Stung

by William Deverell

  Arthur makes a connection: the confusing leaflet on the bulletin board — “Solstice midnight party. Celebrate the Equinox under the Sign of Aries!!” Krishna may have been doing that to the hilt — he still seems stoned. Maybe coming out of a magic mushroom trip.

  Others join them, scrambling into clothes. An odd bunch these, not your typical American refugees. Apolitical, turned on, tuned out, all from a tourist town in Tennessee. Not ridden out of town but bribed to leave. One of them wears a Trump University sweater. Arthur’s not sure if that’s ironic.

  He says, “Today isn’t the solstice, I’m afraid. You might have meant the equinox, but that was nearly a month ago.”

  Krishna’s partner has joined him, tattoo vines crawling up her neck, a blizzard of dark hair, a four-year-old hugging her thin legs. “I told you, Krish, it’s usually on March the twenty-first, that’s a week from now. Hi, I’m Glow. We love your dog.”

  Krishna rambles on obstinately. “I know for a fact the solstice is always the second weekend of March, no matter what. Like New Year’s is always on the first of January.”

  They are all out now, the entire commune, twelve adults and three little kids. Two of the women look pregnant. Arthur had encountered a group of them only two days ago, near the General Store. Ulysses was the magnet then and still is; wolfhounds must be rare in their former Tennessee hometown.

  Arthur displays an iPhone calendar to help persuade Krishna and Glow that today is the twelfth of April, that the equinox is long past, and that the solstice not till June.

  “So, okay,” says Glow, “I guess that’s why no one came. We advertised it all over the island.”

  Arthur’s phone vibrates in his hand. “Excuse me one second.”

  Stefan breathes hard from exertion, his voice weak, barely audible, as he tells of catching views of Tigger steadily moving downhill.

  “What direction?” Arthur asks.

  “Away from his den. We both stopped a while ago to look each other over. He knows I’m not his enemy. But I haven’t proved to be a friend. Right now he thinks he’s leading me astray. It’s a game we have to play.”

  “Yes, but in what direction is he going?”

  “Yours.”

  Arthur looks up at the direction he himself came from, peers about the crags and buttes, sees no sign of life except a soaring eagle. He regards it as unlikely that Tigger will dare come near this convergence of hippies. The fact that he has eluded capture and detection has to mean he’s people-shy.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, please gather around.” They shuffle forward, the twelve adults, now fully awake, eager to hear words of wisdom from this grizzled old seer who has arrived just as, behind him, the sun is about to breach the eastern wall. Ulysses, now unleashed, and the three children chase each other around the tents.

  “Don’t be alarmed but I’ve just learned our visiting cougar may be nearby.”

  “We love Tigger,” says a young man in a U.S. army jacket and a red beret.

  “We welcome all life,” says a tasselled young woman.

  Arthur feels like he’s trapped in one of his ridiculous dreams. He should lecture them — Tigger is not from Pooh Corner! — but he can’t find the words.

  They’re not listening anyway — they’re welcoming the rise of the fiery sun god, now bursting like a volcano from the pinnacle of the tallest hill. A ritual has been planned for this moment, this first ray of sunshine on the supposed first day of spring, and must be performed even though they are three weeks late. A ritual from which he can’t escape: they drag him into a circle of linked arms. He feels foolish, impotent — he has shown himself to be totally ineffective, has been silenced, kidnapped to play a role in some hokey astrological ceremony.

  Arthur stumbles sideways as they move in a slow circle, counter-clockwise, muttering something he recognizes as an attempt at Sanskrit, the Bhagavad Gita.

  Their eyes are closed. No one’s watching the kids but Arthur. Two of them are near the tents, with Ulysses, who is lying down. The third, the toddler sired by Krishna and Glow, has gone from view.

  There he is, an energetic climber, crawling up a few short steps carved into the limestone. A wanderer who has wandered too far, sixty or so yards in the wrong direction. Again Arthur takes a long scan of the snaggled hills above, and though he sees no cougar he does see Stefan on an outcropping, wildly waving, miming a phone to his ear.

  Arthur hadn’t noticed the thrumming in his pocket, but it’s too late to answer — the boy calls: “Mommy, Mommy, come and see, it’s Tigger!”

  Arthur has already broken from the circle, and dashes toward the youngster.

  His mother screams: “Cosmos! You come right down from there!”

  Stefan struggles down a steep slope, a shortcut.

  The cougar emerges from behind a boulder, and pauses fifteen feet behind Cosmos, who scrambles down the steps, starts to run. The cougar pauses, then launches forward, and Arthur’s heart almost stops — indeed, everything slows: Arthur feels himself run sluggishly, as in his nightmare, watches helplessly as Tigger takes menacing slow-motion bounds in the direction of the fleeing four-year-old. But that’s also the direction of his fastest escape route, the long flat runway of the meadow, so it’s not clear which instinct has kicked in: pursuit or flight.

  Cosmos’s parents overtake Arthur, as do a few others with younger lungs and legs. Shrieks of horror as little Cosmos stumbles over a clump of grass and goes sprawling.

  Bursting into this slow-motion tableau comes a lanky, leggy, furry missile who shoots past Arthur on the starboard side as his loud, ferocious barks echo and re-echo between the canyon’s walls.

  Tigger sees Ulysses coming as he is in mid-leap, paws extended, and makes an acrobatic spin in the air of nearly a hundred and eighty degrees before he lands, skids, then makes a beeline for the man-made steps and up the trail that had brought Arthur down here.

  Ulysses, who knows that route, isn’t content with sending the cougar fleeing. He pounds up the trail in pursuit, as if determined to bring the offender to justice.

  Arthur’s shouted commands don’t call him back.

  * * *

  And now the search is not just for a cougar. It’s for Arthur’s brave and maybe foolish young dog. He wonders if some ancient gene had kicked in. After all, Ulysses’s Irish ancestors took down wolves for a living. Coursing hounds, running machines. The war dogs of ancient days.

  He and Stefan have again climbed up and over the northern flanks of the limestone towers, following what Stefan predicted as the most likely route for a cat chased by a dog: a path with no dead ends.

  Arthur wants, of course, to believe his brave pup saved the life of the boy called Cosmos. But Stefan, who captured the climactic seconds on video, argues in favour of Tigger intending a fast downhill exit from the valley, a plan foiled when he saw Ulysses had an angle on him.

  Arthur suspects Stefan is overprotective of Tigger, too eager to portray a wild animal as not dangerous to humans. It’s not a point worth arguing. Cosmos is safe — he had got up quickly and into his dad’s arms and Ulysses will surely be celebrated as a great hero.

  Stefan’s assumption that they’re taking the right direction proves accurate, because they can now pick up barks from below: Ulysses’s deep woofs, music to Arthur’s ears. But a second dog is also being very vocal: it’s Hamish McCoy’s Shannon, once falsely charged with alpacacide.

  It’s just before nine o’clock when they emerge from the woods and jog the remaining way to Stefan’s van. The canine duet comes louder, and has awakened Hamish McCoy — Arthur can hear bursts of profanity, welcome proof he’s his usual robust self. Arthur expects Tigger has taken advantage of this clamour to slip away into the Gwendolyn wilds.

  The van twists down a descent between old-growth firs to a sunny high bank that glows golden from scattered clumps of daffodils. A path leads thirty f
eet below to a crescent beach clogged with driftwood. The driveway curves back toward McCoy’s home-cum-gallery-and-studio, and peters out among a cluster of his towering humanoids.

  The barking continues, but behind them now, somewhere near the shoreline. Stefan brakes, alights, and sprints that way.

  The profanity seems to come from the cold blue sky. “Weepin’ bloody fuckin’ Jaysus, b’y, help get me down off here.”

  Arthur looks up. McCoy, in his work coveralls, is perched atop an abstract bronze figure.

  “I’se got no memory how I shimmied up, exceptin’ an act of God.”

  Indeed, it did seem that McCoy had climbed this ten-foot-tall erection by means of superhuman effort. A vertical, smooth, veined penis, with a set of small, ornamental wings that he may have used as handholds. Chicken-claw legs. McCoy lies athwart the tip of the penis, his arms and legs hugging its bulbous glans.

  “Don’t just stand there, b’y, I got me a bad case of the collywobbles.”

  Across the driveway, slightly downhill, is an aluminum scaffolding on wheels. As Arthur rolls it up toward the winged erection he hears yet another ghostly male voice: “Hello? Hello?” It comes from a portable phone on a grating of the scaffolding.

  “It’s the b’ys from the fire hall. Call them off, Arthur, so’s I don’t look like the fool I am. That there rigging saved me loif, as I remember now. Then your hound and my Shannon clummed together to chase off the cat.”

  Arthur pieces it together: McCoy had been on the scaffolding when Tigger barrelled through the yard toward him. The old leprechaun dropped his phone as he escaped to the penis from the scaffolding, which he kicked away. Ulysses then zipped by, and he and Shannon either treed the cougar or chased it into the saltchuk. They’re still making a racket.

  As McCoy scrambles down, Arthur reaches for the phone. “Good morning, this is Arthur Beauchamp. There is no emergency.”

  “Well, that’s good, because the ladder truck won’t start, even though we charged the battery.”

  Stefan comes up the stone steps from the beach flashing a victory sign. “Yay,” he calls, “they treed him.”

  Arthur phones Solara to initiate Stage Two of Operation Tigger: ensuring his safe passage from the islands of the Salish Sea.

  10

  The tide finally ebbs, after crawling almost to Arthur’s feet. He has a good seat, a front-row drift log with a clear view of an old, sprawling arbutus that leans over the waves lapping the shoreline. He can catch glimpses of Tigger on a long, stout branch that curls high over half-submerged rocks.

  The wildlife officers, who have again rejected Stefan’s offer to help, to coax him down, clearly have a problem working out a plan. Several of them stand at the base of the tree, which clings to the rim of a steep, rocky escarpment twenty feet above high-tide line. Were they to immobilize the cougar with a tranquilizer rifle, he would likely not survive a fall onto the rocks.

  Among that group is the maladroit dogcatcher Leroy Letkow, a hunting rifle holstered at his back. Arthur hopes it’s not loaded. A few other Conservation Officers puzzle over matters from the shoreline, one of them in waders.

  Annoyingly, a quartet of TexAmericans has also shown up, and they are sprawled like seals over bleached cedar logs. Typically, they appear hungover — they were likely awakened by the rumble of the government convoy grinding past the quarry’s entrance road. Tug Cooley, their relentlessly hostile foreman, is not among them.

  Meanwhile, Ulysses and Shannon have retired from the field like honoured soldiers and have been medalled with treats and bones. Both rest on McCoy’s porch.

  Constable Dugald approaches Arthur, stepping from log to log. “Hey, Arthur, I saw on the national news about a dog-of-the-year thing for bravery. I want to nominate your hound for it.” He sits, lowers his voice, less hearty, more sincere: “Sorry I dissed your wolfhound. I got endless respect now. Man, I’d kill to have a big bruiser like that. I’m a dog man, you know. Used to be.”

  “I know. A pity Roberta isn’t a dog woman.”

  “Yeah.”

  He looks so sad that Arthur wants to hug him.

  Dugald comes out of his reverie. “Those wildlife guys better get a move on, before the whole island shows up.”

  That seems prompted by the sound of an ATV grumbling to a halt on the bankside road above. Nelson Forbish soon appears, two cameras slung about his neck, and wobbles ponderously down the stone steps.

  Dugald gets up to go. “That cat keeps moving farther out, that branch is going to break.”

  Or bend low enough for him to jump safely into the water — that’s what Arthur hopes he’ll do. Swim away, Tigger.

  Now the animal is out of view, behind a leafy bough. Arthur rises to find a better viewpoint on the pebble beach. It’s squishy underfoot, where the high tide had reached.

  Tigger inches farther out, testing his chances for a safe, wet landing that might avoid the sharp, protruding rocks.

  An explosively loud crack. Arthur’s first thought is that the arbutus branch broke, because Tigger falls, catlike, feet first. But the blast came from above. A rifle shot, he realizes, and he whips around, looking for Leroy Letkow, and there he is, rifle still sheathed, standing among his fellow animal rescuers, all agog, gaping at the man at the top of the steps, jubilantly raising a high-powered rifle.

  “That’s for Dumbbell!” Tug Cooley roars.

  Tigger’s corpse lies broken and bloodied on the shoreline rocks of the Salish Sea.

  Chapter 17: Rivie

  1

  Monday, April 15

  Picture this: A wife put a bullet through her husband’s head as he drunkenly snored in bed, exhausted after having beaten her black and blue with fist and boot. Again. He’d done this umpteen times, a ritual. Crap, it’s almost bedtime, and I haven’t beat the shit out of Ginnie. Typically, this would give him a hard-on, and he’d rape her.

  He also introduced her to smack, and made her a junkie. Begging for it even as she lay crumpled on the kitchen floor. I’ll never call the cops, please give me a hit.

  She is in the prisoners’ box, this poor soul named Ginnie Littledear, awaiting sentence for manslaughter. It’s today’s opening act, we’re next on Madam Justice Colleen Donahue’s day calendar. With or without Beauchamp.

  Donahue is delivering her judgment on sentence. The range is anywhere from a suspended sentence to life. The defence counsel must have done a crack job last week getting her client down from murder one to manslaughter, given the open-and-shut case, so I’m pleased to report that sympathy does factor into jury verdicts.

  We’ll need all the jury softheartedness we can get, we of the Sarnia Seven, we who sit here bum to bum in the back row. Nancy Faulk settled us here before racing back to the hallway — she is having a bird over the great Beauchamp being missing in action, and is probably on her phone. The pews are packed: comrades in their Bee-Dazzle ware, diverse greenies, old radicals, lawyers, cops, about two dozen press.

  And Sooky-Sue. She is in the front row, just behind the prosecution table. Dressed down today, in a Panic Disorder T-shirt a size too small that calls public attention to her pointy, benippled boobs.

  This burns Lucy, of course, especially since she insists that’s an old T-shirt she’d left in Rockin’ Ray’s squat, pre-Sooky. The born-again bitch, Lucy contends, is laughing at her, rubbing it in.

  That’s because she spotted us yesterday peeking through a window of their alleged church during their paganesque Sunday service. I confess to this childish spying, though I only played a supporting role. As a lame excuse, we’re both stressed because Dr. Wenz returns in a couple of weeks. Lucy will be forced to sleep with Dick Two in his opulent penthouse. I will be homeless.

  Lucy says it’s time to move anyway. Easy for her to say. A couple of times, coming back from a night class, she’d spotted a lurker outside our building. Heavy dude. Toque and padd
ed jacket.

  I know where you live. In two weeks you won’t.

  Anyway, yesterday: Lucy and I subwayed out to the Danforth to the former Kingdom Hall, which is sandwiched between a Greek tavern and a tobacconist. When the front door opened for a couple of late-arriving worshippers wearing, yes, spacesuits, you could hear chants and songs and tom-toms. It looked dark in there, with maybe only candles going. Spooky.

  I totally get it that this sounds like a weird dream, the kind caused by smoking too much weed. And, in confession, Dear Diary, Lucy and I had shared a pipe of some locally, organically grown skunk just before this caper. During which the anarchist queen got so maudlin she needed windshield wipers. Two streams came together to create this deluge: she’s bored to tears with Richard Dewilliger-James and is still crazy in love with Ray Wozniak.

  So, anyway, we scooched around to the rear lane where one window didn’t have its blinds down all the way — the last six inches were open for the air. We had a dim view, from the flickering glow of a mega-widescreen TV, of about thirty recovering acid freaks dressed as if embarking for the moon. The chanting had ended, but the tom-tom guy with the Viking horns kept a steady, ominous beat. Looked like Rockin’ Ray, but I wasn’t sure.

  A high priestess in white, the Empress Sooky-Sue, fiddled with a balky remote, and here’s where it looked more stupid than spooky, as she finally profaned the Lord’s name, bent to the TV controls, turned the volume up. “To boldly go,” intoned young Bill Shatner, splitting his famous infinitive, “where no man (sic) has ever gone before.” Sooky tossed the remote’s batteries into a recycle bin, and that’s when she saw four eyes stare at her. She might have got to the window in time to see our fleeing asses.

  She knows it was us anyway, because Lucy texted her ex last night: Star Trek? How seriously fucked up is that?

  Meanwhile, Madam Justice Donahue carries on (“Regrettably, the jury tacked on to its verdict a recommendation of mercy, which I explained I could not legally countenance, let alone consider . . .”), often glancing at the gallery as if seeking appreciation: not from the Bee-Dazzle vulgarians, of course, but from the throng of reporters. Methinks she likes to see herself in print over coffee in the morning. Her vibrating nose makes you wonder if an itchy little creature nests in her nostrils.