No Quarter

by John Jantunen

  “Do me a favour,” his grandfather said by way of a greeting, “fetch me the book.”

  “For the ’70 Ford Ranger?”

  The old man grunted in answer, as he often did when he shouldn’t have to answer at all.

  “What’s the date?” René asked as he stepped to the shelf and scanned over the manuals.

  “Eighty-three. Should be on the middle shelf.”

  “I got it.”

  Reaching for it, he caught sight of the book beside it and his hand had stalled. The book was four fingers wide, George Cleary and The Unnamed running lengthwise down its spine. But it wasn’t those that made him pause a moment, it was the picture above. It was of two child-sized silhouettes sitting on a tree branch with their legs a-dangle beneath them. Both had long hair and the one—a girl most likely—had her head resting on the other’s shoulder, the boy—most likely—pointing at something in the distance. It struck him as oddly familiar, though he couldn’t exactly say why. The thought arose in his mind like a question begging for an answer, and he was powerless but to pull the book out to see what the cover might reveal.

  The picture there was a painting of a sunset over water. A thin rail of hazy light was mirrored along the surface of a lake, and the sky overhead was overcast and dark, the clouds fading into a starry night above. And at the bottom: a pine tree looming at the water’s edge, the silhouettes of the two children sitting on a high branch. The boy he could now see was pointing out at the lake where there was a small square of white where the sky met the horizon—maybe the sail of a ship. The feeling that he’d indeed seen the two of them before furrowed his brow, and while he was pondering on where that might have been, his grandfather gave out a coarse shout: “You writing the damn manual over there yourself?”

  Slipping the book back onto the shelf, he pulled out the Ranger’s manual and hurried over to his grandfather.

  The old man snatched up the manual without looking up. He flipped through it until he found what he was looking for and then lay it down on the engine block, propping his socket wrench over the crease to hold it flat. His reading glasses were propped on his forehead and he lowered them over his eyes, bending a hand’s width from the page and tracing over the words. His lips moved in silent recitation for a moment, then he nodded and turned back to the truck.

  “You can put it away now,” he said, picking up his socket wrench and reaching it deep within the bowels of the engine.

  René walked the manual back to the shelf. After he’d slid it into the gap he again paused a moment, staring at the spine of the one next to it.

  And that’s when it came to him.

  It’s like the photograph Grams has up on the wall in her kitchen.

  It was black and white and the kids were in full light, not in shadow, but they were sitting on the high branch in a pine tree at the edge of the water. The girl was indeed resting her head on the boy’s shoulder and he was pointing at something across the lake—maybe a sailboat just out of reach of the camera’s focus.

  When he was seven and he and his older sister Jean had first come to live with their grandmother, he’d often caught her staring up at the photo whenever she was standing at the stove. She was a large woman who always wore one of a half-dozen brightly coloured dresses imprinted with wild flowers and impregnated with the flavour of the stew that, for as long as René could remember, she kept at a slow boil on the stove, in case someone happened to drop by unannounced. She’d spend hours, it seemed, stirring at that big old char-bottomed pot with a wooden spoon, all the while staring up at the photograph.

  Once he’d interrupted her revelry by asking, “Is that you in the picture, Grams?” and she’d startled same as if he’d given her a static shock.

  “Huh?” she’d said, looking down at her grandson.

  “In the picture. Is that you?”

  She’d then turned back to the photograph, appraising it as if she wasn’t quite sure what to say. After a moment, she shook her head.

  “No,” she’d said, “it’s not me.”

  “Then who is it?”

  “Just a couple of ghosts, is all.”

  “Ghosts,” he’d gulped, for in those days he’d been a timid boy prone to bad dreams and sometimes wetting his bed.

  He’d looked back at the photo. The steam rising from the pot leant it an eerie gloss so it wasn’t hard to imagine that they were, indeed, ghosts. Seeing the look of terror spreading over her grandson’s face, the old woman bent to him and brushed the hair out of his face with the back of her hand, as she often did to soothe him when he’d awake in the night, crying out for his mom.

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” she’d said, running her hand through his hair on the way to easing herself back up to stand. “They won’t bother you as long as you don’t bother them.”

  Still, in the days, weeks, months to follow, the mere thought of the picture was enough to send a shudder up his spine, and it would be years before he’d even think of entering the kitchen without turning on the light for fear that the ghosts, freed from the photograph, might be lurking there in the dark.

  Scared of a damn picture, he thought, staring at its double on the cover of the book. His cheeks flushed with shame from the memory, and he turned the hardcover over as much to distract himself from thinking about the boy he used to be as to see what it might say on the back.

  At the bottom, there was the picture of a white guy sitting in front of a typewriter. He was wearing a button-down white shirt, its sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and had a hand-rolled cigarette crooked in the corner of his mouth. His eyes were wide as if whoever had taken the photograph had snuck up on him. George Cleary lives in Tildon, ON was all it said by way of explanation, and René read the first line of the paragraph that took up the remainder of the back cover.

  In the dying days of the time before, a boy and a girl are born amongst a small band of Cree living in an isolated village on the shores of James Bay. They will come to hold the fate of a nation in their hands.

  That’s as far as he got before his grandfather was calling over, asking him to fetch something or other.

  “What?” he asked.

  “The three-quarter-inch socket!” the old man hollered.

  René went to fetch it from the tool cabinet and by the time he’d returned to the truck, his grandfather was wrestling with the bit on the socket wrench. He wiped his hands on his coveralls and tried again but he still couldn’t get his fingers to stop from slipping.

  “Goddamned arthritis,” he complained. “Might as well be wearing oven mitts.” Then passing the wrench to René: “You mind?”

  René was still holding the book in one hand, the bit in the other. He tucked the former under his arm, set the latter on the truck’s bumper, and took the socket wrench from his grandfather. He popped the bit off with no more effort than twisting the cap off a near-empty bottle of ketchup.

  “What’s that you got there?” the old man asked.

  “Huh?” he said, handing the wrench back.

  “Under your arm.”

  René drew the book out and held it up.

  “I found it on the shelf.”

  “Shoot, I wondered where I put that. I was looking for it just the other day.”

  “Well, it was sitting right there on the shelf.”

  “Shoot, don’t that beat all.”

  “The picture on the cover . . .” René started then stopped.

  “You recognize it, don’tya?”

  “It’s kinda like the one Grams has hanging over her stove.”

  “That still there?”

  René nodded.

  That gave the old man pause, and he rubbed at the greying scruff under his chin as if trying to divine some deeper meaning to it.

  “She ever tell you about it?” he said after a time.

  “All she’d sa
y was it was of a couple of ghosts.”

  The old man let out a laugh, short and to the point.

  “They ain’t ghosts. Not yet, anyway.”

  “Who are they?”

  “It’s me and her.”

  “You and Grams?”

  “Ya-huh. It was taken by this feller from the university who was visitin’ the reserve one time. We was five, maybe six. He was a . . . watchamacallit. Someone who studies Indians?”

  “An anthropologist?” René said, recollecting the word from history class and surprising himself that he’d actually found a use for it.

  “That’s it. He saw us up in this old tree we used to climb down by the lake, snapped a picture. Gave a copy of it to your gram’s dad and one to mine.”

  “Why’s it on the cover of this book?”

  “I had the same picture hanging on the wall,” he said, pointing then at a blank space above his workbench where a screw hole could just be made out, “right over there. Got wrecked the time the snow collapsed the roof, of course, but that was years after George saw it. It was the day he’d bought the truck, point of fact. I was just signing the papers over when he asked me about it. I told him the same as I told you and a few things besides. That’s how he come to write the book.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s about me and your grams.”

  “This book here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It says on the back it’s about the Cree. You and Grams is Mohawk.”

  “Well, George took some liberties, I won’t deny that.”

  René shook his head as if he didn’t believe him but when he looked back at the cover there was no denying the picture. His expression must have still relayed doubt, for it wasn’t but a moment later his grandfather said, “Look inside, you don’t believe me.”

  René opened the book. Its spine let out a sharp crack as he turned to the first page.

  “Keep going,” his grandfather urged.

  René turned to the next. On the left side there was a bunch of words in small print, the copyright and all that. On the right it read, For Guy. And below, in an almost childlike scrawl, it read: There must be some way out of here.

  “What he wrote there, it’s from a song,” his grandfather said.

  The book was weighing heavy in René’s hands. As far as he knew, his grandfather had been a mechanic at Bailey’s Auto Wreck ever since he’d got out of jail, pretty much his entire adult life. How anyone could have found enough in that to write a book as heavy as a brick seemed unlikely, verging on the impossible.

  “Is this book really about you and Grams?” he asked.

  “I don’t stake a claim on the whole thing, but parts of it are anyways. And I’ll let you in on a secret.” Then leaning close enough to whisper in his grandson’s ear: “You’re in it too.”

  “I am not.”

  “Shades of you are, at least.”

  Now he knew that his grandfather was having him on and he had the proof to call him on it.

  “Can’t be,” he said. “Says here—” pointing at the date on the copyright page, “it was written in 1986. That was before I was even born.”

  “I know.”

  “Then how? I mean, how in hell? There’s no way.”

  “I don’t know how George managed it, but you’re in there as sure as I’m standing here before you. Even got your name right.”

  Shutting the book, René flipped it over to its back, tracing over the words, not really reading any of them as he searched for mention of his name. It wasn’t there. Reaching the end of the paragraph, his eyes again sought out the picture at the bottom. Something about the man’s startled grin, like he’d never had a damn worry in his entire life, brought the taste of bile into his mouth.

  “How the fuck would he know what it’s like being an Indian?” he said before he could stop himself, knowing, as he did, his grandfather’s disdain for swears.

  He hadn’t seemed to notice though, or at least paid it no mind, and without skipping a beat, he said, “I guess you’re going to have to read it, you want to find that out.”

  “It’d take me a year to read through all that.”

  “That’s okay. I ain’t in no hurry to get it back.”

  René flipped it back over to its front cover and stared at the picture as if he might actually be considering it. Truth was, the two “ghosts” had already filled enough nightmares to last him a lifetime, and he’d as soon have the book sitting on the shelf at the head of his bed as he would a live rattlesnake. But when he looked up, the old man was beseeching him with those eager eyes, and René knew he’d be sorely disappointed if he said no.

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea,” he said, suddenly seeing a way out. “Grams’d know I got it from you and she’s like to burn it. Hell, she’d throw a fit she kno—”

  The words choked in his mouth, realizing the kind of trouble he’d just made for himself. A knot twisted in his belly, thinking of the seven kinds of hell he was about to catch for lying to his grandfather, and to his grandmother too.

  “She don’t know you’ve been coming to see me?”

  René shook his head with downcast eyes and the old man turned away.

  “Best put it back where you got it from, then,” he said, his voice like it had been squeezed out through a mouthful of gravel.

  “It’s probably for the best,” he added as René returned it to the shelf. “It’s not really a book for children anyhow.”

  * * *

  It would be ten years before he’d hold the book in his hands again.

  He’d just been transferred to Fenbrook Medium, where he’d serve out the last six months of his sentence. It was right off the 11, not a fifteen-minute drive south of Tildon. Every week the old man would be there waiting for him in the visitor’s lounge. He was the only visitor René ever had during his incarceration, his grandmother having died of a stroke three years before he’d been found guilty of aggravated assault, which at the time had seemed to René about the best thing to be said about the whole sad and sorry affair.

  The first time he came, he brought the book, passing it to one of the guards who, in turn, rifled through its pages before setting it on the table in front of René. René hadn’t glanced at it longer than to see what it was, and when he looked back up at his grandfather he was beseeching him again with those eager eyes.

  “I thought you might like something to read,” he said. “Now you got the time.”

  René nodded, once. It was about all he ever gave by way of an answer as his grandfather filled the half hour they had together by telling him about whatever old junker he’d last saved, who its previous owners were, what was wrong with it, and then a virtual play-by-play of what he had to do to get it safetied, René nodding along to the endless prattle and passing furtive glances at the guards patrolling the aisles between the tables as if he was expecting one of them to jump him at any moment.

  When their time was up that day, his grandfather stood, setting his hand on the book and drumming his fingers on its cover like he was having second thoughts about leaving it.

  After a moment, he turned towards the door then looked back.

  “The part about you,” he said, “starts on page three-ninety-seven.”

  The truth was, René’d just as soon read the dictionary from A to Z, but he’d taken the book anyway. It’d be a month before he’d have cause to open it. He’d finally given in one morning when his cellmate, a Croatian named Dinko who was serving ten for his part in a human trafficking scheme, had fished it out from under the mattress on the top bunk upon which René was reclined.

  “What the fuck you think you’re doing?” René had growled, sitting up on the bed.

  “I read,” Dinko answered, sitting on the toilet. “It helps with—” searching for the right word and then only com
ing up with a sound as if he’d learned to speak English while watching Saturday morning cartoons, “plop!”

  “Well, it’s mine,” René snarled, dropping to the floor. “Give it back!”

  Dinko opened it in his bare lap, showing no signs that he meant to do anything of the sort and said, “A book is for read. What good is book sit under bed? No good, that is what. I read.”

  René reached out and grabbed at it but Dinko was expecting that. He held on tight, gritting his teeth and staring back at René with hate in his eyes. It was the kind of look that could get you killed even in medium security. Dinko was a big man, pushing two-eighty with hands meant for crushing rock, but if it came to a fight René knew Dinko had a compressed vertebra from the car crash that had killed three of his “migrant workers” and had led to his incarceration. He could barely stand on a good day and sitting on the toilet with his pants at his ankles René gave himself better than even odds that he’d be the one walking away. Hell, if he could get the book away from him, he could beat him to death with it, which, if it came to that, would have been the only useful thing a book had ever done for him thus far.

  Recalling the memory of being locked in a life-and-death struggle with a fat man on the shitter—over a book he didn’t even want to read—would give him plenty of hushed chuckles in the days to follow, but at that moment he’d never been more serious.

  “Give it back!” he yelled and jerked one last time.

  Dinko relinquished his hold at the same moment and René was flung back against the bed, his head knocking against the steel frame. The sharp pain turned his world red. He was on the verge of slapping that fat Croat fuck upside the head with the book gripped now as a bludgeon in both hands. But in the instant he was raising it to the task there arose an unmistakable plop! from between Dinko’s legs. That and the sudden smile parting the fat man’s mouth was enough to stay René’s hand.