Savage Gerry

by John Jantunen

  The driver gave a cursory wave through the cab’s window and the man continued.

  Found it, oh about three weeks ago now, when we was hunting. Had a neighbour worked for the CN. Told him about it. Larry, that’s my neighbour’s name, he’s the one who got it running and drove it up to the crossroads where it’s parked now. This is his truck. He lets us use it any time we want. Heck of a guy. We elected him quartermaster. Anything you need, you just ask him. I’ll introduce you when we get there.

  And when’ll that be?

  Fifteen, twenty minutes. Not long. Wait till you see it. I never could have imagined such a thing was even impossible.

  How’s that?

  Offering a devilish grin.

  I wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise. You’ll see.

  Clayton took a last drag of his cigarette and ground it out on the floor.

  You got a doctor there? he asked with eager eyes.

  No, the army took all the doctors. But we scrounged up a couple of nurses. Even built a hospital for them.

  I’d sure like someone to take a look at my leg.

  I was going to ask about that.

  I think maybe it’s getting infected.

  Clayton had sat up and was unwinding the creep vines, removing the bark cast. The camomile leaves had become plastered to the wound and, wincing, he peeled them away. His calf was swollen to almost double its size and yellow puss was oozing from the ragged gash, the flesh a fiery red fading into a deep purple towards the knee.

  It’s infected all right, the man said.

  Burns like the devil.

  You get bit by a dog or something?

  No— Clayton cast Gerald a skittish look that could have only meant trouble. A bear.

  A bear?

  A big old grizzly. Come upon me when I was sleeping. He glanced back at Gerald, who was glaring at him with mounting hostility though that hardly quieted his mouth. I guess it was looking for a midnight snack. Tried to take a chunk out of me.

  This was up in Midland?

  Just outside.

  Ain’t no grizzlies Midland way, far as I know.

  Then I— I guess it must have been a black. I— I don’t know. It was pretty dark. All I know is I was woke up by something biting into my leg, dragging me into the bush. Next thing, G— uh, J-Jason here was up on top of it, plunging his knife into its eye. Killed it too with just the one stab.

  He killed it with a knife, you say?

  The man was squinting over at Gerald again, his pupils pulsating in rapid dilations, trying to get a fix on the other as if Gerald had given in to the sudden urge to jump up and lunge out of the truck, though the only thing moving about him at all was his jaw muscles, contracting in ligatures as taut as an elastic band about to snap.

  Clayton too was staring at Gerald, his mouth hanging open, as if he was trying to think what he could say to get himself out of the mess he might have just made for them. But the man didn’t seem to have drawn any undue conclusions between the stranger sitting on the wheel hub and the story his friend was telling. He clicked his teeth, shaking his head, and looked back at Clayton’s leg. The wound was bad enough that it wasn’t hard to imagine that a bear had done it. His hand was then reaching into his pocket and drawing out the pack of smokes.

  He lit one and held the pack out to Clayton. Clayton took another and inserted it in his mouth, craning forward to let the other light it and peeking back at Gerald, finding some comfort in how the other was leaning back with his arms folded and his eyelids shut.

  Sounds like you two’ve had one helluva time, the man said, easing his back up against the cab, the cigarette drooping out of the corner of his mouth, a pencil sketch of smoke rising from its ember and narrowing his eyes to slits.

  Clayton drew heavy on his cigarette.

  You sure as hell don’t have to tell me.

  22

  Gerald had almost fallen asleep to the truck’s gentle clackety-clack.

  He was shocked into wakefulness by the loud blast from a horn. The sun was glaring at him full-faced when he opened his eyes and he brought up his arm to shield them from its bright.

  As the truck slowed to a gliding stop, a woman’s voice rose in virulent chastisement.

  Brett Townsend, it scolded, you almost made me pee my pants!

  The forest had relented into a field of scrub and low-lying bushes, a lone trunk standing above them, its branches spindly and charred so that Gerald knew a fire had once raged here sometime in the not-too-distant past. Maybe twenty paces from the tracks, knee-deep in a thicket of blueberries, stood a woman wearing tan slacks and a matching turtleneck. The grey mesh of a bug hat mostly concealed her face but the frail croak to her voice and the way she stood half-stooped over with her hands contemptuously pinioned on either hip hinted at her advanced years. Beside her crouched a young girl, no older than four, dressed in a pair of pink shorts and a pink frilly shirt embroidered with a unicorn. Her hands and mouth were stained blue and a dribble of the same was running down her chin. She was staring over at the truck with something akin to genuine alarm.

  Better you pee your pants, Brett said, than being food for the wolves.

  Wolves?

  There was a pack sighting on you through the trees when we pulled up. Five or six at least. Every one of them looking hungrier than the last.

  The woman’s face blanched and she spun on a hard pivot, Gerald following her alarm to the treeline, two hundred yards hence, and seeing nothing but the sun prickling at the ragged spires of the evergreens.

  Lucky we came by, Brett was saying as the woman turned back. You’d have been food for the wolves for sure.

  The woman was shaking her head, onto his game.

  Don’t you got anything better to do than scare the living daylights out of an old woman? she said. I ought to put you over my knee.

  Don’t you tease me now, Ella, Brett joked.

  Gerald couldn’t see the old woman’s expression but he imagined it was somewhere between utter contempt and shameful delight. The girl beside her was bent over, stuffing her mouth with blueberries, and that at least gave the woman a reason to look away.

  Slow down, Bridgette, she urged, you’re going to give yourself the runs.

  The truck lurched slightly forward, Brett shifting it into gear.

  You need a lift back? he called over.

  We just got here. The old woman had knelt and was getting set to return to her own forage. If you’re heading back this way in a half hour or so …

  I’ll see you then, Brett said, adding as he applied the gas:

  Mind them wolves now, you hear.

  23

  The truck slowed again as it rounded a bend.

  There she is! the younger man called out.

  He’d turned to face the front and Clayton clambered up beside him hopping on his one good foot as if he was worried that with the dressing off, his leg would no longer be able to support his weight. He leaned against the cab, soaking in the view and whistling his amaze through the gap in his front teeth.

  You got to see this, he said cocking his head at a half turn towards Gerald though Gerald had a pretty good view of it from where he sat.

  The tracks continued in their westward arc for a few hundred paces hence. Where they straightened out there was a freight car, the first in a ceaseless train spanning the distance towards the horizon. On the left, which was the direction Gerald was facing, there was another field much like the one they’d just passed, though its blueberry bramble had since been remade into a garbage dump. Within its ten or so acres, mounds of refuse rose in staggered pyramids, most of them fashioned out of brightly coloured plastics, bottles and sundry containers, the tallest maybe eight feet high, and covered with blue or orange tarps to secure them against the wind. There was a wall of brand-new tires stacked in six-foot pillars and another
wall of cardboard boxes bearing the name Maytag stacked two by two on top of each other and ten boxes deep, and yet another wall of smaller boxes alternately stencilled Sony and with the black Apple logo. A cluster of brand-new mountain bikes, all of them with white frames and spelling out CCM in blue letters, were propped in rows against a multitude of chrome barbecues. Beside those there was a pile of what looked to be surfboards wrapped in cellophane, another of what appeared to be ornate stone fountains, and other heaps of assorted goods too numerous to absorb in such a few short moments. It looked like the backlot of a Walmart on delivery day, such was the impression that it made on Gerald, and at first he thought that was what Clayton must have meant.

  Except Clayton was looking the other way.

  As the truck slowed to a stop Gerald swivelled his head towards the east to see what had marvelled Clayton so. The forest there had been clear-cut, leaving only a dozen or so blue spruce at intervals standing in solitary vigil over what looked to be a refugee camp for derelict RVs and buses, about a hundred of which were spread out over the twenty or thirty acres of cleared land, all of it teeming with the industry of its thousand or so inhabitants. There were about twice as many tents scattered among the vehicles, most of a design and colour — sky blue — that suggested they’d come out of the same box. Towards the rear, at the receding and greatly diminished treeline, someone was building what appeared to be a gazebo, one man standing in its newly erected trusses and another man on the ground, passing him a board from a stack of lumber. He could hear the stuttered knock of a hammer as the man nailed the board to the gazebo’s roof, elevated above the general sort of restless murmur one could expect from so many people living in such close proximity. Mingled with their din: the caustic blare of hard rock from a speaker beside a man suntanning on the roof of his motorhome, the bark of dogs tied to staked lines and the playful snarl of the ones left free, the latter fighting in swirling packs like whirlpools of fur and teeth, their revelry muted by the buzz of chainsaws from somewhere out of view and the low grumble of quads and side-by-sides winding through the ever-shifting maze of people.

  On the far northern side of the encampment there was what looked to be a pond, fifty yards deep and almost as wide. As the truck pulled to a stop at the first of the railcars blocking its way, Gerald could see that it wasn’t a pond at all, it was a field of solar panels much like the one they had outside of Capreol, though this one was only about a tenth its size. And what had looked like solitary blue spruce, he now recognised as solar generators too, the kind designed to look like thirty-foot Christmas trees, just one of which, he’d heard, was capable of powering an entire household — a feat that spoke as much to humankind’s ingenuity as the teeming industry of the refugee camp itself.

  It was all too much to take in at a single glance (or a dozen) and Gerald sat in stunned wonder as the younger man hopped over the truck’s side and strode towards its rear. He was just popping the tailgate open when a boy, maybe five, appeared from within the drape of an orange and blue tie-dyed curtain hanging over the open door at the back of the freight car five feet from the truck’s front bumper. He had close-cropped brown hair and was naked save for a pair of swim shorts and a diving mask and was holding a jar of peanut butter cradled to his chest, a metal spoon clutched in his other hand. He hadn’t been standing there for more than a second before he turned back to the freight container, calling out, Daddy’s home!

  The man looked up, beaming at his son.

  Hey Bud, he called to him, what you got there?

  The boy stepped to the edge of the freight car’s stoop, stuck the spoon in the jar of peanut butter and held it up, as happy as a kid at Christmas.

  It’s peanut butter!

  Peanut butter?

  They opened a whole car of it. Enough for everyone. Sophie even got one.

  That right? Is it the crunchy or the smooth?

  Crunchy.

  Oh, I like the crunchy. They find any saltines?

  What’s a saltee?

  It’s a cracker.

  The boy thought hard on that for a moment, then turned back and shouted into the open door.

  Mom, they find any saltees?

  After a moment he turned back.

  Mom said they didn’t find any saltees.

  That’s a shame. Nothing goes better with peanut butter than saltines.

  The boy didn’t have anything to say to that and pried the spoon loose from the jar. It was covered with a thick dollop of the spread and the boy stuck it in his mouth, sucking at it as he might have at a lollipop.

  Clayton had since hopped onto the open tailgate and the man was offering him his hand, helping him down. Brett had joined them and while he grabbed a duck in either hand, he passed a clipped glance over at Gerald, who was now standing, stretching out his back and trying not to read anything undue — recognition, perhaps — in the way the man shied away from meeting his eyes.

  I’m going to get these to Lottie, Brett said to his brother. I’ll be back for the beaver.

  Gerald watched him struggling over the rail bed’s loose gravel, thinking that if the man didn’t look back, that’d mean he hadn’t recognized Gerald after all.

  Wendy, Brett said in greeting as he passed by the foot of the ladder leading into his brother’s freight car.

  There was a woman now standing at the open door. She was in her early thirties, slightly younger than Brett’s brother and pretty and thin except for the unnaturally crimson hue to her cheeks — a rash of some sort — and the pregnancy bump pressing out against her summer dress’s floral design. Beside her, a toddler wearing nothing but a saggy diaper was straining under the weight of the peanut butter jar in her hand, a mess of the brown goop plastered over her face and hands.

  Can you ask Lottie if she has a recipe for duck that goes with peanut butter? Wendy called after her brother-in-law with a smile that seemed a little too earnest.

  Brett turned towards her, raising a duck and pointing a recriminating finger.

  Don’t you even think of giving her any ideas, he said a little too stern, though there was already a smile cracking the corners of his frown as he craned his head a touch more, casting one last ominous glance back at Gerald before hurrying off, out of sight.

  24

  The hospital was on the far north side of the camp.

  The younger brother had produced a wheelbarrow and pushed Clayton in that. As they walked along the mud-rutted path beside the tracks, more a wagon trail than a proper road, he greeted everyone they met with a broad smile and nod. Most answered him with a quiet deference — nods of their own and shy smiles — and a few called out in passing, Devon! In this way Gerald and Clayton came to know his name and also that he’d assumed a position of some prominence amongst his fellow refugees, as likely because of his unwavering affability as because he was one of the camp’s founders.

  All the freight cars they passed had also been converted into domiciles. Laundry lines were strung between most of them and extension cords snaked through drilled holes in their steel frames. Emanating from each were all the sounds one might expect in any busy household: the insistent cry of babies, the sprightly banter from a children’s cartoon and the rat-a-tat-tat of videogame gunfire, the hushed patter of voices gossiping over coffee, the oddly out-of-place domesticity of a vacuum cleaner’s buzz. There was hardly anything at all in the constituency of its parts to suggest calamity but as Gerald trailed behind Clayton and Devon the whole of it spoke to a catastrophe well beyond any attempt at a sober reckoning.

  There’s Larry now, Devon said as they approached a white freight car, the first of a dozen in a row, the gentle hum of their fans telling Gerald they were refrigerated.

  The simmer of grilling meat infused with hickory smoke drew Gerald’s attention to a thin and pale man, sixty or so, wearing a black ball cap with CN embroidered in red on its front and flipping steaks on a charc
oal barbecue at the foot of the ladder leading into the refrigerator car. A woman, about the same age, was sitting on a garden bench a few feet past under the shade of a patio umbrella zip-tied to the bench’s back. She was wearing a simple tan dress and keeping one eye on the page of the hardcover book in her lap and the other on a toddler in a one-piece and bucket hat who was trying to wrestle a knotted rope away from a growling pug.

  Hey Larry, Devon called out and when the woman looked up from her book, smiling as warm as if she was greeting a favourite grandchild, he added, Afternoon, Chris.

  She went back to reading her book and Larry turned squinting towards them.

  Looks like you might have brought some weather with you, he said.

  Devon glanced back the way they’d come. Sure enough a vanguard of black clouds was amassing just above the treeline on either side of the tracks and the stiffening breeze brought with it the inchoate smell of rain.

  At least it ain’t the only thing I brung, he answered.

  He’d set the wheelbarrow down and was reaching for the duck he’d slung over the wheelbarrow’s handles.

  Ain’t she a beauty, Larry said as he passed it over.

  Well, you said you were getting sick of eating steak.

  You got that right. We opened another carful this morning.

  More Leadbetter’s?

  Yeah. Having a sale on them. Buy one, get one hundred for free. You need any?

  I already got six defrosted in my fridge.

  What about your friends? Then looking from Clayton to Gerald: You hungry?

  I’m about half-starved, Clayton said.

  Well boy have I got the cure for that.

  He forked one of the steaks onto a cardboard plate and added to that a cob of corn still in its husk from the stack piled on the grill behind the meat.

  Sorry, we don’t have any butter for the corn, he said as he passed it over.

  But that was the last thing on Clayton’s mind. He’d picked up the steak in his bare hands and was already three bites in before Larry handed another plate to Gerald.