No Quarter

by John Jantunen

  “Then it’s good she ain’t here.”

  The answer seemed to satisfy him, and Tawyne didn’t utter another word until the forest broke against the lip of the pit. It was one hundred feet from there to the floor, at a seventy-five-degree pitch, the top five of which went straight down. Ski-Doo tracks wove in and around the bowl, its diameter maybe a quarter of a kilometre at its widest. In the distance, they could hear an engine growing louder in staccato bursts but for the moment they had the place to themselves. Their breaths rose white before them, the only shield they had against the sun glaring down out of a cloudless sky, its rays shimmering in a hundred blinking eyes over the ocean of rippling white.

  “Wow,” Tawyne said. “I mean—Wow!”

  He had that look on his face again—of wonder and awe—and though it wasn’t directed at René, it made him feel just about as good as it had the last time.

  “It’s something, ain’t it?”

  “It sure is.”

  “Alright, now,” René said, straddling the sled and preparing to kick off. “Give me some room.”

  “Hey!” Tawyne said. “It’s my turn to go first.”

  “I thought you went first last time.”

  “The hell I did.”

  “You say so.”

  “I do.”

  “That first five feet’s a doozy,” René said after Tawyne had taken command of the sled. “You’re going to want to push off hard and pull up on the nose, elsewise you’re bound to go arse over teakettle.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, get to it then.”

  “Give me some room.”

  René moved a step back. Tawyne took a deep breath and then kicked off hard. The sled dropped at a steep angle. The boy all but disappeared when it hit the slope’s two feet of powder, the drag of it hardly slowing him as he careened down the hill, the billow of crystals unleashed in his wake sparkling against the sun like confetti made out of glass, born aloft and plying their glitter in the chill morning air.

  * * *

  He wouldn’t see the look again for two months.

  Over the spring he’d taken Tawyne fishing, choosing a different spot every time they met like he had when they’d gone sledding. It was the third week of May when he caught his first fish. They were at Wilson’s Falls, casting off the pier at the base of the hydroelectric station. Tawyne was beaming when he reeled it in and there was that look again as he held up the speckled trout thrashing at the end of the line. René took a picture with his phone and later he’d make it his wallpaper so he could get an eyeful of it anytime he wanted.

  The fish barely weighed a pound and by all accounts they should have thrown it back, but when Tawyne asked what they should do with it, René had answered, “We ought to light a fire. Cook it up.”

  “But the sign said no fires,” Tawyne said.

  And it was true: the sign bolted to a metal post in the parking lot had said that and a lot of other things besides.

  René scratched his head, trying to think his way around it. And then it came to him.

  “Hey,” he said. “I just remembered something. You’re always allowed to start a fire if you’re hungry and need it to cook on.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s the law. And a sign don’t change the law. You hungry?”

  “I’m practically starving.”

  “Alright, then.”

  They’d gone a ways back into the woods and built a firepit and cooked the trout on a stick like a hot dog. After it was done, René made a big show of prying one of its eyes out with his grandfather’s scaling knife, holding the jellied globe on the end of the blade, and licking his lips.

  “You really going to eat that?” his son asked.

  “Hell, it’s the best part. My gramps taught me that.”

  He slurped it up and pried out the trout’s other eye and held it out to Tawyne. He didn’t think the boy would eat it, but he did, slurping it right off the knife, and René would never feel closer to his son than he did right then.

  * * *

  The days turned hot and his thoughts began to drift towards plans for Tawyne’s birthday.

  You could take him up to your grandfather’s old fishing shack, he’d thought on the morning he and Roy were raking algae out of a private beach on the northern shore of Lake Mesaquakee.

  By the time Roy was turning onto Hidden Cove Road, two days later, René had got back to imagining himself soaking in the whirlpool with his son when the perfect end to the day came to him with such ease that he’d known it had been waiting for him all along.

  He’d ask Tawyne how his birthday was shaping up so far.

  “It’s been the best,” he imagined he’d answer. “Better than the best.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “I can’t wait to tell Jean how I jumped off the twenty-foot ledge.”

  “You do that, chances are she won’t let you come back.”

  “I hadn’t thought about that.”

  “I’m just saying is all.”

  “So I won’t tell her.”

  “It’ll be our little secret.”

  “Yeah.”

  Their eyes would meet and there’d be a twinkle in Tawyne’s that’d speak to René of other secrets yet to come: a lifetime full of them.

  “I was thinking,” he would then proffer, “maybe I could take you up to my gramps’s old fishing shack sometime. We could spend the night there.”

  “Like camp out, you mean?”

  “Yeah. Would you like that?”

  “I sure would.”

  “Can you talk to Jean about it then?”

  “Can’t you?”

  “There’d be a better chance of her agreeing to it if she heard it from you. Whadya say?”

  “I’ll ask her.”

  “Alright, then. Now we best get going. Jean’s like to have called a dozen times by now. She’ll be wondering where the hell we’re at.”

  Roy was clicking the music off and signalling left, turning into a driveway barred by a wrought-iron gate bearing the graven image of two gold embossed rams butting heads.

  It’s going to be a good day, René told himself.

  No, better than good. It’ll be the best.

  * * *

  “Just so you know,” the guard who’d emerged from the gatehouse said after he’d written their names down on a clipboard. “Mr. Wane doesn’t allow smoking on his property.”

  “Got it,” Roy said, though the guard was looking at René when he said it, the cigarette he’d hoped to smoke the moment he got out of the truck tucked, as it was, behind his left ear.

  “Now where do we park?”

  “Over by the maintenance shed.”

  “And where’s that?”

  “Behind the tennis courts.” Then pointing, “Go right at the Y, you’ll find it.”

  The guard returned to the gatehouse, and a moment later the two rams butting heads parted ways.

  “You need a puff?” Roy said, turning to René. “You could walk in. I’ll meet you there.”

  “I’m good.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  The Y in the driveway wasn’t fifty feet inside the gate. To the right, the road switched from cedar chips to gravel and led them away from the lake. Through the forest on the left, they couldn’t see more than parcelled fragments of the cottage at its heart: a gable-roofed cedar plank ranch house that looked to have about the same square footage as a football field. The road shortly opened into a parking lot that could have fit twenty Silverados. The so-called shed on its far side could have housed four of the same, two of which could be driven, side by side, through its pair of retractable steel doors. Otherwise, it was built as if out of scraps from the main building. On its right side, the cedar shingled roof extended over several rows of corded firew
ood.

  Roy parked in front of that and while he and René were dousing their arms and the back of their necks with palmfuls of Muskol to ward off the bugs, he kept a watchful eye on the two young women batting a ball back and forth through the mesh of the tennis court’s fence. Both were as pretty as models and wearing sport bras trimmed with sweat, one in short shorts that barely crested her hip bones and the other in a skirt not much longer. The latter wasn’t much more than a skeleton with skin. Every time she made contact, she let out a feral grunt and, faced with the ferocity of her volleys, the other was having a devil of a time getting her racket on the ball, much less getting it back over the net.

  The skeleton woman served an ace that just caught the corner of the box. The other called, “Fault.” The skeleton shook her head and yelled back, “The hell it was.”

  “I just call ’em like I see ’em.”

  The skeleton shook her head and lobbed another ball into the air. She hit it even harder than the first, and in the next instant it struck her opponent in the thigh, causing her to cry out and drop her racket.

  “Now that’s a fault!” the skeleton woman yelled over to her.

  René was just heaving an old scuba diver’s tank onto his shoulder as the injured party limped towards the court’s gate, rubbing her leg to relieve the sting.

  Then the skeleton was yelling, “What the fuck are you looking at?”

  When René glanced her way, he saw she was scowling at Roy, who was blushing under her glare and averting his eyes, looking sheepishly towards René, who was closing the pickup’s tailgate and shaking his head, trying not to smile too hard.

  * * *

  The job for the next few days was trimming trees.

  A branch from a hundred-year-old walnut had come down on the driveway during a storm the previous week. The arboriculturist who had been called in had given it a clean bill of health, but a quick survey of the property had told him there were a couple dozen or so other trees that could use some attention. Herb Delroy, the owner of the Delroy Property Management Co., had accompanied him as he walked the grounds and later in the day had called Roy to see if he could fit him in, ASAP.

  Roy was his odd-jobs man. No job too small or too shitty was his informal motto, and over the five years and change he’d been plying his trade at high-end summer residences on the Mesaquakee and Joseph lakes, he’d proven he was a man of his word such that Herb had rewarded him with enough work to fill thirteen months out of any given year. Finally, it had become too much for Roy on his own, so he’d posted a help wanted ad on the website of the employment agency in town two days before René’s parole officer had scheduled an appointment for him with a counsellor at the same. He only met her once and at the end of the ten minutes they’d spent in her cubicle she’d handed him a stack of twenty-some-odd employment listings. René had called every one of them, but Roy was the only person who’d called him back. After they’d arranged to meet at the Tim Hortons in town, he’d asked René how he would know him, and René had replied, “I’ll be the Indian sitting in the corner.”

  Roy had paused only a second before he’d replied, “Gotcha.”

  “How about yourself?” René had then asked, though he probably needn’t have.

  “Oh, you’ll know me.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Just look for The Mountain,” Roy answered.

  “The Mountain?”

  “It’s what they called me in school.”

  René would later find out that it was a play on his last name—Hill—and that the nickname couldn’t have suited him better, Roy being so tall he had to bend over to get through the coffee shop’s side door.

  Their meeting lasted all of two minutes after he’d sat down across from René with his takeout cup.

  “You got a car?” Roy asked, taking his first sip.

  “No,” René answered. “But I can use my grandfather’s tow truck pretty much anytime I want.”

  “That’s okay, best I pick you up anyway. Where’d ya live?”

  René told him.

  “Shoot, most of the jobs are out that way anyhow. There was one other thing—”

  He couldn’t think of what that was and while he tried to remember it he scratched at the top of his head with the fingernail of his index finger (something René would find out he always did while he was thinking, which maybe explained why he had a dime-sized bald spot there).

  “Oh, right,” he’d finally said. “Heights. You’re not afraid of heights are you?”

  “They don’t bother me none.”

  “Perfect.”

  He was already holding out his hand while he said it, but it was a moment before René extended his.

  “You mean I got the job?”

  “As long as you can start tomorrow.”

  “I can.”

  “Signed and sealed then.”

  They shook to close the deal and Roy left him to finish his coffee. On the way out he made a big show of stepping clear over a young boy, couldn’t have been older than five, waiting with his mom by the pickup counter. The way the boy gaped in awe as the giant’s legs arched over his head made René smile, the first time he could recall having done so since he’d got out of jail.

  That had been nine months ago.

  Until they came to trim the trees surrounding the Wanes’ summer residence, René had all but forgotten that Roy had asked him if he was afraid of heights. Now as they walked amongst the ten acres’ worth of forest enclosed within a wrought-iron fence, it was foremost on his mind. Maybe a quarter of the trees had been marked with an orange ribbon and half of those had notes tacked to their trunks, further instructions provided by the arboriculturist beyond the general one that Herb Delroy had given Roy the week before: “If a branch is dead, cut it. Easy-peasy right?”

  The tallest of the trees was a red oak, a hundred feet tall if it was an inch.

  When they came to that, Roy planted his hand on the tree’s trunk and stared up at the lowest branch, fifteen feet off the ground.

  “You said you weren’t afraid of heights?” he said, turning back to René.

  “They don’t bother me none.”

  “Then I guess you’re up.”

  Roy bent to his duffel, searching within for the throw ball and line, and René took off his shoes. He was just slipping off his socks when Roy asked, “What the hell are you doing?”

  “I can’t very well climb a tree with my shoes on.”

  “That’s why I brought the spikes.”

  “I don’t need no spikes to climb a tree.”

  “You say so.”

  “I do.”

  “But you’re gonna wear the harness.”

  René looked at him like he thought he might want to argue the point, and Roy gave him a hard look.

  “You’re gonna wear the harness.”

  While he strapped it on, Roy clipped the line to the throw ball, which wasn’t really a ball at all, it was a neon orange nylon sack as big as an avocado and filled with lead pellets the size of BBs. To launch it, he’d fashioned a makeshift canon out of a fire extinguisher and a three-foot length of PVC pipe. At ninety psi, it would shoot the throw ball two hundred feet straight up. He filled it to just over fifty with the old scuba tank, then angled its barrel a little off-centre, pointing it towards the tree’s highest branch.

  René was just securing the last of the harness’s clasps when Roy shouted, “Fire in the hole!”

  Jerking the lever, Roy turned his head to the side as the canon popped with a whoosh of air. The ball shot out, the line zzzting behind as it soared past the high branch and landed with a thud twenty feet from the base of the tree.

  “That’s how you do it.”

  They used the throw line to string a length of climbing rope over the branch and to this René attached his harness. Roy looped ten
feet of the rope into a coil at his feet and clamped one foot down over the long side of it.

  “You’re gonna want to give me more slack than that,” René warned.

  Roy made no sign to say he’d heard him except a slight tightening of the muscles at his jaw and René stepped back until he was ten paces from the oak. His back foot had hardly touched ground when he shot forward again, coming at the tree full bore. He leapt at it with two strides to spare, his left foot finding purchase in a knot some six feet up. He pushed off from it hard, getting a good two feet of thrust and grabbing for a hold around the far side of the trunk. Deep grooves ran in vertical channels throughout the bark. His fingers clamped onto two of these, giving him plenty of support, and he clambered straight up the tree with the ease of a raccoon.

  It was how his grandfather had taught him to climb the white oak in his backyard, which the old man made him do a hundred times before he’d even think about teaching him how to make a fist. But René hadn’t climbed a tree in ten years by then. When he was within arm’s reach of the lowest branch he was damn near out of breath and he’d torn the nail on his right index finger after the bark had given way beneath his grip, halfway up. He’d managed to hold on with his other hand and he wasn’t really in any danger, but still Roy called up to him, “You think falling out of a tree is gonna get you the day off, you got another thing comin’.”

  Pulling himself up onto the perch, René sucked at the droplet of blood squeezing past the cuticle, trying to catch his breath as he unclipped the rope from his harness. He lowered it down to Roy so he could hitch the saw to it and while Roy was doing that his eyes wandered towards the cottage, though they didn’t make it any further than the driveway.

  There was a young man standing there.

  He was blond haired and wearing athletic shorts and a pair of running shoes, wraparound sunglasses and black wireless Beats. His chestnut tan stretched all the way to the platinum glint of his wristwatch, his six-pack and the veins running in rivulets up his arms leaving little doubt he used the timepiece exclusively to mark the hours he spent in the gym. He was arching his shoulders, swirling his arms at his sides and shaking out his hands. Likely, he was just loosening up before getting on with his run. But the way his expression suddenly flattened, settling into a vacant gaze as he bandied his head from side to side, made it seem like something more.