But how could Dylan have conceived of such a thing and why would he have chosen me?
In movies it was always personal. Usually it was just a simple matter of revenge, a motif that George himself had often used in his own books.
But what could I have possibly done to Dylan?
A thought punctuated by the emphatic thud of the door in front of him banging shut, making him look up and finding a familiar face staring down at him.
It was Guy Descartes.
He was the old man George had bought his prized Ford Ranger from. Ever since he’d stopped by his garage three or four times a year for an oil change when it was needed and to go fishing with Guy when it was not. George had often brought Deacon along with him too, and so he’d learned that it had been a picture on the wall of Guy’s garage that’d given him the idea for The Unnamed and that years later Guy had met his own grandson the same way the Old Man had in the book. Both of them were named René and George had always made a big deal out of that.
Guy was wearing a brown leather jacket that Deacon knew he’d made himself from moose hide and hung on a hook in his garage. Guy had even let him try it on one time just to show him how heavy it was. He was holding a black cowboy hat to his chest and seemed, at that moment, to have materialized right off the page to offer Deacon a few words of comfort when surely he needed them most, the same as his character had so often in the book, reading all that he’d gone through and taking strength from his resilience as he set The Unnamed back on the shelf, reaching then for The Stray.
But when the old man spoke, it wasn’t to provide him comfort after all.
“He didn’t do it,” he said, getting right to the point.
The scrunch to Deacon’s brow must have revealed his confusion because then Guy added, “René. He didn’t kill those people. I know it.”
His alarm at hearing that finally gave Deacon the will to speak, though he hardly had the composure to form a proper sentence.
“René? Killed? Who? What?”
“You haven’t heard?”
Deacon shaking his head and Guy biting his lip, squinting like he’d gravely misjudged the man sitting before him.
“Thought you were supposed to be a reporter. Where the hell have you been the past two days?”
His glare carried now a bitter reproach, making Deacon stammer, “I—”
Then shaking his head, trying to find a way out of his befuddle, blurting out at last: “Who are they saying René killed?”
“That family burnt up in the fire.”
“The fire!”
Sitting bolt upright now.
“They’re saying he set that too,” the old man said. “They even got surveillance video they say proves it.”
“And you’ve seen it?”
The old man nodded.
“Didn’t prove nothing, you ask me. All you could see was a dark blotch with long hair about the same as René’s. Could have been anyone.”
Deacon then nodding to himself.
“You know something about that?” Guy asked.
“I— No. Just, I mean—what family?”
“The Wanes they’re called. The dad’s some bigwig real estate developer, the mom a movie star. It’s been all over the news. You really haven’t heard?”
“No. I—”
Deacon shaking his head, glancing to the old man looking back at him like he wouldn’t believe a word he might say.
“I mean, I know about the fire, of course. But I didn’t know anyone had died . . .”
His voice trailing off, for it seemed to him a lie.
“Well, I know you heard about Ronald Crane.”
“Ronald Crane?”
“The guy you wrote a story about in last week’s paper. Killed in his van. He was burnt up too.”
“I know who Ronald Crane is. But what—”
Again stopping himself short, gathering his thoughts.
“They think René killed Ronald Crane?” he finally said.
“That’s what they’re saying. But he couldn’t have. He was helping me that night, in the garage. We weren’t done until well after midnight. The van had already been set on fire by then, you said so in the article. I tried to tell them—”
“But why—? Why would they think he killed Ronald Crane?”
“I guess because they found Crane’s wallet under his bed.”
“What?”
“When they searched his trailer. After he beat up that Wane boy. They were looking for him. Asked me if I’d seen him. I told them not since he left for work that morning. They asked if they could look in his trailer. What was I going to say? I let them. That’s when they found the wallet.”
“Ronald Crane’s?”
“So they said.”
“And you haven’t seen him since? René, I mean.”
“Next I heard, he’d been shot.”
The old man then looking to him, such hate in his eyes that it felt to Deacon like a slap in the face.
“He’s—”
“Dead, yeah. Made it to the hospital and that was about it.”
The old man clenching his teeth, fighting back the tears. One breaking his eyelid’s seal anyway and streaking down his cheek. It was a moment stolen right out of The Unnamed, after the Old Man’s nephew had paid him a visit to tell him that his grandson had been killed. It hadn’t come as much of a surprise to the reader, the last fifty-odd pages having recounted the events leading up to how René had become the only suspect in the murder of a man with whom he’d recently been seen arguing in the parking lot of a local bar.
The police had tracked him to his ex-girlfriend’s house. She was also the mother of his child, a boy of three, and René had just got back from teaching him how to fish. He was in her backyard showing the boy how to clean the trout they’d caught, so his son watched his own father get shot down. The police claimed self-defence, since when they’d told him “freeze” he’d spun around holding a knife, which he shouldn’t have had anyway since he’d recently served time for aggravated assault and one of the conditions of his parole was that he wasn’t allowed to carry.
Word on the reserve was that he’d been framed, that it was well-known that one of the cops who’d shot him had recently found out that his wife was cheating with none other than the man René had been seen arguing with several days earlier. It was simply a matter of bad luck, or maybe just convenience, that René’d got into a fight with the victim a short while later, providing the cop with the perfect foil for his own murderous intent.
Deacon trying to process all that he’d heard and measure it against what George had written there and also in No Quarter, a clear pattern forming between the two.
“Was it Dylan who shot him?” he asked, though it came out sounding more like an exclamation.
“Dylan?”
“Cleary.”
“George’s grandson? No. It was another officer. He had a French name, I can’t—”
“Marchand?”
“Could have been. Why would you think George’s grandson’d be mixed up in it?”
The old man was again squinting at Deacon, like he knew he was withholding something.
“I didn’t— I mean.” Then: “Marchand, you say?”
“That mean something to you?”
“No. I mean—Marchand doesn’t seem like the type who’d just up and shoot a man.”
“He said it was self-defence. That René was carrying a rifle.”
“Was he?”
“It was a fishing rod. It was wrapped up in brown paper, so I guess it might’ve looked like one. It was for his son. A birthday present. Way I figure, René was on his way to turn himself in, or maybe he was heading for the hills, I don’t know. Either way, he must have come by the house and picked it up so he could give it to Tawyne before he did. Th
at’s why he’d gone to the reserve.”
“Where he was shot?”
The old man nodding.
“In Jean’s backyard. That’s his sister. She’s been looking after Tawyne ever since he got taken away from the boy’s mother.”
“Was his son there?”
“Huh?”
“At his sister’s.”
“No, thank god. The reserve had already been cleared by then, on account of the fire.”
Deacon took some solace in that, the old man less so.
“They’re calling him a mass murderer,” he was saying. “René might be a lot of things, but he ain’t no killer. You got to tell them that.”
“Me?”
“They wouldn’t believe me. But if you print the truth in the paper . . .”
Deacon lowered his eyes, unable to meet the old man’s gaze.
“I’m not sure I can do that,” he said.
When he looked back up, the old man was nodding like he knew it would come to this and that only firming his resolve.
“I understand,” he said, “your mother was Chippewa. They’s an honourable People, ones I’ve known anyway. Terrible thing happened to her, and your father and your brother. I can’t even pretend to imagine what that’d do to a boy, you being there and seeing that.”
Then shaking his head, clicking his tongue against his teeth.
“What was the name of the fella, you know, the one who found you afterwards?”
Deacon cast him a sideways glance.
“Jon Robinson,” he said. It came out barely a squeak.
“It true he chased away a pack of coyotes before he could get to you? There was five or six I understand. That sound about right?”
Deacon shook his head, clenching his lips. The old man studied him with keen eyes. Clicking his tongue against his teeth again, he nodded as if he’d made his final judgement on the man standing before him and found him lacking.
“Sorry for your loss,” he said, setting his hat on his head. “You have a good day now.”
Guy was already turning towards the door. He’d just put his hand on the latch when he turned back. There was none of the ire in his expression any more, just a tired sort of look, old and worn out.
“George, you know,” he said, “he called you the bravest soul he ever met.”
Reaching again for the door, pausing ever so slightly before throwing his weight against it. As it opened, Deacon could hear the muffled babble from the reception downstairs and another voice raised against it.
“You get me a butter tart?” an old man was saying. He must have been sitting in a chair on the landing, unable, or unwilling, to navigate the stairs into the basement. After a breath an old woman’s high-pitched fret answered, “No, they only had the jam.”
“I hate the jam.”
“That’s why I got you a piece of lemon cake.”
“I’d rather have a butter tart.”
The old woman apparently having nothing to say to that as Guy stepped through the door, slow and steady, his left foot treading gingerly like he had a pebble in his boot.
Deacon watched him leave, the full weight of what the old man had come to ask him adding to the pressure in his chest he’d felt ever since Dylan had whispered in his ear. Maybe George had also told Dylan what he’d told Guy about him being the bravest soul he’d ever met and that had seemed to Dylan cause enough to embroil him in some half-baked plot he’d torn from the pages of one of his grandfather’s Fictions.
And here was Guy Descartes thinking he would help him for the same reason, neither knowing what Deacon did—what George had said was a damn lie, he knew that as surely as it felt again like the weight of the world was pressing down upon him.
Searching out Adele’s picture on the altar, he found a measure of comfort in her smile’s warm shining bright, as he so often had after he’d come to live with the Clearys. Fumbling a cigarette from his case, he put it in his mouth and lit it as he turned back to the old man.
“I only ever saw the one,” he said through his first exhale.
Guy had stuttered to a halt, holding the door open, his hand shaking on the knob, the same as Adele’s had after she’d got Parkinson’s.
“It was standing on the hood, a big old grey, as big as a wolf.” As he spoke his voice was calm and measured, less emotive even than it would have been reading aloud from a recipe book. “That’s what I thought it was. It was only later that I learned there aren’t any wolves around here anymore, so it must have been a coyote, like you say. I’d woken up on the floor in the back of the Jeep. I heard something, sounded like an elastic band snapping. I sat up enough so I could look through the seats. My pa had gone through the windshield, you know. He was stuck halfway in and halfway out. That’s when I saw the coyote. It was chewing on his face.”
The old man’s head flinched as if he meant to turn, yet he did not.
“Bravest soul he ever met. George really say that?”
A subtle hitch then to his head, the old man nodding.
“Well, he weren’t fucking there!”
24
“Talk to me!”
Rain was yelling after him as he stormed through the church’s front doors. She’d been skulking at the back of the chapel when he’d turned and fled, the look of horror on her face telling Deacon she’d heard everything, and that making him angrier still.
His cigarette was down to the filter when he’d reached the sidewalk. He flicked it into the street and turned towards the alley, starting off at a run.
“Stop!” Rain yelled and that only urging his legs faster.
Fuck her, and fuck Dylan, fuck Guy, and fuck George too!
A bang! then, as loud as a firecracker.
Its sharp impertinence stopped him in his tracks, spinning him around. Rain was holding a revolver, no bigger than a starter’s pistol, upraised in her hand, pointing it at the sky, a curl of smoke coiling from its barrel-end. She was cringing against the sound, and as soon as she saw Deacon hurrying back towards her she tucked it into her handbag.
“Are you fucking crazy?” he spat at her, scanning the street for any witnesses and spying a young boy, couldn’t have been older than three.
He was holding the hand of a woman dressed for a day at the beach, standing in the middle of the street where Dominion intersected with Main and staring straight at Rain. His mother was occupied on her cell phone, oblivious to her son’s agape, the shock of hearing the bang! given way to the shock of having just let go of the balloon in his hand. His head then tilting back, finding a red dot winnowing skywards, and his eyes squeezing shut even as his mouth opened into a scream. He unleashed a despairing wail and that was at last enough to get his mother’s attention, though hardly her sympathy.
“Well, I told you to hold onto it,” she scolded, jerking her son roughly across the street.
They’d just reached the far sidewalk when Deacon heard the side door of the church slamming open. Dylan was striding out, his hand on his sidearm so that Deacon knew he’d heard the shot too. Once he’d made the landing though he held up, his hand relaxing and that familiar grin spreading over his lips with the slow resolve of the dawning sun.
In the days to come, Deacon would have plenty of reason to recall how his face had looked. It was a facsimile of the satisfaction Adele’s would wear after she’d completed one of the crosswords she’d made for the Chronicle, as if hearing the shot and seeing it was Rain who’d fired the gun had completed some sort of puzzle he’d been wrestling with. But as Deacon grabbed at Rain’s arm, dragging her on stumbling steps towards the alley’s entrance, it only lent him further evidence of Dylan’s malevolence, the maniacal grin combined with the scar on his face recalling to him any number of comic book villains.
He’d get his first inkling of what the gun might have meant to Dylan thirty seconds after h
e’d slammed the door to his apartment. He locked it with the deadbolt and also the chain, and leaned with heaving breath against its grey steel, his own agitation at perfect odds with Rain’s composure.
It was the first time she’d been in Deacon’s apartment and was taking the opportunity to give it a good looking over. She was wrinkling her brow at the web of dirty laundry remaking the floor into a labyrinth and more so at the pungent odour, equal parts dirty socks, rotting food, and B.O.
“Jesus, Deacon,” she said, turning back to him. “It’s a wonder the rats haven’t moved in.”
Point of fact, they had, at least one he’d seen anyway, scurrying under the stove the last time he’d returned from one of his nightly jaunts. But it was the least of his worries right then, the foremost being the gun stowed in Rain’s handbag, its patchwork of brightly hued embroidered chrysanthemums a perfect complement to the psychedelia of her hippie dress, the both starkly out of place though on someone who’d just come from a funeral.
Of course, this was Rain Meadows he was talking about.
Just two minutes ago, he’d have sworn there was nothing she could have done to surprise him and then there she was firing off a gun in the middle of the afternoon not a half a block from downtown, just to get his attention.
“What the hell, Rain?” he stammered.
“Well, you didn’t leave me much choice now, did you?”
She’d retrieved a cigarette from her bag and was just then lighting it, blowing the first exhale at the ceiling and waving at the smoke, spreading its drift about the air as if to buffer herself against the room’s stench.
“Why—” Deacon sputtered. “Why in the hell do you have a gun?”
“Well, don’t blame me. I’ve been trying to give it to you all week. It’s not my fault you weren’t answering your phone.”
“Give it to— What? What are you talking about?”
She was already reaching into her bag and taking out the revolver, holding it out to Deacon butt-end first. Deacon stared at it as if she’d produced an adder, coiled and ready to strike.
“Go on,” she said. “Take it. It’s yours.”
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