No Quarter

by John Jantunen

  Three clicks later Deacon was staring at a headline reading, “Police Say T.O. Real Estate Mogul Ronald Crane Victim of Foul Play.”

  The contents of the column informed him that Crane’s throat had been slashed prior to his van being set on fire and that given his prominence—his $3.68 billion net worth made him the twelfth richest man in the country—the RCMP would be handling the case. It further went on to say that at the time of his demise he was being investigated by the same for possible links to organized crime related to a kickback scheme dating to the late 1990s, the inference being that his “suspected” murder and his “cooperation” might in some way be related. Information that, albeit intriguing, was useless to a small-town reporter who, in his own article on the matter, had included a quote from “a source within the Tildon Police Services” indicating that “foul play was suspected,” only to read, when the Chronicle came out, that “police are refusing to speculate on the cause of the fire while the investigation is ongoing.”

  It wasn’t the first time Grover had softened his copy. It was something he was especially prone to doing between the May Two-Four and Labour Day weekends in the belief that the cottagers who made up, at last count, seventeen percent of the Chronicle’s subscribers during the summer months were looking for a break from the kind of “if it bleeds, it leads” nonsense they were inundated with in the big city papers. Whether that was true or not, Deacon had his doubts, but he’d learned that his doubts were worth about as much as a snowflake in December next to Grover’s own opinions on the matter.

  The first, and last, time he’d contested one of Grover’s editorial prerogatives had been when he was eighteen. He’d written a story about two pit bulls that had mauled a three-year-old boy while he was playing in a sandbox in his backyard. The pit bulls in question were owned by the boy’s neighbour and were released one afternoon when the Tildon Police Services raided their master’s house on a tip—later confirmed—that it was being used as a meth lab. The dogs had escaped when the arresting officers had kicked in the back door and, finding the boy playing happily in his backyard they proceeded to, in Dylan’s words, “tear his little face off.”

  After Deacon had submitted the article, detailing the events much as described, he’d been shocked to find that the only allusion to the bust or the meth lab was that “two police officers executing a routine warrant in the area had heard the boy’s screams and intervened in the attack.” When he’d protested to Grover, accusing him in his youthful zeal of “butchering his article,” Grover had marched him outside and pointed to the newspaper’s honour box stationed on the sidewalk in front of the office.

  “What’s that say?” Grover had asked and, rather meekly, Deacon recited the words Grover himself had stencilled along the box’s top edge: “How about some good news for a change?”

  “And what kind of person in their right mind would think that finding out their neighbours were operating a meth lab is good news?”

  There’d probably be a few meth heads who’d be plenty happy to hear about it was the answer that had sprung to Deacon’s mind. But then, of course, meth heads don’t generally read the paper. He held his tongue and had been doing so ever since. He knew that Grover would have absolutely no interest in any revelations pertaining to Ronald Crane’s involvement with organized crime, just as he was certain that George most certainly would, deriving as he did no end of morbid delight in any tragedy afflicting the country’s rich and famous.

  Adele, George’s wife of fifty-six years and a second mom to Deacon for the past twelve, had died just before Easter. George had hardly left his property since. Grover and Deacon, so far as they knew, had become his only contact with the outside world, Grover visiting him three or four times a week to play backgammon or cribbage in the evening and Deacon dropping by whenever the mood struck.

  It was a Wednesday, the day the paper came out, and Deacon had nothing on his slate but sweating over the emails he’d relegated to a folder named, Next Week?

  There’s no time like the present, he told himself, shutting his laptop and locking his office door behind him on the way out.

  4

  Ten minutes later he was walking up Baker, the street George lived on. It was more like a driveway shared between its only two residences, though both also had a driveway of their own—the Clearys’ fashioned out of interlocked brick and the Quimbys’ across from it out of gravel, most of which was strewn over their front yard from a winter’s worth of snow shovelling.

  There were two cars parked side by side in front of George’s garage, one a grey Mercedes that belonged to George’s son, Edward, and the other a sporty purple Audi that his daughter Louise drove.

  Deacon had been on the outs with both ever since he’d taken George’s side when they’d tried to get Adele moved into a nursing home after she’d barely survived a bout of pneumonia. She’d been diagnosed with Parkinson’s several years earlier but seemed to be doing okay. Then one night she wandered from the house in the middle of the season’s first blizzard, wearing only her slippers and a nightdress. She’d been found by a snowplow driver, banging on the front door of the pharmacy on Main. When he asked what she was doing, she’d told him that her son was sick and she needed to get some penicillin. She had a prescription, she said, and became increasingly flustered when she couldn’t find it, nor any pockets, in the folds of her gown.

  It had taken the snowplow driver a devil of a time to convince her that it didn’t matter if she found it or not, the pharmacy was closed, and that she’d better get in his truck or she’d freeze to death. Finally she’d relented, and he took her to the South Mesaquakee Memorial Hospital, which was all of a two-minute drive away.

  The pneumonia had kept her there for three weeks before Deacon heard tell of it. He’d graduated from high school that spring. George had insisted he further his education and he’d obliged him by enrolling in the journalism program at Ryerson University in Toronto. He spent a single semester living in a dorm, wishing he was anywhere but there, and when he came home for Christmas he was told Adele was in the hospital. She was due to be released the next day and against the advice of her doctor and his children, George refused to put her in a home, telling them that he’d continue caring for her himself. There’d been a fight, Louise leading the attack in the hospital’s parking lot while Edward helped Adele into the passenger seat of George’s pickup truck and Deacon stowed her wheelchair in the truck’s bed. Louise had accused George of being selfish and refusing to see beyond his own stubborn pride and do what was right for once, her vitriol well beyond what one might reasonably expect from someone discussing palliative care arrangements for her mother.

  When George had closed the passenger door and was circling his truck on the way to the driver’s seat, Louise grabbed him by the arm, her anger seething as she said, “She almost died! You’re too old to look after her. You can barely look after yourself.”

  It wasn’t the first time Deacon had cause to think that the Clearys weren’t exactly the perfect family he’d thought they were when he first moved in with George and Adele. He’d heard other rumblings too, most often during the holidays, which were the only times they were ever all together. Deacon had always kept his thoughts to himself, but bearing witness to Louise’s open scorn for the man who’d taken him in and treated him like a son when nobody else would had stirred something in him that could not be silenced.

  “We’ll manage,” Deacon had called over, and Louise cast him such a look of spite that it could have frozen fire. When she looked back at George, he shrugged as if the matter was out of his hands.

  Edward had treated Deacon with mild disdain ever since; Louise, on the other hand, had treated him with open scorn. Seeing their cars parked side by side in the driveway, he told himself that maybe it would be best if he came back later. Even from the edge of the street, he could hear Louise’s voice raised in shrill sanction from the backyard, elevated to a vo
lume that suggested George had fired another housekeeper without her permission. Thinking how it wasn’t right for them to be ganging up on him again, Deacon willed his legs forward, looping towards the red-brick path leading past the front door, letting that steer him around the house and into the backyard.

  It was almost as big as a football field, its grounds resplendent with cherry and bird berry trees, flower gardens ringed with river-­washed stones, and on its western expanse a quarter acre of tilled soil where they grew their vegetables. But ever since Adele had died, weeds had overtaken her gardens and George had stopped mowing the lawn so that it now resembled an old homestead grown wild with its owner’s passing, a semblance made ever more so by the small red-brick barn set at the edge of the ravine that bordered their property.

  Louise’s voice was coming from the direction of the garden and it was punctuated by a series of sharp barks—George’s golden retriever, Trixie, providing her own response to the attack on her master. Coming to the cherry tree in the middle of the lawn, Deacon caught sight of George standing in what had once been his prized tomato patch but was now overgrown with raspberry brambles. He had a clutch of weeds in his hand. He was swatting it about, spraying soil loosened from their roots in carefully articulated showers at Louise and Edward.

  “I left it to him,” he said, “and that’s final. You can fight it out with my lawyer after I’m gone, if you want. But it won’t do you any good, I’ll tell you that.”

  It seemed to Deacon George must have been talking about him.

  Maybe, he mused, he’d changed his will again, something he’d done a few times since Deacon had come to live with him and Adele. It had never failed to cause a row, and Deacon had made his opinions on the matter clear. He’d have rather been left with nothing if it meant Edward and Louise would leave their father in peace, a sentiment at stark odds with the secret thrill he felt seeing Louise so flustered now.

  Viewed from the back, it was obvious that she’d gained some weight since Deacon had last seen her. She’d been as pretty and slight as her mother in her younger days and the added bulk didn’t so much make her look fat as it did wide, like she’d become a reflection of Adele stretched out of proportion in some funhouse mirror. Edward too had borne a strong resemblance to his father when he was young, though looking at the two of them now, they couldn’t have appeared more different—George, the wild fray of his beard paired by an old dress shirt and grey slacks with a rip at the knee so that he looked like a chartered accountant who’d spent the last five years stuck on a deserted island; Edward, who was in fact a chartered accountant, clean-shaven and sombre, dressed as if he was meeting his richest client for lunch.

  “Be reasonable,” Louise urged and that made Deacon smile.

  She sounded exactly like her mother had when scolding George for some misdeed, most likely to have about the same effect. Then George was looking his way. There was a plead in his eye, and Deacon gave him a sympathetic wave as he turned and walked on a straight line towards the barn’s front door. It had once guarded a herd of sheep and a clutch of chickens at a time when no one thought twice about keeping farm animals in town. After George had bought the house in the early 1970s, he’d refashioned the barn into his private den—a place to read and to write and to generally escape the hubbub of having two young children ever under foot. He’d covered all four walls with shelves and filled those with books. And when he had, he’d taken to stacking new acquisitions on the floor and every other available space, leaving only a narrow path down the middle.

  Directly across from the door hung a picture frame. Behind the glass, a sheet of white paper upon which was handwritten in black marker: “Fiction is a bridge to the truth that journalism can’t touch.” And below that, “Bill.” Deacon had long since come to recognize the childlike scrawl as George’s own and the “Bill” in question as being the familiar derivation of one of George’s favourite authors. Upon entering the barn, Deacon’s gaze would invariably seek out the words, coming across them almost by accident, as if the solution to the mystery regarding the dual and conflicting natures of George The Writer and George The Man would reveal itself if only he caught it unawares. And when it never did, he’d tap the glass with his index finger, like he was doing now, as if to give the elusive secret fair warning that he was closing in.

  The smell of mildewed paper, which had always defined the barn’s character, was diminished by the musk of stale cigarette smoke. It seemed to him as odd, never having seen George himself take so much as a puff, and it immediately drew his attention to George’s old Remington Rand typewriter. It was the same machine on which he’d written all twelve of his Fictions, the last published when Deacon was barely out of diapers, and ever since had sat collecting dust on the expansive oak wood desk in the far left-hand side of the barn.

  Why he’d quit writing was a matter of some debate.

  Grover was Deacon’s main source of information on all things Cleary, and after the fourth time Deacon had read through George’s collected works—he was fifteen and even then inclined to drop by the Chronicle every day after school—he’d asked Grover why George had stopped writing books. Grover had cocked his head to the side and stroked at the curls of his beard. It was what he always did whenever he was pressed to speak on a matter of some grave import, taking a moment not so much to gather his thoughts as to appraise the person in front of him, as if it was they themselves who were determining what he might want to say.

  “It’s a mystery to me too,” he’d finally said. “I guess you’ll just have to ask him yourself.”

  Deacon had been reluctant to do that, for reasons he couldn’t readily define. Instead he’d asked Adele one day at the kitchen table while he was helping her prepare a new crossword, which, in the years before she’d succumbed to Parkinson’s, had been her one contribution to the Chronicle.

  “He didn’t have the heart for it anymore,” she’d answered.

  His books had never sold more than a few hundred copies, and Deacon had taken what Adele had said to mean that George had grown tired of seeing the bulk of them end up as remainders, shipped back from stores, if they even made it that far, their front covers torn off and the rest relegated to an ignominious end in some landfill.

  But the truth was she’d meant it literally.

  “When he turned fifty-five,” she continued, “he got angina. Doctor Morrell told him he’d be lucky to live to see sixty if he kept smoking the way he did. Two or three packs a day. And sometimes when he’d run out of those, hand-rolleds from the Mason jar of Drum he kept on his desk. A disgusting habit.”

  She’d pursed her lips, as if the memory conjured within it the stink of tobacco on his breath and in his clothes, the yellow tint to his fingers and the streaks of tar staining the white of his beard.

  “So he quit?” Deacon asked.

  “He did, and writing too. Said there wasn’t much joy in one without the other. He still wrote for the paper, of course, but never another of his Fictions. And if you ask me . . .”

  A bitter note had crept into her voice and she shook her head as if she couldn’t quite bring herself to utter what she’d meant to say next. They’d never spoken of it again.

  It would be eight years before Deacon would have cause to broach the subject once more, this time with Dylan. They were in his backyard, ten beers into the twelve of Keith’s stowed in the cooler between them as they often were by midnight on a Friday when neither had anything better to do than recline in lawn chairs, snapping bottle caps between their thumbs and forefingers, watching the crowns spin off into the dark, listening for the rap of them against the fence to tell them their aim had been true.

  Deacon had just come back from the bathroom where he’d found, tucked amongst a dozen or so Outdoor Canada magazines in the rack beside the toilet, a trade paperback copy of My Brother’s Keeper. It was George’s third novel and he couldn’t have been more surprised see
ing it there, as much because he’d never known Dylan to be much of a reader as because it was the only one of George’s books that he needed to complete his own collection. (His attempts to find it on eBay had borne no fruit, though he’d found the rest, along with three of his books in German translation.)

  When he’d got back to the yard he’d asked Dylan where he’d got it, and Dylan had answered:

  “It’s George’s. Only copy, as far as I know, that’s left. Unless Grover has one.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He only printed up five. Story I heard is, they burnt up the rest.”

  “What? I—I mean, who?”

  “Dad and Aunt Louise.”

  It seemed doubly strange hearing him say that since the book had been dedicated For My Children, E. & L.

  “Why in the hell would they do that?” Deacon asked after he’d overcome his shock.

  “That’s what I was trying to figure out when I took it off his shelf.”

  “And did you?”

  “Haven’t made it past page ten.”

  “Too bad. It’s a helluva book.”

  “Well, I was never much of a reader.”

  Deacon’s gaze settled again on the book in his lap. Its cover was warped from being jammed in the magazine rack and its pages stained with innumerable drips from Dylan reaching out of the shower to grab a towel. He hadn’t read it in years and the moment he set eyes on the image on its front—a photograph of train tracks disappearing into a snow-bound wilderness—he was powerless but to crack its spine.

  Through his inebriation, the words on page one blurred and the letters set to dancing drunkenly towards the margins on the first page. His head got to spinning right along with them and after a moment he shut it again.

  “It’s a shame,” he said, smoothing the cover to distract himself from a sudden wave of nausea.