When I reached the rectory with Moon clutched to my chest the door was wide open. I walked in slowly, stepped through the kitchen, my boots crunching on glass. I set her down on a blanket on the kitchen table.
“Céleste! Are you all right? Céleste!”
No answer. How could there be? She couldn’t speak … I flew up the stairs and into her bedroom. “Céleste!” She wasn’t there. Down the hallway to the very end, to an unpainted door that looked like the door of a linen closet. Through it to a half-flight of steps.
I heard the revving of an engine out front. Through the attic window I watched a snowmobile roar off. With two riders. Or was it three? Was that Céleste sandwiched between them?
Another sound, from the direction of the grandmother’s study. My wet boots made squeaking sounds as I raced down the attic stairs and along the hall.
The room was severely agitated, in pain: chairs and filing cabinets capsized; books ousted from their beds, splayed, spines broken; shattered pictures and frames, smashed radio and typewriter and globe. Disorder on the scale of an airplane crash. Nothing breakable was unbroken, nothing slashable unslashed—including the flag of the Anglican Church of Canada and the photo of Céleste and her grandmother.
I found Céleste rolled into a ball on the floor, beside the stone ledge of the fireplace. Her eyes were wide open, but her expression was not one I had seen before. It conveyed no recognizable human emotion. Her face was filled with abject, bestial fear. Above her, on the mantelpiece wall, were words she said were written in animal blood: CHILD-FUCKING YANKEE GO HOME.
XXV
I tried to act like a grown-up in front of Nile. But I couldn’t stop the tears, I just couldn’t. It seems like I’m crying all the time these days. It’s a very recent thing. I never used to cry, even when I was a baby.
Nile helped me write an epitaph — he came up with the best bits—and said he’d get it chiselled in stone.
MOON
2004-2009
Where are you now, my gallivanting
Girl, who so happily dwelt with us,
Played with us, fed with us, felt with us,
Years we grew fonder and fonder in?
You who just yesterday sprang to us,
Are we forever bereft of you?
And is this all that is left of you —
One little grave, and a pang to us?
How I wish we were in ancient Egypt, where they had the death penalty for anyone who killed a cat …
Nile said he never knew a cat like Moon and felt very sad. After the burial the sadness turned to anger. He was torqued, totally. I could see it in his eyes. And he wasn’t drunk either. Was the pin finally out of the grenade?
XXVI
We buried Moon the next morning. Céleste spent half the night crying, and the other half composing an epitaph. I spent the night maniacally cleaning up the study. And when that was done I cleaned up the kitchen. And when that was done I started on the bathroom, trying to ignore the blotched and bleary man in the mirror, the sound and stench of engines and chainsaws in my head. Neither one of us slept a second. Anger-—or rather rage, red blindness—can do that to you. In my one hour in bed I counted diminished joys, counted sheep on their way to the slaughterhouse.
It’s only a cat, I kept saying to myself, it’s only a goddamn cat … High-minded individuals, of whom I used to be one, feel that those who are cruel to animals are just ordinary human beings. They’re not criminals; they’re just sick. They don’t need prison; they just need a doctor or drugs to straighten their bent neural pathways. But now I feel that those who commit these acts, like those who commit murder or rape, have cancelled their membership in the human herd. They must be culled.
Céleste didn’t see the intruders. She was watching me from the attic when she heard the back door being bashed down. There were two of them, she said. Her voice had half-returned, badly rusted, a shade above a whisper.
“Who were they?” I asked.
“I didn’t see them.”
“But you heard their voices.”
Céleste hesitated.
“Tell me,” I said.
“The Dérys, père et fils.”
“Shit. Did they … What were they after?”
“Me. And when they couldn’t find me, they went after other things.”
“Such as?”
“Videos. My grandmother kept some in her office. Hidden, like.”
“Did they get them?”
“Some of them, but I’ve got copies.”
“In the attic?”
She nodded.
“That’s it. The end of the line.”
She stared at me, hard. “What do you mean? You bailing?”
I stared back, trying to form words. Sometimes you’ve got to jump head-first into things: my father’s words. I opened my mouth, released a kind of sickly quack.
“Nile? Are you bailing?”
I’ve never jumped head-first into anything; I was a breech baby, born feet first. I was feeling light-headed, and the room began to turn.
“Nile?”
Sometimes you’ve got to put your head in the lion’s mouth: the same voice. “It’s time.”
“Time to do what? Report them? Call the cops? Tell them that they trespassed on land that doesn’t belong to us? That they killed a cat?”
“Time to put my head in the lion’s mouth.”
Céleste pushed her glasses a little higher on her nose. “You all right?”
“Hunters, like water, seek the line of least resistance. Animals are easy to brutalize.”
Céleste pondered this to the count of three, her eyes half-closing. “You want to run that by me again?”
“It’s the end of the line.”
“You already said that.”
“It’s time.”
“You already said that too. Time to do what?”
“Hunt the hunters.”
“Track them down, you mean? Kill them? We don’t have to track them down. They’ll come to us. And soon.”
I waited for the room to stop turning, waited for the words to register. “I … I told Gervais if he came anywhere near this place again, I’d kill him. Literally. In the undertaking sense, in the Sixth Commandment sense. And I meant it.”
Céleste squinted at me, sizing me up, as if I were a suspect stamp she was examining through a magnifying glass. “He’ll be back. Except next time he won’t be giving the orders.”
“No? Who will?”
“Alcide Bazinet.”
I wondered why I even asked the question. I was about to ask another but was distracted by lines on Céleste’s brow. Thinking was a visible process for her—ideas chased across her face like wind across a pond.
“I have a plan,” she said.
“I thought you might.”
Alcide Bazinet, it’s no secret, was a rabid psychopath on the loose. But neither the QPP nor the RCMP seemed overly concerned. Why? Because his violent psychosis was taken out on animals, not humans. At least until recently. Was I going to gather up evidence, submit it to the Quebec and Canadian police, try to get him charged with attempted murder? No. I was going to murder the man as soon as he got out of the pen. Céleste’s plan, however, was subtler and safer—and when my mind was clearer I agreed to it.
By now the entire community assumed I was a wildlife officer, so I wore the uniform everywhere. On patrol in my painted wagon, trolling the streets and forests in quest of the elusive bear truck. At the post office looking for extinct animal stamps and letters from Brooklyn. At Earl’s looking for new shipments of micro-greens. At Walmart looking for the witch who beat the dog with her broom. At the vet’s looking for … the vet.
Céleste promised to stay put in the attic while I was gone, to keep watch with her telescope and mayday me at the first sign of danger. But I was having none of that. I was not going to leave her alone again, ever. She would be travelling with me, I instructed her, from now on.
“Uh-unh,” she replied, s
haking her head. “Veto. First of all, I’m not well enough to bounce around in that rattletrap van of yours. Second, I don’t want anyone to see me, ’cause I don’t want to go back to the foster home where everybody’s a ’tard. Third, no one will be coming back here before Baz gets out.”
I looked at her as if she needed my help and protection. She looked at me as if I needed her help and protection.
“Trust me,” she said.
I had learned to trust her eyes, the light in them, emeraldine and topazine and shades there were no names for. “When he gets out, where’ll he go first?”
“To his cousin’s. Here, take this. Can you get these things for me?”
She handed me a piece of paper ripped from her scrapbook, a list of items required for “The Plan”:
clay (5 one-pound boxes)
flour (2 bags)
gesso (1 bottle)
acrylic paint (one tube of white, ivory, red, blue & green)
clear mat acrylic (one bottle)
ski poles (1 pair) • hockey skates (girl’s size 36 or 6-1 2)
new tires for the van (studded)
“Do you mind?” she said. “I know it’s a lot of money but I’ll pay you back. Do you know where to get the art supplies?”
“Walmart?”
“No.”
“Earl’s?”
“Yes.”
“And Canadian Tire for the tires?”
“No, for the skates. And poles.”
“And the tires?”
“I’ll draw you a map.”
Her detailed map, no doubt to scale, led me to the northern fringe of Ste-Madeleine and a tumbledown Centre du Pneu Express, where I could get “the best illegal mud/snow studded tires money can buy—ask for Ray.” In the same neck of the woods, coincidentally, Gervais and his clan resided, in a purple house she had marked with an X.
“He’s got a family?” I asked.
“Three boys.”
“Good Christ.” What kind of future, I wondered, could his sons expect? Which would come first—prison or coffin?
“And a doormat wife. Last time I saw her she had a couple of black eyes so bad she looked like a panda.”
“And what about Bazinet?”
“What about him?”
“Does he have a family?”
“Sort of. He hates women, especially if they’re in law enforcement, but somehow he’s got a daughter. Around my age. Who lives with her mom north of Tremblant.”
“You know her?”
“Never laid eyes on her.”
Ray, a gentle tattooed mountain of a man, wore a size of blue jeans that I didn’t know existed, and a belt with a silver buckle as big as a pie tin. He installed the new tires and said if I put four hundred pounds of sandbags in the back I’d stay on the road. “Or you could ride with me,” I didn’t say. The streets were all aviary. With the sandbags in the back I made a solid left on Rossignol, right on Hirondelle, left on Alouette. On sharp turns the right front tire rubbed against the fender and sang like a screech owl. At the end of Alouette, a short culde-sac, I spotted a black pickup parked some distance from the curb. I went for a closer look, pulling up beside it. It had a raised chassis and rack of lights, but no grille, no platform, no busted headlight.
On the driveway closest to it was a car that looked familiar: a silver Saab. It had backed in, so I couldn’t see the licence plate. Did it end with RND, I wondered, like the one I saw in the Walmart parking lot?
I was about to get out and check when I heard some laughter. I looked left and right but couldn’t see where it was coming from. What I did see was a young dog, not far from the Saab, a golden retriever. He had a short rope around his neck, right under his jaw. The other end was tied to an aluminum fence post. He was gasping and choking for breath. The more he tugged the worse he made it.
Two boys, sitting on the steps of the porch, were laughing like jackals. I reached into the glovebox for a pen knife.
« Having a good time? » I yelled to the boys, in French, from the sidewalk.
“What’s it to you?” one of them yelled back in English.
I cut the twine and the dog breathed easy again. The grateful beast wandered off toward the van, shaking his head about.
“What do you think you’re doing, buttwipe?” said the same boy.
I closed the blade, pocketed the knife.
“Why don’t you mind your own business, limpdick?” said his friend.
“And get the hell off our property!” said the other.
I was innocent of what happened next. I arranged my mouth into the most beguiling smile and sauntered unmenacingly toward them. “What are you guys up to?” I asked with a kindly, avuncular tone.
“Bakin’ a fuckin’ cake. What does it look like?”
As I passed the Saab I glanced back at its licence plate. Within a couple yards of the taller boy, who had just spoken and was now spitting in my direction, I pointed back toward the dog. When he turned to look I lunged like a fencer and delivered a head-ringing slap. He was one mighty surprised boy. “Mommy!” he cried. The stockier one scrambled to get away but I grabbed him by the ankle and pulled his writhing body toward me. I slapped his face too, backhand and forehand, movie style. Hard, but not as hard as I would’ve liked.
Both remained silent, in frozen recoil, their cheeks flushed and mouths an “o” of shock. “Next time I catch you doing something like that, you won’t get off so easy. Next time I’ll throw you in a jail cell.” I pulled out my wallet. “And if you’re too young for jail, I’ll slap your asses into next week. Is that clear? I said is that clear?”
The two nodded quickly, triple-speed.
“Here, take my card. Give it to your mother, tell her I videoed her beating that dog with a brush. Posted it on YouTube. I said take it.”
I got back in the van, which I’d left running. Not a good time to have ignition problems. The dog watched me from the sidewalk. The boys had skedaddled, but I saw the drapery move in the front window. Should I take the dog with me? Poor little guy, what a lousy roll of the dice he got with this family. I opened the door, called him, but he ran back toward the house.
Back to Hirondelle, then Héron, where I saw an elderly woman throwing handfuls of rock salt from a child’s wagon. As I approached I thought she was waving at me in a friendly way, so I waved back. But she stepped out onto the road, holding her hand up like a traffic cop. I stopped and rolled down my window.
« Officer, I was wondering if you could help me. »
« How’d you know I was an officer? »
« That’s your showcar, right? »
I paused. « I can’t comment on that. How can I help you, ma’am? »
« I lost my dog. »
« A golden retriever? »
« No, she’s a little terrier pup. Well, a mongrel actually. Almost all black with a little white on the muzzle. »
« I haven’t seen her, but I’ll be on the lookout. I’m on my rounds now. Where do you live? »
She pointed to a white wedding cake of a house behind her. A mini Santa’s Village was still on display in the front yard and driveway, incorporating a large Oldfolksmobile. « Thank you, Inspector. Or is it Sergeant? »
« I … it’s Detective Inspector, actually. »
« Thank you so much, Detective Inspector. »
« Any time. Oh, by the way, I’m looking for a black pickup with a big grille and broken headlight. You haven’t seen one like that by any chance? »
« A souped-up monster for hunters? With a mean bulldog face? »
« That’s the one. »
« I don’t know if it has a broken headlight, but I’ve seen one like that two blocks down. On Rouge-gorge. Turn left. A dilapidated purple house on the right, you can’t miss it. »
Purple? « On Rouge-gorge? It doesn’t belong to a man named Gervais, does it? Tall man, scruffy black beard? »
« Gervais Cude, that’s his stinking place all right. »
« Much obliged, ma’
am. Here, take my card. »
The swaybacked house of leprous lavender was more of a barn, with a roof built partly of canvas and odd-shaped boards. An automotive boneyard lay out front, a Quonset hut out back. There was a fence around the property, a sagging wire affair, and a sign, DÉFENSE D’ENTRER, on the makeshift gate. But no vehicle in sight. Or any member of the Cude clan. Where were they? In the barn, eating baked beans out of a can, sharing the fork? In the hut, playing their fiddles or stabbing one another to death with ice-fishing implements?
Back on Héron a black pickup came at me, in my lane. In a game of chicken? No. Its monster tires made a squealing right on Rossignol, which led straight to the highway.
From beneath the passenger seat I pulled out the portable beacon. Put the magnetic cherry out the window and clapped it onto the roof, its power wire strung across my lap. Hit the siren and light switch on the console. Then pressed on the accelerator.
XXVII
I followed the truck into the parking lot of a two-storey eyesore with a red neon sign. Through falling snow I watched it stutter with two burnt-out e’s: BAR CAV. The driver pointed his electric key at the truck from twenty feet away and its doors obediently locked themselves. He didn’t even turn to look at me.
I pulled in beside the pickup and could see right away this was not what I was after. It was a 4 x 4 double cab with a gun rack and spotlights. But no reinforced bumper, no steel platform. I yanked off the cherry, killed the engine. Took off my parka and tossed it in the back. If anyone knew about a one-eyed bear truck, this would be the place to find him.
The Bare Cave might have had charm when it was first built—back when stamps cost 2 cents—but its original wood and stone had been covered with aluminum siding and its large windows painted over like a mortuary. The padded front door, which further sealed the place from all natural light, was covered with Day-Glo stickers and Magic-Marker scrawls, among which:
The Extinction Club Page 24