Fiction 1, Chapters 1 & 2
"Canadian Shield" Copyright © 1993
Chapter 1
"...and the crax [is at war] with the eleus owl, the blackbird,
and the oriole (of this latter bird, by the way, the story goes
that he was originally born out of a funeral pyre):..."
History of Animals, Aristotle
BALTIMORE, MD:
Make no mistake! Wakes, especially Irish wakes, are the women's world.
Some might have called this wake by that name __or even an Irish Gypsy wake__ but those are distinctions that only outsiders make. We are Travellers, not Romany Gypsies. I spell that with a double "l," the Irish way, naturally.
This was a Traveller wake.
A grieving mother sat __stunned__ at the focal point of a small group of her immediate family. She was no more than a few feet from the foot of the second casket.
They might as well have been light years, so remote were she and I. Her pain was fresh, virginal, and in a way I envied her that. My own was not yet old, but still wizened and offering little comfort.
The mother to the dead boys __a widow as well__ was my mother's double-first cousin on her mother's side and her third-cousin, once removed, on her father's.
We are the only people I know to use the expression "double-first cousin" with any regularity. Contrary to certain reports, the Traveller language does not have more words for complex blood relationships than Eskimos have for snow and so we use English to describe that complex relationship __closer than cousins but less than siblings. Our own simple speech is called "Shelta" or "Gammon" in the old country and more commonly "The Cant" in English. It is a dying tongue just as we are a dying breed. But we've been such for many generations and we are still here.
So is the Cant.
The men who accompanied their ladies, while offering condolence, would bend awkwardly for a moment, murmur some version of, "Sorry for your troubles," then immediately desert them. The women loyally sat for their allotted time to attend the one who suffered most.
After a restless few moments of roaming about, the menfolk assembled in irregular ranks to pass the remaining time like idle camp followers. That might be at a neighboring saloon or, if none was available, downstairs in the smoking parlor, or outside around a few open bottles and an upside-down stack of paper cups.
But none of them went out that night. Not into that tempest.
At the front door, more just-arrived cousins were wedging their umbrellas into the several brass stands placed there for the purpose. Weather this evening was thoroughly appropriate and those stands were full. At times the back door even had to be forced shut against the violent thunderstorm outside. We tend to use back doors as a matter of course and we park our vehicles backed in, for quick exits.
I saw no familiar faces among the new people, but they were cousins nevertheless. We are all related to one degree or another.
Such minor diversions were soon blotted up by the dubious attractions of our assembly and my mind tried once more to return to the enigma of the two dead boys in their very own cold caskets. At times now their mother keened, calling in tongues for their departed souls, arms upraised and fingers poised to trace their spectral features. But mostly she rocked her body back and forth in silence, arms clutched to her sides, much too numbed by her loss to give vent to the waves of cold despair that shivered through her, a backwash from an empty future.
The suddenly old woman's wailing, silent or otherwise, echoed a pain that must have already penetrated to her womb, or from it; a pain that was not quite contained within that circle of women. And that which did escape cut right into me.
Yes, the pain of women is sharper to me than that of blunt men. I don't seem to care much about the pain of men anymore.
In any event, I was still not able to concentrate on the bare facts of their deaths, not based on what little we knew. I merely stood and watched while their mother's female comforters were released, one by one, only by the hushed introduction of another arrival. My male relatives were downstairs or, if freshly arrived, circulating through the crowd getting reacquainted. I alone seemed to be trapped in a miserable orbit around the caskets.
Once upon a time it was possible for me to maintain a half-breed's posture of cool detachment __even disdain__ toward this side of my heritage. But I need the emotional warmth of my clan too much for that now; though at some distance, it must be admitted. Too far, I freeze; too close, I decompose.
An Irish sort of vampire.
Time for a transfusion. I tuned in to the background noise. Torrents of conversation cascaded through and around the various clusters of our large gathering. Each member of a smaller group, never more than nine in number, was both talking and listening to all the other members simultaneously. And each such group maintained up to three separate conversations without faltering. That's not an exaggeration.
We are different from all other people in that way; among a number of others.
But I've already said that, haven't I?
I ask myself now: Was this wake much different from others I had attended dozens of times before?
Well __it was, I suppose__ but only in retrospect.
I lost myself then, submerged myself really, in the only world that still remained open to me, the babble of an affectionate family following a long separation. Soon, however, many more raindrops __fat ones, at that__ splattered onto the roof and were fiercely driven against the picture window behind me. The heavy drapes could not prevail and that smattering finally spat too many holes into our tumble-down trialogues for me to follow any of them further. The occasional explosion of thunder had served, off and on, as unfathomable punctuation __the funeral home sometimes shrugging in response. Now it was almost continuous __a bad omen, that; worse than bedlam.
Amid ten thousand flowers, the two closed coffins stood head-to-toe. I had examined the battered bodies of both young men only an hour before and no trace of the familiar could be found now in their remains. They were still boys at play in my older memories, terribly at odds with the torn and bludgeoned meat, stinking of formaldehyde and corruption, that would soon be laid to rest. Even afterwards, under the lily and lilac scent of the "parlor," I still imagined traces of that stench.
Still, I have to acknowledge that it left me pretty cold. That's a terrible thing to admit, I know, but I've lost almost everyone I ever loved and even the capacity to love.
Anger? Well that's another thing altogether.
Only a few months before that night, I myself had been killed. I was still fairly angry about that.
Younger members of the clan had been walking in for a few minutes now; arriving later, not from disrespect or disinterest, but from the need to prepare themselves. They might pull into the lot in pick-up trucks __some, in luxury sedans or sports cars. The males would have traded in their work clothes for expensive suits; their ladies all in beautiful gowns and elaborate hair-dos. And a restaurant had been arranged __one with a good band and a fine dance floor__ to hold the upcoming get-together in high style.
You occasionally read about primitive societies in which a hospitality-inspired bankruptcy is the mark of true nobility, and that there are many others which require the wearing of one's wealth as ostentatiously as possible. To apply either characterization to my clan would not be entirely justified.... altogether.
This wasn't any self-conscious celebration of death that night, however __nor of life, for that matter. This confrontation of those far poles was a matter of necessity, not philosophy. My people are the last true nomads in North America, and weddings and funerals are our stock in social trade. That is where our young men and women meet; where their elders warm themselves at the campfires of companionship; where caravans are made and un-made; where souls are struck from the rolls of living irritants to mellow into affectionate memories.
Such meetings tend to border a county line, in case the rudeness of local authorities might be encountered. Country Nidjee __that expression is one of our more polite way to refer to "outsiders"__ do not always share our sense of occasion.
"Good evening, Uncle John," I said. We were in the center of the parlor room, far from the sound of the storm and inundated by the raucous human noise around us. The latter is no problem for a Traveller, of course. "Sorry for your troubles."
John McGovern was not really my uncle, but being in his sixties entitled him to such a courtesy.
Actually, he was my double first cousin, once removed. His mother and my mother's mother had been sisters; his father and my mother's father had been brothers. We were also more distantly related through other channels. It gets complicated; so call him "Uncle" as I do. It's simpler.
To help make this easier, we'll mostly translate the Cant and Gaelic as we go along and then you won't have to concern yourself with it.
One other thing should be pointed out: If you are not a close personal friend of mine or a discreet relative __possibly a priest hearing a last confession__ something either very good, or very very bad, will have happened to me so that you might learn of this wake and its consequences. An unconditional pardon, perhaps; more likely, an unconditional and well-deserved funeral.
Here and there, I've changed the names to protect the guilty, myself primarily. And some elements were a tough call. Later parts of this narrative come only from hindsight __about critical events that I was not involved in or had knowledge of when they occurred. In the interest of keeping you informed with a minimum of chronological confusion, that means that you, at times, will know of certain events before I do; even though you are the Reader and I am the Narrator.
That's life.
"A sorry time, Richard," Uncle John declared, shaking his head. "A sorry time," he repeated. "How are you feeling, lad? God, you gave us a fright."
"About as well as can be expected, Uncle." I stalled; trying to remember how much I should admit to, and studied the older man's appearance __feigning admiration.
As usual, John McGovern's conservative attire, white hair and calfskin complexion fluoresced an old-money aura completely at odds with his bankbook. A wonderful potential for creative chicanery had been squandered on a low rent lifetime of short-con grifting.
The killer instinct for the big score just isn't there, but it must be admitted that he is unsurpassed in the clan for clean getaways.
In short __dressed up__ he might pass as the headmaster of a school for the privileged, a pampered millionaire or his equally pampered butler. But when greed turns to fear and anger, when the suckers turn sour, his bridgework pops out, the hair gets capped, three-piece suits get packed away and John goes to ground with the indiscernible proficiency of a woodchuck.
One more thing about him. He's a loner, not a leader. And I should point out here that the vast majority of my cousins are honest, if itinerant, craftsmen and tradesmen; only a relatively few of us follow my grandfather's trade.
"It's all right now, Uncle," I assured him. "Really! I've never been in better shape physically. The rehab worked wonders."
That was true enough for my body, if not the rest of me.
He winked one eye closed and examined me dramatically with the other. "Well, you're looking good, sure enough, except maybe for the nose there, but I want to talk to you now without that loudmouth hanging around. You saw the bodies. What do you think?" Leaning closer, his voice had lowered to a whisper.
The "loudmouth" was referring to another halfling who had been standing near me. That one had walked away; although I've heard the expression __we call it clob thusic__ whispered around myself a few times, as well. Actually, Uncle John had spoken to me almost entirely in Cant; words like munya soonying and rajd shmarrick, that I might as well mostly skip over, for all the good a line-by-line translation would do.
"What can I tell you, Uncle?" I murmured back. His comment about my poorly-set broken nose was easily ignored. "Neither boy had to out-run a bear; just his brother. Bears are solitary and a single bear would have only gotten one of them. Even for that one, the odds are that he would have survived if he had played dead."
He nodded slowly, his eyes asking for more.
So I phrased the question that he expected. "But, of course, who's to know that the faster didn't turn to help the slower, and get caught himself?"
Too slow for the head-master. He scowled at me. "You're not telling me anything even a red-neck __reff__ wouldn't know. What else did you see, Richard?"
"Nothing solid, Uncle; just that there didn't seem to be any bite marks. Crushing blows and torn flesh, but no bites. It's not right."
He wanted still more. "What else, then? The old women __he said beuers__ have named you dookerer, a seer. Prove it to me."
"Back off, Uncle!" I snapped back, annoyed. "The old beuers are just that. I soony nijaish __see nothing__ more than anyone else; anyone who looks, that is. And there are no dookerers who are gyucks. No man among us may be a seer; you know that."
That's been true enough, as far as it goes. If most men look only for what they can't see and don't really look at what they can see, they must have a mystery to explain it __something besides their lazy minds. Some among us claim that dooker is a loan word from the Romany. Not I! Whatever you may think of such fancies, the word is uncomfortably close to an old Gaelic word for the magic of the Druids. And a dookerer is one who dookers, of course. Since the time of St. Patrick, almost all our men have been denied that gift or curse, whichever it is.
But for all that my personal faith in such powers was slight __at that time, anyway__ I could hear my own voice take on overtones of the Voices that my grandmother had used in her work. It was a Celtic aided that I would relate, a death-tale that calls for a certain intonation and subtle vibrato.
"Both legs on both boys were broken sharply at the same place," I told him, "and before that, the bottoms of their feet were torn as though they had run barefoot on gravel __not from a stream bed; it was crushed gravel. Both arms on each boy were badly battered on the outside, Uncle. They tried to protect their heads from blows falling on them from both sides. The youngsters were gouged and torn __but there was no meat missing from their bodies. They died in pain and terror, Uncle, but their tormentor was no bear."
"Aye!" He kept nodding his head, and tears were slowly coursing down the dry ravines of his cheeks. "I'm thorryin you, boy, that poor mawker, my own dear sister, she mishlied right into the ruthie thasp herjielle while they were washing her poor karabd gossoons. No one could stop her, the rajd beuer, keenerin all the while like a Bean Sidhe."
I had been there. No translation. It's too personal.
He stared deeply into my eyes, demanding my attention and allegiance. "Jough me, sooby-yan __listen to me, boy! The Theenie, the People, thorry nijaish __refuse to accept__ this lishgael, __this crock of shit here." There was a loud "Slap" as the back of his right hand struck the Canadian report grasped in his left. "Someone must answer for this, boy! We be lajd cools until we grau tha luffee gammy-chat."
Uncle John's voice shook with suppressed rage. We call him "the Little Colonel," because that's what he sounds like, I suppose. And I completely agreed with him that we would be dishonored, __lajd__ as well as fools __cools__ until we had solved this mystery. "Lousy, filthy thing" is the literal meaning of luffee gammy-chat __and that turned out to be a better translation than "mystery," as it happened.
No more Cant, or at least as little of it as possible: I promise.
Still, I wasn't really about to respond that generously to John McGovern's call to action. Just before sloughing him off, though; just after one of those thunderbolts that are so powerful that they can only be felt, the funeral parlor turned inside out.
Not merely physically: impossible, that. But there are deeper layers to reality that occasionally infringe on the tripartite mind of Man; especially those of my lineage. We're all a little crazy even at the best of times, and this was not one of those.
Now there was no one present but She and I. All the rest __even the old man talking to me__ were on the other side of the Universe and well outside the membrane of the Wormhole that enclosed the two of us. The White Lady didn't speak, nor did I. No one among my people knows exactly who or what she is or was. She might have been the goddess Artio in the ancient stories of the Celts. And some say the Lady is only a fairy or perhaps a Bean Sidhe, pronounced "Banshee".
The thunder around us rolled on and on, and I was shocked speechless, even thoughtless. Only once before had I ever hallucinated this badly, except for the terrible dreams.
The dreams?
Later.
Her true form advanced from the body of Her avatar and one shivering finger extended to touch my chest, and then further __to seek for my soul. Disappointed there, the Lady left something of Her own that chilled my insides like the icy despair of the Æsir Hell. It was an unwelcome donation enveloped with its own comprehension, a burden that must be passed on to the living if these Traveller dead were to rest easy in sanctified ground __still at last.
Passed on to the living, I said. Not just any living, but to those who had done this. This burden must be returned where it belonged. I bowed in deference, unable to refuse. Still there was no fear of her in me. Nor any fear for my life or my sanity, for they are both long gone.
Then She withdrew from me, and the Universe reverted to its usual senseless condition, except for an echo of strangely prescient Shakespeare in my memory:
Here lurks no treason, here no envy swells,
Here grow no damned drugs, here are no storms,
No noise, but silence and eternal sleep.
In peace and honour rest you here, my sons!"
The world fell back into place with a clamor, drawing me back into John McGovern's declaration. My right hand grasped his left elbow tightly __I would have said painfully__ but Uncle John didn't notice it. He was livid with the need to turn the wheel. The cycle of true mourning could not be begun until we knew the truth. It was not exactly vengeance that he was demanding, but that was not excluded.
He provided the impetus and I, the direction.
John and his two sons, Mickey and Jack, were to meet me north of Winnipeg, near God's River, where the bodies had been found. The sketchy beginnings of a plan called for us to head north separately. John and his boys would scout the local serfs and generally be available for dirty work when it was called for.
If John's wife had been alive, I doubt if Mickey would have been allowed to go with him; just Jack, who is a hard man.
All we knew of the deaths then, was that there had been a priest involved somehow __along with some sort of scientific survey. So a half-Traveller, with some technical background and an educated line of bullshit, would come in handy. I already owned a fake passport as an Anglo-Irishman from Londonderry, with Canadian immigrant status as an entrepreneur. It would make a good cover; what we call a lishgael, the story that sweetens up a scam.
All of the proper documentation was there. It's one of my hobbies.
* * * * * * * * * *
Racking coughs from my captive audience snatched me forward again to the shadowed chapel and the near-present time. A sip of water helped him to control the interruption.
He asked,"What of Rome, then. What do you know of Rome?"
"This is my story, isn't it? Why not let me tell it at my own pace?"
He grimaced. "At this rate, I might die before you finish. Where would you be then, babbling to a dead man in an empty church? If I am to die here, it is my right to know why in a way that is meaningful to me." The priest was still as arrogant as ever.
"A last request?" I asked.
"Yes, just so. After all, you still consult your little calculator even as you ramble on about Irish wakes. It is obvious that you are still trying to understand these things yourself. Remember: Long before the deaths you speak of, there was a beginning to this for each of the others; for those who died and for those few who survived."
"This is a computer, Priest, and there's more data stored in it than I'll ever have time to comprehend, much less explain to you." I gave it some thought. "Maybe it would help to have another point of view though, another input into this. You want to know about Rome?"
"Yes, just so," he repeated.
Rome! According to the CIA intercepts recorded in the notebook computer, Rome's involvement had started in what once had been Yugoslavia.
The compact shape of a small, muscular man had been fixed in the trawler's bow, inclined against the strong head; the pea coat and knit cap were standard issue for the trade. Now his eyes, scanning the nebulous horizon, suddenly fixed on a decrepit tramp steamer at anchor, about three miles off the port bow. Those eyes were strangely pouched by a double set of shadows beneath each one.
There was just the one ship in sight, outside the small harbor at Korcula, an island off the shoreline of disputed Croatia. It could only be the Dardanelle, which he had come six hundred kilometers to board.
The short man, middle-aged and almost handsome, had worn a priest's cassock while in Italy, a land of priests, before donning seaman's garb in Pescara to cross the Adriatic. Both the Dardanelle and her Captain were thoroughly unwelcome in Italian waters.
That was one reason she had been chosen.
He knocked on the window of the small trawler's wheel-house and pointed to the rust-bucket in the distance. In response, the helmsman strained to turn the wheel counter-clockwise toward the indicated target. At an almost unprecedented fourteen knots, the noisy old boat had a great deal of rudder resistance.
No stranger to the occasional bit of smuggling, the trawler appeared about to bypass the tramp until it was close enough for the larger vessel to conceal it from casual observation on the shore.
Relying on the port-side bumpers for protection, the boat drifted toward the ship's starboard hull where a rope-and-step ladder hung almost to the surface of the sea. A surge of power and right-full-rudder at the last minute allowed the man in the pea jacket just a second or two to grab the rope ladder and transfer himself to the other ship.
Only after he was standing securely on that ladder did the small man __a land-lubber in any language__ look down at the crushing jaws of death beneath him. Then they vanished as the trawler stood off, and he scrambled up the ladder toward an opening in the railing above.
"Where are they?" he asked the waiting man.
The tramp's captain, a bulky, swarthy man with an unpronounceable Bulgarian name and mustache to match, made no comment in response. His eyes beneath the visor of a dirty cap were as dull as pond scum, not reflecting even an acknowledgment of the other's presence.
Then he barked, "Come!" and turned without another sound or even a gesture. He made for the ship's forecastle, leaving the boarder little option but to follow him. Three decks down, the other opened a bolted cabin door and waved him in. With an eye on the door's outside bolt, the smaller man, however, grasped the captain's arm in a surprisingly forceful grip and firmly propelled him into the cabin first.
The smell of vomit and other human waste was still strong inside, even though both the cabin and its single occupant had recently been cleaned with a strong pine-smelling disinfectant. A rope-thin man in sweats, white-haired and empty-eyed, the tramp's sole passenger sat still on the edge of a lower bunk. That desperate relic of a man grasped a small packet in clenched white fingers, while he chanted nonsense too rapidly and too low to be defined, much less understood.
There was no indication that this intrusion had penetrated whatever vision it was that had swallowed him whole.
The visitor said something but it too was incoherent.
The bully who was the tramp's Captain enjoyed the onlooker's discomfort. "Your man," he said, with an expansive gesture. "He says nothing but a name, 'Desiree.' He calls for her over and over."
The officer then stomped over to the sitting man and roughly grasped his slack jaw with a huge fist, turning the captive face up toward the single overhead light. The other paw reached beneath the neck of the sweatshirt and retrieved a small silver medallion, which he held toward the inquisitor as it slowly turned on the end of its chain.
A conventional religious medal on the front, with an oval shape and bas-relief, the back was enameled with a black Maltese Cross on a red back-ground.
"My God!" the visitor said under his breath. "Rico! What in God's Holy Name has happened to you?" In a split-second, he moved to confront the ship's captain, forcefully removing the heavily calloused hands from the seated man's face and property.
Looking upward into the bigger man's eyes, he demanded, "Where are the others." The seaman just shrugged; nothing revealed, nothing concealed in his glance. There were no others; the Roman knew that with a sudden certainty. The companions hadn't made it, he realized, only this remnant of a man who had once been his friend, almost his brother.
He turned back and then bent forward to listen to the chant that his old comrade was murmuring, trying to ease the small plastic box from that vice-like grasp at the same time. But the steel fingertips would not yield until he whispered and repeated a single phrase. The Captain strained but could not quite hear the key that finally unlocked the madman.
"Deus vult! For God and Saint John, Rico. Deus vult!"
The madman suddenly released the container. An expression of ineffable joy spread across his face __only momentarily though__ before he collapsed on the bunk. His friend and superior slipped the retrieved container into his pants pocket; turning back to face the Captain, who now held a large revolver pointed at him.
"What is it you want?" the Roman asked, in a very soft voice. "You were paid one hundred times over the passage for three men. You are making a mistake, Captain."
The swarthy sea captain __who was making a really big mistake__ merely gestured with the revolver's barrel, indicating the container just pocketed. The man under his gun removed the package and slowly, gently, tossed it toward him with a careless right hand, while the left reached out and snatched the uncocked gun, almost too quickly for the movement to register. His right, and then left, steel-capped shoe darted out and back, leaving shards of bone in place of the big man's kneecaps. They had struck with deceptive delicacy.
Their now-crippled target fell onto shattered knees, mouth gaping open with a strange, incoherent scream. And the formerly blank eyes were also shrieking with pain.
The Roman spoke again to the Captain, who had wound up lying on his side on the cold deck, almost formally. "Why did you not take it yourself?" There was no answer, however, except continued groaning.
Then the standing man took a garment something like a neck-tie from his jacket pocket and kissed it. As his hands reached up to place the cloth behind his neck and around his shoulders, he stopped suddenly and shook his head. "That was a stupid question," he said to no one in particular.
The report closed there. The demise of the Captain was a foregone conclusion, but not stated outright.
The priest now under my own gun said to me, "Your information sounds very authentic, my son, but I suspect that you are embellishing the facts somewhat."
"If I was truly your son, 'Father,' exaggeration would be the least of my character flaws. Let me get on with this in my own way, if you don't mind." But I then felt the need to make an oblique confession. "As any man of the cloth should know, bare facts are seldom adequate and often inconvenient for the telling of truth." I took a deep breath before continuing. "But now you must be curious about the trail you left behind and just how I picked it up."
He smiled indulgently at my self-importance. "One moment, please," he said. "Do you know who was the priest from Rome? For that was a stole, a priestly garment for Confession or the Last Rites, not a necktie." Oddly, this priest used Sacramental names that were now out of favor with the Church and no longer politically correct.
I nodded. "Yes. His name was Tedeschi, as you well know."
"And why was his last question stupid?"
"The madman was the only provenance for the container. Had the Captain removed it forcibly beforehand, it would cease to have any value for further extortion."
He pushed his luck some more. "And do you know what was in the plastic container?"
Again I nodded. "It was an 8mm. video tape cassette. And before you interrupt again, I'll tell you what the madman was saying over and over. It was 'Dies Irae.' You should know what that means, Priest."
"Yes. I do know it, naturally."
The man in the cassock chewed on the phrase for a time, nodding his head all the while. "It is the Latin for 'Day of Wrath,' of course." He smiled to himself then, although he was looking directly into me. "The Last Day, when the world will end."
Chapter 2
"She has left your love.
Is this so new?
Ere now many men
Death has severed from wives."
Alcestis, Euripides
FARGO, ND:
That's how I wound up following the Red River of the North toward Winnipeg, proceeding as fast as the law allows in my rented mini-motorhome.
The last time I had paralleled that river, it __along with its southern sister__ had bordered a lovely relationship in Texas and a loving relationship in the Yukon. That was springtime and I had felt alive, then.
Sonnets I had suitably written for both ladies were called "Red River," but each referred to a different river, of course. That the poems shared an uncanny resemblance, it must be admitted. A wanderer can frequently cut corners like that. That's part of the up-side, along with the excitement of arrivals.
The down-side is that each arrival is an omen of departure.
I haven't been able to write much poetry since the doctors brought me back all, or at least most of the way. I had thought at the time __in the shrieking police car, and on the cold, cold gurney__ that I was with my wife and that she'd come back to life for a little while in order to take me home.
It's a pity that didn't work out.
In a way, it's some comfort to know that the best part of me was able to go with her. I still read my old poetry though and then think back, trying to remember exactly how it was.
Maybe the absence now of a poetic sense is merciful. It blunts the loss.
Most people think "Badlands" when they think of the Dakotas __and in fact, that's pretty much on the money further west. But as the Red flows north into Canada, it falls gently through mostly flat country, the northern Great Plains. Either state is capable of inducing in me both boredom and exhilaration, exuberance and great despair, separately and often simultaneously.
Why was I getting involved?
I had no choice. The soul of a woman __orphaned, widowed and suddenly made barren as well__ had fastened on to me like a lamprey eel. Though I did not think of myself as alive or caring in any meaningful sense, it made no difference. She had made her claim on my estate and was entitled to most of what was left of me.
There are so few people left who are in a position, or care enough, to make any demands on my time.
The motorhome was chugging along nicely, even though it carried a fairly heavy load.
This time I was doing the decent thing by crossing the border as myself, a computer programmer-analyst and writer on vacation. The dummy paperwork was buried beneath a heating duct in the floor, sandwiched between the underside of the vehicle and the holding tank underneath.
The year before, it had been my misfortune to draw attention from the Treasury Department and the CIA and there was still a possibility that my current name was on an NSA "watch list." It's possible. Hoover once put every Quaker in the U.S.A. on that list __during the Vietnam war, I'm told__ and his President, Richard M. Nixon, a Quaker, was inadvertently included.
My weapons, on the other hand, were mostly in the open and available for inspection.
Irish Travellers are not generally violent by nature, with some notable exceptions whom I will not note, but my capacity for thinking of clever ways to avoid trouble has been found wanting in the past.
The motorhome was packed full with computer equipment and a specially modified dye-sublimation laser printer. As a state-of-the-art technical writer, the computers and hi-tech printer serve as my "typewriter," and Canadian Customs wouldn't look twice at them. All they required is that I would take the stuff with me when I left Canada. As if I'd leave them behind.
The real ace-in-the-hole, as far as equipment goes, was the modem. That's the interface between my computer and the local telephone system. Short of mounting a duplex satellite dish on the roof __and that would be a touch conspicuous__ my electronics could only function as an offensive weapon if I could tie it into the local equivalent of Ma Bell.
There is a genius at this sort of thing, an inveterate hacker named MacArthur Park, and he owes me big for getting him access to the CIA's system. Mr. Park is not named after the song, by the way; he's too old for that. He was born during the Korean war to a single mother of that race, fathered by an American that she would never name. Over and over again, however, Mac was impressed with her claim that his father was a "Great Man," a "Man of Destiny."
I don't know; that sounds like a tall tale to me. Still, I have to wonder who was their sponsor with Immigration. Mac has seen the records and he tells me that the sponsor's name has not just been erased. It had been slit out of the entry authorization with a razor blade.
My friend owned one hundred shares of Ma Bell back in the old days, more than enough to get him into a stockholders meeting. During the meeting, he extorted a major consultant's contract from management by presenting them with a hypothetical listing of a number of theoretical problems that they might have in their system. That list was accompanied by an equal number of quick solutions to said problems. None of it made any sense to Bell's engineering staff.
All of those problems occurred on the following day, and all of those solutions resolved them immediately.
Mac has gone on to offer similar services to the computer industry. You must have heard of computer "viruses."
Anyhow, he had designed a device for me that could be mounted under any telephone __including pay phones__ in the U.S.A., Canada or Mexico. There's a low-profile base-plate that magnetically clamps to the underside of the phone casing. Then it can be used from inside the motorhome for data or voice transmissions, as long as my rig is within two hundred feet of the base-plate/telephone and the "TV" antenna is pointed that way. The actual handset of the telephone feeds "circuits busy" type noises to the general public when I'm using it. Otherwise it works just fine. And so does the TV antenna.
I don't really know more than a little theory about how it functions. Mac had just mumbled something about "focussed nodes," or maybe he had a cold. At any rate, there are two of them and one antenna handles both.
A few other toys like my "black-box" are tucked away somewhere, too. That's an attache case stuffed with unauthorized empowerment to take candy away from all of the Baby Bells and their cousins. The Intelligence services usually call such devices "black bags" instead.
Then there's the shotgun. It's a Remington 11-87 Deer Gun; a twelve-gage shotgun in every way, except that it's equipped with sights. For hunting, naturally. And the back of the sights are suspiciously tipped with luminous tritium, for night-time work. And knives; after all, I'm camping.
It's the same with the hand-ax.
The small can of pepper spray is fairly commonplace these days and it says right on the container that it stops dogs. A larger can serves to incapacitate bears. The biggest canister of pepper spray is a real whopper for charging rhinos, so I painted it red and mounted it where the fire extinguisher normally is. A powerful stun-baton, 120,000 volts, was tucked away in my underwear drawer along with spare cans and canisters __by way of clever disguises.
"What is the purpose of your visit, please?"
"How long will you be staying in Canada?"
"Are you carrying anything that you intend to leave behind when you leave the country?"
My answers were, naturally, if not truthfully: "Tourism; two weeks; no."
The God-awful truth? Who would have believed it?
Winnipeg was almost a dead loss.
They hadn't run an extensive autopsy before belatedly embalming the bodies, and the death certificate was signed by some medical flunky, almost four hundred miles from the site of the boys' last breath. A truck had brought them both __wrapped in plastic tarps__ with an inadequate report of their discovery by a hunting party of local Cree, on the banks of God's River. That was in response to a missing persons bulletin circulated by the Mounties at the instigation of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese at Winnipeg.
The report of finding the bodies had been signed by a Father Rene Dupont. Checking with the Archdiocese, I ran into a brick wall.
"Who do you think you are?" she shrieked __the brick wall.
The Archbishop's secretary was also the personnel administrator as well as the High Executioner. It wasn't easy to tell what she looked like naturally, because some kind of cast iron girdle and bra combination molded her into an almost perfect cylinder from knees to neck. Almost perfect __there were a few bulges here and there. The shoes were oxfords, and that hair was a mousy brown wasp's nest set on top of what you might call interesting features; albeit, a touch pinched at the moment. The lady was somewhere in her early forties.
"Don't you realize what an imposition this is?" she asked. Rhetorically! Arms akimbo and legs astraddle; with the upswept hair, she looked something like a five-pointed star with a motley paint job.
Her voice had only two tones, exasperation and indignation. I had long since exhausted the first and figured to be about halfway through the second.
"It's almost five o'clock." She pointedly looked at her wrist; although she wasn't wearing a watch at the time.
"Exactly, Miss Guilfoyle," I agreed.
It would be interesting to see who cracked first, she or I.
"I've told you, young man. It is Mrs., not Miss, and Father Dupont is a very busy man."
"Ms. Guilfoyle____" I protested, or tried to.
"Mrs.; that is Mrs. Guilfoyle," she pointed out __again__ but less vehemently. "Please try to remember that."
"All right, Mz. Guilfoyle, I'll try. But Father Dupont must come out of the brush sometimes, right?"
"That is Mrs.; please!" The sonic intensity climbed once more while she fidgeted about her desk, pretending that she had something better to do. "It's bush, not brush, and he stays upcountry because of his schedule. And now, for the fourth time, neither the Archbishop nor I know where he'll be in any given week. Father Dupont flies his own small plane in and out of the bush where he's needed most. And no, you can't have a picture of him or any background information for your article, without his permission. He'd be very upset about that. He's really a very private man."
"Oh, I'm sure he wouldn't mind, really, Ma'am," I assured her. "The article is really more about the Church, you know, and the good work that you're doing up there."
"That's where you're wrong, dead wrong. His wishes are very firm and very specific about that. And the Archbishop has instructed me to say nothing about his background, as if even I knew anything about the man." She sniffed with resentment.
Aha!
I said, "That certainly can't make your job any easier, can it?"
There I was: someone who wanted to listen. At last!
"Of course not. If you only knew___." She ran out of steam, momentarily overwhelmed by the obstacles in her path. Then she picked up pressure again and chugged her way up and over a mountain of everyone else's follies. Eventually she noticed my continued presence, a little surprised that I hadn't disappeared in mid-tirade, like everybody else did.
A compassionate gaze and a little smile did wonders. Fluorescents make my eyes moist so I probably managed to look sincere. Then it was time to cut off a slice of somewhat cheesy charm and put it on her plate.
"I don't suppose that you would care to share a meal with a lonely man, far from home, would you, Madam? Please?"
She was flustered, about to stammer.
"Of course, you'll want to call your husband and extend my invitation to him, as well."
But it seemed that Mr. Guilfoyle had departed this vale of tears some years before. How predictable.
"Just as my poor dear mother did, Mrs. Guilfoyle," I moaned. "How I miss her."
It took a bit of doing but __after another twenty minutes of shameless begging__ the Mrs. finally slipped into a seductive horse blanket, turned out the lights, and pulled me out of her office into the night with the enthusiasm of a nose tackle.
"That lovely cape suits you, you know," I said truthfully. "There's something about the color that sets off your hair."
It turned out afterwards that the late Mister was not dead, merely departed, and not exactly late, but more like absent without leave. Sacramental wine took up the slack.
"I haven't had the opportunity to dance with an attractive woman in years. Do you suppose____"
She did suppose, but she had to lead. The wine helped to make her happy, and the dancing kept her too busy to become blissfully incoherent. As the evening progressed, she began to come into focus for me.
Her first name was Violet and I began to see in her something of the girl she once was on the outside, and still was on the inside.
"What's it like?" she asked, when we tired of going around in circles. "You know, to travel around and learn all about other people. And write about them, I mean. Is it exciting? Do you ever_____ My mother_____"
"Yes? Go on, please." She needed encouragement in the worst way. And not just to go on talking.
Mrs. Violet Guilfoyle looked down at the table-top for ten or twenty seconds, and then a young girl named Vi looked up at me. "Well. I used to write things in school, for the paper, I mean. And some poetry, too. I was quiet then_____ about a lot of things, you know. You'd probably have called me very shy, I think."
I had to smile at that a little. "You pretty well run the show at the Archdiocese; so you must have outgrown that."
"Oh, work!" She smiled back, shaking her head in denial. Vi had a chipped front tooth that gave her a slight lisp __a wistful sort of sound__ only when she lowered her voice for privacy. For me, it reinforced the illusion that our conversation was being carried out across a span of twenty-five years.
"I don't mean that." she said. "I mean_____ Well, I used to keep a diary when I was a child, for a couple of years_____until I was maybe fourteen, I guess. I'd write out everything I felt and things I wanted to feel and_____ Then_____ Well, it sort of disappeared one day, from my bedroom, and I felt just terrible."
Her hands were fidgeting, echoing the insecurity she had felt. I covered them with mine for a moment. "Did you start another?"
"No." She shook her head from side to side, in denial. "No, never again. It hurt too much to go through it again; just like I had lost my best friend."
And possibly her only friend, I thought. "Was that when you wrote the poetry?"
"No, not there. That was later." She blushed. "That was in high school. I kept them, poems, in my locker mostly. And I'd never sign them or anything."
I tried stroking her hand. Her memories of whatever had actually happened were barbed and hurt her terribly as they surfaced. "Why did you stop?" I knew that the poetry must have stopped one sudden day, one rotten day when young Vi had been buried alive and replaced by her mother.
"No reason." Her face was flaming now with shame and indignation, belying the disclaimer. "It's just that there's no real privacy anywhere, no place to get away and write what you really feel. Where nobody can get you and turn your heart and soul into trash with Magic Markers and chalk and writing on walls. My mother was right. She said everyone would laugh at me, and they did."
What could I say: That the shame of the past and the fear of the future would go away someday? They had lived with her for twenty-five years already, and would probably be the last things to kiss her goodbye.
And now I had to betray her, as well. The least I could do would be to make it painless, even if it took a little extra effort. "I think I know what you mean," I said, "at least a little. A lot of people are cruel. You give them your best and some of them throw it back in your face. But you never know which ones are going to act like animals and which ones aren't until after you stick your neck out. So you learn not to stick it out."
Vi nodded, her eyes glistening. And her hands grasped mine to keep her inner self from slipping back into the grave.
A lishgael __a lie__ was necessary, unfortunately. But I would try to make it a gentle one __a helpful, not a hurtful lie. A noble lie, if that is possible, one that made no false promises, one that would leave her feeling better than before.
"Well, Vi_____ To tell the truth, I never expected to run into someone up here that I'd want or need to confide in, someone like you. But I have to be honest with you. Let me start at the beginning...."
As it turned out, the lady knew nothing about the missing persons bulletin; except that a representative of the Order of St. John and Papal Legate __Monsignor Bruno Tedeschi__ had instigated it after a visit upcountry to Dupont's territory. Monsignor Tedeschi was from Rome but spoke beautiful English, "like Sean Connery."
Tedeschi had long since departed.
Well, aside from that, I learned a little bit about Father Rene Dupont that evening, a great deal about Mrs. Guilfoyle and a few more regrettable things about myself. Weirdly enough, I occasionally get the urge to send her some flowers, even now. So I do.
There was a continual buzzing of oversized mosquitos around the lake. Some of them were light planes, but __as they like to say up there__ most of them were oversized mosquitos. This place was one of the few worthwhile trade-offs that I had made with Mrs. Guilfoyle the previous evening, "Red River Aeronautics, Ltd."
Here was where the elusive Flying Father had his float-plane serviced __every ninety days or so__ and the last bill had been submitted for a valve adjustment and tune-up about two months before. It was also the outfit that delivered his necessaries to wherever he happened to be at the time.
There was no way that I was going to wait around a month for him, but it still was possible that I could get more of a lead here than I could from anywhere else. I made a start by looking over the bulletin board on the walkway leading to the landing complex at lake-side.
One of the cards stuck on the board behind the glass read "Aerovac Insurance, Ltd." __just the thing.
A Tessina was strapped to the underside of my wrist and it was loaded with high speed, high-contrast black-and-white film. Except to midgets and children, the wrist rig is very well concealed by my jacket sleeve. A small electronic flash or a polarized light source can be added, but they're seldom necessary.
The camera is a Swiss one, 35 mm., no larger than half a pack of cigarettes, and I've owned it for twenty-five years. The original shutter release and film advance have been replaced with a silent battery-driven set and it's activated by a simple radio impulse. That's sent when I squeeze a miniature transmitter __hardly bigger than a button__ with the other hand, wrapped in the snottiest handkerchief you ever saw. Everybody, but everybody looks the other way when I use it.
The lens is usually pre-set to focus to my middle fingertip, for more than symbolic reasons. Not that it helped in this particular case.
A nosy lady __a senior citizen__ cornered me against the board with a dog and a kid in a stroller. Her hair was dyed the same shade as the dog's coat. The child, a midget male delinquent even snottier than my handkerchief prop, was grabbing my right arm with one hand and vigorously beating my camera with a rubber nightstick in the other.
Her dog, a gay male Rottweiler __an excited gay male Rottweiler__ was sniffing my crotch with obvious intentions toward sodomy or mutilation __my choice entirely.
While her little two-legged devil was assaulting my arm, Grandmother __or whoever__ wanted to know where I came from, was I married, did I like older women, how much money did I make, things like that.
I interrupted her to holler at the kid, while I tried to peel him away from my arm. I grunted, "Where's your mother, you little b____boy?"
Granny must have had her good ear aimed my way. All of a sudden she shrieked, "My mother! My mother's dead. What do you want my mother for?" and then began to ram the stroller into the back of my legs as the midget hung on to my arm for dear life.
I tore my arm and my crotch loose, respectively, barely managed two shots with the camera for safety's sake, and ran back to my camper __taking evasive action__ in a panic. To this day, I wonder if it really happened or was just another symptom; it came and went so suddenly.
We all have our devils to contend with.
While the film was developing and I calmed down __a matter of about fifteen minutes__ I manufactured a dozen or so business cards, in my name, for a contract insurance adjuster that really existed. The (800) telephone number would be picked up by an answering service that didn't care what company the caller asked for, or I set up with them, as long as I pay my bills promptly. They even end every call with, "Thank you for calling (fill in blanks here)."
My identity would be Ralph Bournless for the occasion.
The service thinks that I'm an investigative reporter for the Watchtower, named Gerardo Laguna. So they have about as much personal interest in me as they do in inviting any other Jehovah's Witness into the house for coffee and conversation.
Within a half-hour, the dried negative had been scanned __its image computer-adjusted and sharpened__ and the appropriated logo and company name decorated an envelope and letterhead. That worthy effort authorized me to negotiate a generous payment for any and all of Father Dupont's claims.
I had spent much of the time between, peeking through the closed blinds to make sure that the unholy three were not tracking me down: the terrible tot, the horrible hag, and Fido the _____ What? Queen of the canines?
The scruffy office of "Red River Aeronautics, Ltd." was dominated by file cabinets and old, rickety wooden furniture that Scrooge might have bought second-hand in Dickens's day.
"What do you need, eh?" he asked __the pop-eyed, bat-eared, weak-chinned guy who looked like a tailor.
"Whiskey and women, in that order," I responded. "But that's not why I'm up here. You know that float-plane of Father Dupont's____?" He wasn't particularly pleased with my attitude right off, so we got down to brass tacks at once.
"Cut the shit," he grumbled, in a surprisingly deep voice. "Tell me what you want, so I can say no and get back to work."
I explained that we probably owed the Archdiocese money on some of Father Dupont's previous claims, then shuffled a few envelopes around until I came up with my handiwork. A pocket protector full of pens and pencils, a clipboard and a claims form all lent an air of authenticity to my fumbling.
"What's that to me, eh?" But he lit up a smelly cigar to chase away the bugs; a buying signal if ever there was one.
"You're the owner here, right? So, how'd you like to make a little dough, then?" He nodded twice, waiting for the sales pitch.
As he was the owner, I could pay him off in promises. "Look, when we pay off on wind damage or fire, whatever, we usually pay the check to the order of our policyholder and the company that's got the lowest estimate, right? Both names on the check, so the guy can only spend the money at the place we specify."
"Right. So?" He was not a man of many words, at least on the job.
"So this check's a sort of a rebate, but we don't have to make it out just to his name. You probably did most of the work anyway."
He caught on right away. "So he signs the check over to me and I give him a credit for future work on the plane." His toothy smile subtracted nothing from the gloomy atmosphere in the run-down office, because his teeth were even dingier.
"Yeah, that's it, pal."
"What do you get out of it."
"How about satisfaction for a job well done?" I figured that would give him a laugh, and it did.
He expressed his appreciation. "Bullshit!"
"Ok." It was time for me to be honest with him, kind of. "I get a little free time out of it if I don't have to catch up with the priest. I mean, Toronto's nice, all right. I got a nice house there and all. Sometime's though, you want to get away a little, you know. You know what I mean? Get a little action on the side."
That he believed.
"Thou shalt not commit adultery," he bellowed. Jesus! I thought I'd hit the sound barrier.
Backing off a couple of paces, I stammered an apology. "Hey look! I didn't mean to get you all upset. You gotta believe me: I'm a regular church-goer; a good Baptist. It's just that I've been fighting the Devil, you know, real hard for a real long time."
A little curiosity. "How long?"
"Fifteen years, I've been fighting him."
"How often?"
"Twice a week, maybe three times."
"Hey! You really do need saving." There was reluctant envy in his eyes.
"I promise, friend, I really do. Just let me get on with this job and I swear I'll turn over a new leaf and get home early and be born again with my wife. I really will."
"Good." He suddenly looked around the empty office, as if to confirm that it really was empty, and asked me if I had ever gotten __he scanned the premises again and whispered the word God didn't want to hear__ from any of my girl friends.
Some reluctant detail sufficed to glaze his eyes and sweat his brow. Then he gave me free reign over one of the company's file drawers and got lost for a while.
Between return phone numbers, letters and consignments, I was able to pick up a pretty good pattern for the cleric's travels __a pattern his omniscient Employer didn't seem to know. Dupont's old Super Cub had a range of almost 400 miles, even on floats.
Hello!
There were quite a few times around the first Monday of the month, for example, that the good Father had left messages to be called back at a particular number.
It didn't seem to matter where else he had been the week before.
The might-be tailor and lay preacher was back again, measuring a few boxes of air freight before he'd accept them for shipment __to make sure they'd fit through the small cargo hatches of his airborne flotilla. That accounted for the cloth tape measure that had been hanging around his neck, at least. I had been a bit anxious that he was going to sneak up behind me and check out my in-seam.
Joining him while he was getting some coffee at his office machine, I took out my usual passport to conviviality, a hip-flask with some serious Irish whiskey in it.
"How about a little liquid sweetener, my friend." It never hurts to be friendly.
Uh-oh! A dyed-in-the-wool, unregenerate fundamentalist of the worst sort of painful splinter sect in Christianity, he immediately spurned the healthy influence of alcohol for the opportunity to save my soul again instead.
I should have known better.
The bible-thumper's name was Oral, a word more suited to be an improper adjective than a proper noun despite the other fellow, the one with a terminal case of insolvency. But the theology he declaimed would have put Reverend Oral Roberts __indeed, the Spanish Inquisition!__ to shame.
Christ, in His Infinite Mercy, was apparently a back-slider.
"Dear Lord, God Above," he prayed, __on his knees now, and trying to pull me down to mine__ "Show this sinner the Way. Show him the Hell-fire that he's destined for __fueled by Demon Rum__ that'll fry him like a pork belly slab on a skillet. He'll hop and skip and sizzle for all Eternity, burning black as a nigger, with no hope of your merciful redemption __while we, the Faithful, look on his misery and clap our hands to the music of the Angelic chorus while his flames grow higher and higher. Speak to him, Lord. Tell him how you always sneak up on a man when he ain't looking and take him in the prime of his sinful life __not to mention loose women__ and throw him right down in the deepest Pit of Despair."
After a bit more of that, I started mumbling with him, finally getting in the Spirit of the occasion.
"Oral!" I proclaimed, with a straight face __somehow__ "You've changed my Life and shown me the Way." Having thrown my flask, with its precious essence of Irish Life, the Celtic Viaticum, into the waste-basket disdainfully, I struck a noble pose.
His bulging eyes had followed the path of the flask with parabolic precision. "It's just another everyday Miracle of The Lord, Mr. Bournless," he insisted, anxiously waiting for me to leave.
"Nevertheless, Oral, you were the means of my salvation __the veritable Finger of God__ and I'll never forget it. Now if only I could find a way to shaft this Papist Devil's Spawn and worm my way back into His Good Graces, I'd tear myself away from Demon Alcohol __that ain't no cheap Rum, my man__ and get about doing His Work immediately."
Oral applied himself to the Lord's Malicious Work so avidly that he shook. Of course, there may have been more involved in his shakes than enthusiasm. Or maybe he was a throw-back to the early Holy Rollers or Quakers.
All my hypocrisy got me, though, was a story of mistaken identity. How a visiting Air France pilot had claimed to recognize Dupont from the French Foreign Legion as a fellow pilot-officer. God's Chosen couldn't remember the name in question, and the rest of his Witness was useless to me; creative, Creationist perhaps, but useless.
So I retrieved my still-full flask on the way out, sloshing around the treasure within while his ears wiggled in time to my movements. "Next stop, Oral; Lourdes! Where we pour it in the so-called Holy Water at the Devil's Shrine. Oh, won't Satan rage helplessly at the Work of The Lord!"
But the poor guy didn't really believe me and his intense disappointment lingered in my heart for seconds and seconds, until the door closed. The Godly man's sincerity was in some doubt, though; he'd been licking his lips much too much.
That was the first Tuesday of the month, the day after Labor Day in the States. During the night __back in my camper__ a minor invasion of the telephone system got me the name and address that surrounded that telephone number. And an incursion into Winnipeg city proper stole me a Jeep 4X4 and two sets of switched plates to get to that telephone number.
Some copies of my insurance adjustor ID, properly altered, set up the background. It shouldn't be too hard to ask around about Emil Orlando in a little place like Elphingstoke.
"We don't like the way you look, white man."
That's not the normal answer when you ask a pretty girl, "What's doing in town tonight, eh?" But then again the frightened look on her face wasn't necessary to let me know that the unsolicited criticism had come from behind me. The cowbell over the door had rung when they entered __footsteps announced that there were three of them.
Three against one.
A fast, powerful shove almost sent me crashing into the shelving along the near wall and I barely avoided being trapped there. I swept a dozen or so stacked cans of motor oil into their path to confuse them and keep their eyes on the floor while I tried to get through to the door.
I'm not all that brave.
There were three of them __Indians__ and their intense desire to beat the shit out of me seemed to fascinate the store clerk. Mostly, they just got in each other's way. But I couldn't spare my hands for the second it would take to get to the pepper spray in my pocket. Then two of them were holding my arms, while the third took a hunting knife from hip sheath and waved it under my nose.
The clerk, a young white girl, ran out the front door.
This was the last place. There had been only six commercial enterprises within forty miles of Elphingstoke, but it took all day to cover them given the distances. It had taken most of the night to get there and I was getting a little testy from the lack of sleep.
The knife-waver looked around. Not seeing any witnesses, he said, "You've been asking too many questions, wise-ass. Say goodbye, man." He pulled the knife back to thrust it into my guts.
I snap-kicked the wordy knifer in the groin and he doubled over, grabbing it with his free hand, maybe like a rock star. The red-hot noise that sizzled through his clenched teeth was right in character.
The other two still seemed set on pulling each of my arms out, so I clutched a fist-full of each shirt, and did my best to sit on the floor. That "thunk" you read about really does describe it. Then I got up, just a little more slowly than I used to.
The bent-over Indian in front of me had managed to painfully raise himself up to his full height while I was involved with his buddies and threw the hunting knife at me; a little high, and to his left. I didn't even have time to react, and then he was reaching behind him for something else, fast.
The blade had stuck into a stack of Coke cases next to my head and I was getting a caramel-colored shower. There wasn't time to agonize about decisions, but there was just time to whip that knife through the air.
One moment, the horn handle was just to the right of my right eye. Then, in the next, it was sticking out of the boy's neck, while he whirled around in a spray of spurting blood. One of the carotid arteries then, not the jugular vein.
That's right: "Boy."
Now a dead boy, thanks to me.
My breath started to come short and fast, and I had to take a moment to slow down. Deep breaths. Hold them. Breath out slowly; then in slowly and deeply. Raise the shoulders to clear the carbon dioxide out of the upper lungs. Walk to the bathroom and splash some cold water on my face. Take some time to smell the roses. Funny, they smell like lemon-scented disinfectant. Maybe lock the door and never come out.
Like I had a choice.
Oh, the youngsters had a man's height and a man's weight __two of them had mustaches__ but none of them were over twenty and I was trying to figure out a way to let more than one of them live.
It was no use. If there had been store surveillance cameras, the decision could have been different, but not as it was. The only workable equation called for another death.
Either I left two dead bodies and a live suspect, or two live corroborating liars, two false witnesses against me for the murder of the other. There wasn't much time to think about it. The store with its single gas pump was twenty miles from anywhere else on a gravel road __but sooner or later__ the clerk would get help or somebody would stop by. The puddle of blood was already inching toward my right shoe. How thick it looks.
A less honest judge might have called the first killing unavoidable and the second inexcusable. I knew it was the other way around.
What else could I do?
You are at Fiction 1, Chapters 1 & 2