Midnight Hat Trick

by Vernon, Steve

  Oh shit. Irvin was getting set to filibuster.

  "Well what's so bad about God?" I asked. I knew I was opening a door to a diatribe, but if I didn't open that door he was just going to kick it down all the same and talk all the more. I was his friend. It was part of my job to hear out all of his bullshit, no matter how irritating it got to be. So I let him let it fly, figuring maybe he had a point. Besides, I never did truly trust Will Geer.

  Irvin pointed his favourite rude finger straight up at the truck cab's roof.

  "I'll tell you what's wrong. Where was that old bastard when this peanut-fart dumped gasoline all over the back room of the Hammer Abbey Railroad Hotel? Where was he when Gil was sucking smoke and chewing on hot cinders? Where was he when the bolts gave way on that rusty old fire escape that should have been replaced back when Christ wore short pants. Where was we when they were hanging out of the windows like fucking Christmas decorations? Where was he and what the fuck was he thinking?"

  "Are you done?" I asked.

  "Just about," He answered.

  With that Irvin bounced the pick-up over a rut that I swore he drove straight through on purpose. I left a Hanny-sized dent in the top of the pick-up can and Tyree bounced hard off of the back seat and wedged down onto the floorboards of the truck. Next thing you know he's jammed down hard and he's making strangled scared noises like he was trying breath through the mud-stained upholstery, which I guess he was.

  "Fish him up out of there before he chokes to death," Irvin ordered. "Smothering is just too damned easy for this bastard. I want him to pay for what he done, old school Hammurabi-style. An eye for an asshole, fucker. God has spoken."

  Donny and I turned around and reached over the ridge of the seat backs to try and haul Tyree up. It was an awkward enough stunt, bellying over the seat backs and reaching down to pick up somebody who didn't want to be picked up. What made it harder was Irvin didn't even bother slowing the truck down.

  Tyree didn't help matters any once he started kicking and bucking like a freshly landed muskellunge.

  "Stop that bastard's kicking before he dents up the track cab," Irvin commanded. "I've got one dry nerve left and that rotten eyed prick with ears is pissing all over it."

  Right about then a part of me wanted to ask Irvin just when the hell he was going to stop giving us orders and start giving us a hand, but the part of me that stays away from meat run green and dating close cousins decided to shut up for a while and just say nothing. Irvin was a bad man on a good day and tonight was no time to be fucking around.

  I reached down for Tyree but in the dark I was grabbing at the wrong end. He jammed his boots up against my hand, catching all four of my fingers against the side of the truck. I invented a few creative new names for Jesus and all of his saints and a couple of trailer park angels, all the while trying to rise philosophically above the pain.

  Which was about the time that Tyree chewed his mouth clear of the duct tape gag we'd wrapped across his lips and sank his dirty uncolgated yellow teeth into the knuckle-hinges of Donny's left hand. Donny let out a noise that sounded a little like Whitney Houston stump-fucking a three year old beagle hound. While Donny was working on the high notes Tyree stomped at my other hand and I sang out in harmony. The Vienna Philharmonic Boys Neutron Choir didn't have a good goddamn thing on us, for sure.

  Which was right about the time that we hit the bear.

  * 2 *

  Now the bears around these here parts just aren't that much to speak of. I mean, we're not talking Jeremiah Johnson can-you-skin-griz grizzly bears here. We're just looking at a bunch of fat old flea-bitten black bears, the welfare bums of the ursine kingdom. You see your average black bear is a whole lot more scared of us humans than we might be scared of them.

  Usually.

  Part of it comes down to size. If you're looking at a grizzly you're talking about something that can weigh in at over a thousand pounds and stands about ten feet tall, just built for looming and tearing apart whoever happens to be standing before them. Your usual Northern Ontario black bear isn't much bigger than your average St. Bernard. He's built more for rooting around old dead crap, hunting up grubs and garbage and anthills and road kill. They only stand at about four feet tall hunkered down, which is the posture you usually see them in. The black bear's haunches don't allow them much in the way of standing up straight, unless they're pulling themselves up on a tree or a rock or a pickup truck like ours.

  That old bear come up over that truck like he was meaning to, hitting face first against the windshield and spraying the glass with a big frothy gust of bear spit and fresh blood. We must have hit the bastard head on. It looked like he'd been running at us, like he figured he could take us down.

  Maybe he could.

  Irvin stomped on the brakes while his own face was smashing itself up against the windshield glass. For a moment it looked like the two of them, bear and man, were trying to rub themselves cheek to cheek against the hardened glass in a weird kind of Yogi-Bear-Brokeback moment.

  I had a pretty good eyeball of the whole sordid proceedings, being flung forward like I was from leaning over the seat back trying to catch hold of Tyree, and then being pitched backwards and lambasting the rear curve of my skull against the dashboard. I remember seeing a cigarette burn mark right beside my right cheekbone, charred into the vinyl of the dash where somebody had crushed out a cigarette. The burn mark looked a little like the shape of Italy, like a boot, you know? At that moment in time it seemed like the most important thing in the world was for me to remember just what sort of shape that cigarette burn looked like.

  Donny was lying flat on top of my back, and he was still hanging on to Tyree. Or rather, Tyree was hanging onto Donny's hand with his teeth. The momentum of the collision had hauled Tyree up from under the seat. He wiggled himself up over the seat backs, moving pretty spry for a fellow bound with rope and wire and duct tape. Then he caterpillar-humped his way up over Donny and me, planted his boots against the angle of the front seat and sprung-kicked himself straight out through the already bear-broken windshield.

  I don't quite know where he figured he was going to get to, launching himself that way, but it was a pretty goddamned impressive sight I've got to tell you. We're talking scud missiles and catapulting burning bushes. He went up through that windshield glass like he was part Evel Knievel and part John Shaft. Mind you, the bear had weakened the window considerably.

  "Get hold of that hot fingered, light footed asshole," Irvin shouted, trying to haul himself free from his seat belt. By now Irvin's face was war-painted with his own blood and at that particular moment he looked a whole lot more native than Billy Three-Legs Tootoosis could have hoped to look like following a month of Indian sunburns and Tonto freestyle rap lessons.

  I reached out my arm like a JC Pentecostal on the cross, and wrapped my stoved-up fingers around the door handle. Then I jacked the handle up and felt the mechanism unlatch, but with Donny still spread-eagled across my backbone, I couldn't do much more than hold the door open just wide enough to let a few more bloodthirsty Northern Ontario mosquitoes into the truck cab to feed upon our freshly spilled vitality.

  Next thing I knew I felt Donny's boots going up and over my backbone like it was a stepladder, and he's going right up over the bear's head, trying to catch hold of our runaway arsonist.

  I had to give the boy credit. He might have been a few beers short of a six-pack, but he was never much backward when it comes to going straight forward. If something needed doing, Donny wasn't shy about holding back. He was up and at it, ready for whatever come his way.

  At least that's how Donny looked to be feeling until the bear woke back up.

  * 3 *

  It was enough to piss off the Good Humour man.

  Here we were set out to build ourselves a little home-made revenge when God or Mother Nature decided to deal themselves in for a hand or two and fuck our expectations up like a herd of horny track men racing into a whorehouse on a Sudbury Saturday
night.

  Donny had one boot on the top of my shoulder blade and the other planted on the hood of the truck, looking for all the world like a reluctant surfer stepping up to ride the curl of a particularly dangerous wave, staring face-first into the muzzle of a pissed-off truck-slammed five hundred pound black bear.

  I pushed on the door and rolled out of the truck like I thought I was in the middle of a Miami Vice episode. I don't rightly know what the hell I thought I was going to do, but all that I knew was I had to do it fast.

  I couldn't see what Irvin was up to. Tyree was on the ground at the bear's feet, making a determined rolling wiggle towards the road. I wasn't worried about him. I was worried about Donny, who was just about to get his fool head chewed off.

  I stepped up and shoved my hand, the same damn hand that Tyree had already stomped the hell out of, straight into the face of the bear, accidentally jamming my thumb into its eye socket. It didn't seem to see me coming, especially once my thumb was in its eye. It might have been that it was busy reaching out for Donny. It might be that the bear's peripheral vision had been somewhat fucked up by the collision with the truck. The possibilities were damn near endless but the amount of time in which I had to consider my options was pretty fucking nearly infinitesimal.

  I leaned forward and jammed my thumb deeper into the bear's left eye, chocked my boot heel against the truck's front tire and braced myself hard, like I figured I was going to hold this bear at bay all by myself.

  There's only one way to say this. A bear's head is freaking goddamn big. Even a Northern Ontario black bear can be a hell of a handful once you are stupid enough to get your hands wrapped around him. I could feel the bones in the black bear's face moving like fur-covered plate armour beneath my splayed open hand. So far I wasn't doing anything much more useful than pissing old Yogi off.

  This one-handed Horatio-at-the-bridge Mexican bear stand-off had to be the one of the stupidest tricks I'd ever tried, and you have to keep in mind that this was coming from the fellow who once had roller skated through his high school prom with nothing on but a pair of Tinkerbelle wings and a camouflage of peppermint flavoured body paint. In about the time it took me to stick my thumb in and wiggle it around in the jelly-meat, I was certain that old bear was going to whirl about and rip my arm off and feed it back to me one knuckle at a time.

  Bluntly put, I was fucked.

  Only instead of ripping my arm off the bear stopped stock still and uttered out a roar that made Donny's Whitney Houston beagle call sound like a popcorn fart in the middle of a machine gun shoot-out in a Chinese gong factory. Mentioning a thunderstorm right about now would be just guilding the lily.

  "Get the hell," I started to say, trying to yell at Donny to get the hell out of here, half expecting that big bruin bastard to toothpick my arm bone down to splintery forget-me-knuckles, when all of a sudden Irvin stepped up out of nowhere, quicker than you could say shit skidded skivvies, and slammed the business end of a genuine German Luger smack-square-dab into the side of the bear's skull and fired three shots off fast.

  "Shit!"

  I stepped back too slow, my thumb still jammed into the bear's left eye socket. My ears were ringing the Hallelujah Chorus with a Jimmy Page background of Hendrix-inspired guitar riffs. The side of my face was covered with what felt like bear brains. There were probably bits of the big old bastard's skull mixed in there with the shot-out bear brains, but I couldn't tell for sure. The whole world was ringing way too goddamn fast.

  For a moment all I could do was stand there and stare at the bear's blown-out skull. The side of it was open wide enough for a red-headed woodpecker to build himself a comfortable nest. And then the damndest thing happened. I stood there staring and it looked like the bear was talking to me.

  "Cover your tracks," the dead bear said. "Where ever you been ain't necessarily where ever you're going," Which at the time made about as much sense as a talking dead bear did.

  "Only you can prevent forest fires," I answered back in a blurry bear-wrestling truck-wrecked brain-spattered kind of a daze.

  Then I shook my head and looked again and the bear was deader than the disco duck and everything appeared natural. We were three guys and one convicted and duct taped arsonist, standing in the heart of the Northern Ontario woods over the body of a dead black bear. I expected we made an interesting tableau.

  "Let go of that bear and stop messing around," Irvin said.

  "Jesus Christ," I swore, dragging my hand clear of the poked-out eye socket. "You could have blown my hand off."

  "I think I did," Irvin said.

  I looked down at the hand.

  Shit. He had. My thumb was half-missing. I could see a bit of the bone poked out like the stump of a broken pencil stub. The rest of the thumb looked like it had been run through an electronic pencil sharpener.

  I tried to pinch the wound off, hoping to stop the bleeding, but I might as well try to stop traffic with a dirty look. Little spurts of blood shot out from the blasted thumb end. It felt like I was jerking off my thumb. I hope it respected me in the morning.

  "Here," Irvin said, tearing a chunk from his t-shirt. "Wrap it in this."

  "You shot my goddamn thumb off Irvin." I said while wrapping it in the t-shirt tear-off, trying hard not to wonder when the last time Irvin had washed this particular shirt was.

  "You'll be okay," he told me.

  "You shot my goddamned thumb off," I repeated. It was important to keep the facts straight.

  "That's one less nail you'll have to clip," he offered. "Think of the money you'll save in manicures."

  "It's my fucking thumb." I was losing it, and it was no wonder. You can hold an awful lot of pain in one hand, and nearly twice as much in one finger. That's how come hangnails hurt so badly.

  "The bear would have done a whole lot worse," Irvin noted.

  He had a point. I tried to grin around it, but the whiz-bang was wearing off, and I was starting to feel my thumb throbbing.

  "Fuck," I said, scared and impressed at the same damned time. "We did it. You and I, we killed a bear with our bare hands."

  "We didn't do it alone," Irvin said, pointing down at the dirt. "We did have ourselves a bit of help."

  I looked down. There on the ground were Donny and Tyree. Tyree, bound hands and all, had both of his fists wrung white-knuckled around the bear's nuts, like a kid hanging onto a trick or treat bag. I figured that must have been what had distracted the bear just long enough for Irvin to get in there and administer his fistful of Luger lobotomy.

  "Where the hell did that gun come from, anyway?" I asked.

  "It was a World War 2 souvenir taken right off of an SS Hauptsturmfuhrer," Irvin said. "It was a gift from my grandfather. He brought it home from the war, along with a case of penicillin-resistant Belgian clap and a dirty French tattoo that looked a little like a turtle having sex with the pyramids of the Nile. I figured it might be handy to have along with me tonight, given the sort of work we were up to."

  "Shit," I said. "All I got from my grandpa was this stupid assed name."

  "Never mind the sorry state of your birthright," Irvin said. "Stop your yakking and get Donny the hell out of there."

  That's when I looked down at Donny for the first time since Irvin had simultaneously shot the bear and my thumb off.

  What the fuck?

  It was around then that the bear brains that were splattered on the side of my skull started to itch as if they were crawling for my cowlick. It felt like they were trying to tell me something, but I didn't pay them any mind. I was stuck there, stock still, staring down at Donny. At first glance it looked like Donny was nuzzling the bear's tail, like he was trying to make a telephone call straight up through the bear's asshole.

  Then I looked closer.

  Donny's arm was jammed nearly elbow deep up the bear's tailpipe. He must have round-housed it in there fist first. I had to wonder at the nerve it must have took, dry-fisting a goddamn black bear square in the middle of a moonles
s night half-way through a one-handed shoot-out.

  "That's who the hell you can thank for saving your life," Irvin pointed out.

  "Holy crap," I said.

  "And then some," Irvin said.

  Donny just laid there, his face as white as a bucket of washed over bleach, making fresh-caught trout faces with his mouth.

  It was as delicate situation as trying to extract a bushel of live cats from out of a bucket of dead porcupines. I reached my good hand down and caught hold of Donny's arm and helped him up from the dirt, while Irvin just stood there and snickered. I guess having a loaded pistol in your belt gave a fellow a certain sense of authority.

  Donny's other arm came out of the bear's poop chute, with a cheek-flapping wet-fart sound. Donny's arm was covered in blood and some of the blackest and foulest crap I'd ever seen. It didn't smell one bit like lilies of the valley.

  "Jesus Christ, Donny," I said. "You must have had your arm worked right up into that there bear's lower colon."

  Donny made a few more fish faces. He was shivering in spite of the fact that it was August-hot and sticky out here.

  "Get up here, Donny," I said, leaning back and putting my weight into it. He stood shakily, like a house of cards just waiting to be blown down. He held his poop stained arm off to one side, like he might have wanted to yank it out of its socket and throw it away on the compost heap. All the same, he was hanging onto something that might have been a piece of bear crap, or maybe the bear's pancreas.

  "I got it," Donny said. He was still shaking, his bones poured from rubber earthquakes and slinky wire.

  "What do you got Donny?" I asked slowly.

  Donny looked up at me just as slowly, like he'd just done the single biggest thing in the world, and I guess he had.

  "I got hold of the bear's soul," he said, holding the fistful out towards me.