They killed Chief!
It was from one of the old westerns he and his grandfather used to watch. That particular film was different from the other movies they’d watched in that they’d only screened it once, unlike all of the others — good, bad or indifferent — which they’d seen numerous times. It was also a good deal more violent than any of the other films in his great uncle François’s collection and also replete with sexual acts of a most deviant kind, this going a good way to explaining why they’d never watched it again, Gerald being only seven at the time and it being unfit entertainment for a boy even twice his age.
Gerald couldn’t remember its name and hardly remembered anything about it at all except how it ended. His memory of that began with a Sheriff sitting at his desk scrutinizing the tin star in the palm of his hand with the doleful expression of a man being led to the gallows. A priest was reciting the last rites over him though the Sheriff was paying that about as much heed as the fly traipsing unmolested over his heavily whiskered cheek.
The door then suddenly burst open and a young boy dressed in a leather coat and chaps and wearing a dusty white cowboy hat two sizes too big barged in, hollering, They’re coming!
The scene then shifted to the chug of a steam engine approaching a small mining town, circa 1870. Its main street was empty and the only sign of life was the boy’s three-legged mongrel dog, Chief, panting at the foot of the steps leading up to the Sheriff’s office. At a blast from the train’s whistle, he cocked his head in the direction of the tracks as his owner’s voice rose in sharp declaration from behind.
Let me go! the boy screamed. Let me go!
The Sheriff had grabbed him around the waist and was carrying him kicking and screaming towards the cell in the back of the room, where he meant to keep the boy safe until the danger had passed. A growl alerted the Sheriff to Chief, biting at his pant leg trying to free his owner as the Sheriff flung the boy onto the cell’s bed and slammed the door shut. As he locked it with a key on a large metal ring, Chief was still clinging fast to his pant leg and the boy, now glaring through the bars, goaded, Bite him Chief, bite him good!
At that, the Sheriff drew his sidearm and pointed it at the dog’s head, cocking its hammer back with his thumb.
And though no one watching could possibly imagine the Sheriff actually shooting the boy’s dog — he was a good man to a fault — the boy yelled, Run Chief, run!
The dog turned tail, darting as fast as his lopsided gait would take him out the door and into the street at the very moment the train pulled into the station, letting loose another whistle-blast. Back in the Sheriff’s office the priest was clasping the key’s metal ring to his chest with one hand and making the sign of the cross with the other while behind him the boy pounded at the bars of the cell, hollering, Let me out! Let me out!
With a billow of black smoke and the hiss of brakes, the train ground to a halt and a lone man stepped from its front-most passenger car, exuding the casual flare and fine dress of a big-city poker shark about to show those rubes how the game was really played.
Why hello Sheriff, he said with the uncontained delight of someone greeting a long-lost brother rather than his arch nemesis.
The Sheriff was holding out his holster in one hand, letting it drop into the dirt, speaking not a word. All that needed to be said between the two men was contained within this gesture of surrender, and to savour the moment — his victory over the forces of good — the Villain retrieved a cigar from his inside breast pocket. He bit off its end before inserting it in his mouth and reaching for the match stuck behind his ear. Striking it on his cheek, he took a moment to study the flame, his eyes then narrowing to slits as he searched out the Sheriff, a devious smile parting his lips and the Sheriff gleaning what that meant, his own eyes widening in alarm as the Villain touched flame to tobacco at the exact moment the train’s freight car burst open to reveal the Gatling gun inside.
A pounding then, identical to that which Gerald would years later witness at the prison. Bullets shredding the town in a calamity of splintered wood and shattered glass, spewing over townsfolk huddled in far corners, clutching their loved ones, leaving no building unharmed, least of all the Sheriff’s office. The priest bore the full brunt of its fury, caught in the hail of bullets like a marionette dancing at the mercy of some spastic puppeteer and flung up against the cell. The key ring was rent loose from his hand and skittered to within arm’s reach of the boy cowering under the bed as the assault continued its unrelenting carnage. Lanterns exploded in the general store and in the livery stable, flames racing up the latter’s wall and crackling against the hay, horses whinnying and rearing up in their fright, and the bullets raging on, sparing nothing and nobody in their furor except the Sheriff, who was watching with gathering horror as his town was at once torn apart and consumed by flames, and only himself to blame.
The scene then shifted to the ridge above the town, where there watched from atop a pale horse a lone rider, dressed as a perfect duplicate to the boy who’d sounded the alarm. The Gunslinger was smoking a hand-rolled cigarette and observing the spectacle below with an expression that revealed little except that he had a heart as cold as stone.
As the last few shots echoed about the canyon walls, he turned his horse with the lassitude of a cowboy too long on the range and the scene shifted back to the town, panning over its shattered façade laced with blood-drenched bodies draped out of glass-toothed window frames, and then searching out the livery stable doors, engulfed in flames and fallen off their hinges. A horse, enlivened by fright, bolted through them. A single gunshot rang out and it reared up, crashing to the ground with a terminal thud, and the scene shifted back to the Villain.
A wisp of smoke trailed out of the barrel of his gun as he turned to the Sheriff penitent on his knees two feet in front of him.
I reckin you ought to ’ave killed me when you had the chance, Sheriff, the Villain said.
The Sheriff stared up at him with quivering hate, a last act of defiance before the Villain swung his revolver butt-first at his head. But it was not the dull thud of steel on bone that sounded, it was the splintering crunch of the livery stable’s roof collapsing, belching a mire of sparks from the inferno within.
Some time had passed, for the building was toppling at the same moment the Gunslinger was riding into town, puffing on his hand-rolled cigarette, oblivious to the devastation, his eyes fastened on the saloon at the end of the block where the Sheriff had been hung, crucified, from the eave over the front door. Blind even to the boy slumped in the dirt, cradling his dead dog. Blood matted Chief’s fur and there was a smear of it on the boy’s chin.
They killed Chief! he cried.
Looking up and seeing the Gunslinger passing by without a glance, the sorrow etched in the boy’s face turned to rage.
Don’t you care? he screamed, scrabbling to his feet and yelling after his hero. Don’t you care about anything?
Tears were now streaming down the boy’s cheeks and on the night he’d watched it with his grandfather Gerald was crying right along with him, great braying sobs like he couldn’t have imagined anything worse than a three-legged dog being shot down in the street. The old man watching him from his easy chair, not moving a muscle, letting the boy cry himself out, the way he couldn’t when they’d buried his mom not five days previous, her son standing over her grave as stone-faced as any gunslinger.
For years after, whenever Gerald had found something dead, whether it be a squirrel or a racoon run over by a car, or even a dead fish washed up on shore, he’d remember that dog. He’d counter the corresponding pang rising in his chest by looking up in mocking mimicry of the boy in the film and crying out, They killed Chief! In this way he’d taught himself never to cry again.
Staring now over at the poodle, he wished he’d saved a tear, if not for it — left by its owners to die chained up in the yard — then at least for his son, whom
he’d treated no better.
Thinking again of the boy in the movie crying out his desperate plea to an uncaring world and that carrying ahead to Evers, doing the same standing in the open front door of their house, his mother dead on the floor behind and his father standing in the driveway before him, his diminutive form at odds with the heft of the army duffel slung over his back, holding his rifle in one hand and his bow in the other, imploring the boy, Get a move on!
Flinching now from the impatient tone of his voice, like the boy was dilly-dallying with his chores and hadn’t just found his mother bleeding out through a hole in her chest and then watched his father, in cold blood, kill the three men responsible.
Evers then crying out against an even greater injustice: We can’t just leave her here!
And that finally producing a twinge in Gerald’s chest, a slight pang as far removed from a tear as a grain of sand was from a mountain, but still it was something. Knowing that he’d left his son to a fate far worse than he’d seen in any movie and looking to the sky again, the swirling masses of carrion feeders telling him that Sudbury wouldn’t be any better than the “safe zone.” The name of the street where Evers lived in foster care was all he could recall from the address Jordan Asche had inscribed in his copy of Savage Gerry: Canadian Outlaw. He only had a vague idea of how to get there and even if he did manage to find the right house, it wasn’t likely to do him any good.
If Evers hadn’t been able to get out of Sudbury when the shit hit, he’d probably be dead along with everyone else.
Fumbling then for the picture tied around his neck, wrestling it out of his shirt and staring down at Evers, so fierce and wild standing with his bow upraised on the birthday rock, the pang growing in Gerald’s chest like a dying ember given new life by a sudden gust of wind. Staring then deeper into the picture than he ever had before, as if it might contain a message hitherto unrevealed, knowing in fact that it did.
Evers’s best chance at survival, he told himself, would have been up at the lake.
Feeling something else then, he wouldn’t have called it hope but at least it was something other than despair. Turning back the way he’d come, he started off at a brisk walk, his pace accelerating with every step so that by the time he’d come to the corner of the wall it was escalating towards an all-out run. Hearing a voice then — his own — screaming out its own desperate plea to an uncaring world.
I’ma coming for you Evers. I’ma coming!
40
He approached Capreol under the cover of dark, shuffling along the tracks as a ghost might, willing away his hunger and thirst, his all-abiding exhaustion, seeing nothing and feeling nothing either except that the tracks were but an illusion drawing him not towards home but into some ethereal netherworld, as if he’d died somewhere along the way and he was now but the spectral manifestation of his former self spurred onwards by a longing so intractable that he’d be doomed to walk upon them forevermore.
In this way Gerald came at last to where the rail line crossed Highway 84, which the locals called Capreol Road, perhaps because they couldn’t reconcile the two lanes of pothole-laced blacktop that ferried them in and out of town with anyone’s reasonable definition of a highway. But it wasn’t the sight of the crossing that at last forced his weary shuffle to a tentative surrender, it was the sight of the moon glimmering off the rippled surface of what appeared to be a small lake on its far side. It had appeared the same to Gerald years ago, the first time he’d passed the solar field, riding in the pick-up truck beside the old man who the woman at the children’s aid in Sudbury had told him was his grandfather.
The world had seemed plenty unreal to him then, too.
He’d felt about the same as he had sitting in his closet mere hours before, listening to his mother being shot down by the police, his hands clamped over his ears and his eyes squeezed shut, muttering to himself, You’re just dreaming. Wake up wake up wake up!
The old man beside him proof enough that he never had, for he couldn’t really have been Gerald’s grandfather since all his grandparents had died before he was born, his mother had always been plenty clear about that. So it must have just been some terrible dream. Looking up through the windshield as the truck bounced over the tracks he could see the noonday sun shimmering off the surface of a small lake, that meaning nothing to him until the road had straightened out and the lake had broken apart like a puzzle thrown into the air. It seemed the pieces were setting to float right off into the sky and he’d been filled with a sudden elation.
You are dreaming!
How could it be otherwise? Lakes don’t just break apart like that.
Pinching himself hard on the arm, which is what his mother told him to do when he was having a nightmare, seeing in that same instant it wasn’t really a lake at all but a field of solar panels tilted up on metal posts. Thinking it was a lake had just been his imagination playing tricks on him and he’d known then that he was in the middle of a nightmare but it was a waking one and there would be no way out of it.
In the intervening years, the solar lake had come to reside in his mind as nothing more remarkable than the Esso station at the corner of Highways 84 and 80, the latter’s four lanes leading west into Hanmer — not so much a town as a loose conglomeration of subdivisions gathered around a mall, a couple of fast food outlets, two groceries stores and a Canadian Tire — or the green sign on the side of the road a half klick beyond reading Capreol 6 km, Wahnapitae 18. Just another way-marker telling him he was almost home.
It spoke to him now of that simple truth again.
With nothing more substantial between him and it than a few kilometres of potholed blacktop he eschewed the orderly trespass of the railway’s ties for the road’s crumbling chaotic of asphalt leading him on a widening arc away from the tracks and then looping back, running parallel to them for the last three kilometres into town. Where the road straightened out there were three white crosses raised up on the shoulder to his left — memorials to three teenagers who were walking along the road one night and had been struck by a drunk driver. They’d been killed some forty years earlier but every year since someone had returned to repaint the crosses and string new wreaths over their beams, sometimes adding little gifts — toy cars and stuffed animals, a baseball glove with a ball clasped in its mitt. He could see a hulking form amongst them, large enough to be a bear cub, except it reminded him more of a dog, its two ears raised in static alarm from the top of its head and its two eyes glinting in the moonglow, tracing after him as he walked by.
His hand instinctively went for the hilt of his knife and he angled for the far shoulder, giving it a widening berth. In so doing he saw that it was a dog all right but of the stuffed variety, its largesse immediately reminding Gerald of the ones they gave out at the game booths every year during the fall fair in Hanmer.
Now you’re scared of a damned toy!
Shaking his head and that not enough to keep him from smiling, thinking of the monsters he’d faced not twenty hours ago. Treading on, drawn ever forward by the fluorescent speckle of streetlights appearing in the distance, lining the road leading into town. The town itself was effusing a faint glow — the thin and hazy waft of light pressing into the sky’s gloom doing nothing at all to diminish its star-fraught splendour and Gerald deriving no small comfort from the idea that Capreol had somehow managed to get its power back on.
It was a feeling that barely lasted a step.
Cast under the first of the lights, overlooking the turn-off for Capreol Lake Road, he could see the boxy outline of a vehicle, its pitch-black shell made even darker still within the fluorescent’s bright. It looked like a tank on wheels but he knew it went by the name of Light Armoured Urban Tactical Vehicle, several of which Sudbury had been gifted by the province after the passage of the Northern Ontario Repopulation Act. Gerald had only ever seen one of them up close, some fifteen years previous, during Capreol Days, th
e annual celebration commemorating the town’s birth in 1918. They’d driven it out for display and had let the kids climb in and out of it as if it was some sort of a jungle gym. Evers, then four, had made a big fuss when Millie wouldn’t let him join in the fun. In fact, the moment she’d laid eyes on the urban tank she’d turned right around, marching back home with Gerald hurrying along behind, carrying Evers slung over his shoulder, wailing his distemper.
Showing off a thing like that, she’d fumed. It’s like they’re bragging about how the world’s gone to shit. Well count me out. I ain’t gonna have no fucking part of that, no fucking way!
Millie hardly ever swore and though she’d never said as much, Gerald took her furor to mean she’d had a less-than-pleasant encounter with one of those urban tanks when she’d lived in the city. The sight of the same now guarding the entrance to Capreol wasn’t enough to add more than a stutter to his weary plod, but it did have his eyes darting about the dark expanse of trees on either side of the road.
There’s plenty of other ways to get to Stull other than the highway. You could cut back over the tracks, take the dirt road that runs along the Vermilion to Lakeshore. And if it’s guarded too, you could swim across the river, stick to the cover of the forest along its far shore, swim back when you come to where the river split, right across from the old farm.
He was looking away from the road only for a moment but that was long enough that he didn’t see the crater where the asphalt had crumbled into the ditch. His right foot plunged into it and slid away from him on the loose gravel, toppling him forward, his legs splaying out beneath him and his left knee knocking against the lip of the hole, sending a sharp spike of pain shooting up his leg. Bent over on all fours, trying to push himself back up and barely having the strength left to even lift his head.
There was a red beam lancing out of the dark on the far shoulder and it was shortly joined by another from the near side, the both of them playing at a game of tag on his forehead as two shadowy figures emerged onto the road, not ten paces hence.
Savage Gerry Page 23
