Jimmie glances at me, then he makes a turn on to Gull Pond Road. “So it hasn’t got to the news, then.”
I shrug at him as we pass between houses and driveways, each throwing yellow and orange light on the late-autumn lawns.
“You remember those guys that used to come into Mudder’s Donuts and sit by themselves with all their equipment and papers, and never talk to anybody?” Jimmie asks.
“Sure,” I answer. “Ecobay Corporation. The ones with the big black bus. Trailer. Whatever.” I remember it: big copper letters and a sharp line under it, the full length of the truck. Always reminded me of some ’80s science fiction TV show.
“You ever notice that as soon as Georgie was found missing they up and left? Stuck around for six months, and then alluva sudden, gone?”
I give him a dull look. “Ecobay is a consultancy. All above board. I know, because one of the VPs is a client of mine.”
“You know what they consult in?”
“Mineralogical surveys,” I say. “What’re you asking me for? You’re the geological engineer!”
He shows me a toothy, angry grin. “Waste disposal. Of the toxic variety.”
I snort.
“Illegal toxic waste disposal,” he insists.
“That’s what you’re going on about?” I ask.
As we wind our way down Gull Pond Road into darkness, he says, “They’re back. For the last three weeks, I’ve seen them driving every day, up and down Gull Pond Road. First time in ten years, and people go missing again?”
This is news to me. I get gooseflesh. “You think Ecobay is making people disappear?”
He shrugs one shoulder. “I think something is happening up Gull Pond Road, and I think Ecobay’s got something to do with it, sure. And if they’re making people disappear, I don’t want them to catch me midday.”
“What people?” I ask.
“My neighbour John, he was the first. Disappeared Friday night. And up the road there, a little girl named Emmie—seven years old, left a shoe behind at the foot of her bed. Just Sunday night. Everybody knows about it, but official word’s not gone past Witless Bay. Explain that.”
I shake my head. “This is bad.”
“I know.”
“I mean, it’s a bad idea. Turn around, let’s call the cops.”
His foot eases up on the accelerator, only because the turn is tight. He doesn’t stop until we’re on the far side of Little Country Pond, where we see his headlights reflected in the brakes of a parked tractor trailer.
“It’s none of our business,” I tell him. “What if they’re only doin’ their job?”
“In the middle of the night?” He points up. “In this?” The rain’s not so bad now, but he’s made his point. “What if that big truck is full of nuclear waste?” I give him another dull look. “Or something poisonous. Mercury, maybe.”
“And dump it here? Who in God’s green Earth would come all the way out to the middle of nowhere and…” The more I talk, the more I realize he might be onto something. Small towns are easy to buy off. “You think somebody caught them dumping the stuff, and Ecobay disappeared them along with the waste?”
For the first time in ages, I see Jimmie with a straight face. “If we get honest-to-Jesus proof what’s going on here, then we can ask for help from outside Newfoundland.”
I can’t say this is a better way to spend my wife’s forgotten birthday, but maybe I can keep Jimmie outta trouble for once. Or at least know where to look for his corpse.
Some distance ahead, we pull off to the side of the road, and unload the four-wheeler. He gives me a helmet. At least nobody’ll see my face. We board the four-wheeler and backtrack along the snowmobile path toward the creek between Little Country Pond and Larry Neals Pond. It doesn’t take long before we spot some tracks. He stops the four-wheeler, and I get off to take a closer look with the flashlight. He takes off his helmet to hear me better. “And?”
I don’t have to answer, and we’ve got to move. We see the trees light up yellow, long before we hear the motor. Jimmie shuts off his engine and the lights, puts the four-wheeler into neutral, and we shove it off the track and around a big rock, where we hunch down and hide. Another heavy-duty off-roader comes peeling down the track, hauling an empty low-bed trailer that bounces left and right behind them. One of the riders keeps looking over his shoulder like the devil’s on his heels.
In their haste, they don’t see an axle-snapping dip in the path. They both go ass-over-teapot, clean over the handlebars. But does that stop them? The first one gets to his feet and runs so fast he’s punching his chin with his knees. Then the other one gets up, breathing so loud it sounds like somebody’s sawing trees, and then he starts to cry. A second later, he’s flinging himself up the path after his buddy.
Jimmie has his head on a swivel, like he doesn’t know if it’d be more fun to chase down Ecobay or go deeper into the dark and find out what they’d done. Finally, after we hear their big old diesel engine whinny, he makes up his mind and grabs me by the jacket front. “Come on.”
“At least Millie would have the decency to kill me in the comfort of me own home!” I whine as I put my helmet back on.
We drive slow for probably twenty minutes. There’s nothing out here but rocks, moss, bog, trees, and trail. It’s not even ten o’clock, it’s cold, and I’m tired. I tap Jimmie on the shoulder and tell him to turn around, but he doesn’t. He keeps following the trail.
Suddenly, he points ahead. I don’t see what he sees.
“The water,” he shouts over the engine.
“I’m not going in!”
“See?” He stops the ATV and turns off the motor. “Dunker’s Pond. Last known address of Georgie MacCrae’s left shoe.”
Ecobay has left behind four pallets of unmarked metal canisters. I see evidence that something heavy has been dragged into the water. Jimmie tells me to start filming while he brings the ATV up closer, to shine a brighter light.
I creep a bit closer to the water’s edge, where the weeds are broken down. The funk of the bank makes my nose wrinkle. It smells like mold, rotting pork, and dead fish. All the tracks here are jumbled. I see the curve of a lot of wide heels.
And then I realize these shoes have no treads, and they’re shaped like the leaves of a water lily.
That’s when I see the gouges in the mud, the kind your fingers make when you’re being dragged arse foremost to your death.
At this point, I am shitbaked and ready to outrun the Ecobay truck all the way back to Witless Bay—a better name for our port-of-call they never found! I dash over to tell Jimmie what I seen, and there he is, standing ankle deep in water, staring straight down with his gob open and his eyes half-shut. I run at him and plow him down to earth with a big splash for both of us. He’s yelling at me, and I’m rolling him over mud like he’s on fire until we’re twenty yards uphill of the nearest puddle. He finds his traction and shoves me back.
“What’s wrong wit’ you, b’y?” he demands, and all of a sudden, I can’t remember. I only remember being scared hairless of something I seen in the mud.
“Somebody’s been dragged into the water.” I haul him over, careful to keep my hands on him in case one or t’other of us get pulled in.
There’s no sign of the lily-pad shaped prints. Only shoe prints and the finger-drag marks.
Jimmie holds me out at arm’s length and stares at me. When he’s unsatisfied, he takes the flashlight from me and shines it in my face. “This is big,” he says. I can’t see him—I can’t see anything but orange neon squiggly marks burned into my eyes—but his voice is grinning. “Come on.” As we run floundering to his four-wheeler, he says, “I’ll bet that’s where John went in!”
I switch off the GoPro and say, “I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s been pissing down for twenty hours straight. No way John’s tracks would still be here, if ‘e went missing on Friday night.”
He turns in the drive
r’s seat to look over his shoulder at me. I can’t read his expression, but I can read his body language. He’s as alert as a hunting dog on a duck fart. He puts on his helmet, and so do I.
We don’t say another word until the off-roader is loaded and we’re back inside the nice warm cab of his truck. We stare bug-eyed at the windshield for a while, until he turns to me.
“We need to find out who else has gone missing from town,” he says. “Before those Ecobay b’ys get too far. That’s why they run off so fast. Dump and run before anybody knows they’re gone from town!”
“No, b’y. They weren’t scared for their secrecy. They were running for their lives.”
“You’re right… Only two men came out, but how many went in?”
We drive back in silence, covered in stiffening mud, dutch-ovened in our own worry. By the time we’re back in his driveway, the rain has stopped and a fog has rolled in. That’s when we both get a case of smarts and call the cops to tell them what we seen. I upload a copy of the video to his computer and beat it home to Goulds, where my wife is keeping our bed company, and where a sleeping bag has been laid out on the couch for my personal convenience.
I dreamed all night about being chased by the Swamp Thing. I cancel my first meeting of the day, so I can call up Jimmie and find out what the police are going to do.
I get his wife, instead. She gives me the gears for letting Jimmie slip out at night with all of her kids at home alone. It takes a lot of cooing before I can get an answer out of her: Jimmie left for work strangely early. She knows, because she heard him turning on the kitchen radio at 4:00 a.m., when he’s never done so before. When I hang up with her, I see a voicemail waiting. It’s my own missus, advertising a local hotel that specializes in rooms for one.
I try calling Jimmie again around noon, but this time nobody’s home.
I mean to try again when school is out, but I get caught up in a conference call that goes into double-overtime. Once I finish, the receptionist hands me a lengthy note. I’ve had two urgent calls come in. One was from Millie. The other was from the cops—a Sergeant Francis Noseworthy of the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary.
I don’t know who to call first, but I do know it’s got something to do with Jimmie. I call up the missus. She tells me about how Jimmie’s wife Laney called her up in a panic, because she’d found one of Jimmie’s shoes on the driveway. Millie understands the significance of this, and she asks what she can do to help. I don’t know yet. So I call up Sergeant Noseworthy next. He tells me to meet him in Witless Bay and answer questions about last night. I can’t shake the feeling that he wants to give me a brand new pair of chrome-plated bracelets.
I do what I can to get through the rest of my work day, and then I get in my car.
I pull off into Mudder’s Donuts, because I’m going to need a last meal. While I wait at the counter for my donut, I hear an old familiar voice. I turn on my stool and see Mrs. Pettigrew. She’s as ancient now as she was when she was our grade three teacher, back in ‘82. She’s got her hands on her walker, but she’s still seated. Her eyes are wide and bright, but she’s not looking at me. She’s not looking at anything. She’s flushed. “Did you hear it?”
“Hear what?”
“Last night,” she warbles, “under the rain and over the waves…”
I don’t remember Mrs. Pettigrew waxing so poetical before. All I remember was a lot of “Paul, don’t eat that” and “Paul, don’t put that in your nose.”
“Hear what?” I ask again.
She says, in a wondering, musical, but cracking voice, “The white horse rolled ashore, so many years ago…the night of the perfect storm…” Her eyes flare open a little wider, and she whispers, “John heard it too… And Georgie…”
I quit my stool and sit in her booth. “Mrs. Pettigrew—what do you know about Georgie’s disappearance?”
She smiles, showing me teeth the colours of Indian corn. “I could never catch up. I’d always get turned around, somewhere between Little Country and Dunker’s Pond… Following the music, leading me around and around until I was back on the road, far away…”
“The music?” I ask. I remember Laney telling me she’d heard Jimmie playing music downstairs around 4:00 a.m. “Mrs. Pettigrew—”
“But the boy,” she whispers hoarsely, “he stuck to it like glue…”
“Missus—”
The bell jangles over the front door, and that’s the end of that goosebumply conversation. The police have found me.
At a borrowed room in the town hall, I tell Sergeant Noseworthy and three scowling members of the RNC everything I know. I give ‘em my GoPro and its storage card. They take plenty of careful notes, too, comparing them against stills from my camera, double-checking spelling and times. They seem real interested about the canisters and the guys who left ‘em behind.
They ask me a lot about our boy’s night out, too. I hold nothing back. They ask me if we’d been drinking, or fighting, or smoking up. They ask me about what happened when he came home—Laney gave him a hotter reception than Millie gave me, what with hell hathing no fury, etc., etc.
After forty minutes, they let me go, hinting that if I ever wandered back to Dunker’s Pond, I might scare off Ecobay and undermine the investigation. Worse, I might get myself arrested for tampering with evidence, and Sergeant F. Noseworthy looks greedy to fill up the St. John’s jail with the likes of Jimmie and me. I leave, feeling like a traitor, a suspect, and a real scut boob all in one.
I’m halfway out the door when I realize I forgot to ask if I could at least join the search party, so I go back inside. Before I open my mouth, I see Noseworthy and his cops ripping off their notes and dropping them into a box marked Shredding. There’ll be no investigation, and probably no search party, either.
This pisses me off. Jimmie’s only one of three people gone missing this week, and those are the ones I know about. I hear one of the cops say they’re going to call in the Army to help drain Dunker’s Pond so they can get at all the bodies.
Still haven’t got my GoPro back, yet, either. Bastards.
Now, I know there’s only one way Jimmie’s gonna get found alive, and that’ll be by me opening my eyes and taking a walk. I exit the station like a business man, and as soon as I’m around the corner, I gallop off to my car, drive back to Mudder’s Donuts, and find that Mrs. Pettigrew has already ambled off to nobody knew where, never to be seen again.
I don’t know what else to do. I call up Millie and apologize. I tell her everything, and she doesn’t interrupt. At the end, she asks if I want to come home. I tell her I do, but not until I know what the cops are going to do about Jimmie. She tells me she’ll come down and wait for me at Laney’s house. I tells her I loves her. She tells me I’m an ass, but in the best kind of way.
I get into the car, drive up Gull Pond Road, and park on the culvert. There’s no signs to say “police investigation” or whatever, and no sign of search parties. I don’t see Jimmie’s truck nor any fresh ATV tracks. I spend the last shades of daylight looking for the boy, but not a sign. I go back to where I started from, grab my flashlight, and get out again.
It’s unseasonable warm now, and as I’m walking through the woods, I look up and see that the sun’s setting in the east. I stop and look behind me, and I see that the sun’s also setting in the west. That one’s a normal reddish colour—Sailor’s Delight—and in the east, the sunset’s an ungodly greenish colour—Sailor’s Incontinence.
I think maybe Jimmie’s on to something with his conspiracy theory about nuclear waste.
My feet start to turn back, but then I remember Jimmie saying it was people involved. I figure it’s just construction lights shining through the swamp gasses, so I shush up my feet and soldier on.
I get past the banks of Little Country Pond, and about ten minutes later, the green glow’s brighter than the sunset behind me, and the air takes on a funk you can taste and feel. That’s when I hear the radio, and all my hair stands up.
“Jimmie?” I call out.
It sounds like a man singing over a crackling a.m. radio down there by the banks of Dunker’s Pond. I hear rustling, too. That’s when I stop and tie double-bows in my runners, just in case.
I stand up again, and I come to the spot where the canisters were left behind. In some spots, my sneakers make loose farty noises when I gotta pull them out of the mud. Dunker’s Pond overflowed with all the rain.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see motion on the far bank. At first I think it’s one of them guys from Ecobay all dressed in green, but then it moves the upper part of its body. I blink, and I rub at my eyes, and I squint, and I look again. I figure it’s gotta be a horse escaped from somebody’s farm, but it looks mighty sick and sad.
And then the horse turns and comes towards me, through the green fog. I hear splashing noises like when my mudder used to slap the water out of my wet jeans before hanging them on the line, and I see that horse is walking across the damn pond.
A more sensible man would have turned and put those double-knots to use, but I was out of my senses, so I just stood watching this horse come toward me, thinking about the Swamp Thing and the Toxic Avenger, and about how my face was gonna melt off like that guy in the original RoboCop movie.
This horse is so big I could run under him without ducking. His mane clings like watery green tar on both sides of his head and neck. As he gets closer to the bank, the weeds bend away to make room for him. All around him, seaweed waves from his viridian flanks like he’s dragging it through a tide. His hoofs are as big as garbage pail lids, and green as algae, and when he snorts, ropes of snotty pond scum come out of his nostrils.
It takes me a while, but I realize now the a.m. radio is coming from the horse, the same four notes, over and over again, humming like wind in the rigging. The closer he gets, the louder and harsher the noise, like a gale coming to shore.
“Now, now hold on there, Nelly,” I hear myself say. The horse keeps coming toward me. “I’m only here for my buddy Jimmie.” The horse stops singing and stares at me out of one big bleedin’ eye, making a noise like he’s drowning in his own phlegm. I hold up my hands and try to think of soothing things to say, but all I’ve got is “Sweet Jayses, Mary, and Joseph!” The horse gnashes his teeth—and not them square kind of teeth you expect to see, but a mouthful of knives and a couple of tusks—and even though I got smart earlier and took a good piddle, still a little squirted out of me. I know toxic waste can do weird things to a lotta animals, but fangs on a horse and wavy seaweed tentacles are beyond the pale. I smirk like a fool. “Jimmie,” I say. “Short wiry fella with a nervous giggle.”
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