No Quarter

by John Jantunen

  From the front seat he heard his mother screaming, “He’s not breathing!” and the thought pounded in his head that Abel can’t die, not without finding out what kind of bug it was—he can’t, he can’t, he can’t. An inconsequential thought measured against everything else he’d stand to lose, but there it was looping through Deacon’s mind as if by holding onto it, his brother would have to be alright.

  Then his mother was screaming again.

  “Watch out!”

  Deacon didn’t have but a moment to ponder on what she’d meant before there was a sound like a train wreck and he felt what seemed like the entire weight of the world pressing down upon him.

  9

  Later, when he was asked what he remembered about the crash, Deacon would reply that he didn’t really remember anything but waking up in the hospital. And really, he’d add, he didn’t remember much about the two weeks he’d spent there except the steady beep of his heart monitor and the smiling face of a pretty, young nurse who changed his dressings three times a day.

  Dr. Morrell, the Cleary’s family physician, was the first person who’d asked him the question. It had been a year almost to the day after the Jeep, the police report conjectured, had swerved to miss a moose and ran headlong into a spruce tree, the force of the impact catapulting Bergin halfways through the windshield as one of the tree’s branches impaled Abel through the head and Rose through the breast, the branch itself piercing their seat and grazing Deacon’s forehead.

  Deacon had come into Dr. Morrell’s office for the last of his monthly checkups. Before then Dr. Morrell had only made enquiries of a physical nature, if his headaches were getting better, for example, and whether the pins in his arm were causing him any discomfort. It was only on their final visit together, while he was shining his penlight into Deacon’s eyes, that he’d asked about the crash, broaching the subject in a casual tone as if the matter was of no great import. Deacon had been alone in the back of the Jeep for the long side of twenty-four hours before he’d been found. He knew it was those unaccounted for hours that Dr. Morrell was most interested in and also that he had absolutely nothing whatsoever to say about them. Still, he squinted and looked up at a corner of the room as if he was ruminating deeply upon it.

  Dr. Morrell waited patiently until it had seemed Deacon might never answer and then prodded him by saying, “It’s okay, take your time.” Only then had Deacon replied. When he had finished speaking, Dr. Morrell nodded, telling him that that was to be expected, though the tone of his voice made Deacon suspect he was just saying it to humour him, that he didn’t really believe he couldn’t remember anything but was unwilling to push him further.

  The second person who asked him about the crash was Rain Meadows.

  The year she’d graduated from high school, her parents had both succumbed to lung cancer, six months apart, and after her father’s funeral she’d learned their house had been remortgaged to within a nickel of its worth. Her inheritance hadn’t amounted to much more than it and a rusted-out Plymouth Reliant, and her only choice had been between leaving it to the bank or taking over the payments herself. She’d chosen the latter and for the past twenty-odd years had been fighting a losing battle against its descent into ruin.

  The house was heated by an old oil furnace, and the cost of keeping it liveable during the colder months had driven her to spending winters cottage-sitting for the Bickers, a wealthy family from Pittsburgh who wanted to keep their chalet warm and dusted on the odd chance they weren’t flying south over the Christmas holidays. In the intervening months, she plied her mother’s trade, making thirty bucks an hour reading Tarot and listening to a clientele of mostly elderly widows pine after their dearly departed, offering in return her assurances that they were waiting with open arms for them on the other side. But that barely provided her with enough to buy groceries and she’d supplemented this meagre income by taking any number of odd jobs that came her way, most of which amounted to pauper’s wages cleaning houses for Tildon’s professional class.

  She’d once provided this service for the Clearys. Adele had fired her after only a couple of weeks, and though Deacon wasn’t privy to the details, he figured George must have been to blame because he’d paid her to write the Chronicle’s horoscope ever since.

  Deacon was seventeen when George asked him to use the paper’s delivery van to drive her back to the Bickers’ cottage after she’d indulged herself one too many times at the open bar during the Chronicle’s annual Christmas Party. It took twenty-five minutes heading north on Highway 4 followed by ten minutes ploughing through a foot and a half of snow on the private road leading to the Bickers’ A-frame, perched atop a granite ridge overlooking Skeleton Lake. After he’d pulled up to the cedar rail stairs ascending to the chalet’s wraparound veranda, Rain asked him if he wouldn’t mind coming in until she’d checked the place over, laughing as she said, “You never know what might be hiding under one of the beds.”

  From the outside it looked like a rather modest affair, but standing in its front lobby it was clear that only a Saudi prince could have mistaken it for that, its structure comprised of a million dollars’ worth of cedar logs stacked around marble floors and both overseen by a thirty-foot vaulted ceiling, a hundred feet of glass running along the wall facing the water. Rain made an elaborate play of tippy-toeing up the spiral staircase leading to the second floor, turning back to Deacon every few steps and putting her finger over her mouth, warning him to silence. She took her time upstairs and when she came back down her hair was wet and she was wearing a violet bathrobe with the initials MB stitched in gold over one of its pockets.

  Deacon found it a little strange, seeing her like that, but didn’t give it any undo significance, the first real sign that he’d wandered into uncharted territory being when she’d reached the bottom of the stairs.

  “How old are you anyway?” she’d asked.

  Deacon had swallowed hard, for no reason except that there was a sudden lump forming in the back of his throat.

  “Seventeen,” he croaked out.

  “Seventeen?” she mused. “I was a hellcat when I was seventeen. You a hellcat, Deacon?”

  Deacon had no idea what a hellcat was but, regardless, it was a good bet that he wasn’t. He shook his head.

  “No, I guess you aren’t. You seem more the shy type. That right?”

  Deacon shrugged, though he knew it to be true.

  “That’s okay,” she said and set her hand on his shoulder. “When I was seventeen, I had a thing for shy boys.”

  She’d then taken his hand and led him past the kitchen to the guest bedroom where she slept. She hadn’t said another word until she’d got undressed and was slipping under the covers.

  “You coming or not?” she said, and Deacon didn’t need to be asked twice.

  That first time, he’d barely lasted two strokes before he came, but she’d been plenty understanding, laughing, and ruffling her hand through his hair and saying, “You’re a hellcat after all.”

  For the next four months, hardly two days passed that Deacon hadn’t driven the van out to the Bickers after George and Adele had gone to sleep. One night after she’d slid off of him, she lay on her side with her head propped on her elbow, staring at Deacon until finally he turned to her and asked, “What?”

  She brushed the long drape of his hair up over his ear, trailing her finger along the scar running in a jagged line just above his right eyebrow—the most visible reminder of the crash.

  “George says you don’t remember what happened,” she said. “Is that true?”

  Deacon said it was and repeated the line he’d given Dr. Morrell. He looked back to her. The way she was biting her lip made it plain that she didn’t believe him either.

  “Doctor Morrell said it’s to be expected.” Sitting up in the bed, he foraged amongst the covers for his underwear, hoping that would be the end of the matter.
/>   It wasn’t.

  “You can talk to me,” Rain said, setting her hand on his arm as Deacon wrestled to get his underwear over his feet, “you know that, right?”

  “If I remember anything,” he promised, “you’ll be the first to know.”

  They hadn’t spoken a word about it since.

  The only other person who asked him about the crash was Crystal Cleary, Dylan’s younger sister and George’s granddaughter. She was a year older than Deacon and all through high school she’d taken him under her wing. Mostly this entailed saving him a seat in the cafeteria so he wouldn’t have to eat alone and letting him tag along to an endless series of house parties thrown by the sons and daughters of Tildon’s professional class when their parents were away, those nights invariably ending with him sitting on a couch nursing a bottle of beer, waiting for Crystal to return from whatever dark nook or cranny she’d retreated to with whatever boy had caught her fancy.

  And that’s what he’d been doing on the night that she’d asked about the crash, except he was sitting on the end of a dock, his shoes beside him, his feet stretching for the water just out of reach. It was Crystal’s first weekend back from her freshman year at the University of Toronto, where she had quickly learned that plenty of her classmates had summer residences on the lakes around Tildon. One of them had invited her, along with a couple dozen of her closest friends, to a bash to celebrate the end of the school year at what Crystal had called the parents’ “log cabin,” a description that called to mind an entirely different picture than the ten-thousand-square-foot monstrosity that had confronted them after the guard at the front gate had waved Crystal’s Prius through.

  From there the party progressed with the dull familiarity of all the other parties to which she’d invited him. Crystal asked him to see if he could track down the kitchen and find space for her six-pack of vodka coolers in the fridge. When he came back into the living room she was sitting on the lap of a young black man tall enough to be the centre for his school’s basketball team and Deacon made a sideline for the nearest exit. It opened onto a wraparound deck and he followed its steps down to a marble walkway. That, in turn, led him to the dock buffering the beach from the boathouse which did, in fact, look almost exactly like the picture that had sprung to mind when Deacon had thought of a log cabin, though it was larger by a factor of three.

  He sat at the end of the dock, sipping from the pint of Bacardi he’d brought and lighting cigarettes with the regularity of an egg timer set to soft boil. An hour or so later he heard Crystal calling out to him, “There you are! I’ve been looking for you all night.”

  “Well, I’ve been right here,” he said, fumbling for another cigarette from his pack.

  “You’re missing all the fun.”

  She was going through a Rasta phase. As she slumped down beside him, dreadlocks the size of pine cones battered her brow in sharp contrast to the pigtails she’d worn just months earlier, her orange hair and freckled cheeks making it a natural that she would have dressed up as Anne of Green Gables the past two Halloweens while handing out candy at her parents’ house.

  “I’ve been having plenty of fun all by myself,” he said, holding up the now three-quarters empty bottle of rum to prove his point.

  She gave him one of her patented less-than-bemused frowns, and in the sheen glossing her eyes Deacon could see that she was high on something beyond the joint they’d shared on the car ride over.

  Lighting the smoke, he felt her hand brushing at a strand of hair that had slipped loose from his ponytail and the pad of her thumb waxing delicately over the scar above his right eyebrow. His body tensed as it always did when she touched him and he distracted himself from the sudden tingle rising in his belly by blowing misshapen rings into the still night air, aiming them for the moon’s mottled globe as if he were trying to hang a lasso around it.

  “You know,” she said, rubbing the scar, lost in the infinite tactile delight of the stoned mind, “I always wondered.”

  “What’s that?”

  “If it was true.”

  “If what was true?”

  “That you don’t remember what happened after the crash.”

  Deacon took another drag off the smoke, knowing then what he’d suspected all along—that even if none of the Clearys had asked him about the accident, they’d all talked about it, and probably the whole damn town had too.

  “It’s true,” he said.

  “You don’t remember anything?”

  “Not much. Until I woke up in the hospital. But mostly that’s a blur too.”

  “What’s the first thing you do remember?”

  “Clearly?”

  “Yeah.”

  “A parrot.”

  “A parrot?”

  “Sitting in the window beside my bed.”

  “At the hospital?”

  “No, at George and Adele’s.”

  “In my dad’s old room?”

  Deacon nodded.

  “I woke up one morning and there it was, this big old parrot sitting on the window ledge. Prettiest thing you ever saw.”

  Recalling it then, the image of the bird appeared clear in his mind. And though, really, it wasn’t the first thing he’d remembered, he’d told himself it was so many times that it had come to seem that the bright reds and oranges of its plumage might very well have been like the sun melting away the fog that had become his memory.

  He’d lain there in bed, watching it ruffling its feathers and peering over at him through its lizard-like eyes.

  It must have escaped from someone’s house, he thought, and that had led him to thinking that its owner was likely missing it. The idea that there might be someone out there—a child perhaps—crying over their lost pet planted the seed of another idea in his head. If he could catch it, he could draw up a few pictures, put them on the bulletin board at the grocery store like people did when they’d lost a dog or a cat. But first he’d have to catch it. He was just thinking of how he might do that—You could go around the other side of the window, maybe chase it inside—when the parrot, all of a sudden, lit out from the sill.

  Deacon jumped out of bed and ran to the window just in time to see it disappearing into the branches of a maple tree at the far end of the yard. He was still in his pyjamas, one of the four pairs he’d found folded in the top drawer of his dresser, along with a half-dozen pairs of socks and underwear. The other drawers were filled with clothes too, and the closet hung with an assortment of jeans and jackets. But in the four weeks since he’d got out of the hospital he’d only ever worn the pyjamas, rarely leaving his room except to use the bathroom and to eat at the kitchen table, though he hadn’t often felt hungry and rarely did that either—lying in bed most of his days, sleeping. And when he couldn’t do that, pulling the covers up over his head as if he could hide from the past, knowing it was a fool’s game, that when the dark settled in it would be there like a monster under the bed, waiting to reach out and grab him.

  Seeing the bird and making plans to catch it had awoken something in him that he’d have sworn had died along with his parents and his brother all those months ago. Watching it fly off, he was certain that he’d missed his chance, and then getting to the window just in time to catch sight of it seeking refuge in that maple tree, he saw that maybe the future he’d imagined still had a hope of coming true after all.

  You’ll need some bait if you want to catch it, he thought.

  Parrots eat crackers.

  They do.

  There’s a box of saltines in the kitchen cupboard, next to the cereal.

  Best be quick about it.

  Rushing then from the room and down the hall—the plush of the rug feeling as soft as moss under his feet—and coming onto the cool of the kitchen’s linoleum, he found Mrs. Cleary sitting at the table, a piece of graph paper and a dictionary in front of her, tapping a p
encil against her dentures as she worked out the crossword for that week’s paper. In the years to come, he’d take to sitting with her and they’d work it out together, he flipping through the dictionary, offering her words, and she wearing out endless erasers trying to make them fit, sharing something in those moments that no dictionary in the world had enough words to fully account for: a carefree future sitting right there before him, though he hadn’t an inkling of it at the time, the possibilities of the one he’d just imagined chasing him past the old woman, the open-mouthed alarm at which she’d greeted his sudden entrance becoming something else entirely as she watched him climb up onto the counter.

  She covered her mouth with her hand, tears wetting her eyes though she’d often say afterwards that she’d never felt happier than she was then, watching Deacon grabbing for a box of crackers and dropping back to the floor, him noticing the look on the old woman’s face and thinking maybe he owed her an explanation—they were her saltines after all. In his rush towards the back door the words spilled over themselves, bubbling out of his mouth, and Adele without her hearing aid and so all she’d heard was, “parrot . . . crackers . . . hope . . . don’t mind.”

  And then he was gone again, hurrying into the backyard.

  The maple tree was perched at the edge of where the ground sloped into the ravine, its canopy providing shade for what appeared to be a small red-brick barn. Halfway across the yard, Deacon checked his pace, slowing to a fast walk, not wanting to startle the parrot. But when he came to the tree’s trunk, peering up into its branches, it was nowhere to be seen. He circled the tree twice and then stepped to the gully’s edge, scanning over the tops of the trees lining the valley beyond. He couldn’t see it there either and walked back into the yard, looking up at the sky and seeing a dark shape drifting against the blue.

  It wasn’t the parrot though, it was a bird of prey: a falcon or maybe a hawk, he couldn’t tell which.

  Falcons hunt birds, he told himself.

  He’d read it in one of the books on his father’s shelf, about how in some cities they used falcons to hunt pigeons to keep them from shitting all over the place. Pigeon shit was like acid. It’d eat through solid stone if you let it, and in cities where there were a lot of buildings and statues made out of stone—old cities, cities in Europe—they used falcons to hunt pigeons. He didn’t know if hawks hunted birds too. He knew they hunted mice and rabbits but he couldn’t recall if they also hunted birds. It didn’t matter anyways because whether it was a falcon or hawk, it was too far away for him to know for sure.