Ravenna Gets

by Tony Burgess

  “I just found out that my old landlord wants me to pay for the carpet he says I ruined.”

  “Oh.”

  “I don’t care. I just won’t answer the phone for a while.”

  Finally another video. Mariah Carey. Ed writes her name down on a piece of paper. He runs a karaoke business called Waygooze Productions and he has a gig with a benefit for the Stayner Skateboard Park. He can’t figure out whether to get music for kids or adults. Sometimes they listen to the same things.

  A bullet hits Ed in the elbow and he flinches. Glenda hears his breath go in but not come out.

  “So. My family says I should just tell you where to go.”

  Ed sees red rushing up from an underground well in his arm. A second bullet enters his chest, making a temporary cone out of his heart.

  “I defend you, you know.”

  57 Pine Street

  Bob Venton’s head is bobbing and his green Bing Crosby hat goes down down like wet wax on a candle. This little alcove at the side of the Tim Hortons is the wing of a stage. Bob has recently tried to lay claim to the name “Jazz in the Park” so that he could sell it to Meaford. He did run the Jazz in the Park in Wasaga Beach, a blaring festival of John Williams movie soundtracks that scared the walleye from the edges of Nancy Island, but he doesn’t own the title. Wasaga Beach is looking for him. He has spent the winter running a Cole Porter review in the basement of The River Inn. Tickets were twenty-five dollars a pop, and shows ran nightly through the winter months. He expected to get twenty to thirty people a night so he could bankroll his musical about the Collingwood shipyards. He has already written the opening number about shipbuilders spending their money on hookers. Unfortunately, only thirteen people showed up to see Baby, It’s Cole Outside. Thirteen people. All winter. Now Bob Venton’s on the run. It’s hard to say exactly from what. Unpaid musicians or yet another municipal grift involving parks and rec. He stands here, hat dropping to hand and plans to enter the Tim Hortons in order to borrow money so he can buy a coffee. People’ll think he left his wallet somewhere. Money just out of reach. A nickel on a bird’s head or a dime popped up off a tin can. Bobby’s eyes, so close together that they make each other nervous, speaks through a little rubber beak. He speaks in a kind of scat.

  “Hey, big daddies. Man, that’s a day to be big.”

  Bobby rubs his ear, as if to erase what he’s just said. Barry Little looks up, his big owl face reddening.

  “Hi, Bobby. What can I do for you?”

  “Ah. Be-dap. Be doo. Man, I just need some … to boot me some geets.”

  Barry sighs and draws coffee from the edge of his cup.

  “Mash me a fin, pops?”

  “Not readin’ ya, Sammy Davis.”

  Other patrons are trying to hide behind steam.

  Bobby snaps his fingers. “Sorry, daddy-o. My jib is on a slide.”

  Barry blinks froggishly.

  “Sorry, mack. My jive is off-time and—”

  “Shut up, Bobby …”

  “Hey, pops. Hey, daddy. Hey—”

  “Bobby.”

  “But …”

  “Bobby.”

  Bobby pauses, pointing his index fingers out and down. His expression is very sad. “Could ya see me for a cup of Joe, Barry?”

  Barry shifts his heavy left hip up as he forages through a pocket. Bobby rocks his fingers back and forth, shooting imaginary guns off into the floor.

  “Fly me to the moon. Hey.”

  When Barry holds out the coins, Bobby sweeps his hat out under his hand. Barry is embarrassed by this and looks up at Bobby. Bobby’s hair has formed into a greasy fin under the hat. His eyes so very close together. Barry releases the coins into the hat. Bobby winks and clicks his tongue.

  Bobby stands behind a thin mechanic in dirty overalls. Bobby is almost too nervous to wait for his coffee. He begins tapping his feet, shuffling his heels.

  “When the shark bites. Yeah. With his teeth, man.”

  The mechanic turns slowly and fixes a look on Bobby, stopping him suddenly. Never at a complete loss, Bobby extends his arm and pops his hat into the air toward his head. A quarter hits him in the eye and he doubles over. Some dimes and nickels tinkle to the floor as Bobby holds his eye. He stomps on the coins to stop their spinning.

  “Bobby?”

  Bobby has one hand over his eye. It’s the manager of Tim Hortons. A tight-skinned man with hard black hair.

  “Did you hurt yourself there?”

  “No, man. No.”

  “Okay. Look, you’re gonna have to leave.”

  Bobby stops for a moment, as if to give him the chance to take that back.

  “You can’t be … uh … borrowing money here.”

  Bobby smiles and puts his hat on. His eye is blood red. A final quarter slips from the inner brim and sticks to the sweat on his forehead.

  “Okay. I’m sorry, man. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay, Bobby. No, I’m sorry … look, it’s just I can’t …”

  “I’ll just go.”

  Bobby’s eyes wobble like a compass to find each patron, then settle on an empty table.

  The sun is powerful outside and Bobby has to cover his injured eye. Before he steps off the curb, the manager comes out with a coffee, nods, says nothing and slips back in.

  To get to Meaford from Stayner you have to take Highway 26 through downtown Collingwood and along the base of Blue Mountain to Thornbury and finally, the tiny, pretty harbour town of Meaford pops up. Bobby’s hitchhiking inland, to Duntroon, then back out to Collingwood.

  The fields between Duntroon and Stayner lie like drapery across a foot, curling and swooping in fine detail, lazily folded backwards or cinched by a stand of crabapple trees. This is the valley Bobby walks in. Crows as big as cows pull at meat near the road’s edge. Poles lift the lines up, up and onto Duntroon’s distant brown puff. It is rural paperwork country. Quarries pull the white from the grey ground and long tree farms sit in paragraghs. Bobby walks into his valley like a man in search of a blue bird. Whistling, his one good eye scanning the pale escarpment, Bobby realizes at the pit of the valley that he hadn’t planned on walking up the other side. He throws out his thumb.

  A pickup truck descends from behind, from where Duntroon tips over onto the mountain, and it races down pulling a hell-wig of dust. The driver sees in the distance poor Bobby Venton, his big feet pigeon stepping, his hands thrust in pockets as if to keep luck from flying out of them. His crooner’s hat, with its crushed felt and tiny red feather, mark him as a man who walks at the bottom of a giant screen, a movie bearing down on him, swinging like a dream into the valley.

  In the back of the pickup are four boys from Ravenna. They are heading to Stayner to raid the co-op for axes. The killers have been shooting their guns too liberally and have run out of rounds. The job will have to be finished with farm implements.

  Bobby turns at the sound of the truck. He watches as it crosses the median. Bobby steps back onto the shoulder, but not fast enough. The truck clips his hip, sending him twirling in the air like a baton, up and over the fence, headfirst into an immature field of corn.

  The driver looks in his rearview. The road is empty and his boys are quiet.

  Bobby lies still on his side, bent at the waist like a safety pin. His lower spine and hip are shattered, but he is still breathing.

  We look to heaven and send up our thanks for this small life spared. A life barely worth living in a body that, though lying still, is heading violently in two directions at once. He will come to, then die.

  35 Main Street

  Murray is on the second landing of the fire stairs going up the clock tower. There are no windows, but people are going up and down these stairs all the time and he asks them about what’s happening. He was wounded last Friday. He had come to Main Street from Pine. He was going to get a coffee when two children with pitchforks jumped out of the back of a van and lunged at him. One of the forks went into his knee and the other into his ribs. They ha
d him like this, trying to pull his leg off and push his heart out. A man came from somewhere and he struck one of the kids in the face with a bat. It was a real fast swing that curled the kid back and dead before he hit the ground. Murray saw one of the kid’s eyes on the lawn. The other kid dropped his pitchfork, or rather, left it in Murray and ran. God knows where.

  Murray saw bits of things. It was a nice day. The sun was shining, and it was hot, but Collingwood has all this shade on its sidewalks so, rather than oppressed, you feel pampered. But this was crazy. The man with the bat asked Murray something that Murray couldn’t make out. He was terrified. He seemed to know what Murray didn’t at this point. The people of Ravenna had gone nuts. They had invaded Collingwood over night. They were trying to kill Collingwood. The man managed to get the pitchfork from Murray’s ribs, but before he could free his leg, something scared him off. He ran up over his front lawn and down the side of his house. The holes in Murray’s chest didn’t feel deep, not mortally deep, but he had this fork fully driven through his leg above the knee. The man with the bat had completely abandoned Murray to the sidewalk. The child on the grass was dead. The sky so clear. Why was this happening? Murray tried to pull the pitchfork out, but it was angled down. He just couldn’t move well enough to get a hold of it. He didn’t want to cry out for help because he was so uncertain about what was happening. Time passed. The clouds were lengthening, like white canoes drooping down over town. What was all this? Murray began to fear that there had been some kind of evacuation or something. He couldn’t hear cars or people or anything. But in Collingwood? Why would people invade Collingwood? Those kids had jumped out of a van. Someone had been helping them. The driver had seen him walking along and slowed down, stopped and sent those kids out to kill. The van had pulled away again, he thought. When that man killed the boy. Murray’s chest has stopped bleeding. There are three black clots on his shirt. His leg, though, it’s still bleeding. Not pouring, but oozing. He can’t be completely still, because of the weight of the pitchfork. He feels like a piece of food sitting on a plate.

  “Help!”

  He has to. He has to cry out. He didn’t even know why he was being quiet.

  “Help!”

  He hears a door open at the house where the man disappeared. A woman’s voice.

  “No! No!”

  Then the man:

  “I have to tell him what to do.”

  Murray thinks this is crazy. He calls out:

  “Do what? What do I have to do?”

  A shadow closes the sun. The man stage whispers:

  “Can you walk?”

  “No. Not with this in my leg. Help me.”

  He puts his hand hard onto Murray’s leg then hauls on the pitchfork. Murray whines as it slides out. Murray sees the blood rising up and spilling out. The man pushes his hand on the holes. Murray screams and the hand darts away.

  “No. No. You have to be quiet. Okay. C’mon.”

  An arm slides under Murray. The woman’s voice from afar:

  “Leave him. There’s a truck coming. Leave him.”

  Murray is dropped.

  “Pretend you’re dead. Sorry.”

  He’s gone and now Murray can hear the truck. It’s coming down Pine Street towards Hurontario. Why does he have to pretend to be dead?

  The truck stops beside Murray and he lies still. He’s lying on the sidewalk pretending to be dead.

  Do I close my eyes? he thinks. He doesn’t even know how to act dead. He finds a cloud and stares at it, however it’s moving quickly and he’s aware of his eyes drifting upward. He locks them open and blank. Dead. Pretend dead.

  He hears the truck door open and moments later it slams closed. The truck idles noisily. Two men talk. He can see the blur of them at the periphery of his dead vision.

  “He’s breathing.”

  He stops breathing. His eyes sting.

  A face closes in on him. A wrinkled face. A little scar on his chin. Bright grey bristles.

  “Are you playin’ dead?”

  He’s doing what he was told to do.

  “I’ll tell ya.”

  He has a wobbly orange ball in front of him, filling the sky. He thinks his eyes are burning out.

  A shape cuts into the ball. He smells gas. His lips open and gas flows between them. The orange balls explodes in his lungs and he rolls over but pain has arrived in his leg now. “Jesus!”

  “He killed this boy. Kill him.”

  He presses his face to the sidewalk and is surprised when he falls asleep.

  He can’t recall being asleep like this ever before in his life. He has left the situation, but is still aware that things are very dangerous. He tries to feel his way back. If I’m being killed now, he thinks, I want to know. He pays close attention to how he feels. If I am unconscious, he thinks, how will I know when I shift from being asleep to being dead? Where are my hands? He thinks they are flopping upward. Either limply as his body is being transported, or weakly because he’s still trying to protect himself. He can’t tell. Limply, weakly. Then they get solid again. He drives his elbow up to knock them away, but they are not there. He stands up and looks at the empty street. No blood. No boy. No pitchfork. Had he imagined all of that? Had it happened?

  What is it with this war? The fighting goes on and every day that passes gets us further and further from the day before it all started. The things that were normal. The Fernwood Farms corn maze on Airport Road. The used car lot in a cow field on Fairgrounds Road. The ancient barn on the Poplar Sideroad, so overgrown by vines that it looks like a giant green oven in the middle of a flat field. Things you see and say to your friends. “Well, it’s nice. A little out of the ordinary.” And nobody disagrees. My God, this is a place where nobody disagrees. If someone, the mother of the woman who owns the barber shop, say, does disagree, she says, “I don’t think they should breed coon hounds in town.” But, you know, Barry Little breeds coon hounds at the edge of town. Does he still fall under some by-law code against breeding? Yes. Yes, he certainly does. But we all understand that he’s at the edge, and if we can’t come to agree that people who are at the edge can’t do a little more than us at the middle, then we have become ruled by the rules. We bend a little. She was not bending. She wants to catch us all. This big woman with a face like a tire, she can just go fuck herself today.

  “Hey, Mr. Man.”

  Murray puts his gloves on a Maclean’s magazine.

  “How are ya?”

  “Well, we’re just fine, I bet.” He smiles and sit beside Barry Little. In the mirror.

  Annie is the barber. She’s got a face like the sun, only made out of margarine. Ugly, sunny woman. “You need a haircut, Mister.”

  Murray rolls his eyes around. She treats all the men like children. Barry Little rubs his nose and gives Murray a look.

  The door opens and a small man enters. “Hey, Annie.” He nods to Murray and for some reason ignores Barry. “Hey, Annie, does your mom have cancer?”

  Annie pauses, adjusts her scissors in the air over the boy’s head.

  “‘Cause two people now have told me she’s got cancer and lost all this weight and I figured I’d just come ask you.”

  “Mom!” Annie calls, continues cutting, ignoring everyone.

  “Hey. You don’t have to call her. You can tell me. Jesus.”

  Annie’s mother is bigger than Annie and is built like a government dock. “What? Oh, it’s busy. Hi, Barry. You wanna hand, Annie?”

  “Sure, mom. Hey, Mr. Jonstad here is asking after your health.”

  Mom looks at Mr. Jonstad. “It’s fine.”

  Mr. Jonstad is embarrassed.

  “Did you want a haircut?”

  Mr. Jonstad mumbles no. Apologizing, he backs out of the store.

  Mom slings a thin apron across her watery middle. “Everybody thinks I got the cancer. I don’t have the damn cancer and if I did it would be my business.”

  Annie is cutting air around the boy’s head. Trimming a halo she can
see. Mom signals to me.

  “I think Barry’s first.”

  Barry speaks finally. “Oh. You go first. You get your haircut first.”

  All the time Mom’s cutting my hair I can see Barry’s face.

  “Hey, Barry. How’s the Blueticks?”

  He looks up. “Did you complain about my dogs to George?”

  “Joseph George?”

  “Yeah. By-law.”

  “Nope.”

  Barry slaps his knee and grabs his chin. His face is bright red.

  “You bet somebody did. And I want a last name and a first name off somebody.”

  When these people die, that is, now, there is so much glass breaking and screaming. The shot from five guns enters the front window at the same moment. It is enough for now to say that they are dead. The street is long and many, many more will die in the minutes ahead.

  The Clock Tower

  They were on the second floor, four of them, Clarence, two teens and a hockey mom. None of them had slept in forty-eight hours and they had gone through their last Timbits hours ago. Mom had dragged a plastic suitcase of cordless powertools up the stairs and now she sits with saws—Skil and reciprocating. One of the teenage boys has a pitchfork and the other has a baseball bat. Clarence has a javelin that he took from the high school. They are in strategic positions. There are two doors that open to this landing. Pitchfork boy sits by one and baseball bat by the other. When someone comes through a door, one of the boys brings him down by either driving the pitchfork or swinging the bat. The enemy goes down or at least stumbles and Clarence hurls the javelin at their torso. Then Mom descends with her blade spinning. She goes for the neck, pushing the blade as hard as she can, opening up a lethal wound. Her job is important because a man down with a broken leg and a hole in his gut can absolutely get back up, so when Mom opens the throat, he gives up. They want him to know right away that he is dying and then to lie down and do it. It takes time. The dying lie there spilling and gurgling until they stop.

  They know that there is one guy left up in the tower top. They have two of his buddies rolled against the wall. Below them there could be hundreds. As long as he’s up there signaling his situation, enemy is gonna try to get up here. They have to make a move.