The Horn of a Lamb

by Robert Sedlack

  The applause continued. Some of the players left for the dressing room, but the good guys stayed behind and skated around the rink, applauding the fans.

  Fred, caught up in the farewell, had not returned his binoculars to the luxury booth to see what was going on with Badger. He turned to Jack in the middle of the ovation. “I don’t remember everyone clapping last year, buh, buh, don’t forget, sometimes my memory does not work so good.”

  He slapped his hand on his thigh until the last player left the ice. And then a small section of fans began to sing a crowd song usually shared with visiting playoff teams during the last seconds of their elimination. A traditional song of good-spirited ridicule, on this night it became a heartfelt homage from thousands: “Nah nah nah nah, nah nah nah nah, hey hey hey, goodbye.”

  The singing spread from section to section until the arena was filled with song. Fred looked down at Wendy, who was also singing. Her eyes glistened.

  Jack stole a glance at Fred and hoped that he understood what was going on.

  “Nah nah nah nah, nah nah nah nah, hey hey hey, goodbye.”

  Jack was up a few rows chatting with some fans. Fred sat by himself, licking mustard from his beard. A hand touched his arm. “Um, um, holy crow, Riddler, I was watching you through the binoculars and there was a bad moon rising, buh, buh, it never came, how come?”

  “Shhh,” said Badger as he sat down beside Fred.

  “I am so glad that you are safe.”

  Badger looked across at the tunnel leading to the concourse. Two city policemen stood with a young man wearing a vendor’s cap who was pointing in Badger’s direction. One of the policemen came over. “Sir? Could you come with us, please?” Badger began coughing and stood.

  “Not you, him,” said the policeman, pointing at Fred.

  “Huh?” said Fred.

  “No,” said Badger.

  “Buh, buh, I didn’t do anything.”

  By the time Jack sprinted down the concrete stairs, Fred was being escorted to the tunnel. Fred didn’t recognize the Pocket Dawg vendor, but the Pocket Dawg vendor had recognized him.

  “Is that your handwriting?” asked the detective.

  Fred had been staring at the note for some time. And the question had already been asked once.

  A commotion ensued outside. The door flew open and Badger tried to storm inside. A security guard grabbed his arm and pulled him back. “I’m his lawyer, what are you charging him with?”

  The head of security waited for a nod from the detective before motioning with his hand for the guard to let go. He did so, but had to push Jack from the room on his way out. Jack yelled, “What the hell’s going on?!?” and the door slammed shut.

  Badger moved in behind Fred, who was relieved that someone was watching his back. Especially someone crafty like Badger. “Is this the note everyone’s talking about?” asked Badger as he bent forward over Fred’s shoulder.

  The detective snatched the note: “Nobody should be talking about it.”

  Badger turned to the detective, dismayed. “You’re not going to let me see it?”

  “It’s evidence,” said the detective.

  “Of what?”

  “Advance knowledge of a crime to be committed.”

  Badger looked at the Pocket Dawg vendor. “You found the note? Where? How do you know it was his? Did you see him drop it?”

  “Don’t badger the witness,” said the detective.

  Fred’s double-barrelled laugh exploded. The head of security spilled coffee on his starched white shirt.

  Badger put his hands on Fred’s shoulders and Fred giggled and squirmed because it tickled. “The young man you’ve dragged in here for an illegal interrogation suffers from the effects of a traumatic brain injury. In addition to obvious physical impairments, his short-term memory is severely handicapped. You can ask him what he had to eat tonight and he won’t remember.”

  “Um, um, I had a Pocket Dawg, so there.” Fred stuck out his tongue at the detective.

  The detective put the note back on the table and sat beside Fred. “Are you okay?”

  Fred nodded, then became perturbed. He plucked a white thread from the detective’s jacket and relaxed. “Perfect.”

  “You want some more water?”

  Fred shook his head. “Hot milk, with cherry flavouring.”

  “We don’t have that.”

  “Well excuse me for living.”

  “Now, Fred, you’re not in any trouble here.”

  “Not in any trouble,” spat Badger. “You’re saying he had advance knowledge of a criminal conspiracy and did nothing to prevent it.”

  “Who said anything about a conspiracy?” asked the detective.

  “A criminal offence. You’re just setting him up.”

  “Not at all.” The detective smiled affectionately at Fred. “I just want to know if you wrote the note.”

  “Don’t answer that,” said Badger.

  “The handwriting is quite unique. If needed, we could get samples of your writing and let an expert decide.”

  “You’ve got to be joking,” exclaimed Badger. “A handwriting expert? For what? Nothing happened.”

  “Someone intercepted our feed to the Jumbotron!” yelled the head of security. “Don’t tell me nothing happened.”

  The detective nudged the note closer to Fred. “Do you remember if you wrote the words public execution?”

  “How do you know it’s not execration?” asked Badger.

  “Try hard,” encouraged the detective.

  “It’s not a matter of trying hard,” shouted Badger.

  “We’re done with you, counsellor,” said the detective, nodding to a policeman at the door. “Get him out of here.”

  “If you coerce a statement out of a mentally handicapped man …” yelled Badger. But he had to stop yelling. And cough. And he continued to cough until he doubled over. He finally righted himself and pointed a finger at the detective. “…I will publically rip you a new asshole when this goes to court.”

  Fred looked at Badger, concerned about his coughing. “Buh, buh, the note looks like something I would write and everybody can stop yelling because my hockey team played their last game of the season tonight and I am very sad and tired and I just want to go home.”

  The detective lifted the note from the table and put it in his pocket. “One last question.”

  “Just like Columbo, um, um, always one more.”

  “The information on the note, where did you get it?”

  Fred sighed. “Buh, buh, can I talk to my lawyer?”

  The detective stared circumspectly at Badger. “Sure.”

  “Okay, so go away and stand over there,” said Fred, pointing to a corner. “You too,” said Fred to the head of security, who scowled, dabbed his coffee stain with a napkin and reluctantly joined the detective. Badger sat with Fred and the two whispered. Badger nodded and squeezed Fred’s arm weakly. “You can come back now.”

  The detective returned and sat beside Fred. “So where did the information on the note come from?”

  “What note?”

  The detective pulled the paper from his pocket and showed it again to Fred. Fred looked at the note carefully and then pointed his thumb at Badger. “Him.”

  And that’s when Badger, white as Taillon’s coat, coughed one last time and keeled over, landing hard on the floor.

  twelve

  Fred’s black-and-white checkered kaffiyeh, tied loosely around his head like a babushka, flapped in the breeze. Jack had tried to ignore him but it was impossible, with Fred sitting on the roof of the house hitting his own sternum repeatedly and wailing in a high-pitched tone just like he’d seen the Palestinian women do on television. Given his practice at the art of the double-barrelled laugh, he was an expert at tongue manipulation and he’d pretty much mastered the cry.

  It had been going on since after breakfast. Once Jack saw that the pregnant ewes were becoming agitated by the wailing, he stomped over to Fred. “All
right, enough! We’ll go!”

  Fred was down the ladder in no time.

  Jack had no idea why the three old men were sitting like sentries outside Badger’s hospital room. All he knew was that he wasn’t going in and he wasn’t comfortable standing there. So he went to find the coffee machine he had seen in the lobby.

  Fred sat nervously beside the bed. Badger, pale and motionless, was hooked up to a respirator. Various other tubes snaked across the blanket that covered his body. Fred had not been inside a hospital room since his accident. And the smells and the sounds were almost enough to make him bolt. It was Juliette’s presence, a strong and comforting presence, that gave him the courage to stay.

  “It was congestive heart failure,” explained Juliette. “And an emphysema attack.”

  “Buh, buh, he’s going home soon isn’t he?”

  Juliette’s chin began to quiver. “The doctors aren’t as optimistic as I am,” said Juliette, smiling bravely. “But that’s just because they don’t know Alfred.”

  Fred turned away and pulled something from his back pocket. Juliette couldn’t see it was the cover torn from the dime novel The Sunless City. She also couldn’t see the scrawls Fred had written on the back. Words he was now reading to himself, and when he was done he turned. “I don’t know any Alfred, buh, buh, he told me a lie about you being dead and he told me about the horn of a lamb and now I don’t know what to believe and I really wanted to believe.”

  “He couldn’t say anything to you. I doubt he’s told anyone but me.”

  Fred peeked at the back of the book cover again. “He told me he was on a troop train.”

  “I know.”

  “And men were shooting farmers from the train.”

  Juliette put her hand on Badger’s heart protectively. “He was nineteen years old, Fred. He got caught up in what the others were doing. I don’t think an hour’s gone by in his life when he hasn’t thought about it.”

  Fred’s eyes began blinking rapidly. “Um, um, he said he was one of the good guys who put a stop to it.”

  Juliette frowned. Badger’s hand suddenly popped out from under the bedding, found Fred’s and squeezed it. “I’m sorry, Fred. I’m so sorry. I never lied about the horn. I swear to you.”

  Fred shuddered. But then his other hand, his good hand, began stroking Badger’s pale, freckled skin. “It’s okay, it’s all going to be okay.”

  Fred sat on a hay bale in the corral and watched the ewes with their big bellies waddle this way and that. The sketch pad in his lap had been a gift from Mutt many years ago. His left hand traced the same image on a blank page that appeared on the previous seventy pages: a horn, crudely drawn. Fred continued to watch the ewes and drew another horn. And then another.

  thirteen

  Taillon sat impassively beside the fence. The carcass of a cow, minus the head and two back legs, lay crumpled beneath his powerful jaws. The surprise bounty, a victim of old age, had been found during Taillon’s morning patrol, a patrol that had taken him to a neighbouring pasture.

  He had paused for longer than usual beside the Feniak salvage yard. The cries of a woman and the squeaky movement of a 1967 Volkswagen camper van had initially brought his ears forward. But the longer it went on, the less interested he became. Moments after hearing the woman scream he clasped the carcass in his jaws and dragged it away.

  “Fred accidentally saved Madison’s life.”

  “How so?” asked Mrs. Feniak.

  “If the hot dog vendor hadn’t found the note, who knows what would have happened,” said Jack. “We might have been witnesses to an execution.”

  The police interrogated Badger in the hospital for days. They were naturally suspicious that he had chosen to forego his seat in the stands, a seat he had occupied faithfully for years, for a seat in a judge’s luxury box beside Andrew Madison. They also questioned Juliette. It took them no time at all to connect her to the Flin Flon Five.

  It was no coincidence in the eyes of the police that Badger had made his way so near to Madison on the same night that Madison’s face appeared unexpectedly on all four screens of the Jumbotron. Badger had the means and the opportunity, and in the eyes of the police he definitely had the motive: revenge. Madison’s smear campaign had cost Badger his bid to save the team. They also knew how much Badger detested rich, powerful people. You didn’t end up as leader of the Flin Flon Five because you liked them.

  Shortly after the Jumbotron feed was interrupted, two technicians had rushed from the control room and inspected the cabling and the many amplifiers that led to the screens.

  When they arrived at the third amplifier, they found the sabotage. Someone had unhooked the British Naval Connectors at the ends of the four cables that ran from the Jumbotron control room and hooked them into their own black switcher box. The switcher box was connected to a receiver that transmitted the images of Andrew Madison captured on video by somebody using a wireless camera. All of this fed directly to the Jumbotron.

  The police concluded that five people were involved. Several witnesses said they saw three old men in the last row of the arena, one of whom appeared to be holding a small video camera. The other two seemed to be lookouts. All of the men were wearing what looked like false beards, reading glasses and bow ties.

  These same men, wearing similar disguises, had been caught on security cameras the day before the game while a Neil Diamond concert was being set up. The police surmised that this was when they had hooked up their electronic equipment. Although the police never positively identified these men, they presumed that they were the other members of the Flin Flon Five.

  The biggest question was why. Why had they gone to so much trouble to put Andrew Madison’s face up on the Jumbotron? Not one of the five members said a word to the police. And, because the men had worn disguises, there was not enough evidence to charge them with anything.

  Newspaper readers, radio listeners and television watchers knew within days that there was a direct link between the interception of the Jumbotron feed and Andrew Madison’s early exit from the game. There were all kinds of rumours: a sniper on a gangway, a bomb in his box.

  Jack had his own theory. Badger had been planning to shoot Madison in cold blood. He was still angry that the police hadn’t frisked Badger that night or checked for a gun in the luxury box. “It’s bad enough to murder someone but do you have to do it in front of the children?”

  “Maybe that emphysema addled his brain.”

  “His brain’s been scrambled since he joined the communist party.” Jack rolled over and stood up, rubbing his sore jaw, smelling Marilyn’s luscious scent on his cheeks. “You sure fixed the place up nice.”

  “It’s better than it was.” Candles burned on a tiny table beside a small mattress covered by a soft, cotton sheet and a purple comforter. Mrs. Feniak searched around the comforter.

  “Whatcha looking for?”

  “A receipt I found underneath the plywood.” Mrs. Feniak picked up the yellowed receipt. “Nineteen-seventy-one, cigarettes were only fifty-five cents a pack.”

  Jack suddenly felt really old. “Jesus Christ, let’s see that.” Mrs. Feniak handed the receipt to Jack, who could barely make out the type.

  “Swan River, Manitoba,” said Mrs. Feniak.

  Jack whistled when he made out the prices of gasoline, toothpaste and chocolate bars. He would have whistled and probably said, “I’ll be goddamned,” more than once if he knew that Mrs. Feniak’s hideaway had had twelve previous owners, including a band of five malcontents making their way from Winnipeg to Flin Flon, Manitoba, in 1971. He might have also suggested they find another hideaway. Badger used to concern him. Now he gave him the creeps.

  “My bra.”

  Jack saw it by his jeans and tossed it to her. “I think you took the wrong guy as your lover.”

  “No, I took the wrong guy as my firewood partner.”

  “Bridget bought a cord,” said Jack cheerfully. “Sure be nice to spend a night somewhere. I’m less
jittery in the morning.”

  “You just need to relax. You’re too wired.”

  “We always seem to be in such a goddamn hurry.” Jack rummaged in his jeans and found his underwear. He awkwardly put one foot through and then the other and banged his head on the ceiling.

  “I’m not complaining, Jack.”

  Jack watched as Mrs. Feniak pulled her panties up over her hips. “Goddamn, Marilyn, you look good in pink.”

  “Lavender.”

  “Yes.”

  Jack stepped out of the rusted Volkswagen van and shut the door behind him. Jack leaving first had been Marilyn’s idea. As with all her discretionary measures since Fred had come back that day for his hockey tickets, he went along without argument. And these measures included her home being off limits in case one of her children returned from school unexpectedly.

  The cooled blood in Jack’s veins made the jump over the fence a lot more humbling than the hot-blooded vault he had executed earlier in the morning.

  Jack didn’t like sneaking around like a backdoor man. Marilyn had promised she would tell her children when the time was right. Jack figured she was stalling, waiting to see if his erectile bugaboo was temporary. His anxiety was a good fuel source for the farm but it limited the intimacy that both of them were craving. “Give it time, boy, give it time,” said Jack as he peered across the swaying grass and saw a dirty motorhome leaving his driveway. “You son of a bitch.”

  Taillon stood up on the sheepskin-covered mound. He knew from the pace of Jack’s boots across the wet field that a predator was near and he churned out a low, ominous growl. The cow carcass would have to wait.

  The Georgie Boy’s tires kicked up a storm of dust as it barrelled down the gravel road. The stretch ahead was flat and straight. Jack pushed his accelerator to the floor, passed the motorhome quickly and slammed on the brakes. His truck slid sideways and came to rest at an angle, effectively blocking the road.