Savage Gerry

by John Jantunen

  That so?

  She was piling two steaks on a plate and adding to that half a loaf of the Texas toast and three heaping spoonfuls of coleslaw.

  I hate to think about what all those people in tents are going to do when it starts snowing.

  Shaking her head then and grimacing, really not wanting to think about that. Her expression brightening then:

  It was lucky I still had this old beast, she said as she set the plate in front of Gerald. Don’t know what we would have done without her.

  He was feeling lightheaded and slightly nauseous from the smoke and the humidity. He didn’t think he could eat even half of what she’d made for him but picked up his knife and fork nonetheless.

  The knife was of the steak variety with a stainless-steel serrated edge that made the meat, when he cut it, seem like it was made of warm butter. As he ate, he sliced off increasingly larger pieces, his hunger growing with every bite. Trent was holding his own steak in his bare hands as he gnawed it, and Darlene had gone off to where Linda was sitting on the couch in front of a TV tray to cut up hers. When she was done, she lit another cigarette and stood leaning against the counter, looking at Gerald almost meditatively, seemingly entranced by the simple act of watching a man devouring a meal she’d just cooked for him.

  No one spoke until Trent was forking the last mouthful of coleslaw into his mouth.

  Good, he said.

  You can say that again, Gerald agreed.

  For a moment it looked like Trent would, but instead he said to no one in particular, He’s my friend.

  We know, Trent, Linda said, frowning as if what he’d said was meant as a personal affront. God. You’re always talking about it. We know he’s your friend. He’s my friend too. God!

  Gerald was standing with his plate, about to carry it to the sink, but Darlene intercepted him before he’d managed more than a step.

  I’ll take that.

  Smiling then at him, warm and deferential.

  I’m tired, Trent said, yawning, and she turned to him.

  You should be. It’s been a busy day.

  Worms, he said as he stood.

  Don’t worry, I’ll wake you up in plenty of time to catch worms.

  Worms, he said again. Eeew!

  30

  While she folded down the table and pulled the benches together to form a bed, Gerald excused himself on the pretence of having to take a leak.

  You can use the bathroom, she said as he started for the door.

  It’s okay. A little rain never killed no one.

  But really what he wanted to do was take a look outside, see if he could discern any sign that The Sons might be hatching something. The door got away from him as he opened it, slamming hard against the side of the motorhome. The wind was lashing rain on a horizontal against his back as he forced the door closed, thinking, They’d have to be crazy if they’re planning something on a night like this, but that doing nothing at all to ease his dread as he walked to the swamp side of the awning.

  It provided little shelter from the swirling rain. His shirt was pretty much soaked through by the time he was done and the damp fabric clung to the outline of his ribs and the sharp nubs poking from the lean of his chest. It was cooler now and at least it provided him with some relief from the sticky heat.

  The lights went out as he approached the Airstream’s door. He was just reaching for its latch when it opened a crack, the wind snatching it from Darlene’s grip and Gerald lunging forward, grabbing it with both hands to keep it from slamming again. He was just closing it behind him when Darlene put her hand on his arm, whispering in his ear, We’ll go up front.

  The Airstream’s cab had a domed ceiling high enough for Gerald to stand up in. Someone — maybe Darlene herself — had painted it black and then speckled it with a Milky Way’s worth of glowing white dots made to look like stars. Gerald was admiring the view as Darlene shut the door behind them, squeezing past, putting her hands on his shoulders as if to steady herself and Gerald flinching when a finger foundered into the groove of scarred-over tissue where he’d been bitten by the bear. She didn’t seem to have noticed anything odd about it and plopped down in the driver’s side of two swivelling chairs, both of which looked to have been carved out of a single giant egg.

  Letting out an exhausted Phew!, she sat for a moment, sprawling her legs before her and closing her eyes, letting her hands hang limp off the chair’s armrest. She held the pose for barely a second and then snapped back to life, swivelling the chair left as her hands groped towards the storage compartment in the door.

  Gerald had since sat down in the passenger seat. It was more comfortable than it looked and when he leaned back it reclined along with him. A footrest extended from beneath it like on his grandfather’s La-Z-Boy, providing him, it seemed, with a window seat at the very edge of the universe. There was a clicking sound followed by a flicker and then he smelt the faint tang of weed. He sat up, swivelling towards Darlene. She had a small pink metal pipe pressed to her lips and was sucking the lighter’s flame through its bowl. She took a long slow draft and released the smoke in a billowing stream, Gerald basking in its musky allure, watching it mingling in eddies under the starred dome and then sweeping through an open crack in the window as Darlene worked its crank.

  You puff? she asked, holding the pipe out to Gerald.

  I might have one.

  He took it, put it to his lips and leaned forward, letting her light it and taking a good long drag himself before passing it back. Darlene took another and then offered it again. Gerald shook his head — he ought to stay at least halfway alert — and she tucked the pipe into a small metal tea box that he could see was mostly filled up by a Ziploc bag, no doubt her supply. She stuffed this back into the side compartment and tucked her feet up under her legs. In the way she looked questioningly at Gerald she seemed about to ask something but it was too dark to tell for certain and she spoke to him not a word.

  They sat there for some time, listening to the storm’s rage. It was muted somewhat and came to them mostly as whispers and the clatter of branches broken off in the gale and battering at the windshield, which was already plastered with leaves and pine needles whelmed in the currents of tributaries streaking on a fast-flowing horizontal so that they looked like tiny canoes caught in a flash flood. Gerald followed them with the lackadaisical delight he might have had watching a stick trundle down a creek when he was kid. The needles shimmied in dizzying circles and were washed into a nettle at the edge of the glass. There was an anomalous bleating — sounded like goats — calling in far-faint distress. As the needles were plucked upwards and sent reeling into the night, the bleating began to sound like screams, as if the canoes were full of people wailing as they were sucked into a tornado. Their cries were shortly overshadowed by a splintering crash — a tree toppling. It sounded like it was coming down straight on top of them and Darlene sat bolt upright. Her hand darted out and grabbed Gerald on the leg, the both of them frozen stock still, listening then for any sign of the damage it may have wrought, hearing only the wind’s bluster and the goats crying out in renewed despair.

  God, Darlene said, releasing her hold and tucking her feet back under her legs again, it feels like the whole world is coming apart.

  Gerald had thought much the same thing, couldn’t have been more than a few days ago.

  But it wasn’t the wind made him think so, it was …

  Fighting through the hazy dim of his weed-softened mind, struggling to remember where he’d had cause to think that.

  It was the stars. Like the frayed ends of string left over from a missing button. That’s what it was.

  Recalling then the sky’s twinkling bright as him and Clayton had come onto the 400. Remembering all those abandoned vehicles, the dread he’d felt then now oozing from his belly — a thick and hot tar that seemed to be coursing through his veins, melting
his bones, remaking him into some gelatinous thing about to pool into a puddle on the floor. Leaning back, he stared up at the starscape riddling the ceiling, gazing as if into infinite depths, thinking not of Clayton now but of Millie, of how one night when she was pregnant with Evers and it had been too hot to sleep they’d gone up to The Ridge. He’d brought a blanket and stretched that over a patch of dewy moss preserved from the sun’s scorch by the viewing rock’s shade, lying down on that and Millie cuddling against him, slipping her hand under his shirt and plucking idly at the triangle of downy hair that spouted from his chest as he stared up at the night sky, feeling in that moment that they were the last two people on earth and he couldn’t have been happier for it.

  And so it was that Millie was foremost on his mind as he felt himself floating amongst the stars, a lone astronaut cast adrift, letting their idle twinkle guide him towards sleep.

  31

  He awoke into a clamorous dark.

  The rattle of window glass, the batter of eaves loosed from their moorings, and a violent tinkling of wind chimes, someone all the while shaking him as if the place was set to come down on top of them.

  Gerald! Millie was crying out.

  There was a fury in her voice to match the wind’s bluster and the sharp rebuff of her nails digging into his flesh shocked him bolt upright. She was sitting up too, a comforter groped around her legs like potting soil, her body as thin and tremulous as a newly sprung fern. A voice, his own, was crying out as if from a corner of the room, You’re dreaming! He knew it to be true yet he was powerless to awake or to extricate himself from the pantomime playing out between himself and Millie.

  What? he asked, without feeling his lips so much as move. What is it?

  I heard something.

  What?

  It sounded like … someone screaming.

  The hell it did.

  It was coming from the barn.

  You’re imagining things. It’s only the storm. Lying back down, rolling over and drawing the covers over his head. Go back to sleep.

  But Millie wouldn’t be mollified and shook him again.

  I’m telling you—

  Her nails were gouging his arm like an eagle’s talons holding on to prey and that disabused Gerald of any notion he had of going back to sleep.

  All right, all right, he said casting the covers aside and setting his feet on the floor. The hardwood trembled from the gale as if maybe the house really was coming apart. Pushing himself upwards onto legs clumsied by sleep, he tottered away from the bed, his hand outstretched like a blind man’s cane, reaching out and feeling for the window’s pane, his fingers touching the glass and stilling its rattle. Leaning into it, he scanned over the yard’s dark, searching out the barn’s monolith of darker yet.

  You see something?

  He shook his head.

  No.

  The word was barely past his lips when there flared a sudden spark as fleeting as a firefly’s flint. Another flash a few feet further on and then another: a light winking between gaps in the barn’s slatted wood.

  Son of a bitch, he said.

  What?

  Tracing ahead with clenched teeth, searching out the barn’s door. After a moment it was haloed by a sudden bright like a lantern coming around the bend in a mine shaft.

  Ellis is after your crop again, isn’t he?

  Gerald not answering but the flustered creak of floorboards as he crossed the room provided a response clear enough. Flinging open the closet door, his hands groped under a pile of sweaters on the top shelf and grasped at the butt of his grandfather’s old Smith & Wesson.

  I told you not to put that bear trap out there!

  There was a bitter recrimination in her tone and when he turned back to the bed with the gun upraised in his hand, there was a bitter recrimination in her eyes too.

  It’ll be all right.

  What are you going to do?

  I’m just going to have a talk with them.

  If Ellis stepped in that old bear trap, I doubt he’s going to feel much like talking.

  That’s why I got the gun.

  He smiled, trying to ease her worry, but her lips were curled into a tight frown and he turned towards the door, his free hand groping for its knob. And then he was walking down the stairs, a sudden and jarring shift that again planted the fleeting idea in his head that he was dreaming, the urgency in the thought immediately quelled by the faint whimper of their Staffordshire terrier, Daisy. She was hiding under the couch as she often did during a storm. When he’d reached the bottom, the whimpering stopped and then he could hear the rake of her claws as she scrambled out from underneath the sofa, scampering across the hardwood floor. She found him at the front door as he pried back its sash to steal a look out and he felt the cold and wet of her nose dabbing at his bare leg.

  Nudging her away with his hand and peering through the bevelled glass with the Smith & Wesson upraised, seeing nothing beyond the outline of his truck parked at the foot of the porch. Craning his head then, searching for the dark shape of the barn. Above it a river of clouds flowed black and turbulent against the creaking frenzy of the metal rooster spinning atop the barn’s roof and he turned his gaze towards the road, seeing nothing of value there either. Snapping open the revolver’s chamber, checking that it was loaded, seeing it was and clamping it shut. Reaching then for the door’s knob, taking a deep breath and hearing the creak of stairs from behind.

  Gerald, Millie urged, wait!

  Twisting the knob nevertheless and pushing at the door, the wind pushing back. Fighting against the gale and squeezing through the gap. The wind was like a hard current of water, drawing against his bare chest and at the curls of his beard so he could feel them lashing against his throat. The hair on his head was standing on end and his fingers were fighting to maintain a hold against the door’s slam. Easing it shut and turning to the yard, scanning past his truck and the barn and finding only the sway of trees, the black river of clouds running in violent swells overtop. Feeling like God’s own fool, standing there naked save for a pair of boxer briefs and holding the Smith & Wesson as if he meant to play gunslinger, never more unsure in his life of what he meant to do next.

  On the awning over the porch hung the wind chimes he’d made for Millie’s last birthday. Five twelve-inch spans of aluminum pipe tied to fishing line and jangling against a hexagonal disc he’d cut from a maple log on its way to the fire. Listening past their frenzied tinkle and searching about the yard, windblown grit in the air dashing at his face and squinting his eyes, telling himself whoever it was must have been long gone.

  The bear trap coming into his mind then, thinking, If Ellis had really stepped in it …

  And that thought turning him towards the road, tracing the channel between the cedars that marked the driveway and catching sight on his periphery of a speck of bright darting between their boughs. A flashlight swinging at a brisk pace. Someone running down the potholed gravel.

  Thinking, The bear trap is forty pounds and the only way to release it is with a special wrench, like a double-jointed tire iron. Fat chance anyone would find that and even if they did they sure as hell wouldn’t be running down the road. It’d be lucky if they were ever able to run again.

  And that thought leading him right back to the barn door at the moment a sudden flash erupted, no brighter than someone lighting a cigarette. There was a hollow pop! and then the sear of flesh, like a hot poker thrust into his arm. That still not enough to wake him even as it jarred him out of all sense of time, what happened next skipping about in fits and starts, time returning to its usual flow only when he was lying on the floor inside his front door, panting heavy and feeling the sticky heat of blood running in rivulets down his arm. His voice was rebounding in his thoughts, You’ve been shot! A silent scream followed by the faint, almost imperceptible, shattering of glass though it would have been a s
lim chance in hell that he’d have thought that between when the bullet passed through his arm and when it struck the window beside the door.

  Gerald! Millie cried out again.

  Not so much panic in her voice anymore as confusion. And pain.

  His head turning left and seeing Millie lying sprawled on her back. A well in her chest like water oozing through a hole in river ice, her head turning towards him, her chin lolling in a slow decline, coming to a rest against her shoulder, her mouth slightly ajar and her eyes become static globes, bereft of life but hardly accusation. Feeling in that moment that he’d never really been certain he’d loved her until then, that love now become a terrible thing with her lying maybe dead on the floor, and nobody’s fault but his own.

  Scrambling to his knees and bending over her, screaming, Millie? Millie!

  His own voice was all of a sudden overcome by another whispering in his ear. The panic in it was as sharp as a siren and bleating with the same frenetic undulation.

  Gerald, it said. Gerald. Gerald, wake up!

  When he opened his eyes, Darlene’s face was pressed inches from his. Her hand was on his shoulder, shaking him into consciousness, and there was a look of fear in her eyes. His first thought was that he’d been screaming out in his sleep, but it wasn’t that.

  There’s some people outside, she whispered. They’re calling for you.

  And then he could hear it fighting through the gale’s batter — a familiar lisping voice shouting out his name with the urgency of a master calling his dog home.

  Gerald! Zip was yelling. Come on out, Gerald. I know you can hear me. Don’t make uth come in there now!

  A brief pause and then a shattering of glass, the skittering thud of rock skipping across the floor, the dull thump of it hitting the wall.

  That wuth your latht warning, Gerald.

  Catapulting himself out of his chair, skirting through the cab’s door, coming into the Airstream’s living room. The drapes on the window beside the cab’s outer wall were blowing inwards almost horizontal and he hunkered low, approaching the window, not sure he really wanted to see what was out there. Broken glass crunched beneath his sneakered feet and there was a funnel of wind blowing through the hole, through which he could see Zip standing on the path just beyond the Airstream’s awning. The rain had stopped and the moon had come out just short of a quarter full. In its sparse light, Gerald could make out that Zip was holding an assault rifle of a military grade and there was another man standing beside him, a hulking behemoth approaching seven feet tall, naked save for a pair of jeans cut off just above the knee, muscles like they were breeding on him. His skin was unnaturally grey, as if it had been smeared with ash, and his head was shaved and crowned with a red stripe. He was wielding a hunting knife in each hand, both almost big enough to be called machetes, and it didn’t take a second look for Gerald to know it was one of the grim riders he’d seen at the prison.