Hands up! a muffled voice ordered as they approached. Where I can see them!
Hefting himself up and raising his hands above his head, gasping out a feeble, I surrender. I— I surrender! Feeling the words in every fibre of his being.
The two figures were both clad in black riot gear — body armour, masks and helmets — and shouldering assault rifles. They came to a stop five paces from Gerald and from the rifle on the right there flared the white beam of LEDs. It probed over Gerald’s upraised and trembling arms first and then scanned down over his face, finally settling on the knife at his belt.
He’s got a knife, the one said, though he didn’t seem overly concerned.
I see it, the other answered.
Nice and easy now. I want you to take the knife out and put it on the ground. And when Gerald paused a moment the man took a step closer: I won’t ask you a second time!
Lowering his one hand and fumbling for the sheath, unclipping the clasp and drawing the knife out, setting it on the ground in front of him.
Slide it over here.
Gerald giving it a shove and it barely moving two feet.
The one with the flashlight was circling around behind him. He felt the barrel of the gun pressing into the base of his skull and a hand pulling up the tail of his shirt.
He’s clean, the man with the flashlight said, circling back towards the other.
I don’t know. He looks like a Euphie to me. And he sure smells like a Euphie, too.
He’d have track marks if he was a Euphie.
Could be he was injecting between his toes. They do that, you know?
He’s not a Euphie. You just have to look at his eyes to know that.
The abrasive scour of the light again over his face, and Gerald fighting to keep his lids from shutting, letting them take a good look.
He’s just half-starved, the one said after he’d switched off the light. Hey buddy, where you coming from?
Gerald opening his mouth and barely a croak coming out.
Give him some water, will you?
A hand was shortly reaching out, handing him a black metal canteen. Its cap was already unscrewed and he took it up, raising it to his mouth with a trembling hand. Water splashed over his beard but enough got in his mouth to set him to coughing.
Take it easy there, buddy. You’re going to drown yourself.
He took another sip, smaller this time, and managed to get that down. He was just draining the canteen when a burst of static erupted in unison from the radios clipped to both men’s collars.
Everything all right out there? a decidedly feminine voice inquired.
Another burst of static and one of the figures answered, Just another stray. Clicking off his radio and then reconsidering. You better bring out the quad. I don’t think he’s going to make it on his own.
Roger that.
The man who was talking was walking away and the other towards Gerald. The latter bent at Gerald’s knife, plucking it from the ground and Gerald watching him, thinking that it was the last time he’d see it. But when he reached Gerald, he held it out hilt first and Gerald took it and slid it back into its sheath. Then the man was grabbing him by the arm, helping him to his feet. He could hear the rumble of an engine and presently two headlights swivelled around the urban tank heading in their direction.
The man was patting him on the shoulder. It was only a light tap but Gerald’s legs almost buckled under its force, fighting against wobbled knees and buoyed in his efforts by the jovial tone that had crept into the man’s voice when he spoke again.
Welcome to Capreol!
41
The quad was a black side-by-side driven by a woman wearing the same uniform as the others but lacking the helmet and mask so that Gerald could see she had short blonde hair with a single braided strand dangling over her left cheek. Her skin was unnaturally dark for a white person’s and pulled so taut it reminded Gerald of a woman at Central North by the name of Struthers who’d been a champion bodybuilder before she turned guard.
The driver had given him a brown paper bag half-filled with popcorn and as he languished in the passenger seat he munched from this in between sips from the canteen wedged in his lap. She’d been casting him sideways glances the whole way, Gerald hoping they didn’t amount to anything more than mere curiosity. The only thing she’d said to him so far was, I thought you might be hungry, when she’d handed him the popcorn bag, and she didn’t say another word until they were passing Hanna Avenue.
Hanna was a boundary of sorts leading into the town’s easternmost residential neighbourhood. The street lights were on there too. The houses, mostly modest bungalows and simple two-storeys, all had their porch lights on and most of their windows effused a yellow glow and it didn’t seem much like anything had changed since last he’d been here, except that there were more people about than he’d ever seen before. Older couples walking their dogs and families strolling along, kids on bikes and groups of others playing basketball on stand-alone nets in front of driveways loaded with cars and not a single vehicle out on the road other than a few quads weaving through the crowd, none moving faster than a brisk stroll.
You know, the woman said as Hanna Avenue fell behind, you look familiar. What did you say your name was?
He hadn’t and had no intention of telling her now so he said the first name that popped into his head.
Clayton, he offered. Clayton Crisp.
She shook her head.
Doesn’t ring a bell.
Gerald had finished the bag of popcorn and was washing the last mouthful of that down with the rest of the water.
You from Sudbury? she asked.
Elliot Lake. It was where his grandfather had been posted when he’d first joined the RCMP and he’d had only good things to say about it. But I’ve been living Midland way these past few years.
Elliot Lake, that’s where you’re going?
My parents are still there, figure it’s as good a place as any.
You walking the tracks?
Yeah.
Well you’ve a ways to go yet.
She was looking at him like she didn’t quite believe him and Gerald asked, What was the name of this town again?
Capreol.
Gerald shook his head.
Nope, he said. Never heard of it.
They were passing by the townhouse complex between Hemlock and Field Streets. There was a country rock song blaring in French from a speaker somewhere, adding the perfect accompaniment to the revelry taking place in the parking lot — a community barbecue it looked like, its good cheer embodied by a throng of kids racing about with sparklers upraised, chasing each other amongst the adults, their elders laughing in between sips from the tall cans of beer in their hands.
Field Street was so named because it ran along the perimeter of the old high school field and its approach added a sombre taint to the otherwise festive atmosphere. It was crowded with tents and several dozen RVs and camper trailers and swarming with a few hundred people milling about in between. It struck Gerald as similar enough to what he’d seen at the train camp that when a flare of red shot up from somewhere within, a pit carved its way into his stomach as he watched it shoot into the sky, his mounting dread hardly diminished as the flare exploded overtop a line of railcars parked on the tracks beside the road. It released a flower of sparks like an autumnal tree burst into life, its leaves floating on a lazy downward drift even as another flare, green this time, shortly followed its trajectory and exploded into the outline of a four-leaf clover.
The woman had slowed the quad to allow a father and two sons to cross the road, heading towards the field. All had skin the colour of coffee beans and fishing rods propped on their shoulders and the eldest of the boys, maybe twelve, was carrying a string of three fish on a metal chain. They looked like bass. The woman must have read some
thing in Gerald’s expression and the way his hand was clutching at the hilt of his knife as the clover dissolved and was replaced by a crackling sizzle of white streamers, one after the other seemingly without end.
Midland, huh? she said as she throttled forward. How’s things down south these days?
Well they ain’t got the power on yet, as far as I’ve seen.
It’s only been three days since we got it on ourselves. You see those solar panels on your way in?
I was wondering about those.
They used to feed into the main grid and it was a heck of a time figuring how to get them back online. The circuits were all fried. Finally someone had the idea to feed them into the train engines. They’re just big old batteries.
That so?
One of them is enough to power half the town and we got six of them now.
At the field’s westernmost edge the town had built its children a splash pad. It was in full swing, thirty or so kids romping in its spray and lit up by the multicoloured halogens imbedded in the cement of its bowl, their laughter trailing its mirth after the quad as it approached the Welcome To Capreol billboard. Beneath the greeting was a painting of an old steamer train puffing three clouds of smoke above the inscription, Established in 1918. A banner reading Capreol Days Now On! was tacked below that. To this someone had added in black paint Come Celebrate 142 Years of Train Power! and hearing what the woman had said, it seemed fitting to Gerald that it was the trains which had brought Capreol back to life since it was those that had given birth to the town in the first place.
Up ahead he could see an unbroken stream of people crossing the highway at Kelly, a side street angling towards the downtown. He could hear the faint beat of a drum and the ecstatic whine of an electric guitar as the quad drove closer. The music was echoing down the canyon of houses on either side of Kelly and growing louder as the woman did a U-turn, bringing the quad to the curb a few yards from the intersection.
This is where I let you off, she said. Then pointing down Kelly Street towards Young: Downtown’s that way. You can get something to eat there and there’s a church across from the Foodland. You can ask if they still have any free beds.
I might just do that.
His knee felt like it had been hit with a hammer and his legs like they were filled with wet sand and as he slipped out of the seat they barely seemed to have the strength to support him.
You take care now, Clayton, Clayton Crisp.
She applied the gas and the quad shot away. Gerald watched after it until its taillights were but specks and its rumble only a whisper, then turned and walked towards Kelly Street. It was a couple of blocks to where it crossed the tracks, on the other side of which the road split into two one-ways. To the right, Bloor led past the railway museum and the old CN building before looping back towards Young at the foot of the block or so of stores lining either side of this, the main street. Even from his vantage he could see the festivities were in full swing. Young was lit up like the twelve days of Christmas all rolled into one and seething with a mass of people, could have been five thousand or more.
Most of the people crossing the tracks were headed away from the downtown, some of them eating hot dogs and others hamburgers, a smattering of kids among them holding popcorn bags and cardboard wands swirled with candy floss or drinking from bottles of pop. And here he was damn near starving, thinking that doing anything but taking the quickest route home would be nothing but a fool’s errand.
It was a five-minute walk from where he was to Railway Avenue and from there it was only ten minutes to Stull. Twenty minutes at a brisk pace and he’d be walking up his driveway, though he doubted he could manage more than his weary trod and so it would probably take him the long side of forty-five.
Best get at it then.
He scanned down the river of people, looking for a break big enough to squeeze through and trying not to look anyone in the face for fear they might recognize him. He was just stepping into a gap and heard a voice raised in shrill sanction, What the fuck? I thought we were going to see the show!
He traced it to a woman standing with her back to him on the far sidewalk. She had a shock of synthetic neon-green hair to her shoulders and was wearing a matching spandex one-piece suit that lent her figure the appearance of a pear that had grown legs. She was shouting after a scruffy-looking man in ripped jeans and a black T-shirt, his hair a scraggled frazzle of curly brown tied into a ponytail lashing at his back. As he scurried away he threw a nervous glance over his shoulder, directed at none other than Gerald himself.
He didn’t know the man but it was obvious the man knew him. As Gerald watched him barging heedlessly through the stream of people on Kelly Street in a mad rush to tell a certain someone whom he’d just seen, a clear image formed in his mind of what would likely happen next.
Slow down, son, I can’t understand a word, Charlie Wilkes might be saying from his open front door in just a few short ticks. You just saw who?
The man repeating what he just said slower this time and Charlie shaking his head.
That’s impossible. Gerald Nichols is in jail. And he ain’t never getting out, I made sure of that.
The man frantic in his appeal, and that leaving old man Wilkes with little choice but to concede that it might at least be worth looking into.
Just let me fetch my piece.
Gerald telling himself, They’ll be looking for you on the main roads first. You ought to cut into the bush at the end of Vaughan, take the long way around. And you’ll want to be quick about it too!
But still he stood there as trenchant as a sapling whelmed in a spring flood while the stream of people jostled past on all sides, barely able to summon the energy to imagine himself fleeing through the woods much less actually doing it, his only hope of freedom reduced to a mad dash, likely with the hounds on his tail. The fact that he’d be running to something, maybe even towards his son, rather than away, seemed like a poor consolation.
Thinking then:
Fuck it. If they’re going to come after you, you might as well have a full belly when they do. I’m about done with running anyhow.
And with that thought adding a spring to his limping gait, he started forward, swept at once into the ambling current of people drifting him in its languorous flow towards the downtown.
42
If there was one thorn in his grandfather’s side about Capreol, it was that it hadn’t died before he had.
When the old man had inherited the family homestead, the town’s population had just dipped below one thousand and it seemed to be heading in that direction. The stores on Young were all boarded up and half the houses had simply been abandoned, the bottom having long fallen out of whatever real estate market had existed prior to his arrival.
After Gerald had come to live with him he’d often said with his characteristically sardonic smile, It won’t be long now before it gives up the ghost altogether, and then I can finally die in peace.
But by the time he’d gone to check his trap-line that one last time, the population had surged to just over five thousand, a record of sorts, though a minor one in the grand scheme of things for sure. A bunch of new stores and a few restaurants had opened along Young and they’d even built a whole new subdivision off Ormsby, where before there’d only been a gravel field. Gerald’s grandfather had treated every grand opening or moving van unloading its wares as just one more cut in a death of a thousand, as if each new arrival was waging a personal vendetta against his dreams of ever finding peace.
If this keeps up, he quipped one time they were returning from Hanmer and saw a crew recalibrating the population sign to 5250, I ain’t never goin’ die.
That the blame for its revitalization could be attributed to the Northern Ontario Repopulation Act, which had allowed his mortal enemies to so prosper, was for him like salt poured into those thousand wounds. The influx of u
ndesirables from the south into Sudbury was matched with a corresponding influx of medical personnel, social workers and PSWs at a government mandated ratio of four to one. Those of a status too low to qualify for housing in the “safe zone” had sought out the relative safety of the surrounding towns, Capreol acquiring a prominent place among them since it was the most isolated of them all.
Crossing the tracks, Gerald, confronted by the roiling sea of people wandering up and down Young Street, mused that his grandfather must have been rolling over in his grave. The densest conglomeration of them seemed to be about halfway down, centred on the vacant lot beside the Legion, which was where the music was coming from. They’d often had live shows there on Saturday nights and all of the bands sounded pretty much like the one he was hearing now belting out a rollicking blend of country and rock, the singer screaming something about a girl called “Mustang Sally.”
The parking lot of the Foodland on his immediate left was almost as packed and everyone he could see was eating a hot dog or hamburger, the adults all drinking from tall cans of beer and the kids from bottles of pop. He could see wafts of smoke rising above the crowd from in front of the grocery store’s sliding doors, carrying the aroma of grilling meat. He joined the end of the line, twenty people deep, and bided his time while he waited scanning people’s faces, looking for someone he knew or rather someone who might have known him. He saw a few he wasn’t entirely sure of but no one he truly recognized until he was only a couple of spots from the four folding tables separating the hungry masses from twelve propane barbecues, six loaded with hot dogs and the rest with hamburgers. There were bags of buns on the table and three older women and an older man wearing aprons and paper chef hats were filling them with an endless sizzle of wieners and patties. It was the man he’d recognized, none other than Rudy Mills.
Rudy had been Capreol’s deputy fire chief, which Gerald had always found odd since he was the last person he’d have expected to see up on a ladder saving lives. He had a belly about as big and hard as a twenty-pound bag of flour and skinny little legs that always seemed to be on the point of buckling under his girth. He was pretty near the first person Gerald had met when he’d come to town on account he was one of his grandfather’s most loyal customers, and then one of Gerald’s too when he took over the family farm. When Gerald was a kid, if it had been him who’d gone to fetch his eggs, Rudy would always slip a folded-up ten dollar bill into his hand on the sly and whisper, Now don’t let the old man find out. Stingy old bastard like that’d like to dock it from your pay, nudging him in the ribs as he said it so the boy would know he’d meant it as a joke.
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