Primal Scream

by Michael Slade

  Whatever the reason, I can't stop dreaming of hacked-off heads, and now find my neurosis fed by the psychosis of a killer on the loose. The killer sends us Polaroids of mounted severed heads, and I find myself compelled to blow them up on the photo enlarger I use for astronomy shots.

  Dad, I'm fucked up.

  To do something about it, I spoke to Dr. Ruryk. He is a shrink working with us on the Headhunter case. I'm the VPD liaison assigned to the Horsemen's squad. The squad is led by a superintendent named Robert DeClercq. On Ruryk's advice I enrolled in a self-awareness course at UBC, and find myself smitten by the instructor who leads the workshop. Her name is Genevieve DeClercq, and she's the Mauntie's wife.

  I want her, Dad.

  "Some of you are here because you feel cursed by your past." That's what she said in our introductory class.

  "Emotions rage within you which you can't work out, so I want you to write a letter only you will see to the person you perceive as the wellspring of your problem."

  That's you, Dad.

  So here goes.

  1954.

  That was the year.

  I remember you standing at the drugstore counter talking to the pharmacist while I walked back to where the comic racks were kept. It was the first Tuesday in the month, so the new Blackhawk would be in. That's how I saw the head.

  To reach the racks I had to pass shelves of adult magazines: Life and Look and Ellery Queen and Saturday Evening Post. The head was on the cover of Real Man's Adventure. The title of the pulp mag among the slicks was as red as the blood dripping from the eyes, nose, and neck of the mounted trophy. Between shreds of skin dangling from the cut peeked an ivory vertebra. What I remember most is the eyes, rolled back in their sockets so just slivers of pupil hypnotized me.

  I was seven years old.

  A strange thing happened as I gawked at the eyes. I was no longer in Thorson's Drug Store. As if sucked off my feet and vacuumed through the door of the pulp's cover, I sat in the prow of the dugout canoe facing the Great White Hunter at the stem. His khaki jacket was soaked with sweat and plastered to his chest. I could see a St. Christopher's medal around the tensed muscles in his neck. Bullets in loops sewn across the front of his jacket. A safari hat with a leopard-skin band was pushed back from his knitted brow. A finger was on the trigger of the Remington.

  We were surrounded.

  A circle of severed heads ringed our canoe, each trophy stuck on a pole affixed to the prow of a dugout. The boats were manned by Amazon Indians. . . .

  Assuming command of the Headhunter squad was the second-worst decision of DeClercq's life, topped only by what resulted from his successful involvement in the Quebec October Crisis. Marriage to Genevieve had done wonders for his psyche, eventually repressing his guilt over Jane's death, so when the commissioner asked him to lead the Headhunter manhunt, Robert thought himself a healed man taking on the case.

  He was wrong.

  For no sooner was it public knowledge that he was top cop than the psycho zeroed in on him as a worthless : adversary. His first day on the job brought the taunt WELCOME ABOARD, ROBERT. DO YOU THINK YOU'RE UP TO THIS? with the Polaroid of Portman's head. Already tinder dry with fear, the city exploded in riot when the rape and beheading of the nun ignited a feminist rally decrying the lack of police suspects. A grinning jack-o-lantern left in place of the nun's head was followed by another Polaroid and taunt: a punk-rock; tape of "Jimmy Jazz" by The Clash. No matter what tactics Robert employed, the killer stayed one step ahead. Guilt over Jane had been repressed, not exorcised. Bodies and taunts came faster and faster as cracks opened in his mind. Each butchered woman mirrored the daughter he hadn't saved in time. All my daughters. All my fault. All this blood on my hands. First he popped Benzedrine to work around the clock, then began drinking to kill the pain, sliding rapidly downhill after Natasha Wilkes was raped and beheaded, his name pasted across the nose of the W. C. Fields mug replacing the skier's head, etched with the taunt NEVER GIVE A SUCKER AN EVEN BREAK. Again and again he dreamed of finding Jane too late in the cabin, and awoke with night fright to the pitiful cry from her head stuck on a pole: "I knew you'd come, Daddy. I knew you wouldn't fail me. ..."

  November 13, 1982, it all came to a head.

  Public hysteria spooked the politicians. Chartrand, was forced to yank DeClercq from command of the; squad. Haunted, depressed, sleep-deprived, and on thef verge of public disgrace once news he was fired was released the next day, Robert drank. Unknown to him, another taunt had arrived at the VPD: SAY UNCLE, ROBERT. HAVEN'T YOU HAD ENOUGH! PS YOU DEVELOP THIS ONE, with the negative of Wilkes's head. The taunt wasn't necessary. He'd already had enough. So after pulling the phone from the wall, he locked himself away in the greenhouse of his home to commit suicide.

  Hara-kiri.

  I'm coming, Jane.

  The honorable way out.

  But also unknown to him, a flying patrol of Spann and Scarlett was closing in on John Lincoln Hardy, the pimp of the headless hooker recovered from the river. Earlier that same night the killer had made a mistake, beheading a student of Genevieve's instead of her when the luckless woman left a North Van seminar to fetch a bottle of port from her instructor's car. DeClercq knew nothing of this because the phone was unplugged. When Spann and Scarlett located and searched Hardy's North Van mountain hideout, they discovered a cache of coke, the freshly severed head of the student, and the knife with the nicked blade secreted under the floorboards. Then Hardy arrived and was shot by Spann as he lunged to knife Scarlett.

  Robert had his gun in his mouth when Genny burst into their home. Finger pulling the trigger, he heard the news. "Don't do it, Robert! You got him! A flying patrol brought him down!" A smidgen away from joining Jane, he didn't blow his head off.

  Later, he wished he had. For the tragic irony of it was that history repeated itself. Just as success in the October Crisis brought kidnappers to his door, so solving the Headhunter case had a heartbreaking aftermath. Exactly what happened remained unclear, but the facts gleaned by subsequent investigation were:

  Flood enrolled in Genevieve's workshop during the Headhunter case. Obviously the beheadings exacerbated his childhood trauma. Whatever the reason, I can't stop dreaming of hacked-off heads, and find my neurosis fed by the psychosis of a killer on the loose. The killer sends us Polaroids of mounted severed heads, and I find myself compelled to blow them up on the photo enlarger I use for astronomy shots.

  While Robert's psyche fractured under stress from his past and the taunts, Genevieve met Flood privately for lunch. They were seen together by Joe Avacomovitch of the forensic lab. About the same time Robert caught traces his wife was delving into the Headhunter file he had brought home from work. Was she reading it to help Flood with his neurosis, the same way she had once helped Robert deal with Jane, and had that relationship blossomed into an affair?

  Whatever happened, Flood gave in to his compulsion to blow up the heads, for after his shoot-out with Spann on the night of the Red Serge Ball, investigators found the walls of his apartment plastered with enlargements of celestial wonders and the Polaroid taunts. The blow-ups were still exhibited six weeks after John Lincoln Hardy was shot, so evidently Flood never conquered his neurosis.

  Did it drive him mad?

  With the help of cocaine?

  Robert was the hero who took down the monster. If not for his tactic of reviving flying patrols to secure the dragnet, the Headhunter might still be stalking women. The same politicians who had called for his head were now demanding he be made chief superintendent. In December, six weeks after the case was closed, the RCMP feted him with a Red Serge Ball. The governor-general himself flew west to host DeClercq at his posh men-only club for congratulatory drinks, so Robert asked Genny to meet him at the ball in the Armories.

  He was still at the G.G.'s club when Genny phoned the Armories and got Sergeant Rodale:

  "Fetch Robert, Jim. It's important."

  "He's not here yet. We expect him soon."

&nb
sp; "The moment he arrives, pass this on. I'm with one of my students, and there's a serious problem. Tell him he's a policeman and has to speak to him on a matter of grave concern."

  "I'll make sure he gets it."

  "Good. I'm on my way."

  Katherine Spann had been undercover on a drug bust when she was called to duty with the Headhunter flying patrols. As she was leaving for the Red Serge Ball, one of her snitches from back then called with a cocaine tip. Later that December night the fink died from an overdose. The tip was half a pound of coke was hidden in the left front wheel of a Volvo parked in the underground lot of a West End apartment building. Detouring on her way to the ball, Spann found the drugs in the hubcap of a car registered to VPD Detective Al Flood. As Spann replaced the hubcap to summon backup, Flood and Genny emerged from the elevator servicing the lot. The VPD cop drew his gun and fired at the Mountie. In the ensuing shoot-out a ricochet killed Genevieve. Flood escaped from the lot down the back alley to a costume shop. Breaking a cellar window, he scrambled inside and hid among the costumes. Afraid her quarry would get away through the shop, Spann followed. Guns blazed underground, and when the smoke cleared, Flood was dead and Spann was critically wounded.

  The inference drawn from these facts by detectives who investigated the shoot-out was that Flood was a renegade cop who had cracked under the stress of neurosis. Unable to cope with the torment, first he turned to the self-help workshop, then to cocaine. Whether he was a coke addict or dealing to run away rich, the blown-up heads proved Flood was a sick man. Genevieve had sought to help him as a psychologist or lover, and ended up in the wrong place when he crumbled.

  The file in Robert's lap was the police file which condemned Flood. Too many times had he studied it back then for answers, and finally gave up when nothing but questions rose. If Genny loved Flood, why had she loved Robert so ardently to the end? Had Genny sought solace because her husband was lost in a realm of depression, Benzedrine, and drink? If coke drove Flood mad, why was no trace of the drug found in him at the postmortem? If he was trafficking, why stash valuable contraband in a car registered to him, in a hubcap which could easily fall off? If Flood wrote the letter on file to his dad at Genevieve's suggestion, why was no follow-up odyssey journal found? And if this file held no answers, why did maple leaves draw Robert back to it now?

  The Mountie thumbed through the booklet of Ident photos.

  Here was Flood's apartment with blow-ups of the severed heads pinned to the walls. Enlargements of the Greiner, Grabowski, Portman, and Catholic nun taunts. The Polaroid copies among shots of the heavens through a telescope.

  Here was . . .

  Wait a second.

  Robert flipped back.

  For only now did he grasp the fifth taunt on the wall.The Ident shot was framed so it was barely seen, just a few black lines within the border of the blowup extending beyond the width of the camera's lens. Robert recognized the pattern of the black lines as strands of Wilkes's hair, and realized Flood had also enlarged the taunt the cabbie had brought to VPD headquarters the night Hardy died.

  The taunt with the pole in the pail of sand mixed with maple leaves.

  The maple leaves his mental ouija linked to Flood.

  Now the ouija spelled E-L-V-I-R-A.

  As Robert thumbed on in the booklet of photos.

  Here was the elevator from Flood's apartment down to the underground lot.

  Here was Genny sprawled dead beside the Volvo in the parking lot.

  Here was the trail of blood Flood left in the snow when he fled wounded up the ramp from the underground lot to the back alley and down the alley to the costume shop.

  Here was Flood shot dead among the costumes stored in the cellar of the shop.

  Here was a sequence of photos recording details in and around the lot: bullet holes and shell casings and the glove-marked hubcap full of coke; a burning tin and garbage can across the alley from the mouth of the ramp sloping down into the lot ...

  The phone in the greenhouse rang.

  His finger for a bookmark, Robert pushed up from the Watson chair to answer the call as Katt led Catnip like the Pied Piper from the bathroom belching steam to her bedroom. Instead of a pipe, the cat followed a boom box playing Depeche Mode.

  "DeClercq," he said.

  "Chief, it's Katherine Spann. Rick Scarlett of UBC Detachment called. This morning, four headless men were found near Pacific Spirit Park. One was cuffed around a tree and anally raped."

  Through the greenhouse glass Robert gazed across the onyx bay at the wigwags flashing along the Spanish Banks shore. A sense of deja vu washed over him, for back in 1982 the Headhunter victims also had been dumped within sight of his home.

  Upping the taunt.

  "Where are you, Kathy?"

  "I'm driving to the scene. The Oak Street Bridge is dead ahead."

  "I'll meet you there," he said, and punched off the portable phone.

  Returning to the Watson chair, he found a bookmark to replace his finger in the book of photographs. About to mark his place to continue later, the Mountie froze in the act.

  Hackles rose on his neck, and a chill ran down his spine.

  For in the photo under his finger was that elusive detail with new meaning now.

  The Ident shot was taken vertically into the mouth of the burning tin across the alley from the parking lot ramp. Nestled among the ashes was a small triangle that could be the unburned corner of a book. Robert had wondered back then if it was Flood's journal, but too little remained to confirm or reject the suspicion. His mind recorded and dismissed the other unburned objects in the tin, for only now did he possess a reference to give them meaning.

  Scattered in the ashes were dozens of small gold rings, identical to the rings through the lips of Bron Wren's shrunken head.

  Wounded Knee

  The North

  Zinc Chandler, too, was engrossed in reading a police file. As he sat drinking coffee black in a Force plane winging toward Totem Lake, he scanned a report by the psychiatrist on the crisis management team, hoping to grasp what motivated the standoff rebels holed up in the sundance camp.

  Wounded Knee?

  In America's Southwest in 1889, a Paiute medicine man named Wovoka had a vision. One day God would cause all Indians to float up into the air, so He could cover the earth with a new land, crushing all white men; then Indians would drift down to once more hunt the buffalo. His Utopian vision, which called for patient peace, led to the Ghost Dancer movement, which quickly swept the West. If they danced and kept on dancing, Ghost Dancers believed they could dance whites away, and magic ghost shirts would make them impervious to bullets. The Sioux were steeped in the culture of war, so the ghost dance they picked up was a bellicose one. Afire with it, Big Foot led his 350 Minneconjou Sioux off the reservation. The culmination was the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek, where, on December 29, 1890, the U.S. Army slaughtered 300 Sioux, 230 of them women and kids, with machine-gun fire.

  Across a century, Black Elk spoke to Zinc:

  "The snow drifted deep in the crooked gulch, and it was one long grave of butchered women and children and babies. When I saw this I wished that I had died, too, but I was not sorry for the women and children. It was better for them to be happy in the other world, and I wanted to be there, too. But before I went there I wanted to have revenge. I thought there might be a day when we should have revenge."

  The second Battle of Wounded Knee in 1973 saw the FBI face off against the American Indian Movement for seventy-one days in South Dakota. FBI agents were shot and killed. From that sprang a new hybrid spirituality that spread in a diaspora across the United States and up into Canada. As natives emerged from the rubble that whites had made of their lives, they sought to rebuild what remained of their cultures by reviving traditions, including traditions from distant bands their ancestors never met.

  Pan-Indianism.

  Sweat lodge, ghost dance, and powwow were revived, but it was around the sundance—most important of
all Plains tribe rituals—this hybrid spiritualism gelled. The sundance was embraced by Navajo at Black Mountain and Paiute out West, and eventually by Moses John here in Canada. A ritual of four-day fasts with pain-induced visions, traditionally it was danced by piercing chest muscles with wooden pegs strung from the top of a pole, against which dancers writhed until the pins were torn loose. A ritual of self-sacrifice and suffering for the people, it had a profound effect in weaving together political threads for natives ground down by whites and yearning for self-worth.

  Chandler had walked the despair of too many Indian reserves not to grasp the pull. Suicide rates among the young were fifteen times greater than elsewhere in the country, and unemployment stood at eighty percent. With life expectancy down by a third, what was there to lose in adopting a ritual which sought to redeem honor? If he were native, would he follow the lure of the sacred sundance?

  Perhaps.

  The peril in hybridization was the mutant at Totem Lake. Moses John, a Plains Cree, had gone searching for one of those rare "power" sites suitable for a sun-dance and found it on Gitxsan land. Totem Lake became his retreat to connect with spiritual roots. The sundance, however, was seen by some as a prelude to "taking up the lance," so Grizzly and his Doomsday cult arrived to graft their conspiracy theory onto the hybrid spirituality at the lake, beliefs usually associated with right-wing groups in the States, but which also resonated among Indians paranoid a white-dominated New World Order was plotting genocide.

  Grizzly had been at the second Battle of Wounded Knee.

  For him, was that proof?

  The way Chandler grasped it, this New World Order was big business, government, and news media conspiring to form a monolithic global dynasty. Opposition was to be "defanged" in ways that made Hitler seem a bleeding heart. Reserves, concentration camps, and leaders elected under the Indian Act collaborators, the Mounted Police were Gestapo in red. The millennium was when it would all go down, and only survivalists entrenched on sacred land would be free.