by Edward Riche
The police radio announced there was a vehicular pursuit in progress, four cars chasing a female suspect in a Ford Focus. More action Gary wasn’t seeing.
Gary would torture himself by counting the number of pickup trucks on the road carrying nothing in the back. Newfies wanted a truck even if they had no call for one. Gary supposed it was to do with the oil economy, people needing to believe they were part of it by donning the costume. Today, on the way home, Gary was one-for-twenty-one. He’d counted twenty-one pickups and only one, carrying a large, grey plastic fish box, being used for the purpose for which it was designed.
The pickup ahead of him now made it a record, one-for-twenty-two and, as a bonus, it was weaving in and out of its lane, the driver either looking at a phone or impaired. Gary didn’t need this but there wasn’t much waiting for him home in the Southlands; he was on call so couldn’t even look forward to a beer. He activated the light on the dash and gave the siren a couple of cycles. The driver took a moment to realize Gary was there, probably listening to music. The truck straightened up, the driver put on his blinker telling Gary that he was looking for a place to pull over. The truck slowed and turned down a dirt lane of an abandoned farm.
The track was so narrow that the pickup had to continue over the rutted way past the boarded-up homestead to find a spot to park. Tree branches, maple and some apple, scraped the side of Gary’s car, making a sound he found oddly reassuring, recalling trips to the countryside of Ontario with his family when he was a boy. There was a clearing ahead, enough space to turn farm machinery around, and the remnants of an old barn, its roof collapsed. The truck stopped there. It seemed a sensible place, out of traffic, suggesting to Gary that the driver wasn’t drunk but distracted. Gary knew he should call in and run the plate number but that would mean paperwork later. He would see if there was any sign of intoxication and if not simply give the guy a warning. That way he’d be home sooner.
Forty-Seven
This was the end; an impaired charge would ruin Wally. It would be all over the news. Trina was looking for a reason to leave him, he knew it, and she’d been ragging him about the drink. He’d refuse the breathalyzer. No, that was as bad. Pretend he was stricken? Having a heart attack or taking some sort of fit.
He knew this place — the Lucys owned the land and rented it to hay farmers. When old Tom Lucy died, his youngsters wanted nothing to do with it, didn’t want cow shit on their shoes, couldn’t even be bothered to lease it and they let it go to seed. Now the land was worth a fortune. Wally’d seen the plans for the subdivision that was going up here, the water and sewer was going to cost the city a mint because of the elevation. Tom Lucy’s children and grandchildren did nothing for it; they owned it because it was given to them. And what did Wally get? Nudding! What did the O’Neills have? Fuck-all in a brin bag.
If he slowed this thing with the cop down, called his lawyer, stalled for a hour, would he clear .08? How many did he have in him? Couple of beers and then rum and Coke. Three drinks? One . . . two . . . No! He’d had five rum and Cokes.
Run for it? Wally’s truck could probably get across the fields but the ghost car would hold up in the mud. Cop would call in others on patrol; they’d nab him on the other side. Would they? How long would they take to get here?
In the side mirror he saw the cop getting out of his car.
Forty-Eight
The air was humid and smelled of manure. Nearby crows were in dispute.
Arizona was the desert. Was landlocked. Was hotter than this but bone dry. Gary was ready for such a change, a big one, a new life, really. Despite the cost, the disruption of the move from Toronto he’d been obliged to make, despite his want of children, of a family, getting another life was not an opportunity given many people.
Blue 2012 Dodge Ram, plate number HBX 237.
Would Gary be a changed man in Embustero? Would he present himself differently? He would treat himself to new clothes, a whole new wardrobe. “Clothes really do make the man,” Eugene had told Gary when they were working up his legend for the G20 operation.
The night after Eugene arrived in St. John’s to tell Gary they would accommodate his request to relocate, Gary had gone online to look at a couple of singles dating services in the Tucson area.
First drops of rain. He . . .
The truck lunged. Gary heard the engine and the tires tearing up the dirt, stones spraying the undercarriage. It was in reverse, coming for him. Before he could move the corner of the bed was in him.
Tonnage of corner, like a house turned inside out.
His chest was gone. He felt that. He was on his back. His left arm was not right.
This was serious.
He was in trouble.
To breathe was.
Blood blood.
Dodge Ram. Room 22.
Plate number 126 246 163.
One of the crows.
Catch my breath.
Policeman.
Someone please call my brother 905 237 911 please call.
The sea was so cold in Newfoundland you couldn’t swim in it.
Everything was going to be fine. All good.
This is.
Another cr
Forty-Nine
From her bed or her desk at work Patty more and more frequently heard the cry of emergency vehicles’ sirens. They weren’t nearly so common in years past, she thought.
Today there’d been a terrific commotion outside the office, a knot of trouble that closed down the intersection nearest the parking lot in front of the Atlantech offices.
A police chase had ended with a collision. Patty and a few others went outside in time to witness the arrest. A woman, in her thirties, Patty guessed, was hauled from a small Ford, a gash on her head flooding mounded blond dreadlocks, turning them henna brown. There were tattoos on her neck. She was shoeless, in track pants with a brand emblazoned across the seat. Put roughly up against her car she was handcuffed with quick skill and then swarmed by hands in blue latex. Fight had first lifted the woman but as it departed she grew heavy as stone. The police dragged her to the caged back seat of a cruiser.
What were this woman’s crimes, Patty wondered, and how would she atone for them?
Jesus forgave but God judged. Only now did Patty see that God’s mercy was his judgement. That all was measured, tallied, and accounts settled did more than reward the righteous. It was the only means by which justice and free will could reside in the same house.
Judgement was the pure and final weighing of things.
We did not understand it. Pastor Maggs himself was vain to assert that he did. It wasn’t religion at all; it was scientific. Nature punished the wicked.
Moral codes were not invented or imagined, they were not prescribed. They were observed in every sense of that word. Observance. You know what is right. You know what is true. Relativism meant chaos. What was evil? Chaos. Chaos was evil. The devil was disorder. A bloom was order. The tides were order. Turmoil came from the unravelling. To be judged was an entreaty to be in order. Prayer was a plan of action, a schedule. Prayer was a to-do list.
Was it kind to forgive the sinner? No, it was actually kinder that they be castigated. To leave ill deeds unpunished was to leave the burden on those who committed them.
Punishment was salt on meat.
Was there any greater passion than wrath?
Fifty
Alessandra wasn’t being particularly discreet. She took the time to stop in the middle of the Blackmarsh Inn parking lot to search through her handbag, concerned, Matt supposed, that she’d left something behind in the motel room.
Matt noticed a car from Sentry, the security company, and wondered if they’d taken down the number of his licence plate and realized, quickly, that such a notion was absurd.
At every red light during the drive back downtown, Matt worried someone stopped in the
next lane was going to look into the car and see him, the mayor, with Alessandra and put it together that they’d minutes before been in bed at a motel in the west end.
They were on Topsail Road heading east toward City Hall when she asked, “Why were you looking for me?”
“I don’t . . .”
“Maria said you were looking for me. I came back to my office, you’d been there . . . presumably not to propose we go have a fuck at the Blackmarsh Inn?”
Jaysus, she was laughing, this was all a grand lark for her. She’d rolled the window down to let the summer air get in her hair. She’d donned her big round sunglasses and was smiling at the heat of the sun on her face.
“No. I was going to talk about the naming rights issue, Kavanagh Court,” Matt said.
“So ridiculous.”
“I think it’s . . . it’s the way it’s done these days.”
“Then we leave it undeveloped, a grove of trees,” she said. “That might even be better. It would. ‘Parks’ — that’s someone telling you how to enjoy nature. Bad as a zoo, if you think about it. Leave it.”
“I don’t think Council will even understand what you are saying.”
“Forget them, Matt. They are such clowns. Is there any way we can go for a glass of wine?”
“A glass of wine? Now? I don’t think so. We have to be careful. Are you going back to City Hall?”
“No. If we can’t get a drink I should go home. Play nursemaid.”
“I don’t know where you live.”
“Oh.” Alessandra sounded surprised, as though now knowing one another as they did could not jibe with knowing so little about one another. “Rennie’s Mill Road.”
As they neared Alessandra’s house Matt asked, “Where should I let you out?”
“In front.” Alessandra was puzzled by Matt’s question.
“Okay, sure.”
He pulled up to the curb and put the car in park. Alessandra opened the door and then turned back and, taking his head in her hands, kissed him on the mouth.
“Nobody saw anything,” she said, and laughed again as she climbed out on to the sidewalk.
Fifty-One
Coming in the front door of his house Matt heard no sounds of life. He made straight for the shower.
At the top of the stairs he heard Patty’s voice coming from behind the closed door of their bedroom. She was speaking with someone. On the phone with one of the kids or her sister?
But why had she closed the door?
Matt caught himself hoping that Patty might be in their marriage bed with another man, that he could catch her cheating and that he would forgive her and they would move on.
He thought he would open the door and make a sign that he wasn’t going to interrupt and was going to take a shower.
As his hand reached for the knob he heard that Patty was not talking to Katie or Jack or Fiona. “Today, Lord, I learned again it was . . .” she said.
Patty would hear the water running, Matt reasoned, and know it was him. There was no reason to intrude on her conversation with the maker.
Patty was seated at the dining table fussing with her iPhone.
“You took a shower.”
“I felt gross.”
“That Deer Man is back in Bowring Park.”
“I think he’s in the hospital,” said Matt.
“No, they let him out. It’s on Facebook,” said Patty.
“I didn’t know.”
“It is sick, the whole thing.”
“You’ve said before. I’ll grant you it is mighty peculiar but —”
“It’s more than peculiar, Matthew, it’s deviant, to be taken over by an animal, to be . . .”
“To be what, Pats?”
“I thought you were going to do something about it.”
“I did what I could,” he said. “We contacted the police.”
“Well, he’s still there.”
Patty laid down her iPhone and slid it across the table, pushing it away.
“These phones, it’s a form of idolatry,” she said.
“I suppose, in a way, yes it is.”
“And Apple? It’s a cult. It’s like a consumption cult.”
“A cult, Pats? I think that’s taking it a bit far.”
“I’m cooking salt fish for supper, with potatoes and scrunchions.”
“Not with tomato and olives?”
“Do you prefer it that way?”
“No. I like both. I love fish and potatoes.”
“Never had it any other way growing up than with fatback and onions and drawn butter,” Patty said as she stood and went to the kitchen.
Fifty-Two
Going through the change, Trina was hot as a woodstove, and with a fever of dread running through him and his guts a-boil Wally was burning up in his bed. He went downstairs and lay on the couch.
His trial would be brief and sordid. Upon conviction and the harsh sentencing that was dealt those who killed a policeman, he would be shipped to a horrific prison on the mainland. Were there Newf networks within those tall walls? No, they were too small in numbers; the demographic crisis, the decline of the Newfoundlanders would be as clear to see behind bars as it was around the bay. And having run over one of their law and order cousins, the guards would not protect Wally. Wally would be the plaything of sadistic natives. They would revenge the extinction of the Beothuks on his sorry Catholic ass.
Wally began to tremble. He had to put this panic away; he wasn’t caught yet. He needed to appear calm to avoid arousing suspicion. What was there to link him to the corpse on Lucy’s farm? It might still be lying there, unfound, the trail colder and colder. He needed to put his mind to something that would settle it, so he made himself think on the O’Neill Evacuation System. Like sucking on dumbtit, rolling those pictures in his head always soothed Wally. He saw the rivets and thick windows, the hull a coat of armour. He imagined it dropping from the rig into an ocean churned up into curds and disappearing for a moment beneath the surface and rising, buoying up, and the powerful motor turning the screws to convey it safely to open water. The storm raged but the boat was unsinkable, it rode waves as big as office towers and within, strapped to his seat, snug, safe, unsinkable Wally saw himself so at ease that he could let his eyes close and rest, could feel the vessel on the currents, hear the ocean as you would in a shell to your ear.
Fifty-Three
Haldeman Estates
301 Locura Canyon Road
Enredo, California
93446
Meredith Devereaux
Director, Parks and Recreation (acting)
City of St. John’s
10 New Gower Street
P.O. Box 908
St. John’s, NL
Canada
A1C 5M2
Dear Ms. Devereaux,
I have read with great interest about the man transitioning to deer who lives, unharrassed, in a civic park in your city.
Some years ago my beloved wife, Hildy, and I confronted and ultimately accepted the fact that she too was a deer. We live on a large, award-winning winery near Paso Robles that, until recently, easily accommodated her needs to roam and forage. By 2009 Hildy was living happily here as a hind.
In 2011 we had a brush fire in the area that badly spooked Hildy. The smoke and flames drove her and other wildlife deep into the rough terrain of the Santa Lucia coastal mountain range. I thought I’d lost her. When she finally returned, after an absence of ten days, she was in poor condition and had to receive medical treatment against her will.
One impact of climate change is the certainty that such brush fires are going to be a regular feature of life in this area of California. Further, recent drought has greatly increased the risk of contracting coccidioidomycosis, or Valley Fever, a potentially life-threatening resp
iratory condition caused by the inhalation of fungus endemic to the area. All mammals are vulnerable. As you probably know, we live on a major fault in the earth. Earthquakes are a significant cause of the soil disruption that allows the spores to be disseminated.
Other than refuelling stops at the Goose Bay Air Base, I have never been to Newfoundland and know of it only what I have read and heard from fellow U.S. Service men. My father was stationed, briefly, at Fort Pepperall during his military service, but I never heard him speak about it.
I judge, given the acceptance shown by your community, that your Bowring Park might provide a more suitable habitat for my wife than California.