by Giles Blunt
Kevin wanted to get out of there and get to bed and just sleep. The mood was way too weird.
Red Bear smiled. “Don’t worry,” he said. “In a week or two, I will make a sacrifice, and then we will know exactly how to turn our fortunes around.”
“Sacrifice?” Kevin said.
“Don’t say anything more just now, Kevin. You will see soon enough what I mean.”
Leon flicked his cigarette into the fire. “Does this sacrifice mean I get to walk down Main Street again without worrying I’m going to get seriously fucked up by bikers?”
“Oh, yes. I guarantee it. If things go the way I expect them to, six months from now the Viking Riders will tremble when you approach.”
“Righteous, man,” Leon said. “Way it should be.”
9
A WEEK AFTER THAT SOLEMN NIGHT on the beach, the four of them meet up at the Rosebud Diner, a greasy spoon just south of town by Reed’s Falls. Red Bear, Kevin, Leon and Toof. Toof’s looking shame-faced because he got lost on his way to the Rosebud—a place he has been to at least three times, by Kevin’s count—and the others had to wait. Red Bear doesn’t say anything, just stares at Toof with those husky’s eyes of his. Then he leads them out into the woods.
First they follow the hydro lines over the hill, then they veer off into a snowmobile trail, deserted at this time of year. After a few hundred yards, they venture onto a trail that is a trail in theory but is scarcely easier to walk than the thickest of the brush surrounding it. Eventually they come to the crest of a hill, a rocky clearing.
Red Bear had them build an altar fire the way he had shown them. He pointed to the three-quarter moon, riding some low clouds. “Perfect,” he said. “Just perfect.” He was dressed in buckskin pants and vest, both with a fringe, the vest decorated with intricate beadwork. Hollywood Indian, Kevin thought, preposterous on anyone else, but not on Red Bear. A canteen clanked against his belt, next to a long knife sheathed in buckskin.
Red Bear waited until the fire was blazing.
“Our sacrifice is waiting on the other side of the hill. You three stay here, and do not move—no matter what you hear, do not move. You may hear nothing. When I return I will do a ceremonial dance. If this is too strange for you, if you cannot open yourself to other cultures, other customs, then I ask you to back out now. Back out now, and never return.”
Nobody moved.
“If you choose to stay, you must never speak of this to anyone. Do you understand?”
Red Bear stepped up to Kevin, his face inches away, pale eyes otherworldly. “Do you understand?”
“Yeah, sure. I understand. I’ll stay.”
Red Bear did the same to Leon. Leon also said he would stay.
Then Toof. Runty little Toof with his turned-up nose almost like a pig’s. In the firelight he looked like some nocturnal creature.
“Do you understand?” Red Bear said to Toof. “You must never speak of this to anyone.”
“I won’t. I promise.”
“On pain of death,” Red Bear said.
“Don’t worry about me,” Toof said. “I won’t tell a soul, eh? You guys are like my brothers.”
“Exactly. We are your family now.”
Red Bear unsheathed his knife.
“Wait in silence. I will return in ten minutes. Do not speak during this time. Stare into the flames and empty your minds. I will ask the spirits for direction.”
Red Bear pointed the knife high over his head, stretching on tiptoe as if hoping for lightning to strike. He began to speak in what Kevin figured was Ojibwa or Chippewa or some damn thing. Sounded like nothing he’d ever heard, full of clicks and gutturals, not sentences so much as a meandering flow of syllables. There were many repetitions. Then Red Bear lowered the knife and strode over the hill, beads rattling.
Kevin stared into the flames.
No sounds came from the far side of the hill, and none of the three figures around the crackling fire said a word.
Kevin’s face felt scorched, but his back was uncomfortably cold. He wished they were downtown, sinking a few pints at the World Tavern.
There was a cry, and then a dark shape came over the hill. Red Bear broke into a run, cried out again and leaped into the circle between them and the fire. He was chanting now, and doing a loose-limbed shuffle around the flames, accompanied by his low singsong. His shadow, thrown by the firelight, reared and stretched across the surrounding rocks and trees.
Gradually the dance became more energetic. Red Bear leaped and spun, his arms and shoulders gleaming in the firelight. His arms were soaked in blood up to the elbows. He swung a large leather bag from hand to hand around his body, and he revolved around the fire, making a wheels-within-wheels pattern. Then he stopped, opened the bag and held it upside down over the flames. The contents crashed onto the burning wood, and sparks swirled into the sky.
The other three jerked back from the fire, coughing and brushing at their clothes. When Kevin turned back, a pig’s head was sizzling in the flames, its little eyes shut tight and crinkled at the corners as if in merriment. His muzzle was wrapped with duct tape. His four trotters sizzled and blackened around him.
Red Bear stood close to the fire and stretched toward the sky, every muscle in his body straining. The veins in his neck stood out like electrical cords. His voice had gone thin and raspy and the words came streaming out of him with a terrible urgency. The words—if in fact they were words—collided with one another. Spit flew across the firelight, and at one point Red Bear sounded like he was going to choke. Kevin wondered if he was insane. Leon didn’t look particularly perturbed, but Toof was open-mouthed, a kid at the circus.
Then the voice stopped, and Red Bear seemed to go slack, released from whatever had held him. He sank slowly to the ground.
Nobody spoke.
After a while, Red Bear spoke in his normal voice. “Did I say anything?”
“Yeah,” Kevin said. “You said a lot. Unfortunately, not in English.”
“Sometimes I don’t know if I am just hearing the voices, or if I am transmitting them.”
“Oh, you were transmitting loud and clear.”
“Perfect,” Red Bear said. “We have direction now.”
“Which way do we go?” Toof said. “North?”
Leon gave him a look of pity. “Not that kind of direction, you moron.” He turned to Red Bear. “How much direction? Do we know what to do next?”
“Oh, yes. I have a time and a place, an actual address.” Red Bear slapped his knees and looked at the others. “You were frightened?”
“No, it was fantastic,” Toof said. “Like something out of the movies, man. Cool dance.”
“You?” Red Bear looked at Leon.
“Naw, I wasn’t scared. Can’t say it was the most comfortable I’ve ever been in my life.”
“You?” Red Bear’s gaze fell on Kevin.
“Nervous,” Kevin said. “The voice thing definitely made me nervous. Also, you have a lot of blood on you.”
Red Bear looked at his arms as if he had never seen them before. He opened his canteen and poured water over first one arm, then the other. It took him several minutes to get the blood off.
“Did you really kill a pig over there?” Toof said.
Red Bear ignored the question, or maybe he didn’t hear it. He was concentrating on cleaning the blood off his arms. “Probably my voice changed, no?”
“Yeah,” Toof said. “You went all fuzzy.”
“That is not my voice. That is the spirit talking. He doesn’t want to talk, so it’s a difficult thing sometimes. But what he told me …” Red Bear dumped the rest of his canteen onto the fire. Water hissed and steamed. “If what he told me is true, we are going to have great success.”
“When?” Toof wanted to know. “When does it start?”
“Three days from now. We’ll take a little trip together.”
“Where? Where are we going?”
“You ask too many questions. I’ll tell you
where when it’s time to leave.”
A few days later, Red Bear had Leon round up the other two and bring them out to the Rosebud. Leon refused to tell them what it was about; it was supposed to be a surprise. Red Bear was waiting for them at his usual table.
“I have found us the perfect home,” he said, leaving a fiver on the table for his coffee.
Outside, he climbed into his BMW, and the rest of them followed in Leon’s Trans Am. The place turned out to be an abandoned summer camp on the south shore of Lake Nipissing. The collection of little cabins was slated for demolition, after which a hotel was planned on the site. Red Bear had some connection in the demolition company and had arranged use of the place for the summer. There was an overgrown baseball diamond, a big stone fireplace for cooking outdoors and a collapsed ruin of a dock.
“Man, it’s got a beach and everything,” Toof said. “Volleyball posts, too. I wonder if there’s a net anywhere.”
“Why, you wanna start a team?” Leon said. “There’s no net, no ball—there’s no supplies of any kind. There’s just the cabins.”
“What’s it going to cost?” Kevin said.
“Nothing at all,” Red Bear said. He smiled behind glittering sunglasses. “Our only costs are water and electricity.”
Within a day, all of them had moved in. Each had his own cabin and could come and go as he pleased. Cooking facilities at the camp were minimal, so they would have to eat a lot of their meals at the Rosebud, but Red Bear and Leon spent as much time at the camp as possible. Kevin and Toof, on the whole, preferred town life during the day, but you couldn’t beat the rent.
A couple of nights after moving into the camp, Kevin had found himself in the back of a small cabin cruiser that cut across the choppy north bay of Lake Nipissing. Toof leaned over the side, trailing a hand in the water. Leon was at the wheel, and Red Bear was in the big leather seat beside him. He swivelled slowly back and forth, a small smile on his lips. He still wore his sunglasses, even though it was well past sundown.
A stiff wind was blowing in from the west, and Kevin was wishing he had brought his jacket. They had pushed off from a private dock in Shanley and now they were scooting across the vast north bay. They were so far out that the car headlights looked like fireflies. A full moon lit the silvery spire of the cathedral and the blocky apartment buildings that form Algonquin Bay’s skyline. The Manitou Islands slid by on their left, the Anishinabeck reserve on their right. After that, lights on the shore became sparse. When the moon ducked behind a cloud, the lake went black as velvet.
Twenty minutes later, Red Bear pointed to a set of lighted buoys. “French River,” he said, yelling over the noise of the inboard. “Nearly there.” He stood up, placing a hand on Leon’s shoulder. He leaned down and said something to him, pointing through the windshield. Leon turned the wheel and the boat scooped around toward the shore. Three lights glimmered among the trees, a triangular constellation.
“That is what the spirit showed me,” Red Bear shouted above the noise. “That triangle.”
At a signal from Red Bear, Leon cut the motor and they drifted on the black water.
“From this point on, no one speaks. Leon and I will do all the talking. There may be no one there, or maybe one person at the most. Either way, it won’t be a problem. Toof, you stay in the boat.”
“No, I wanna come, too. Come on, Bear. Lemme come, too.”
“You stay in the boat. It’s important. You must be ready to take off at any moment. Can I trust you to do that?”
“Oh, sure, eh. I’d just rather go with you guys is all.”
A dock materialized before them in the dark. Red Bear leaped onto it and wrapped a rope around a cleat, then said to Kevin almost in a whisper, “Toss me that one.”
Kevin tossed him the aft rope, and Red Bear pulled the stern around so that the boat was facing out toward the lake. Then he took another coil of rope from the stern and hung it over his shoulder as if he were about to climb a mountain. Toof went up front behind the wheel.
Kevin and Leon jumped onto the dock. The three of them moved silently along the sand toward the triangle of lights. Kevin followed Leon up stone steps to someone’s backyard, a small bungalow all but hidden among tall bushes. He looked around and saw that Red Bear was no longer with them. There were lights on in the house, and the shifting cool glow of a television. Kevin’s heart thudded against his ribs.
Leon didn’t hesitate. He went right up to the door and knocked.
The TV went silent. Then a man’s voice, not friendly: “Who is it?”
“Peter Northwind sent me.”
There was the sound of something sliding and then a pinhole of light in the door. It dimmed, and the voice came again. “You’re not Northwind.”
“Well, no duh, asshole. That’s why I said Northwind sent me. You Wombat?”
“Never mind who I am. You’re early. Like four hours early.”
“We had a tailwind. What’re we supposed to do, float around your fucking lake for a couple of hours?”
“Password.”
“What?”
“You heard me. What’s the password?”
“There isn’t one, cowboy. I got twenty pounds of passwords right here.” Leon held up the suitcase.
“Stand back from the door.”
Leon and Kevin stepped back a little.
“Make a move and you’re dead.”
“Don’t worry. We’re not moving.”
The door opened and a human immensity with a grey ponytail filled the doorway. A gun gleamed in the moonlight.
“No one fucks with the Viking Riders and lives to tell about it,” he said. “I hope for your sake you’re not trying to do that.”
“Hell, no,” Leon said. “We’re not about to mess up a great relationship.”
“I got no relationship with you. I got a relationship with Northwind. Put the suitcase down and step back.”
Leon put down the case, and he and Kevin moved back. Kevin had never had a gun pointed at him before and he was amazed at how effective it was. His kneecaps were doing a major shimmy and he badly needed a bathroom.
“Open it.”
Leon dropped to one knee and pressed the catches of the case.
“Hang on a second, I think they’re stuck.” He rattled them a little, cursing.
“I don’t like it,” the man said. “You can go fuck yourself.”
A soft thud. A blade was pressed against the man’s neck. “Drop it,” Red Bear said. “Or I’ll cut you another mouth.”
The gun stayed where it was. “You so much as give me a paper cut, your friend here dies.”
“Yes, but he will die quickly. Whereas you …”
“How do I know you won’t kill me anyway?”
“I don’t need to,” Red Bear said. “If you don’t give me a reason to kill you, then I won’t.”
The man lowered the gun. Red Bear pulled it from his hand and brought it down on his head.
The man sank to his knees, struggled to rise, and Red Bear clouted him again. The man toppled and stayed down. Red Bear tossed the gun to Leon, slipped the rope off his shoulder and tied the man’s hands with a complicated knot.
Leon pulled at Kevin’s sleeve. “Come on.”
Kevin followed Leon through the doorway into the kitchen.
“Anybody home?” Leon yelled, then giggled. “I love this thing,” he said, waving the gun. “I could get used to this. Let’s do a circuit. I feel like making a withdrawal.”
They went from room to room, looking for the cash Red Bear had said would be there. The place had an unused look, definitely underfurnished. Kevin threw open a few closets, finding nothing.
Then Leon shouted from another room, “Found it!”
Leon was in a small bedroom, empty except for a narrow cot. He had already pulled the briefcase from the closet. It was the kind that had combination locks on the latches, but the Vikings hadn’t bothered to use them. He snapped them open, and then they were looking at th
e most cash either of them had ever seen, stacks of it bound in tight bundles.
“Oh, boy,” Kevin said. “Why do I have a desperate urge to pee?”
“‘Cause you’re wettin’ yourself, man. We’re rich.”
“Now maybe you believe in magic, hey?” Red Bear had come in behind them.
“I always did,” Leon said. “But now I’m a magic evangelist. I’m a magic missionary. I want to convert people to magic.”
“Back to the boat,” Red Bear said. “We don’t want to be here when the rest of the Vikings get back.”
When they were outside again, Red Bear slapped their biker hostage into partial consciousness. The man got to his knees, swayed and threw up. It took a while, and some prodding with the knife, to get him down to the dock.
Kevin didn’t like seeing so much of the knife. Nothing Red Bear had said before this adventure had prepared him for violence.
Toof started the motor as they stepped into the boat. He touched the briefcase as if it were a holy relic. “Are we on top, or what?”
“We’re on Mount Everest, man,” Leon said.
Red Bear pushed the groggy Rider, now reeking of vomit, on board. “Keep him below. Clean him up and put this over his mouth.” He tossed Leon a roll of duct tape. “But make sure he can breathe. I don’t want him to die on us.”
Leon shoved the biker down the steps ahead of him and disappeared below.
“What are we going to do with him?” Kevin said. A tumour of anxiety was growing in his belly.
“We’ll just hold him until this little transaction is over, then we’ll let him go.”
“The Riders will kill us, you realize. I mean, really kill us. Kanga disappeared from the face of the earth.”
Red Bear stepped so close to Kevin he could feel the heat from his face. The look in Red Bear’s eyes was so tender, Kevin was suddenly afraid he was going to be kissed.
“You don’t have to worry about anything any more, Kevin. I am looking after you now. And as you can see …” he gestured toward the shore, the sky, the lake, “… there are others looking after me. All you have to do is trust me.”