No Quarter

by John Jantunen

  Bailey’s Auto Wreck was not two hundred yards from Moose Point Road, which everyone called The Moose Point Expressway. If it had been the daytime she would have cut down the half-kilometre stretch of hard-packed gravel that dead-ended just short of the Moose River separating the reserve on the north side from the wooded land to the south. From the road’s terminus there was a path leading down to the water and one of her cousins, Jesse she thought it was, had had the bright idea to tether a raft between two maple trees on either side, fashioning a makeshift ferry. It made so that anyone looking to hitchhike into Tildon could cut fifteen clicks off their trip. Being as it was the second week of July, she probably wouldn’t have bothered with the ferry though. It was god-awful heavy and it would have taken her twice as long to pull herself across the river as it would have to swim, something she’d have preferred to do anyway, the river’s cool carrying with it the promise of a brief respite from the heat that even now was turning her shirt into a sponge.

  If it had been daytime she’d have almost been home by now but halfway down Moose Point Road the county had placed a metal Dumpster so the tourists wouldn’t have to drive all the way to the landfill to get rid of their trash. The smell of garbage attracted the bears. Unwilling to take the risk of running into a brown or a black in the dark, she stuck to the highway even though that meant a ten-K hike to the bridge spanning Maynard’s Falls and another five clicks spent backtracking along the road on the other side of the river.

  If she was lucky she might catch a ride at least part of the way, so every time she heard a car coming up behind her she turned around and stuck out her thumb. And that’s what she’d been doing when she caught sight of it: a glimpse of grey fur bristling within a car’s headlights as it passed by on the road. It might have been a coyote or just as likely some stray. The message board at the Maynard Falls General Store was plastered with missing dog signs posted by cottagers who’d made the mistake of letting their dogs roam free. As far as she knew, most of them never saw their pets again, meaning a few of them must have still been out there, grown wild and hungry.

  The car, a black Mercedes, sped past without even slowing down and the dark again swallowed whatever animal was about. She froze stock-still, peering into the shadows, trying to figure out if maybe it had been her imagination.

  It didn’t take her more than a breath to see that it wasn’t.

  As another vehicle approached from the opposite direction, two glints of light shone back at her. They couldn’t have been anything but eyes and she turned, waving her hands over her head, trying to get the driver’s attention. If he saw her he made no sign beyond, it seemed, pushing his foot a little harder on the SUV’s gas.

  Spinning back around, she tracked the vehicle’s progress and there it was again: the bristle of grey fur crouching in the ditch.

  It was a coyote, there was no doubt about that now.

  It had frozen within the headlights’ glow, but the moment they’d passed she heard the crackle of leaves under paw. It was walking towards her. Bending, she scooped a handful of gravel from the shoulder and flung it, screaming, “Go on. Shoo. Leave me alone!”

  She heard the rat-a-tat-tat of the stones pelting the ground and even before they’d settled she was backing away, reaching for the knife in the back pocket of her jeans. It had been her brother’s, what he called a butterfly knife. She’d been carrying it ever since she was nine and her neighbour, a man she’d known as Uncle Pete her whole life, had followed her one morning when she’d gone down to the river to pick fiddleheads for her mother. He’d said he’d snap her neck if she ever told anyone what he’d done to her, wrapping his hands around her throat and squeezing just a little so she’d know how easy it’d be. She promised him she wouldn’t and he released, patting her on the head and calling her a good girl, though she’d felt like anything but.

  That night she’d stolen the knife from the glovebox in her brother’s truck, making another promise, this one to herself, that she’d kill any man who dared lay his hands on her again. She’d spent hours practising how to quick draw it as she’d seen her brother do, snatching it from her pocket and flipping the blade up with a flick of her wrist, stabbing the point upwards under some imagined chin then flicking it again, snapping its grips back over the blade. When she’d mastered that, she painted the stainless steel handles of the knife with the black and orange nail polish she’d used last Halloween when she’d gone as a witch. Now when she spun it around, the handles blurred into a flutter almost resembling a monarch’s wings.

  With a brazen clack, the handles scissored together and she thrust the blade out. The sound stilled the coyote and its shadow was lost again into the greater shade. She held her breath, peering into the dark and listening for something to tell her if the coyote was still there. There was no sound save for the mosquitoes buzzing about her head and the crunch of her sneakers shifting against the gravel underfoot.

  Just as she was exhaling, two spots of light appeared around a far bend in the road. She watched the bright approaching, watched it scour over the asphalt, watched it touch on the coyote, its head turned, craning towards the vehicle slowing as it approached, close enough now that she could see it was a red minivan. She stuck out her thumb and as it passed her by it was already angling onto the shoulder.

  She set off after it at a run.

  Before it had come to a complete stop, the driver’s side door was opening and a man was craning his head out. The cherub pudge to his cheeks defied his age, in his midfifties she guessed, so that it almost looked like a baby’s face had been glued over top of his own. Above, he had a thin stubble of bleach-blond hair, and below, doughy folds of flesh oozed out from under the collar of a brightly coloured Hawaiian shirt.

  You need a lift, little miss? he asked.

  I sure do, she answered coming to the door, out of breath.

  Well, go around the other side then.

  She circled around the van’s front, running her hand over its bug-splattered grill, her racing heart eased by the bright of its headlights. When she came to its far corner, she looked up at the driver watching after her through the windshield. He smiled, warm and friendly like her grandfather would, and that gave her enough courage to crane forward and peer around the edge of the van.

  Beyond the taillight’s red glow, she wasn’t able to see much beyond the dark, and if the coyote was lying there in wait for her, it made no sign.

  Deacon paused here long enough to light a smoke before flipping to the next page.

  Chapter 1

  A two-by-ten bolted to a rock at the river’s edge. Someone’s notion of a diving board. Now broken. The platform projected a mere six inches over the water. The end frayed into splinters. Needle points that speak to some long-ago summer’s day suddenly turned foul.

  The bear grunts at it. Snorts. Beads of water glisten over its back, trailing from its coat. The lap of the current against the shore. The rush of a car on the highway whooshing against the sway of the cedar trees creaking above.

  The smell of rotting meat.

  It turns, padding up the footpath until it comes to a loop of gravel cut into the forest in the shape of a figure eight. A picnic table where the two loops meet. The wood softened by damp and mildewed. One of its legs rotted away, the bench sagging, almost touching the ground. A garbage can beside, its lid clamped tight against scavengers. Not much to recommend our bear.

  Except there is the cage: an eight-foot-long mesh of reinforced steel, six feet high. Its silhouette, this night, is as dark as the inside of a cave.

  The bear walks towards it, wary. Sniffing at the bait, rancid from the heat and befouling the air though it smells as sweet as honey to our weary traveller. It pauses. Raises its nose to the breeze. Something else. It snorts again. Shakes its head. Takes a step backwards.

  Come on, you son of a bitch, Del whispers.

  He’s sighting on it over the stee
l tip of the arrow drawn back on the bow he’d fashioned over the winter out of a length of black ash.

  His brother Andre had hawked over him, sneering, while he used his father’s hatchet to hack at the six-foot log he’d dragged into the garage, later refining it with a paring knife and using an awl he heated in the fire to stencil a wolf’s head, mid-howl, along the top half’s inside curve. Rubbing it with linseed oil to keep the wood supple while he bent it into shape, millimetres at a time, tying it off with kite string, saving the line he cured out of sinew from a deer his uncle had shot that spring. Only stringing it proper when the bow was ready, six months from the morning he felled the ash.

  And when he had shot it that first time—never more proud of himself than when he saw the arrow fly true—Andre was there again, standing beside him, shaking his head. Scoffing.

  What you aim to shoot with that thing?

  Del answering, We’ll see.

  You’d be lucky to kill a coon. Forget about a deer.

  No, not a deer.

  Then what?

  We’ll see. We’ll see.

  The bear is walking forward again, each step taken as if on thin ice. It’s a black. Three foot to the shoulder. An adolescent. Not much more, really, than an overgrown racoon, and Del smiles at that, thinking of what his brother had said. The cage is nestled in a small recess in the northwest corner of the rest stop. The bear isn’t yet halfway to it from the path leading up from the river.

  For his blind, Del had chosen the hollow within a grove of cedars some twenty feet behind and downwind of the cage. The only thing about cedars though is that they attract the mosquitoes. Hordes buzz about him, like flies bobbing on the end of fishing lines. To hide his scent, Del has smeared boiled poplar sap mixed with crushed juniper berries over his face and the back of his hands and neck, a recipe he learned from his grandfather. One of the skitters has become stuck in the syrupy goo plastered to his forehead and he can hear its zzzt zzzt as it struggles to pull free.

  The bow’s line digs into the joints between Del’s index and middle fingers, cutting off the circulation. It’s been two minutes since he first saw the bear. It feels more like an hour.

  He should have waited for the bear to come to the stone he’d stood upright five feet from the cage to mark his range. Shouldn’t have drawn back the arrow the moment he saw it lumbering out of the river, sighting on it between the cedar boughs. Del knows this now but still he won’t release the tension, won’t give his fingers the relief as if feeling them growing numb means something beyond impatience.

  Come on, now, he whispers.

  Three more steps. Now two. Just one more—

  Headlights flare against the screen of trees, a vehicle slowing on the highway, angling into the rest stop. The bear reels around, bolting back towards the river.

  Son of a—

  The vehicle’s headlights wash over his blind.

  Ducking low, pressing his face to the ground, Del curses again, Damn it all.

  When the crunch of its tires has quieted, he rises to his knees and peers through the cedar boughs. He can see that it’s a minivan parked at the far end of the loop, its driver’s side fronting towards him, its engine still running, exhaust flaring red in its taillights, its interior dark, not even a shade of movement.

  Probably just a couple of teenagers, he thinks. A quick fuck, or a blow job, on the way home. Had to be tonight, didn’t it? Right now. When you’ve been out here for six hours every night this week. Goddamn.

  He watches the van for a minute or two. Nothing. He stands, looking through the forest to where he’s parked his motorbike, some thirty paces through the scrub. It’d be a five-minute ride along the forest path to the Moose Point Ferry, another ten to get across the river, five more after that to get back home where Andre would be waiting up for him in their room, whispering the moment he pulled himself through the window, So?

  Del crawling into bed, not saying a word.

  Fuck it.

  Setting his bow on the ground, the quiver on top, he removes the bandana he’s tied over his head to keep the bugs off the back of his neck. Folds it in a triangle. Ties it over the bridge of his nose. Grinning now with malevolent foresight, thinking of the teenagers’ startled shame when he taps on the van’s window with the point of his knife, given over to horror when they see the mask over his face.

  He draws the knife from the sheath on his belt. It’s ten inches, haft to tip. Serrated teeth down the one side. The blade sharp enough to shave ice.

  He’s just prying apart the cedar boughs when he sees another set of headlights turning into the rest stop.

  You got to be kiddin’ me.

  He freezes, crouches down again. The second vehicle is a sedan, black and sleek. As it pulls past, Del can just make out the shadow of a word spanning its doors: POLICE.

  It’s one of those ghost cars, the kind cops use to catch speeders.

  Del watches it coast to a stop beside the picnic table, so rapt he can hardly breathe.

  You need to get the fuck out of here, he tells himself as the cruiser’s door opens.

  Still he doesn’t move an inch, watching the cop getting out. In the yellow glow from the car’s interior light, Del can see that the officer is young and white and also that he’s seen him plenty of times before, cruising Highway 118 in the same car and once at the Maynard Falls General Store, pulling into the parking lot while he and his brother sat at a picnic table, licking ice cream cones. He’d even tipped his hat and smiled in their direction on his way towards the port-a-john stationed around back. Hard to forget a face like that, the cop’s left cheek, as it is, looking like someone had squeezed his head in a waffle iron.

  As the cop approaches the van, his right hand settles on the grip of the gun slung low on his belt and he holds the flashlight in his hand up over his head, angling its beam on the driver’s side window. A splash of red smears the glass and he jerks the flashlight downwards. Glances about, shining the light over the forest in a quickening arc.

  Del drops to the ground. The beam skirts the cedar boughs above him, then moves on.

  Did you see that? he thinks. Smeared on the window of the van. It looked like—

  He shakes his head.

  Your eyes are just playing tricks on you.

  If it was though—

  Ain’t nothing you can do about that now.

  He lifts his head again, wedging two fingers into the cedar boughs, prying its screen apart, not seeing anything but sprouts of grass. Every bit of reason telling him to just forget about it. Get the fuck up. Go.

  Instead he stands, taking hold of the branch in front of him, pressing it down just enough so that he can see through its drape.

  The cop is at the van, shining the light in at the driver. His body is blocking Del’s view of whatever it was he thought he saw.

  A slight hitch then to the light, shining it on the passenger maybe. Del hears a door opening. The cop mutters something, sounds like, Shit! Then he’s dodging sideways, his two legs moving with military precision as he darts around the front of the van. A moment later a figure flashes through the lights at its rear, running hard, its feet finding the asphalt and its body hunkering down, pushing for more speed, the cop in frantic pursuit.

  Del can see now that it’s a girl. She’s wearing a skirt anyway, her hair dark and about as long as his, hung halfway down her back. She couldn’t be much older than thirteen. As delicate as a fern and running like she was trying to beat the devil. The cop two strides behind, chasing after her, reaching out, clawing at the air a hand’s width behind her head. She zags, ducking the cop’s grasp and he stumbles, suddenly off balance. That gives her another step.

  She’s going to make it!

  It takes a mountain of will for Del not to call out, cheering her on.

  Then, all of a sudden, her feet give out from under h
er. She reels, flailing madly, trying to keep herself upright. She can’t and goes down hard. As her knees and arms scrape over the gravel, Del sees that it’s the stone he’d used to mark his range that’s tripped her up.

  Bad luck, he thinks, knowing that really it’s not. It’s something else. His fault.

  He watches her scrambling back to her feet, not more than ten paces from his blind. Her face, suddenly unmasked from the drape of her hair, comes into clear relief within the moon’s glow an instant before she’s jerked backwards by the cop grabbing at her arm. Just enough time for Del to see that he knows her.

  It’s Emma Dupuis, he thinks, dumbstruck by the notion. They’ve been in the same class since kindergarten.

  How—?

  Shaking his head, his confuse eclipsed by thoughts of Emma’s older brother, William, who everyone calls Big Willy, though never to his face.

  As mean a son of a bitch as you’re likely to find this side of the pound (Del’s father’s words). In and out of juvie until he was old enough to do some real time. Mostly for drugs but the last time was for shooting at a surveyor he found on contested land. That made him a hero amongst some of the younger men on the reserve, Del included. It was while Big Willy was serving eighteen months for unlawful discharge of a firearm that Sarah Decaire, Del’s second cousin on his mother’s side, had gone missing. She was fifteen and known to sniff gasoline and fuck anyone who’d give her a taste of something that packed a little more punch. When she disappeared it wasn’t much of a surprise. Word on the reserve was that she’d run away, and the Mountie they sent out to investigate agreed, assuring her parents that, sooner or later, she was bound to turn up. That was over a year ago and no one’d heard a word from her since.

  When Big Willy was released, he went around telling anyone who’d listen that she was dead, killed by a cop no less, he heard it from someone on the inside. Most people thought he was just trying to stir up shit and there was even a motion put to council to have him kicked off the reserve. That had failed, and afterwards Big Willy kept to himself. Rumour was he was back to selling drugs, using the money to buy guns, handing one out to anyone who promised to use it the next time some Hunio ’on would come onto their land.