All he can see are flames within the frame of its window so that it appears the very air beyond has ignited.
This sight, at last, is enough to rouse him from his stupor. His good hand clutches at the couch’s cushion, prying his body from within its seam, up and onto unsteady legs turning now towards the door. He approaches it with stuttered step, feeling not so much alarm at the sight of the raging inferno beyond its double-glassed pane as the same incredulity he’d felt when he was ten and, entreated by his father, had peered over the rail of the boathouse’s deck and found on the dock below him a man he’d known, until then, only as The Viper.
He and his father had also just watched Two Minutes to Midnight, sitting on the very couch receding behind him now, two weeks to the day since his cousin had beaten him up and forced him to eat dog shit. Whenever they’d crossed paths in the interval, his father had greeted him with a stilted silence. It had spoken to Taylor of his disappointment and so, when his father had finally broken the silence, asking him if he’d like to watch a movie and holding up a DVD of Two Minutes to Midnight, which his mother had staunchly refused to let him see due to its R rating, he’d taken that as a sign that he was making an effort towards reconciliation. It had been a great comfort to Taylor at the time. Peering down from the boathouse’s deck, a moment after the credits had rolled, and seeing a familiar Asian man with two cobras lashing out along his forearms, his incredulity then was tempered by a sinking feeling, knowing that he’d been wrong about why his father had shown him that particular film and also that the real reason wasn’t likely to provide him with any comfort after all.
Coming now to the door and peering through its window, Taylor sees that it’s not the air that is on fire but his mother’s boat and his own sense of incredulity is only tempered by a slight confusion as to how such a thing has come to be. The flames have engulfed the sail, and a piece of the fabric has torn free. Born aloft in a swirl of wind, it rises at a frantic pitch as if striving to make its place amongst the stars, its betters unblinking in their contemplation of such earthly pride, Taylor watching its ascent much the same. Its moment of glory is measured by no more than a single inhale before its light is vanquished by its own ambition, reduced now to a ribbon of ash, an ember filament razing its surface and making it seem to wink at Taylor before its grey is absorbed into the sky’s speckled black.
Taylor is just exhaling when a slighter incandescence prods at his periphery. He turns towards the beach, finding at once the source of the illume: what appears to be a bonfire, except that it’s oddly misshapen—not like a bundle of sticks at all but like a log, a foot thick and six feet long. A branch juts from the log’s end, almost like a . . . an arm stretching for the water just out of reach of its fingertips. Then he notices other specks too: a trail of smaller fires running on a direct line away from the main blaze and leading his gaze towards the grassy expanse at the beach’s perimeter.
There: a fringe of light pushing against the dark with the simmer of the rising sun.
The memory of the rumbling boom, the flicker of the bonfire, the trail of flames, and the impossibly approaching dawn aligning now in perfect symmetry with the escalating scream he’d heard only a moment ago, the cusp of understanding provided perfect exclamation by a jolt of glass smashing at his back. The bottle that made it explodes against the wall above his bed, not more than ten feet from where he stands gaping in mute terror as the bottle’s lit wick unleashes a torrent of flames washing over the wood panels and dousing the bed. Droplets of it splatter the carpet like motes of burning tar. The smell of gasoline is ripe in the air, and he can hear the crackle of hairs along his forearm singeing from the heat of the rapidly keening flames.
Now clawing at the door’s knob, flinging the door inwards, never more awake than he is throwing himself through the gap and onto the landing. He pitches hard against the balustrade and flips around, afraid to turn his back on the fire as if it might contain some sort of malevolence hitherto unrevealed. Flame then lashing out through the door, and his good hand finding direction in the rail’s downward slope. His feet stumble clumsily, his heels careening over toe, neither able to find sanction on the steps as if their sole function is to trip him up, finding at last the dock’s even plane, though the wobble in his legs makes it feel like anything but.
Above him, the boathouse’s cedar panels crackle, hissing smoke in thin streams, and the open door emits a monstrous bellow like a just-sprung-to-life creature of hell’s creation venting the agony of its birth. But Taylor barely registers it, such is his alarm at what he sees on the far side of the driveway.
Flames lap in fevered spires from the house’s gabled roof against a funnel of black smoke whipped into a frenzy by the inferno below. The stained-glass window at its fore has been reduced to a gaping maw of sharply fractured shards providing a clear view of the furnace within. Directly beneath it, his father’s limousine is a smouldering husk of cratered-out windows, its back doors askew, hanging off their hinges, its rear-end splayed open like it had been packed with dynamite. His mother’s car is littered with flaming debris from the fallout, and the tops of the trees enclosing the building are also ablaze, crimson embers flitting about the canopy of the trees yet unafflicted with the wilful petulance of fireflies. The sinister totality of this panorama is so perfectly aligned with the devastation wrought by the cruise missile he thought he’d heard blaring from the TV only moments ago that his earlier confusion about how such a thing could have come to be is swept aside, knowing that his own father must be to blame for the apocalyptic vision confronting him now.
The notion that such a dastardly act of revenge—perhaps over a business deal gone wrong or simply one bad guy sending a message to another—would only seem plausible to some coked-up Hollywood screenwriter who, never in his wildest imaginings, would conceive of such a thing happening on our home and native land, carries about as much weight in Taylor’s no less drug-addled mind as the haze of smoke swirling about him.
Flame gusts whoosh from tree to tree on either side of the house. The only things within his spectrum not on fire are the sand and the water and, beyond those, a narrow strip of forest on the far side of the beach. The spaces between the palisade of trees are filling with smoke, but it’d be a few minutes before the flames caught up, plenty of time for him to reach the fence separating their property from their neighbour’s, and from there only thirty seconds at a hard run to their front door. No matter that the fence is eight feet tall, designed with the expressed intention of deterring unwanted visitors, and him with a broken arm on top.
That’s a mountain he’ll have to climb when he gets there.
He’s just taken a deep breath in anticipation of the sprint ahead when a lumberous crash turns him back to the house. Its roof is caving in and its facade toppling too. The combined force unleashes a cloud bank of seething grey spilling over the driveway, approaching the beach like an avalanche in slow motion, consuming all within its reach. Taylor treats that as good as any starter’s gun, lunging off the dock and keeping low, moving fast. The beach’s sand is cool against his bare feet, though the air there is just as hot, the breeze wafting in from the lake miasmic with the heat spurned by the boat burning at his back. The sting of its smoke blurs his vision so that as he approaches the slightest of the fires, not more than ten paces hence, he can’t divine much about it except that it’s a body.
Its fire’s fervour has lessened some but flames still roil over the subtle curve of its spine, its skin peeling in crisp curls. Its face is buried in the sand and the back of its head is scorched bald, not an inch of it left unscathed except for one of its feet, curiously intact at the end of a charcoaled and still-smouldering leg. As he approaches, he can see there’s a chain draped over its ankle and from that a glint of gold dangles in the shape of two masks—one laughing and the other frowning.
It’s his sister lying there.
His legs slow to a plod, coming at th
e body with the same measured determination The Russian General had come upon his son buried under a pile of rubble, dropping to his knees, tilting his head towards the heavens, venting his rage. No time for Taylor to release himself to a similar act of grief. At that very moment a hand clutches at his arm, spinning him towards the lake and he finds Jules standing there. He’s naked save for a pair of Speedos which tells Taylor that he’d just returned from one of his midnight swims. In his right hand he clutches an axe. It’s the one that his uncle Harley had dubbed Axcaliber and for as long as Taylor could recall had remained cleaved into a block of hardwood beside the firepit his grandfather had built on the far side of the beach. When Taylor was fourteen he’d finally wrenched it loose after years of trying and had held it aloft like he’d imagined King Arthur had done with its namesake. Uncle Harley had fallen to his knees, bowing in mock reverence, and Taylor had never been so proud of himself as when he’d proclaimed, “Long live the King!”
The sight of Axcaliber and the frantic pitch of Jules’s voice as he pulls at his arm, yelling, “Move it!” leaves no doubt that they really are under attack. But neither are able to wrest Taylor from his shock and his eyes track back to the charred corpse as the vaporous deluge unleashed from the house washes onto the beach.
Coughing against the smoke, unable to breathe, yet knowing he has to do something. He can’t just leave her there.
It’s his sister!
“Goddamned it, move!”
Jules pulling hard at his arm again, giving Taylor no choice. Dragging him backwards, Jules’s hand suddenly loosens its grip. A strangled gasp. Enough to turn Taylor away from Sandra.
Inexplicably, Jules is stumbling towards him.
Axcaliber is lagging in one hand, its blade dragging along the sand, and his other is clenched around his throat, a geyser spraying red between his fingers as he teeters sideways, lost at once into the swirl of smoke. And beyond that: an endless murky dark, empty of all reason except that a blotch of it appears to be moving closer.
Taylor startles back as the blotch merges into the shape of a man. He is wearing black jeans and a black hooded sweatshirt. Curls of long dark brown hair hang in loose garlands over his face and within its drape, Taylor can’t see much beyond the angry grit to the teeth glowering out from beneath.
It’s the Indian!
A thought that’s barely reared in his mind before his left heel bumps against his sister’s arm. The heat of her flames singes the hairs on the back of his leg but he can barely feel that, his world now reduced to the hunting knife clenched in the man’s upraised hand. It lashes out with the whip of a snake’s bite, and he stiffens under the sudden pinch of its blade piercing his gut and the grate of it nicking his spine on its way to skewering out his back.
His good arm flails out, feebled and weak. The man bats it away as if it were no more nuisance than a fly, then draws himself close, cinching the blade deeper. Pain now like he’d been bathed in it, the sum total of all he is and ever would be compressed into the beads of black hate that have become the man’s eyes: pinpricks as sharp as any knife. And though there is a truth in them unmasked by any movie, Taylor feels only a tremor of doubt.
Something . . . the man’s face . . . his left cheek . . . a scar . . . like . . . like his head had been squeezed in a . . . a waffle iron.
19
He’d slept like the dead and awoke feeling not much better.The grandfather clock was striking the hour and each successive chime tolled like a sledge driving a spike deeper and splintering the back of his head. The empty bottle of Canadian Club that had done the damage resided within easy reach on the table in front of George’s reading chair, and so it wasn’t much of a mystery to him why he was feeling the way he was. The clock, though, was another thing entirely. Its incessant clang was rising in stark defiance of time itself, for it couldn’t possibly have been that late, the greyed light parsing the window’s dusted pane telling Deacon that the night had passed but the sun was still a long ways from ordaining the day.
But still the bell kept on tolling, Deacon counting along with each stroke thinking they’d never stop. The twelfth hovered for a moment and then faded, and then nothing but the lash of branches raking against the roof and a bluster of wind rattling at the barn’s eaves.
Must be a storm brewing, he thought, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, which would explain the hour’s gloom.
He had to pee something fierce but couldn’t yet summon the verve to raise himself out of the chair. Habit had him reaching for the cigarette pack inside his jacket pocket. He knew it was empty before he’d pried open its lid, and his eyes sought out the ashtray beside the bottle, one filling up as the other emptied, the both together forming a clear record of the hours he’d spent in restless deliberation; the mystery of how George had come to write what he had was steadily losing ground to the more beguiling question of why someone would have taken it, leaving only a few photocopied pages in its stead.
Before he had fallen asleep the night before, he’d read them over a half-dozen times, looking for some sort of answer and finding nothing to satisfy the question of why someone would take them, but one line giving him a clue, at least, concerning the matter of who.
Hard to forget a face like that, the cop’s left cheek, as it was, looking like someone had squeezed his head in a waffle iron.
Reading that had given him a line on filling in a few of the other blanks as well.
What was it George had said the morning he’d come to tell him about Ronald Crane?
“Helluva thing, him dying like that.”
Could have been, he conjectured, when Dylan was pulling traffic detail up on the 118, he’d spotted Ronald Crane’s Caravan cruising the highway with a frequency that had struck him as too regular to be anything but part of a larger pattern. Maybe he’d mentioned something about it to George. With the reserve so close, it would have been natural for him to make a connection to the recent investigations into missing and murdered Indigenous women, George had spoken of it often enough.
A seed of an idea then planted in George’s head: Dylan tailing Ronald Crane as the real estate tycoon patrolled the 118 looking for young hitchhikers to abduct, knowing that any missing girls from the reserve would most likely be treated as runaways, their cases closed without more than a cursory investigation, one of them a girl who’d swore she’d kill the next man who laid a hand on her. The story progressing from there, filling four hundred pages and when he’d finished with those, making his corrections and typing it out all over again.
Dylan must have come into the barn and found what George had written and taken the originals.
But why leave these? Why go through the trouble of photocopying the first two chapters and the first page of the third?
Recalling then what Dylan had said after he’d startled him the night before.
“I catch you in the middle of something?” he’d asked, Deacon tracking the shit-eating grin he’d worn while he said it back to the night Ronald Crane had died.
“Hope I didn’t catch you in the middle of something,” he’d said then too, fronting him the self-same expression.
He’d been talking about Rain that night and her name had been right there on the page in front of him when Dylan had knocked at the barn’s door. Too strange a coincidence in a night already filled with more than its fair share. Deacon flipped to the last page in his lap, reading it over again. It was obvious that Dylan had included it as a wink and nod, as if he’d wanted to make sure Deacon knew he’d left them for him to find.
But as he read the last line, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d meant to tell him something else as well.
He had forty years on her own thirty-nine, but the pill he’d taken made him feel half his age as he thrust into her with the precision of a see saw, she gasping, “Oh! Oh! Oh!” which he took to mean that she was about to climax!
There were several in
ches of space at the bottom of the page, which got him to thinking that maybe Dylan had blanked out a few (or five) of the lines that had come after.
But why would he do that?
The obvious answer was that he didn’t want him to read what came next.
Maybe he really was working with Ronald Crane, as the boy—Del—had thought, and that only came out later.
But that didn’t ring quite true either, a thought spawned from how his gaze had settled on the final word. The exclamation mark seemed starkly out of place and between the c and the l there was slight gap and limax! was a little darker and also a trifle askew. Deacon ran the pad of his index finger over the word, feeling the subtle indent of the characters and in this way came to know that Dylan had typed the last five letters after he’d made the copy. There were faint threads above and below them: traces of the white-out he’d used to blot out the word he’d replaced, the curiously anomalous c making it a good bet that it had originally been come.
“Climax,” he said aloud as if speaking it might provide some clue as to why he’d do such a thing. And when it didn’t, he studied the word, certain now that it held the key to unlocking the secret of what Dylan was trying to tell him, and that only giving rise to the vague impression that he’d just missed something.
He thought back to the night Ronald Crane had died, not so much recalling the conversation he’d had with Dylan at the rest stop as what George had written. He’d clearly meant for Ronald Crane’s death to be the beginning of something and he saw now that Dylan, for reasons he couldn’t fathom, had wanted him to see that too, but not what came after.
His eyes drifted back to the page.
climax!
The culmination of events leading towards the end, an end that George had already written and that Dylan must have read, seeing something there that he’d wanted to keep hidden, revealing to Deacon only how it started, but not how it ended, an end that George had written and that Dylan must have read . . .
No Quarter Page 27
