Savage Gerry

by John Jantunen

  There you are, Clayton said, grinning wide. I thought maybe you’d took off on me again.

  He was lying on a stretcher, with the head rest raised. His leg was dressed with gauze wrapped from his knee to his ankle and there was about him the sharp odour of antiseptics.

  I was just outside. Checking on the line for the showers.

  Boy, I sure could use one too. I can barely stand the smell of my own stink. But Nurse Maddox said I had to stay in bed.

  That’s good advice.

  She also said you might’n maybe have saved my leg with that staunchweed, only she called it yarrow.

  It was just lucky I found some, is all.

  Lucky, hell. I’d been dead twice over if it weren’t for you.

  Clayton was staring at him again with that unbridled adulation and it made Gerald feel as uncomfortable as it did the first time, doubly so for what he was planning to do.

  He averted his eyes.

  I ought to get going, he said. Clean myself up a bit.

  He was turning towards the curtain when Clayton spoke again.

  I’m going to be holed up here for a couple of days, he said. Nurse Maddox said, if you want, there’d be a spare bed for you too.

  I might just take her up on that.

  Parting the curtain, he moved on stealthy steps towards the back wall, seeing a seam in the canvas that might just have been his way out.

  Can I help you with something?

  The young nurse was standing beside the first of the cots, hidden from view by the back wall of the last cubicle across from Clayton’s. She was holding a plastic bottle in her hand like the ones bleach came in and was about to pour it into a metal bowl, maybe sterilizing some instruments. She was glaring at Gerald as if she suspected he was up to no good.

  Gerald took a hard left, sidling towards her as if on the sly, all nonchalant, no different than he would have approaching a nurse in a real hospital looking for directions to the bathroom.

  Say, he asked in an urgent whisper, is there a back way out of here?

  26

  The wind had picked up some.

  As Gerald tore through the woods couched along the eastern side of the settlement he could hear it thrashing about the treetops and in the ominous creak of Jack pines, the frantic rustle of poplar leaves whispering to him what seemed a dire warning and harrying him onwards as heedless as to what they had to say as he was to the wind’s bluster, sheltered from the force of its gale not so much by the trees as the forest proper, as if the latter weren’t merely an accumulation of the former but an entity unto itself — a living, breathing thing all of its own, the trees themselves as irrelevant as the sprouts of hair upon the chin of a beast that had swallowed him whole.

  It wasn’t but a couple minutes later that the forest broke at the edge of a lake. He came to its shore, gasping, his legs feeling like they’d turned to rubber, a sad state of affairs for a man who’d once taken pride in his stamina above all else. He stood there a moment staring out at the water, trying to catch his breath.

  It wasn’t a big lake, maybe a half kilometre across at its widest and twice as long. Grey swells rippled away from the shore in mimicry of the ones bludgeoning the sky. The swells further out were capped with curls of white, and the sun was a pale disc refracted within its turmoil as if it wasn’t cast from above but from below, a distant beacon straining up from some underworld realm, calling out to him in warning or distress, there was no way to tell.

  He stood there staring at it until between one swell and the next it disappeared, swept under by the waves as if it had been drowned. There was almost immediately then a clap of thunder, so loud it might as well have been two mountains colliding as weather fronts. It was rumbling itself out when he heard the barking of dogs. They arose as a sprinkle of rain would on far-off leaves and merged into such a sudden and urgent threat that the thought startled into his head, They’re coming for ya!

  Shocked into flight and running with the desperation of a fox with the hounds on its tail, though hardly with the same grace, crashing blindly through the trees buffeting the lake, not so much a forest now as a loose conglomeration of impediments put in his way to trip him up.

  Hearing the dogs barking, closer yet, and dashing into a bog of cattails crowding the shore. He sank up to his waist before he made his third step and waded on until he was up to his chest then crouched down low until the murky water was lapping over his chin. He heard another clipped bark followed by a growl and scanned back the way he’d come.

  There were two golden retrievers fifty paces away. They’d found a black garbage bag someone had tossed into the woods. It had been torn open and the one dog was licking at a bubble of plastic like the packaging that vacuum-sealed steaks came in, barking and growling at the other whenever it came too close. He heard then the grumble of an engine and a man’s voice calling out, Buster, get away from there!

  Through the cattails all he could see of the man was that he had a swollen gut pressing against a black-and-red button-down shirt and was wearing a yellow ball cap. He was sliding out of the driver’s seat of a side-by-side, one of those with a roof so that it looked like a golf cart with oversized wheels, and chiding after the dog, What I tell you about eating garbage? Go on, shoo!

  He swatted at it with a hand that didn’t come within five feet of it but the dog acted like it had been kicked, whimpering and turning tail, fleeing in a widening arc away from the man, the other dog watching it with lolling tongue so that it looked like it was laughing at its friend. The man, Gerald could now see, was wearing work gloves. He bent at the garbage bag, plucking the wrappers from the ground and stuffing them back through the hole in its plastic, picking the bag up delicately then between both hands, all the while muttering to the dogs or maybe just to himself, Goddamn pigs. It would have taken them more effort to haul the bag out here than bring it to the dumpster. Ignorant sons of bitches!

  He’d brought the bag to the side-by-side and was heaving it onto the garbage already piled high in the trailer hitched behind, Gerald watching the man slide back into the driver’s seat and turn the vehicle around, feeling more the fool by the second.

  You’re no better than Clayton scared by that grouse.

  He’d extricated himself from the muck and was following a deer path leading him around the lake’s western shore. The thought of Clayton produced in him a sudden shame, for leaving him as he had and for also lying to him, making him think he was coming back. Seeing the familiar gloss of unbridled admiration in his eyes and hearing his voice echoing from some distant recess, I’d have been dead twice over if it weren’t for you. Imagining what would have happened to him in the moments following his own cowardly escape.

  That cop coming into the waiting room, his gun at the ready, sighting on the empty space, waving a hand back through the door flaps, motioning for someone on the other side. Brett coming in with his rifle, the others already scattering about the perimeter a moment too late to see their quarry slipping out the rear, the nurse when he’d asked pointing at it wordlessly — relieved, it seemed to Gerald, that he was looking for a way out — not towards the back of the tent but to the far side, between two of the cots where there was a slit cut in the canvas sealed with Velcro, handwritten letters in black marker running vertical on either side reading EMERGENCY and EXIT.

  The nurse then stepping through the flaps and Gerald seeing her startled docility in the way she faced the cop and her gaping back at him like a deer sighting on a hunter, certain that if it didn’t move it wouldn’t be seen. The cop stalking towards her with the wary resolve of a wolf, whispering, Where is he?

  The nurse starting, I— then stopping, fairly certain she knew who he meant and yet not so certain that it didn’t give her pause to consider.

  Who?

  Gerald Nichols.

  The cop impatient, blurting it out, perhaps a little too loud, lo
ud enough anyway that if his quarry was still hiding in the back he’d be able to hear it. The name meaning nothing to the nurse and the cop seeing that, adding, The man who just came in here. Looked like a crazed surfer bum.

  The nurse startled into docility again.

  Is he here or not?

  He—

  What?

  He went out the back.

  When?

  A minute ago?

  Her voice upraised at the end, for that uncertainty had returned, making her question herself, her relief at getting rid of the man, thinking now she’d done something wrong not reporting someone so blatantly suspicious right away.

  The cop cursing under his breath as he turned back to Brett but before he could say a word beyond a muttered, Shit, the nurse interrupting him, eager to make amends.

  But his friend is still here.

  That giving the cop pause to consider and Brett asking, What do you want us to do there, chief?

  The cop answering, Well I reckon you better fetch the dogs.

  Except he wouldn’t have said “I reckon” like some small-town sheriff in one of those old westerns Gerald and his grandfather used to watch and whom, the older he got, the more his grandfather had begun to sound just like. Gramps most certainly would have used “reckon” though it would come out “reckin” in his adoptive Southern twang. But the cop he’d seen earlier would have more than likely used “I guess” or “I suppose” or some suitable substitution deprived of any and all colloquial seasoning but still making his point clear enough.

  The sound of their pursuit startling you as the wind lashed against the trees, except it wasn’t them coming after you, it was just someone cleaning up the woods.

  That doing little to counter the feeling that he was being chased. Likely he was already outside any sense of jurisdiction the cop would have contrived for himself, the limits of which would have begun and ended with the camp that had sprung up around the train and wouldn’t, surely, have extended this far into the bush, especially since Gerald hadn’t harmed the cop or his family, nor anyone within the entirety of his purview.

  These musings failing to account for much but, in the very least, bringing him back to where he’d started from.

  It weren’t fright made you run, he told himself. It was shame. The shame of leaving the scarecrow behind, or rather, the shame of having to face him again after they’d led you back into the camp.

  They’d likely put you in one of them empty freight cars until they’ve figured out what to do with you.

  Seeing its door opening and the fading light chasing at its dark, finding Clayton sitting against its rear wall, squinting against its bright as they manhandled Gerald inside, hearing the clank of the door shutting as terminally as the clank of the one in his jail cell, every damn night he’d spent at Central North.

  Except …

  The word forming in his mind without any instigation from him, as if his subconscious somehow knew better and Gerald flummoxing after it, trying to make any sense as to why that word would have suddenly sprouted in his mind.

  Except …

  Turning the word over on his tongue and that leading quite naturally to the thought:

  Except you weren’t thinking about Clayton when you’d heard the dogs, you were thinking about … Evers.

  Remembering that first gust of wind thrashing through the trees, like something had burst, unleashing a gale with the force of a dam breaking. Looking up at the ominous sway and hearing the creak of Jack pines and the frantic whisper of poplar leaves, recalling the last time he’d done so. It was six days before him and Evers had been caught by Charlie Wilkes, whose own purview would have extended to the ends of the earth if that’s what it took to bring the man who’d murdered two of his sons to justice.

  They’d had a few close calls the previous year, the odd helicopter on the horizon, the drift of smoke that could have been a hunting party as likely as someone hunting them, once the distant yelp of dogs, the latter keeping them on the move for four days until a hard rain had finally washed away any semblance of their scent. It was the day after that they’d lit their first fire, to dry their clothes and to heat the last can of beans squirreled away in Gerald’s backpack, saving it for a special occasion and their escape from the dogs seeming plenty special enough.

  While the beans simmered on the fire Evers had suddenly asked, Why’d they have to go and kill mom?

  It seemed to have bubbled out of nowhere though it was plain in the way he’d been fretting with a stick, stoking it in the fire, that he’d been brooding on it for some time.

  It was a-an accident, Gerald answered, the tremble in his voice making it seem not altogether the truth. They were shooting at me. They didn’t know they’d hit your mom.

  Why were they shooting at you?

  Gerald thinking of the bear trap springing around Ellis Wilkes’s leg even as he said, It was just a mis— a misunderstanding.

  If it was just a misunderstanding, then why’d you go and shoot those men?

  Gerald didn’t have an answer for that. Every time he’d tried to make sense of it, all reason was lost to the memory of Ellis Wilkes floundering on the ground as Gerald came around the back of the pick-up truck, Ellis’s older brother, Wade, lying dead on the ground and the bear trap’s sharply toothed grin clamped around Ellis’s ankle, looking doubly malevolent in the crimson glow from the truck’s taillights. Ellis had his cell phone pressed to his ear and as Gerald levelled his grandfather’s old Smith & Wesson at his head he’d whimpered, Daddy, he’s going to kill me.

  Gerald flinching at the memory of what came next and looking back to his son. The boy was staring at him with a facsimile of the expression Ellis had worn that day and Gerald averted his eyes. Evers must have got the point and had gone back to fretting with his stick for a moment. Then:

  What’ll they do if they catch us?

  Gerald was levering the can of beans out of the fire with two sticks and waited until it was safe on the ground to answer.

  They’ll put me in jail.

  For how long?

  Forever, I’d guess.

  And what’ll they do to me?

  I’d imagine they’d put you in a foster home.

  The boy considering that with downcast eyes, prodding the fire with the stick and catching a flame on its end, holding it up and staring at it with plaintive deliberation.

  That ain’t never going to happen, he said and punctuated his resolve by blowing the flame out.

  The dying ember cast his face in a reddish hue and the ribbon of smoke trailing from its end split it in two. A bitter and steely-eyed veil had then lowered over the boy’s face like a shroud and that had filled Gerald with dread, for all that Evers had lost and more so for the child he feared he’d never see again.

  * * *

  It would be the fireflies that brought the boy he’d known back to him, if only for a moment.

  They’d wintered in a cave on the other side of Ishpatina Ridge, the highest point in the province and also the tipping point for the entire continent, the waters beyond all flowing into Hudson Bay. Ishpatina was a six-hour hike from the nearest road and the cave a half a day’s walk north of that. Their shelter wasn’t much more than a gaping dome in the base of a hundred-foot ridge, its ceiling some thirty feet at its peak, its floor a wreck of crumbled granite leading upwards and tapering into a small recess towards the rear. They’d enclosed that with a frame cobbled from birch saplings and tarped with cedar boughs and deer hide. They made their beds out of the same and when they’d lit a fire it was right cozy, even in the dead of winter. For the seven months they’d stayed there, the cave had begun to seem almost like a home and even come the melt they’d rarely strayed more than a half a day’s walk from it.

  One evening, early in the spring, they were returning from checking their traps and had come to the b
ackside of the ridge from where the cave was. The ground there rose on a steep slope towards a cliff face some eighty feet at its summit and was populated mostly by poplar trees though there were a few maples amongst a sparse sprinkling of birch. Through some mechanism foreign to him the ground beneath them was almost entirely uncluttered by underbrush and fallen branches, while on the front side the forest floor was a tangled web of toppled trunks and tumbled boulders, raspberry brambles and poison ivy growing in thick swathes among them. Because of the latter, they always used the back way to get into their cave. That meant scaling the eighty-foot ridge and then climbing down through a crack in the cave’s ceiling that formed a natural sort of chimney. It really wasn’t much of a bother. Both the ridge and the chimney seemed almost exclusively designed for the purpose of climbing, the former with plenty of handholds and ledges upon which to rest and the latter with a staggered series of outcroppings which formed a natural staircase to what Gerald began referring to as their own personal penthouse suite at the top of the world.

  It had become Gerald’s custom to climb an ash tree perched at the edge of the summit in the evening, Evers joining him less and less as the months progressed, the same as Gerald himself had rarely accompanied his grandfather to The Ridge in his teenage years. He would sit with his legs dangling beneath a high branch, watching the sun setting over a world he no longer belonged to and feeling more and more what his grandfather must have felt, revelling in the victory of having made it to the end of yet another day. And as he approached the cliff it was with the thought foremost in his mind that if they were quick about it they’d get there just in time to catch what was promising to be a doozy.

  It was late in April, or maybe early in May, but already so hot that every breath seemed a trial unto itself — the kind of heat that sapped the energy right out of your marrow. It seemed he had barely the strength left to pull himself the first few feet off the ground, much less the next eighty. When he turned back to see what was keeping Evers, his son was standing with his back to him at the crest of the slope. The forest beyond was already shading towards dark and within its gloaming there arose a sudden flicker amongst the trees. A moment later a second flicker and then a third and a fourth, the flickers thereafter appearing at such a rate so as to be beyond enumeration but hardly comparison. The easiest was with the number of stars in the night sky except their languid drift didn’t so much resemble stars as it did the waft of fluff from a field of dandelions rent aloft by a sudden gust and then set ablaze. But any real accounting for the sight in words could hardly express the wonder that had suddenly overcome Gerald, seeing the air enlivened so.