He roared by one likely tree.
He couldn’t breathe. He was rocking back and forth. Where was the final detachment? The purposeful calm of the fighter pilot? He’d made his decision. Never get to the bottom of anything, never find out what was happening or how it was happening. Whatever it was. It was too huge, too amorphous, too close. Outside. And inside. Alive. In his blood.
He was approaching a second tree. He could see every bone in his hand as it clenched the steering wheel. It looked like one of Chasson’s x-rays. He was getting ready for take-off. Somewhere.
The tree was racing closer, bounding toward him in great giant strides. He thought of Carole. She’d made him promise something. “Don’t surprise me,” she’d said. Wasn’t that what she’d said?
Not like that other soldier had done. Her fiancÈ.
Poor Carole Birley.
* * *
Someone had just knocked at the door.
Carole was in the kitchen making herself some lunch from the few things she’d brought from her mother’s and feeling angry and frustrated that Wilf could leave her alone for so long, that he could be so deaf to everything she’d said, so blind to what she’d been plainly feeling.
She stood there listening for whoever it was to knock again. There was only one door in the house. There’d been a back door at one time, but someone had taken it off and had covered the opening so there’d be room for the electric stove.
Another knock.
Carole walked across the living room and looked outside. Mr. McLauchlin’s Buick was still sitting there, all shiny and dark. There was no other vehicle in sight. She tried to see the front stoop. She pressed her face to the window but she couldn’t see.
Each time she’d returned that morning from wandering aimlessly around in the yard she’d locked the door. It was locked now.
A sharper knocking. It had a proprietary sound to it this time, as if it might be the owner of the cottage. Or perhaps Mr. McLauchlin. What if he’d come out by cab, frustrated that Wilf hadn’t come into town to talk to him, angry that Wilf still had the car.
“Hello?” she called out, “Who is it?”
No one answered.
Carole unlocked the door. Duncan Getty was standing there. His great head looked even larger than it usually did with all of his hair shaved off. He looked half-starved. She could see pieces of chain dangling down from his wrists. She could see a large piece of broken glass in his hand.
“Carole,” he said, “guess what? We’re goin’ to get married now.”
She couldn’t make her voice come out. She couldn’t feel her legs.
Duncan seemed to take her silence as some kind of agreement. He stepped inside the house.
Carole backed up. “I don’t know whether this is such a good time to get married, Duncan.”
He stared down at her legs. She could see now that his whole body was trembling.
“It’s just that it takes a lot of planning to get married. We’ll have to invite people and rent a hall and everything like that. It’s very complicated.”
“But we don’t need all that. We can get married by the river.”
“Can we?” Carole turned away. Where are you, Wilf, her mind was racing, taking off, flying around and around, where are you?
Duncan trudged over to the bedroom door. He stared down at the mattress like he couldn’t take his eyes off it. “Unless you want to get married here.”
If I run out the door, how far will I get, Carole thought. Three steps? Four? “Getting married beside the river sounds a lot better, Duncan. Nicer. Maybe when it’s warm. Maybe sometime this summer.”
“We have to do it now.” Duncan turned to look at her, “Because of Dandy and Babe. That’s where they are. I’ll show you all the best places, where moss grows soft as anythin’. Where fresh water comes right out on the bank and it’s good to drink, where you can get out of the wind, where there’s sunny spots. You can ride on Babe, because she’s more gentle than Dandy. We can live there forever.”
“But we can’t live outside all the time. What if it snows?”
“It won’t snow, Carole.” Duncan reached out as if he wanted to touch her. His wrist looked mangled under its iron bracelet.
“Maybe we should think about it some more. If you could help me fix this place up, we could live here.”
“There’s somebody else livin’ here already.” His tawny eyes slid back to the mattress again. The jagged piece of glass was scraping restlessly against his trouser leg. “By the river or here.”
Some woman began to cry in Carole’s mind. She turned away and walked back toward the door. “All right then. You can show me if you like. We can go down by the river. Let’s visit all those nice places.” She picked up her coat and pulled it over her trembling shoulders. She stumbled outside and looked down the laneway. Wilf wasn’t there.
Duncan came out behind her and walked toward the river. He motioned her to follow him. Carole trailed along behind. He turned and started walking backwards. “You didn’t feed my horses when I had to go away. I thought you knew enough to look after them.”
“I thought someone else had done that. I asked about them and someone said they were being looked after in a really nice place. I’m sorry, Duncan. I’m sorry!”
Duncan looked as if he didn’t know whether to believe that she was sorry or not. “Anyway, they got away. They’re livin’ down in the valley now. I seen them.”
“Oh, I’m glad.”
They were approaching the trees. Carole’s feet felt like wood, thumping uselessly against the ground. Dragging.
“You’ll get up on Babe. I’ll get on Dandy.”
“All right.”
She could hardly make her legs move. “You walk so fast, Duncan. Maybe we could rest for a while.”
Duncan stopped and stared up at the tree he’d been sitting in. “I’ve seen your naked titties lots of times, you know.”
Carole’s mind went blank.
“Pressing them up against the window. Spreading them out. You were teasing me. I was too stupid to know, though.”
Duncan turned toward her with a groan.
* * *
The first thing Wilf noticed was that the door had been left open. He’d been rehearsing his speech past every likely tree and rattling over the bridge at Glen Morris. “I didn’t want to surprise you,” he’d say, “so I have to tell you about Buchenwald and Michael Chasson and typhus,” he’d say. “Not to upset you but if we could just talk. Maybe I could get through this, Carole.” And they would have a grownup conversation. And then she would know. And if it didn’t work, if her voice, her touch, her arms didn’t work, at least when he drove away she wouldn’t be surprised.
Wilf got out of Andy’s car and stared at the open door and suddenly he wasn’t thinking about himself anymore.
He walked into the house. “Carole,” he called out. He looked through the rooms.
He went outside again.
Maybe she’d gotten so angry she’d walked back into town. But it was four miles away. Maybe she was off on a stroll. “Carole!”
It seemed to Wilf that everything had gone silent. He looked toward the river. No sparrows were twittering in the tangle of nearby bushes. No crows were cawing in the far distance. No sound of the wind, though the high branches in the pines that circled the cottage were moving back and forth.
“Carole!”
His eyes caught a flash of colour farther out in the waist-high grass. He waded out toward it. Carole’s coat was lying there. A sleeve was stretched out and pointing off toward the river.
Panic came loose everywhere, in the sky, in the air.
Wilf pushed on toward the valley and came up to the edge of a ravine. He could see a flow of muddy water moving fast far below. He stepped off and plunged down. The steep slope was slimy and wet. He began to slide on his knees. A scream ricocheted up the ravine to meet him. He stopped.
Silence again. And then another scream, racing up from the river, scattering and chattering past him like a flock of frightened birds. Wilf let himself go and began to slide again. He could hear the churn of the water clearly now; it continued to grow louder.
He saw Carole first. She was cresting against the flooding river, her hair, her face, her naked body wet and gleaming, clinging to a fallen tree, going under, surfing up again.
And then he could see Duncan Getty working his way out toward her, the muddy water swirling around his waist, hauling himself up, tipping the tree down.
Carole disappeared.
“Murder me first!” Wilf bellowed out.
Duncan turned, his round boy’s face shining, his shirt open and floating in the current.
“Kill me!”
Duncan began to wade toward the shore. Carole’s face came up out of the river. Wilf could see a glint of broken glass in Duncan’s hand.
“That’s right,” Wilf whispered, barely able to hold himself up, bracing against his cane.
Duncan looked half in a daze rising up out of the water. Blood was running down his chest, streaming across his broad white belly, disappearing inside his soaking pants. He raised the broken glass and like a penitent and entranced monk, he punched it into his flesh again.
“Come on,” Wilf whispered.
Duncan took a step up the slippery bank, looked down and when he looked up again the black handle of the cane was descending through the sky.
Wilf could hear Duncan’s skull crack as he hit it. The shocking delight of the impact went right up his arm.
Duncan went down on his knees.
Wilf raised the cane again.
“Wilf,” Carole screamed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Wilf and Carole didn’t stay on at the stone cottage. Carole went back to her parents’ home. Wilf went back to his old room at his father’s place.
Mr. McLauchlin told Carole that she could take as much time as she needed to recover. She insisted that she wasn’t hurt, that nothing had happened to her, but it was clear to everyone who saw her that first day that this wasn’t true. It took her two days to get out of her mother’s bed. Her mother had put her there because Carole’s own bed was still out in the country.
Wilf sat with her in her parents’ house. When she felt like going outside, he sat with her on the front porch. He felt overwhelmed by guilt. They talked about everything they could think of except what had actually happened. Sometimes they were content enough just to sit together and not say a word.
Carole had half-swum, half-climbed back out of the river and Wilf had covered her up with his coat. They’d struggled up the ravine together, had climbed into Andy’s car and had driven into town. By the time two OPP officers, the Chief of Police and Wilf had returned, Duncan had crawled about fifty yards away along the shore. He was lying there as still as death, covered in mud and looking like some unknown creature.
“He’s dead,” the one OPP officer had said.
The Chief had knelt down in the mud. “No. Unfortunately he’s not,” he’d said.
After ten days of rest Carole came back to the office, sat down at her desk and began to type. Wilf had been thinking in a desperate kind of way that it might help if she could talk about just what did happen, because it was clear to him that she was still struggling. He couldn’t bring himself to ask though, and she didn’t say.
He didn’t tell her about the injection. The plague. He didn’t say a word about Buchenwald. Or his search for a suitable tree.
Spring came and went and the heat of the summer settled over the town and no further mayhem or murder occurred. This didn’t surprise Carole. She’d already told Wilf that she knew it was over. Whatever it was. Wilf had ended it himself that day on the river because instead of dying she’d lived. And by her intervention, and only by her intervention, Wilf knew, so had Duncan.
Wilf had to agree with her. There had been some kind of change that day. He’d left the group of men who were standing around Duncan and he’d walked into the dense trees and he’d felt something lift out of his body and out of his mind and float away, filtering through the ferny places, drifting along the shadowy corridors, up through the shafts of sunlight. He just didn’t know what it was.
“Will the court be open to the public?”
Carole and Wilf were sitting on the porch steps in front of her parents’ house late one airless August night. Duncan’s trial was coming up and she’d been too embarrassed to ask Mr. McLauchlin.
“It doesn’t matter. You won’t have to go. They’ll get him on Basil. They won’t need you for a lesser charge. Just your statement. And Dad says he’ll make sure it’s read into the record and discussed in the judge’s quarters, not in court.”
Carole nodded and looked up at a white blur of moths chasing themselves around a street lamp. “He said he wanted me to take my clothes off. He said he’d seen me lots of time through my bedroom window.”
“Oh?” Wilf continued to stare off into the dark, not daring to move or look her way. “So I did. And then he started to touch me all over and then he picked up that piece of glass again. And I ran. Flew down the hill. Saw the tree in the river, and all I could think to do was climb out on it and the water was so icy cold and he was punching that glass into his chest and I screamed. And he punched it into his chest again. And I screamed again. And he came climbing through the branches like someone I didn’t know, like someone I couldn’t recognize no matter how much I tried. I didn’t know who he was!”
Carole got up and walked out the front walk and stood there under the light.
“Are you all right?” Wilf asked.
“I don’t know.”
The next morning Wilf climbed into his father’s car and without telling Carole or anyone else where he was going, drove to Hamilton. Duncan was being held there again waiting for his trial. Wilf was somewhat surprised that no questions were raised when he identified himself at the reception desk as a friend of Duncan’s. He was early for visiting hours though and had to sit in a nearby coffee shop for most of the afternoon. He wasn’t as surprised on his return because he had to empty out all his pockets and the area for visitors had a heavy wire mesh running between the prisoners and whoever came in to see them; a burly guard was standing at each end of the room.
If a person were contemplating revenge on a prisoner, Wilf thought to himself, a person wouldn’t be able to act on it.
He handed the slip of paper he’d been given to one of the guards and was told to take a seat and wait. Three women, girlfriends or wives, Wilf guessed, were talking to three men sitting passively on the other side of the screen.
A door opened and Duncan came in.
He seemed pleased when his eyes found Wilf. He shuffled over in leg chains and sat down.
“How are you doing, Duncan?”
“I’m fine.” He looked around at the other people and smiled a kind of shy smile.
“How’s your head?” Wilf could see a long scar across his temple and fading suture marks.
“I get dizzy sometimes. I’m better right now.”
“How’s your chest?”
“All right.”
“Do you like it here?”
“Better than freezing.”
Wilf nodded and said more softly, “Do you know why I’m here?”
Duncan thought about it for a moment. He looked like he knew a secret, but he shook his head.
Wilf could feel the pain in his side and a heavy pain behind his eyes. “I just wanted to see you again. Have a closer look.”
“At what?”
Wilf shook his head. “I really don’t know.”
“I just wanted the house.”
“You what?”
“Because Carole’s my friend. I wouldn’t do nothin’ to hurt her, Wilf. I just needed a house.”
“You needed a house?”
“You went away, didn’t you? If Carole went away too then I could have it. I needed a house to live in because I couldn’t live in my own house no more. I was just chasin’ her away. That’s all.”
“Who told you to say that?”
Duncan moved his face close, so close his nose almost touched the wire; his tawny eyes looked sly. “That’s not why you’re here,” he said.
“It’s not?”
“No. You nearly killed me. You came to see how you’d feel.”
“Why?”
“Because you want to feel it again.”
“I’ve killed a lot of people, Duncan.”
“I know,” Duncan said.
Wilf got in the car and began the thirty-mile drive back toward his hometown. And now he knew what the injection of that bacterium had caused. It had remained innocuously in his body, just as Michael Chasson had said, but it had changed everything. It had altered his consciousness; it had given him eyes to see.
He could see Adrienne. He could see Duncan and Scarfe. He could see Kelly’s daughter, feel her quickening heart as she watched her father’s face and listened to the weakening cries coming from the cellar. All the wild, ecstatic, unfathomable pleasure of it.
And he could see himself.
Wilf aimed the car down the busy highway.
Duncan needed a house.
It sounded like all the paltry defences and obfuscations at Nuremberg. They all needed a house. It sounded like every Council of War’s explanation everywhere. Every revolution. Every domestic bloodbath. Every common thug.
Everyone needs a house.
Wilf sped along.
I was never motivated by base instincts,
the good doctor said.
Of course not. Who but a madman would confess to serial acts of homicide because it feels so good? Beyond the reach of all social engineering, beyond all hope of enlightenment, all ideas of human progress.
A truck roared by. A long line of shining cars streamed toward him.
And now Wilf knew why that boy in the cage had held the answer. Because he was us. In his sad, half-formed face, in his incapacity, in his entrapment. He was us.
“But just think.” Wilf was talking out loud now, “Think of all the tender people who wouldn’t harm anyone, all the communities that get along, the co-operation, the goodwill. Isn’t this true? Isn’t this truer still?”
He could see Carole as clearly as if she were sitting there beside him. Her gentleness. Her gracefulness. Her unruly lock of hair that he loved.
Where is God, Wilf thought to himself.
The sun was beginning to set. It was truly beautiful flaming across the highway, it filled Wilf’s eyes.
It filled his heart.