by Mark Leslie
It was dark and there was the odd odor of propane gas and mustiness in the air that quickly overtook Scott’s fond memories of the special scent of that sexy woman’s hair.
Scott remembered that he had been on an overnight fishing trip with his father; that, on this early November weekend, they had been somewhere far up Highway 144 in mid-northern Ontario, at a special fishing spot his father had picked out. And, despite the cold, there they were, hunkered in the middle of nowhere and partaking in a father/son venture in a trailer.
“Dad! What the hell?”
“Sorry, son.” Lionel Desmond said, and Scott could see, from the light of a gas lantern on the far side of the trailer, the pop-out spot where his father had been sleeping, his father fiddling with the bottom compartment of his tackle box, hastily putting something away. “I must have poked you with the stem of my poppy when I was looking for the little yellow flashlight on your bunk.”
His father indicated the little red molded plastic with green flacking that was fastened to the plaid fishing shirt with a pin. His father had always been a stickler for wearing the poppy, part of a Canadian and UK tradition of commemorating the servicemen and servicewoman who have been killed in conflicts since 1914. In Canada, Remembrance Day was celebrated each November 11th (part of the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, a date significant because it that time in 1918 when the First World War officially ended) and from the beginning of November, Canadians wore the red poppies over their hearts as a symbol that they remembered.
Before the general public started wearing them, news anchors and other public officials were usually the first the begin sporting the red plastic flowers on their collars.
Lionel Desmond, so long as Scott could remember, always took Remembrance Day very seriously. He would start wearing the poppy at least one full week before Halloween, even when it was common for most of the rest of society to begin wearing it on November 1st. And he had always booked November 11th off work, always attended the parade and ceremony that took place downtown at the Cenotaph.
Scott remembered the time when he was little and, at the ceremony in the blistering cold and snow, during the two minutes of silence, time meant to be spent in quiet reflection, Scott and his school chum, Edward Leroux had been making silly faces at one another. Two minutes to a seven year old could seem like an excruciatingly long amount of time. Standing across from him, Edward was crossing his eyes and sticking out his tongue. Scott smiled and then found himself hitching as he tried to control giggling out loud.
The only sound was the wind, the occasional sniffle or cough from one of the three hundred people standing in silence in such a tight area; and, very quietly, Scott’s heavy breathing as he tried to hold the laughter in.
His father had caught his eye and sent him such a dire and stern warning that the giggles immediately vanished. And, afterwards, Lionel Desmond not only threw his son over his knee with his pants pulled down and proceeded to spank him with the thick leather strap that was used in the Desmond household for corporal punishment – a spanking that lasted a full two minutes and left Scott with a burning and throbbing backside that he couldn’t comfortably sit down on for the rest of the day, but there was a lecture and a learning experience to be had.
Yes, there had always been a learning experience to be had with Lionel Desmond.
The day after the painful spanking, Lionel sat his son down and told him, again, the story of Lionel’s father, Scott’s grandfather and how the man had given his life for their country as a soldier in World War II. How Lionel, who was only two years old when his father died overseas, didn’t even have more than a single fleeting memory of his Dad.
“Tens of thousands of men and women gave their lives, sacrificed themselves, and went to serve the common good, in order for us to have the freedoms that we now have.” Lionel explained. “And despite them giving up so much, putting themselves directly in the path of harm’s way, virtually the only thing that we do is once a year, we wear a poppy on our chest, we attend a ceremony to honor them and we give two minutes of silence in respect for all that they have done.
“Two simple minutes. That’s all that is asked. Two minutes of reflection, of quiet, of respect.” His face turned red as he spoke. “Is that pittance of time really too much to ask for?”
After the lecture, Lionel made Scott write out “In Flanders Fields” the classic poem written by the Canadian solder, Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae after presiding over the funeral of a friend and fellow soldier, two dozen times. Then, he forced his son to read Generals Die in Bed a classic world war one book by Charles Yale Harrison, The Wars by Timothy Findley, Night by Elie Wisel, and D-Day by Stephen E. Ambrose.
Scott liked reading, but was overwhelmed with the message that was spoken through the books. He didn’t complain, and worked his way through them over the course of the rest of the month. The books moved him, terrified him, inspired him, and made him think. Upon completing them he was actually interested in reading more and understanding more, and so picked up The Diary of Anne Frank and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer.
At the end of that November, when his father knew he had read the four books, he never spoke with his son about it again, never talked about the books or asked Scott to share his thoughts upon reading them.
All that he did was sit down across from his son at the breakfast table one morning, and said: “Do you see, now, what I mean? Do you understand now, just a little bit of what it was like? Do you get why I take Remembrance Day so seriously?”
At that point, he pulled his wallet out of his back pocket, opened up a compartment and took out a small square white and brown picture of a young soldier who couldn’t be more than eighteen or nineteen. A peaked solder cap on his head, and a lopsided grin suggested the world was his oyster and there was a whole universe ahead of him that he eagerly embraced.
Scott had never seen the picture before but he knew, without his father saying another word, that this was his grandfather, his dad’s father.
“I might only wear a poppy for a couple of weeks in October and November each year, but I carry this picture around with me all of the time. I wear my father’s memory every single day.”
All Scott could do was nod, with a single tear running down his face.
He had got it.
And from that day on, Scott himself took Remembrance Day very seriously.
Nowhere as seriously, though, as his father.
Scott could remember, in fact, that no matter where he was or what he was doing, Lionel Desmond would wear the poppy for the whole period between October 24th and November 11th. Even out here, in the middle of nowhere, where nobody would see him, he still wore the red flower on his shirt. When Scott asked him why he wore it even when nobody could see, his father turned to him, a very serious look on his face, and said: “I’ll see it. I’ll know. It’s not just for show. It’s just as much for me.”
There was one year that Scott never forgot, shortly after his father’s gall bladder surgery, when, upon returning home but still not recovered enough to go back to work, spending most of the day in bed in his pajamas, Scott witnessed the man, who could barely stand because he was in so much pain, get up and stand quietly during the two minutes of reflection on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.
Lionel Desmond took remembering very seriously, and there was no thing or nobody who could ever or would ever take that away from him.
He would always remember.
Scott always thought the poppy’s design, with the single stick pin, might have purposely been fashioned in the way that it was because, each year he suffered no less than a dozen prickings, a side effect of the simplistic design. Perhaps that was a good thing, since the poppy was there to remind us of the way in which soldiers suffered and gave their lives for our freedom. A little pin prick every once in a while was a sharp and simple reminder that our minor woes are nothing in comparison.
Having been pricke
d by poppies hundreds of times over the years, Scott rubbed at his shoulder, confused. His shoulder hurt far more than any poppy stabbing he’d ever experienced before.
“What were you doing leaning so close to me?” Scott asked, still rubbing his shoulder, considering taking the long sleeve shirt he had been sleeping in to see if he was bleeding. But the subtle puffs of his breath in the air reminded him of the intense cold, a cold that was already starting to seep in now that he had been sitting up and out of the cocoon of his sleeping bad.
Strange, he thought, that the poppy could poke through not only my shirt, but also my sleeping bag.
“The flashlight was stuck between the mattress and the canvas wall,” his father said. “I had to lean in really far to get ahold of it. Looks like I really stabbed you good.”
“You did that all right,” Scott said.
“Sorry.” Lionel closed the tackle box and shoved it under the bench desk he was sitting at, in the small kitchen area of the pop-up trailer. “Well since you’re up, we should get out on the lake. It’s almost five-thirty.”
Chapter Seven
Today
After hustling quickly into the nurse’s room on the second floor of Digi-Life’s Liberty Village office, Scott slowly closed the door behind them, careful to ensure the latch didn’t click too loudly. Then he carefully engaged the lock before turning back to Gary.
His friend had a concerned look on his face.
“You’re freaking me out, Scotty,” Gary said. “What’s going on here?”
“I wish I knew,” Scott said. “I’m really not sure what is going on or why it is happening, but Herb is trying to kill me.”
“Herb Canter?”
“Yeah.”
Gary’s face took on an odd expression, a look Scott recognized immediately – it was the one people normally reserved for when a crazy person cornered them on the street or in a shopping mall. It was a combination of a subtle “deer in the headlights” lift to the eyes combined with the quick eye-darting that suggested the person, feeling backed into a corner, was looking for any opportunity to escape the situation. There was no fight or flight about this; it was all pure flight, because they prey understood that there was no rational way of defeating this foe in the “hand to hand” combat of normal socially acceptable conversion. No, the crazy person was following a specific agenda, performing a script that nobody else had access to, and would take you down the pre-determined path they controlled entirely. Usually, the crazy person, completely oblivious to normal social convention, would never pick up on the subtle nature of the terrified and cornered person’s eyes; they would, if they even noticed anything much in the face of the person they were speaking to, in the bull-headed following of their precious script, would likely have interpreted the wide-eyed look to be that of genuine and unabashed interest.
That is what the look on Gary’s face told Scott.
“I’m not crazy,” he said, doing his best to speak in a calm and rational voice. He knew, having put Gary into that ‘Oh no, I’m speaking with a person who has lost their marbles’ state, that it would be difficult to navigate without everything sounding a little bit crazy to him.
“I was working at my desk on the fourth floor,” Scott said, “when Herb called me in to his office. He at first seemed normal, but there was a strange glazed look on his face, and a very subtle almost robotic tone to his speech.
“I didn’t think much about it at first. I mean, it is still early, for all I knew, Herb hadn’t had his morning cup of coffee and was still working off one too many the night before.
“But he tells me to close the office door, and the next thing I know he’s taking a shot at my head.”
“He what?”
“He fired a bullet at my head.”
“With a gun?”
“Yeah, a handgun of some sort.”
“There’s no way. I would have heard it. Those things are loud.”
“It must have had some sort of muffler or silencer on it, because it didn’t make a loud noise, just a strange sound. Because I had my back turned, I thought the sound was Herb smacking a thick plastic ruler down hard on his desk – you know how as a student you used to hold it down firm with one hand, but with the other hand, slowly pry and bend the ruler back so it would snap down hard against the desk. That is exactly what it sounded like.
“So there I am, shocked by the sudden hole punched through the drywall beside me and the dust and smoke, when I hear this sound. I turn and duck at the same time, and see Herb is holding a gun.”
“No way,”
“Yeah, and he says, in this strange, robotic voice: ‘You won’t get away. You cannot evade us.’”
“Us?”
“Yeah. So I figure Herb has lost it, worked way too many sixteen hour days. I mean, my work is pretty solid, so there’s no way it was a performance issue.”
Gary issued a nervous laugh into the room.
“But I figure he’s whacked. So I duck down and half-crawl half run out of the room, run around the corner, eager to get the hell away from there, when I see this security guard coming down the hall toward me.
“Safe, I figure. I’m safe now.
“But do you know what he says to me when I tell him about Herb?”
“What?”
“He says: ‘You won’t get away. You cannot evade us.’ In that same robotic tone. As his eyes are just as glazed as Herb’s were.
“No!”
“Yeah. I figure, holy crap, I’m in a bad sci-fi thriller now. But I know, immediately, that I’m toast, so I run from the guard. Soon enough both Herb and the guard are after me, repeating that line again and again.”
Scott then proceeded to explain the rest of the story to Gary. As he told the tale, he injected bits of humor into it, like he had about the work performance joke when Herb shot at him. Given their jovial relationship and the way they liked to make fun cracks at one another, he knew Gary would realize he wasn’t crazy if he told the story, as unbelievable as it was, with a bit of a sense of consistency for their relationship. Gary was an analytical person, he knew – he would believe even a difficult to accept story if all of the elements that, otherwise, made complete sense, lined up.
So, though Scott didn’t have all that much skill as a conversationalist, being a hacker, someone used to guiding a program through logical steps; particularly logical steps that, while deviating from the original outline and intent of the program, still seemed normal and not at all out of place, was just part for the course.
“Do you think it’s just the two of them?” Gary asked, when he got to the point of bumping in to his friend on the second floor. “Or could there be more. I mean,” he pulled out his mobile phone and they both glanced down at it, “should we call 9-1-1?”
A sound outside the door, the scuffle of footsteps, startled them both.
Chapter Eight
Thirty Years Earlier
“A lock, Dad?” Scotty had said, with the perfectly blended inflection of despise mixed with the emboldened question of authority that one expects from virtually any fourteen year old.
“Fishing lures are expensive,” his father replied without turning his back.
Lionel Desmond had been sitting at his workbench and puttering with one of the gigs with a pair of needle-nose pliers and a stretch of fishing line when his son, moping around from room to room, bored during the March break, stood behind his father and watched him work. Scotty had been there a few minutes, curious to see what his father had been doing, but bored with being bored, and noticed, not for the first time, that the tackle box sitting on the right hand side of his father’s workshop bench had a small lock affixed to it.
“People steal fishing lures?” the tone of his voice suggested he was speaking with an idiot. It was a tone that had come natural, and often, from the young man, and not just when speaking to his father, but when speaking to virtually anybody. Not that, unless he was called upon in school, he spoke much.
Mr.
Prescott, his computer teacher, might have been the only person Scotty regularly spoke with where he didn’t use that tone. Heck, Prescott might have been the only person Scotty would have considered a friend.
“Yes,” Lionel said. “They do. People steal fishing lures all the time,”
“Losers,” Scotty huffed.
“I have close to eight hundred dollars of lures and other fishing accoutrements in this box.”
“Eight hundred?”
“Yes.”
“I thought you made a lot of the lures yourself.”
“I do. But even the parts can cost a lot of money.”
“Really?”
For the first time in months, the tone in Scotty’s voice changed, and Lionel Desmond immediately sensed it. The query wasn’t layered with contempt and ire; it was a genuine element of interest and intrigue.
Lionel turned from what he was doing and looked his son in the eyes. It had been years since Scotty had taken any sort of interest in anything his father had to say. He sat a bit more straight on the stool in front of his workbench, his shoulders back and his check poking out.
“Yes. Have a look at this one here. I special ordered it through Ramako’s in Sudbury. It cost me about one hundred and sixty bucks. I took this painted agile crankbait, combined it with a monster grub I ordered through eBay and added my own layers of reflective tri-color paints. The total cost comes to just over three hundred."
“Wow.”
“I know. Who would have thought fishing could be such an expensive hobby.”
The temporary lifting of the bile in Scott’s voice fled, as he considered something and again challenged his father with another question.
“So people might break into your truck and steal the tackle box. Okay, I get that. But why do you keep it locked when it’s in the house? It’s not like Mom or I would even care to peek inside.”
Lionel Desmond’s shoulders sank back down a little as he realized the interest and lack of despise was just a fleeting thing.
