by Geoff North
Ray settled into bed thirty minutes later and switched through the TV channels. He watched the local news and quickly became bored with stories he knew little or nothing about. The weather channel was issuing dire warnings of a fast-moving storm pushing up from the States expected to dump a foot of snow within the next forty-eight hours. He watched the first few minutes of a mystery movie but gave up after the opening credits ended. A marathon of Family Guy was playing on channel forty. Even Peter Griffin’s mindless adventures were too advanced for his tired brain to follow. Ray finally turned the television off and tried to get to sleep.
He was in the ocean again. He could no longer see the resort. The sandy beach with its dozens of stumbling tourists was gone. It was just ocean, miles and miles of rolling waves. And then he spotted something in the distance. Something small and black bobbing up and down in the navy blue. It came closer. Ray wasn’t afraid. He swam to it and wrapped his arms around it. The thing was cold, like ice, and it was heavy. They started to sink, quickly. He could feel the pressure of the water pushing in on his body as blue faded into black.
Ray jolted up from his bed, clutching at the air above him. He woke up fully and looked at the clock on the nightstand. It was after midnight. He got up and stumbled into the washroom. Water was on his brain. He got into the shower and made it as cold as the dial would allow. The pressure from the shower head increased, stinging into Ray’s skin like needles. He tried to turn it off, but the stream intensified. It went from cold to warm to burning hot. The water turned black. Ray jumped back and slipped, falling to the shower floor. Two sinewy black ropes popped out from the drain hole between his feet. They grew fingers and wrapped around his ankles. The black thing started to pull.
Ray woke up and clapped a hand over his mouth. He’d been screaming. He glanced at the clock. Twelve-thirty. No more sleep. He didn’t want to be alone. Perhaps Dawn was still awake. He dressed and went to her room. Ray couldn’t see any light spilling out from the crack at the bottom of the door. He placed his ear against it and listened. No sound. She was asleep.
He went outside and breathed in the night air. A walk would clear his mind. Ray went back to his room, grabbed his coat, and set out. He went as far as the Subway and paused in front of the cold beer vendor. Maybe the sports bar on the other side was still open. Ray went around the corner and saw the open sign still lit up in red. One drink to calm his nerves, maybe a double, and straight back to bed.
There were half a dozen patrons left inside. They were clustered at a couple of tables in the back around a pool table. Young men, none yet thirty, all loud and drunk. Ray was about to turn and leave when he spotted a girl amongst them, slumped over and drunker than the rest. Dawn.
“Aw, shit,” he mumbled.
They stared at Ray as he approached as if an extra-terrestrial being had just stepped out of its spaceship. One of the two playing pool set his stick down on the table. “Hey, buddy. It’s kinda late for seniors to be out wandering. You got dementia or something?” His friends laughed.
“That young lady’s my daughter, and she’s coming with me.”
The guy sitting closest to her wrapped an arm around Dawn’s shoulder. “The fuck she is. We’re having a good time, and she ain’t leaving until she wants to leave.”
Dawn’s forehead was almost resting on the dirty table. Ray shook his head slowly. “I don’t think she’s capable of knowing what she wants at the moment. She’s coming with me.”
“You’re not her dad,” the guy said. “Just some old pervert trying to score with a chick too drunk to know any better.”
More chuckles. Ray looked them all over. Most were under six feet and skinny. The one sitting next to Dawn was the biggest, maybe Ray’s height. Ray was no fighter, but he’d seen enough in his younger days to know how things went. To even stand a chance against greater numbers, you had to take out the biggest threats first. Hopefully it wouldn’t get to that. He stepped closer to the table.
“Back the fuck off, buddy,” the big one warned. The other guys stood. The ones playing pool came around to Ray’s side of the table.
It had gotten to that. Most older men in Ray’s current position would try harder for a peaceful resolution. Ray knew this wouldn’t end peacefully, and he was too tired, too worn down, and too depressed to attempt it. He grabbed the big one by the back of the head and slammed his face into the table with all his strength. It was enough to break his nose and shatter a few teeth. It was also enough to knock him unconscious.
What Ray didn’t take into consideration was the speed of youth. Even drunk, they were faster than him. The first fist caught him on the side of the chin, staggering him back. A second punch went into his ribs. Someone struck him in the kidneys from behind. Ray went down to his knees. He could hear Dawn coming to her senses. “Dad? What the hell?”
He was punched again in the ear, and then square in the face. Ray’s head was ringing, and he could taste blood in his mouth. One more hit and he would be lying on the floor next to the bozo he’d knocked out. He swung blindly with one arm and connected with one of the pool player’s crotch. The guy pitched forward, cracking his forehead into another. Ray stumbled to his feet and blocked an incoming fist. He punched the kid in the chest and sent him back into an empty table. Three of the six were down. Three were left standing. Two jumped in and grabbed Ray’s arms. The third was about to attack when Dawn whacked him over the skull with a pool stick.
The lone female server was screaming somewhere behind them. “Break it up, the cops are on the way!”
The fight was over. Dawn, though drunker than the rest, could still move better than Ray. She directed him out of the bar and into the night. “Why?” Ray started to say and then spit blood onto the sidewalk. “Why did you end up here?”
“Stupid question to ask an alcoholic.” They started back for the hotel. “Are you okay?”
“Better now that you’re out of there.”
“Wow.” Dawn giggled. “Can’t believe my old dad fought a bunch of guys in a bar.”
Ray spat again and rubbed his lower back. “Not all that well, I’m afraid. I’ll be pissing blood for a week.”
She cleaned him up with a couple of white face cloths back in his hotel room. “You can forget about getting your deposit back.” She tossed them into the trash pail next to the bed. “The good news is your nose isn’t broken and you didn’t lose any teeth.”
“Stupid thing to do,” Ray muttered. “Fighting a bunch of kids.”
“Not as stupid as me getting drunk with strangers.” The walk and the cold air had sobered her up considerably. “I’m sorry. I swear, I’m done drinking. I’m done with all of it.”
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep. If you just promise to try, I’ll be happy.”
Dawn nodded. “I’ll check into AA when we get back to Manitoba. It’s a start.”
“It’s a great start, Girl-of-Mine.” He paused for a moment and then asked. “Why there, why now?”
“I guess everything just got to me. No job, Tyler… what you told me about Aunt Alicia. It isn’t your fault, don’t get me wrong. I don’t need much of a trigger to set the bad habits off.”
“How do you really feel about that?” Ray asked. “About what happened to her.”
“I still don’t think any of it was your fault, but honestly, you should’ve told your parents.”
“I know.” He tried resting his face in his palms, but it hurt too much. “I’ve been paying for that mistake my entire life. Maybe now, before it’s too late. Maybe I can finally tell Mom.”
“Not a good idea. She’s dying. How would it feel if you were in her place?”
Ray considered it for a few moments. “Awful, I suppose. It wouldn’t be nice hearing your son killed your daughter.”
“You didn’t kill her. She was playing with matches in a pile of dry straw. It likely would’ve happened if you never showed up.”
“Maybe.” Ray sighed, and his entire body shuddered. “But
it wasn’t the only time.”
“What do you mean?”
“I killed someone else.”
1983
Raymond’s family had survived the tragedy of losing Alicia. The pain was still raw, but they had survived. The trip to British Columbia the summer before had helped in the healing process. It had been good to get away from the farm for a few weeks. When they’d come home, the piles of remaining rubble where the pig barn once stood were gone. Neighboring farmers had pitched in with the machinery to flatten and bury it. A swath of new grass grew in its place and rows of colorful flowers had been planted. The memory of a daughter taken too early, a sister lost, lived on. Ray—he no longer liked it when people called him Raymond—would live with the memory of what really happened on the first day of summer break in 1981 forever.
Some people might believe losing one child would make parents cling to their remaining children more tightly. That wasn’t the case with Ray. He was thirteen years old. An official teenager. Nancy and Thomas Wallace gave him an even longer leash to play with. He could stay in town after school and pretty much do whatever the hell he wanted, so long as he went to his grandmother’s for supper no later than six and was ready to be picked up for home by nine. His grandmother didn’t even care how long he stayed after the meal was done. All she expected was good manners and someone to wash the dishes after they were done.
It was one of those Gramma visits in the early evening, sometime in October. It was a Friday. Ray had the whole weekend to look forward to. He’d been fed well and was putting the last of the old woman’s dishes away. She was still sitting at the kitchen table, transitioning from a fear talk of Ray’s older brothers becoming addicted to hard drugs—they weren’t, and never did—to a depressing rehashing of his sister’s death. It was that very evening, Ray would recall in later years, that he really didn’t like his grandmother. She was a fear-mongering old witch.
He excused himself and left her house, running past half a dozen other homes with fallen leaves fluttering about in their front yards, all the way to Main Street. It was as quiet and dead in the middle of Rokerton as it was in any other small town. Ray still had a few hours to kill so he hoofed it to the west end, into the park, and past the camp grounds. He followed the bank of the winding river out of civilization and into the forests. Ray’s goal was to reach the rapids, an area where the river narrowed through a natural deposit of rocks. Older kids hung out there to drink beer, and couples liked to make out. He didn’t expect to find anyone there this time of year. The night came too fast and the air was too cold.
Ray wasn’t the only one that had gone out to the rapids that evening. He could see a little girl with bright red hair sitting out on the largest rock. It was the same rock he’d planned to sit on. Not only was it the biggest rock in the pile, it was the flattest and the one furthest out into the water. You could lie there nice and dry and watch the water rush by on all sides. It pissed him off thinking he’d have to walk all the way back without even setting foot on it. He was about to turn back when something caught his eye moving in the bushes not far from where the girl was sitting.
A man appeared. There was a trail there, Ray knew, that led back through the trees to a back road. The girl must have come that way earlier. It was probably the kid’s dad. Ray had grown a little more curious. He settled down into the tall reeds by his section of the stream and watched them. He didn’t recognize either one. The man stepped on the stones sticking up from the water to the bigger one where the girl was. He spoke, and the little girl said something back. Ray was close, but he couldn’t hear them. The running water made that impossible. They talked for a few more minutes. The man standing, the girl sitting.
The man did something then that made Ray feel instantly uncomfortable. He removed his jacket and pulled off his shirt. Men aren’t supposed to do that in front of little kids out in public unless they’re getting ready to go for a swim, Ray thought. And this guy wasn’t going to jump in the river, not at this temperature. He moved in front of her. Ray could no longer see her face, but he knew she was scared, he could tell by the way her legs were shifting on the rock, the way they curled up under her. The man’s hands went in front of him, as if he were preparing to take a pee.
In that second the girl became his sister. It was Alicia sitting there, and she was about to be molested. Ray sprang up and rushed through the reeds and grass towards them. He wasn’t even aware by the time he reached the rocks that he’d already bent down and picked a smaller, jagged one up.
The man turned too late. There was a dull expression on his face, his eye lids were half closed. It was a look that filled Ray with hatred. The man’s underwear was down to his knees. He couldn’t have reacted in time even if he tried. Ray swung back and drove a sharp end of the rock right between his eyes. That’s all it took. The man fell forward into the river with a heavy splash. The clear water turned pink, then deep red. And then the man’s dead body started floating away with the current, his bare ass sticking out the entire way until he disappeared altogether.
The little girl stood up. “My name’s Abby. Me and my parents just moved to the farm over there last week.”
She was pointing at the forest, to the trail the molester had come from. “Hi, Abby. I’m Ray Wallace, and you can’t tell anybody what happened here.”
It was only thing they said to each other—Abby introducing herself, and Ray warning her to keep it a secret. They didn’t scream. They didn’t cry. Ray tossed the bloody rock and the stranger’s clothes into the river and Abby rubbed the dust from her bottom. They went their separate ways, Abby to her new farm, Ray back to town. The body was discovered a week later thirteen miles downstream. According to the identification found in the abandoned car, the man’s name was Troy Peterson, a convicted pedophile released back out into the public just two weeks earlier. An autopsy wasn’t performed. The body had rotted in the water and been smashed by rocks into an unrecognizable mess. The pain he’d inflicted on others had finally visited him in the end, and only two children would ever know the grisly truth.
“Oh my God, Dad… you’re a hero,” Dawn said from the end of the bed.
Ray was lying back down, fully clothed and very tired. “Heroes don’t murder people and make little girls keep it secret.”
“Most kids that age would’ve done the same thing, I know I would. Why should you get in trouble for stopping a monster like that?”
“That’s what I thought at the time.” He rose onto one elbow and rubbed his sore eyes. “But it weighs on a guy after the years, even if the bastard had it coming.”
“What happened to the girl? What ever became of Abby?”
“She didn’t tell anyone… not as far as I know, anyway. We didn’t talk in school. She was a few years behind me. Her family moved away a couple years after that. Never heard where they ended up.”
“You’ve unloaded a lot off your chest today. It couldn’t have been easy.” She glanced over at the clock. It was after three. Dawn stood and kissed her father on the forehead. “Get some sleep. Maybe we shouldn’t try and leave too early. You’re a mess and I’m already feeling hungover.”
Ray didn’t answer. He was fast asleep.
Tyler heard a door close somewhere outside his room. He went to his, opened it, and looked both ways down the hotel corridor. No one. He returned to the desk next to the bed and sat. Probably some drunk asshole, staggering back to their room. Tyler took another long swig from the vodka bottle. “He’s not the only one.”
It was a dumb idea, heading after his girlfriend halfway across the country. It was only gut feelings he had to go on. And his gut told him she was with her father, and they were driving west. That Doole idiot had pretty much confirmed it. Where they were at this very moment was unknown. Maybe they weren’t that far ahead of him. He’d hauled ass for ten hours all the way to Calgary, averaging a speed of a hundred and thirty kilometers an hour between fuel stops.
Tyler had quickly visited his grandfa
ther’s home before leaving Winnipeg. The old man had been collecting hand guns since before Tyler’s dad was born. He had most of them hidden away in his basement. None of them were registered.
He opened the single desk drawer and pulled one of those guns out. His grandfather also suffered from Alzheimer’s. By the time he noticed one of his Glocks was missing, Tyler would already be finished with it.
“No, it wasn’t a dumb idea.” He pressed the cold steel against his face. “You shouldn’t have done it, Dawn. We could’ve made it work. We will make it work.”
Chapter 10
Someone was knocking on Dawn’s door. Or they had gotten inside her head and were banging on the underside of her skull. She groaned and rolled over to see the time. Eight AM. She took a deep breath and exhaled. At least she didn’t feel like throwing up. The knocking resumed. “Come on,” she mumbled. “What happened to leaving a little later?” She got up and opened the door.
“Good morning.”
“Hey, Dad. How’d you sleep?”
“Your uncle Bruce called a few minutes ago. Grummy passed away during the night.”
“Oh.” Dawn slumped against the open door, unable to say anything else.
“He said she went peacefully. There was a nurse with her. She held her hand right to the end.” Ray pulled his daughter in and hugged her. “Sorry to wake you up with the news, and I’m sorry I didn’t get us out there in time to say goodbye.”
“Don’t be sorry,” Dawn finally said. “She lived a good, long life. It’s easier to handle knowing someone was with her.” She looked up into his eyes. “How are you?”
Ray entered the room. “I feel okay. Maybe telling you everything yesterday was what I needed. And now that Mom’s gone… it feels like a weight lifted off me. There are no more secrets to keep. When I get out there, I’m going to tell Bruce and David the truth about happened in the pig barn that summer.”