Claw

by Katie Berry

  “If it wasn’t EMS was calling, then who was he calling? The station for an on-duty member to respond?”

  “That’s the thing. After Olsen gets off his phone, he saunters up behind the kid, slaps his cuffs on him and drags him off to the manager’s office saying he’s high on drugs and disturbing the peace. The really interesting part about all this was that about ten minutes later, instead of the on-duty cop responding, it was Chief VanDusen himself!”

  “Now that is interesting!”

  “Yeah, I thought you’d like to be kept up to speed about the latest developments. So anyway, Olsen directs VanDusen to the manager’s office where the kid was stowed. VanDusen goes in to interrogate him, but a few minutes after he gets into the office, the paramedics that I called show up. They mosey in and sedate the kid and haul him out on a stretcher. I don’t know if VanDusen found out many details about whether it was that thing from the Ridge or not.”

  “Very interesting. Okay, thanks very much, Trip. By the way, the weather office said the fog is supposed to be a little thinner in the morning, so I’m hoping to do some boom-boom with Baby tomorrow. I’ll see you at 0700 at the yard, okay? But if you could clock in a little before that to hook her up, that’d be great.”

  “You bet, boss. I’ll catch you on the flip-side.”

  “Tomorrow, my friend,” Austin said, ending the call.

  Alex, overhearing part of the conversation, said, “What’s happening with Uncle Trip, Dad? Something about the raccoon?”

  “Something like that. I’ll know more in the morning, hopefully. Let’s eat our grub and then catch the game,” Austin said, referring to the hockey game that was coming on in a few minutes.

  “Awesome!” Alex said, dishing out mounds of spaghetti. With a final ladle of pasta on top of the mountain already on Austin’s plate, one of the meatballs rolled off and made a break for the edge of the table.

  Austin caught the meatball lightly in the palm of his right hand just as it was rolling off the precipice toward its doom. “Almost like the song there for a second,” Austin said with a laugh, placing the ball back on his plate.

  “Sorry?” his son inquired. Sudden realisation dawned on Alex before Austin could respond and he laughed, saying, “Almost rolled off the table and out of the door, and nobody even sneezed!”

  Austin laughed again, but as he did, he noted the meandering, red-sauced trail the ball of meat left behind on the white Formica kitchen table. Without warning, his memory flashed scenes of the gore-smeared ground at the campsite onto the back of his mind, and his appetite suddenly took a rain-cheque for the dinner that sat on the table before him.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Despite the fog, the Bonanza Buffet at the Golden Nugget Casino and Resort had hosted a Friday night dinner crowd that kept things jumping in the kitchen all night long. Time had gone quickly for Dan Lewis, but he was still glad the kitchen was finally closing down for the evening. This was his last garbage run, involving a large bucket of used oil from the deep fryer he had to run out to the reclaim barrel. When he was done he had places to be and new worlds to conquer. Visions of himself kicking back and kicking ass suddenly filled his head. In his car sat a new MMORPG that he’d picked up at the Gas ‘n’ Gulp on his way to work. Now, he just wanted to get things done and was in a hurry to get home, play the game, and ruin his friends.

  Pulling open the metal door leading to the back parking lot, Dan surveyed the shifting grey void before him. “Damn, this shit is thicker than pea soup, man,” he said, unconsciously paraphrasing one of his Grandpa Frank's favourite expressions. The fog was indeed so thick this evening that he could barely see the reclaim barrel at the corner of the building.

  The heavy metal delivery door creaked in its frame as it settled against the faded-yellow Dairyland Milk crate Dan wedged underneath the bottom corner. The last thing he needed right now was for the door to slam into his ass and make him Exxon Valdez all over the place again. It was a trick he’d learned on his very first shift after he’d cleaned the slippery slop up off of the ground, the walls, and then himself.

  Turning, he grabbed the handle of the hefty white plastic pail behind him and dragged it forward, then paused for a moment before continuing on his final journey. He momentarily enjoying the warmth of the oil steaming between his legs before venturing into the chilly evening.

  Somewhere across the mist-filled parking lot sat his 1981 Turbo Trans-Am, invisible for the moment, veiled by the shifting greyness. He thought about the video game sitting on the cracked leather passenger seat of his car and smiled — he’d be transported to another world soon enough when he was done in this one.

  But Dan’s smile oxidated as he thought of the bodywork he still had to do on the Trans-Am. He’d been slowly restoring it, telling everyone how he was going to make it better than new. He hoped by summer he’d have most of the bodywork done and all of the rust patches fixed so that he would no longer have to suffer the indignity of having Chef Murray call his classic ride, ‘tetanus on wheels’.

  As if on cue, perceptible for a few brief moments through a gap in the swirling mist, the car appeared. Dan ran his eyes lovingly over the sweeping curves of the vehicle’s distinctive outline. It sat bathed in a golden halo by a single, humming, sodium-vapour light cycling on and off high above. After burning brightly for a minute or so, the ailing light would fizzle and pop as its ancient circuits overloaded, causing it to dim to a level more appropriate to a corner table in a romantic bistro than the primary source of lighting for an entire darkened parking lot.

  Sitting next to Dan’s Pontiac, its box-like shape no less distinctive in the shifting fog, was a large, green garbage dumpster. Being the new guy in the kitchen, Dan had the honour of getting assigned the crappiest parking spot on the lot, which just happened to be located right next door to the puke-coloured refuse bin.

  His current load’s destination was not across the treacherous, black-iced lot. Instead, it was located down at the corner of the building where the oil reclaim barrel was located.

  He inhaled, then slowly exhaled and leaned forward. With his shoulders hunched, he gripped the bucket’s handle in both hands and lifted it with a grunt. Laden pail dangling between his legs, Dan waddled toward the reclaim. Every few metres, his feet would lose traction on the large, unsanded patches of ice underneath the eaves of the building. Puddles of water, formed by the daytime melting of icicles hanging from clogged gutters overhead, froze into unintended skating rinks at night. They rarely saw any sand or salt — it was just another excellent example of Ray Chance’s budgetary cutbacks.

  “This is slippery as shit, Ray!” Dan observed out loud as he slipped and slid his way along the side of the building. The light overhead started spazzing out once more as he approached the barrel, threatening to extinguish itself at any moment and leave him in the dark.

  “I’m batting a thousand tonight!” he said, shaking his head. Dan noted with annoyance that the oil reclaim barrel shared something in common with the garbage bin across the way; they both had a single, shitty, piece-of-crap light that Ray Chance was too cheap to replace. Some nights, when he ventured out into the poorly lit parking lot, a pail of oil or bag of garbage in hand, Dan wondered if it might be his last.

  Up until last October, he used to joke that his biggest fear was that he might get jumped by some starving forest creatures for the food scraps he was carrying — perhaps duped by a cunning coyote, or maybe rolled by a pack of rummaging raccoons.

  The previous fall, Dan discovered the reality of the situation to be quite a bit different, and it did a lot to remind him of where he was working — in a restaurant in the woods, in the middle of nowhere, pouring more delicious smelling refuse into a garbage bin already overflowing with remnants of smorgasbords past. It was something that was bound to attract the wrong kind of attention, eventually.

  The late October evening had been just like any other at the kitchen, apart from it being a particularly busy one. After a rather f
renetic evening, Dan had been slogging the last bag of still-warm scraps and slop out to the battered garbage dumpster to add it to the other bags he’d deposited several hours earlier. As he dragged the huge, black bag along the ground, it left a slimy trail behind on the asphalt, as if an enormous gastropod had just dragged itself across the darkened parking lot during one of the sodium-vapour light’s intermittent down cycles. “It Came From Beyond The Dumpster,” he said, ominously, laughing at his own joke.

  Dan paused for a moment next to the bin, the big bag resting next to his legs and pulled out his pocket vaporiser. Tonight, it was loaded with a particularly potent strain of West Coast Indica shatter that Dan liked to wind down with at the end of the evening. He inhaled deeply and felt the high-THC concentrate flood into his bloodstream from his lungs, swimming into his head and giving him the floaty feeling that he liked so much. With his vaporiser, he was able to get there in seconds, as opposed to minutes with a joint -- joints being so twentieth-century of course. It was not lost on him that the easy convenience of such a high-potency drug was not something particularly conducive to his retaining gainful employment, and Dan’s spotty work history could attest to that.

  Exhaling a cloud of vapour, Dan sighed, grabbed the no longer steaming bag and dragged it the last few metres to the bin. Everything was as he’d left it, sort of. He thought he’d locked the bin, or at least put the security bar down, yet there it sat, one of its thick metal lids in the up and open position. There was also a slight chance that some of the potent marijuana may have clouded his memory and he may have forgotten to lock it, but he was pretty sure he’d closed it at the very least.

  He shrugged.

  Bending down, he hefted the heavy bag with both arms, its semi-liquid contents gurgling and squelching near his face in a most alarming manner. He silently prayed he hadn’t put a hole in the bag as he’d dragged it along the pavement. As he was about to tip it in, a sound came from inside the container — a cracking noise, like somebody popping their knuckles. Slowly placing the bag back on the ground, he stood on tiptoes to take a gander inside the open lid.

  The flickering light of the sodium-vapour high overhead was now almost at its peak, much like Dan. Two sparks of glittering light were reflected back at him from within the darkened dumpster. Looking more closely, he suddenly realised the sparks were a pair of gleaming, brown, close-set eyes. They blinked once, and another loud crack reverberated from within the dumpster.

  Dan jolted back, choking down a scream. He tripped over his feet and went down hard on his buttocks. Not looking or caring where he was going, he scrambled backward like a crab at low tide, his eyes never leaving the open lid of the bin.

  Inside the dumpster, sitting atop a small mountain of spoiled food was a rather large black bear. It poked its head out of the bin momentarily, as if curious to see what all the ruckus was about. Hanging from the corner of its mouth was a bone from the previous day’s prime-rib roast. It blinked its beady brown eyes at Dan a couple of times, then sat back down inside the bin to continue its evening repast. A new series of snaps and cracks emanated from inside the bin as it enjoyed the bone’s marrow.

  What Dan didn’t realise was that the bear was more interested in eating the big pile of tasty garbage it was sitting on than chasing him down and ravaging him. Nevertheless, he leapt to his feet, spun a one-eighty that would have made Tony Hawk proud, and tore his skinny ass back toward the main building.

  “Antoine! Antoine!” The heavy metal door collided against the concrete wall as Dan flew through the entrance. He stumbled to a stop, turned and slammed the door shut. As he locked the door, he shouted over his shoulder into the room, “There’s a huge fucking bear in the garbage bin! I don’t know how it got in there, but it’s eating the garbage right now, and it almost ate me, too!”

  Kitchen manager Antoine DePascal stood, rubbing his head and listening to the kid. He had just been cleaning out the deep fryer when the kid exploded into the room. Not a man prone to being jumpy, thanks to his large size, he’d nevertheless cracked his head a good one as he’d jerked back involuntarily, startled by the racket. And now Dan stood before him, an expectant look on his face, still panting slightly, his messenger job done and his near-death experience related.

  Taking his oversized hand from the growing lump on the top of his head, Antoine briefly scratched his fingers through his bushy, black beard and asked, “Finished?”

  “W-w-what do you mean?” Dan stammered, still nervous from his recent encounter.

  “Is that it? Are you sure there isn’t anything else you’d like to tell me?” He cocked one of his thick eyebrows slightly.

  “N-no!” Dan looked away from Antoine’s penetrating gaze, feeling the guilt surge in him as he suddenly remembered not locking the bin. And then he remembered why; it was the same reason he usually forgot to do things each shift at the kitchen and elsewhere in his life, and the reason he had gone through six jobs in the last twelve months.

  With a heavy sigh, Antoine grabbed a ladle and an empty cast iron frying pan off of the stove and marched out the back door into the faint, flickering light that bathed the isolated parking lot.

  Holding the frying pan aloft over his two hundred and five-centimetre tall head, Antoine began clanging the ladle against it. He boomed out, "Get the fuck out of here, you big, ugly, hairy bastard or I’ll make a goddamned fur coat out of you!"

  As Dan watched, he realised he wasn’t sure how hungry the bear might be and didn’t know whether or not it might challenge Antoine if it were starving.

  DePascal advanced toward the bear in the bin, continuing his performance. He was a hard-muscled slab of a man that you'd be a fool to reckon with. Most sensible people would cross to the other side of the road if they saw Antoine approaching them with anything other than a smile on his face.

  Dan remembered wondering at the time, how anyone, or anything, wouldn’t be running like hell, upon seeing Antoine advancing toward them so menacingly while shouting at full volume and whacking a frying pan with a ladle as he was.

  With the sound of claws scraping against steel, Dan had his answer. The black bruin’s head popped out of the high, green bin, not unlike an oversized bear-in-the-box, no cranking required, Dan thought with a giggle.

  Upon seeing the spectacle of this black-bearded man-mountain coming toward and it making such noise, the hungry hairball decided to conclude its evening buffet and move on to greener dumpsters. Scrambling out of the bin, the bear balanced on the lip for just a moment before tumbling forward out of the bin and landing on its head, temporarily stunning itself.

  This brought a roar of laughter from Antoine and Dan’s smile suddenly faltered. Somehow, the sound of Antoine’s delight was even more terrifying to him than the discord of his aggressive shouting and noise-making toward the bear.

  After a brief moment, the animal sat up and shook its head, gaining its senses as well as its feet. It bugged out without a backward glance, shooting up the mountainside behind the resort faster than a Greyhound with a hambone to bury.

  Seeing that his ear-ringing display of bravado was a success, Antoine lowered the frying pan and ladle to his side and watched the bear scamper off, a grin faintly visible through his thick black beard. He turned to Dan and said, “And that, young Padawan, is how you get rid of bears!”

  Still shaking slightly from the adrenaline that coursed through his body, Dan said, “Thanks a lot, Antoine! That was amazing! That thing scared the shit out of me!”

  Holding the frying pan at his side and using the ladle to scratch the middle of his muscular back with the other, Antoine said, “And exactly how do you think that bear got into the dumpster in the first place, Dan?”

  Realising that the jig was up, but still not wanting to admit fault, Dan sputtered, “I locked it, I swear, really!”

  “Hmm… I see,” Antoine rumbled as he turned back toward the kitchen. Over his shoulder, he said, “Bears out in the forest are packing lockpicks now, are they?
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br />   Since that evening, Dan had been religious in his locking of the bin. But half the time he was doing it in the dark due to the malfunctioning sodium vapours. And despite Antoine’s requests for upgrades to the electrical out back, Ray Chance hadn’t responded, and neither light had seen any maintenance over the winter. Dan had left an anonymous note to Chance as well, after his close encounter in the fall, saying reliable lighting in the staff parking lot would be a fantastic thing, but nothing had been done. Now, whenever he went out there, he was never really sure what was happening with the lights. Sometimes, it seemed they were just performing another feat of electrifying psychedelic wonderment for his amusement. But at other times, he wasn’t sure if they were going to crap out entirely and leave him in the dark as they finally shuffled off this mortal coil and joined Tesla in the Great Electrical Hereafter.