No Quarter

by John Jantunen

  13

  By the time he’d reached that point in the story, the moon was lost behind the curtain of evergreens on the far side of the lake and the party had emptied into the water.

  The beach was cluttered with a deluge of shirts and pants, underwear and shoes. Their owners were splashing about the shallows, all of them naked and five or six of the girls riding on the shoulders of heavily muscled young men playing at a game of joust, trying to knock the others from their steeds. Their drunken revelry seemed a world away from the dock as Deacon told Crystal how he’d found the pellet gun propped against the chair by the window and spent the afternoon prowling the backyard, shooting a half-dozen blue jays.

  “It seemed the least I could do,” he explained, “after what George had done for me.”

  “He brought you back to life,” Crystal said.

  “I guess he did.”

  He cast her a sideways glance. The way she was staring at him recalled at once the mischievous zeal with which Rain had looked at him after she’d led him into the guest room of the Bickers’ chalet on the night he’d driven her back from the Chronicle’s Christmas party. Seeing that look in Crystal’s eyes, he was just then thinking how sweet it would be if—

  A thought splintered into shards by a booming voice just then yelling over to the dock, “Crystal, I need a partner!”

  Turning towards the shallows, he saw the basketball player standing waist deep in the water. Moonlight glistened over his chiselled flesh making him look like some sort of mythical hero risen from the depths.

  “Duty calls,” Crystal said and then he felt her hand on his shoulder.

  She used it to push herself to her feet, squeezing his arm once before she let go as if to provide some consolation. He watched her slip her bra up over her head and drop it onto the dock. Her back was to him. All he could see were her slender curves silhouetted in the dark and as she slipped from her bottoms he searched about his thoughts for anything he could say to get her to turn his way, if only an inch. The basketball player was wading towards her and Deacon turned to him, seeing in his wide-mouthed grin a fair view of the one he was missing out on.

  He heard a splash and turned to the shallows where Crystal had just dove in, tracing ahead of the ripples she’d made and seeing her head come up at the basketball player’s waist. Lifting her out of the water, he set her backwards on his shoulders, burying his face within her belly. She responded by laughing at what he must have been doing with his tongue and slapping at his back, yelling, “Turn around. I can’t see. Turn around!” as he blindly hastened to join the fray.

  14

  Recalling the scene as he turned off Hiram Street and started up Baker, he was overcome by a familiar sinking feeling. It was the same way he always felt when he was approaching the end of The Stray. Walking up the Cleary’s driveway with the book weighted in his jacket pocket on the night after he’d discovered George was writing again, he now regretted bringing it, knowing that he’d never be able to reclaim the profound sense of calm he’d felt the night before, sitting with his back propped against the barn’s wall, lost in the numinous clatter of the clackety-clack.

  The driveway’s cobblestones led him towards the house. Its windows were dark and the brick path leading into the backyard darker still. On either side of the alcove overhanging the front door were two cement planters painted red and as big as wellheads. They had once been filled with tiger lilies but had gone the way of all of Adele’s carefully cultivated flower gardens, filled now with weeds—mostly dandelions and timothy grass—windblown from the neighbours’ yards. When he stepped from between them he paused, seeking out the rhythmic pulse of keystrokes from the Remington Rand but could hear nothing beyond the faint strains of a country song leaking through the Quimbys’ open garage door.

  He started down the walkway into the backyard and when he came to the tufts of grass curling over the bricks at the path’s end he paused again, tracing the barn’s outline to the lone front-side window and finding that dark too.

  George is probably just taking the night off, he thought, best try again tomorrow.

  And yet still he lingered, his gaze settling on the vague outline of the rock on the barn’s windowsill. He told himself he shouldn’t even be thinking of doing what he was thinking of doing but started forward nevertheless. It was well after nine and shadows ranged long over the unmowed lawn and overgrown flowerbeds. He kept within the shadowed fringe of the treeline, ducking low and coming at the barn as a burglar would.

  He unlocked the door as quietly as he could and eased it open with the caution of a drunk teenager sneaking through his bedroom window just before dawn. He shut it behind him with similar care. From his inside breast pocket, he retrieved his cell phone. He activated its flashlight and kept the beam at his feet, gracing the floor with just enough illume to avoid toppling the stacks of books on either side of the path leading him towards the desk. Light splashed over the two stacks of paper sitting side by side to the left of the typewriter. Moving to the smaller of the two, he pried the bottom page up ever so delicately with a fingernail, so as not to disturb the rectangle that framed the stack amidst the scattering of ash covering the desk.

  The sheet was blank except for the title centered on the page: No Quarter. He let the sheet drop. On the second there was a quote: If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who caused the darkness. V.H. At the top of the next, there was the word prologue and he lifted the page until the first line came into view.

  How long it had been following her, she couldn’t say.

  He’d barely got to the end of that when he was startled by a whimper arising from the other side of the door. The pages slipped from his grip, slumping back to the desk, their sudden descent blowing at the outline of dust, blurring its sharp lines. He froze stock-still, listening. The dog whimpered again and this time it was accompanied by the rake of claws against steel. Alarm hastened him away from the desk. He followed the flashlight’s glare back through the stacks of books, seeing Trixie’s snout raised up to the door’s window, her seeing him too and emitting a sharp whine as he reached for the knob.

  As he closed the door behind him, Trixie barked and he bent to the dog, shushing her and letting her lick his cheek.

  “You just getting back from a walk?” he asked and glanced towards the house, expecting George to be standing there at the end of the path, wondering why she’d set off into the backyard.

  But the brick path was empty and he scanned over the house’s windows looking for a light or a shade of movement, anything to tell him that he’d gone inside. It was as still as a tomb. Trixie had turned around and was walking towards the garden. Deacon watched after her, scouring the backyard for any sense of where she might be headed.

  Amongst the gloom he couldn’t see much except that the door to the garden shed was open. Three summers previous, someone had stolen a jerry can full of gas out of the same shed. They’d used it to paint a pentagram in fire on the field surrounding the helicopter landing pad behind the hospital, and ever since George had been real particular about making sure the shed’s doors were locked up tight. Seeing it open now didn’t exactly set off any warning bells but it did provide a focal point to the sense of foreboding that had begun to settle in his belly. He took a direct line for it and was just cresting the cherry tree when he caught sight of something jutting from within the nettle of barbed stalks at the edge of the raspberry patch. It took him only a moment to see that it was one of George’s workboots. Its sole was crusted with dirt and its toe was pointed skywards.

  He set off at a run.

  Trixie was laying down beside George when he made it to the edge of the garden. She looked up as Deacon craned forward and peered down at the old man, sprawled on his back amongst the brambles. His eyes were open, vacant and dark, and his right hand was resting on his heart. A blotch of what a
ppeared to be blood soaked his shirt from the collar to his belt. At first glance, it looked to Deacon like he’d been shot. The shock of finding him that way and thinking that the violence so intrinsic to his Fictions had somehow caught up with him didn’t relent even when he bent to the old man and set his hand on George’s shoulder, seeing, or rather feeling and smelling, that it wasn’t blood at all, but motor oil.

  He’d learn, a week later, it was from the Rototiller sitting not five feet away. Deacon had started it up so he could cart it off to the dump and had been startled by a geyser of the black fluid spraying from a corroded gasket. He’d seen then an image of George startled too, a sudden shock too much for the old man’s heart to bear. Not that it mattered a damn bit whether it was blood or motor oil, for the result was much the same.

  George was clearly dead.

  RENÉ

  “A funeral?” René asked in answer to his grandfather’s question. “Who died?”

  “A friend.”

  “I didn’t think you had any friends.”

  René was standing, travel mug in hand, on the porch leading into his grandfather’s clapboard bungalow. He’d awoken in his trailer with a tickle in his throat that might have been the start of a cold. When he sat up, the room seemed to tilt away from him and he shivered like someone was running ice cubes up his back, so he knew he’d be lucky if that was all it was. His grandfather kept a box of what he called lemony citron in his cupboard, and René had skipped making his morning coffee, thinking a couple of packets of that might do him a world of good.

  His grandfather had called to him from the garage’s door as he’d mounted the porch steps, and when René had turned he was hurrying towards the house, beseeching him with eager eyes, an expression he often wore and which always reminded René of a dog begging for a treat. At René’s rebuff his expression turned dour and he scratched at his billy goat scruff, trying to think of a name to prove his grandson wrong. He mustn’t have been able to for after a moment he said, “They’s gettin’ thin on the ground, that’s for sure.” Then looking up again, “So can I get a ride in with you or not?”

  “Saturday, you say?”

  “I did.”

  “You know I see Tawyne on Saturday.”

  “I also know you meet him at the Tim’s in town. Ain’t but a ten-minute walk from the church.”

  “What time’s it at?”

  “The funeral?”

  “That’s what we’re talking about, ain’t it?”

  “It’s at one.”

  “I was planning on leaving around ten.”

  “That’s fine too.”

  “You were just going to hang around?”

  “Well, I was hoping to see . . .” he said, sneaking a peak at René out of the corner of his eye, “Tawyne anyhow. Saturday’s his birthday, ain’t it?”

  “No, it’s on Sunday.”

  “But you’re going to celebrate it on Saturday.”

  “You know I am.”

  “So what do you say? Can I get a lift?”

  René thought about it.

  “Jean’d have a fit she saw you,” he finally said. “It’s one of her rules. I toldya that.”

  “Ain’t no harm in wishing him a happy birthday.”

  “Tell that to Jean.”

  The old man man’s face sunk.

  “Didya get him a present?” René asked after a moment.

  “I figure I could rustle something up.”

  “Jean’d just as likely take a hammer to it as let him open it. If she knew it was from you.”

  It came out sounding mean, and he’d meant it to. He felt bad all the same. It wasn’t the old man’s fault he was in a pissy mood; it was the thought of starting a ten-hour day feeling like hammered shit.

  Clutching at the wolves on his hands and counting to five, René waited for his calm to return. When it did, he let his gaze wander back to the old man.

  “Okay,” he finally said. “I’ll let you come. As long as you stay out of sight.”

  The old man’s expression brightened.

  “You can count on it.”

  * * *

  René had just filled his travel mug from the electric kettle on his grandfather’s kitchen counter when his Samsung rang. It was Roy, telling him that he was running late.

  “I’m just passing Rainbow Ridge,” he added. “I’ll be there in under twenty.”

  “I’ll be here,” René said, and Roy hung up without bothering to say goodbye.

  He drank his lemony citron sitting in his grandfather’s chair at the kitchen table, about the only surface more than two square feet in the entire place that wasn’t covered with an odd assortment of engine parts, which leant the house the appearance it was more an extension of the garage than a home, good and proper. On any other day, he would have taken it outside, since his grandfather didn’t abide smoking in his house. But he didn’t much feel like having a cigarette just yet and besides the latest issue of the Chronicle was sitting at his grandfather’s spot at the table.

  It was the headline on the front page that had caught his attention.

  George Cleary, 1942–2015, it read and it didn’t take more than a second glance at the name to know that he must have been the friend his grandfather was talking about. Below the headline there was a picture of a man sitting at a typewriter with a cigarette crooked in his mouth. He was clean-shaven and couldn’t have been older than twenty-five and hardly resembled the old man who used to drop by three or four times a year to go fishing with his grandfather.

  He drove a 1970 Ford Ranger XLT, its make, model, and year permanently etched in René’s mind. He’d helped his grandfather repair it a half-dozen times, though he’d only met its owner on three occasions. The first two times René had been there when he’d pulled up into the driveway. His grandfather had come out of the garage where he was working on a car, standing at the door and shaking his head, like it was the devil himself who’d come to pay a visit.

  When George stepped out, René’s grandfather would call over to him, “You still driving that old piece of shit?” and George would call back to him, “I’ll be driving it until I find the son of a bitch who sold it to me. I aim to run him down and then good riddance to the both of them, I say. Hey, wait, there he is now!”

  George would then hurry back into the cab of the truck. He’d gun the engine and the truck would lurch forward as if he meant to make good on his threat, and René’s grandfather would make a game of scurrying for cover—two damn fool old men playing at being teenagers.

  After a moment, George would turn off the truck’s ignition though when he’d get out he’d be cursing, “Goddamned piece of shit, stalled on me again. I guess it’s your lucky day.”

  He’d be grinning when he said it and René’s grandfather would be grinning right back as he walked towards him.

  “Good to see you, George,” he’d say, and George would look over to René, suddenly struck shy by the old man’s pointed gaze.

  “Good to see one of you anyway,” George would say.

  George’d then collect his rod and tackle box from the back of the truck, and René’s grandfather his own rod from the garage and they’d set off up the path leading through the woods at the back of his grandfather’s three-quarter-acre plot, neither in any hurry, it seemed, to get to Lake Koué.

  The last time he’d seen him, he was seventeen and George had brought along a boy, whose name René couldn’t remember. He was some years younger than himself and a shade lighter skinned, though he was unmistakably Indian. René’s grand­father later told him that George and his wife had adopted him after the boy’s family had died in a car crash and that he was Chippewa, on his mother’s side. Whenever she said grace, René’s grandmother was careful to pay tribute to “these honourable People” who had lived in Mesaquakee before Hunio ’on and their diseases had chas
ed them north, their own People migrating there from Kanesatake, Quebec, several generations later after a dispute with a Jesuit priest had threatened to turn ugly.

  While the old men were shaking hands, the boy had gone to fetch the gear from the truck’s bed. With two rods and tackle in hand, he stood staring at René with the same daft expression as the tourists who’d come up to the reserve to see some “real” Indians. René had fled into the garage to get out from under his gaze, and a short while later his grandfather had poked his head in the door to ask him if he’d like to come fishing with them, the first time he’d ever done so. René answered that he ought to be getting home. It wasn’t exactly the truth, and after they’d departed he took his time putting the tools away and sweeping the floor, all the while fighting a losing battle to keep his attention from wandering towards the hardcover book wedged amongst his grandfather’s collection of owner’s manuals, one of every make, model, and year of car or truck he’d ever sold, over one hundred in all.

  He kept them on a grey steel utility shelf arranged in chronological order, the oldest dating back to 1972, the year he’d got the job at Bailey’s Auto Wreck through Corrections Canada’s work-release program. Seeing the endless parade of cars meant for the crusher, he’d been alarmed at such waste. Whenever he found one that he thought worth saving, he’d buy it from Clarence Bailey for its scrap fees, fix it up, and sell it for cheap, mostly to teenagers buying their first car or to single moms who couldn’t afford anything better. He’d give them a two-year warranty on labour for when it broke down, which was a damn site better than they’d get at any of the used car dealerships in town. He kept track of the dates of sale by affixing a label to the spine of their particular owner’s manual, ordered in, new, from the Auto Parts store in town and stored on the shelf as much as a record of his life’s work as it was for reference.

  The manual for George’s truck was three-quarters of the way through the middle row. It was purchased, according to its label, on October 23, 1983. The truck had been in and out of the garage a couple dozen times since. As such, the manual was dog-eared and stained with innumerable oily fingerprints. René was thirteen years old when the Ranger’s alternator had started making a grinding noise. He’d dropped by after school, as he often did on the afternoons his grandmother had her drum circle, or council meetings, and he knew he wouldn’t be missed. He’d found his grandfather under the Ford’s hood. Engine parts and tools were strewn haphazard on the floor around his feet.