Friday, September 22, 1972
The vampire in the dirty green army surplus jacket and cowboy hat boarded the Canada Northern Star Charter Lines bus from Ottawa to Sault Ste. Marie at noon.
Jim Marks, who had been driving for Northern Star for twenty-five years and would retire early at the end of October, looked sourly at this late arrival. He was tired of waiting and wanted to get the trip underway. It was a long one, and boring. The total driving time would be nearly eighteen hours. There would be a refuelling and dinner stop in Toronto at five p.m. and another in Sudbury later that night. He wished he’d joined one of the majors years ago, bus lines like Greyhound or Voyageur Colonial, with normal, civilized hours and routes instead of old charter dinosaurs like Northern. He was too old for this job. He felt every one of his forty-eight years tonight, and his ass in the driver’s seat felt ninety.
“Ticket,” Jim grunted, extending his hand. The vampire gave him the ticket. Jim tore off the driver’s half and handed the remaining portion back.
Jim, of course, didn’t see a vampire. He saw a filthy hippie.
In fairness to the vampire, any man with hair below his collar looked like a filthy hippie to Jim Marks. The world was crazy. Between the hippies down in the States and that commie Jane Fonda carrying on over in Viet Nam and all the drugs and weird music-never mind the fact that you couldn’t tell the boys from the girls anymore-the planet was going to hell in a handbasket. If Jim Marks was the Prime Minister of Canada, the first thing he’d institute was mandatory haircuts for every male over the age of five.
The vampire took the ticket and moved down the aisle. His hockey bag banged against the metal armrests a couple of times. Jim resisted the urge to tell him to be careful. There was nothing to be careful of, but the metallic noise was annoying and Jim already had a headache and a long night drive ahead of him.
None of the other passengers noticed the vampire as he passed. No one notices anyone on buses unless they are exceptionally beautiful or handsome, or dangerous-looking, or extremely fat-in which case the potential seatmate can look forward to a very long, very uncomfortable ride. The vampire was none of these things. He was entirely nondescript-a bit more dishevelled-looking than the average bus passenger, maybe a little dirty, but not remarkably so for a passenger on a night bus through the mining towns of northern Ontario. He seeped into his seat near the back of the bus like cigarette smoke and settled in for the ride north. For all intents and purposes, he might have been a ghost-felt rather than seen, whose passage might have been marked at most by a momentary waft of air. Or, marked by nothing at all. He wasn’t sure what people felt as he passed, but he did like to imagine the worst.
In his seat near the back, the vampire covered his eyes with the brim of his cowboy hat and laid his head against the window. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep. If he slept, he would dream. If he dreamed-as he now could again, since he’d stopped taking the pills that flattened out his thoughts, rendering his movements turgid and his dreams uneventful and quiet-the voice would come to him and tell him what to do next. The voice did come to him, and he smiled in his sleep as he listened.
In Toronto five hours later, the vampire got out and stretched his legs. It was raining.
He ordered a hamburger, fries, and a Coke at a greasy spoon on Edward Street, not far from the bus depot, so he could keep his eye on it. He left his hockey bag on the seat, knowing that no one would look inside. He looked through the windows of the diner and watched the cold sluice down, dirty waterfalls of greasy urban soot against the glass. His gaze flickered up to the darkening argentite sky. The rain was intensifying. By his calculations-and he was nothing if not obsessively fastidious about facts-the moon had been ninety-seven percent full last night and would be entirely full when it rose tonight, and remain so through Saturday as he completed his voyage north. While the rain and clouds might try to hide it, the full moon would still be there. The vampire would know. He’d feel it rise and he would grow stronger and stronger.
When the vampire was finished eating his hamburger, he took out the paperback novel he always carried in the side pocket of his army surplus coat with the intention of reading it to pass the forty-five minutes until it was time to re-board the bus.
He patted his pocket, feeling an unfamiliar bulge there, and frowned. He’d forgotten he still had the fucking things. He looked around to make sure no one was watching, and then he took the grimy, nearly full bottle of pills out of his pocket, squinting to read the label. With a ragged thumbnail, he scratched off his name. Then he carried the Thorazine to the garbage can near the door of the diner and tossed it in. He glanced about again to make sure no one had noticed him. Of course no one had noticed him. They never did.
The coach was less than half full as it pulled out of Toronto at 6:15 p.m. Jordan Lefebvre was glad of it. He had his choice of seats. He chose two on the left-hand side of the bus, towards the back. He placed his guitar and his rucksack on the seat next to the aisle and leaned his bruised face against the window. The cool glass felt good against his swollen skin. The sun left the sky early in mid-September and the coming night rode alongside it beneath a shroud of rain as the driver navigated his way out of the city, turning north onto highway 400.
Jordan was seventeen, almost eighteen, and today he had run out of both money and luck. He’d heard the term “rock bottom” before, but he never expected to have reached it before he was old enough to legally drink and vote. On the other hand, today he was finally a man. He’d grown up hearing older boys talk about how great it felt to finally “lose it.” It didn’t feel great to Jordan. He touched his swollen bottom lip, probing it gently. He winced when he found the split skin and his finger came away wet and red.
Jordan had arrived in Toronto three months earlier from Lake Hepburn, a small mining town in northern Ontario that no one in Toronto seemed to have heard of-a fact few people he met there had ever allowed him to forget. He’d brought his guitar, a few changes of clothes-a couple of pairs of Lee Riders, some underwear, some faded flannel bush shirts, a spare pair of boots.
Lake Hepburn was one of the thousands of ubiquitous northern hockey towns where boys became drinking, fighting, hockey-playing men by their mid-teens, if not earlier. Men for whom two options existed: working down the mine, or joining the army. Neither appealed to Jordan. He had the bruises to show for it-those you could see and those you couldn’t. Towns like Lake Hepburn tended to scar their sons in the same way the mines scarred their fathers, a cycle of mutual exploitation that had gone unquestioned, generation after generation.
Jordan had always been his mother’s favourite. She’d bought him a secondhand guitar when he was fourteen and would listen to him practise for hours. She encouraged his dreams and told him he sounded like Jim Croce. Jordan loved her the way he loved no one else. His father called it beatnik crap. Jordan was a mystery to his father, a man with neither the time nor the inclination for mysteries, especially under his own roof.
Late at night, Jordan sometimes heard his parents arguing through the wall of his bedroom. His father’s voice would rise and Jordan would catch words like normal and wrong and dreamer and other boys in between his father’s raw profanity. Those were the times he knew they were discussing him. His mother’s voice would rise in answer. Jordan heard words like be someone and out of this town and success. And dreams, which sounded like a completely different word when his mother said it. Then the furniture would crash. Things would break.
One night when he was twelve, during one of their increasingly frequent arguments, Jordan heard the brutal smack of flesh meeting flesh. He’d jumped out of bed and opened his parents’ bedroom door to find his mother bleeding from the mouth and his father standing over her, trying to pull her to her feet. Jordan smelled the liquor from the doorway. His father stank of it. It seemed to be coming out of his pores.
“She’s fine,” his father was muttering. “She fell. It’s all right. Go to bed. Go on, get out of here.” His mother was trembling. Her eyes were wide open and she shook her head imperceptibly, silently imploring him to do what his father asked.
“Mom? Mom, are you OK? What’s happening? What happened?”
“I’m fine, Jordie. Your Dad and I were just talking and I tripped on the carpet and fell. I’m all right. I just bumped myself. It’s OK. Go to bed, Jordan. Don’t make a fuss.”
Jordan hadn’t moved. He’d looked his father full in the face, holding his gaze for a long, defiant moment, refusing to drop his eyes. His father’s flat, open hand began to rise, but it stopped in mid-air. That one time he thought better of it and lowered it to his side. As he looked down at his bleeding wife, Jordan could have sworn he saw a flicker of shame.
It would be the last time his father exercised that restraint, however. Jordan never saw shame again. It was as though seeing his own brutality reflected in Jordan’s eyes extracted too high a cost, one his father bitterly resented having to pay.
The beatings began a week later. They began as random slaps across the back of Jordan’s head for clumsiness or for “acting smart.” They evolved into whippings with a leather belt for chores not done to specification, or any other occasion when Jordan failed to live up to his father’s variegated standards of acceptable behaviour.
Jordan learned to stay out of his father’s way as much as possible, which, in a small house, wasn’t much at all. He learned to dress in layers, so the bruises wouldn’t show; not that he was likely to get much more than pro forma sympathy from the adults around him. In Lake Hepburn, the disciplining of children, especially boys, was a family matter and one best dealt with inside the family. There was one consolation: when his father’s belt came down across his body, raising welts and cuts on his ass and legs, he knew that his mother was being spared.
“Why don’t you ever fight back, you fucking little pissant?” his father had asked once during one of the beatings. He’d even managed to make the question sound reasonable. “Why don’t you try to take me? Why don’t you try to make me stop?”
But Jordan never fought back. He sensed on some primal level that he was paying for his mother’s safety by acting as the object of his father’s rage. Unfortunately, Jordan’s capacity to endure pain was remarkable. The beatings lasted from the time Jordan was twelve until he was seventeen.
The last time his father beat him was the night before got on the bus to Toronto three months ago. His father had come home drunk from the Legion Hall and tripped over a kitchen chair on his way to the fridge. He’d stormed up the stairs and woken Jordan with slaps and punches, screaming about his irresponsibility. The belt had come out remarkably quickly considering how drunk his father was. Jordan got the worst of it across his naked back and shoulders before his father, exhausted from his exertions, stumbled to his own bedroom and passed out.
Jordan’s one regret, that pre-dawn morning when he’d snuck out of the house with his rucksack and guitar and hitchhiked to the next town over, was that his mother would be frantic. He’d left a note in her sewing basket telling her he was going to be all right and that she shouldn’t worry. He had two hundred dollars he’d been saving for two years, plus fifty he’d taken from his father’s wallet.
When he’d arrived in Toronto late that first night, Jordan had checked into a dirt-cheap hotel on Jarvis Street frequented by hookers and their johns that stank of industrial cleaner and cockroach spray, and underneath that, pussy and dried semen. After a week in the hotel, his chest and legs were covered with bedbug bites. He’d found a “roommates wanted” notice tacked on the bulletin board of a bookstore on Spadina, not far from the university. Two men in their early twenties shared the apartment with a girl who was pregnant by one of them, though she was unsure of which one. None of the three seemed to find anything unusual in the arrangement.
“It’s all beautiful,” she said. “We’re all, like, one, you know?”
At that first meeting, the older of the two men, Mack, had been pleasant enough towards Jordan. The younger, Don, had regarded him with distrust. The girl, who said her name was Fleur, seemed entirely ambivalent, if friendly enough. After she’d introduced herself, she went into the kitchen and made herbal tea. She’d asked Jordan if he wanted some. He politely told her no. He couldn’t bring himself to tell her he had no idea what herbal tea was.
Mack told him, “There’s a mat on the floor near the kitchen. It ain’t much, but it’s clean. First and last month’s rent would be great if you have it. First is OK, I guess, if you don’t. You got a sleeping bag?”
“No, afraid not,” Jordan had said. “But I can buy one, I guess. Still cheaper than a bed.”
“No problem,” Mack said. He’d gestured towards the closet. “Brian left one, I think. He OD’d. Bad trip. He don’t live here no more. You can have it if you want it.”
Don, who was sitting on the floor stroking Fleur’s hair, suddenly looked up. He glared at Jordan. Then he turned to Mack. “Why don’t you just give the place away for free, for fuck’s sake?”
“What’s your problem?” Mack said mildly. “He don’t got a sleeping bag. We got an extra one. What’s the issue?” Fleur leaned her head back on Don’s chest. She closed her eyes and sighed as though this were a conversation she’d heard before, and it bored her.
Don said, “How old is this fucking kid?” He pivoted his head and glared at Jordan. “Seriously how old are you?
“I’m seventeen,” Jordan said. He smiled tentatively. Don’s sudden aggression had momentarily driven away any thoughts of the intrinsic creepiness of sleeping in a dead man’s sleeping bag. “But it’s OK. I have money for the rent. I brought it from home.” He patted his jacket pocket. “Right here.”
Don said again, “For fuck’s sake. Do we need a kid here? Are we that fucking broke?”
“Jesus, what’s your problem? He’s fine. In case you haven’t noticed,” Mack said, looking pointedly at Fleur’s swollen belly, “we need some bread right about now.”
Jordan said, “Hey, if this isn’t going to work out, you guys-I mean, I don’t want to get in the way, you know what I mean?” His voice cracked. He sounded like a kid now, even to himself.
Fleur giggled and, for the first time, gave Jordan her full attention. She smiled widely. “Relax, man. It’s beautiful. Don, relax, baby. It’s cool. The kid’s all right. Aren’t you, kid?”
“Yeah, sure. I mean, yes. I’m all right.”
She laughed. “You’re cute, kid. What was your name again?”
“Jordan. Jordan Lefebvre.”
“Nice.”
Don flushed a deep red. The cords on his neck suddenly stood out in sharp relief. He scowled and looked away while Jordan and Mack shook hands awkwardly.
“Welcome, man,” Mack said. “Don’t worry about the sleeping bag. We washed it. It’s clean.”
That afternoon, Jordan had returned to the hotel on Jarvis. He’d packed his rucksack and put his guitar back in its case. He paid the bill, and checked out. He sniffed the sleeves of his flannel shirt, catching a whiff of roach spray. His nose wrinkled in distaste.
As he set out across downtown towards the apartment, Jordan had allowed himself to believe, for the first time since he’d arrived in the city, that he might have some sort of future here, free of his father’s shadow. The July sunlight had been hot and bright. Jordan felt sweat gathering under his armpits and along the line of his back. He stopped and shrugged off the strap of his guitar, placing it gently on the sidewalk. He took his flannel shirt off and tied it around his waist. Yes, better. Jordan squinted, shielding his eyes with his left hand. He scanned the still-unfamiliar cityscape and assessed the quickest route to his new apartment and the beginning of what he believed was to be his real life.
He’d found a job washing dishes and occasionally busing tables at a restaurant on King Street that paid him just enough to cover his rent and keep from starving. His roommates, by and large, ignored him, though Fleur and Mack seemed to like him, which made him feel like an adult. Occasionally Fleur brought him a cup of herbal tea when she was making some for herself.
He sometimes caught her staring at him when she thought he wasn’t looking. Once, when she’d been looking, he’d turned to smile at her. She’d smiled back, but it wasn’t the sort of smile she used when Don and Mack were present. It seemed somehow private, somehow inviting, though Jordan would have been at a loss to identify exactly what sort of invitation was being extended.
On one of those occasions, he’d become aware of Don standing in the doorway. Don looked from Fleur to Jordan, and then back again. His eyes had been cold as two chips of black ice. Jordan had felt a territorial menace coming off Don in waves. Unlike Mack, who was always amiable, even if he seemed perpetually stoned, Don had never relaxed around Jordan. And he watched Fleur the way a wary dog watches a piece of meat-covetously and on guard for challenges to his primacy.
In the three months that he’d lived with them, Fleur’s belly had grown round and full. Jordan occasionally wondered what it would be like to be born in this apartment, not knowing which of the two men was your father.
He’d asked Fleur once, when they were alone, if she knew. She smiled at him and pressed her index finger against her lips.
And then, that afternoon, after three months of silence, he’d called his mother in Lake Hepburn to tell her he was OK. He called from a payphone in the early afternoon when he knew his father was at work. She finally picked up after six or seven rings. When she came on the line, Jordan knew there was something terribly, terribly wrong. Her voice was small, and her words sounded like she was speaking them through a mouthful of meat.
“I’m fine, Jordan. Are you all right, honey? I’ve been so worried.”
“Mom, what’s going on? What’s happening?” Jordan squeezed his eyes together against the images that rose in his mind: his mother’s careworn face bruised purple and swollen, her body crisscrossed with belt marks. Broken glass, broken doors, holes in the walls. I should never have left, he thought. I should have tried to take her with me, at the very least. On her end, he heard his mother begin to sob and he damned himself with guilt. I should have known that if I left, he’d start hitting her instead of me.
“Mom, I’m coming home. Right now. I’ll be there by tomorrow.”
“Jordie, listen to me. I want you to stay where you are. Don’t come home. I don’t know what he’ll do. He was real mad when you left.”
“Can you go stay at Aunt Lee’s?”
“I’ll be all right. Please don’t come back here, at least not now. I’m all right, I promise.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can, Mom. I’m coming home soon. Then, I’m going to kill him.”
Jordan had walked back to the apartment in the rain. When he arrived, Fleur was sitting at the kitchen table writing in her journal. She raised her head and pushed her long hair out of her eyes. When she saw that he’d been crying, she stood up, her face softening into an expression of concern.
“Hey baby, what’s the matter?”
The simple kindness of her question had threatened what little self control Jordan had still been able to exert.
“Ah. Nothing. Rough day. Lost my job,” he lied. “I don’t think this is for me after all. I should never have left Hepburn.”
She stood up and reached out her arms. He allowed himself to be enfolded, welcoming the tenderness. Then, Fleur was kissing him and unbuttoning his shirt. He kissed her back, at first with a virgin’s tentativeness and then with an entirely unfamiliar, instinctive aggression. He smelled patchouli and Halo shampoo as he pressed himself against her awkwardly, feeling the rise of her belly wedging them apart.
“Are you sure we should-”
Fleur slipped her tongue into this mouth, cutting him off. She ran one hand through his hair, still damp from the rain. She slipped the other down the front of his jeans, taking his cock-which felt harder to Jordan than it had ever been-between her fingers and squeezing it with an exquisite, expert skill. She undid the button and pulled his jeans and his boxer shorts down across his naked hips. He pushed them the rest of the way down till they were tangled at his feet and kicked them away, naked, for the first time, in the presence of a woman. If his nakedness shamed him at all, it was transitory. Jordan had three thoughts simultaneously. The first, that he was going to get laid-seriously and thoroughly laid- for the first time in his life. The second was that the first woman he was ever going to fuck was pregnant with another man’s child. The third, that he didn’t give a good god damn because he was going to get laid- seriously and thoroughly laid-for the first time in his life.
A fourth thought-that this was as dangerous as anything he’d ever done in his life, knowing that Don could come home at any moment- came and went in another wave of lust.
When Fleur shrugged off the bathrobe she wore, Jordan saw she was completely nude. Her belly arched gently outwards from a body that was more slender than he would have expected, freed of the smocks and baggy shirts she’d worn during the time he lived there. Jordan marvelled at the pale curves of her body, the swollen breasts and the soft delta between her legs, almost hidden by the press of her belly. When she knelt down and took his cock in her mouth, he thrilled at the unfamiliar sensation of her mouth and tongue on a part of his body that only he had ever touched.
She’s beautiful, Jordan thought, surprised. He realized that he had expected her body to look grotesque and distended in its fecund state, but he’d never seen anything as desirable in all of his seventeen years. He put his hands on her upper arms and awkwardly raised her to her feet, leaning forward to kiss her. The feeling of his cock against her flesh made him light headed. He reached out tentatively and touched her breasts. She moaned softly in response and arched her back, offering herself further. Her nipples were moist with fluid lactate that tasted sweet against his tongue.
He allowed himself to be led to the bedroom she shared with Mack and Don. Fleur lay down on the bed. Jordan spread her legs with his knees and pressed himself between her legs.
“No,” she whispered, as he started to grind. “Slow down. Not like that.” She climbed on top of him and gently lowered herself on him. Jordan gasped as he slipped inside her. “Like this. Slow. Yes, slow down. Good. Yeah.”
“I love you,” he blurted out, realizing, even as he said it, how ridiculous he sounded. But at that moment, he was telling the truth. He loved her. He’d never loved anyone so much in his life. He laid his hands over her belly.
“Hush,” Fleur said. “Don’t talk. Just fuck me.”
“This is my first-I mean, I never-” Jordan wasn’t sure if he was apologizing to her or warning her, but it was suddenly very important that she know he was a virgin.
Fleur whispered in his ear, “Oh baby, I know. That’s all right.” She put her hands on his ass and guided him into her. “Like this. Now, just go with it.”
When he came, Jordan cried out, a sound from deep in the back of his throat, one that sounded foreign even to him. He felt himself dissolving, as though everything from his waist down had become insubstantial. He shouted again, this time as his body shook with erotic aftershock.
He was drenched in sweat. Rivulets of it ran from his hair into his eyes, making them sting. He was suddenly terribly thirsty.
“I need a glass of water,” he said, inclining his head towards Fleur. “Do you want one?”
“Yeah, please.” Her voice sounded very small. She gathered the sheets and blanket around her body and rolled away from him, staring at the wall.
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah. You’d better get dressed. Don will be coming home soon.”
“Yeah, you’re right.” Jordan looked at her again. “Are you sure you’re OK? You don’t sound it. I mean, you wanted to, right?”
“Yeah, I wanted to. Hurry up, now. Get our water, and get dressed.”
Jordan was halfway back across the kitchen floor with two glasses of water, still naked, when he heard the sound of a key in the lock. He looked back over his shoulder into the bedroom. Fleur was sitting upright on the bed, her mouth a perfect oval of terror.
The door swung open and Don stepped across the threshold. Jordan smelled the whiskey even before Don looked up and saw him standing there, frozen in place. Don took in Jordan’s nakedness, the two glasses of water, and Fleur on the bed with the covers gathered around her.
“What the fuck? You whore! And with this fucking kid?” He whirled to face Jordan. “You little piece of shit, I’m going to fucking kill you.”
Don drew his arm back and slapped Jordan across the face. Jordan’s vision went white, and the two glasses of water shattered on the floor. When Jordan stumbled backwards, pain singing through his head, Don punched him, knocking him to the floor. Jordan felt the broken glass cut into his palms as he tried to stand. Don clenched his fists and turned, stumbling, towards the bedroom.
Fleur screamed. “Don, it didn’t mean anything! Don’t hit me! The baby! Don’t hurt the baby!”
Don leaned down so his face was inches from Fleur’s. “Who’s fucking baby is it, you whore? Is it mine? Is it even Mack’s? How many other guys have you been fucking while we’ve been out busting our asses trying to keep a roof over your head? You slut!”
Jordan stood up. His nose was bleeding and his left eye and bottom lip were swelling shut. “Leave her alone,” he said thickly. “Get away from her, you asshole.” Don turned towards Jordan, his face contorted with rage. A line of snot ran from Don’s left nostril. Jordan was again assailed by the familiar smack of sour whiskey on his breath.
“What did you say, you little-”
Jordan hit Don as hard as he could with his closed fist. It was a perfect punch, an instinctive punch, the sort of punch he’d seen his father throw back home. It took them both by surprise. Don fell backwards and crashed into the bedroom closet. To Jordan, the splintering sound of the cheap plywood slats as they snapped beneath Don’s weight was deeply satisfying. He grabbed Don by the hair and pulled him to his feet. Then he hit him again, and again.
He hit him the way he’d always wanted to hit his father-not only for what he’d done to Jordan, but for what he’d done to Jordan’s mother.
He beat Don until his face was a pulpy mash of red, and until he thought he felt the bones of his face about to yield.
Fleur screamed. “Oh my God, Don! Don!” She took a step towards Don, still clutching the sheets against her body. “Jesus, baby! Are you all right? Jesus!” She reached for him. He slapped her hand away.
“Don’t fucking touch me.” He got to his feet and wiped the blood from his mouth. He pointed a finger at her. “I’m going for a walk. If this fucking kid isn’t gone when I get back, I will be. You and Mack can raise the baby on your own, whoever’s baby it is. And you,” he said, turning to Jordan, “go back to whatever shithole you came from. You don’t belong here.”
Jordan heard the front door shut and the sound of Don’s feet on the stairs, then the fainter slam of the door to the street.
“You need to get out of here,” Fleur said, staring past him to the door. Her face was ashen and there was an edge of hysteria in her voice. “He can’t leave me. He just can’t. You have to go.”
“Go? Where?” Jordan screamed. “Where am I supposed to go?”
Fleur was moaning now. “It’s his baby. I need him. You have to leave. Get dressed, for God’s sake, and get out of here.”
“I thought you said it was everybody’s baby?” He reached for his jeans and pulled them on. “He’s going to hit you again, you know. You and this kid you’re about to have.”
“Oh, God, I’m sorry. Look, it was a mistake. It was nice, you’re a great guy, but… look, get dressed. You have to leave. He’ll be back in half an hour, I know him. If you’re here, he’ll leave me and the baby.”
“What about Mack?”
“What about Mack? It’s not his baby. He won’t be able to help me take care of it!”
“What, you fuck me, then when I save you from that asshole, you throw me out? That was my first time, you crazy bitch! Jesus. Where am I supposed to go? I don’t know anyone else in this shitty fucking city. I don’t have any money, and I don’t have anyplace to go! What’s wrong with you?”
“I don’t know, go back home. Go back to your hometown. You said yourself it wasn’t working out here for you here. You said you lost your job, right? You can go back to that town you’re from. What’s it called? Lake Huron? You can go there, can’t you?”
“I can’t even afford a bus ticket home,” Jordan said dully.
Fleur spoke quickly. “There’s a hundred dollars in the bottom drawer.” She gestured frantically towards the dresser. “It’s inside the peanuts can, under my clothes. Go look. It’s under those sweaters.”
It took Jordan less than fifteen minutes to pack what little he’d brought to the city, and since he’d accomplished nothing, been nowhere, and done nothing, he had nothing to take back with him except what he’d brought. When Fleur left the room, Jordan lifted a half-full bottle of rye from the nightstand beside the bed that he hoped was Don’s and quickly tucked it into his bag.
In the bathroom, he gingerly washed his face with cold water. He winced, marvelling at how quickly the wounds from Don’s fists had bloomed under his cheek and beneath his eye. The blood had stopped, but he looked rough as hell. There was a bottle of prescription painkillers on the upper shelf in the medicine cabinet. The prescription was made out to “Benson, Don,” he noted with grim pleasure as he put the bottle in his knapsack. Jordan would need it later, he was sure. His nose probably wasn’t broken, but Don had hit him pretty hard. It was starting to hurt like hell. He hoped Don felt worse than he did and that he’d go looking for these pills as soon as he came home from his round-the-block sulk.
Piece of shit, Jordan thought. These people are crazy. Especially Fleur. Crazy bitch. They’re all crazy bitches. They marry men that hurt them and kick the ones who don’t hurt them out the door. And when the kid is born, he’ll be next. Just like I was.
He heard her knocking on the bathroom door as he turned off the faucet and dried his face on the dirty towel hanging over the bathroom curtain.
“Are you OK in there? Come on, Jordan, you’ve got to leave. He’ll be home any minute.” She was dressed in her smock again, and it looked like she’d run a comb through her hair. Her eyes were puffy from crying, but she was visibly calmer, more like the flower power “it’s all beautiful” freak chick he’d met three months ago.
“One question,” he said in the doorway. “Why? Why me? Why now?”
She shrugged. “I liked you. You’re cute. Don and Mack, you know… Well, we’re all going to be together once the baby is born, and I thought-”
He cut her off. “He’s going to hurt you. And he’ll hurt the baby. He’s not going to stop.”
Fleur shook her head. She smiled blankly and said, “No, he’s not like that. I just made him jealous. He’s never like that. He’d never hit me.”
Half an hour later at the bus depot, Jordan asked the ticket vendor when the first bus for Lake Hepburn was leaving. He told Jordan there was a Greyhound departing for Sault Ste. Marie at midnight with a stop in Lake Hepburn just after 5:00 a.m.
At some point between the apartment and the bus depot, it occurred to Jordan that he had very likely committed a crime by beating Don as badly as he had. A crime that Don could report to the police, one that could land Jordan in jail. And if he was in jail, he could kiss off any chance of saving his mother from his bastard father. He looked around the station guiltily, half-expecting to see police officers coming through the doors, pointing at him and drawing their guns.
“Anything before that?”
The ticket vendor looked up and raised his eyebrows when he saw Jordan’s bruises. “Not a fan of our great city, I see. Okie-dokie, just a minute.” He checked the schedule again. “Well, lookie here. There’s a Northern Star bus leaving in an hour. Ticket’s almost half the price.” He leaned closer to Jordan. “It’s sort of an old bus, kid. Not real comfortable. If you wait for the Greyhound, you’ll have a smoother ride. You look like you could use it.”
Jordan said, “I’ll take the Northern ticket, please.”
The vendor sighed. “Round trip or one way?”
“One way, please,” Jordan said. He paid for the ticket and went to wait on one of the benches near the platform.
Jordan boarded the bus at six p.m., making his way to the back where, as fate would have it, he met the vampire, who was sitting in the opposite row of seats.
He smiled sympathetically at Jordan and said, “I hope you made the other guy look worse, at least?”
Jordan turned his head. “Excuse me?”
“Your face. It looks like you were in a fight.” Jordan thought the man might be in his late thirties, certainly no older than forty. He was darkhaired and clean-shaven, but his face had a thick five o’clock shadow. “Was it over a girl?”
“Yeah, it was a bad fight,” Jordan said. “And it was over a girl. And the other guy did look worse. A lot worse.”
“My name’s Richard,” the man said, extending his hand across the aisle. “Richard Weal. My friends call me Rich.”
“Hi, I’m Jordan.” He shook Weal’s hand warily. He wasn’t used to talking to strangers, but since the ride was going to be a long one, he figured it was better to be friendly than not, if only to ensure a peaceful trip.
Weal smiled. “Where’re you headed?”
“Lake Hepburn,” Jordan said. “Just before Sault Ste. Marie.” He shrugged off his jacket and put it on the seat next to him. Feeling obligated, he asked. “How about you? Going far?”
“A town called Parr’s Landing,” Weal said. “It’s been a long ride for me. I’ve been riding this bus since Ottawa. That’s five hours already. I can’t feel where my back ends and this seat begins.”
“Never heard of it,” Jordan said. He shrugged. “I mean Parr’s Landing, not Ottawa. You have family there, in Parr’s Landing?”
“It’s near Marathon.” Weal smiled again, revealing a mouthful of yellowish teeth that looked like they hadn’t been brushed in days. “On Lake Superior. In the bush. In the middle of nowhere, truth to be told.” Weal laughed, an abrupt high giggling screech of hilarity entirely out of sync with the rest of his delivery. “I used to live there a long time ago. I’m an archaeologist. I’m doing a PhD at the University of Ottawa on the history of the Jesuit settlements in northern Ontario during the seventeenth century. Or rather, I was. I took a bit of a sabbatical, for health reasons. But I’m going back to complete some of my research.” He patted his hockey bag. Jordan saw that his nails were filthy, the cuticles crusted with what looked like dried mustard and ketchup.
“So… you got family there?” Jordan repeated, more out of politeness than anything else. He’d not finished high school by the time he escaped his family tumult in Lake Hepburn and he had no idea what a PhD was. He was having a hard time following the conversation. He wondered if he’d taken more of a hit than he’d thought when he landed on the floor. His head was beginning to pulse in earnest. “I mean, in Parr’s Landing.”
Weal smiled at that. “Blood family.” He covered his mouth with his hands and giggled again. “The best kind.”
“Sorry, what?”
“Never mind.” Weal held up a thick sheaf of papers bound with a heavy clip. “I’ve been re-reading the manuscript of this book I’m writing. I’ve been editing it. It’s going to come true soon.”
“It’s going to what?”
Weal leaned close enough to Jordan’s face for Jordan to smell his breath, which was quite foul. “I said, it’s going to be published soon.” His eyes narrowed. “Why, what did you think I said? Are you hard of hearing?”
Jordan pulled back, nauseated by the odour of Weal’s breath. “Sorry,” he said. “My head hurts pretty bad. You know, the fight.” He decided then to bring the conversation to a close. He wouldn’t have felt like talking, even to someone less unkempt and, frankly, weird. He wanted to sleep. He felt like shit and he wondered if maybe Don hadn’t actually managed to break his nose after all. He looked up the aisle, but all the free seats were in the back, where he already was. He couldn’t easily move without calling attention to his desire to distance himself from Weal and he had no desire to antagonize him, or otherwise engage his attention beyond what he still hoped was just small talk. “I think I’m going to close my eyes, Rich.” He yawned in an obvious way he hoped didn’t look too fake. “I’ll talk to you in a bit, OK? You can tell me more about your book.”
“Oh, of course, young sir,” Weal replied. He had removed the clip and was turning the pages. His nose was pressed so close it was almost touching the paper. “I do apologize for rambling a bit. It’s been a long day. I’m a bit knackered myself.” He smiled. “That said, I’ve got my book. And my tools.” He patted the hockey bag again. “Would you like me to wake you up when the driver stops in Sudbury for dinner? I imagine we’ll all be quite famished by then.”
“Sure,” Jordan lied. “Please do.” He leaned his bruised face against the cool glass of the bus window and closed his eyes. He promised himself that when the bus stopped in Sudbury, he was going to change his seat as unobtrusively as possible.
There was a crest on the first page the freak had waved at me, Jordan thought aimlessly. And it said University of Toronto. Not University of Ottawa. And then he chastised himself. Stupid thing of you to notice. Like you’d ever wind up in either of those places, you big dummy. What do you know about any of that shit?
His face hurt like hell. Then he remembered the painkillers he’d stolen from Don’s bathroom. He reached into his knapsack and took out two of the pills. He swallowed them dry, trying in vain to work up a mouthful of spit to ease their passage down his throat. He gagged at the acrid dry taste. He remembered the whiskey in his bag and took a long pull straight from the bottle. He shivered, his eyes watering. His face really hurt. He took another pill out of the bottle, considered it for a moment. He knew nothing at all about drugs, or what might constitute an overdose, and was flying blind. What the hell, he thought, and popped it in his mouth. He took another swig of the whiskey, and another. The amber liquid seared his throat, the heat travelling down through his body to his empty stomach, radiating outward towards his extremities, leaving him light-headed and warm.
The pills had an immediate effect. A slide show of mental images flickered across the screen of his mind-his mother, his father, Fleur, their lovemaking, and, of course, Richard Weal. Jordan’s lips and jaw felt numb, and he was utterly relaxed.
Outside, the city was consumed by the night and vanished entirely, leaving an eternity of highway stretching north as far as he could see. Only distant neon stars, rendered opalescent by the rain, broke the blackness. Lulled by the motion of the bus beneath him, Jordan yielded to the barbiturate admixture of painkillers and whiskey coursing through his system. He closed his eyes again, and slept.
The bus travelled a north-northwest route along the Trans Canada Highway towards Georgian Bay, exiting onto highway 69, continuing north around Georgian Bay towards Parry Sound. The rain stopped, giving way to thick fog that drifted in from the rolling farmlands on either side of the highway, which then gave way to tracks of young pine forest.
The moon, which had begun its ascent hours before in the rain, came out from behind the scudding black rain clouds, frosting the road on either side of the bus with silvery light.
In Barrie, a mother and her five-year-old daughter boarded, and in Parry Sound, four passengers who’d boarded in Toronto disembarked. But no one from Parry Sound boarded. After five hours, the bus pulled into Sudbury for a half-hour refuelling stop.
Jordan slept through Jim Marks’s announcement that all passengers could step out, stretch their legs, and get something to eat at the diner next to the terminal.
No one boarded after the break, Jim noted sourly. His mouth tasted like bad coffee and cigarettes and his back ached. He felt his jacket pocket for the Dexies he kept there. He hated using the amphetamines, mostly because of what they did to his stomach. Though at his last physical, Doc Abelard had warned him that the Dexies, in conjunction with his hours, the cigarettes, and the forty extra pounds he was carrying around his waist wasn’t doing his ticker any favours. Just as a last resort, Jim told himself. Don’t want to fall asleep and crash this old bitch before I get a chance to collect my pension.
He looked back. He counted five passengers in the back of the bus as he pulled out of the lot: an old lady sitting two rows behind him who had asked him three times already “just to be sure” that he was stopping in Whitefish; the teenage boy sleeping against the window halfway to the back who hadn’t gotten out at the Sudbury stop; the tired young mother with her little girl-Missy, he’d heard the woman call her back at the dinette; and the guy in the very back row reading a book. Come to think of it, Jim thought, that guy didn’t get off the bus in Sudbury to stretch his legs, either. One of them-the kid, he thought-was getting off in Lake Hepburn. The other guy had bought a ticket all the way to Sault Ste. Marie.
There were fewer and fewer passengers on the northern routes, Jim realized, and he wondered how long Northern Star would be able to hold out. His retirement wouldn’t come a moment too soon.
Jim turned the bus west on Highway 17 and repeated the name of the coming towns like a mantra: Whitefish, Spanish, Serpent River, Thessalon, Garden River, Lake Hepburn, Sault Ste. Marie.
It would be hours yet before dawn. It was going to be a long fucking night.
At 4:15 a.m., Jim Marks pulled the bus over to the side of the road to investigate what he feared might be a flat tire on the right side. He took his parka down from the overhead compartment, put it on, and stepped outside.
Overhead, the full moon shone down like a headlight. The thought came to him-as it happened, one of the last thoughts he would ever have-that he’d never seen a night this bright and clear up north. The radius of the moon’s light aureole was such that while the larger sky was as blackest black, the area around the moon itself was indigo blue.
He shone his flashlight along the undercarriage of the bus. The tires were all intact and none were damaged. He shrugged. Whatever he had heard and felt, at least it wasn’t a flat. He’d include the incident in his report and the mechanics could check it out when they pulled into Sault Ste. Marie. He checked his watch. They’d only lost fifteen minutes. He stepped back onto the bus and looked down the aisle. The passengers seemed to have slept through the stop, which, given that most bus passengers on long routes were light sleepers, was itself a miracle.
Jim settled himself into his seat. He fastened his seat belt and started the engine.
In his peripheral vision, he caught an abrupt flurry of motion in the rearview mirror and looked up.
The man in the army surplus jacket from the back of the bus wasn’t asleep at all. He was wide awake. He was running along the aisle of the bus with spider like agility, past the sleeping teenager, past the woman and her little girl, towards the driver’s seat.
Jim opened his mouth to tell the man to go back to his seat and sit down, but nothing came out. Then, suddenly, the man was directly behind Jim and drawing back his arm. In his hand, he held something long that gleamed in the overhead light of the cabin. The last thing Jim Marks saw was a flash of silver in the gloom as the man’s arm came down viciously in a wide arc.
Jim threw his arms up to protect his face, but it was too late. There was a short, blinding sheet of white-hot pain and sharp pressure as the chisel end of the archaeological rock hammer split open his skull, but his conscious mind barely had time to register it as pain. He was dead before he hit the floor.
Jordan was jolted awake as the bus swerved on the highway. For a moment he didn’t know where he was. He’d been dreaming that he was caught in a thunderstorm, or an earthquake. There had been the sound of thunder and of a woman singing some sort of high-pitched, screaming lament. It had been a harsh, unpleasant sound-one that, even asleep, had filled Jordan with dread.
He blinked and looked around him. Then he felt his face begin to throb, and he remembered that he was on a bus.
Jordan looked down at his watch. It was five a.m. His mouth was parched. He half-stood in his seat and looked around. The darkness inside the bus was complete except for the green glow coming from the dashboard. Squinting, he could make out the shape of the bus driver hunched over the steering wheel, but nothing else. He tried to remember what time they’d left Toronto-six? Six-thirty? It was now five in the morning. They weren’t due to reach Lake Hepburn till after six. And had the bus been full? He tried to remember-half full? A quarter full? He switched on the overhead light above his seat. The weak bulb illuminated nothing besides his seat and the seat next to his.
The bus was moving very slowly and he heard gravel under the wheels. Gravel? We’re supposed to be on a highway. Jordan pressed his face against the window. Beyond the thick fog, there was nothing but blackness. He saw no other cars, no gas stations, and no highway lights of any kind. It was as though the outside world had simply been swallowed up. The rows of seats ahead of him were tombstone-shaped in the gloom. He shook his head, trying to shake off the thick, gauzy haze left by the painkillers and the whiskey.
Something’s not right here. Something’s not right at all.
Jordan stood up and was assailed by an unfamiliar odour that made his stomach clench. For a moment, he was sure he was going to puke. It reminded him of iodine and rust, or the rotten smell of sulphur, or stagnant pond water, or shit, or some foul combination of all four.
He stepped out into the aisle of the bus and felt his way along the rows in the darkness. The smell grew thicker as he advanced. The bus was unbearably hot, as though the driver had turned up the heat as high as he could. Again, his head throbbed and he felt his stomach contract in protest against the thick smell in the air.
How can the driver not smell this? It’s disgusting! How can he keep driving and not wonder if anyone is sick back here? For that matter, how could any of the other passengers stand it?
Jordan took another step up the aisle and slipped in a slick patch on the floor. The forward motion of his foot and his own weight carried him backwards. He lost his balance and fell, landing on his tailbone and elbows. Bolts of sharp pain shot up his arms and spine. Wincing, he rose to his feet and flicked the switch above the nearest empty seat. In the watery halo of lamp light, Jordan held his hands out in front of him and stared. His first thought was that perhaps he’d cut himself when he fell. Then he looked at the legs of his jeans. They were smeared and wet, and as red as his hands. Jordan knew what the smell was. He was covered in blood-not his blood, someone else’s. Someone very close by. He stifled the scream that threatened to erupt from his throat, and turned on the light above the seat in front of him.
Then, Jordan did scream. There was no way not to.
He was looking at the body of a woman with her throat torn out. The blood from her wounds-there seemed to be at least two, apart from her torn throat, including a deep gash in the top of her skull from which a thick paste of brain, bone fragments, and hair, was leaking like red oatmeal. It had all but obliterated her face. Her left ear looked as if it had been half-bitten off and lay raggedly against the side of her skull. Jordan looked at the seat next to the woman’s body. Amidst the rags-no, not rags, a little girl’s fluffy pink coat marbled with great whorls of crimson- Jordan was just able to make out a tiny red hand and a dangling green rubber boot.
Up ahead, at the front of the bus, the slumped shape behind the wheel drove erratically forward, apparently oblivious to Jordan’s screams. In the driver’s window, thick tentacles of fog beckoned and recoiled in the yellow headlights. Jordan thought he could make out clumps of trees crowding in on either side of the road. They were definitely not on a highway. Jordan had spent his entire-if brief-life in the country and he recognized a country road when he saw it, even at five a.m. in a blind terror at the scene of some sort of gruesome bloodbath through which he’d apparently slept like the dead in a haze of painkillers and whiskey. But he was awake now-completely, horribly awake. Either that, or his nightmare had somehow followed him out of his dream and into real life.
He screamed, “Stop! Stop the bus! Stop the bus! She’s dead! Somebody killed a lady!”
Calmly, the driver turned the wheel of the bus and pulled over to the side of the highway. There appeared to be no haste, no urgency in the sequence of movements.
Still not right, Jordan’s mind gibbered. He shook his head frantically. Am I still asleep, or is this really happening?
Another wave of slaughterhouse stink rose from the woman’s body and Jordan vomited. Then, smelling his own puke, he vomited again.
When he stopped retching and stood up, he saw Richard Weal standing there beside the steering wheel. In his left hand, he held a pickaxe. The blade of the axe was clotted with clumps of flesh and hair. In the right hand, he held a red-spattered butcher’s knife with an eight inch blade. To Jordan, he looked like a monster out of a horror movie. The entire bottom half of his face was caked with blood. The front of his shirt and army surplus jacket were soaked with it and shone wetly under the dim overhead lights of the driver’s cabin.
As Jordan’s terrified mind shook off the last remaining shred of torpor and his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, he saw the bus driver’s mutilated body crumpled at Weal’s feet. Half his skull was missing and his throat had been torn out.
“The blood is the life,” Weal said thickly, licking his lips. He waved the pickaxe idly in Jordan’s general direction. “I told you, I brought my tools. He tells me how,” Weal said reverently. “He speaks to me. They told me, in that… place, to take the pills. But when I did, I couldn’t hear him anymore. He showed me how to do this. He sends dreams into my brain. He wants me to find him so I can live forever. I’ll be like him. I’ll be able to fly.”
“You’re crazy,” Jordan whispered. “You’re fucking crazy.”
Weal smiled, his teeth red. “No, no, I’m not crazy. He wants me to wake him. He wants me to find him where he sleeps and wake him. He loves me.” Weal cocked his head like a dog listening for a supersonic whistle. “He’s speaking right now. I can’t believe you can’t hear it. He says I should kill you, because if I let you live, you’ll tell everyone about him. About us.”
Weal wiped the knife on his pants and began swinging it lazily in front of him like a pendulum. Jordan heard the hiss as it cut the air. Weal took a step towards him, still swinging. Jordan jumped back, slipping again on the gore-slick floor. Weal took a compensatory step forward as though he were leading in some ghastly tango.
“No, I won’t tell! I swear! Please, please, let me go! Please! I have to get home.” Weal swung the knife in wider arcs and feinting half-jabs at Jordan. He grinned, advancing. Jordan backed up farther. “My mom needs me! My dad’s hurting her. Please, if you kill me, she won’t have anyone to protect her. Please, don’t. Oh God. I’m begging you.”
“The blood is the life,” Weal whispered. “And I’m going to live forever.”
He struck hard with the knife, slashing Jordan across the chest. The blade shredded Jordan’s shirt, and bit deep into flesh and muscle. He screamed as the blood rose from the wound. Jordan clutched his chest and backed away. Weal kept advancing, driving Jordan backward, slashing with each step, cutting Jordan’s hands when he tried to ward off the swinging blade, slashing his neck and face when Jordan’s bleeding hands were elsewhere.
When finally Jordan staggered and fell, dizzy from shock and pain, Weal turned him onto his back, almost lovingly. He kissed Jordan on the lips. Then he drew the knife across his throat, severing his carotid artery. The last thing Jordan felt were Weal’s lips against his throat, lapping at the blood that gushed from the wound.
Through dying eyes, Jordan looked up and tried to focus on his murderer.
Weal’s face became his own father’s face, full of deadened, murderous rage. Then it was Weal’s face again. Then his father’s. Then it was Weal’s again.
Directly behind Weal, a tenebrous, mist-like column was forming, vaguely human-shaped, but seemingly made entirely of darkness. Its head (or whatever part of it looked to Jordan most like a human head) was inclined towards Weal’s ear, and it was indeed whispering to him but, now dying, Jordan heard the whispering, too.
It said, Wake me.
In the end, dying proved different than anything Jordan had ever imagined it might be.
For one thing, it seemed to go on forever, long past the point where the pain had stopped. Past even the point where his heart stopped pumping and his brain died. As Jordan drifted above his body, he looked down at himself, bleeding out on the dirty floor of the bus, and felt the truest compassion he’d known. He saw himself as he’d never seen himself in any mirror while he’d been alive. He saw the fragility of his body and he realized how tenuously human life was contained by such brittle shells of flesh and bone under the best of circumstances.
Dimensions of brilliance exploded outward as he continued to rise.
Past, present, and future fused together in a continuum. There were no more secrets. Every truth of the world was laid bare to the dead.
Jordan knew, for instance-and not without satisfaction-that his father would die of pancreatic cancer two years from now, in 1974. He would go quickly, but not without terrible pain. He knew that his mother would remarry, this time to a man who would cherish and care for her. He also knew that, late at night, as she lay in bed with her gentle, loving husband sleeping beside her, she’d think of Jordan’s father and his cruelty and wonder if that wasn’t, in its own way, real love. In those moments, she’d glance over at her sleeping husband and hate herself for wishing he wasn’t just a bit harder, just a bit rougher, the way a man ought to be. Then she’d remember the terror, and she’d forgive herself for those treacherous thoughts. She’d lay her head on his chest while he gathered her in his arms till she, too, slept, dreaming of Jordan, telling herself over and over again that he was somewhere safe, living his life, and knowing in her mother’s heart that he was gone.
He drew comfort from the knowledge that Fleur would leave Don before the baby was born and that the violence that had marked Jordan’s life would never mark that of Fleur’s son.
Jordan continued to rise.
He saw that the dead were everywhere, masses of them, like a vast eldritch ocean that stretched in every direction. Men, women, children- even animals. He laughed with revenant delight. The sound of his laughter fell in a shower of ectoplasmic blue sparks in the ether of this strange new in-between dimension where everything and nothing was the same as it was in life.
When Jordan was alive he’d once asked a priest about whether or not dogs had souls. His own dog, Prince, had died from eating poisoned bait in the woods the previous week, and Jordan had been inconsolable. The priest assured him that animals had no immortal souls and reprimanded him for being stupid enough to believe they did. Jordan had cried, but he suspected the priest was wrong-or lying. For years afterwards, he’d felt Prince’s presence constantly when he was alone, especially at night in his room where the dog had always slept.
Here the dead crowded the desolate country road where Weal had awkwardly parked the bus, peering curiously through the windows, tapping noiselessly on the glass in an endless, one-sided attempted dialogue with the living. Finding none inside the bus, they scampered along the roof and launched themselves into the night like spectral fireflies in search of living receivers who could hear their voices. They looked as they did in life, and in death seemed neither overjoyed to be free of their mortal bodies nor particularly tormented. No wings, no harps, no robes. They just… were.
Jordan felt the warm press of millions of souls caressing his own as they passed through him. He realized now, as he never had when he was alive, how not alone he had always been. What a comfort it might have been to know that, he thought as he reached out to receive them.
As Jordan was absorbed into the massive vortex of spiralling black light, he looked down one last time.
Below him, in the road, Richard Weal had stepped out of the bus with his hockey bag full of bloodstained picks and hammers and saws. He withdrew a bottle wrapped in a dirty towel. Stuffed into the bottle’s opening and held in place by the stopper was a wick made of cloth. Weal took a lighter out of his jacket pocket and lit the wick. The flame glowed brilliant blue. He hurled the bottle through the door of the bus. It shattered on impact, igniting a fireball that engulfed the interior of the bus in a matter of seconds. Even before the gas tank blew, Jordan knew his body was burning, and that when the authorities found the scorched out hulk hours later, there would be nothing left of him to identify.
Riding Weal’s shoulders, the great black shape that only the dead could see pressed close to him, whispering to him, rippling and undulating with malignant purpose as Weal picked up his hockey bag and began to walk.
Jordan knew-as he knew everything now, including the terrible end of Weal’s story-that there would be unlocked houses along the route to Parr’s Landing. There would be trusting people. There would be cars driving north with passengers who felt sympathy for a lone man hitchhiking home to a northern mining town to be with his sick daughter or his dying wife. Weal’s bag of hammers and knives and picks would do the rest. All the while, the great black shape folded its wings around Weal and urged him forward.
And then, the part of Jordan Lefebvre that was still tethered to his experience of dying flickered out entirely, his essence becoming one with the souls around him, passing completely from the world of the living into the gloomy country of the dead.
Monday, October 23, 1972
That morning at the Blue Heron Motel-thirty miles outside of Sault Ste. Marie on the edge of the northern Ontario bush country, near the village of Batchawana Bay-Christina Parr woke just after sunrise from a dream of her dead husband, Jack. It was a widow’s dream-an inchoate dream of the deepest and profoundest longing. She woke from it with her arms outstretched as though to receive an embrace.
Christina knew that if either of the other two occupants of the motel room had asked her to relate the dream’s narrative to them, she would have been at a loss. The language of her grief was private and even now, after almost a year, Christina was still painfully learning its vocabulary and orthography.
She raised herself on her elbow and looked down at her daughter, Morgan, lying next to her. Asleep, buried in the blankets with her black hair (Jack’s hair) half-covering her face, Morgan looked younger than fifteen. Lightly and tenderly, Christina smoothed it out of Morgan’s face without waking her. Across the room, in the other bed, her brother-in law, Jeremy Parr, snored softly, his bare arm outside the blanket, pulling it in to his body as though he were a cold, small child.
Christina had been dreaming of Jack almost nightly in the nine months since the accident. The dreams varied in scale and intensity like music, from the highest soprano pitch of remembered fragments of joy, to the deepest, lowest basso profundo of grief and loss. From the latter, she would wake up sobbing, her throat dry and raw as though she had been swallowing graveyard dirt, feeling as if she were buried alive, and the darkness of her bedroom a sealed, airless coffin. On those nights, when she switched on her bedside lamp to try to read the book she always kept on her night table for this exact purpose, knowing full well that she wouldn’t be able to forget the yawning, empty space next to her on the bed, she wondered whether the pain would ever end, or if this was what she had to look forward to every night for the rest of her life.
Last night was different, though. Last night she dreamed she and Jack were together, walking in a vast green pine forest shot through with gold sunlight. Jack was leading her by the hand. She could still feel the imprint of his palm in hers. She looked at the inside of her hand, half expecting to see his fingerprints. With the insight peculiar to dreamers, particularly dreamers of love, she knew it was one of the forests near Jack’s family’s house in Parr’s Landing, where they’d both grown up. It was a dream of comfort and security, a dream that drew on emotional subtitles that stretched back over the course of eighteen years, including the two years they’d spent together in high school in Parr’s Landing before Morgan had been born. The dream felt like an augury, but of what she wasn’t yet sure. The now familiar ache was there, of course. But this morning it was tinged with something she couldn’t quite identify.
Christina looked at her watch. It was 7:25 a.m. The light leaking through the motel curtains was deep orange, a pellucid autumnal hue that was unique to northern regions where the snow came fast and early and winter ruled for seemingly endless months. The light spoke of stars in the violet-blue early morning sky, of columns of Canada geese streaking south across the vastness of Lake Superior and Lake Huron, while below them, the forests turned the colour of fire and rust and blood.
Then she realized what the dream had been tinged with and the thought came, unbidden and profoundly bittersweet: I’m almost home. My God. I never, ever thought I would come back here.
Christina dressed as quickly and quietly as she could so as not to wake Morgan and Jeremy. She donned a pair of jeans and pulled a bulky sweater over the thin T-shirt she’d slept in. In the bathroom, she splashed cold water on her face and ran a damp comb through her thick blonde hair. There were faint purple smudges under her eyes, but all in all, she thought, she looked pretty good for a woman who had just driven ten hours across the country from Toronto to Sault Ste. Marie, with a heartbroken and anxious teenage girl and a twenty-five year old gay man at the end of an affair he claimed was the love of his life-and for whom this was as reluctant a homecoming as it was for her.
There was a diner across the street from the motel. Christina sat at a booth near the window and ordered scrambled eggs and home fries. From where she sat, she could watch for Morgan in case her daughter woke up and came looking for her. It seemed unlikely, given how deeply she was sleeping when Christina had left the motel room. Sleep was nature’s best balm. Morgan and Jack had been exceptionally close, perhaps closer than most fathers and daughters, and his death had devastated her.
That, coupled with the sudden uprooting from the only home she’d ever known-in the only city she’d ever known-to move to a town she’d only ever heard discussed in the most negative terms by her parents, had taken a visible emotional toll.
What sort of a mother packs up her grieving teenage daughter and loads her into the back seat of a rusted-out 1969 Chevy Chevelle and drives her to the ends of the earth to start a new life, you ask? She took a sip of the fresh coffee, wincing at the bitterness and adding more sugar. A broke one, that’s who. A broke widow whose freewheeling, romantic, carefree late husband hadn’t taken out life insurance because he thought it was bourgeois, but took out a second mortgage on their house without telling her-one she found out about when the bank foreclosed on it. A woman with no job and no savings, but who had a rich mother-in-law, one who might despise her, personally, but might still feel a sense of dynastic responsibility for her granddaughter out of love for her eldest son, if nothing else.
At least, she thought, I hope she will.
As she ate her breakfast in blessed silence, Christina watched as the light advanced. She’d forgotten how clear that light was, especially in the fall. The mist on the lake was burning off as the sun climbed higher. On the other side of the lake, she could make out a scattering of white buildings underlined by a dirt road at the foot of the sloping, mountainous hills stretching against the blue sky. Alone in the booth at the diner with her thoughts, accountable to no one, and with nothing around her at that moment that had any bearing on her life, she gazed out the window as the sunlight touched the burnished leaves of the line of maple trees framing the motel where her daughter slept.
When she was sure she could see the beauty, she allowed herself to feel hope.
Christina felt a sudden crashing wave of terrible longing for Jack, one that stunned her once again with its ferocity. Tears blurred her vision, but this time she didn’t wipe them away. She rode the pain like a wave, not fighting it, cresting with it instead, allowed it to deposit her, gently and safely, in a rational place.
She paid her bill and left the diner to wake up Morgan and Jeremy. They still had a four- to five-hour drive ahead of them to Parr’s Landing and whatever waited for them there.
They were on the road within an hour and a half. Morgan and Jeremy were awake, showered, and packed up by the time she got back to the motel. Christina was surprised but pleased. Getting Morgan ready in the morning had been an ordeal more or less from the day she’d turned thirteen. The waitress at the diner smiled at her when the three of them trooped over and sat down at the booth she’d left twenty minutes before.
Christina said, “A couple more hungry customers for you before we get back on the road this morning.”
“Couldn’t get enough of our good country cooking, eh?” The waitress beamed at Morgan and Jeremy. “Is this your hubby and your little girl? She looks just like her handsome daddy. You want some hot chocolate, honey?”
Christina felt Morgan flinch beside her. She opened her mouth to tell the waitress that Jeremy wasn’t her father but her uncle, but before she could say a word, Morgan smiled at the waitress and politely replied, “Just some orange juice, please.”
When the waitress returned to the kitchen with their order, Christina turned to Morgan and said, “That was very nice of you, sweetheart. It was very considerate.”
Morgan shrugged. “It’s not her fault. She didn’t know. And I do look like daddy and so does Uncle Jeremy, so she wasn’t all wrong.”
Jeremy said, “Your father had all the looks in the family. Ask your mother. He was so handsome when he was your age that everyone was in love with him. Your mom was the only girl in Parr’s Landing who’d ever caught his eye. It was like Romeo and Juliet with those two.”
“Romeo and Juliet was a tragedy,” Morgan said. The previous year, her class at Jarvis Collegiate had studied Shakespeare’s play in English Lit. The teacher, Mr. Niven, had run the Franco Zeffirelli version of the film on the reel-to-reel projector in the classroom and Morgan had fallen in love with Leonard Whiting. “Mom and Dad weren’t a tragedy. They ran off and got married. They had me. They got out of Parr’s Landing. Romeo and Juliet never got out of Verona.”
“You’re right, they did get out of Parr’s Landing.” Jeremy’s eyes met Christina’s over the table. “They did. They got away and they met their destiny. And the best part of their destiny was having you.” He reached over and put his hand over Morgan’s. “I’m so very, very glad they did.”
Morgan allowed Jeremy to hold her hand for a brief moment, and then pulled it gently away as though to avoid hurting his feelings. Her love for her uncle was unquestioned. The question for Morgan seemed to be how much of that love she could show without feeling disloyal to her father, at least for now. Christina observed their interaction and saw that Jeremy understood. She sent a silent prayer of thanksgiving for Jeremy’s presence to whichever divinity took under its wing the families of fatherless girls and husbandless wives.
When the food arrived, Morgan took a bite of her toast and asked Jeremy, “Isn’t it weird having a town named after you? I mean, I’m going to see my name everywhere, aren’t I? That’s going to be weird. Wasn’t it weird for you and Daddy?”
“It was weird,” Jeremy admitted. “But you get used to it. Your dad and I never thought twice about it. You won’t either, after a while. And the town wasn’t named after us, it was named after our great-grandfather- your great great-grandfather. He founded the town in the late nineteenth century. That was a long time ago, and nobody thinks about it anymore. We’re just like anybody else.”
“Then why did you leave? Why did you move to the city? If it’s so great, why didn’t you stay?”
Jeremy glanced around the diner, which was slowly filling with people. He lowered his voice slightly. “Morgan, you know why I had to leave. There were… problems. I know you know what those problems were. Your dad and mom and I have told you about them. We don’t need to discuss it again here, do we?”
Morgan looked chastened. “I’m sorry, Uncle Jeremy,” she said. “I didn’t mean to make you feel bad.”
“It’s fine, Morgan. But we have to remember that we’re not in the city anymore. Things are a lot different out here. There are things we can talk about in public and things we can’t talk about.”
Time to nip this one in the bud, Christina thought. “Sweetheart, I know you’re nervous about today. I know you’re nervous about meeting your grandma for the first time, especially after everything we’ve told you about her. Try to remember that the bad things we told you about happened a long time ago. Your dad and I were very young and your grandma and grandpa were very mad at us for running away together and having you.”
“They didn’t want you to have me?”
“Morgan, we’ve talked about this before. They didn’t think it was right for us to have you since we weren’t married.”
“But you did get married. You are married.”
“They wanted your daddy to stay in Parr’s Landing, go to university, and take over the mine. When the mine shut down, they blamed him for not being there to help save it. They were mad at both of us, honey. But they weren’t mad at you.”
“I don’t think we should go there. I think we should go home.”
“That’s all in the past,” Christina said, ignoring Morgan’s last comment. “Your grandma Parr was very nice to invite us to come and stay with her for a while.” Christina saw Jeremy wince. She pursed her lips to signal to him to keep quiet. “We need to get back on our feet.”
“Why couldn’t we get back on our feet in Toronto?” Morgan’s bottom lip began to tremble. “Why did we have to come here? Daddy didn’t want us to come back here. He hated it here. He told me so. And now you’re making us move here. It’s not fair.”
“I know, Morgan. But we have to make the best of it when there’s no alternative. And believe me, there’s no alternative. It’ll be what we make of it.”
“It’ll be fine,” Jeremy said. “It’s a beautiful part of the country, Morgan. And your grandma’s house is very old and very big. There are wonderful log beams on the ceiling and lots of paintings on the walls. It’s on the top of a hill with a great view of the town and the river below it.”
She brightened. “So, are we rich? I’d like to be rich.”
Christina and Jack had never been the beneficiaries of any part of the Parr fortune after they’d left the Landing together, so there had been no reason to inculcate Morgan with any illusions of wealth. As a result, it had simply never occurred to Morgan that her new life in Parr’s Landing would be any less hand-to-mouth than her old life in their house in the Cabbagetown district of Toronto.
“Morgan-” There was a warning edge to Christina’s voice.
“Your grandmother is rich,” Jeremy corrected. “Well, she’s not as rich as the family used to be before the thirties. But yeah, she’s rich.” Jeremy looked across the table at Christina. This time, she was the one who winced. “But she’s very stingy, so it doesn’t matter if she’s rich or not. It doesn’t matter to us, anyway. But you’ll get to stay in a beautiful house, one that’s so big you won’t hardly have to see the rest of us unless you want to.”
“Beautiful, beautiful,” Morgan said sullenly. “I always know when you’re lying because you say things like ‘beautiful’ instead of describing them properly. It’s not beautiful at all, is it? It sounds like an old witch’s castle or something. Daddy said she was an ogress. He said she ate her young. I bet it’s a horrible house.”
Jeremy smiled. “I think your father was speaking metaphorically, sweetheart. Did he really say that she ate her children?” He laughed. “Did he actually use that phrase-that exact phrase?”
“Yeah, he did. Why?”
“Because that was my line. That was something I said to him once about your grandma. I was kidding, of course. I don’t think she literally eats her young. Although, she might want to eat her granddaughter. You never know. You’re delicious.” Across the table, Christina felt Morgan relaxing. Jeremy had succeeded in distracting her from her fretfulness. She’d started to giggle. Jeremy continued, his voice ominous. “The winters are very long up here and Parr’s Landing is in Wendigo country.”
“What’s a Windiggy?”
“Not ‘Windiggy,’ Wendigo. It’s an Indian legend. The Wendigo was a cannibal spirit that possessed men and made them eat human flesh.”
“That’s disgusting,” Morgan said, her nose wrinkled in distaste. “I bet it’s fake anyway. There’s no such thing.”
“When we’re settled in, I’ll take you up to Spirit Rock,” Jeremy said. “I’ll show you the Indian paintings on the cliffs above Bradley Lake. You can see for yourself. They’re supposed to be paintings of a real Wendigo. Your dad and I used to swim there when we were kids. Everyone in town has seen them.”
“For real?” Morgan’s blasé façade of adolescent disinterest slipped momentarily. She’d loved legends and stories ever since she was a little girl, something Jeremy had clearly remembered and was now using to his advantage. Christina again met his eyes but this time she smiled. He smiled back.
“Well, the paintings are three hundred or so years old,” Jeremy said seriously. “And they’re pretty faded. But yeah, that’s what they’re supposed to be. There was a Jesuit missionary settlement on the site of the town sometime in the seventeenth century. There are lots of stories about it. Parr’s Landing is a pretty interesting place if you know what to look for.”
“Mom, why didn’t you tell me any of this stuff when I was growing up?”
“Oh,” Christina said, affecting nonchalance. “I don’t know. It’s something you really need to see for yourself.” I didn’t tell you any of this stuff because I didn’t want to think about any of it. I wanted to forget it all. And I never wanted you to be curious enough about it to go find out about it on your own. You were supposed to be my city girl. And instead, here we are. “It’s really a beautiful town in its own way, Morgan. I think you’re going to like it a lot. At least let’s try to give it a chance, shall we?” She looked hopefully at Morgan. She laid her hand on top of her daughter’s, much as Jeremy had done earlier, but this time Morgan didn’t pull her hand away.
She squeezed her mother’s hand. “OK, mom, I promise. It’ll be OK, you’ll see.”
The waitress came back to the table. “All done? Can I get you folks anything else?” She looked at Morgan’s plate. “Honey, you didn’t eat very much. Not a big eater, eh? Would you like something else? Some pancakes or something?”
“No, thank you,” she replied. “I wasn’t very hungry. I’m not much of a morning person. But the food was great.”
“Just the bill please,” Christina said, reaching for her purse. “We have to get on the road. We still have a long way to go.”
They took Highway 17 north along Lake Superior towards Montréal River.
Christina drove steadily, her eyes on the road. After half an hour, the silence in the car became oppressive and she turned on the radio, hoping that music would, at the very least, act as some sort of mental bridge by which the three of them could come out of their private thoughts and meet each other halfway. The reception was terrible. She’d forgotten the degree to which the igneous granite of the Precambrian Shield, covered with the thinnest layer of soil, interfered with radio transmission in this part of the country. She turned the radio off and pushed an America eight-track into the deck, humming along to “Horse With No Name” until Morgan asked her to stop so she could enjoy the music. Christina smiled at that, but she stopped humming. At the very least, it meant that Morgan’s mind was temporarily occupied by something other than how much she missed her father, or her dread at the thought of starting a new life in as alien a place as a teenager from Toronto could imagine.
Through the windows of the car, the landscape grew wilder. The original Trans-Canada route had been Highway 11, called “The King’s Highway” in a colonial forelock-tug to His Majesty King George V. The unforgiving terrain of the two-billion-year-old Precambrian Shield had been so resistant to taming when it was being built in 1923 that the Algoma Central Railway, which had connected Sault Ste. Marie to various northern Ontario mining towns, including Parr’s Landing, bypassed the 165-mile gap between Sault Ste. Marie and the Agawa River. The “Big Gap,” as it was called, had been a treasure trove of virgin timber surrounded by deep gorges and rivers bracketed by steep-walled granite canyons. In 1960, the newly completed Highway 17 made the route shorter and simpler, but no less dramatic than its antecedent highway, along which Christina remembered driving with Jack-and with Morgan slumbering in her womb-nearly sixteen years ago. Of course, sixteen years ago they had been driving in the opposite direction, towards a new life. Perversely, she reasoned that she was still driving towards a new life, but in a completely different sense.
Ironic, she thought. Ugly, tragic, but ironic nonetheless.
On either side of the car, the highway rose and fell, bracketed here and there by soaring granite cliffs of rose and grey stone. Forests of maple and birch planed off from the highway into the distant badlands like great wings of red and gold. Christina saw the edges of algae-encrusted swamps laced with dead logs and slippery rock, and deep pine everywhere. As they approached the town of Wawa, the maple and birch gave way to a mélange of birch and various other deciduous trees, as well as conifers, adding the blessed rigour of dark green to a palette from which Christina felt nearly drunk with colour. Through the window, Morgan squealed with delight and pointed to a moose standing back from the road beside a tamarack swamp. As the car swept past, the moose ambled back into the deeper brush, either cautious or indifferent to their passing.
In Wawa, Morgan made Christina stop the car so she could look at the twenty-eight-foot tall metal statue of the Canada goose that had been built twelve years before, in 1960, and dedicated to the town that had taken its name from the Ojibwa word for “wild goose.” After Morgan had taken a few pictures with the ancient secondhand Kodak Brownie 127 Jack had bought her for her thirteenth birthday, she said she was hungry. They drove through the town and stopped at a roadside chip stand run by a taciturn old man and his wife, the two of them virtually indistinguishable one from the other, with short-clipped grey hair, ruddy skin, and wrapped in denim and lumberjack flannel.
Jeremy bought beer-battered fish and salted chips wrapped in newspaper. Morgan fetched blankets from the car and they sat down to eat at one of the nearby picnic tables.
As they devoured the surprisingly delicious fish and chips, Christina mentally calculated how much money she had spent, including moving out of their rented house on Sumach Street, plus gas, food, and lodging since they’d left Toronto, and realized she was dangerously close to depleting what funds remained.
She looked up at the sky, less bright and blue at two in the afternoon than it had been when they left Batchawana Bay that morning. They were still about three hours away from Parr’s Landing, off the main highway and deep into the northern Ontario badlands at that. Christina felt another flare of anxiety as she realized they would need to fill up the Chevelle’s gas tank. She hoped they didn’t run out of gas or break down before they got to Parr’s Landing. She calculated that they would arrive near five p.m. when it was beginning to get dark.
There would be nothing for miles if anything happened. Christina had no desire to spend the night on the side of the road, miles from nowhere in Ontario bush country while the forest came alive around them in the impenetrable blackness she remembered well from her childhood.
Beside her, Jeremy Parr, lost in his own thoughts, remembered the blackness, too, though his blackness, while different from Christina’s, was no less implacable.
Jeremy didn’t regret accompanying his sister-in-law back to Parr’s Landing-not because he was ambivalent about returning to the locus of the worst emotional pain of his life, but because he knew there had been nothing else to do. He’d been fired from his bartending job the previous week, and even if he hadn’t been, there was no way-at least in the short term-that he would have been able to support the three of them. Christina had no job skills, and Morgan’s mourning had been such that there was no question Christina had to be there for her daughter.
Jack and Christina had saved his life. He felt he owed it, especially to his dead brother, to try to keep Christina and Morgan safe. And right now that meant going home with his sister-in-law and his niece and watching over them while they were in his mother’s house.
Jack and Christina had taken him in without question after his mother had sent him to the private clinic in North Bay to get help for his “problem” after he tried to kill himself in his seventeenth year. Adeline Parr had signed all the requisite papers, and Jeremy had been loaded into a limousine in the middle of the night and told not to resist, or he’d be restrained.
“This is for the best, my darling,” Adeline had told him, standing back, delicate and ladylike, as he fought with the two burly orderlies who were holding him by either arm and pushing him towards the car. “This is all for your own good, you’ll see. You’ll be safer there, too. The town is too small, and you’ve made it too dangerous for yourself to live here with the things you’ve done. When you come back, you’ll be cured. Things will be different-you’ll see.”
A sympathetic maternal smile never touched her eyes. They were cold and practical, the eyes of a widow used to issuing orders to inferiors-orders she expected to be obeyed. Adeline had been entirely unmoved by Jeremy’s tears and his pleading to be allowed to stay, that he would be good, that there would be no more trouble with other boys, that what happened hadn’t been his fault. Adeline had stood in the hallway of Parr House, immaculate in a black wool suit and pearls and watched her younger son dragged out of his home in the middle of the night and shoved into the back seat of a black Cadillac Fleetwood with blacked-out windows.
Turning to the driver, who had obviously been summoned to wait by the front door in case Jeremy put up too much resistance, she pointed a manicured index finger towards the drawing room off the main hallway and said, “His bags are in the other room. Please see to it that they’re loaded immediately. Tell Dr. Gionet at the clinic to telephone me if there’s anything else.”
And with that, she’d turned away, her high heels clicking on the black-and-white marble entryway, without ever turning back.
At the Doucette Institute, the psychiatrists set about attempting to cure him of his affliction. For six months, Jeremy endured icy baths, and electric shocks applied to his hands and genitals while being forced to watch black-and-white films of naked, oiled, muscular men. He was strapped to chairs in darkened rooms for hours, and injected with apomorphine, after which he was forced to drink two-ounce shots of brandy to induce nausea. When the nausea became nearly unendurable, the room was heated and bright lights were shone on large photographs of male nudes, and he was told to select the one he desired the most. At that point, Dr. Gionet played a tape describing his “illness” in graphic, sickening detail until Jeremy vomited out the drugs, and was given more. The tape was played every hour. After thirty hours, detecting dangerous levels of acetone in Jeremy’s urine, he was sent back to his room to recover.
But the treatments always began again. Other nights, he was awakened every two hours by congratulatory messages about how different his life would be once he’d conquered his “inversion” and been rendered “normal.” Every morning he was injected with testosterone propionate and made to listen to records of women’s voices, lush and frankly sexual voices that, to Jeremy, merely sounded whorish and insectile through the scratchy speakers of a turntable.
In sessions, his psychiatrist, Dr. Gionet-who, Jeremy noted with fresh disgust at every session, had terrible pitted acne scars on his face, and eyes that were even colder and more censorious than his mother’s, and breath that made Jeremy think of an open grave-forced him, over and over again, to repeat every graphic aspect of every sexual fantasy he’d ever had. In the end, Elliot made them up, which seemed to satisfy Dr. Gionet, who seemed unable to distinguish between fact and fantasy when it came to what Jeremy told him.
Worse still, he forced Jeremy to reveal every intimate detail of his discovered friendship with Elliot McKitrick. He made him describe Elliot’s body-every part of it, what he’d done with it, and what Elliot had done to him by way of reciprocation.
That implacable, dry voice, impatient, professorial and peremptory:
What did you do with that boy, Jeremy? Tell me again.
Weeping in reply: He’s just a friend. We’re friends. It only happened once. We didn’t mean to do anything wrong. I’m sorry. It only happened once. I’ll never do it again. I’m cured now. Please, please, please let me go home. I want my mother. No more tests. They hurt too much.
And, coming full circle, Dr. Gionet’s oily, coercive compassion again: How are you going to be better, Jeremy, if you don’t trust me? You do want to be normal, don’t you? Don’t you want to be cured?
At night, locked in his cell-like room, he’d cry himself to sleep, wondering what he’d ever done to be sent to this place.
On the nights he was allowed to sleep through till dawn instead of being woken every two hours by the recording, he dreamed a mosaic of familiar images-Parr’s Landing itself, swimming with Jack in the cold black water of Bradley Lake beneath the centuries-old Indian paintings of the legendary Wendigo of the St. Barthélemy settlement etched into the granite cliffs that stood sentinel around the lake. He dreamed of his mother’s house. In those dreams, he explored the vast dim rooms on the upper floors of the house. They were dreams of secrecy, as though he were hiding, though in the dreams it was unclear what he might be hiding from. He dreamed of his mother-dreams of guilt and chastisement and shame, dreams from which he sometimes awoke gasping for breath, feeling as though he’d been caught in flagrante delicto committing some terrible crime for which the punishment was being sent away forever.
The worst dreams were those of Elliot McKitrick, because Elliot berated him as Jeremy wept, telling him that Jeremy had ruined Elliot’s life forever by being so weak and sick and such an invert and leading him astray, destroying Elliot’s chances for a respectable life among decent people. And in those dreams, Elliot’s voice wasn’t Elliot’s voice at all-it was the voice on the tape.
After six months, Jeremy lost twenty-five pounds he could barely afford to lose. He had dark circles under his eyes and almost-healed burns on the most private parts of his body. But Dr. Gionet had pronounced him cured and he’d been allowed to return home.
Adeline welcomed him home as though he’d been away visiting relatives which, as it turned out, was what she’d told everyone in Parr’s Landing who’d asked where Jeremy was.
On his first night home, Jeremy and Adeline ate dinner in the mahogany-panelled dining room at Parr House. Although it was just the two of them, Adeline ordered the table to be set formally with Viennese damask and Georgian silver, as though Jeremy were a visiting dignitary instead of her seventeen-year-old son who had just returned under the cover of darkness from a private psychiatric hospital.
“I expect things to be different now, Jeremy,” Adeline said. “With the boys, and your… incident. They will be, won’t they? I missed you so much while you were away. It was hard enough when your brother got that slut in the family way and ran off without a word. The detectives said he was in Toronto, living openly with her. Openly. Can you imagine?”
This line of lament-her abandonment by Jack five years before; the “slut”; Morgan, the “bastard granddaughter,” whose existence Adeline had discovered when she hired a private detective in Toronto to find Jack- was one Jeremy had heard many times before from his mother. He’d long since learned to let his mother’s invective run its course, especially on this one topic of family betrayal.
“And apparently they have a five-year-old. My only granddaughter, born illegitimate. But still, never even a photograph!” Adeline looked pained. “Can you imagine? Your old mother hates to be left alone, darling.” Adeline paused delicately as though she were waiting for him to hold a door open for her, or pull her chair out. She laid the sterling silver fork in her hand elegantly against the gold rim of the plate. “You won’t disappoint me, will you, Jeremy? You are cured, aren’t you? Dr. Gionet assures me that you are, and that we won’t have any more trouble. Because if we do,” she added, “he has also assured me that there will always be a place waiting for you at the Doucette.”
Jeremy ran away that night.
He hitched a ride with the driver of a supply truck returning to Wawa from a round-trip delivery. From Wawa, he’d hitchhiked to Toronto over the course of four days of near-starvation and beneath a thick coating of accumulated highway grime. Most of his rides assumed he was a runaway of some kind, but because he was frail and small, his rides took pity on him, especially those men who were travelling with their wives.
After two days, he became aware of a solidarity of sorts among night drivers. Night drivers seemed more inclined to understand, even sympathize, with the notion of escape, or flight, or adventure in a way that those who travelled openly and respectably in the propriety of daylight might question. Jeremy answered as few questions as he possibly could without being rude-easier at night, somehow-though he willingly participated, as best he could, in any conversations his benefactors chose to initiate, seeing it as the least he could do under the circumstances.
But Jeremy still held back as much personal information as he could. He knew his mother would find him eventually, if she chose to, but he was determined to leave as sparse a trail as he could. In his mind, he entertained cinematic, paranoid fantasies of police interrogations of the drivers who moved him farther and farther away from Parr’s Landing. At seventeen, those interrogations seemed entirely feasible in a world where a seemingly omnipotent magna mater like Adeline Parr could lift a telephone from its cradle and, with one call, condemn her own son to six months of torture and sadistic psychological experimentation-all with no more effort than it took her to order a freshly killed animal from the butcher shop on Martin Street in Parr’s Landing.
The last eight-hour leg of his journey from the town of Thunder Mouth was in the back of the red Volkswagen bus driven by the lead singer of a folk quartet from Saskatchewan-three men, John, Wolf, and David, and their “girl singer,” Annie-who were moving east to follow the burgeoning music scene that was in full flower in the coffeehouses of the run-down Yorkville section of Toronto. They told Jeremy about a club called The Purple Onion where they had been invited to perform. Annie told him he reminded her of her baby brother, Victor, back in Estevan.
When they stopped at a Red Barn on the side of the road just before Durrant, Annie bought him a Big Barney and fries, and a chocolate milkshake. Jeremy was certain that nothing he’d ever eaten before in his life had tasted as good as that hamburger. She watched him devour it as though he’d never seen food before and quietly ordered him another one. He ate that one slower, but only marginally.
Back in the van, he fell asleep in the back seat to the sound of them singing “Jimmy Crack Corn” in four-part harmony. When he woke up, it was early evening. They had arrived in Toronto and were driving down Yonge Street. Looking out the window at the shops and the people, he touched the breast pocket of his jean jacket where the carefully folded piece of paper with Jack and Christina’s address was, and breathed a deep sigh of relief. If he’d believed in God, he would have said a prayer. He felt entirely safe for the first time since he was a small child.
At Bloor Street, the musicians let him out. Annie tucked a five-dollar bill into his pocket and told him to come see them play sometime.
“I’m sorry we can’t take you right to your brother’s, but we’re running behind schedule as it is,” said Wolf, squinting down at the map in his hands. “The neighbourhood you’re looking for is called Cabbagetown. According to this, it isn’t far. Just walk east till you get to Parliament, and then turn right. You should be able to find Sumach Street real easy. If you can’t, just ask.”
“Thank you guys so much,” Jeremy said. “And thanks for the burger, Annie.” Impulsively and clumsily he reached out and hugged her. Inhaling in the caramel scent of her hair and skin, taking the soft, warm, nurturing femaleness of her, he marvelled at the difference between her hug and the agate-hard brittleness of his own mother’s hibernal embrace. Jeremy held tightly to Annie for a moment, and then let go.
“Be safe, little man,” Annie said, ruffling his hair. “Have a big life.” Then she climbed back in to the waiting van and the door slid shut.
The red Volkswagen turned right on Bloor, towards Yorkville; Jeremy turned left on foot towards Cabbagetown, each in the direction of their respective destinies.
Arriving at the house on Sumach Street, Jeremy rang the doorbell. Jack answered the door. Before Jeremy even had a chance to speak, Jack pulled him into the house and hugged him as though he would never let him go. Behind him came Christina and five-year-old Morgan. When she saw that everyone else was crying, Morgan companionably burst into tears, which made all of them laugh.
Late that night, in front of the fireplace, he and Jack talked while Christina and Morgan slept upstairs. Jack wept when Jeremy told him about what they’d done to him at the Doucette Institute with the express permission of their mother. He, in turn, explained to Jeremy that his mother had tried to pay Christina’s parents to force her to get an abortion. When they refused, Adeline Parr had warned them to be careful, because a mining town was fraught with potentially fatal accidents. Christina’s parents told Christina what Adeline had said, and Christina, in turn, told Jack.
Jack confided to Jeremy that they believed that Christina’s life- and the life of the baby she was carrying-would be in danger if they remained in Parr’s Landing. So they’d escaped that night much like Jeremy had.
“I’m so sorry I left you,” Jack said. “Forget our mother. Forget everything you knew before. You can be yourself here. If you want to be… well, you know, if you want to be with… men, that’s OK with me. It’ll be fine with Christina, too. We’ve known… homosexuals before, you know. There are some right here in this neighbourhood. They’re nice fellas, run the antique shop on Parliament. We’ll make our own family here. A new family. You don’t have to go back.”
“What if she comes looking for me? What if she tries to force me to come home?”
“You’re turning eighteen in a couple of days, Jeremy. Remember, last year they lowered the age of consent from twenty-one to eighteen. She can’t touch you even if she wanted to, from a legal standpoint. She can’t make you go back.”
“You know she hired detectives to find you and Christina,” Jeremy said fretfully. “She knows where you live and everything. She’ll know I’m here.”
“Let her,” Jack said defiantly. “I don’t care. Also, she didn’t try to get me to come home, remember? She just wanted to know where I was. She wants to be in control. That’s always been the most important thing for her, our whole lives. Besides,” he added, “I don’t think she’ll come looking for you. She’s probably happy to have you out of the way. You can’t embarrass her here.”
“She sent me away. She can do it again. If we get any hints that she’s after me, I’ll have to leave. I just can’t go through that again. I’d rather be dead.”
“Don’t worry, Jeremy. I won’t let her.”
Then Jack held him as Jeremy wept against his shoulder. When Jeremy’s sobs had subsided, Jack took his brother’s hands in his own.
“Stay here, Jeremy. Be an uncle to Morgan. Be Christina’s brother-in-law. Love whomever you want. I don’t care, and neither does Christina. I’ll protect all of you. I’m never, ever letting you go again.”
It was a promise Jack kept faithfully for the next ten years. He kept it right up to that night in February, nine months ago. Driving home from an out-of-town sales call in Guelph in a sudden snowstorm, he hit a patch of black ice on an eastbound highway while trying to avoid an oncoming snowplow. The car fishtailed, then spun into a three-sixty, crashing into the guardrail. He hadn’t been wearing a seat belt. The outward trajectory of his body was stopped only by the steering wheel, which crushed his chest and lungs in a fraction of a second.
Jack Parr died of thoracic trauma and internal bleeding while waiting for an ambulance from Guelph that finally arrived twenty minutes later. By that time, Christina had been rendered a destitute widow, Morgan had been rendered a half-orphan, and Jeremy had been rendered the only son of Adeline Parr, the long-abandoned ogress of Parr’s Landing.
“What?” Jeremy was startled out of his reverie. He turned to Christina. “Sorry, Chris, I didn’t hear you. What did you say?”
“I asked you what you were thinking about. And keep your voice down,” Christina whispered. “I think Morgan’s asleep.” She checked her rearview mirror and saw that her daughter was, in fact, sleeping in the back seat of the Chevelle, with her head leaning against the wadded-up sweater she was using as a makeshift pillow.
“Oh, I don’t know. I was remembering things. I was thinking about Jack.”
Christina was silent, her eyes on the road. Then she said, “I know. I’ve been thinking about him all day myself. This is the one thing he never wanted to happen. But what can you do? Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans, right?”
“You know, it could be all right. She might have changed, you know.”
“I don’t see her forgiving any of us for leaving-especially me, since she blamed me for-” Christina looked into the rearview mirror again. “Well, for the way I changed her plans for the family. I also have a feeling she blames me for Jack’s death, too. She didn’t directly say it in the letter, but it was there all the same.”
“Having the surviving son be someone like me wasn’t part of her plan for the glories of the Parr family, either, Chris. Don’t take all of this on yourself. She never forgave me for being queer, let alone for failing her loving attempts to cure me. I still have nightmares about that sadist. Dr. Gionet, I mean,” he said wryly. “Not Adeline. Though she’s been known to haunt a dream or two, as well.”
“Well, I have nightmares about Adeline all the time.”
Jeremy peered into the darkness through the windshield. There was no light anywhere except what was provided by the Chevelle’s headlights bouncing off the gnarled logging road. “It’s pitch black out here. I guess I forgot what it’s like at night. Jesus, it’s Saturday. If I were home I’d be dancing with handsome men at the Parkside or the St. Charles right now, with my shirt off and a bottle of poppers in my nose. Ah, memories. They’re all we’ll have to sustain us out here in God’s country. Where the hell are we, anyway?”
Christina said, “We’re just south of Marathon and about five miles to Hattie Cove. After that, about half an hour.”
“That was my attempt at humour, by the way,” Jeremy said. “I’m hurt that you didn’t laugh. I mean, about the poppers and the dancing.”
“I just doubt that it’s much of an exaggeration,” Christina replied tartly. “And besides, right about now it sounds pretty amazing. Have you thought about it, by the way? I mean, what it’s going to be like for you back home being openly hom… sorry, gay,” she corrected herself, using the word that Jeremy and his friends applied to themselves.
“You said ‘home’ to refer to that place,” Jeremy said. He shuddered. “It’s not my home. Toronto is my home.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes, I do.” He sighed. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to bite your head off. And yes, I’ve thought about it a lot. Of course I’m not going to be ‘openly gay’ there. You don’t get to be ‘openly gay’ way up north. I don’t think they’ve even heard the word ‘gay.’ It’s ‘faggot,’ ‘fruit,’ or ‘queer.’ Or, something worse. Aside from the fact that I’d get killed-scion of the great Parr name or not-who on earth would I ‘be gay’ with?”
“Have you thought about that guy you used to know? What was his name-Elliot? Elliot McCormack?”
“McKitrick. Elliot McKitrick. And no,” Jeremy lied, “I haven’t. I haven’t thought about him in years.”
“I wonder what happened to him?”
“I do know that his father beat him up pretty badly when he found out about us. I heard about it from my mother. Used a whip on him, apparently. My mother said I should be grateful that she loved me enough to send me to the Doucette instead of doing to me what Elliot’s father did to him.” He was silent for a moment. “I don’t know what happened in the end.”
Softly, Christina asked, “Did you love him? I mean, ‘love-love’?” Jeremy sighed again. “Oh, what’s love? I fell in ‘love’ a lot in Toronto. I certainly thought it was ‘love-love.’ With Elliot, we were both young.” He paused. “Yes, I did love him, I guess. He was so handsome, almost as handsome as Jack.”
“I sort of remember him. I went to school with his sister. She was pretty, too.”
“Elliot’s probably fat and bald now and married to some water buffalo with seven kids. That is if my mother didn’t have him killed.” Jeremy laughed mirthlessly. “Jesus, why are we doing this? Remind me?”
“I’m doing what I have to do,” Christina said. “I have no money and no place to go. We couldn’t keep staying on people’s couches, and I couldn’t support Morgan by working as a waitress, let alone help her through this grieving period, if I was away every night. Not yet, anyway. That’s why I wrote to her. No, Jack didn’t want me to ever have to do this, but it’s something we should have thought about when he was alive. And frankly, Adeline owes me for what she did. And she especially owes Morgan. She’s her granddaughter, for Christ’s sake.” Christina reached over and touched Jeremy’s knee lightly with her fingers. “You, on the other hand, are being a saint on this earth for coming with us to protect us. Jack would have been so proud of you.”
“How much do you think she”-Jeremy indicated Morgan with a nod of his head, not wanting to say her name in case it woke her-“has figured out about what happened back here before she was born?”
“I don’t know. We’ve always been very careful when we spoke about the family, as neutral as we could possibly be. We didn’t want to plant monsters in her head.”
“Maybe it’ll be different this time,” Jeremy said. “Maybe things will have changed and it won’t be… well, the way it was.”
“What was that Faulkner quote from Requiem for a Nun that Jack loved so much?”
Jeremy closed his eyes. “‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’”
They drove in silence for half an hour, the car interred in the northern Ontario darkness as effectively as if it was a mine cart travelling a mile and a half beneath the earth. Then the road abruptly widened and Christina gasped.
“Look,” she said.
Jeremy looked. He drew in a sharp intake of breath.
It was as though the night sky had begun bleeding muddy orange light from a rip in the clouds, threaded now with skeletal fingers of luminous red and yellow. And the clouds now parted like stage curtains, revealed the low full moon, vast and sovereign, and seemingly large enough to touch the edge of the earth.
Beneath the moon, the town of Parr’s Landing rose out of the blackness, stretching to meet it. Beyond the town, the vast forests and the cliffs above Bradley Lake held Parr’s Landing in the same stony centuries-old embrace.
This was the same view the Indians had for a thousand years before the arrival of the French and English. It was the same view the French Jesuits first saw when they arrived on the shores of New France, travelling by canoe and overland to build the doomed mission of St. Barthélemy to the Ojibwa in the seventeenth century.
It was the same view Christina Parr had seen every night for the first seventeen years of her life, and the last vista of Parr’s Landing she’d seen when she turned her head, like Lot’s wife, that night almost sixteen years in the past when she’d fled the town with Jack Parr.
Unlike Lot’s wife, however, Christina hadn’t been turned into a pillar of salt as punishment for looking back. But for its part, Parr’s Landing might as well have been petrified by her backward glance for all it had changed.
Faulkner was right, she thought.
“Wake up, Morgan.” Christina called gently over her shoulder. And before she could stop herself: “We’re home.” Then she turned the Chevelle left on Main Street, onto Martin Street, and began the steep uphill climb towards Parr House.