In the Cage

by Kevin Hardcastle

  The constable stopped at the edge of the lawn and put his hands on his hips. The man stood about six-foot-three and he’d an athlete’s build just beginning to go to seed under his blues. Square jaw that he’d not shaven in a few days by the look of it. The cop had played semi-pro hockey as a young man but he’d been a cop longer than any of that now. He looked up at the sky. Both skies.

  “Was a nice day, wasn’t it?”

  “It was,” Daniel said.

  The cop looked at Daniel. At the house.

  “Sarah home? Your girl?”

  “Just me,” Daniel said. “Am I in trouble or somethin’?”

  “If you have anything you’d like to confess to, I’m all ears.”

  Daniel took a drink.

  “No,” he said. “Fuck. I don’t have the time or the means to get in trouble no more.”

  The cop nodded.

  “You find out what assholes stole my rig?” Daniel said.

  “Not yet,” Smith said.

  “Well, I won’t hold my breath on that.”

  Daniel set the can on his knee and studied the constable. He leaned heavy on the chair arm.

  “Alright. Why in the fuck d’you come all the way out here?”

  “I need you to come look at something,” Smith said.

  “What?”

  “Not entirely sure. That’s why I need you to look at it.”

  Daniel peered out across the fields. He took another drink.

  “Do I have to?” he said.

  The cop shook his head. Took a moment to reset.

  “Listen,” the constable said. “The both of us know what kind of work you’ve done around here. And I know that you’ve been straight a little while.”

  “Actually, I’ve never took a charge in my life. You can look it up.”

  The constable’s radio crackled on at his chest and he listened a second and pressed a button to quiet it.

  “Whatever you were into before, that’s not what I care about,” Smith said. “If you quit the work maybe you at least had the sense to know which way it was going when you left.”

  “How’s that?”

  “This is a county that used to have bikers growing weed and robbing each other. Now we’re into war atrocities. Shit that’d even give you nightmares, Dan. That you’d not want your daughter to even know was possible.”

  Daniel sat there awhile. He rolled his shoulders and drank the rest of the beer. Dropped the can to the grass and stood.

  “You gonna pinch me for drivin’ now?”

  The cop looked around.

  “You don’t even have a vehicle here,” he said.

  “Yeah. I need a lift to the end of the road there so I can borrow one.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t be seen in that fuckin’ cruiser.”

  When they walked into the station house there were two cops sitting at desks in the back of the reception office. Heavyset man with a buzzcut and a young woman with her hair pulled back in a ponytail. Another tall cop standing at the front counter, stamping papers. All of them armed and uniformed. The man at the counter stopped what he was doing. Eventually the heavyset cop turned and saw who had just come through the front door. He coughed and the female cop looked up. She half-waved at Daniel.

  “Hey, Mike,” said the tall cop at the counter. “How’s it going?”

  “It’s goin’,” said Smith.

  The constable waited at the door until he heard the buzzer go. Click of the lock as it unlatched.

  “Come on,” he said.

  Smith shoved the door open and went in. Daniel followed him, looking down at the back of the cop’s head as they crossed the threshold and the door shut behind them. Sharp crack as it set flush in the metal doorframe. Daniel felt strange. A chill right through him. He followed the cop down the corridor until they came upon the room that held the man’s desk. Seven more in that humble space and nobody attending them.

  Daniel was already sitting when Constable Smith came around to the other side of the desk and settled in to his seat. He’d not been there two seconds and he stood back up. He reached down and undid his belt and took it off. Laid it heavy on the table. Baton, cuffs, pepper spray, pistol and all. Then he sat down again. The constable leaned back with his hands on the chair arms.

  “That bother you sittin’ there?” the constable said.

  “No,” Daniel said.

  “I’d always been told you don’t like guns. That right?”

  “They can make an awful mess.”

  The cop smiled. He’d laced his hands and now he popped the knuckles on his left hand, on his right. Then he leaned forward and took up a case file from atop his desk. He opened it up and turned it around and dropped it back on the desk in front of Daniel. Daniel just sat there.

  “Please,” the constable said.

  Daniel waited a few more seconds and then he shifted in the chair. In the open folder he saw the first of a series of crime-scene photographs. He picked them up and went through them. Wide shots and close-ups. Greyed skin darkened by layers of bruising. Small black holes here and there. Blind eyes, clouded white. The insides of fingerjoints like rings on a tree trunk. Daniel let his eyes wander to the corresponding paperwork left in the file. Constable Smith reached over and shut the folder and took it back. He shook his head. Daniel went through the pictures again. Muttered something. He set them down in the middle of the desk. He’d begun to breathe heavy. Couldn’t hide it.

  The cop waited.

  “What?” Daniel said. And too loud.

  “You know that poor fucker in there?”

  “His name is Lucas O’Hare,” Daniel said.

  “He a friend of yours?”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “But if there were violence, you’d not be on opposite sides.”

  “I liked the kid.”

  The constable nodded and then he took the pictures and went through them himself. By his face he’d likely done so many times before. He took a deep breath of his own and then laid them back down.

  “You saw that they cut off his fingers? Pulled out his teeth? Set fire to parts of him?” Smith said.

  “I saw.”

  “Well. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to process a man like that. Not considering we knew who he was on sight.”

  “It makes sense if you know who did it.”

  “Yeah. Who?”

  Daniel shook his head no.

  “You don’t know or you won’t say?” Smith said.

  “Pick one.”

  “What?”

  “There’s a lot of evil assholes out there I can think of that might have done it. One that I’d put at the top of that list,” Daniel said. “But I don’t know for sure. If I did I might even be stupid enough to tell you.”

  “And he’s working for Clayton. Ain’t he?”

  “I assume you knew the answer to that before you asked it.”

  The constable nodded. He leaned in and put his index finger to the top picture.

  “This is bullshit,” Smith said. “We can’t have it.”

  Daniel just looked at him.

  “You don’t have anything else to say about it?” Smith said.

  “I’ll say that you’re in trouble if you don’t lock him up quick.”

  The constable leaned back in the chair. Crossed his arms. He let his chin hang down near his chest for a moment.

  “This has to disturb you, Dan. Being so close to home,” Smith said.

  “It disturbs me plenty. That was just a boy they killed. And not a bad one either.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Some of those guys are just tryin’ to make a living. Whatever you think.”

  Constable Smith took the photos back and put them in the folder and closed
it over. He loosed his shirt at the collar and rubbed at the back of his neck with one hand. Eyes of a man who’d not slept. Little bruise outside his brow that Daniel hadn’t noticed earlier.

  “I have trouble believing you are clear of that work. Entirely. That you don’t have something else you could tell us.”

  “Well you should believe it.”

  “Why?”

  “‘Cause you will never see pictures of me like the ones in that folder. Not ever.”

  The constable studied him awhile.

  “I appreciate that, Dan,” the constable said. “But if you hear anything…”

  “I make sure I don’t hear nothin’ anymore. You know everything I know.”

  “Okay.”

  Daniel started to get up.

  “And what if you do end up back at work alongside these fellas?” the constable said. “If you gotta be in the same room as the man who’s doing this heinous shit?”

  Daniel made a funny sound. He patted his pockets for his keys as he stood.

  “That ever happens and you’ll get all kinds of help from me,” he said. “You won’t have to worry about that motherfucker ever again.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  The man went up his porch steps two at a time. Long, long legs under his jeans. His hair would have reached his waist were it not pulled back and tied. He opened the screen door and let it slam behind him. Then he got his keys and opened the front door of the house. Out in the bordering wood he heard branches crack. He stopped and turned. Stared out into the dense treeline to the north. The sun shone full on the grass. Loons called from the lakewater to the rear of the house. The Mohawk man turned around and pushed the door open gentle. He had to duck under the lip of the doorway as he went in.

  He crossed the length of the living room in four strides and reached for the top of the eight-foot bureau that stood against the wall. His great fingers touched only wood. The Mohawk held the rim of the bureau-top in his hand. He could hear the other man breathing somewhere in the space behind him. He did not know how close the man was until the floorboard between the living room and kitchen entryway gave off a groan. He turned around.

  Tarbell stood on the hardwood in his stockinged feet. He held the sawn-off shotgun in both hands, aimed from the hip. The Mohawk’s rifle lay on the couch near Tarbell with the bolt and magazine removed. The two men were but ten feet apart.

  “You heard the board?” Tarbell said.

  “I heard you breathin’.”

  The blonde smiled.

  “Why didn’t you go for that buckknife in your belt?” he said.

  “’Cause you had the rifle, idiot.”

  Tarbell quit smiling. He snorted.

  “That was a bitch to get down from there,” he said.

  “I bet,” the Mohawk said.

  Tarbell kept the gun steady. The Mohawk man straightened up. His shoulders were as wide as the bureau. He had a huge head and a wide face with pockmarks on his cheeks. Dark eyes. He had no man-made scars on his face.

  “Where’s Wallace and Clayton?” he said.

  “They’re not here,” said Clayton’s nephew. “They thought you’d be somewhere else. I thought you’d be here.”

  “How’s that?”

  “They think you’re scared of Clayton.”

  The Mohawk said nothing. He seemed not to be moved by any of it.

  “You’re a big fucker. Aren’t ya?” Tarbell said.

  The Mohawk reached behind his back. He did it slow with the pale-eyed man watching him. The buckknife came back with his hand and he stood there with his fingers settling their grip on the handle.

  “Those things are a hell of a lot slower to fire when you ain’t got the hammers cocked. You know that?” the Mohawk said.

  Tarbell tilted his head to the side. Stared on and on.

  The Mohawk gave no sign before he moved, stepping hard to the right and then coming straight. He’d closed the gap to naught by the time Tarbell fired. Tarbell did not save either barrel and the shot blew from the muzzle in spitflame and hit the Mohawk’s chest and stood him straight up. His shoetoes danced the floor and then he went backward and slammed to the hardwood like a tree felled to shieldrock. Somehow he was not dead. Blood bubbled at his lips and his eyes rolled but his chest still rose and fell and he still drew air by his flared nostrils. Tarbell had already broke the barrel and shucked loose the spent shells. He reloaded the weapon and held it fast, ready to slap the barrel straight. He stopped and stood with the short-stock stuffed into his right armpit and the broken shotgun draped over his arm like a waiter’s cloth. The dark irises of the Haudenosaunee man were wound back to the top righthand corner of his eyesockets and his massive hand crept the floorboards and then reached out desperate. Nothing there. The buckknife lay out in the floor beyond the Mohawk’s reach.

  By the time Wallace came into the room Tarbell had the Mohawk sitting upright and was stood behind him with a fistful of hair. Edge of the buckknife dug into the Mohawk’s forehead. Look of intense concentration on his face. Wallace was on top of them before Tarbell turned. Wallace got hold of the knife hand and tore it clear and then turned Tarbell’s wrist until the blade dropped. Tarbell came clear as well and there the Mohawk fell back to the hardwood just a foot from his knife, a neat red line across the length of his brow. He didn’t reach for the blade. He was dead.

  Clayton came into the room where the dead man lay. He saw Wallace standing between the Mohawk and his nephew. Tarbell leaned against the wall, rubbing his right wrist with the opposite hand. Clayton had to survey the room again to be sure of what was in front of him.

  “What is wrong with you?” he said.

  Tarbell raised his head. He didn’t seem to know that Clayton was speaking to him. Then he took a deep breath and stared down at the killed Haudenosaunee. Back up at Clayton with his cold eyes. He got up off the wall and walked out of the house. Looncries echoed in the outlying dusk. The pale-eyed man cried back.

  PART THREE

  The welding rig for the truck had been bought by Daniel on a five-month run out west. He went alone and left in late autumn, driving through that vast territory where roads ran in a wide, counter-clockwise arc from the southern tip of Georgian Bay to the western boundaries of Lake Superior. Rounding those waters to the north took him a day’s worth of driving through smaller and smaller towns and through ragged wood with gaunt trees more severe than their like in the south. Massive rock faces on high cliffs and beside the rolling highway grounds. Ravens and eagles alighted and looked down from their perches. He saw hints of bear and deer. He saw one great moose that waited for him in the road under moonlight to stall or kill him.

  He bought the welding rig from a Haligonian who’d just finished a five-year hitch welding pipeline on-site. The man went over the rig with Daniel and then they shook hands and they pulled the bolts and clamps from the Nova Scotian’s truck and four men lifted the rig and set it down in the bed of Daniel’s truck and bracketed it to the metal. Daniel paid less than he should have but the man wanted rid of the machine and he promised he wouldn’t ever try to buy it back. The Nova Scotian wouldn’t even have a drink with the men he’d been working with. The ex-welder went east and Daniel went north, so tooled, and travelled site to site. He slept in the truck until it started getting cold. Then he lived in motels and garages, bunkrooms, colonies of portable shanties where he drank smuggled whiskey and stood in his longjohns pissing into the frosted campside brush, snow to his bootcuffs. That was October. By December he stood pissing again at site’s edge. Fire lit the sky atop great stone exhaust pillars, above gigantic kilns and metalwork framing. Burnt cloud smothered the sun and was there yet in blackest night, hulking over the world. Daniel didn’t work that far north again.

  He counted days until Christmas. Too many. At first Daniel wouldn’t go into town with the men and then he would. He didn’t figh
t. When he laid his hands on men and pulled them clear they knew something was wrong and stayed back. He drank beer and whiskey with the tradesmen from the east and the older men played guitar or banjo or mouth harp or washboard. They sung old songs and the younger men knew few words or none at all. Still they tried and many of them could hold a tune. One night three Newfoundlanders showed up with a jug of moonshine they’d bought from a group of Métis labourers near Peace River. That night in town a fight broke out between Daniel’s men and a gang of lumberjacks back from interior British Columbia. Daniel hit the biggest of them with a straight right and he felt the man’s jaw unhinge and then watched it list and spill two broken lower-front teeth before the lumberjack crumpled. He’d not hit anybody in three years. Someone broke a full beer bottle over Daniel’s head and he did not feel it and inside of a minute there were six men down and all but one were bleeding from the mouth or nose or eyes. All but one, who lay facedown over an upturned table, his shoulderjoint twisted out of the socket so that the whole arm hung stretched and simian at his side. That same arm had lately held a beer bottle like a bludgeon. If Daniel were able to remember the brawl he might have remembered that he studied the wreckage for a very long time and then said aloud that he thought the man might lose the arm altogether.

  He flew east for four days at Christmas and then he flew back. Nobody had known his name at the brawl. They told the police again and again that they had nothing to tell. Daniel moved about freely from site to site and job to job. He tried not to drink but he did drink. He got quieter and quieter. He drank alone and paid out of pocket to avoid campsites and colonies. Once in a while he went to a shithole pub or inn to watch the fights on TV. He talked to people sitting at the bar, only about the fights. Few pegged him as an ex-fighter. When they did he lied and had a few more drinks and then he left. He bought off-license beer and drank it in his truck and sometimes he woke there in brilliant morning with the battery dead and his bones frozen.

  In late March he set out for home. All he had in the truck was a duffel bag of clothes on the passenger seat. The welding rig stood ugly in the back window of the cab and looked in at him. At the tail end of the bed were truck-mounted boxes that held his tools and some that were his father’s. A storm had been predicted from the Northwest Territories and it was supposed to last for a week. Daniel left early to beat it. The weight of the truck kept him slow and he ran through gas quick and took pills to stay awake. He crossed the Saskatchewan border, tired through and ripe in his clothes. Daniel didn’t see the boundary sign in the white. He couldn’t see five feet of road ahead of him and when the wipers stammered and froze he had to open the window and lean out. Frost clung to his eyebrows and his hair and his eyes watered and he wiped them clear. He drove on and on and then at once the road was there and the sky was bright above where the clouds thinned. A weird fog trailed at his spinning truck tires for a mile or so and he drove faster and kept looking out at it and then it was gone.