No Quarter

by John Jantunen

  “Mine?”

  “George gave it to me before he died.”

  “It was George’s?”

  “He told me to give it to you. Said you might need it before this was over.”

  Her voice was upraised at the end as if it was begging for an answer.

  “He said that?”

  “He also said you’d understand. Well, go on, then, take it, my arm’s getting tired.”

  Deacon finally reached for it, taking it by the grip, Rain letting go and Deacon’s hand sagging from its weight. He turned it over in his open palm, taking his first good look at the pistol. It was old, he could see that. Most of its nickel plate had worn off, exposing grey steel beneath. It had a piece of copper wire bent and soldered around the trigger guard and along the top on either side of the sight groove was inscribed: U.S. Revolver Co. and Made in the USA. Likewise on the black plastic grip: U.S.

  It felt heavy in his hand, too heavy for such a small revolver, but when he took it by the grip and laid his finger against the trigger, the feeling of weight lifted as if the gun itself knew how it should be held.

  It was a line from My Brother’s Keeper and it rang true when Deacon did the same, pointing the gun at the floor and counting off the bores in its cylinder. There were seven in all.

  Again from My Brother’s Keeper:

  It looked like it should shoot six but it shot seven.

  To make sense of why that might have been, William had only to recall one of the westerns he’d watched at the Odeon Theatre with his younger brother James. It had ended with a gunfight, as they most often did. The bad guy had got the drop on the hero, cornering him in an alley between the livery and the saloon and pointing his gun between his enemy’s eyes. The hero had held up his arms as if he meant to surrender and the bad guy had looked from one hand to the other, seeing four fingers and a thumb outstretched on the right but only his pinkie on the left. It was wiggling at him and he knew what the gesture meant but he pulled the trigger anyway.

  The two men heard the click as the hammer struck an empty chamber at the same moment but this time the hero got the drop on the bad guy. He delivered a hard right to his chin and followed that up by reaching for the knife in his boot, flinging it and burying the blade in the other’s chest.

  William took comfort in the recollection as he closed the top drawer of his father’s dresser, thinking he’d never much considered himself the hero-type and if it came to all that, the good guy’d be in for one helluva surprise.

  Walking then to his father, passed-out dead-drunk in his bed, snoring in voluminous waves. His head was resting on his arm and the knuckles of his hand were sheared of skin from where they’d caught William’s front teeth the night before. Blood from the next blow, which had broken his nose, was spattered on his wrist. Placing the muzzle of the gun into the middle of that son-of-a-bitch’s forehead, he pushed at it hard enough to open his eyes.

  His father awoke blinking against his drowse. Seeing what his eldest boy was holding in his hand, his eyes opened wider still.

  Good mornin’, Pa, William said and pulled the trigger.

  “You didn’t know?” Rain asked, snapping Deacon from the daze of staring down at the gun that William had killed his father with and then had also used to shoot the man who’d murdered his brother, emptying every last one of the remaining five rounds into the posse who’d come seeking vengeance.

  Deacon shook his head, though he’d always suspected as much. George’s middle name was, after all, William and he’d found further evidence in what Dylan had told him about Louise and Edward burning the copies their father had given them.

  Rain was then reaching out and straightening the collar of his jacket, the one he’d taken from George’s closet so he knew she must have been thinking of him.

  “George was a hard man, there’s no doubt about that.”

  Her voice had taken on the wistful tone of a middle-aged woman recalling her first love. She trailed her fingers down his chest and Deacon looked up from the gun in his hand. A glisten wetted her eyes.

  “But with me,” she said, “he was always quite . . . gentle.”

  25

  They ended up back at Rain’s house because she had weed and that calmed Deacon some.

  After they’d smoked, they lit cigarettes and she asked, “So what’s going on, Deke?”

  He told her.

  It started out as a trickle of words and ended up a flood, Rain listening without saying anything, until he came to the part where Dylan had said, “Buck up, son, we ain’t hardly yet just begun.”

  “It’s just like in George’s Fictions,” she said then.

  “One story always pointing to the next . . .” Deacon offered.

  “. . . and that always worse than what came before.”

  Her lips scrunched into a question mark, her brow furrowed as if trying to divine some deeper meaning to it, and he was looking at her with surprise, for she’d never given him a hint that she’d read any of George’s Fictions, much less enough of them to have known that. He wasn’t sure yet what to make of the idea that she had, and also that she’d been keeping it from him all these years, just like Dylan.

  He hid his unease by taking a long slow draw from his cigarette, and then Rain was talking again.

  “You didn’t know Dylan before he joined the army,” she asked, “is that right?”

  “Only met him a couple of times. He was six years older than me when I came to live with George and Adele. He was already on his way—”

  “He was a real sullen child,” Rain interrupted, lost in her own train of thought. “One might even say morose.”

  That gave Deacon pause for it didn’t sound at all like the Dylan he’d come to know.

  “So he changed?” he finally said.

  “Most people’d say for the better. But not—”

  “George.”

  “Dylan told him one time, he’d seen the truth of what George had written when he was overseas.”

  “A world on fire.”

  “Said he couldn’t get it out of his mind. Said it was following after him.”

  “And what did George think of that?”

  “Well, you know George. Always hoping for the best—”

  “and expecting the worst.”

  “I know it made him nervous the way Dylan talked. The way he’d become obsessed with his Fictions. And—”

  She was shaking her head and biting her lip.

  “What?”

  “How jealous he’d become of . . .”

  “Of who?”

  She cast him a sideways glance.

  “Of you.”

  “Me?”

  “The way George treated you. Like the son he’d always wanted.”

  George had never said as much but Deacon had always wished it were true. Hearing her say it now, he felt a sudden shame for cursing his name such a short while ago. The feeling was short-lived for there then arose in his mind the memory of Dylan calling his grandfather “a fucking monster.” At the time, it had been just another clue to solving the mystery surrounding the dual and often conflicting natures of George, The Man, and George, The Writer.

  But now he saw it as a clue to something else entirely.

  If what Rain said was true, he mused, and I became the son he’d always wanted, then maybe Dylan became the son he’d always deserved.

  A multitude of scenes from George’s Fictions cascaded him then: a rapid cycling through several centuries worth of depravity and despair.

  Such horrors and yet . . .

  Had George really written anything outside of our own history?

  Nothing, except . . .

  The future.

  And thinking that, the two things all of a sudden became one.

  Maybe then, he thought, we shouldn’t expect our future to b
e any different from the one he’d imagined.

  A fleeting enough thought, no doubt abetted by the current state of his high.

  And then he felt Rain’s hand on his own.

  It seemed for a moment that she must have read his mind and meant to offer him some sort of reassurance that it was just his imagination running wild. But it was his cigarette she was bound for. Half of it had been reduced to a thin column of ash leaning precariously over the rug. She scissored it between two fingers and, with a cupped hand beneath, brought it to the ashtray on the green steamer trunk.

  “You okay?” she asked as she passed it back. “You had a strange look on your face there for a moment. Like you’d seen a ghost.”

  He gave her a curt smile.

  “Just stoned, is all.”

  He took a drag from his smoke, trying to recall what they’d been talking about.

  “Did he say anything else?” he asked, exhaling.

  “Lots,” Rain answered. “You couldn’t shut George up, he gets a couple of ryes in him.”

  “I mean, about Dylan.”

  Rain’s expression scrunched and her tongue prodded at her top lip, which is how she always looked when she was wrestling with something.

  “There was one thing George was always going on about . . . Something about the darkness . . .” Shaking her head, trying to remember what it was. “He who caused the darkness . . .”

  Reaching over then to tap her own ash as if that might have helped recall it to mind.

  “If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed,” Deacon said. “The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who caused the darkness.”

  “That’s it.”

  “It’s the quote George put at the beginning of No Quarter.”

  She thought on that for a moment.

  “So it was to be a morality tale,” she said at last.

  “No surprise there.”

  She took another drag off her cigarette and Deacon did the same.

  “The guilty one . . .” Rain said as she exhaled. “You think George meant Ronald Crane?”

  “He was guilty, no doubt about that. But Ronald Crane—”

  “He died too early.”

  “Yeah. George would have—”

  “Saved the truly guilty one—”

  “For last.”

  “So he must have meant—”

  “Someone else.”

  “Likely someone—”

  “He hadn’t introduced yet.”

  Tilting her head back, Rain blew a long train of smoke towards the ceiling. And when she spoke it was to give Deacon pause again, thinking maybe she had been reading his mind after all.

  “Well, whoever it was,” she said, “knowing George, we’ll all end up paying for it, in one way or another.”

  26

  They spent the rest of the daylight filling in some of the other blanks, huddled in front of Rain’s laptop like two cave dwellers seeking refuge before a fire.

  They started with the article Deacon himself had written when René had been charged with aggravated assault for beating up his girlfriend four years before. When that didn’t tell them much, Deacon told Rain what René had told his grandfather and then Guy had told George. That Dahlia Fields, René’s ex-

  girlfriend, had run off with his son, he didn’t know where, and then had shown up six months later at his apartment. She was drunk and angry and demanded that René pay her two thousand dollars in back child support before she’d let him see the boy again. René had told her to go fuck herself and had slammed the door in her face. And that was the last, he’d said, he’d seen of her until he was facing her in the courtroom, where she was telling the judge that he’d punched her in the face and thrown her down the flight of stairs leading from the second floor of the house that they’d once rented together. Photos taken at the hospital that night suggested that she’d hit every one of the twelve steps with her face, losing two front teeth in the process and breaking her nose and one of her cheekbones. She’d also suffered a severe concussion which, she said, made it almost impossible for her to provide adequate care for her son, then three years old. She had an eyewitness to corroborate, and Dylan himself had testified that when he’d arrested René, the skin on two of the knuckles on his right hand was peeled back and he had the photos to prove it. René would account for the injury by explaining that he’d punched the door after he’d slammed it shut but no one, save his grandfather, had really believed that.

  They’d then trolled for the name Wane amongst the news coverage of the fire, using what they’d found to google Bryson, Celia, Taylor, and Sandra. They formed a pretty clear picture of the former two from their Wikipedia pages and a good idea of who Sandra was from Facebook and an even better idea about Taylor from affluenza.com.

  They watched the footage shot at the Diplomat Hotel twice and then watched the latest post. It already had 1,234,067 hits and purported to be from a live stream by three twenty-somethings—two young men and a woman—who seemed to have taken their inspiration from Young Master Wane.

  They’d driven a grey Mercedes convertible to some ramshackle bar in the Florida Everglades, filming themselves consuming thirty-two shots between them and taking turns dancing with the bar’s equally drunk clientele. There was a fight and they fled the scene as the chairs started to fly, whooping and hollering their delight as the Mercedes tore along a lonely stretch of road cutting through the swamp. And that’s what they were doing when the car suddenly, and for no apparent reason, swerved off the road, its occupants screaming like they were on a rollercoaster as the picture caterwauled, turning a full three hundred and sixty degrees.

  Then:

  A splash of water. The picture onscreen is reduced to a blur out of which there arises a muffled exclamation: “Jesus!”

  The camera fumbling and finally locating the driver, slumped over the wheel. They’ve landed in the swamp and water is pouring in through his door’s open window.

  “Are you okay?” the woman asks.

  The driver groans and sits up straight. There’s a gash over his left brow bleeding into his eye, but he says, “I think so.”

  The camera then shifts to a shot of the empty back seat.

  “Where’s Devon?”

  A frantic scream. The camera tracks back to the driver but finds only his flailing legs as he’s jerked backwards out of the car.

  A distant splash and then utter quiet.

  “Aston?” the woman implores, scouring the swamp with the camera’s light and settling on a pair of eyes bobbing menacingly above the surface. Not even a second to ponder them before there’s a carnivorous bellow from the back seat. The camera jerks rearwards. The snap of an alligator’s jaws fills the frame for an instant and then only black.

  “God,” Rain said, “it’s like they ain’t got any sense south of the forty-five, eh, Deke?”

  Deacon laughed, the first time since George had died, and Rain rolled another joint to celebrate that. They smoked it upstairs, sitting on her bed. Afterwards, Deacon took her from behind, in honour of George.

  They were at it all night.

  * * *

  He awoke sometime around noon.

  Rain had opened the drapes and the window too. There was a band of sunlight warming his bare chest and he could hear a myriad of noises rising from the street below: the steady thump of tires slapping against a pothole and the insistent throb of a bassline from some rap song growing louder as the car approached, the grate of a motorcycle’s engine trailing after it, a teenage girl shrieking with the tenacity of someone who’d just had ice water poured down her back—little sprouts of life as if to remind Deacon the town was still carrying on around him though, right then, it seemed miles away, too far removed yet to draw him back into its fold.

  There was an odour of burnt bacon fat flavouring the air
. He wasn’t yet ready to get up to see where that future might lead and as he lay on his back plucking idly at the chest hair sprouting into the morning sun, his mind wandered back to something Rain had said while they’d shared a cigarette the night before.

  “You ought to write it.”

  She’d just asked him what he was going say in the Chronicle about what Guy had told him.

  “Grover’d never let me print any of that in the paper,” Deacon had answered, though it sounded like a poor excuse.

  “It’s not up to Grover,” Rain had said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “George left the paper to you.” Smiling coyly and covering her mouth with her hand, speaking through her fingers, “I wasn’t supposed to say anything.”

  Deacon reaching over then to tap his cigarette in the ashtray on the bed stand, seeing the pistol and asking himself:

  What would George do in your place?

  Rain had all twelve of his books lined up between two crystal balls on her dresser. It was the first time he’d been in her bedroom so he’d never seen them there before. He found himself scanning over them now.

  “You ought to write it,” Rain said. “That’s what you should do.”

  “Write what?”

  “No Quarter, silly.”

  “George already did.”

  “Your own version, I mean.”

  “I couldn’t—”

  “Why not? You already know how it ends. And didn’t George always say that as long as you know how it ends, the rest’ll practically write itself?”

  As far as Deacon knew, he’d said the exact opposite but he wasn’t in the mood to argue. He’d picked up the gun, spinning the chamber, and sighting it on one of the crystal balls.

  It had ended with a world on fire, the same as in all of George’s Fictions, except, of course, My Brother’s Keeper, which wasn’t really a “Fiction” after all.

  The revolver in his hand now gave Deacon a pretty clear idea of why that one might have ended so well and, like in so many of his books, the solution to that mystery only served to point to a deeper one, hitherto unrevealed.