Savage Gerry

by John Jantunen

  All he could see of what was making the noise were spurts of flame belching pinpricks, darting through the dark. They hit their mark with a thrash of treetops moving right to left, crushing the smaller trees in their wake and causing the larger ones to shimmy and shake, Gerald but one of a few dozen men watching the path of destruction in dumbfounded awe.

  Those Sons sure don’t fuck around!

  Clayton had gained the courage to stand and was doing so now beside Gerald, calling out over the pounding with an undisguised glee matched by the joyous grin of a child witnessing the miracle of fireworks for the first time.

  How many locals might be hiding in the trees and were no doubt then being pulverized to a mush, it was impossible for Gerald to even guess. For all he knew, it could have been all of Penetanguishene, the town upon whose outskirts they’d built Central North. It seemed likely that someone had sounded the alarm and a hastily contrived posse had descended on the prison, carrying whatever weapons they had — mere hunting rifles most likely. Gathering in the woods to the east of the prison which for the past fifty years had provided jobs for some five hundred men and women, many of whom lived in Penetang, as it was commonly called: a great boon for any town in which the predominant industry — tourism — lasted only a few months out of every year. All those men and women, whose only crime had been a desire to protect their families from the ravaging hordes of prisoners likely to be unleashed on their town by an excavator as large as the one they’d been told was toppling the walls of the Central North Correctional Centre, now being reduced to a bloody pulp while Clayton and the others to a one — minus only Gerald himself — cheered and called out with wild gestures of encouragement.

  Their cheers were shortly eclipsed by a rumbling noise, growing louder with the celerity of a flash flood and turning Gerald towards Pod 1 as the semi-truck surged into view from behind. It must have turned around in the open space on the far side of Pod 5 to get up speed for the dash across the field, and was picking up greater speed still. Its lights were off and the only thing to illuminate it was the distant glow of stars and the lap of flames from the bonfire, towards which it was racing on a collision course. It struck with an explosion of sparks and their sudden flare revealed the figure of a man tied with arms outstretched over the front grill — none other than Jules Blake. Firelets spattered over his jumpsuit and singed in his hair, Jules all the while screaming against their ravage as the truck sped past, its wheels gnashing at the soft soil and spattering earth in great sodden clumps.

  Fifty-odd men were crowding the trailer’s bed, clinging to wheel hubs and to each other, and there was a lone man standing amongst them. In the dark, all Gerald could make out of him was that he was holding fast with one hand to a chain affixed to the truck’s cab like a charioteer and that his other arm was upraised and ended at the elbow. A baby’s hand sprouted from its stump and rather implausibly supported a machine pistol emitting sporadic bursts of flame into the night sky.

  The trailer’s still-lowered ramps were bouncing over the heavily rutted ground and down this tumbled the makeshift barbecue. It was spitting embers and spewing sparks and careening towards a man chasing after the truck, stumbling on a lame foot and calling out in vain pursuit, Wait for me! Wait for me! His eyes widening in alarm, he dove out of the way, the half barrel blundering past and the white van swerving to avoid it as it spun in a loop, coming up fast behind the trailer.

  Letting off a last burst of gunfire from its box, the van breached the gap, passing in heedless slight both the too-slow and the uninvited, quartering right, angling across the field in pursuit of the truck, its trailer flanked now by four grim riders, two on each side. The fifth hung back until the van had passed then roared after with its banner flapping behind and every man still standing in the yard was gazing with abject longing after the motley caravan bumping over the curb and onto the road, disappearing in an instant behind the cluster of trees that shrouded the prison from the houses on Fuller Avenue.

  There arose in its passing an anguished chorus from the locals secreted in the woods, desperate voices and distant screams, as remote to Gerald as the starlight. Shortly, flickers no less bright began to appear amongst the shadowed pillars of the tree trunks. Their spectral beams cut through the fringes, growing brighter as the survivors clambered into the field, and Clayton clutched Gerald’s arm, worried maybe that they’d start shooting again. But the fight had clearly gone out of them and their good intentions had been reduced to a straggle of shadowy forms in frantic flight towards the road.

  There were men running the other way now too. First a couple then a few more and then all the uninvited and the too-slow were swept into a mad dash back towards the prison. It was as if what they’d just seen spoke to them of the sanity of four walls and a bed, a quiet place to wait out the end, and Gerald was thinking much the same. But it wasn’t their cells they were bound for, it was the overturned barbecue. What remained of the pig’s carcass was lying beside the barrel. The men converged on it like a pack of hyenas, tearing loose its bones and gnawing at the meat, breaking fire-brittled ribs and femurs and sucking at the marrow.

  Behind them Pod 1’s hexagon loomed large. It had since come to resemble a monstrous birdhouse pocked with holes, and those spoke to Gerald only of the men still trapped inside. The prison population ran to over two thousand and there couldn’t have been even a hundred of those sprung free. All the rest must have been still trapped in their cells, the already dead making it a living hell for those unfortunate enough to find themselves yet drawing breath. It seemed like he should have been able to hear them — a second chorus of voices calling out from their doom — and more so that he should have felt something, knowing it was just the luck of the draw that had spared him. But he felt little beyond the resilient pang of hunger in his belly coupled with a faint apprehension as to what might happen next, and all he could hear was the frenzied gnash of teeth and the stifled crack of bones from those ravaging the pig.

  A man had wrenched its head free. He was scurrying away with the pig’s head tucked under his arm and two others were chasing after him. The two were then tackling the one and all were lost into the yard’s shade, the one crying out, This is mine. Get your goddamn own!

  Gerald heard the thud of clenched fists pounding at the man’s head even as he felt the clutch of Clayton’s hand on his sleeve, dragging him on a hard right towards the hole in the fence.

  Come on man, he was yelling, whatya waitin’ for? We’re free!

  8

  The apple tree is just down there.

  They were peering, one on either side, around the trunk of an oak tree. All that stood between them and their past lives as wards of the state was the twenty-or-so-acre forest of spruce and pine at their backs. Any and all of their possible futures found perfect expression in the two lanes of asphalt stretching in either direction not ten feet away, though it didn’t so much resemble a road as a tunnel, cast as it was in utter black.

  Clayton was pointing right and Gerald stepped out into the ditch. Leaves crunched beneath his feet and he stopped at their sound, peering again down the road as one might at a fast-flowing stream whose depth was uncertain. Clayton though had no such misgivings. He was hustling past, scrambling up the loose gravel of the ditch’s incline and starting down the road.

  Come on, he called back, you ain’t never seen apples like these!

  He set off at a jog but his legs didn’t quite seem up to his haste. He hadn’t got more than a few strides before he slowed to a fast walk and Gerald had trouble even keeping up with that, his own disused legs feeling like two logs cramped at the bottom of a wood pile.

  On their side of the road the forest broke at intervals into spacious yards, some cluttered with the vague outlines of children’s playsets — swings and slides and one an extravagant fort with a bridge between its two towers — but most empty except for the odd maple tree or willow looming against bungalows and
simple two-storey houses, cars and pick-up trucks, sometimes three and four, in every driveway. Gerald glanced anxiously from these to dark windows, looking for any sign of movement from within as he passed, but Clayton only had eyes for the other side. The houses there, to a one, were palatial. They were guarded by fences, eight feet tall and mostly made out of wood slats, though there was also a span of black wrought-iron pikes between which pressed the clipped boughs of a cedar hedge, and further on a two-hundred-foot span of cobbled stone, also eight feet high and rimmed with what appeared to be thorny rose stems growing out of its mortar.

  The stone wall ended at a vacant lot, a hundred feet across and lightly wooded with the thin trunks of poplars and the even slighter stalks of aspen. Gerald’s grandfather would have called them junk trees and they told Gerald that the lot had been clear-cut in the past few years, for poplar and aspen grew about as fast as weeds. A slight breeze murmured through the leaves of the poplars, a delicate rustle that carried with it a faint hint of algae which suggested to Gerald that what the fences were really guarding was access to the private beaches encircling Georgian Bay.

  When he’d come to the far edge of the lot, Clayton turned back and whispered over his shoulder, It’s this one here.

  He scurried across the road, following the strip of loose gravel shouldering it from the far ditch until he’d come to the corner of another of the wooden fences. Ducking low then for no reason except it fit the part of an escaped prisoner, skirting along a wall as if trying to evade the probe of a spotlight, stopping only when he’d come to the gate, halfway along. It was fashioned out of wood slats of the same light hue and the only thing that differentiated it from the fence at all was that it had a diamond cut into it to serve as an eyehole. Into this there’d been fitted a metal grate, its bars made in the image of cross-thatched vines.

  Clayton crouched even lower before that, looking backwards and searching out Gerald, spotting him across the road and giving him a frenzied sweep of his arm, motioning him over. He then raised himself so that his head was even with the eyehole and snuck the quickest of peeks through it. He mustn’t have seen anything to cause him undue concern and took a longer look and was still doing that when Gerald came up beside him.

  He could see now that what he’d thought were vines was actually the body of a snake coiled in a criss-cross with its head hanging below as a hook or maybe a handle since the door didn’t have one of those. It had neither a latch nor a lock and the only way of ringing the house was a blank vidscreen secured in the post beside it.

  There it is, Clayton whispered and shuffled sideways so Gerald could have a look too.

  He did so, steadying himself by gripping the snake’s head in one hand and pressing his face to its coils, the significance of those hardly lost on Gerald as he peered into what could only be described as someone’s little piece of paradise. Two storeys of glass framed the house, its roof flat and this ornamented with a lattice draped with vines, potted plants hanging below, a patio perhaps. Tracking left then into the expansive yard and finding at once the tree cast against a murky black, the subtle lap of water against a dock telling him that must have been the lake. All the while he was staring through the hole, he was thumbing the snake’s head, or rather one of its fangs. The point was almost sharp enough to draw blood without any help from him so that when Clayton slapped him on the arm, saying, Come on, we’ll go around the other side, he felt a sharp stab and jerked his hand back.

  His thumb pad was already beading blood and as he trailed after Clayton he sucked at it, thinking it’d be a lucky thing indeed if a prick in his thumb was all he suffered following after such a damn fool as Clayton Crisp.

  9

  I’ll give you a boost.

  They’d threaded through the poplars and aspen crowding the empty lot until they were about halfway to the water. Clayton was squatting down at the fence and cupping his hands into stirrups between his legs.

  I don’t need no boost, Gerald said.

  Clayton looked from him to the top of the fence and back again, his doubt that Gerald would be able to reach the top, much less climb over it, writ large in the dubious curl to his lips.

  Well, can you give me a boost then?

  Squatting low, Gerald cupped his own hand. Clayton stepped into that, hoisting himself up and over, and Gerald stood there a moment, telling himself he’d be better off on his own and that this was as good a chance as any to rid himself of the scarecrow. He’d gone so far as to take a step towards the road before the grim riders he’d seen at the prison impressed themselves upon his mind.

  If it really had become their kind of world, Clayton’d be lucky to last a day.

  So what if he doesn’t? You don’t owe him nothing.

  He nodded to himself but that didn’t do him a damn bit of good and he turned back to the fence.

  There were two poplars growing in front of it, four feet apart. Reaching to the limits of his arms, he took the trunk of each in either hand and pulled himself up with a shimmying motion until he was clear of the top of the fence by a good foot. Pendulum-swinging his legs backwards, he propelled them forward, letting go of the trees and thrusting his body over the fence, landing crouched with the ease of a cat.

  When he stood, Clayton was looking at him again with unbridled adulation.

  Shoot, he said, that’s a helluva trick. I’m gonna have to try me that sometime.

  They approached the tree, scouring the ground for any apples that might have fallen. Finding none, they peered up into the tree’s lowest branches. There weren’t any visible there either.

  Shoot, Clayton said, it was full of apples last time I saw it. Maybe there’s some higher up. Give me another boost.

  Gerald obliged and Clayton clambered onto the lowest branch. He stood hugging the trunk, his head craned upwards, searching amongst the leaves.

  I think I see one, he whispered down.

  He climbed in his gangly fashion, disappearing amongst the foliage before he was two branches up, his whereabouts known to Gerald afterwards only by a sporadic rustle and leaves falling with the wistful drift of boats sailing on a calm sea. He was up there for some time, Gerald all the while keeping sentry on the house for any flicker or shadow moving about within its dark glass case, seeing nothing beyond the outline of a table and chairs.

  Bombs away!

  Gerald looked up a fraction too late to dodge the globe as big as a softball parting the space between the branches. It struck him in the shoulder and bounced into the shadows. He scurried after it with down-stretched arms, his fingers prodding in grass gone to seed and almost as high as his knees.

  Sorry, Clayton said, dropping back to the ground. That one got away from me.

  His jumpsuit was spilling over with the fruit. One arm was crooked under a bulge that would have put him into his eleventh month if he’d been pregnant, and as he chomped on the apple in his other hand, three or four apples were pressing outwards from the V of his half-opened zipper.

  Ain’t they sweet, he said after taking his first bite.

  Gerald was already on his fourth.

  Ain’t never tasted sweeter.

  God, I can’t remember the last time I had me a fresh-picked apple. The ones they gave us at Central North always tasted like Styrofoam.

  You don’t have to tell me.

  Gerald was by then nibbling at the core of his. Pitching it into the lawn, he eyed Clayton’s cleavage with a depraved sort of wantonness.

  Go on, Clayton said, offering up his bosom, have another.

  Don’t mind if I do.

  Hell, you can have as many as you—

  Shhh.

  Gerald had stopped mid-chomp. He could have swore he heard—

  What? Clayton whispered. What is it?

  A gentle swish then, like a sliding door opening and then he heard it again — a low growl — except this time it wa
s louder and left no doubt in his mind as to what it was. The growl was immediately followed by the frenzied rake of nails on wood, the dog’s claws trying to find a grip on the back deck as it lunged out through the opened door, swinging a hard left. There then was an instant of utter quiet, the dog maybe leaping down a set of stairs, and then a bristle of fur was tearing out from behind the corner of the house, letting loose a snarl as mean as a bear’s.

  Gerald and Clayton spun as one and the both of them set off in panicked flight towards the fence. The grass battering against their legs might as well have been sand, for the way it sucked at their feet. To Gerald, it felt like they were running in slow motion and the fence a mile away, though it wasn’t more than twenty feet from the apple tree.

  Clayton was screaming, Jesus! Fuck! Christ!

  Gerald leaping and getting both hands on the fence’s top, his sneakered toes finding purchase on a slat, pushing him upwards and over. His left knee knocked against the wood as it cleared the fence, spiking a sharp pain up his leg and sending him reeling into an awkward plummet. His hands flailed in front of him, trying to couch his landing, but it was his face that struck first. Something tore into his cheek, a sharp stick gouging from his temple to his chin, snapping his head back. The sudden agony erased all sense of the impact and the world went black, disappearing altogether except for the pain in his cheek, the rabid snarl of the dog from the other side of the fence and Clayton screaming, It’s got my leg! It’s got my leg!

  Pushing at the ground, levering himself to his feet, looking up at the fence.

  All Gerald could see of Clayton was his head and two arms — the boy holding on for dear life. His legs were thrashing in a frenzied assault against the other side of the fence and he was screaming, Get the fuck off! Get the fuck off me!