What’dya miss most about being inside? he’d started off by asking.
Evers was the clear answer in Gerald’s mind but he didn’t want to get into all that so instead he answered, Swimming I guess.
No shit?
On a hot summer’s day, ain’t nothin’ better than a cool dip. You?
That’s easy. A decent mattress.
That’s a good one.
Clayton smiled like he’d never received a better compliment than that.
A girl I used to go with, he said, she had this king-sized pillow-top, you know? Most comfortable bed I ever laid in. I asked her one time how much her parents had paid for it. You know what she said?
What?
More’n you paid for your car, I bet.
Shoot, I said, that ain’t saying much.
Then she asked me how much I paid for it.
I says, I asked you about the bed first and she says, The difference is, I don’t really give a shit how much you paid for your car.
So I told her, I paid four grand for it.
You’d have to be an idiot to pay four grand for that piece of shit, she says.
I guess I’m an idiot then, I tell her and she says, You won’t get no argument from me.
She broke it off a short while after. When I asked her why, she told me she was sick of being with such a damn fool. So I says, If this was about the car, the joke’s on you, because I only paid eight hundred for it.
That was the last time I saw her. Weren’t no big loss really, she was a real handful, more like four, you know what I mean. But I sure did miss that bed.
Then clicking his teeth:
I never did find out how much her parents had paid for it.
And sometime later:
You ever been to Marmora?
What’s that?
It’s a town. Where I’m from.
Never heard of it.
I ain’t surprised. Ain’t nothing but a spit, forty-five minutes on the other side of Peterborough. You heard of Peterborough?
Rings a bell.
Ain’t never been there?
No.
Well, you ain’t missing much. Only reason I ever went was I had a girl there.
The one with the bed?
No, this was another girl. She had a futon. You ever fucked on a futon?
Can’t say as I have.
It was like fucking on a sack of flour, hers was anyway. But I was talking about Marmora. They had this old pit mine up there. It was seven hundred feet deep. All but the top hundred was filled with water from an underground spring. A while back — long time ago, before I was born — the owners tried to sell it to Toronto. They was going to plug up the spring, drain it, fill it with garbage. Bunch of environmentalists got together, you know what they did?
What’s that?
Stocked it with fish. Lake trout, mostly. Snuck in there one night with a water truck filled with ’em. Hundreds, maybe even thousands. After that the government wouldn’t let the company sell the mine. Said it wasn’t fair to the fish.
Why didn’t the owners just catch ’em all?
I don’t know. All I do know is that there’s a huge pit full of spring water and lake trout just outside of town. Used to think about it a lot when I was a kid, how if things got any worse — you know, end-of-times shit — I figured there wouldn’t be a better place to live than Marmora.
Things must be pretty bad now.
And getting worse by the minute, no doubt.
So you heading back?
Ah hell, I ain’t never going back to Marmora.
And lastly:
So what do you think happened?
You mean, why the power went out?
Yeah.
Gerald thought about it for a moment.
Ain’t seen enough to know one way or the other, he finally offered. Then thinking about his grandfather and what Jules and Zip had said: Whatever it was, it’s been coming down the pipe for some time.
That’s what Virgil said, too.
Who’s that?
Virgil Boothe. He was my cellmate these past six months. He was some high muckety-muck in The Sons.
Lucky for you.
Clayton raised his empty pop bottle as if in toast.
Cheers to that.
Then working at a strand of meat lodged in his teeth with a fingernail:
Virgil was a real prophet of doom, I tellya. He was always going off about how it’d be the damn Yanks who’d do us in. Said it was only a matter of time before they got sick of paying for our water. He said they had a virus could shut down our entire electrical grid. All it would take was the push of a button and the lights’d go out and that’d be that. They wouldn’t even have to attack, he said. All they’d have to do is seal up their borders and wait. Ninety percent of the population wouldn’t last the winter and they could just move right in. Said it’d be any day now.
The first time he told me this, I asked him, How can you be so sure? He says, Boy, ain’t you been paying attention? I told him I never had much use for the news, which I figured is what he meant, and he laughed and clapped me on the shoulder. The news ain’t got nothing to do with it, he says. All the news does is muddy the waters. That’s its job, to keep you from seeing what’s going on right there in front of you. You got to use your own two eyes, boy, you really want to know what’s going down.
He was getting all riled up, spit spraying out of his mouth and his eyes, I swear to god, like they were about to pop out of his head. Reminded me of this Euphie who was with me in remand. He never shut up the whole time I was there. You say boo while he was going off, he’d come at you. One time I saw him bite another man’s ear clean off who’d told him to shut it. Virgil was looking that way too, so I just smiled and nodded, like he was speaking the god’s honest truth, though at the time I thought he was as crazy as the rest of them Sons.
Just look around, he went on. You got front-row seats right here. Ain’t no better barometer for the state of affairs than a prison. Cons, he said, are like those canaries they used in coal mines. Then he asked me, How many riots we had over the last year?
He was looking at me like it’d be my neck if I didn’t answer so I says, I don’t know. I only been here a few days.
He wasn’t even listening.
Fifteen goddamned riots, he said. All because they’ve packed twenty-five hundred men into a jail meant for half that. The most of them drug addicts or nut jobs. And them building new prisons every day, like they can just lock all that crazy away, forget about it.
And if things are getting bad up here, they’re ten times worse in the States, he said. It’ll be any day now, the power’ll just go out. You mark my words.
Picking up an apple, Clayton rubbed it on his pant leg before continuing.
As I said, I’d always thought he was crazy.
Raising the apple then to take a bite, shaking his head.
I sure don’t now.
He ate the apple without saying another word and after he’d pitched the core into the woods he looked at his wrist, as if he was checking his watch.
What time you think it is? he asked.
Gerald was crouched by the dying embers of the fire and turning the end of a birch branch over in the coals. It was six inches long, about the width of his middle finger, and he was hardening its end in advance of attaching the blade.
Sometime past midnight, I’d guess.
Feels like seven o’clock to me.
When Gerald looked over at him, Clayton was grinning at the joke and that made Gerald smile, too.
Clayton wheeled around and Gerald went back to turning the branch. He’d just wheedled the blade into the slit he’d made in the hardened end and was tying it off with a strip he’d torn from Clayton’s undershirt when the scarecrow came
tromping back out of the bush, zipping his jumper and grinning like the goose that had just laid a golden egg.
Gripping the makeshift knife by the hilt, Gerald pressed the blade into the seam of his pant leg to see if it gave. It held just fine and he tucked its haft into the elastic of one of his socks as Clayton gathered up the last three apples, holding two in one hand and one in the other, his arms cocked as if he was setting to start juggling them.
Where to now, boss?
Gerald’s hand had sought out the photograph slung around his neck and his thumb was stroking at its veneer as if trying to bolster his resolve from the boy’s indomitable spirit.
Home, he said.
13
They came to a river as the first faint strains of light were leaking into the sky towards the east. Thick grey mist couched its banks, rendering the far shore an ill-defined and vaguely ominous slope leading upwards into a veil of nether white. The water beading in their beards and cooling on their cheeks was a welcome reprieve from the night’s humidity and they stood for a time, tottering on the hollowed-out web of roots straining at the base of a cedar tree bowed at a precarious angle over the water.
The darkly ribboned stream below frothed into a dirty foam within the branches of a beaver-felled maple tree and caught within its net was a detritus of plastic bottles and pop cans, a single purple flip-flop and a pair of pink underwear snagged as if on a finger, riding the current in a listless pantomime of pleasures long past but hardly forgotten. Watching it with the eager remorse of a boy spying from a closet as his sister undresses, Clayton licked his top lip, covering his lechery by blurting out, We ought to fill up the water bottle.
He bent, about to lower himself down through a gap within the thicket of roots, and Gerald clutched at his arm.
This water ain’t clean, he said. We’ll find a spring elsewhere.
Gerald was already turning downstream and Clayton turned after him, pausing momentarily to look back down at the quixotic eroticism of the underwear’s shimmy and that only firming his resolve.
You go on, he said. I got to take a piss. I’ll— I’ll catch up with you.
Gerald hadn’t made it more than twenty steps when there appeared out of the mist a slightly darker shade of grey: the cement trestle of a bridge. The water passing beneath flowed languid and calm, a perfect counter to the restless fret of his mind as he looked up the gravelled embankment leading towards the road.
They’d spent the night in anxious cavort, skirting from one wooded refuge to the next as they followed Highway 12 south from the fringes. Its two lanes had led them on a winding path away from Midland — Penetang’s sister city — guiding them along the shores of Severn Sound, a sheltered cove opening into Georgian Bay and scattered with small settlements, the main purpose of which was to service the tourists whose cottages lined the shore. They travelled under the cover of dark, seeing neither a soul nor a single light, Gerald all the while planning the journey yet to come.
The 12 would take them to the 400, a four-lane highway that would lead them on a straight shot north, connecting with the 69 this side of Parry Sound and that taking them into Sudbury. It was the short side of four hundred kilometres and on his own he figured he could manage thirty or forty klicks every day, which meant he’d be walking into Sudbury in less than two weeks, Capreol seven or eight hours after that.
Except he wasn’t alone.
In the five or six hours since they’d roasted the dog they hadn’t made even ten kilometres and Clayton had barely managed those, stumbling along on his wounded leg, huffing like a horse run too hard, each step seeming like it might be his last.
Glancing back the way he’d come, Gerald found Clayton emerging out of the fog, hobbling along with the use of a stick to take the pressure off his wounded leg, though it hardly increased his pace. His pant legs were wet to the waist and he was grinning with embarrassed aloof. Gerald let him pass and followed him up the embankment and onto the road. Dawn’s first rays were struggling against the early morning mist, masking it in a hazy shade of grey. They couldn’t see even halfway across the bridge, the fog was so thick, and Gerald stood a moment listening for what might lie ahead. He could hear a not-too-distant cawing of crows — maybe a few dozen — and the ominous tenor of their cacophony gave him little incentive to venture further.
Clayton, though, plunged straight ahead, disappearing into the grey. After a breath, Gerald slunk after him, holding his blade before him like a dagger and knowing it wouldn’t be any better than a toothpick if someone spotted them crossing the bridge. When he’d caught up with Clayton, he was crouching down halfway across, peering at something, Gerald couldn’t quite make out what.
You think he’s dead? Clayton whispered.
Who?
Clayton motioned his head down the road and Gerald took a cautious look forward, seeing the vague form of a man emerging out of the haze. He was sitting propped up with his back against the cement barrier that guarded cars against a ten-foot drop into the river below.
He’s dead, ain’t he? Clayton asked.
It’s a helluva funny place to take a nap, if he ain’t.
As Gerald approached the body, he knew the man hadn’t been dead for long, a few hours at most. He hadn’t yet begun to smell and his skin hadn’t turned grey, as Orville’s had a few hours after he’d died. The man was wearing a pair of aviator sunglasses propped on a flourish of auburn hair and a blue collared golf shirt and tan khaki shorts. There were lesions, like squished slugs, eking out from within his collar and the cuffs of his shirt.
Gerald gave him a wide berth as he stepped around him. On the body’s far side there was a smattering of muddy footprints imprinted on the sidewalk — several medium-sized dogs or maybe coyotes. Walking a few paces past he heard a sudden squawk and saw a black form — one of the crows — pitching upwards through the mist. There was a vague impression of another body lying prone on the ground just below where it had taken off, and he turned around.
Clayton had taken the pair of sunglasses off the man and was fitting them over his ears.
I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Gerald said as he approached.
He ain’t goin’ to mind.
It’s not that. You see them tracks on the ground there?
Gerald had come back to within five paces of the body and that was about as close as he was willing to get.
They look like dog tracks.
They’re coyote. And they didn’t want nothing to do with him.
So?
Clayton tilted the sunglasses up and peered down at the man.
The man was sick, Gerald said.
Sick?
Can’t you see the sores on his neck? That’s what must have killed him.
Clayton was staring down at the body harder still.
You don’t think it’s catching, do ya?
I ain’t no doctor.
A culminating unease was curdling Clayton’s lips and all of a sudden he jerked backwards away from the body, flinging the glasses off his head and wiping his hand on his pant leg, looking over at Gerald with fearful eyes.
Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to touch dead things?
14
Without another word they followed the river downstream.
Their prison jumpsuits made them a pretty clear target. Worried that someone would see them as a threat and take a shot at them, Gerald thought it best if they sought shelter during the day and only travelled at night. The sun had yet to appear as anything more than a subtle lightening of the fog, and the less-than-subtle nag of mosquitoes battered at the back of their necks and faces with a frenetic buzz. They came to a copse of cedars along the bank and he told Clayton they’d hole up there for the day. Inside was a cubby as good as any cave, big enough for the two of them to lie down out of the sun, and the ground was well cushioned by fallen cedar fronds. Gerald broke off a fre
sh one from a low-hanging branch and crumbled it between his fingers, pressing the fragrant leaves to his nose and inhaling deeply of their scent, which he’d often done on his many wanders through the woods north of Capreol.
I think it’s getting infected.
Clayton was hunched over his leg, sitting with his back against the cedar’s trunk. He’d peeled off the dressing and was wincing at the mangle of torn skin hanging in jagged flaps over the two deep furrows in his calf. The mosquitoes had followed them into their shelter and Gerald swatted at one sucking at his neck while he looked over the wound.
Some staunchweed’d do it a world of good, he said, remembering the poultices his grandfather had used whenever he cut himself.
You got any handy?
It grows practically everywhere. Bound to be some around. Best thing for you now though is to get some rest.
Gerald lay down on the ground with hands behind his head and his eyes closed, though he was too wired to sleep.
Clayton stretched out beside him.
You think that man really was sick? he asked after a few breaths.
Sure looked it.
You think maybe that’s what happened? Why the power went out? A sickness of some sort.
I thought you said it was the Yanks.
No, it was Virgil thought it was the Yanks. Could have been a sickness just as likely. Plenty of those going around.
You say so.
Could have been them Earth Firsters, too. They’ve been threatening to shut her all down ever since all those islands disappeared in the South Pacific. Ah hell, it might just as well been them nanopreds.
Nanopreds?
Nanoscopic predators. You never heard of nanopreds?
I’d tell you if I had, Gerald said.
They’re these microscopic machines they, like, program to hunt vermin. Bugs and slugs and whatnot. They use them in farming and they also made these ones that target mosquito larvae.
Those ones mustn’t have worked too well, Gerald countered, swatting at one of the bloodsuckers feeding on his cheek.
Savage Gerry Page 8