by Tony Burgess
“OK. Listen, if they wanna do this cannibal thing, God help us, I wanna write my Orpheus into it.”
Les grabs his Ovid by the spine, spilling several pages to the floor.
“Shit! OK. Listen, I can do it. It’ll work. It’ll be great. Look I gotta go. I got a hunter on my property, and I gotta chase him off. I’ll call you later.”
3
A HUNTED POPULATION
The hunter stops and turns towards the sound of the truck door slamming. The two men square off opposite each other, a full acre apart. As Les reaches behind to flip the door handle to check that it is locked, the hunter holds his rifle out from his waist, his hands gripping in formal distances from either end. Les recognizes this as a military move, a way to hold a rifle safely and run. In order to accentuate the joke being formed between them, Les begins to walk towards the man as casually as he can, stopping occasionally to cock his head and lift his hands in surrender. When they are within twenty metres of each other the hunter turns and starts lifting his knees in a strange slow run. Les raises his wind-chapped hands to his wind-chapped cheeks.
“Hey! Hey buddy, hang on there!”
Buddy manoeuvres evasively around a stack of cordwood, successfully disappearing from the enemy’s sight. Les has grown annoyed, and as he reaches the spot where the hunter has disappeared he shouts, “Hey, asshole!” Three feet to his right the asshole crouches against the woodpile and kicks his feet out in order to roll onto his belly. He becomes tangled in the low boughs of a tree. Resorting to a clumsy series of civilian manoeuvres, the hunter, still on his side, slaps at the tree, which has snatched the barrel of his rifle.
Growing concerned for the safety of both man and conifer, Les approaches the battling pair with his hands out — hands that flit in a signal between harmlessness and helpfulness, careful not to trigger the wrong response in this man. With a final grunt and tug the man frees the weapon, driving its expensive butt directly into Les’s shoulder. Before the first impact has even had a chance to hurt, the weapon fires and kicks Les again. Spinning onto his back, Les feels his shoulder disappear into the ground. He reaches to see if it’s still there. It is. The pain surfaces out of the snow to find the shoulder. The brightness of this feeling springs through his body and sweat fills his boots. Les lies still for a moment, and he hears the hunter crashing through the forest. He sits up painfully and realizes that he is now seriously angry. You want an enemy? Les thinks, well, you’ve got one. And I’m gonna wrap that precious weapon of yours around your neck.
The anger arranges itself directly over the pain, and when Les stands he is already sprinting after the hunter. The path of the man’s escape is itself a spectacle. He’s not gone between trees but attempted to run through them. On their cracked branches hang, like Christmas decorations, little shreds of a camouflage snowsuit. At one point Les hops over the discarded knapsack of his quarry. Later, black latex goggles lay in the path, crumpled like S&M gear tossed off in a moment of passion; at some distance the rifle itself, pretty and scented with oil, reclines across a pillow of snow.
Les pauses here beside the rifle and thinks, coldly and soberly, I might kill this son of a bitch. Les lifts the rifle. The elegant black backsight rises up from the stock. Across the empty space over the barrel a thin line leads to the foresight at the weapon’s conclusion. Les lowers the rifle without checking the safety, and he strolls — dangerously, he knows — handling the weapon dangerously. He flips his frozen finger in and out of the trigger guard, the scent of it warming his hand.
He reaches a frozen stream where the hunter has obviously grown confused, his trail doubling back over itself, aborting directions. He’s lost. Stupid bugger. Scared stiff. Les lifts the rifle and turns the bolt handle, flipping the round out into the snow. He throws the safety on before cradling the gun over his shoulder. After spending several minutes tracing the meandering steps of the hunter he determines that he’s probably heading down the centre of the frozen river.
One hundred metres along Les discovers the hunter lying on his side, facing away. He grows alarmed and, moving closer to the figure on the ice, notices blood spreading out from its face. Leaning over the body he sees that, in fact, there is very little face left. By the aggression of the act and the senseless snatch of missing face, of missing life, Les knows that a human being has done this.
Has just done this.
4
FALLING
The detective looks like a hockey player. He has a penalty box chin and eyes that recede way up into the cheap seats, the greys, faint in a mist beneath his heavy brow. His tie flips across his chest like a cat’s tail, alive, kinking against his knuckles for attention. The suit is not his preferred uniform, not the one he trains in. That one has action figure invisibility, so he ignores what he’s wearing, and the suit sails up over his shoes, gathers thickly in his armpits, and keeps rising north. He looks over at the man sitting across from him. Quiet. Patient. The detective thinks of himself as a people scientist. Les Reardon is a quiet, patient man.
Sitting in the little coatroom of a country church, surrounded by a dragon of wire coat hangers, Les Reardon has been shifting uncomfortably on a small wooden chair for two hours. Expecting to leave any second, he’s kept his coat on. Now that the detective has come in and sat down, Les regards the chain of hangers circling him as a lost opportunity. With his coat off he might have appeared cooperative, casual, at home in the investigation. Les puts his heavily padded elbows on his knees and twirls his cap in his hands. He feels restless. He wants to say something.
The detective continues writing in a folder. He’ll do this for five minutes. Testing his theory. Mr. Reardon is a quiet, patient man. Mr. Reardon works with someone else’s cows and horses. He’s a drama teacher. The detective likes men with decent effeminate professions. He looks up at Les to assess the femaleness of the man, to determine whether to contest it or flirt with him. The detective notices that his own handwriting is pioneering the interview, the dots are pecking impatiently on the outskirts of the “i”s, and a brusque circle around the date misses something crucial. The detective introduces himself.
“Mr. Reardon, I’m Detective Peterson. How are you? I appreciate you co-operating.”
The detective attempts to untuck his sleeves at the elbow, but can’t.
“I guess what I need to hear from you is exactly what happened out there.”
Les tells his story. He remembers it as a western, a shootout, but he tells it as if he were a decent man, protecting his property. As he tells the story, “I found a wounded deer in the garage last year, so I have posted the property …” in Les’s head, or rather his imagination, a crazy bulb swings at the end of a cord, and the drama teacher stands in its green light, staring down the sights of a weapon. His grin hangs off the side of his face, a stirrup lost across the ankle of a boot. When he’s finished, the detective gauges the effect of the murder scene on Les. A drama coach, or whatever he is, he’s not so decent. He’s acting.
Let’s see a show.
“Awright, I have a dead man, and I have a man here, sitting across from me, who I found at the scene. You chased the victim into the dense brush, swinging his rifle at your side, and all of a sudden it’s a homicide scene. Now, what do I say? What do I do with your connection here?”
Les straightens the label on the inside of his cap. It curls back against his baby finger, a tighter furl for having been unwound.
“Uh. Detective, I didn’t shoot him. He wasn’t shot. He was … uh … he was …”
“Yeah, yeah, we don’t know what he was yet. Was there anybody else with you?”
“With me? No. Not with me. I didn’t see anybody else.”
“You live alone Mr. Reardon?”
“Yep.”
“Ever married?”
“Well, not quite.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I lived with a
woman for four years.”
“Here in Pontypool?”
“No. In Toronto. In Parkdale.”
“Any children?”
“Yeah, uh … one.”
“How old?”
“One month.”
“Really. Daughter?”
“Son.”
“Awright, Mr. Reardon, we’re going to be in touch with you. So, make sure you stay available. If you should happen to remember anything, anything at all, call me at this number.”
The detective gives Les his card and leaves the coatroom door open as he goes. He turns down a hallway that he’s sure Les will not take when he leaves. Peterson leans his thighs against a radiator that runs the length of a wall underneath a basement window. He looks up at the parking lot that spreads out from his chin. A lone vehicle sits in the southwest corner. The truck is Les Reardon, remote, beige, built for leaving in. Closer to the detective is a pyramid of ice, jaundiced and sore with crystal pellets. This is the son. The detective looks for the baby’s mother. The small parking lot is bordered by a winter-toughened hedge. In its chipped line are rocks of ice. No mother. Beyond, the highway. Car-free. Further, the heavy trees and, not visible from this little window, a frozen river that has a crazy, pink spot in its eye. No mother. A month old. Jesus, what happened there?
Les stands four feet from his car with his arms stretched out and his knees bent. A warm wind arrives, just as he steps onto a large patch of ice. Now he hangs like a surfer against a blue screen — dipping and rising — not walking. Eventually he falls. In the middle of his wheel to the earth he doesn’t think of his son, he thinks of the infant’s mother. He remembers — when Helen’s blood sugar levels slipped off and she would seem to lose sight of everything and her hands made small, brittle help-me flights up to her face — how impossibly cold her lips became. He’d kiss them just to feel their cold, their distinct mark on his own melting mouth. He loved her then.
The ice slams against his temple. He holds his head in his hands as he lies there, pulling his knees up. Les is crying, and if he’s crying for anyone it’s himself, even though a tiny bug, in the centre of his brain, shaped like a baby, is crying as well. The baby’s crying. Les moves to the edge of the ice, and he presses the tips of his fingers over the frozen bubbles drawing himself forward. He manages to get to his feet and recovers quickly. He crawls the truck to the edge of the highway and pauses to join the traffic on the empty road.
Detective Peterson has his hand over his mouth, as much to stifle noise as to keep a piece of sandwich from flying loose. He’s just seen Les fall, and he’s laughing with his back to the wall. As his laughter hardens, he slides down onto the radiator. It will spread heat up through the seat of his pants, and he will have to jump forward, yelping. He will lose a little nugget of bread and fish while he spins around, palming the cheeks of his ass.
As funny as this is, and it’s probably funnier than it seems, it’s more. It’s what you get for laughing cruelly at the pain of others.
5
THE ED GEIN THING
Les is going to meet with Mary at the school. He wants to talk about the Ed Gein thing. As he drives he pictures his own revulsion at the children’s proposal. Mary’s considered it, accepted it. Les pictures higher and higher moments of fine discomfort. His Orpheus. Les looks out the window at the snow fields passing in long checkers of white and black. Out there. Out there is a killer for God’s sake. For a moment he includes his afternoon encounter with bloody death as just the very reason why Ed Gein is an inappropriate subject.
He looks forward to the centre line shooting its bars at the grill. Slow? Fast? What kind of a phrase is it?
Les adds up his argument for Ovid and against Ed Gein. Shape Shifter versus Killer. The former can also be the latter, but the latter can only destroy the former. Open. Closed. Dead. Alive. Good. Very bad. Except, he can’t quite hear the speech, something is holding it in front of the truck, not letting it in where it could be audible. Les looks out and watches a barn, black as the moon, and he knows why he has no speech. Because there really is a killer out there. I crossed paths with a predator today. Someone bloody. Out of control. In control? He’s out there. Now. He feels the tickle of fear grow. He pictures the rough hands of Ed Gein pounding the side of a horse.
“Hi Les.”
Mary is the principal of the school. Her background is military, and when the province attempted to redistribute talent outside the cities it met with a firmer resolve than its own in Mary. She is well liked, far friendlier, with more imagination and sanity than the young, unstable reformers so popularized by the government. At least that’s the local perception. She is a veteran of the tough decision, respectful of things beyond her control, with an angry, emotional bottom line. She detests the current government’s flippant emergencies. She is alarmed at the appearance of Les.
“Les, are you OK?”
She lowers Les into a chair in her office and he tells her his story. His back aches and his eyes water as he recounts the horror of what he’s seen. The scene has grown slightly bloodier now that it has taken possession of him, and he feels the bowling ball holes of the hunter’s eyes slipping behind his own sockets as he speaks. Looking down at his hands retracting between his knees, Les knows that he has changed. He feels that this person he’s becoming is not reliable, and of course he’s right. He’s attempting to absorb a great deal of unrelated material into a fairly primitive emotional machine. As the spinning blades descend into the febrile jar, what is going to be made of it all? An enlarged estranged lover, a son so new he’s still in orbit, a dead man’s cuttlefish face — and the cuttlefish himself, out there, scrubbing blood from his hands in the snow. He can’t help but make mistakes. I am at the centre of this. I am somehow made of this now. Ashamed, he confuses Mary’s hand on his shoulder with Helen’s.
Something she never did. She never let me soften. Not like Mary does.
He gives Mary a look so sodden with feeling that she turns away.
This man is in shock, Mary thinks, and she asks him to wait while she goes to get the nurse.
Shock has made Les dull. He looks automatically to his wristwatch, but is unable to distinguish the time as being any different from when he had sat waiting for the detective. He rocks the face between his thumb and forefinger, feeling the tightness of the band around his wrist. A swirl of fake snow, distributed up from the base of the watch, covers the front of a dark church, and falls again quickly, frosting the little plastic cemetery on its grounds. Les shakes his hand, stirring up the scene as he winds his watch. He peers at its face and this time he can see a tiny robot, clad in a torn hunting vest, mechanically dipping and lifting a shovel in the cemetery. Les scours the icy black forest behind the church, looking for the killer. It is no surprise, then, that he does not understand that there is more than one killer on the loose.
The first killer, whose work Les has already seen, is now burrowing his upper body in the snow, thrashing his open mouth against the frozen ground. He is soon going to die a death like no other. Another killer is brandishing the same open mouth at a nurse, not thirty metres from where Les now sits. This killer has the nurse’s lips in his mouth and, with enough power to break both their necks, he shakes her face until its muscles pop from their moorings. The nurse falls against the cabinet, just out of reach of Les’s wild sight, and slides onto the floor. The killer’s neck is broken and he stands over the nurse with his head dropping to his chest. His mouth is open, a bright red gasket through which the bleating of animals can be heard. The sound he makes isn’t human; the message, however, is unmistakable. He’s saying: This doesn’t work, I’m failing.
The killer flees up the hallway, led by his own open mouth. Distended by its searching, it now flails forward. When Mary arrives in the nurse’s room she stops at the door, going no further than the single bloody hand wrapped around the door frame. Murder scene, she thinks. Ge
t Les, get out of the building.
She runs down the hall, back to her office. Les looks up, calm and blind. He makes a child’s resistant face when Mary drags him up by the arm. She doesn’t explain, leading him through the gymnasium toward a side door that exits onto the parking lot.
Mary pulls Les back, swinging his slightly stupid body behind her.
There he is.
The killer is sitting against the wall beside the door. He is rocking his upper body, his arms bowing at his sides. At their ends are upturned hands. Dead hands. Dead legs. His extremities, face, fingers and feet, are creased with jellied blood. Mary takes a step back, knocking into Les. He trips in a fall that brings Mary down with him. The killer is stirred and he sways his torso backward, turning his head to see them. Mary takes a four-legged step away. The killer tilts his body in her direction, as if he is part of her movement. Mary freezes, knowing that this man isn’t thinking, that he’s responding to his environment automatically. She sees his eyes. His eyes. Like split thumbs they rise in his sockets and turn in their glue of prehensile clots. Towards her. Looking. The thing coils slightly, and Mary knows exactly what it will do.
It jumps across the floor.
6
THINGS THAT BEGIN WITH “O”
Les focuses finally, resorting to a default set of perceptions. So, when he feels the weight of Mary on him, he thinks this is the morning after, that she is marsupial in her affection. He feels a centipede walking along his neck and he opens his eyes. Far above is the gymnasium ceiling, Mechano blue and space shuttle white. Mary is bleeding on him. She grinds against him to escape a man who is pushing her head with his own. She shakes herself and detaches the killer’s mouth, letting it free fall directly onto Les’s cheek. Les feels the lamprey gathering of skin and he rolls, sliding Mary out from between them. Beside him, the cannibal folds in half.