No Quarter

by John Jantunen

  It’s like the show a fighter puts on while he’s waiting for the bell to ring, that’s what it is.

  René didn’t have long to ponder on what that might have meant, as just then Roy called out, “Heads up!” The chainsaw’s blade was swivelling towards him and one of its teeth grazed his forearm. He felt a sharp prick as it drew a fine line over his skin. It was already beading blood by the time he grabbed the saw by its handle.

  As he unclipped it from the rope, he glanced down at where the young man had stood. It hadn’t been more than a couple of seconds since he’d done so but he was nowhere to be seen.

  * * *

  It would be an hour before René saw him again.

  They’d done two more trees in the meanwhile. Roy had climbed the second, walking up its trunk using the spikes attached to his boots and the belt slung around the tree’s trunk to inch his way up, slow and steady. René was rappelling back down the third when the man came walking back up the driveway. His skin was aglow with sweat and there was a black SUV—a Lexus—keeping pace beside him. It had tinted windows and René couldn’t see who was driving, but it was plain he’d done something to piss the young man off.

  “You want to wipe my ass while you’re at it?” he was yelling.

  René unhitched the harness and held it out to Roy, who was rubbing at his eye and wincing against whatever grit was in there.

  “You catch some sawdust?” René asked.

  “A goddamned black fly.”

  “They sting like a bitch, they get in your eye.”

  “You don’t have to tell me. I’m going down to the water, see if I can’t wash it out. I guess we’ll call that break.”

  René’s gums were aching like they always did when he hadn’t had a smoke for a few hours, much less twelve. Whatever good the lemony citron had done had long worn off. The tickle in his throat was back and his head felt like it was floating two feet above his shoulders. Taking a break would have done him a world of good, but he’d have to hike off property if he wanted a cigarette so there didn’t seem much of a point. He busied himself instead, lugging the gear to the nearest marked tree: an elm beside the driveway directly across from the boathouse. It split into three about halfway up and René didn’t need the note attached to the trunk to tell him that two of the limbs were rotted clear through.

  He was just filling the fire extinguisher from the scuba tank, thinking he’d like to take a shot himself, when he heard a shrill voice calling out, “There you are!”

  The skeleton woman was coming down the marble steps leading from the front door of the so-called cottage. She looked to be naked except for a pair of bright red stiletto sandals. As she passed the black SUV, just now pulling to a stop, René could see that it was just a trick of the light, though the two strips of tan fabric covering her delicates—more string than bikini—hardly fit his idea of being dressed. The driver of the SUV must have had the same thought because as he stepped from the vehicle, he was lowering the dark shades from his eyes and peering over top of them to get a better look. He was almost as tall as Roy but had at least eighty pounds on him. His neck was like a tree stump and his arms just as thick, their muscles bulging the sleeves of his hooded black sweatshirt, its tint roughly the same shade as his skin. René followed his gaze to where the young woman was hobbling over the driveway’s cobbled stones on a direct line for the young man walking towards the boathouse.

  When she reached him, she grabbed him by the arm and the young man startled at her touch, spinning around. His lips were moving so he must have said something, though it was too faint for René to hear.

  “Well, I hope you didn’t tire yourself out too much,” the woman replied, making her meaning plain by running her index finger down his chest, drawing a line through his sweat and then sucking on her finger—her fervency making the act more desperate than seductive. The man seemed to think so too. He responded by spinning around and marching brusquely past.

  He must have said something else for as she trailed after him she asked, “You mind if I join you?”

  He made no sign that he cared one way or the other. When she caught up to him, she swiped off his headphones. She placed them over her own ears and dodged away from his grasping hand, walking backwards, doing a little dance to the beat of whatever song it was he’d been listening to. All it would have taken was a strobe light and a pole to make it into a striptease and to that the man responded much the same as René—shaking his head and trying not to laugh at the comic luridity of her gyrating hips. She’d come to the dock and hadn’t taken more than two steps onto it when one of her heels caught in a space between the boards. She let out a startled shriek as she teetered backwards. She would have fallen too had the young man not darted forward, sweeping her off her feet and into his arms.

  “My hero!” she exclaimed and then shrieked again as the man slung her up and onto his shoulder.

  He set off at a run and the last thing René saw of them before they’d disappeared behind the boathouse was the sandal jostling from her foot and bouncing off the dock, pitching with a faint splash into the water.

  * * *

  René was already up in the tree when Roy returned. Even from there he could see his eye looked like a burning ember and that he could barely keep its lid from wincing shut.

  “You get it?” René called down to him.

  “No. It’ll be in there all day, I know it. Son of a bitch, if it ain’t one goddamned thing it’s another.”

  “Whenever I got something in my eye, my grams’d roll up tissue into a point, use it to fish out whatever it was. Never failed.”

  “Your grams handy?”

  “She’s been dead going on seven years.”

  “Then I can’t see how she’s going to help me now.”

  Roy rubbed at his eye again.

  “There’s a box of tissues in the truck,” René said.

  “You aim to play nurse now?”

  “I’m just saying is all.”

  “It’ll come out by itself.”

  “You’re the boss.”

  * * *

  The day had turned hot.

  René’s shirt was soaked with sweat before he was even halfway done with the elm. The streams running down his back carried the sawdust lathering his neck into his pants and by the time he was lowering the first branch it felt like there was sandpaper chaffing at the crack of his ass. The back of his arms and neck were itching from mosquito bites, and he would have liked nothing more than to take a break—smoke a couple, maybe have a swim. But it’d be two hours before lunch and even then he’d have to hike off property if he wanted a chance to do either.

  Roy seemed to have been reading his mind for René barely had time to brush off the flakes of wood from his arm when he was calling up to him, “If you’re jonesing for a smoke, you could take the truck—”

  “I’m okay.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’ll grab a couple at lunch.”

  “You mind getting started on that second branch yourself then?”

  “What’s up?”

  “Thought I might try your grandmother’s trick with the tissue.”

  “It still bothering you?”

  “It’s like a piece of glass is stuck in there.”

  Roy started up the driveway and then René remembered something.

  “You got to wet it first,” he called after him.

  Roy turned back.

  “What?”

  “The end of the tissue. After you roll it to a point.”

  “That the trick?”

  “Works every time.”

  * * *

  The second branch was bigger than the first and René dropped it in two pieces. Roy wasn’t back yet and after he’d scaled down from the tree, he searched out another orange ribbon. The gauge on the scuba tank was reading into the red. H
e figured it’d be good for at least one more shot before they’d have to fill it with the compressor in the back of the truck. He was just hooking up its hose to the fire extinguisher when he heard the skeleton woman’s shrill voice again, rising in a fever pitch from directly behind him.

  “There he is!” she was shrieking. “That’s the son of a bitch I saw peeping through the window.”

  René craned towards her. She was pointing straight at him and the young man was striding forward on the same line, no more than five paces away. René hardly had time to open his mouth to say not even he knew what—a denial of some sort—before he caught a blur on his periphery: the man’s shoe on a collision course with his head. It struck René in the jaw. His world went suddenly white and the next thing he knew he was on the ground, his cheek pressed into the mat of pine needles nettling its surface. The world had canted sideways and within its tilt he could see the man standing a ways back. He was bouncing on the balls of his feet and his head was bobbling from side to side. There was a piercing glint in his eyes: a challenge, daring René to get back up.

  He could see two other young men, moving on a quick lateral away from the other, circling towards René on a wide perimeter. One was short and stocky and the other tall and lank. Both were wearing tan khaki shorts and garish Hawaiian shirts and staring down at the screens of identical cameras held at their waists, one pointed at René and the other at their friend. Them being there, filming as they were, meant something, René knew that but not what. All he did know was that he was lying on the ground, a static whine ringing in his ears, and the taste of blood in his mouth.

  Then the skeletal woman was screaming, “Kick his ass!” and the man was striding towards him again.

  René had pushed himself to his knees. He was bent over on all fours, a trail of bloodied spit spanned from his lips to the ground, and the man was bringing his foot up hard into René’s chest. There was a voice screaming in his head, “Don’t do it! Don’t you fucking do it!” By the time he felt the hard sting of shoelaces striking his ribs, he already had, snatching the man’s leg in both arms and thrusting himself backwards and up. He caught the man off balance and threw his weight forward, toppling the other to the ground and coming down on top of him.

  The back of the man’s head hit hard enough that René felt his own teeth rattle, but the other hardly seemed to notice. His leg had sprung loose from René’s hold. He scissored that and its mate around René’s waist, wrapping them together in a vice grip and twisting him just enough that when he lashed out with his elbow its point drove square into René’s ear. An explosion of such pain, it seemed to hurl him backwards off the man so that he’d become just another spectator watching whoever it was who had taken his place bear down on the other with both fists, pummelling at his face as if hell itself had been unleashed through them.

  A sharp crack brought René back to himself. One of his hands was clamped on the wrist of the man’s right arm and the other on his elbow. In between them, a sharp spear of bone piercing the skin and spewing blood. How he’d done such a thing was a mystery to René but not what it meant. The broken arm and the mash he’d made of the man’s face spoke to him of all that he’d just lost, and the image of his son appeared to him as clear as the bubbles frothing red at the man’s lips.

  Tawyne had that look in his eyes—of wonder and awe—and he knew he’d never see it again.

  The man beneath him was begging, “Please, no more. Please.”

  The whimper to his voice made René madder still and his hands were already wrapping around his throat. Someone was screaming, “Motherfucker, motherfucker!” Maybe it was himself, he couldn’t tell. The man’s legs thrashed feebly at his back and he would have squeezed the life out of that son of a bitch had he not then felt the sharp yank of someone grabbing a fistful of hair at the crown of his head. The hand jerked him backwards with such force that René felt the skin on the young man’s neck grating under his fingernails. Reeling, his hands flailing helpless at the air and his feet clambering for solid ground, finding only the whisper of pine needles brushing against his bare toes. And then even that was lost to him as he was swung with all the grace of a wrecking ball.

  He slammed into the trunk of the tree at his back, his breath wrenched from his chest to the staccato beat of three fingers’ worth of hair snapping at their roots. He barely had time enough to register that it was the man who’d been driving the SUV standing before him now and then the man’s hand was lashing out, the point of its thumb driving knuckle-deep into René’s eye. It felt like a firecracker going off in his head. Pain such as he’d never felt. Half his world in the dark and the other half almost as black, comprised entirely of the man holding him by the hair at arm’s length, his other hand clenched, the nail on its extended thumb as sharp as an arrowhead and René knowing it would be the last thing he ever saw.

  René’s own hand now working with a will of its own, thrusting into his tool belt and finding his utility knife, slashing it upwards, the blade slicing through the drape of the man’s sleeve with such ease that it might have only caught fabric had the man not let out a startled gasp. His grip lost its hold and he stumbled back, clenching at his arm. Strands of hair straggled between the fingers on his one hand and blood burst in a flood through the ones clamped over the gash. Such hate in his eyes that René could see only death on the other side. Waiting on the man to make good on their threat, René’s every muscle tensed, the utility knife’s sharp quivering before him with singular intent, a lone breath all there was to buffer this moment from the next.

  Then:

  “What in the hell?”

  Roy was standing not ten feet away.

  All it would have taken was a quick sideways glance for René to see the alarm spreading over his face. But it would have taken the voice of God himself to distract René just then, seeing nothing beyond the folds of skin oozing from beneath the man’s collar, one clear swipe at that maybe his only hope of getting out of this day alive.

  Neither did the black man look up, though he did pause mid-stride just long enough for René to see another way out. He dodged sideways, clearing the tree and backing away, the utility knife guarding against the other moving to pursue. René had two steps on him by then, enough of a gap that he did now pass a glance at Roy, seeing no trace of the alarm that had just a moment ago defined his face, his shock absorbed in the interim by something else. If René had to put a name to it, it’d be despair, but the tenor of his voice when he spoke again would have placed it closer to contempt.

  “What the fuck did you do?”

  Such bitter recrimination in the gentle giant’s eyes that René would have had to have been blind in both eyes not to see his fate spelt out within.

  He turned and ran.

  15

  Deacon hadn’t been back to the barn for four days. All thoughts of the Fiction George had been writing had fled the moment he’d found him lying dead in the garden, and it would take that long before he’d have cause to think of it again.

  In the interim, he hadn’t talked to anyone except Grover. Only a few minutes seemed to have passed from the time he’d found George to the point of getting over the shock and dialling his number, but the display on his phone had put it at closer to an hour.

  “What’s up, Deke?” Grover had answered with after two rings.

  “It’s George,” he said.

  “George?”

  “He’s—” The word couldn’t find purchase on his tongue and he discarded it, pressing on. “I—I found him. In the garden. Heart attack. I think.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “No. He is not.”

  Silence now on the other end.

  Then after a moment: “Is he—” Grover’s voice choking on the same word that had defied Deacon only moments ago.

  “Yes,” he answered.

  Another silence. Then:

  “Have
you called anyone?”

  “No, I just—”

  “You haven’t called nine-one-one?”

  “No.”

  “It’s okay. I’ll call. Are you at the house?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  Not wanting to face George again, Deacon had circled to the front of the house and called Dylan. He wasn’t answering his phone and after the beep Deacon had let the time run out without saying a word.

  Crystal was the only other person he’d have cared to speak to, the only person who might have known how much George had meant to him, who wouldn’t offer him petty condolences as if to say the price of living was dying and that alone should have made him feel better. But Crystal’s last Facebook post had shown her lighting a candle—“For Grams”—in the Santa Marie Del Mar Basilica in Barcelona, one of a continent’s worth of stops on the all-expenses-paid European tour that her parents had given her as a reward for graduating, with honours, from the U of T.

  Over the following days, he bided his grief the best he could, lying in bed from sun-up to sundown and wandering the streets most of the night trying to wear himself out enough to fall asleep.

  On Thursday morning there was a knock at his door.

  “Deacon,” Rain called out. “I know you’re in there.”

  He lay still, holding his breath until he heard the creak of the stairs’ rickety wooden frame as her footsteps led her down into the alley. He then rolled over, turning his back on the door. There was a small bookshelf pressed against the wall beside the bed and he found himself tracing over the titles of George’s books pressed between the two brass monkeys he’d found at Ye Olde Antique Shoppe in town. There was a gap at the end where he’d taken out The Stray and it was on this his gaze settled, recalling how he’d brought it with him to George’s on the night he’d died and trying to think of what he’d done with it.