We'll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night

by Joel Thomas Hynes

  Vague, listless rumble somewhere to the left of him, or maybe ahead, seems to be gettin louder, rowdier, as he tromps along.

  Might be a river.

  Scouring his memory for any maps he mighta grazed over in the HMP library, but comes up with nothing. Tries to remember the name of whatever town that hairy trapper dropped him on the outskirts of, started with Drum, some burnt-out French name that Johnny’s brain wont even let him attempt to pronounce.

  No idea how long he slept before the crash, no inkling how many miles.

  Remote, hazy flash of Gavin or Trevor at a gas pump.

  Winking lights of industrial sprawl through the tinted glass, a toll bridge.

  Powerful fucken weed, hey Johnny?

  And hey, old Scrapper. Aint thought about that dog in years. Mind of the time he got into all them Russian hens. Good dog he was, rabid little savage.

  The night is cold but the air is dry, hardly a breeze.

  Johnny stops and turns back and combs the skyline but can no longer pick out the flashing red and blue lights, no longer discern the direction of the highway, cant decide how long he’s been walking, ten minutes or two hours, and it dawns on him that he might just be headed nowhere.

  We’re lost Johnny, we’re lost . . .

  Rambling overgrown woods path that sometimes disappears altogether so that Johnny is leaning forward, using his body weight to urge and thrust his way through dense scrags of brush and knotted branches, stumbling over rotted stumps, slopping through puddles of muck.

  Back out to open trail for a few minutes, now hacking and clawing his way again.

  Nowhere.

  Woods.

  We’re lost Johnny, we’re lost . . .

  We’re not Mikey, how can we be lost?

  Where’s the track? Where’s the bridge Johnny, what’s that? Listen . . . what’s that?

  Stop it will ya . . . it’s a loon . . . I dont know . . .

  With Mikey, troutin. First time ever in the track on our own. Eight or nine years old. We were told to be out to the road before dark but the trout were savage, going after the bare hook and everything. All nice pink bellies. A string of about two dozen each slung over our shoulders. Time they let up feeding we could barely see our bobbers. We’d turned down to the pond by an old slab bridge, followed the river down. Nothing we loved more than troutin the rivers. So we figured to follow it back out to the track, like we were told. But we’d trouted all around the pond, and there’s more than one river running in. The one we followed out looked right. But it kept going, and no bridge, no track. We’re laughing and foolin, Mikey bragging about catching the biggest trout, fighting over a bag of chips. The river thins out, weedy and feeble. It becomes another pond. We see the darkness. Mikey goes up past his knee in the marsh, fills his rubber. Then I do, only I gets mine stuck and I falls and drenches me jacket too. Mikey sayin This way, this way, we never went this way. Tromping through the marsh in circles and coming back to the edge of the pond. Walking along another river, knowing it’s not the right one, that it’s too low, too tame, but going it anyhow. Then woods all around. Mikey tryna catch his breath.

  Listen Johnny, what’s that?

  What? Nothing, there’s nothing Mikey . . .

  That! Do you hear it? Someone . . .

  Stop it Mikey! Alright. There’s no one . . .

  There’s only three trout left on my string, three of the first ones I caught, wrinkled and crusty with moss. The rest are gone. Mikey starts to cry and then I starts and we’re running in the dark and I’ve got ahold of the hem of Mikey’s coat and when he trips and falls I falls right on top of him and we’re huddling there sobbing, terror-stricken in the night with the horrible woods enclosing us, heavy with evil, teeming with the worst of our fears. Things live here, unnamable perverse shadowed beasts that stalk and prey on children and carry them away screaming to some putrid lair where their arms are torn from their sockets and devoured raw right down to the marrow in the bones. No trace. Two young boys who went into the woods and didnt pay heed and were never seen again. Something got them. Some thing.

  What’s that Johnny? Listen . . . what’s that?

  Mikey dont . . .

  No listen . . .

  And then we hears it, a voice, a man’s voice off in the distance, calling, calling our names. Mikey bolts to his feet and howls Daddy! Daddy! We’re here . . . Then I’m shouting through the sobs Uncle Austin! Uncle Austin! and we’re rushing, jostling towards the voice but there’s no path so we stops to listen again, the voice askin where we are, but we dont know, we dont know, the voice tellin us to walk towards the sound, Walk towards me voice Mikey! B’ys youre alright, walk towards me voice . . . The voice singing, an old party song, an Irish song, beautiful booming echo, closer, closer . . . something, taking the train to Belfast, what was that song?

  I’m right here b’ys, right here on the track . . .

  Uncle Austin standin on the track with his arms outspread as Mikey leaps into them and buries his snotty face in his father’s thick shoulder.

  I gotcha now. It’s alright little man. Daddy gotcha. It’s okay little woodsman. You got a fright didnt you? Youre alright now . . . c’mon little buddy . . .

  Johnny trailing behind, snivelling. Mikey snug in his father’s arms, big hand thumping his back, rubbing his hair.

  Shhh . . . it’s alright little man . . . Daddy gotcha.

  One of Mikey’s trout slips from his string, the big one, the biggest one.

  Plump speckled pink belly gleaming in the moonlight.

  Johnny stoops to pick it up, then decides against it.

  Dull pop as he twists and grinds the fleshy moonlit thing beneath his heel, slick, scarlet innards spewing out through the trout’s glossy gills.

  Wandering through the backwoods somewhere in fucken Quebec? Jesus Christ Johnny. Stealthy black flutterings of bats or fucken flying rats or something criss-crossing the path, swooping. Johnny reeling back from a soft flapping shadow grazing his cheek. The urge to shield his eyes warring against the fear of not seeing what he already cant see.

  Icy, hostile sludge seeping through the sole of the left boot. Wasted emaciated leather click-flopping with each mindless step. Johnny’s blistered heels long since layered numb with highway calluses, but limping now anyhow. Flexing and squeezing his throbbing hand where the glass punctured. Wheezing and cold sweating and wanting to lie down, wanting to stop and rethink, regroup, reassess, but afraid to look too closely, stare the lunacy in the face. For fear of turning back, then turning back again. For fear of throwing his hands up. What the fuck am I doing here? The thought to smash the urn on the rocks down over the banks of the nearing river. Or stand at the river’s edge and say a little few words and scatter Madonna into the roiling current, black snaking creature with its faithless destination. Madonna. Johnny Teardrops standin with an empty urn, miles and years from everything he’s ever thought himself to be, no further obligations to this world, nothing pressing, anonymous, stranger, face with no past walking through woods. Wander deeper, deeper. Fashion a shelter. Carve a point on a stick. Track something. Stalk it. Kill it. Eat it raw. Something with blood. Big, small, squirrel, rabbit, beaver, stray dog. Hot blood. Dig a hole and crawl into it and never utter another foolhardy word. Telephones and pavement. Forms to fill. Glass things. Motors. Identification. City folk. Procedures and checkpoints. Lineups and meters. Money. Having. Not having. Showin up and takin off. Party girls. Bull queers. Classifications. Ketchup beer. Dope. Bad ink. Door buzzers. Piss tests. People and their fucken cameras. People. Police. Being policed.

  What’s it all for Johnny? Live your whole life. Live your whole life to find out youre not who they says you are. That they’re not who they made themselves out to be. Live your whole life to find out something you knew in your bones the first moment you opened your eyes. That they’re not who they says they are. And to start from there. Or not there, but here. Start from here, now. Start from then, even, not being what they told you you wer
e. Too late now, to start new back then. Have to start now. Being what? No bloodline, no past, nothing to show but a file thick as Pius’s dimwitted skull. Marks and scars with no stories to go along with. Bones that crick and pop and grind where they shouldnt.

  Johnny home from Whitbourne. Back in that house. Hardly a word spoken. No special dinner, no welcome home, no welcome, not fucken welcome. Tanya off at Jimmy Dawson’s shack, coming home to change her clothes and shower once in a while. Grungy stink of weed and jizz and Charlie perfume. Dopey glaze in her eyes, hugging Johnny on her way out the door and wishing she had a bit of money for him. Johnny on his own with Pius and the missus, her, Old Bat Shit, who once was his mother, who mighta looked him in the eye twice in her life. Her with her stories of UFOs following her in by the pond on her evening walks. Her, barred off in the bedroom muttering Hail Marys for days after running into her father’s ghost in the old churchyard down the harbour. With her past lives and bad nerves and horse tranquilizers and weekend excursions to the Mental in St John’s. Fucken burnt, tellin ya. Gone, she was, gone long before Johnny was ever spat out into the world. And now the three of them sat around the living room watchin that show on CBC, what was it, that one with the cop who walked around crime scenes and had flashes and visions. Bald-headed fella with glasses, moustache. Who fucken cares what it was called. Sat there, pumping TV slop into their brains, and Johnny walks to the fridge and pours himself a half glass of Pepsi. Then to the cupboard for the bottle of Crown Royal. Pius, God love the sodden old shithead, not registering what Johnny’s doing until the glass is just about topped off. Johnny with the drink gone before Pius makes it across the kitchen floor. Tossing the glass into the sink where it shatters into the supper pots. Pius dead in his tracks. Johnny, for the last six months steady go at the weights, and a foot taller than when he went away. Pius’s hand on automatic, fiddling with the buckle of his belt, his jaw tight, quivering. Johnny laughing, delighted.

  Whatcha gonna do with that belt old man?

  The old girl catching the scent of violence and shouting at the two of them that the program is back on:

  Come on, lay off that nonsense!

  You shut the fuck up in there Mother. Nothing to do with you.

  Pius? Pius? Mind what the doctor said! Pius???

  Pius with his fist clamped tight to the buckle, waiting, waiting like an old burnt-out gunslinger. Johnny casually twirling his head on his shoulders, grinning, his right hand drawn back behind his torso, down, out of sight.

  You listen here my son, you dont talk to your mother . . .

  She aint my mother. She belongs in a fucken straitjacket . . .

  Pius??? Pius what’s he sayin???

  I’ll call the cops on you, little bastard . . .

  And with that word Johnny grounds his left foot forward and throws the punch he’s been waiting his whole life to throw. Breakneck uppercut that pancakes Pius’s nose with a staggering bloody crunch of failed vertebrae and mushy cartilage. Ah Christ, hardly any way for family to be gettin on, what? Then a straight left jab to the mouth and one of Pius’s teeth clacking into the far corner of the kitchen. Old Bat Shit howling blue murder out through the living room window. Johnny casually slipping into his jacket, tucking the bottle of Crown Royal under his arm. Scooping Pius’s tobacco and papers from the kitchen table. Pius on the floor dazed and gurgling in a puddle of blood and the old girl jumpin on the couch in the living room screamin for help, Help, help us!!!! Wouldnt know but Johnny was some sorta home invader, some stranger in off the road.

  Johnny raises the bottle of Crown Royal and grins at the scene, walks out the door into the crisp fall night, thinks about going back for the Pepsi, then carries on towards the lower path to the Gut Pond. Where else to wait out the shitstorm? A grand lifting, a new weightlessness as he pushes through the reeds towards the twine shed down by the Gut. Fresh absence of dead weight. Johnny feels faster, stronger, even smarter. Dangerous. Not to be fucked with. Ever again. He pictures Pius in the deafening slow-motion moment before the first punch destroyed the middle of his face. The flash of fear, the dawning panic, the reluctant passing of the torch. The twinkle of new knowledge that what once was will never be again. And then the tumbling of that old man onto the faded and scarred linoleum. Johnny replays the scene again and again, flexes his left hand where the knuckles are indented with the pattern of Pius’s teeth. And he tries to feel something other than glory, tries to conjure up something soft, something lenient. But he cannot. McGregor sayin I know you Johnny Keough, I know your kind. Youre the kind who doesnt know that other people feel. Youre the kind who doesnt feel for other people. Youre a fucking little sociopath. That’s what you are. And you dont even know what that means do you Johnny? You dont even know what you are. Johnny tracking the word down in a dated medical text in the library—referred to as a personality disorder characterized by the inability to form human attachment and an abnormal lack of empathy, masked by an ability to appear outwardly normal. Having to look up the word empathy too—the capacity to recognize, and, to some extent, share feelings with others in society. Johnny slamming the heavy text shut when he feels McGregor’s eyes scanning him from across the table. McGregor grinning, peeling an apple with a pearl-handled pocketknife that Johnny woulda given his left nut to get his hands on at that moment. Lying in his bunk that night and thinkin So that’s what I am, a disorder. That’s why I never shed tear one at Mikey’s funeral. Cause I’m a disorder. Uncle Austin, Mikey’s dad, with Johnny held up by the lapels of his Sunday jacket:

  Fucken abomination! That’s what you are!

  Shaking Johnny back and forth like a scarecrow outside the funeral parlour, and not speaking words, groaning through his teeth, boozy spittle blasting Johnny’s face and neck. Then Austin on his knees in the gravel parking lot, big bubble of snot bursting onto his moustache. All the gang from school leant against the back wall of the parlour pretending not to see, not to hear. And what did any of em know? Voices? Women crying. Pius, God love the old pasty-faced prick, standin at the edge of the parking lot trying with the toe of his shoe to stand a bottle cap on its edge.

  Johnny bending to pick up a button popped loose from his jacket.

  Not feeling.

  This bitter, long-gone scene, the numbness of those hostile days that followed Mikey’s suicide, all that slicing through Johnny’s head as he booted open the heavy wooden door of the government twine shed the night he dropped Pius. Flopped down in the corner on a rank pile of capelin nets and sipping at the Crown Royal. Listening to the familiar wail of sirens echoing across the harbour. Drifting off to sleep to the sound of his name crackling through the cruiser’s loudspeaker. Not feeling a fucken thing.

  And you went quietly that night didnt you Johnny? No fuss, no hassle. Group of gawkers out on the beach road, the flash of the ambulance lights on up over the hill outside Pius’s. Down to the Ferryland lock-up for a couple of days, transported into Town then, fast-tracked to your very first adult trial.

  Given the brutal nature of Mr Keough’s crime Your Honour . . .

  Two years less a day. HMP. Johnny barely seventeen, half shitbaked, not knowing who to talk to, where to sit, who to look at. Big burly fuckers eyeballing you. Guards treating you like a youngster. Roaming the block wondering when he was gonna get called out and who by. But how quick they changed their tune, hey Johnny? The fucken mileage when word got around that Johnny was Steve Puddester’s son, Stevie the Scar, who was away in Springhill then, tail end of a five-year bit. However that got around. Johnny wondering who in the fuck this Stevie character was. Pack of tobacco waiting on your bunk that first night. Fellas nodding at you walking down the hall. This fella named Shiner shaking your hand like you were old pals and taking you down to the rec room and setting you up with a workout, nobody daring to give you any hassle. Coming back to the cell that evening and someone’s after leaving a radio and a wicked set of headphones on Johnny’s bunk. Job in the kitchen where you ends up in on every scam, no matter how big
or small. Everything passes through the kitchen—cigarettes, cellphones, all the dope, titty mags, endless messages. Yeast pellets and little packets of sugar. Brewing ketchup beer in a garbage bag, a few gallons enough to get the whole wing plastered. Good times, a lot of the time. Like when what’s-his-face, that Harnum fella from out around the bay who was locked up for screwing a cow, came along in the lineup to get his supper and Larry Morgan laid a handful of hay on his tray. Harnum swiped the hay onto the floor and Larry Morgan says: What? It’s good enough for your girlfriend. How the place went up. And where did the fucken hay even come from? Shiner slipping Johnny an address and he starts writing letters to Stevie, his father, in Dorchester now. Johnny’s heart pounding, the pen shaking in his hand, full of something like hope, tellin Stevie all about Tanya and Pius and Old Bat Shit. About that cunt McGregor in the boys’ home. About what happened with Mikey, Mikey hearing nasty voices inside his head. Johnny askin all sorts of questions that he never got no response to. How did you meet Tanya? What’s the story? What do I call you? Do you even know about me? How? And nothing, not a letter in return. But grateful as fuck for the stuff coming down the line. Pricey new pair of sneakers and a hoodie one day waiting on the bunk. Davey Alyward slipping Johnny an ounce of weed the day before Christmas Eve. And next thing Johnny’s going on nineteen years old and the gates are swinging open with no one waiting for him on the other side, no girlfriend, no Tanya, no fucken Pius. Nowhere to go. Not knowing hardly a soul in the city except for a few lads from the inside he didnt really care to see no more. And then Shiner pulling up outside Erin’s Pub on Water Street. Johnny hanging with some travelling kids from the mainland, kids with matted hair and German shepherds and everything camouflage and sun-blasted and stinking. Shiner literally grabbing Johnny by the scruff of the neck and heaving him into the truck. A room waiting for him in a boarding house on Brazil Street. A little job. Go over and kick a door in and smash everything in sight. Hundred bucks. Another little job. Wait outside this gym on Elizabeth Avenue and give a certain dipshit a few darts in the face. And dont say a word, dont make a sound, no threats, no names, dont take nothing off him. Dont lose your cool. Two hundred bucks, enough for six green monsters back then. Johnny back on ice in less than a year for assault and uttering threats. Well looked after on the inside though. Well looked after. Going back wasnt too hard atall. Johnny thinkin, nights lying in the bunk, the first time he was in, that there’s no way, no way, never again. But then you finds yourself back inside and it’s not too bad, really. Easier, knowing the ropes, knowing the shortcuts, familiar faces. First time in Johnny’s life he felt like he had a bit of community for fuck sakes. Making up lies, tellin all about his trip to the Mainland to hang with Stevie the Scar. Toughest motherfucker ever tried on socks, man, no question.