Savage Gerry

by John Jantunen

  The ground at their feet was pebbled with stones overgrown with moss, a dried-up creek bed that for the past half hour had been leading them roughly northeast, or so said the compass that had come with the Car Buddy. The dawn had broken about the same time as they’d found the creek. Its light wasn’t yet strong enough to render the sky anything but a froth of milky white, but it was plenty bright for Gerald to locate a stone about the size and shape of a flattened mandarin orange amongst the rubble.

  Cinching it between his thumb and forefinger he stalked past Clayton, who had since become wise to Gerald’s game and had taken to staring back at the bird with a hungry lust tinged with the ecstasy of revenge.

  Don’t get too close now, he whispered when Gerald had come to within ten feet of the elm tree. You’ll startle it.

  Gerald ignored him. Grouse weren’t overly bright and once they’d found the safety of a higher perch, you could practically come close enough to grab them before they took flight again. He paused only when he’d come to within five feet of the bird, cocking his arm back and exhaling slow and steady as he might have done if he’d been holding a rifle instead of a rock, letting fly with the same easy stroke he’d have used skipping a stone.

  The rock struck the bird in the breast, knocking it from its perch even as it made a flustered attempt at flight, its one wing broken and useless and its other lashing about in frantic palpitations driving it downwards harder still. It had barely hit the ground, flopping about and squeaking like a rat caught in a trap, when Gerald was upon it. He grabbed it by the neck and wrung the life out of it with a quick jerk of his wrist.

  Afterwards they collected a half dozen stones apiece, pocketing five and each keeping one in their hand at the ever-ready. Gerald had also picked up a stick and as they forded along the creek bed they both used theirs to knock against passing tree trunks. In this way they startled four more birds from the undergrowth. Three of these also came to roost on a low hanging branch and he let Clayton have a first go at each of them. He missed with every throw and Gerald killed two of them the same way as he had the other. After Clayton missed again with the next, Gerald found a flat boulder about the height of a picnic table and set the three birds he’d killed on that. While he began the onerous task of plucking them without the benefit of a pot of boiling water he watched Clayton throw six stones at the last bird. It had come to roost on a branch in a beech tree not six feet off the ground and none of Clayton’s throws came close enough to give it any reason to depart.

  Use your stick, Gerald offered while Clayton stuffed his pockets with a few more rocks.

  What?

  Your stick. Walk up to it and knock it on the head.

  It’ll just fly away.

  Not if you make like you don’t see it. They ain’t overly bright. If it thinks you can’t see it, it’ll let you walk right up.

  Clayton grimaced his disbelief but turned back to the bird nonetheless. He approached it with delicate footsteps, his eyes averted to the ground, Gerald all the while watching after him, thinking about how he said he’d planned to set off into the wilds after he’d killed his stepfather and here him not even having enough sense to know how to hunt a grouse.

  When Clayton had come to within a few paces of the beech tree, he glanced back at Gerald, seeking reassurance. Gerald waved him on and he took one more step, his foot crack!ing over a fallen branch and the bird taking sudden flight. Clayton cursed, Shit!, and thrust after it with a vain swipe, striking his stick on the branch upon which it had sat, and that serving only to break off its end. The four-inch piece flew, pinwheeling, after the grouse, Gerald watching in disbelief as it hit one of the bird’s wings, knocking it off kilter and sending it reeling into the trunk of an oak tree.

  Clayton stumbled after it, chasing it in frenzied mimicry of its palsied flop over the ground, Gerald even then giving the bird ten-to-one odds that it would somehow end up coming out on top.

  20

  They found the tracks two days later with the sun fading towards evening, its shine broken into parallel shimmers along either rail, leading on a straight path through the forest.

  The mosquitoes that had plagued them most of the morning had relented to the day’s simmer though the deerflies never had. A horde of them buzzed in dive-bomber fashion about their heads and crawled into the drape of their shirts, Clayton flailing at them in mounting hysteria and then surging forward, limping as fast as his wounded leg would carry him down the tracks, as if he could outrun their menace. Gerald knew better and sufficed to swat at them as he ambled in pursuit.

  You ever seen so many deerflies? Clayton asked when he’d caught up with him.

  Just wait till we get to Capreol.

  They’s bad in Capreol?

  I once seen ’em carry off a dog who made the mistake of falling asleep on the porch, Gerald said. It was something his grandfather had often joked about. Last I saw of the dog was it disappearing over the treeline. They’s bad all right.

  Blueberries grew in wide swathes along the embankment and there were other berries too, sun-shrivelled raspberries and blackberries the size and shape of thimbles. They descended from the tracks at leisurely intervals, eating to their heart’s content and then starting off again in their weary trod. Clayton had filled his water bottle with the fruit and took gulps from this as he struggled along behind, Gerald stopping every few paces to let him catch up.

  How’s your leg holding out? he asked when he’d come into the shade of a rock cut. A trickle of rust-tinged water drained out of a crack in the granite’s wall and Gerald pressed his lips to it, slurping at the liquid tasting of dirt and leaving a coppery dryness in his mouth.

  Feels like the dressing’s full of broken glass.

  Clayton filled his bottle from the trickle and then shook it up with the berries. Its orange tint turned to blue and he gulped half of it down in one swoop and then filled the bottle again.

  How far you figure it’s to Capreol? he asked as he recapped the bottle.

  A fair ways yet. Three hundred kilometres, maybe more.

  I ain’t never going to make it on this leg.

  Gerald didn’t have much to say to that. He looked down the tracks to keep from seeing the despair in Clayton’s eyes.

  Why don’t you rest awhile, he said after a moment. I’ll see if I can’t find some more of that staunchweed.

  * * *

  He wasn’t more than a few hundred yards into the forest atop the rock cut when he caught sight of a flick of white. Looking up and seeing the tail end of a doe bounding off to the left with its jackrabbit hop, zigzagging across a meadow and forsaking the cover of trees as if its aim was something other than mere flight. Habit had Gerald scanning to the right, sighting at once another deer poised at the edge of the meadow. Its coat was darker than the first and it was smaller. An adolescent. It was frozen, statuesque, and staring straight at him, Gerald holding his breath and hearing Evers’s voice as clear as day.

  Why’d it just stand there like that? It’s almost like it wanted me to shoot it.

  He’d been five when he’d said it. They’d spent the morning creeping through the woods on the far side of The Ridge, not ten minutes north of their house. Evers was carrying the bow Gerald had made him and Gerald was unarmed except for the knife sheathed at his belt, for they weren’t after deer that day, weren’t after anything in particular except maybe a chance for Evers to make his first kill, a chipmunk or maybe a squirrel. The rustle of leaves at their feet had startled a doe from its graze. Evers had brought the bow to bear, drawing back the arrow notched in its string, but before he could release, Gerald had set his hand on the boy’s shoulder, stilling him and pointing to the other deer, not more than twenty paces hence. Evers had swung around, sighting on it and inhaling one long slow breath, as his father had taught him. Just before he was to release, Gerald had grabbed at the arrow, staying the shot. The deer had bounded away a
nd Evers had looked up at him, frowning in petulant dismay.

  What are you doing? he scowled. I had it in my sights.

  Oh, I know, Gerald consoled. But that bow ain’t strong enough to kill a deer. Probably just have wounded it and that wouldn’t have been fair to the deer.

  But if I’d wounded it, Evers countered, you could’ve chased it down. You done it before, ain’t ya?

  How’d you know about that? For he’d never once mentioned it to the boy.

  Mom told me all about it.

  She did, did she?

  Said you lit after it one time when you was hiking on the other side of the lake. She said she thought you’d abandoned her in the woods, you were gone so long. Said she was some mad—

  Mad, hell. She was fixing to skin me alive.

  An hour or some later she heard you whistling. When she finally tracked you down, you were carrying the deer over your shoulder.

  I was carrying the deer over my shoulder? That what she said?

  Uh huh.

  Well, your mother does tend to exaggerate.

  While they were walking home Evers had asked him about the second deer.

  Why’d it just stand there like that? It’s almost like it wanted me to shoot it.

  No, it weren’t that. It just thought you’d go after his mother. I’da guess that’s why she was making such a ruckus while she run away.

  You’da guess?

  I don’t know for sure. I ain’t read it in no book or nothing. Just something I’ve noticed over the years.

  The boy had thought on that.

  Just like that grouse we saw the one time, he’d said after a moment.

  Gerald had nodded, knowing exactly what he’d meant.

  One morning, that same spring, they’d been walking up the trail to the lake and it had swooped past them, clipping Gerald on the arm, and then diving onto the path not five feet ahead, thrashing about like it had a broken wing. Evers had chased after it, just like Clayton had, except it wasn’t really wounded, it was just playing at being hurt. The proof of that Gerald found in a sudden flurry of wings from the bush: a mother grouse and several of her chicks taking flight. As soon as they were safely out of sight, the other had made a miraculous recovery and flown off too, a few scant inches from Evers’s grasping hands.

  It’s just the way of things, Gerald had concluded. Ain’t no mystery to it. In nature, parents’ll often sacrifice themselves to save their young. That’s the way it should be. Hell, I’d do the same for you.

  The boy was looking up at him like maybe he didn’t quite believe what he’d said but when he spoke Gerald knew he had something else on his mind.

  I hope it never comes to that, he said and Gerald had laughed.

  You and me both.

  A sudden shame now at the memory, flushing heat at his cheeks, thinking of how he wasn’t there when Evers had needed him most, twice over now. The first after he’d shot Ellis Wilkes for the sin of killing Millie, and him and the boy had fled with reckless abandon into the northern wilds. Regardless of the story he’d told that Jordan Asche fellow during his incarceration, the nine months he’d spent on the run from the law had cemented in his mind as a form of mania — a monomaniacal flight from all reason and hope save for the promise of one more meal, one last sunset. A fragile paucity of minor triumphs that couldn’t have led to anything other than insurmountable defeat, the full scope of which had haunted every one of the nights he’d spent locked in his cell at Central North, cursing himself from dusk to dawn for his vainglorious pursuit of the impossible.

  The second, five years later, stuck in a prison cell as the world teetered on the brink of what, he couldn’t exactly say, except it was plenty bad — maybe even The End — and his son out there to face it all alone.

  His hand reached, as if by instinct, for the photo strung around his neck. Looking down at the picture and seeing Evers on the birthday rock, so fierce and wild. Hearing then someone calling out his name. A frantic dispatch that seemed to have sprung from his own addled thoughts, calling him towards home.

  He heard a thin rustle and when he looked up again he caught the young deer’s tail end darting into cover of the woods and he grit his teeth, his legs bent like springs, as if he meant to chase it down like the one he had before.

  Gerald!

  It was clearer this time and coming quite distinctly from behind him. When he turned around, Clayton was waving to him from the edge of the scrub.

  I got us a lift! he hollered.

  A what? Gerald yelled back.

  A ride. Come on, man, they ain’t going to wait all day!

  * * *

  By the time Gerald came back onto the top of the rock cut, Clayton was limping down its far slope towards the tracks. Gerald trailed after him, approaching the rock cut’s edge with stilted caution, craning his head ever so slightly forward and looking down at the tracks.

  A white pick-up truck was parked just below, the kind with retractable train wheels so it could drive right onto the rails. It had CN decaled in red on its front door and in the driver’s seat there was a man leaning his arm out the window. He was in his forties and had an auburn beard almost as full as Gerald’s and was wearing a camouflage hunting suit and a green wide-brimmed hat, could have been a Tilley. At the back of the truck was another man, younger than the first and with a neatly trimmed blond beard. He was wearing the same outfit except for a ball cap, also with a camo design, and was standing at the open tailgate, offering Clayton his hand. Clayton took that and let himself be pulled up onto the truck’s bed. On its floor there was a large beaver alongside four ducks but it was towards the rifle in the younger man’s other hand that Gerald’s attention had become fixed. It looked to be a .303 and had a scope and a stock of some dark wood, maybe walnut.

  After he’d helped Clayton into the back, the man looked up at Gerald looking down, appraising what must have appeared to him to be some sort of crazed surfer bum, such was what the dire squint that had come into his eyes told Gerald anyway. He’d since shifted the rifle into his arms, cradling it not unlike a soldier standing at ease, keeping his finger near the trigger, on guard against the possibility of a threat hitherto unrevealed.

  21

  Any reservations Gerald had about the man’s intentions were put to rest by the time the truck had resumed its travels.

  As it picked up speed, Gerald settled onto one of the wheel hubs in the open truck bed beside the dead ducks. He quickly surmised that the man was halfway blind and squinted as a matter of course like he was fighting a constant battle to keep whatever he was looking at in focus.

  He lounged in a casual slouch against the cab, with the rifle propped beside, and the moment the truck was underway he took a pack of smokes from the breast pocket of his shirt. Lighting a cigarette, he offered the pack to Clayton, who took one with the eager fumble of an addict, and then to Gerald, who waved him off.

  So where you two coming from? the man asked with his first exhale.

  Up, uh, Midland way, Clayton answered. We was, uh, working there.

  After lighting his cigarette, he’d laid down on the floor with his head propped up on the beaver and puffed away with the idle delight of someone spending a leisurely day at the beach.

  You heard about the train all the way up in Midland? the man asked.

  The train? Clayton asked right back. What train?

  You ain’t heard about the train?

  No. We’s just walking the tracks, trying to get back home.

  And where’s that?

  Clayton opened his mouth and Gerald gave him a subtle nudge with his foot and an even more subtle shake of his head.

  Uh, Clayton said stuttering. N-North Bay. It was the only place he could think of. I got family up there.

  If you’re going to North Bay then you’re on the wrong tracks.

  These tr
acks don’t go to North Bay?

  Not unless you’re taking the scenic route.

  Shoot. We must have taken a wrong turn.

  You don’t want to go to North Bay anyhow.

  And why’s that?

  You heard about the Pickering plant?

  Of course we heard about the Pickering plant. Have to be living under a rock not to hear about that. What’s that got to do with North Bay?

  Army diverted all traffic up Highway 11. After what happened on the 400.

  That was a real shit-show, huh?

  That’s one word for it.

  The man shook his head at the thought, smoking for a time in solemn contemplation.

  Across from Gerald the forest broke into a lowland swamp. The tops of trees — spruce mostly — poked through the water’s murk around the cross-thatched dome of a beaver lodge. As they passed it by there was a sudden flapping of wings and the man snapped to attention, bringing the rifle to bear at his shoulder, squinting through its scope then relaxing, seeing it was only a heron. It laboured towards the sky as heron always do, with its contradictory mix of anxious perturbulance and casual grace, the two reconciling somewhere between the swift thrust of its wings and the gangly dangle to its legs.

  No, the man said, watching the heron swoop over the treeline and out of sight. I’d say you’re about better off anywhere other than North Bay right now.

  Exceptin’ maybe Toronto.

  The man looking up with a crinkled smile, finding some sort of consolation there.

  I’d guess you’re right about that.

  They puffed on their cigarettes for a while and when he was exhaling his last, Clayton asked, You were saying something about a train?

  It was me and Brett who found it, the man answered, pride swelling his voice. Brett, that’s my brother. Say hello, Brett.