Pontypool Changes Everything

by Burgess, Tony

  The entire Don Valley, deemed to be a hotbed of cannibal activity, is sprayed with a molten plastic.

  The Toronto Islands, which have reported only rare cases of the disease, are carpet bombed.

  In Hockley Vailey, one hundred and twenty cannibals are rounded up. Soldiers discover that if a bullet is grazed across the tops of zombie heads, they dance in seizure while squirting blood into the air. Informal contests are held to see how many zombies can be made to dance at once.

  Just outside Sudbury, troops succeed in getting sixty-three zombies to die jigging. The same is attempted on the bridge over Owen Sound Harbour and it backfires. Eight soldiers are dragged to their deaths beneath the hull of the docked Chi Chi Man. Two more soldiers are killed by friendly fire as bullets ricochet at the waterline of the ship.

  A helicopter descending on Ceasarea by Lake Scugog encounters over a thousand zombies in a cannibal frenzy. They have discovered an enclave of healthy citizens hiding in the post office. The helicopter circles until its panicking pilot, his face streaked purple with anger, dives his aircraft into the centre of the orgy.

  A lighthouse in Gravenhurst catches fire. A nurse is hiding four elderly people in its lookout. She crosses herself and makes praying hands as the smell of burning gauze stings her nose.

  In Barrie a defiant population takes to the streets to embrace their cannibal brothers and sisters. An emotion-choked voice blares from a megaphone, pleading for people to return home. The snapping of compassionate necks can be heard clicking through the town and army personnel descend with guns blazing under tear-streaked faces.

  A convoy of heavily laden trucks snakes along Highway 7 toward the Elora Gorge, where bodies are dumped by the thousands from a great height into blood-oily water.

  A hidden coyote population joins with packs of agitated wolves to roam through ditches snapping at hands and feet.

  An arsonist in Orangeville kills his family in their sleep and slicks himself down with gasoline.

  A throng of looters in Scarborough greets the new day smiling and empty-handed. They are all shot through the head.

  A couple who have been holed up in a cottage on Rice Lake light a fire in their front yard to attract the attention of rescuers. They are shoved backwards onto flames by the giant hands of haunted people.

  In a farmhouse near Orillia a widow sneaks out at night and drags corpses through her front door. The scene is lit eerily from within by a flashlight held in its place on the table by a sugar dispenser.

  A zombie in Havelock leaps onto the back of a cow and looks up laughing as a farmer drives a pitchfork into its back.

  In Angus a group of men lash a suspected pedophile to a raft, then send him off down the freezing Notta-wasaga river. A helicopter is dispatched to save him. As it swings along a river in the sky, men shake their fists from below.

  A schoolteacher hides his Grade Twos in a grain silo, only to become a predator himself by midnight.

  Four people stand under the Dufferin Gates, remove their clothes, and pass a straight razor back and forth on unspeakable dares.

  A prisoner in the Kingston penitentiary slams his back up against the bars in a sexual passion that will end in the death of the man he has loved for six years.

  A garage mechanic in Sarnia is shot by a stranger as he pulls down the rattling bay door.

  Three yachts set sail from Port Credit Harbour and are sunk by a coast guard vessel that has, up to this point, been firing on the seagull population. A young captain holds up his head, like a bust of Beethoven, in the pocket of air inside the ship’s bow.

  A four-year-old girl in Brampton runs screaming to her parents’ bedroom. They sit up to greet their crying daughter with faces that are unmistakably afflicted.

  The population of Norwood is zero.

  Guelph, three hundred. Maybe.

  St. Catharines, eight hundred.

  Hamilton is particularly disastrous. Pockets of homicide flare up with crazy unpredictability, confounding a military strategy that flexes itself, finally, in an anguished genocidal nightmare.

  Hamilton: population definitely zero.

  The QEW, stretching down around the corner of Lake Ontario to Buffalo, is host to a marathon of mad runners who are ignored by the Ontario military. They fall into a blinding wall of American weapons.

  A serial killer sits in silent obedience at home in North York, surrounded by four uncommunicative guests.

  By January the population of Ontario is only two-thirds of what it was, and there are no zombies left alive. By the first thaw an enormous clean-up is under way. By spring all killing has virtually stopped, except for the occasional murder committed by hunters who rush into the deep woods in the hope of bagging a real-life monster.

  24

  Home

  If everything that ever brought a person to their knees, head bowed, hands clutching at thin air, had to be characterized somehow, several hands would shoot up immediately. Some of us are eager to tell others how this happens. You are born with what will bring you to your knees, and it patiently acquaints itself with you over long decades until, one day, with a blinding finger, it reaches up …

  No, that’s not true. Not really.

  Other hands go up. No one is called upon to answer. The look from the person at the front of the room, a left hand caging a left eye, communicates that it’s already too late, that we are already sitting in positions strange to this endeavour. We quiet down, fold our hands in our laps, respectful. The instruction is that forgiveness should be sought in the most forgiving space in the world: a little lounge music, an unregenerate appetite for heroin, a peaceful hand touches the corner of a chin, and a scratching fingernail is dragged up and down a forearm. A forearm as long as a country laneway. Someone leans over a neighbour’s crossed legs and says, “It’s good to be here anyway.” As a chosen member is carved open at the throat, hands knocking a lamp, a box of pencils, several people moan — “mmmmm” and “ahhhhh”— so we lower the lights.

  Greg’s Higher Power reaches out beside his bed and traps a lamp switch between his fingers. The turquoise adjustable work lamp is clamped not to a table but to a short plank of wood held in place on the floor by a brick. When he pushes the switch on the crown of the metal shade the bulb is inadvertently directed towards his face. He redirects it with a swat. He turns to face the wall and waits for Harley who is sleeping in the upper bunk, to hit the snooze button. The beep persists and seems to get louder, more obnoxious. Greg’s Higher Power raises a leg from the bed, pulling it through the coarse grey blanket, which slides off, grating the smooth leg he extends into the bottom of the mattress above him.

  “Yeah. Mmm-hmm. Ten minutes.”

  The Higher Power sits up on the mattress and leans his face into his hands, breathing deeply through his nose. He smells the dampness of the mattress on his fingers. The lamp faces out across the cellar floor. Along space heater sits on three old issues of the Hamilton Spectator. The front pages of the papers are browned by the heating element and their bottoms are cold and wet against the concrete floor. Like a closet of props the cellar is crammed with neglected junk. Two old televisions, a collection of broken hoes, a saddle, canoe paddles, a stack of rough scaffold planks, a mouldy array of old coats, a rusted-out stove, a soft, black cardboard box full of engine parts, a rack of clothes bundled under plastic and tied with binder twine, a plywood reindeer with a red bulb hanging from its nose. Under the charred pipes of a giant furnace is a bunk bed. Greg’s Higher Power has lived here throughout the winter in the orange glow of the space heater, waiting for his grief to settle, for Greg to be less with him, for spring to come. For summer to follow.

  He was picked up at the side of the road by a farmer named Jackson several months ago, and by the end of the trip, which took them down to Markham and back again, to a farm just outside Pontypool, the farmer had taken on his grim-looking passenger as a hand. Jackson led the lifeless man into the cellar, where his son Harley slept, and left him there to wait
out the winter months in bed until the first haying in August. And now, after an interminable season spent with the conjugating clicks of a furnace and the hug-me glow of a battered space heater, the Higher Power is woken by Harley’s alarm on the first day of haying season.

  Halfway up the stairs the Higher Power smells bacon, and by the time he opens the door, heavy with winter coats, onto a large kitchen, the mould on the back of his tongue suddenly tastes of toast, fried tomatoes and pancakes. Dolly, the farmer’s wife, turns to him from an electric skillet full of bacon sitting on a dishwasher and smiles, gesturing with a greasy spatula for him to sit. The table has been extended with a mismatched leaf to accommodate a vast array of hot food. Three tall stacks of light-brown pancakes, a huge peppery bowl of steaming tomatoes, a long plate, heavy with bright-green-and-red-flecked omelettes oozing cheese. An entire corner of the table is devoted to a small city of jams and preserves. A tray of still-sizzling steaks sits between two fat glass pitchers of freshly squeezed orange juice. Jackson is seated at the head of the table, and though he’s a reserved man by nature the Higher Power senses an excitement in him today. He is wearing cleaned and pressed work clothes with a bright orange cap on his head. He is staring thoughtfully at his plate, chewing, taking care, it seems to the HP, that his long grey sideburns, trimmed and combed, stay clear of the huge forkfuls of food he brings up between them.

  Jackson acknowledges the HP’s presence at the table by anxiously breathing once and pausing his hands over his plate. When the HP has settled, Jackson continues eating, hurrying now for everyone else’s sake. A leader should lead, and Jackson looks up frequently through the curtains of the window above the sink, picturing himself out there already, frowning at a series of disasters that always marks the first day of haying. Dolly is watching him above her thick glasses and the HP notices how striking this is, this looking, the peculiar distance in her eyes. Dolly knows Jackson will not return her gaze. A shy man, even around his own wife. Jackson looks back at his plate, frowning, breathing in anxiously again. He doesn’t look at her, but he knows that she’s watching him and he says, “Ah-yeh, ah-yeh.” Dolly wipes her hands on her recently ironed apron and looks out the window to where her husband has pictured himself. She leans over the dishwasher and looks out further to the acres of cut and fallen hay.

  “Hope it’s dry enough, Jackson.”

  Jackson doesn’t look up, and the scowl he makes is nearly a smile. Dolly steps over to the doorway that leads to the cellar and flicks on a light behind a hanging coat. Jackson attempts to look up after her but winces at the effort, “Ah-yeh. Ah-yeh.”

  Dolly looks back, smiling briefly at the HP.

  “Harley!”

  A nearly orange dog moves off the living room carpet and clicks its toes across the yellow linoleum of the kitchen. Dolly follows the dog to the end of the counter and leans ahead of it, stretching her arm to open the door in the dog’s path.

  Harley appears, stripped to the waist, his blond hair towelled up. While directing his appeal to Jackson, he accepts a light admonishment from his mother’s eyes.

  Jackson shuffles to rise, with his hands circling an empty plate, and waits for Harley to sit down. The Higher Power watches Harley’s long arms reaching for syrup, butter, salt, pepper. The young man surrounds his plate with condiments before sliding clean fingers under the fifth pancake in the pile halfway up the table. When Jackson has left, Dolly turns to the HP.

  “Do you need more toast?”

  The HP pushes his chair back. Tossing a napkin from his lap, he reaches for a toothpick. He turns it in the air towards Dolly before dropping it on his tongue, rolling it into the corner of his mouth. All winter the HP has had a fantasy that come haying season he will say “Thank ya kindly, ma’am” often, and he considers this a dry run. As he leaves the table Dolly lays a hand on his back and places a large plastic jug of water in his hands. He moves his shoulder blade under her hand so that she can feel him. He nods, satisfied that one of the reasons he feels so fine this morning is the fact that he feels no compulsion to disclose his good mood to anyone in particular. But Dolly can tell that her guest is happy, that given half the chance he might just get past that terrible state he was in when he arrived those many dark months ago.

  “He’s comin’. Aren’t ya, Harley?”

  Dolly directs this comment to the HP, who feels a status is bestowed on him by her. The HP takes it as a way of positioning him in the chain of command. Not just a hand, maybe the second man. He senses that one need only be a man here; it doesn’t matter that your demons once got the better of you. You’re a man. And just by being here, assuming a place on haying day, you are ultimately tougher than those demons. Dolly looks at her son as if he’s a man too young to have demons, someone who, like Dolly, follows after those who do. The HP winks and clicks his tongue, thanking the little lady with a deferential nod. He steps out into the backyard, looking over the field on the first haying day.

  The farm is relatively small, three twenty-five-acre fields that begin at the base of a slope off the backyard stretch out to the highway. To the south stands a large grey barn and a fenced-in field. The HP notices twenty odd cows gathered in a distant corner. They sit and stand in what must be an uncomfortable fit of bodies, as self-conscious as a family posing for a formal portrait. They turn their heads in unison away from the HP, in response to some invisible stimulus.

  The work done on these farms is performed in the old way; unlike government-run farms, these are businesses that have hung close to ruin for generations. These farms are not about preparing animals for slaughter but about preparing families to live with what they inherit. One of the things all the farming families spread across this difficult land inherit is a deep and elaborate stock of stories about each other. Each piece of land is the public log of a private struggle, and for this reason a great deal of animosity is exchanged through the windshields of cars passing each other on rural roads. Most of the stories begin as ammunition stored and distributed against specific hostilities between neighbours. Beneath each story is a forgotten dispute, and above them are cast the loose lines of future feuds. Any given farmer’s day-to-day struggle to survive is interpreted by his neighbours as perverse. Grotesque. Unresolved. Unsuccessful. Story laden.

  These stories are also the mark of membership in this community. In haying season all the farms join in a communal pool of machinery and labour. One farmer will cut several fields of hay, and another will bale them, and yet another will come along with a crew and a convoy of wide, flat trailers to haul the bales up onto conveyors that roll them offinto the black, dusty mows. This summer ritual binds the community. It is the counterpart to winter’s bitter collection of tales. The deep-blue ice of dependency and imagination give way to back slaps and bright forgetting in sunshine. All is forgiven. The good families are rising above.

  The HP can see a man sitting in a tractor that drags a thresher across Jackson’s field. He has donated his labour and machinery in exchange for the use of Jackson’s combine. This man lost his combine back in ’67 after dishing out huge sums of money to lawyers. It seems that his son had come down with meningitis, and the man had the bright idea that he’d treat him at home with massive injections from the same needle and medicine that he uses on newborn calves. He has kept his son at home ever since, locked in a room that has to be boarded against his freakish strength and mindless outbursts. His wife, who died in ’73, was supposed to have been torn limb from limb by her son one Christmas morning. No one can completely recall this terrible secret, and when the weather’s clear for a stretch in early August they slap their friend gratefully on the back as he mounts his tractor in their fields.

  The engine clanks offand the man dismounts his tiny metal seat. In the quiet the HP hears another motor start up inside the barn. Jackson appears on top of a green tractor followed by the baler. They head toward a field that has already been cut. The HP runs toward Jackson, swinging his bottle of water and holding his cap down with his
free hand. He has to sprint to catch up with the back of the baler. After two attempts he manages to clear the three heavy bars that drag on the ground. He steps onto the platform that also drags, bumpily, held by chains to the baling chute. The HP barely has time to pull the crisp leather of his gloves over his hands before the first bale rises shaking in the chute. The HP reaches down, forcing his fingers under the twine, and tests the integrity of the bale with a sharp pull. Too sharp. The bale springs into the air. He uses this momentum to assist in tossing the surprisingly heavy bale behind him, into position between the first and second bars. He succeeds in getting the bale in place but can’t recover his centre of gravity and flies headlong over the long block of hay onto the ground behind it.

  He shakes the dullness from his face and leaps to his feet. The second bale is already wagging at the sky and getting further away. It falls free of the chute and tumbles sideways. The ground grabs at it, pulling it off the platform. By the time the third bale appears the HP is standing behind it, reaching back again to the first twine. But this time he gives it only a respectful yank to encourage it along in the machine that, he knows now, is fully capable of doing most of the work. He slams the bale down beside the first, shifting his own position twice in order to preserve balance. He looks back at the second bale, now a hundred metres away, and knows that come the end of the day it will look lost and wasted in a field of neatly spaced, perfectly stacked triangles. The next bale is even less of a struggle. With these three forming the foundation of the structure, the HP slaps his full biceps optimistically and reaches over to swing out the fourth bale and begin the critical second tier. It falls on its heavy edge in the v-shape of the bales turned toward each other beneath it. The weight of the compressed hay binds their faces, pulling them towards each other, strengthening the structure. The HP heaves the last yellow obelisk into its slot. This forms an apex from which fall, on either side, the perfect sheer walls of a triangle. The last heavy bale makes the other tiers powerful. The HP kicks a heavy drop-forged pedal at the front of the platform, dropping the bars into the ground. The three edges at the base grip the earth, floating the A-frame off into the field behind the baler.