by Tony Burgess
As morning approaches, those that have been sleeping rise to a fine Caesarean mist rolling thick off the water. The Deputy Mayor is summoned to his front door by a ring, and he steps out into the white shroud wearing only a plush grey and black dressing gown. Flames course along its hem and he is forced to stomp out the conflagration with flat gold slippers. When the fire is extinguished, he separates his toes from the cooked excrement of a child. He calls out in horror at the long charred bar that’s flipped up to hang in his abdominal hair. He slams the door wildly on this golden moment, waking a couple who are sleeping back to back in the yard of the Mayor just around the corner and up the hill.
“Hey, cat woman, get up.”
Jack pokes Kathy in the ribs.
“Oh God. Oh God, he didn’t come home again, did he?”
Kathy reaches between her knees and brings up an empty mickey of Southern Comfort. She tosses it at Jack, who deflects it with the back of his hand.
“Hey! Hey! Listen. Someone’s coming.”
They hear a car pull into the driveway, just feet away from where they hide. Kathy jumps up onto her haunches and prepares to spring on the Mayor. Jack, still laying on his back, hooks a finger through a belt loop in Kathy’s jeans. Suddenly, a boot comes crashing through the grass and the Deputy Mayor is staring down at them.
“Oh Fuck! Look at this! What the hell is going on here?”
The Deputy Mayor swats his hand down, almost involuntarily, and it cuffs through Kathy’s hair. Jack restrains her by the belt loop and the pair crab-crawl backward.
“This is two nights now! You guys have some fuckin’ mental problem? You’re breakin’ the goddamn law, you know that? You’re stalkin’ or stakin’ or some fucking thing here.”
Brian Hellgate’s anger is uncontainable. When Jack rises behind Kathy he is struck in the face. The Deputy Mayor swings again at the air above them. He is aware that he is losing control. He steps back and forward quickly, kicking Kathy’s shin hard.
“Hey! Ow! Hey!”
The Deputy Mayor senses their fear and he rolls his eyes back before swooping to pick up a rock. He fires it directly at Jack, whose head flips to the side with the impact. Kathy lunges across the ground to Hellgate’s feet, but the Deputy Mayor has picked up a full can of beer from behind him and has hurled it at her shoulder. The pain bites across her back and she curls up hard. Jack has risen and, striding forward, yanks down on the Deputy’s coat.
“Hey, you bastard. I’ll take some of that!”
He jabs up weakly, driving his fist into Hellgate’s elbow, cracking a tiny finger bone. In a small screen opened by the jolt of nervous lightning inside the Deputy’s forearm, each man glimpses the other’s bright, irrelevant thoughts.
Jack sees the Deputy’s murderous interior: a small boy covering his eyes as a hot wire of urine cuts across his cheek. Another stream, this one colourless, lighter fluid, is carrying orange flames into his hair.
The Deputy snaps backward, also disturbed by what he sees; he tries, in fact, to turn away because of it. Jack is pulling up on a fishing rod, feeling the strain of a remote weight. His hand suddenly opens up on the reel and small pink bones spring free, wet and bleeding like genitals. The Deputy winces as he feels the tug of a fish hook in his jaw, deep beneath his teeth, and his entire body follows, trying to stay ahead of the horrible pulling.
He leaves quickly, slamming the door of his car, then rubbing his elbow as he cautiously turns the key.
“Oh yeah, now that’s fuckin’ normal.”
Brian hits the horn three times, sending the bruised and battered Jack and Kathy deep into the Mayor’s backyard.
“Robert! You crazy fuckin’ idiot!”
★
Like all impulsively cruel people, Brian’s personal history is a Christmas tree of warning signs, crucifixes, and sleeping lambs.
Brian Hellgate was born in a farmhouse to a hard Irish couple in Hockley Valley. His father arrived in Ontario to escape his poor Irish roots and the clumsy, brutal pursuit of the British. Kirin Hellgate recognized two things about his adopted country immediately. First, though subsidized, he would remain poor. And second, that there was, in the Hockley Valley of the 1940s, no law whatsoever. This man, naturally, made a hobby of these facts: he would enact revenge fantasies on unsuspecting neighbours — with impunity. Soon he was torching barns and stabbing cattle all across the valley. His first and only son, Brian, became an innocent pawn in this game. He would leave the infant in a barn, then hide in the field until some farmhand stumbled in and emerged, seconds later, confused and frightened, with the abandoned child in his arms. Kirin Hellgate would then step forward from his hiding place and beat the man with a cedar post — for kidnapping his only child.
This game, for which he was never confronted, let alone arrested, amused him for years.
Until one, terrible, day.
One of Kirin’s many problems was that his child was growing up. On the day in question his boy was three and a half and quite capable of wandering back out of a barn on his own. Which is exactly what he did. Kirin was hiding around the south side of a building, leaning on a pitchfork, and waiting when he heard his son call out.
“Fadder! Fadder! Dar’s a rat in har! Fadder!”
Kirin jabbed the pitchfork into a pile of manure and jogged around the corner.
“Ge’ba’ in thar, by, ’fore I burrah y’ in dis har shite!’’
Brian stood, comprehending for the first time that his father was, in spite of his great ringing laugh, the most dangerous enemy he would ever have. He spun around to escape back inside, but felt the giant barn lurch toward him. Its huge brown teeth shook up through the soil. He turned, shrieking, and ran to the field. In that instant a black spike of cloud swung across the tips of trees. Terrified, Brian stopped. He crossed himself with his arms, clutching his shoulders, and waited for his father to reach him. Then he saw a man walking down the rutted path from the farmhouse.
“Hey there. What you think you’re doin’?”
Brian ran to the man, calling out for help.
“Go boy. Go on up to the house.”
The man pushed Brian past and squared off with Kirin. Brian didn’t stop running until he was inside the open shed beside the farmhouse. He pulled a scythe off the wall, causing a heavy leather whip to slide slowly down a beam to his feet. He stepped on it and heard the dried skin creaking. The smell of gasoline made him lightheaded and his perfect view of the barn below strobed slightly and bled. Brian lay the scythe across his forehead as he watched, ready to fall on the blade if his father killed the man. The two figures approached one another, peacefully enough. The man gestured back to Brian, then down to the pitchfork that his father now leaned on. Kirin said nothing but continued to lean and look up at the man with a hand shielding his eyes from the glare of the sun. The man seemed to grow exasperated. Throwing his open hands at the sky, he turned to go. Brian watched his father closely. Kirin Hellgate’s top hand rose a couple inches up the pitchfork handle. His bottom hand dropped. Brian stepped off the whip to warn the man who was shaking his head, his back to his father and the barn. Kirin lifted the fork and began walking forward. Steadily. Not quickly, but without any hesitation.
He walked up the path behind the man with long even steps. And then he brought the pitchfork up from below, lodging its sharp tips in the man’s back. The boy fell into the shed and scrambled into its dark pockets, finding a heavy saddle to hide under.
In the following weeks Brian was made a ward of the state, while his father was shipped off to serve time for murder. The boy baked pies for a large laughing woman who looked after up to forty children at a time. She slapped her children mercilessly and worked them like mules. She forced all the children under ten to live naked until an older child moved on and left his or her clothes behind. Brian spent a month in her kitchen dodging the boiling spatters of cherries and rh
ubarb that rained down every day, all day, on his naked body. When he was eventually returned to the care of his real mother his tiny sticky body was a mottled map of non-stop torture. The immense woman handed him over to his mother, with huge tears rolling down her laughing face. When Brian leapt up from beside the giant trunk of her calf to his mother, the woman swung her head down off the loose fat of her neck and slapped her lower lip against his back, slamming her teeth together an inch from his flesh.
Brian’s mother was quite thrilled that her cruel husband was gone and that her only son, with whom she had the most feeble relationship, had been returned to her. Almost immediately, she began to compensate for her husband’s horrific abuse. She fed him, mostly chocolate, and kept him in bed for days at a time, never straying far from it herself. She showered him with a daily dose of kisses and hugs. Brian’s mother even sold a large portion of the farm to pay for the tutor who would teach him, in bed of course, with a small slate leaning against his knees, and a pitcher of ice tea by his side.
Little Brian began to appear sickly, due largely to his complete lack of exercise and fresh air. His mother responded to this new development with unbridled enthusiasm. She sold another portion of the farm in order to bring faraway doctors to Brian’s bedside, where they sat in suspicious silence and then prescribed heavy medications. She was torn apart over her dying child, praying for his recovery, pleading loudly to God from the hallway, while mixing medications into large stews. But she was also torn when he actually showed signs of recovery. She may not have even been aware that at times she completely neglected to feed him — and when he would relapse into illness she would stuff his belly with more of her sweet purple stews.
When Brian reached adolescence he began to venture out. Shakily at first, but forced by the embarrassment he was beginning to feel at the fact that his chronic diarrhea required him to use a bedpan in his mother’s presence. His mother allowed the excursions, but insisted that he wear dresses: they were more functional for a boy with such terrible intestinal troubles. Soon she noticed how pretty he looked, skipping down the hall on his thin feet, and she grew his blond hair long and combed it nightly. She put necklaces on him and, since he was so horribly pale, deepened the colour of his wan cheeks with blush. At sixteen, when he told her he wanted to go out into the world to work, she broke down.
“But, Brian, you’re only a little girl. You can’t go out there. You’re a wee pretty thing. Some horrible man will snatch you away. There are things I haven’t told you.”
“But, mother, I want to go out there. I want to.”
“I can’t let you sweetie. You poor little thing. Please, no.”
After great fits of bawling and sobbing, Brian stormed upstairs, found a pair of trousers, packed some buns from the pantry, and left his weeping, inconsolable mother laying on her side in the kitchen. She hammered the floor with her fist.
Once outside, Brian, who had come to believe that he was the fairest, gentlest of God’s creatures, made a strange discovery about himself. At the bottom of the driveway was a cardboard box that housed the old barn cat’s litter of kittens. Without even so much as a pat to their wee heads, or pausing to take in the glory of their fumbling limbs, Brian leapt into the air and came crashing down.
He stamped with great relish, pushing the little corpses against the cardboard. When he was done he drew a deep breath, straightened his back, and felt the ascending thrill of having, as a young man, committed his first free act in an already too-long life.
★
Long ago, Brian discovered that he need not carry around the heavy weight of his past. He could, in fact, shrug it off.
Now he’s sitting in a washroom stall at the town hall, waiting for the Mayor to arrive. The bathroom door opens, and he hears the Mayor whistling. Brian hooks his foot under the stall door and draws it inward. He can see the Mayor taking his steps back from the urinal.
“Robert!”
The Mayor pinches the tip of his penis to prevent the spray from tumbling to the floor. He feels a painful jolt circle deep in his body.
“Brian? Brian! What’s new, my friend?”
The Mayor, never having been yelled at from behind during the delicate, early stages of micturition, feels that the pinch was a bit impulsive and, perhaps, difficult to undo. He closes his eyes and springs his fingers off. The pent-up stream drills at the back of the urinal. Greatly relieved, it is sent soaring up into the Mayor’s favourite high place. He feels like having a passionate conversation.
“Brian, Brian, you shouldn’t bark at a man tryin’ to take a piss.”
Brian launches himself out of the stall.
“OK, you silly ass, listen to me. I want a whole bunch of people arrested this morning.”
Brian slaps the top of the urinal beside the Mayor and pushes his face between the wall and the peeing man.
“There’s a little fuckin’ brat … brother of that whatshisname kid … put shit on my front porch this morning! I want him in freakin’ handcuffs by noon!”
“You mean Kyle Finn’s little brother? That kid’s only ten-er-something, Brian.”
“I don’t give a shit! I want that kid smacked around a bit! Stomp his fuckin’ guts out!”
The Mayor can feel a light spray of urine on the back of his hand but doesn’t dare look down: the Deputy Mayor is also spraying his face with spit.
“Well, let me talk to his folks.”
“I don’t think, Robert, that you’re in a position to talk to anybody! Did you know you got fuckin’ stalkers and squatters all over your fuckin’ lawn?”
“What?”
“And Robert, where the hell are you stayin’ these days?”
“What?”
“Where the fuck have you been these last few nights? You’re not goin’ home are ya?”
“Uh, what do ya … Sure I’m goin’ home.”
“No you’re not.”
“What do ya think? I go home. Yeah.”
“No you don’t.”
“Yes I do, Brian.”
Brian can feel his fists clenching and he’s overcome by the desire to bounce the Mayor’s head off the wall.
As he’s about to do just this, he catches a sharp odour. He pulls his head away, turns and leans forward, sniffing the air around him.
That kid! I can smell his shit on me!
The Mayor rinses his hands quickly, then holds open the door for his Deputy.
“Come on Brian, sheesh.”
Brian pauses for a second, smelling the air that rises off him. Nothing. Christ, I’m in a toilet and I smell shit. What? Am I getting paranoid? He launches himself past the Mayor and halfway through the door, where he’s struck again by an overwhelming odour of human feces. Oh Christ. It’s Robert.
★
“OK, the Treasurer asked me to offer her apologies. She won’t be here again today, I’m afraid, so I’ll be acting as the Treasurer.” The Mayor looks at each face for objections.
The meeting is sparsely attended, and those few people who are present stare, transfixed by a pinecone that is hooked into the top of the Mayor’s dyed blond hair. Brian is wondering when it made its appearance.
Did I miss that?
The Mayor returns their stares with his patented grin; the skin above and below his lips however, is dark. It’s as if he’s been eating dirt. He cocks his head.
“What?”
Everyone lowers their eyes and, collectively, they spot a dry cake of mud holding a small leaf to the piping at his shirt’s cuff. Robert turns up his hands and they all withdraw slightly in their chairs, away from the bright grey streaks that line his palms.
“What the hell is wrong with everyone?”
A reporter for the local paper leans forward.
“Mr. Mayor, excuse me, Your Honour, sir, but you’re filthy. Is everything all right?”
&nbs
p; The Mayor opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. He wants to say something and, reaching down in his throat with the back of his tongue, tries to force a word, any word, upward. Nothing comes. He closes his mouth, aware that his grin is lower down his chin than he would have hoped. It is a grin, though, for all its effectiveness, it might as well be a deep, trembling frown. He’s caught. Caught at somthing. These are concerned faces. Concerned faces are what devils wear: fire red, awkward, sliding us all down a skewer.
Robert Forbes feels the prick of an eye in the middle of his heart. He looks down.
Oh God. I am. I am covered in filth. How could I miss that? Oh God.
He pulls at the cuffs of his shirt and crumbles a dried ball of mud that rolls out into his hand.
When he looks up, the council sees their Mayor’s mouth, for the first time, drop to a simple line, an utterly open expression. They’re frightened: their Mayor may be an actual person.
Robert rises from his chair.
Brian, who is furiously rubbing the table in front of him, looks up. He wants to say something obvious, anything that might be obvious.
“Uh, Robert, sit down there, will ya?”
The Mayor drops his hand and pushes on his fingers like a spider pumping a wall. He clicks his tongue. He’s just going to leave.
When he has left the room, Brian grabs his nose and says to the council secretary: “Jesus, that guy smells like shit.”
TEN
Marion has spent three days in her car. For a great deal of this time she’s examined the console: its ledges, its pleasant lights, the advance of its gauges. Across the top, at the base of the deep swell of the windshield, it is beige and looks softer, more forgiving looking than it actually is. A shallow beveled pan is sunken on the passenger side, and on the driver’s side there’s a swooping curve that rises over the instrument panel in front of the steering wheel. There is a twilight of colour under here, an arrangement of distances and horizons that evokes a holographic postcard — three wise men on luminescent camels under a twinkling star in the desert.