can’t even remember the last time I took a piss. How long was it since the lights went out?

  More’n a month ago.

  Couldn’t have been that long.

  You talking about the main lights or the emergency lights?

  The emergencies, them’s the ones in the hall?

  Yeah.

  They’s the ones I mean.

  It’s been five days since they went out.

  Well, I ain’t taken a piss since a day after that. And it was a day before then I last took a shit.

  Grease hissed in the fire’s coals and Gerald walked over to it. The meat was bubbling on the low side and he gave the spit a half turn. The meat was bottom heavy and flopped to its original position and he rotated it back and held it there, crouching in the waft of black smoke. It stung his eyes but smelled a little like heaven and he basked in its promise of a filled belly shortly to come.

  And I was always real regular like too, Clayton was saying. He’d sat back on the bench and had picked up an apple. One at seven in the morning and another at seven at night. My mom used to say she could set her watch to it.

  He took a bite of the fruit and chewed on that.

  It’s what done me in, you know? he said after a moment.

  What do you mean?

  Why they caught me.

  They got you on the shitter?

  No. But I was coming out of it.

  And the cops got the drop on you?

  No. It was Earl.

  Earl?

  He was the man my mom married after my dad died. I was just zipping my fly when he clocked me over the head with a rolling pin, or at least that’s what they told me later.

  Why’d he do that?

  Clock me over the head? I guess it was because I’d shot him in his bed not five minutes earlier. Three times in the chest. If I’d just shot him in the head like that Ellis Wilkes fella you killed, I’d have been home free.

  Hearing him say that, Gerald snapped his head around and whatever good mood the smell of grilling meat had lent to him drained from his bones.

  What did you just say?

 
If I’d just shot Earl like the feller you … His voice trailing off seeing the look of murder in Gerald’s eyes.

  What the fuck do you know about that?

  Nothing. I mean— Only, only what they wrote in that book about you.

  Gerald grit his teeth and shook his head, an involuntary twitch spurred by the memory of the eight hours he’d spent talking to Jordan Asche in an office in the prison’s administrative wing.

  At first, Gerald had only answered him with two and three words at a time, mostly just confirming or denying stories the journalist had heard from other sources. About his past, how his father, Wesley Nichols, was an enforcer for the Sudbury chapter of The Sons of Adam who’d put his mother, Dolores Beausoleil, in the hospital eight times with multiple broken bones, the last time with a fractured skull, and how Wesley had ended up at none other than the Central North Correctional Centre for his part in the shooting deaths of eight people, including three women and two children, at an isolated farmhouse just outside of Chapleau. He’d been killed in prison in apparent retaliation for the same. Three months later, when the police knocked at her door, Dolores, hooked on Euphoral, had answered brandishing a knife and was shot dead while her then-seven-year-old son was cowering in his closet.

  Gerald had told him that he didn’t know anything about that and Jordan had smiled, plainly not believing him but unwilling to push him any further so early in the interview. The journalist was sitting with his back to the window overlooking the parking lot and sunlight was glinting off the blond highlights in his perfectly coiffed hair as he consulted his notes.

  When did you start dealing weed? Jordan had asked after a moment. Was it before or after your grandfather died?

  Weed? Gerald had asked, feigning affront. It’s illegal to sell weed without a licence.

  So you didn’t deal?

  No sir, he lied, though it wasn’t much of one. All he ever did was grow a few plants, selling buds from those by the quarter to people who didn’t have a car or couldn’t bother driving to the dispensary at the reserve or who’d rather buy from a white man or who’d as soon buy from anyone as long as it wasn’t the government.

  So Ellis Wilkes wasn’t after your crop the night he broke into your barn?

  Hell if I know what he was after.

  But it wasn’t the first time Ellis had broken into your barn, was it?

  The truth was it was the third, or so Gerald suspected. The first two times he’d stolen the crop Gerald had hung to dry from the rafters and on the latter of these he’d left a freshly laid turd on the floor, his idea of a joke, as screamingly hilarious as what he’d done to Chuckles some years previous. But Gerald couldn’t even think about that without wanting to punch something and so he’d simply said,

  What can I say, I guess he must have liked his eggs.

  Eggs?

  They were about the only thing in the barn of any worth, far as I know.

  Jordan had smiled curtly at that and then consulted his notes again.

  What can you tell me about your grandfather’s old bear trap? he asked after flipping through a few pages.

  Hearing mention of that had been like an electric shock administering ten thousand volts with Jordan Asche’s hand on the button. Gerald had been filled with rage at the mere thought of it and more so at the way Jordan was tapping his pen on his notebook and looking at him through preening eyes.

  It weren’t my grandfather’s, he’d blurted out. It was my great-granddaddy’s!

  Such vitriol in his voice that he heard the creak of leather at his back and knew the guard at the door was reaching for his baton. Jordan too had reacted with alarm and was covering his unease by thumbing at his notebook.

  Of course, of course, he’d said. Then looking back up again, smiling in a vain attempt to regain Gerald’s trust. I understand he’d hung it over the door after he’d built the barn.

  That’s right.

  Gerald’s anger had subsided some and he was feeling embarrassed at his sudden outburst, his shame further compounded by how rattled he’d been at the mere mention of the bear trap.

  Forcing a mawkish smile he’d said rather sheepishly, I remember the first time I saw it. Gave me one helluva fright, I tellya that.

  Relating then:

  It was the very first time I followed my gramps into the barn, on the very day I’d come to live with him.

  When you were seven?

  That’s right. I was maybe five steps through the door when I heard this, it was like a, you know, a predatory hiss from a dark corner. When I turned towards it all I could see was a pair of yellow eyes and two white fangs. It was one of the barn cats. They were half-feral, a skittish lot. I’d never get within an arm’s length of one the entire time I lived there but I didn’t know that at the time. It seemed it was about to pounce. I spun on my heels to get the hell outta there, and that’s when I saw the bear trap hanging over the barn door: a circle of teeth as menacing as a shark’s bite. The barn seemed to come alive right then, like it was a creature unto itself. It was as if the restless clop of hooves on cement, the fretful clucking, the ravenous snort of pigs, were all emanations from the same beast, if that’s the right word.

  Jordan told him it was as good a word as any and Gerald continued.

  And when I saw that bear trap hanging over the door it looked like the creature’s gaping maw. It seemed like it was about to lunge — snap-snapping — off the wall and right then and there the barn’d swallow me whole.

  Jordan had laughed good-humouredly. Gerald had shook his head, laughing too, and their laughter had become like a hairline fracture in a dam that brought the whole story pouring out. And as Gerald told it he began to see another side to it he’d never seen before, or maybe it was just the way he’d wished it had gone. By the end of the telling it had become something entirely different than the way he’d always thought of it, like it had meant something more to him than merely a life sentence and his son forced into foster care.

  * * *

  Looking back at the bench, Clayton was still gazing at him with quivering apprehension and Gerald felt bad, like he had with that Asche fellow, scaring him the way he had.

  You really read that? he asked as a peace offering.

  Hell yeah, Clayton answered. And it was mighty inspiring too.

  I wouldn’t know.

  You never read it?

  Gerald shook his head.

  Two years after their interview Jordan Asche had sent him a copy of Savage Gerry: Canadian Outlaw. On its cover there was a photograph of mad-dog eyes peering out through a slot in a cell door — his own eyes, they were meant to be, though they were tinted green and not his hazel and the door itself seemed to have been culled from some Hollywood movie rather than the door that had stood guard over him. The latter was painted orange, not steel-grey, and also had a rectangle of reinforced Plexiglas for the inmates to peer out of, if ever they felt so inclined, though Gerald never had. It seemed as much of a lie as the one he’d told Jordan, as if there was any truth to be derived from how he’d killed three men and then fled into the northern wilds with his thirteen-year-old son except that he’d be in jail for the rest of his life and Evers would grow up a ward of the state, a feeling exacerbated by what was handwritten on the inside page.

  To Gerald, it read in Jordan’s almost girlish script, Give my best to Everett.

  Below that was the address of the foster home where Evers was staying, all that Gerald had asked in exchange for the interview. He’d started a dozen letters to his son by then without ever figuring out what it was he’d really wanted to say. He’d thrown every last one in the garbage and that’s what he’d done with the book too.

  Well it was mighty inspiring to me, Clayton was saying.

  And you didn’t learn nothing from it?

  Hell, I learned plenty.

  Not enough to keep from getting
caught.

  Ah hell, that was just stupid bad luck. Clayton shaking his head with the memory, and then: I had the whole damn thing planned down to a T. I was going to set off into the woods just like you did, had a bag packed and everything. A rifle, plenty of ammo, a bow, a knife, flint, everything you took and a few things besides. I even had a pair of binoculars, which is the one thing you said you’d wished you’d brought. I was just heading out the back door with my pack when I felt it coming on. I looked at my watch, damned if it wasn’t seven o’clock on the dot. So I turned around and the last thing I remember was coming out of the bathroom in our kitchen, zipping my pants. I woke up the next day in a hospital, handcuffed to a bed.

  Taking another bite of the apple and tonguing the chunk into his cheek, sucking the juice from its meat, ruminating deeply, as if trying to make some sense out of his own story.

  I’ll tell you one thing I did learn, he said after he’d swallowed. That Earl, he sure was a tough old coot.

  12

  They ate sitting on the bench, pulling off pieces of the sinewy meat from the skewers. They were half-burnt and half-raw and almost too tough to swallow but they tasted similar to goat which Gerald had always liked, though he preferred it stewed.

  Their previous conversation seemed to have opened the floodgates in Clayton and while they ate, the gnash of their teeth was interrupted at intervals by the idle wilds of his restless mind.