These two scions of the Dominion motored back to the gravel pit: a good hiding place for a car with a likely corpse in its trunk. Here Rue said Georgie’d feel better once he had a horde of harlots. George giggled.
Rue winked: “Doncha wanna see Lovea again? I knows ya went down to Saint John last month to see her cause you couldn’t get pussy from big-belly Blondola. Now, with the stash ya got, you can taste Lovea. She’s real tangy!”
Joyge ask, “How ya know that?”
Rue was sly. “Ya gotta work her sweet thing like a horse.”
Rue and George only had to pass through a screening clump of bushes and a thick double stand of pines and spruce to get from the gravel pit to their shack, only about a hundred yards in all. When they come, bloody, into the house, they was expecting to find Plumsy Peters there. But Plumsy’d decamped, leaving infant Otho all alone in his crib. Nicely, Otho was snoozing nice and sound. The fire just needed heartening—to warm Otho, yes, and to burn up guilty things. Georgie freshened the fire. Then the boys got rags and two quart milk bottles filled with soapy water.
They went back out into the cold night and set to launderin the car upholstery. George washed one side of the car, Rufus the other.
George simpered, “Silver’s blood’s fuckin everywhere.” They slaved like Cynthy had, dying, scouring a pimp’s toilet. Look, Georgie and Rue were both on their hands and knees, panting, working hard to clean up the blood. Horror: the blood fuckin leakin through seats, spoutin through upholstery, as if two no-brainers had turned on a tap. They was spongin up blood (sloppily). They poured water into a milk bottle so they could do a lackadaisical job cleanin up blood by flashlight.
They trashed the bottles and rags in the snowed-on gravel. Back to the house they went. Water slithered from a tap, coiled at the drain, vanished. Four red hands divided the flow. Rue stripped off his overalls and stuffed em and the hammer into the stove. George incinerated his own clothes too. Rufus demanded the watch and wedding ring from Georgie.
He said nope: “Lemme sell em.”
Rue snapped, “When Silver’s car is found, the cops’ll look for the watch and the ring and they’ll be evidence.” Both trophies got dropped in the stove.
George told his brother, “Now I’ve got money; you’ve got money. How about you going fifty-fifty with me on some food and wood?”
Rue say, “Gotta get my clothes out the cleaners.” His smile was moonlit. “When money changes hands, it changes minds.” He told Georgie to scoot to Saint John, drop the car, take the first bus back at dawn. But first, George should run him up by Minto so he could set up a gamblin alibi.
George said he’d do errands, then pick up Rue.
George motored to the Community Lunch, parked down the street, went in, settled a bill. He saw Plumsy there and told him to go tend Otho, that he’d get top dollar and lots to drink. Rum was not just Plumsy’s vice; it was his consciousness. So Plumsy donned his moth-chewed coat and lumbered out. Then George drove to Gus’s and Russ’s and bought Coke and apple pie and sat and ate—to revisit and then satisfy his daylong hunger. After that, George hummed back to the gravel pit, parked, then scrambled up a small hillside of bushes and the stand of trees to go back in his house. He thought he should go back, unlock the trunk, and check to see if Silver had started breathing again. But he was scared of likely facts.
Back at the shack, George come in and see Rue sitting, real easy, with Plumsy. Both were drinking beer, talking about nothing. Then, coolly, like he wasn’t worried about nothin, Rufus pulled out his nice bulky wad of bills, said, a tad drunkenly, “George, show Plumsy your money.”
George shook his head no. “Ain’t got no cash.”
Rue glared at George. “Plumsy ain’t no cop. I told him already about the score. Now, show him your half.”
Plumsy looked at George eagerly, and his glance communicated pride: could Georgie really have socked a taxi driver and sacked his cash? Seeing that admiration in Plumsy’s face and the tension in Rue’s, George slowly hauled out the wallet, thumbed through it, displayed George VI’s five-, ten-, and twenty-dollar faces.
Plumsy whistled low, appreciative. “My, Joygee, looks like you got more cash than Rufus.”
George say, “Plumsy, if any questions come up, tell em Rufus was home all night lookin after Otho, while I was out gamblin.”
Rue nixed that story. “No, that’s my alibi! I’m goin up to Minto to stay all night.”
Plumsy piped up again. “I’ll watch the baby and all, but I need to bag more beer.”
Rufus passed him four quarters. “That’ll keep ya till we get back.”
Plumsy ask, “How ya gettin to Minto?”
George blurted, “We got a brand-new Ford back in the pit.”
Rue nodded: “We took the man’s car, too.” Rue sucked the last of the beer.
Plumsy yelled, “Hey! Isn’t ya leavin the rest of the beer for me?”
Rue withdrew a fistful of silver from a pocket: “Don’t sweat it. We’ll see you fixed up for that.”
IV
NOW early, early morning of January 8, 1949, the boys felt compelled to trudge back to the gravel pit, open the car trunk, and diagnose Silver. They was hoping he’d sit up, teeheeing, asking what Sambo joke they were playing. Silver’s eye glared up at em. The brothers closed the trunk, but George, fumbling, couldn’t lock it. He couldn’t get the key to turn.
So Rue stomped on the trunk lid with one foot, then turned the key in the lock: “Joygee, go to Saint John and throw the keys in the harbour.”
Leaving Plumsy at the house with Otho, George and Rue wheeled to Minto. George wore Burgundy’s dark taxi cap. It felt good. Rue tried it on, rakishly, like a jazz man. The moon minted four copper pennies in four eyes.
In Minto, Georgie stopped at Junior Clarke’s place.
Rue knocked, yelled, “It’s me, Junior.”
Junior shouted, “Show your mug at the window.” Rufus stood at the window; a curtain swished. Then Junior cracked open the door. A big fat fellow.
Rue ask, “Got a game on?”
Junior said, “Show your stake.” Rue flashed his blazing bills.
Junior: “Okay. You cheat, I’ll bust your ass!”
Rue say, “What?” Junior weren’t amused.
Leaving Rue in Minto, George drove along the road back toward Fredericton. He saw a hitchhiker and stopped for him, a large-built fellow, this French chap whose English was shaky. He was a giant version of the little man in the trunk.
George ask, on impulse, “Know where I can get liquor and a gal?” The hitchhiker—Willy Comeau, ex-lumberjack—was scared of George. He feared he was a cop cause of that official-looking cap. George said, “I’s a taxi driver! Ain’t no cop! Ya know any Negro cop?” Both him and the French man roared at that gag.
Willy told George to go down a side road and up a hill and into a driveway and turn his headlights off and on twice. He begged Georgie for ten bucks, and Georgie used the moonlight to figure out what a ten-dollar bill looked like and gave it to Frenchy. Willy rapped on a door and parleyed in Acadian. This other man, who never turned on a light and never left the shadows, went away from the door, then came back with a box and a bag. Willy returned to the car with a quart of whisky and two quarts of beer, or two quarts of wine and one beer. This was all the liquor Willy had in his hands. Between 2:30 and 3:00 on Saturday morning.
Then Georgie motored back into Minto, on a whim, to check on Rue. Willy tagged along. Back to Junior’s went Georgie, arriving to see Rue leaving.
Rue was glad: “Junior just put me out cause I quarrelled with his rules.” He saw the hulking, quiet Willy and ask, “Who the fuck are you in my brother’s car?”
Willy only knew rotten English: “I’s knows where fuckin booze is, chief.” Willy showed Rue his cache of liquor.
Rue got into the car, opened the quart of wine, and give the big man a drink and took one himself and asked George if he wanted one. George said no, then let Frenchy out on a little hill by
a store which sits on the right hand side of this road. Then him and Rudy boomeranged to Barker’s Point, passing again through Fred Town. The moonlight rained like bleach—the way it cut through shadows.
Back home, at 4 a.m., the boys sat in George’s kitchen, listening to Plumsy snore and trying to decide where to put that sluggish form in the trunk of the car parked in the gravel pit. Rue said again, “Best bet is to take the car into Saint John and park it there.”
V
A CUNOUS pilgrimage: to go into Saint John, used to receiving barrels of potatoes, barrels of apples, barrels of molasses, and barrels of rum, with a corpse that wasn’t in a barrel. To pick up Highway 102—the Lincoln Road—to Saint John, George swung north up the Richibucto Road, driving right by Jehial’s where Silver’d perished only a few hours back, to Marysville, headed east through the village, passing two-storey red-brick houses (accommodating Marysville Cotton Mill workers), to ford the Nashwaak River via Bridge Street, then turned south to cross the Saint John River and pass through Fred Town—and cross into a mug’s history.
He was sure to be recognized. Here he was a notorious “local colour” Negro, poor, in a literally bloody taxi-driver’s cap, driving a deadly new and new-smelling stolen black Ford sedan, a corpse in the trunk, and yet careering boldly along well-policed streets like ritzy Waterloo Row. Eventually, he veered onto the Lincoln Road, that nasty two-lane icy highway flowing windingly along the river to Saint John. And he did so half-asleep, half-drunk, and thoroughly spooked.
George talked to himself, explaining to the dashboard and the still slightly bloody upholstery that this, ahem, slaughter of Silver was really a kind of sacrifice to cleanse his own sins. Somehow those hammer blows were the death knell of his past errors and failures. He glanced at the cool, smooth Crown-land—Government of New Brunswick—snow. It almost seemed to whisper as it slicked past in the moonlight, “You’re okay, Georgie. That body in your trunk is like vanilla ice cream, and ice cream is good. You’re A-I, A-OK, with a new baby girl who is just like chocolate ice cream.” Because Silver had suffered this accident (no hard feelings), George felt he could convert himself into a teetotaller, a hard worker, a faithful husband, and a respectable father. Blood might be flourishing in the trunk, but George still considered it a virtual velvet casket, much like the one in which his mother had been buried. Besides, to commit murder, you had to have intended to commit murder, and no one had lusted to see Silver die. That he did expire, well, that was just Fate acting up. After all, George now had the money to redeem Blondola and Desiah, his newborn. Apparently, Desiah’s birth had mandated Silver’s death. There was a balance here. George told himself that, having survived Silver, he should now take Blondola and his kids and go, maybe, to Cuba, start over in a warm place of rum and Christianity, where lots of Coloured people looked just like him, and he could thrive as a jovial, harmonica-playing fisherman. Certainly, it now seemed very agreeable to drive by Stanfield Jackson’s place, pay off a two-buck debt from three months ago, and put this ill-gotten cash to healthy use.
None of this philosophizing complemented Georgie’s screaming desire to see Lovea, to smell and taste her, to feel her wet and soft, to hear her sigh and moan. But tonight—or this morning—was an occasion for tests, for experiments. He could be forgiven for trying everything now. If murder could summon redemption, then adultery could invoke salvation. George now vroomed faster—first to pay off Jackson, then to pay Lovea.
George stopped in Lincoln to get gas but couldn’t rouse the B.A. garage man from a death-like sleep. In Upper Gagetown, he drove to a B.P. man—Havelock Gerrard—he’d known before, wheeled into Gerrard’s yard, blasted his horn five, six times, until Gerrard come thumpin down from his bedroom above the gas pumps, bawlin Georgie out, and gettin, in return, only “Sorry” and a mollifying tip. George bought four dollars’ worth of gas and gave Gerrard—forty-five, white, grey, and tobacco-smelling—an extra buck. Gerrard then sank two quarts of oil into the car: a dry engine. Inside the service station, there was a string, one used to lynch bologna, hanging from the ceiling. George could see it through the window. Ominous paraphernalia. He bought a package of Player’s cigarettes, two Daily Double cigars, and a chocolate bar. George told scowling Gerrard to make the bill out to Elroy’s Taxi, so he could get his cash back. (He also hoped the bill would serve as an alibi, suggesting Silver had loaned him his car. Indeed, there’d been no complaint from Silver.) Gerrard spotted a dark stain in the snow where the car’d been.
South, south, south, and further south, George swerved toward Saint John. He’d fortified his brains with coffee doused with rum. Drowsy, he stopped at Oromocto, in the parking lot of Acadia Distillers, makers of amber Governor-General’s rum, and began to doze, his windows rolled up, the engine running. He was wakened ten minutes later by the distillery guard rapping on his window. Groggy, Georgie cranked the window a peep. Cold air hammered his face. The guard glared whitely in moonlight. “I thought you was dead. Shouldn’t snooze with the motor on. Poison builds up, makes you feel sleepy, and you sleep, but don’t wake up.” George thanked the guard for the warning and started back to the highway. He almost forgot about Silver drowsing peacefully in the trunk. It was peaceful.
Fields blurry with January snow. Night greasy with snow, slick.
Four miles below Gagetown, Georgie turned off the road, took the back road leading into the Hussar Farm, then took the road cutting through Elm Hill—that old black village where land titles were a spaghetti dinner. He stopped at Rocky Jackson’s house, woke up his buddy by honking, roused a barkative hound too, and did so just so he could ask befuddled, angry Rocky where his son Stanfield was, cause Georgie owed him two bucks. The dog kept lunging at the end of its chain and barking a blue-black streak in the night that was blue molasses with morning. Rocky yelled at his mangy mutt to shut up, but he could strangle Georgie for botherin him at this god-danged hour. No, he didn’t know where Stanfield was, but he guessed he was with a woman—just like hisself.
“I got no business with you, Joygee!” To pacify Rocky, George give him a buck for himself and two for Stanfield. He’d driven down from Fred Town with a flock of dollars after a “cash windfall, no, eruption,” he couldn’t give details about: Ask him no questions. No questions got asked.
There was snow bulked up round the pines. The dog barked again. George slid away in the comprehensive night, all its stars ablaze, and set his mind on Lovea, her asking him that last time, last month, “Is your heart on fire?”
Nearing Saint John, George saw the nickel-plated river melt mercurially into the town. He was traversing a Nouveau-Brunswick of white darkness and dark light, a matrix of blizzards and shadows.
Arriving in Saint John (lousy fiefdom of a lumber-baron clan who slew whole forests to satisfy familial greed) about 6:15 a.m., Georgie careened through a cliff-slippery, hilly city, dramatically shuddering, crazy, toward the Fundy. He saw churches mushroom from solid gravel; teeter-totter houses see-saw up and down steep, cascading hills. He felt sensations of vertigo and inversion because of the Leaning Tower architecture. It was an interesting place to be drunk—like walking up a Ferris wheel. The two-storey-high Victorian wood-frame houses seemed set to tumble into the Fundy’d Atlantic. Here was a damn damp port. In town, he passed that true heart-of-whiteness, with dead citizens at its core: the Old Loyalist Cemetery, that graveyard crowded with traitors to the Republic. His engine throbbed, failure: failure, failure. Then he skidded down the long slope of King Street, capped by Birks, the diamond merchants, to the bottom corner suggesting a new Piccadilly Circus: the semicircle of the Canada Permanent building, its grey-brown cement face gazing paternally at the wharves and docks and tea-laden ships.
George considered that if he dumped Silver in the Saint John harbour, right beside him, it would constitute a burial at sea, a noble naval honour he’d seen practised frequently in the Merchant Marine. But he were scared to touch that dead body. No, let Silver rest, gleaming, in his come-by-chance tomb.
George made a beeline for number 47. Where else to be on such a nightfall morning, save in the company of a woman in a house where men are expected to shut up or sing? The four-storey structure sat across the tracks from steaming train engines and the steaming, frigid harbour water, always indigo, perse, or slate grey. Right below Fort Howe, the hilltop cannon post loved by the British Navy when it was guarding New Brunswick from the grasping Yanks. Taxis’d always be at 47 Moore, so George’s—Silver’s—didn’t seem unusual. After he parked at the back, stood woozily, and trudged slowly toward the front of the house, George jumped back as two humongous rats, squealing, flying, incisors and claws sweeping at air, fell from the roof and thudded into the snow at his feet. (In Saint John, the rats were so big that, when leaping from roof to roof, a few would miss and strike pedestrians, cars, or just the ground.) Then he had to sidestep stringy cats who streaked from shadows to bat about and maul and chew the struggling, gut-splattered rats. He turned and saw a mutt sitting under the Ford’s trunk, lapping at the suddenly brothy snow.
George went up to the front door, tired from stress, and rang the bell. Dutchy, mean-mugged, tar-eyed, and tattooed, auburn skin, peeped through a peek hole, seen it was Georgie, let him in. George asked Dutchy for a pail of water and two towels to clean the “throw-up in the car.”
George washed the floor of the car, the back of the car, the doors of the car. He ignored the trunk area, but had to keep shooing away that persistent, growling dog. The towel soiled with blood he threw away.
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