After The Fires Went Out: Coyote atfwo-1

by Regan Wolfrom

  “There’s no way to be sure of that,” Graham said.

  “Listen to me for once. I know what I’m talking about. You’re not the one who’s actually had to do this kind of thing before. This isn’t a game, Graham. You have no idea how any of this shit goes down in real life. So don’t start acting like you can even have an opinion when it comes to keeping us safe.”

  Graham didn’t back down. “You’re gambling with the lives of every person in this house. I don’t know what you want out of all this, but I actually want to live through it. I’d like a chance to start a new life or something, you know, raise a family…and I’m not going to throw it all away because you want one last chance to relive your glory days.”

  I dropped my dish towel and left the kitchen, knowing that I wouldn’t be able to stay another minute without punching him out.

  Sara found me before I’d dressed to go outside, and by the time the two of us were out past the barn I’d told her everything, about the Girards, about Natalie and Tabitha, about Graham. She didn’t say she agreed or that she disagreed with anything I’d said. She just held my hand and listened.

  As I talked I felt like I was a child again, back when I would get so upset about something that I could barely breathe and I couldn’t even talk, my whole body heaving as tears would run down my face.

  And I realized I was crying, because I knew that everything was falling apart. We’d lost Ant and I'd killed Marc, and now we had two less people to face an enemy that would come for me eventually. That was assuming that we’d only stay two down, that we wouldn’t lose Graham, too, that he wouldn’t pack up and leave, taking Lisa with him. And maybe taking everyone else, too.

  But then I found that I was crying because I missed my old life, where I got to be an asshole just for kicks, not because I was trying to keep people alive.

  I don’t think I can protect this so-called family anymore; even if I’d been there in Toronto, crouched by the front door of our townhouse with a baseball bat, telling Alanna and Cassy to keep the noise down…even then I wouldn’t have been able to save my family from the chaos that would swallow them.

  I’ve spent so much time blaming everyone else for being trapped away from home, blaming travel restrictions and fuel shortages, like those were the things what kept me from saving my daughter and my wife…but the truth is so much easier to understand: I just didn’t have it in me. I wasn’t the hero, or even a good father, and I was certainly never a good husband. I was just a fool who liked telling people what to do. And I was angry with Graham because he’d finally grown enough of a backbone to point out what a phony I’d become.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” I said.

  Sara gave me a hug and kissed my cheek. “Don’t believe your doubts,” she said. “You can’t trust yourself right now…you can’t listen to anything your mind is telling you. Listen to me instead.”

  I didn’t interrupt.

  “You are a good man,” she said. “You’ve saved the lives of over a dozen people. You led us to make this home together. It isn’t your fault that Ant is dead, and at least he lived his last year with his new family and not by himself. And Marc Tremblay's death was an accident, no matter what you think you did. And what happened to Zach Walker, to the Marchands and the Girards…there was nothing you could do. And the rest of us are still here, Baptiste. What do you think would have happened to us if you hadn’t been here?”

  “You would have figured it out.”

  “That’s not true. You know it’s not true. You’ve seen what the Walkers wanted me to sign. Ten years of service. And they wouldn’t even take Kayla because of her goddamn ex-boyfriend.”

  “You never mentioned that ―”

  “I guess there was that stranded work crew near the airport, but they’d only take us girls, and only if we didn’t mind spending most of the time on our backs in trade.”

  “Those idiots didn’t last long…”

  “And I’m sure the Tremblays and the Porters would have tried their luck on the highway if we hadn’t have helped them.”

  “Now that’s sad.”

  “Yeah, yeah…but what about Fiona? If you hadn’t taken her on, where would she be? She was fourteen years old, Baptiste…no parents, no friends. She wouldn’t have had a chance.”

  I shook my head.

  “Don’t bother arguing with me,” she said. “I know you don’t agree with me right now. But all I want you to know is that I’ve always believed in you, and that doesn’t go away even when you’ve lost faith in yourself. You’re our best chance by far, Baptiste. I’d say that’s obvious to everyone but you, apparently.”

  I knew she meant it.

  I leaned in and gave her a kiss.

  “We should get back,” she said.

  By the time we’d come back to the cottage the dishes were done and everyone had gone about their evening routines. It was like nothing had been said.

  Lisa glared at me, though, so I knew that Graham had already talked to her. Lisa doesn’t believe in hiding her feelings. That’s something I’ve learned to respect.

  Neither of them said anything to me.

  Matt and Kayla seemed to be avoiding me, too, while Fiona seemed oblivious to all of it as she sketched in her notebook.

  It was all for the best. I was still upset, and I knew that the anger would come out either in tears or in blind rage. Crying in front of everyone was not something I was willing to do, and I couldn’t afford the other.

  But at the same time I know that I need to make Graham understand. He needs to know that there’s no room for discussion when it comes to our safety.

  It’s my responsibility…it’s my decision to make.

  I went upstairs with Sara. The two of us laid together in bed, Sara with her reader and me with my tablet, writing an entry in my journal that I’m not sure how I should end.

  At least I have Sara.

  Having her beside me makes this bearable.

  6

  Today is Thursday, December 27th.

  Ant wrote this last August:

  It’s hard for a guy like me to talk about love; I’ve spent my time on this earth in pursuit of a full variety of the storied Canadian beaver, and truthfully, falling in love gets in the way of that.

  But love is something that sticks with you, like a bad cold or genital herpes, and sometimes it gets even worse as time goes on. Sometimes it won’t go away no matter how much you want it to, no matter how much time you spend fapping to other girls.

  I miss Natalie. It was impossible being with her, after being with her sister for so long, but that doesn’t really change anything for me. I think she misses me, too, not that we can send each other texts or try to run into each other at the grocery store. We might as well be a thousand kilometers away.

  I left the Girards without any time to pack or really say goodbye; all I had time for was to tell Natalie that I loved her. She smiled in that way she always did when she heard my normal bullshit; I don’t think she understood what kind of love I was talking about.

  One day I’ll get up the nerve to go back and explain it to her.

  The night I dropped off Natalie and Tabitha, I took that little Honda back to McCartney Lake and parked it at a cottage up the road. It still had just over half a tank, but I didn’t really have any plans for how to use the gas that was left.

  Last night after Sara had gone to sleep, I decided to drive back to the Girards’ in that little car. I brought along a vest and a helmet, but I didn’t feel like putting them on. I even took off my belt, stuffing it on the passenger seat beside me. It all felt like too much to carry.

  I almost got stuck a few times in the snow, and at those moments I felt pretty stupid that I hadn’t brought along a snow shovel or any sand. But luckily that little car had more guts than I expected, and I made it all the way to Bondy Lake.

  I’d forgotten to bring the tarps, too.

  I went back into the empty house and gathered up the bed sheets. Then I brought
them down to the car and spread about half of them in the back; I folded down the passenger seat as well to get a little more room.

  Then I took the rest of the bed sheets and I went to the root cellar. I strapped on my headlamp, which felt strange strapped directly against my scalp and not onto my helmet, and I lowered myself down to where the bodies lay.

  I’d been worried about coyotes finding the frozen bodies, not that I was sure if they’d be able to do much with them. But most of the dead Girards looked just as they did before; there might have been some rodents down there, but I didn’t look that carefully.

  Natalie and Tabitha probably looked exactly like they did the day they died.

  I knew it wasn’t fair to leave Tabitha there, away from her family and then away from her best friend, so I wrapped the two of them up with the sheets.

  I carried Natalie first, and I didn’t know how to feel as I balanced her over my shoulder like a surfboard, her body rigid and cold. I placed her in the car and then I went back for Tabitha.

  I felt a little guilty leaving the rest of them there, but I knew it would be hard enough with two.

  I drove them back to McCartney Lake to the place near Wright Creek that we’d chosen when we lost Ant. I laid them both out in the snow, Tabitha wrapped in a sheet of yellow and green flowers, and Natalie covered with pink unicorns.

  I decided that one day I would go back to the root cellar, for the children at least.

  I gathered some logs from our firewood pile, along with two bottles of lighter fluid, since I didn’t have any kindling. I lit the fire and I waited a few minutes for the flames to grow hot. Then I grabbed my steel shovel and shoved it into the fire.

  It took much longer to dig those two graves than it did to bury Ant, and the sun had already risen before I had finished filling them back in.

  I was just glad that my heart had kept up with the digging.

  Kayla found me there.

  “Sara’s looking for you,” she said.

  I tried to give her a smile; I’m not sure it worked. “Thanks for letting me know. You’re not going to ask me what I’m doing?”

  She gave me a look that surprised me, like she understood exactly how I was feeling. She wrapped her arm around me. “I know what you’re doing…and I know that he’d appreciate it, Baptiste. Ant really did love her.”

  “That’s what he wrote.”

  “He told me once. One night when we were out together by the lake. I asked him if he wanted to kiss me, and then he just blurted it out like he was confessing to murdering someone. ‘I’m in love with Natalie Girard,’ he’d said. And then he gave me a hug and a kiss on the cheek and said that a blowjob would be perfectly acceptable, however.” She started to laugh. “I can’t imagine what it would be like to be in love with someone like Ant. It must have been so frustrating most of the time.”

  “That’s what love is, Kayla. If you’re not frustrated you’re doing it wrong.”

  “I’ve never thought of it that way.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t tell anyone about this.” I really didn’t want to explain why I did it. I’d cared enough to drive two dead girls up from Bondy Lake, but I’d never even bothered to ask where the Tremblays had chosen to bury Marc.

  “Don’t you think they’ll notice?” she asked.

  “Just don’t tell them for now, okay? Let them find out another day.”

  “Okay.”

  “Thank you, Kayla.” I gave her a kiss on the forehead.

  She giggled. “That means you love me,” she said.

  That made me smile. “Yeah…that means I love you.”

  We walked back together. And when Sara asked, Kayla told her that she’d found me out on a walk.

  I doubt Sara has any idea what I was doing out there near Ant’s stand of sugar maples.

  She didn’t ask me.

  Today was the day for limbing and splitting the birchwood.

  We’d cut down around two dozen birch trees during the late summer, while there were still enough leaves to suck moisture out of the wood. Now it was time to revisit the fallen trees and turn them into firewood. We also have around twenty balsam firs on the ground just off the road, but they’ll have to wait for sometime next week, after we’ve sobered up from New Year’s.

  When we first moved into the cottage at McCartney Lake, we’d run our stove off of hastily-cut fir and whatever pre-split bundles of firewood we could find. Some of it was too green but we made it work. Graham had done his best to tell us about hardwoods versus soft, and how his father used to swear by Pacific Madrones for their firewood, which didn’t mesh well with them living in central Illinois. Based on his advice we made sure to cut some birch as well that summer, piling it on the metal racks to season for the following winter.

  Now we’re hooked on birch, and it’s been easy enough to find; you just go to wherever there was a forest fire ten to twenty years ago and there you’ll find your firewood. We’ve seen colonies of young birch trees all over the district now, but it’s the older trees we need, the ones where the bark has already turned white, and the closest acreage of firewood-ready birch is on the far side of the lake. That’s where our fallen trees were waiting.

  One of the only good things about the breakdown of society is that for the first few months there was plenty of equipment sitting around, waiting for you to take it all home; that’s made the job a whole lot smoother.

  After being up all night, all I really wanted to do was sneak upstairs and go to sleep, but I had to set an example, or at least make sure Matt didn’t look better than me. Ant was gone, so someone needed to take his slot.

  So five of us piled onto our three tracked ATVs, leaving Kayla and Fiona back home with the dogs and a shotgun, and headed off to our woodlot. Sara and I pulled the utility trailer while Graham and Lisa dragged the splitter behind them. It took three times as long with snow on the ground, the trailer and splitter wheels getting stuck in a few patches of powder on the way.

  I would have liked to bring Des and Juju with us, but I wasn’t comfortable leaving just two people back at the cottage without some kind of backup. If someone came along we’d be able to hear the barking echoing out over the lake.

  As expected, it was Lisa and Graham who worked the hardest out there, taking the bucked logs and setting them up on the splitter. Matt did his best on limbing with one of the chainsaws, but as always his coordination was a little off. Sara loaded the split logs onto the trailer while I did a little of everything.

  I just couldn’t keep up with Lisa and Graham; I wanted to, but there’s no way my heart would be able to take it, even if I’d had a full night’s sleep. As hard as it was to do, I made sure to take a break every five minutes or so. As much as I was glad to have brought the defibrillator along in the trailer, I wasn’t hoping for a chance to use it.

  We heard the dogs barking just before lunchtime. We all stopped working and listened. No gunshots, no screams, just the dogs. I was sure it was just a local pest running through the yard, maybe a squirrel or a Tremblay. But we still needed to be sure, so Lisa and I hopped on an ATV and headed back to the cottage to check, while Graham stood watch at the woodlot.

  As we reached the back of the cottage, we could hear voices. We climbed off and readied our guns, Lisa with the shotgun and me with my pistol.

  “Baptiste!” a man’s voice called out. “Your girls won’t let us come inside.”

  I came around the corner to see a black half-ton, with Ryan Stems standing in front. He didn’t seem to be armed, or that’s what he wanted me to think, but a man standing by the passenger side door had a shotgun aimed right at me.

  I was way too tired for that shit.

  I didn’t have my vest and I didn’t have my helmet. There was no way I could take them both out before they got me. And I knew there’d be a third man somewhere. Maybe crouched around the corner of the porch…maybe up in the loft…

  I pointed my gun at the man by the truck. I noticed that Lisa had done th
e same.

  Kayla and Fiona were behind the screen of the front porch; despite what she’d told me before, Kayla was holding the shotgun like someone who didn’t know how to use it.

  I turned to Kayla and Fiona. “Are you two okay?” I asked. They both nodded. Kayla kept the gun up and aimed, her arms shaking.

  “I didn’t mean to frighten anyone,” Stems said.

  “Bullshit,” Lisa said. She started to angle her barrel towards him.

  “Why did you come here?” I asked him.

  “I wanted to tell you in person. There are going to be some changes around here..”

  “You’re leaving? Have a good trip.”

  “Fucking hilarious, Baptiste.” Stems shook his head. “After what’s happened the last few weeks…this can’t go on. You need to stay on this side of the river.”

  “Like a time out?”

  “There are too many guns in Cochrane District. Too many guns and too many murders.”

  “Don’t forget the explosion,” I said.

  “This isn’t a joke. I don’t find dead bodies as funny as you do. I guess you laughed like a hyena when you found the Girards.”

  “What happened to the Girards?”

  “Don’t screw around, Baptiste. Detour Lake. Running around and pretending they’re me, remember? You know they killed those two girls because of you. And the rest of ‘em, I guess. And I’m not willing to see the same thing happen to the Walkers or the Marchands. Or to your people.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “We’re taking over. From the North Driftwood River to the Abitibi, from James Bay to Timmins. And our borders are closed.”

  “I don’t think we can agree to that,” I said.

  “We don’t need you to agree. We have more guns than you.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “I know you like playing the heavy. But try to remember who you're talking to.”

  “Who am I talking to? Some idiot from Minnesota who thinks he’s tough because he was stupid enough to join the US Army?”