Savage Gerry

by John Jantunen

  They the mesquite again? Devon asked, seemingly to pass the time.

  No, the hickory.

  Oh, I like the hickory.

  Larry was shaking his head, mirthful, watching the two men devour the steaks.

  God, they really are half-starved.

  They should be. They walked in from Midland.

  Midland? They heard about the train all the way down there?

  They say they were just walking the tracks. This one’s Jason, and he’s— I never did get your name.

  Clayton, he answered, stuffing the last of the steak in his mouth and tearing at the cob’s husk. Clayton Crisp.

  Larry had forked another steak from the grill and was dropping it on the plate in Clayton’s lap.

  God they’s good, Clayton said.

  Plenty more where that came from.

  Larry gave Gerald another too and even before Gerald had taken his first bite he was thinking about the four still on the grill.

  Plenty of corn too. Then turning to Devon: I could fill the wheelbarrow up for you.

  I got a dozen still.

  What about coleslaw?

  When’d you get coleslaw.

  Opened a car a couple of hours ago.

  Is it the creamy or the Dixie?

  Dixie?

  The one with the bigger chunks? And sometimes carrots?

  That’s the one.

  I only like the creamy.

  What about Texas toast?

  What’s that?

  It’s garlic toast wrapped in tinfoil. You cook it on the barbecue.

  You find any spaghetti sauce?

  Not yet.

  Nothing better with garlic toast than spaghetti.

  Ain’t that the truth.

  You’ll tell me if any comes in?

  You’ll be the first to know.

  * * *

  Larry had given each another steak and cob of corn for the way.

  Gerald had finished the former and was starting on the latter as they passed two water trucks parked on the far side of the path leading along the tracks. The first was dispensing water to a lineup of people carrying jugs and the second had a firefighter’s hose leading into a building fashioned out of chinked logs and labelled with a sign that read Showers. Beyond these there was a row of porta-potties — a dozen in all — and those more than anything lent the place a festival-like atmosphere. Thinking that recalled to Gerald how he’d thought the same thing when he’d first come into the prison’s field after being freed from his cell, and look how that had turned out. Each subsequent step increased his dread at even pace with the certainty that there had to be a catch here somewhere. With Brett’s ominous glance so fresh in his mind, he got to thinking that maybe the only catch was simply that there was no place at the settlement for him.

  Clayton had said something, Gerald didn’t catch what, and Devon was answering, We got a saying around here, Just ask and the train shall provide. Those solar panels were in one car and them solar spruce in another. And you see where they’s building that gazebo?

  He pointed towards the rear of the camp.

  It came out of a car too. There was fifty of them, which seemed kind of useless at the time and then someone got the idea that if you put a few of them together they’d be perfect as a bandstand. We’re going to have a concert come Saturday. Already got a half dozen acts signed up.

  Shoot, I’d like to see that, Clayton enthused.

  Well you’re going to, come Saturday.

  I can’t believe you did this in a few short weeks.

  Just people helping people, that’s all it is.

  They’d come to a T in the path. One way continued on along the tracks past the solar pond and the other turned right, leading past a row of RVs on its way to a green canvas tent with a large red cross painted on its peaked roof. The tracks beyond the T split into two lines as well, one running parallel to the other. The outer one was all freight cars and the inner one just four black cylinders, petroleum most likely. Two soldiers tethering a German shepherd on a lead were walking their way and several others were stationed on top of the containers, standing watch at intervals.

  Seeing them, Clayton clenched his knapsack tight to his chest, no doubt thinking about what the old man with the dog had warned what a soldier was likely to do with someone caught looting.

  What’s with the soldiers? he whispered as Devon turned the wheelbarrow towards the hospital tent.

  They showed up a couple of weeks ago, said they’d come to protect the fuel.

  Protect it? Protect it from who?

  They didn’t say.

  A fella we ran into said half the army was down the road a stretch.

  They set up in Parry Sound. They got a refugee camp there for all them people fleeing Toronto. Most of them were pretty sick with the radiation, far as I heard.

  You seen it?

  Devon shook his head.

  No, but I’ve met plenty of people who have. More than enough to know I’d never want to.

  They trundled on, none of them talking until Devon had pushed the wheelbarrow up to the two closed flaps at the front of the hospital tent.

  Here we are, he said, raising the wheelbarrow’s handles to allow Clayton to wriggle out.

  You’re okay taking it from here? he said, turning to Gerald.

  Gerald nodded and Clayton, wiping his hands on his shirt, reached out, grabbing him by the arm to support himself.

  If you need anything else, Devon said as he spun the wheelbarrow around, you know where to find me.

  25

  Just inside the flaps, cordoned off with a sheet of green canvas, was a waiting room big enough to house ten folding chairs, all of them empty, and a small desk painted a metallic grey, in the chair behind which sat a woman in green scrubs. She looked about the same age as Clayton — barely out of her teens — her youth further evidenced by a pimple she’d picked to a scab at the corner of her mouth. Otherwise her skin had a milky white complexion, unblemished except for a smattering of caramel-coloured freckles on either cheek. Her long chestnut hair was woven into a thick braid and when they came in she was picking through the loose fray of it for split ends, snipping the ones she found with a pair of surgical scissors.

  Setting the scissors aside, she looked up at them with a mild diffidence but even that was enough for Clayton to forsake any and all pretence of infirmity. He surged away from Gerald, swiping the rabbit-eared hat from his head and running his hand through the greasy mat of his hair in a vain effort to smooth its tangle. The nurse shrunk a little in her seat as he approached, grimacing at him, no doubt the same as she would have if a guy like Clayton Crisp had the audacity to ask her to the high school prom.

  Clayton didn’t seem to register her disdain, or if he did he was used to that kind of reaction from the opposite sex such that it had long ceased to bother him.

  Devon said you’d take a look at my leg, he said.

  Gerald watched as the nurse craned forward ever so slightly and her frown deepened, no doubt as much a result of catching sight of the wound as by the fecundity of the body odour emanating from Clayton. She wiped her nose as if with a sudden urge to sneeze as she settled back in her chair, taking up a pen from the desk and brushing off a few snipped hairs from the piece of paper on the clipboard in front of her.

  Your name? she asked.

  Clayton. Clayton Crisp. That’s Crisp with a C.

  She wrote it down, the very act seeming to restore to her a professionalism suitable to her vocation, for when she looked back up her expression had resumed the diffidence with which she’d greeted their entrance.

  And you were bit? she asked.

  That right. By a b— Cutting himself off short and then leaning in closer, lowering his voice a tad. I was a bit by a dog. A big old German shepherd.

&n
bsp; And when was this?

  Three nights ago.

  And have you treated the wound since?

  He did. Motioning towards Gerald. Used what he called staunchweed.

  The nurse looked up from her scribble, appraising the man standing just inside the flaps. She seemed to find him as lacking as the man standing before her.

  Staunchweed, she said, with a dismissive upward lilt to her voice as she wrote it down.

  Then:

  Are you allergic to anything?

  Ate a batch of mussels one time and my face swelled up like a balloon.

  But no medications?

  Oh, no.

  Writing that down too and then standing with the clipboard, turning towards the flaps in the back of the tent and motioning for Clayton to follow.

  The moment they were gone, Gerald slipped out the front door.

  The sun had disappeared beyond the bank of charcoal clouds billowing in from the south and there was a warm breeze blowing in from the same, carrying with it the now distinct smell of rain on asphalt. An elderly couple walking a black Lab on a leash passed by and this was followed by a young couple swinging a three-year-old boy by the arms between them and an elderly Black man with a towel slung over his shoulder, naked save for flip-flops, purple trunks and a matching swim cap. All of them nodded to Gerald, who returned the gesture even as his gaze roved over the camp, not looking for anything in particular until it had settled on a group of four men standing at the tracks where the road divided in two, knowing then that was what he’d been searching for all along.

  Brett was foremost among the men and he was pointing towards the hospital. He wasn’t looking at Gerald but two of the other men were, each casting specious glances his way and then turning back to the fourth man. He was dressed all in blue and elsewise nodding with the formal countenance of a cop as Brett spoke in urgent bursts. Gerald couldn’t hear what he was saying and had no way to confirm that they were even talking about him but given the solemnity instilled in the bob of the cop’s head it might just as well have been, Way I heard, he’s a stone-cold killer, as likely to shoot you in the head as give you the time of day.

  The cop nodding again and setting his hand on Brett’s shoulder, maybe answering, If it is him you’re lucky to still be alive, that’s for sure. And one thing else is for sure, he isn’t likely to come quiet. We got to be smart about this.

  The three men listening with rapt nods of their own so it wasn’t hard to imagine the cop feeding them instructions on how to best go about apprehending such a violent man as Savage Gerry, the first of which would be to go fetch their rifles, maybe round up a few other people.

  We’ll meet back at the bandstand in, oh, five minutes.

  The men were already turning away when the cop said something else, his hands moving in a downward suppressing motion so it could very well have been, And whatever you do, keep it on the down-low, you hear?

  Brett and the other two men stalked away along the row of freight cars, picking up speed with every step. A young boy ran past them, heading the other way. All of a sudden he tripped, falling right in front of the cop. The officer responded by helping the boy up, dusting off his shirt before sending him on his way with a friendly pat on the head, and with the lawman momentarily distracted, Gerald ducked back into the waiting room.

  He stood just inside the flaps, breathing hard and his eyes darting about, finding the desk empty and then striding on a straight line for the flaps leading into the back. He hadn’t made it halfway there before they opened and the pretty young nurse appeared from within, her expression startling at the man surging towards her, everything about him seeming to suggest he was about to attack her. Gerald catching the look of fright and stopping short, swallowing hard and catching her off guard with the joviality of his tone.

  I was just going to check on my friend, is that okay?

  Nurse Maddox is still with him, she answered, putting the desk unmistakably between herself and Gerald. It’ll just be a few minutes. You can see him then.

  * * *

  The nurse disappeared back through the flaps shortly after, maybe spooked by Gerald’s restless jitter.

  He’d tried sitting in one of the chairs, acting all casual, but hadn’t managed that for more than a few seconds. An increasingly dire scenario was playing out in his thoughts and that had driven him back to his feet. Standing at the flaps and peeking out through a crack, not seeing anything to prove him right but thinking nevertheless, It’ll be any moment now.

  Tracking in his angst the likely progress of the posse he was certain was then amassing at the bandstand, six or seven men all with rifles and the cop with his sidearm, the latter charting the plan with a stick in the dirt.

  We’ll station two men around back, in case he tries to escape. Another here — drawing an X on one side of the tent — and one man here. The rest of us will go in the front. I’ll take the lead.

  Standing back up then, taking out his gun and checking the cartridge, not to make sure it’s loaded — he already knows it is — but because it lends the necessary imperative to what he has to say next.

  This is a dangerous man, a real psycho. He killed three men in cold blood already, two of them peace officers. If we don’t do this right, we could be looking at a hostage situation, so if you see a shot, you take it. That understood?

  All the men nodding with solemn expressions suitable to their task.

  All right then, let’s go!

  Gerald so certain about his impending doom that he turned towards the rear of the camp, looking for any sign to tell him he was right. The bandstand was hidden behind the haphazard maze of RVs and tents and he couldn’t tell if they were marching away from that or not. Otherwise he saw no evidence to either confirm or deny his suspicions and yet that only gave him further cause for worry.

  You can see him now.

  Gerald jerked his head towards the nurse.

  She was standing behind the desk, her hands on the back of the chair, her fingers drumming a nervous patter on its wooden frame, looking ever so much like someone who’d been briefed on the situation and was sent back in to maintain the illusion that everything was still on the up and up.

  Could be they were waiting to grab him the moment he stepped through the flaps, or maybe they’d just start shooting.

  Telling himself, If they really were back there, they’d have never sent the girl. They’d have just shot you through the flaps.

  That not seeming too likely either.

  If they missed or the bullets tore right through him, there was nothing but a thin layer of canvas to stop them from hitting someone in the camp. The cop would’ve thought of that.

  No, they’d be lying in wait for you outside. Hell, they probably already are.

  Nodding to himself even though the whole thing was seeming more far-fetched with every passing breath, all there was to tell him it wasn’t just his imagination running wild being the race of his heart and the sudden impulse to lunge through the tent flaps, come what may.

  You want to see him or not?

  The nurse was looking at him like she could read his thoughts and Gerald gave her a pinched smile as he moved on quickening legs towards the back of the waiting room. He burst through the flaps into a much larger space. The front half of it had been sectioned off into cubicles made out of the same green canvas as the tent, three to a side. Beyond these there was an open area lined with beds resembling army cots. All the ones he could see were empty and the spaces between cluttered with a wide array of medical equipment, a defibrillator and saline bags on poles, heart rate monitors and a refrigerator. It was the back wall of the tent he was most interested in though and he stalked past the examination cubicles, trying to divine if there was another way out.

  He could hear a phlegmatic cough from the first of the cubicles, eclipsed by the reassuring croak of an old wom
an’s voice.

  You’re doing great, honey. Get it all up. You’ll feel better when you do.

  From the cubicle across the hallway there rose then the voice of another woman carrying a much sterner demeanour.

  I don’t care when the last time was you had a shower, you’re not to get out of that bed until I say so and that’s an order.

  She’d hardly finished when the last curtain on the left opened and a woman backed out from within. She was wearing a stethoscope and a doctor’s lab coat and had a thick wash of starch-white hair pulled back into a ponytail. That and the folds of deeply tanned skin wrinkling her face into a desertscape placed her age anywhere between sixty and seventy-five, though there was something decidedly more youthful about her than that. Her eyes maybe, the brilliant bluish-green of a tropical sea undiminished by the passage of time, and also the spring to her step as she intercepted Gerald on his way past.

  You must be Jason, she smiled. And then she did look her age, her teeth yellowed and streaked with brown, and the unmistakable musk of a body in decay about her.

  Uh, Gerald said, confused for a minute and then remembering. Yes. Jason, that’s me.

  Your friend’s been asking for you.

  Looking downwards at him, for she was a tall woman, approaching six feet. The gentle, almost shy, curl of her lips and the strand of hair in a casual drape about her cheeks again lent her the impression of a much younger woman. She set her hand on Gerald’s arm and opened her mouth as if to say something when a violent fit of coughing erupted from across the hall.

  Nurse! the old woman’s voice called out. Nurse!

  Excuse me.

  Gerald watched after the nurse until she’d stepped into the other cubicle and then turned towards the rear of the tent, telling himself he wouldn’t get a better chance than this.

  That you out there, uh, Jason?

  Taking one more step and then cursing under his breath, turning on a hard pivot and pitching through the tent flaps on the last cubicle.