Blackstrap Hawco (36 page)

‘I'm afraid of the black man,' she cries.

‘
Qui
?' Constable asks, irritated.

‘
L'homme noir
. I saw him on television. Stealing.'

How to answer that? There are no black men here. Not his place to instruct the child.

The girl hurries to the edge of the bank. Her hands joined in front of her, her feet moving up and down, wanting to run.

‘Stay,' he says. ‘Please.' He ducks under a branch.

‘Are you there?' the girl calls.

And Constable Pope sees the bulk ahead. Through the trees, a head turns toward him. A man's head where he is hunched over a woman. Not so frightening. Not so terrible. A robber of not so dangerous a sort.

Ah, oui
, thinks Constable Pope.
Famille.

 

Stumbling through woods for innumerable hours. Tired now in body. Impelled toward an opening. The other side. It is here. There. You drown. You burn. You suffocate. Bitch says. Bitch says. Bitch says. YesFuck. I am here. For only you. Voices discerned. Playful laughter far up ahead, the delicate sound sifting through blazing leaves and evergreen boughs. The sunlight itself, splashing him in the face. Awakening pain and fingers curled. Sweet innocence of voice. When he was young. He
is moving. That much is known. Toward a single sound capable of scouring him clean. If only a child. If only a son. If only a daughter. Not such a pillar-crash of inner ruin. He blinks his huge eyes, glasses lost miles ago. That time with Emily. Out of pity. In silence. In a way never understood. Neither of them admitted to. An act never spoken of. But nine months later. His? He will not say the name. Lipchewer. Fleshrotter. Arselicker. A blur of colour and sound that he grunts toward the back of his head.

A young girl.

Pose. Frozen in that.

Red red red lips caked with make-up, groves numbered in close up.

Up.

She bounces.

Light as the breeze.

Things he could tell her. If his tongue did not sting. So fiercely. The. The Lord. Lord. Incites the purified, the driven. YesFuck. Wake up.

6.00 a.m. Each day until the day. The. An infinitely small speck of recognition. Unearths itself, dirt blown up ahead. Lord. They advance through the forest with a cup and a pill.

And remain steady, patient, for growth will come.

Ahhh, it surges out of him, focusing, listen. He has stopped. It is still. It is exact. A forest, wilderness, city, cabin, apartment, house that he is stopped in. He sees. In these man-made or natural-ceilinged and open-skied compartments. It is him alone framed outside of this.

 

Blackstrap stares down the length of shotgun. Notices the trees have begun to thin. A view of objects beyond the woods. Outside the life of the forest. A different world. Unreal how it is found. The side of a cabin. Like it does not belong. Other people. A police car. The shapes of objects that do not fit in. The back of Isaac Tuttle's head. Lower. Through his shoulder blades. The space to the left. Where the spray of pellets would pop through. To make mush of the heart.

$1.50 for the shotgun shells. This is what Blackstrap thinks. Write it up in the book. As a debt. If he pulls the trigger. The entire world will hear.

Cabin up ahead. Just there. How many feet? Twenty. His cheek takes the lash. A branch with a stinger. For YesFuck. Half-eaten bodies. Nailed to walls. Built around JuicyPlum. JewySlum. Jerusalem. A count of lashes to open him. How many? Twenty feet. Her. How many? To her. Her is always him. Her to suffer. For him – a gutless wonder. Crows ripping at flesh. He has stopped counting. Wishing for another. Life. What is seen and wanted. The land. Always occupied wrongly. Thoughts – whip-snapping here to there. Unbounded by continents, divided by theology.

And thank you.

The child's laughter closer. City child in the lie of the land. That flourishes. Through the bounty of YesFuck. FuckYes. The child-drawn scribble. Portrait of the fisherman. Behind him, an ocean. The cunt suck pull of sea. And thank you. Thank you. The fishing grounds. No longer now. Empty. Cunt suck pull of the sea gone slack. Beyond shore.

Haggard whore. Biblical exactitude and majesty. For the seas shall empty. How not to believe? A walk across an ocean. Once. With feet floated by fish.

Crown-sanctioned scroungers.

Out of foreign ports.

Overseas.

To vanquish.

God's country.

New Found Land.

Beneath a crow-wing flap of a flag.

Of unholy bone-gnawers:

Piecemeal progress.

Who from where?

YesFuck in the tower. Says nothing. Smells the spillage. Dreams of killing. His skull a glistening fist.

Isaac lifts his head, unsticks his eyes to the opening through trees. Flicker. Unreal. He stands and trips again. Hands bracing ahead for the fall. One hand onto a hard thick root. The other penetrating softer
space. A woman's mossy hair, through her giving flesh, like warm dough, implying his hand deeper.

Life to life stiff nipple

Entanglement

His prick one thick pulse

Bobs when fingered, willing

to burst and blossom a bouquet of bleeding hearts

Falling too deeply, he must tell. The child everything before he is too old. Too much of a shrunken apple before she takes the bite.

Any second now.

 

‘Dad?' The girl calls into the trees. Her high-pitched voice tingling with fright. ‘Police man?' Panting sounds. Pawing noises through the branches. And she trembles on her feet. The face rises toward the bank. The bulk of something. And the girl screams. An animal. No. A monster coming toward her. Slasher Eddy. Slasher Eddy. With a blood-black face.

Constable Pope is now near. The girl lurches for his legs. Hugs them and screams without letting up. Slasher Eddy. Pointing. Slasher Eddy.

‘It's okay?' Pope says tentatively. More troubled by the girl's electrified overreaction than by the hideous sight of the man. He touches the top of the child's warm head. Squints into the slanting light that mingles with dust through the limbs and trunks. Revealing the dark flashings of a human form. Gurgling or growling. Until it makes it up over the bank at the edge of the clearing. The staggering body. Large white eyes against the stained and bleeding face. The squinting exaggeration of expression that could only belong to Isaac Tuttle.

The young girl lifts her face. Away from where it was pressed into the fabric of Pope's pant leg. Mouth shut and silent. She peeks toward the woods. Screams again. A shrill sound that carries far across the land.

 

A great wounded bird. Behold, he cometh with clouds
, is Isaac Tuttle, his eyes shifting within a clotted face of bright-red and brownish-black streaks and scratches, to stare woundedly at the sky.
And every eye shall see Him,
and they also which pierced Him. And all the kindreds of the earth shall wail for him.
He nods okay.

 

‘Ashley?' a man's voice from the woods at the back of the cabin. Hurrying out of the trees, ‘Ashley?'

A woman calling unsteadily, ‘Ashley,' forceful and yet troubled.

The man and woman step quickly from the woods. Scrambling up over the bank alongside the cabin. The woman rushes to the girl and scoops her up. The woman's blouse unbuttoned beneath her rumpled jacket. Revealing her pale blue brassiere and rounded cleavage. Her breath racing and erratic. The man is startled. Stops in his tracks. Flushed as he buckles his belt and scans the scene. Not expecting a policeman. Not knowing. Coming close to inspect his daughter. Touching her arm. Caringly tilting his head to stare into the child's fear-struck face.

‘What is it?' he asks, out of breath. His throat dry. Almost choking on the words. He notices the man near the bank. Jerks back. Then to the RCMP officer, ‘What the hell's happening?' he demands. Outrage overcoming embarrassment.

‘It's okay,' says Constable Pope. ‘She had just a small fright.'

‘A fright!' says the man.

‘Isaac Tuttle,' Pope calls out.

Isaac tilts his head, freezes, hears the calling. Caught, his jaw churning from side to side as he speaks out from the disoriented swirl, the sound a mash of thick liquid rasping. A blurry outline. One thought for these unfocused people, through the punching bloodbeat along the veins in his temples,
Christ 'av mercy on yer souls, ye frightened sinners.

‘You go to the hospital,' says Pope. Eyeing the half-dried blood beneath Tuttle's chin. ‘We'll find out who did this?'

Isaac Tuttle bends his head sideways and watches Pope, sniffing the air. He shrieks, throwing his arms up into the air.

The girl's scream recedes. Followed by the sound of a door slamming. The mother has taken the daughter inside. Footsteps in the grass. Pope turns to the man in his beige down-filled jacket.

‘Where'd he come from?' the man asks. Searching into the trees. The mesh-work of naked branches. Speckled orange leaves and green boughs extended from brown-splotched tree trunks.

Isaac Tuttle shifts his tongue, the pain provoking anger. He steps for the girl's father, but Pope grabs his arm.

‘Mr. Tuttle,' says Constable Pope. ‘I think we move on.'

The man snickers. Straightens his wire-rimmed glasses.

Pope turns with the wounded man in his grip. Leading him. Patiently up the leaf-strewn path into the blaze of colours.

‘I knaw sssy worh, 'n ssy layor…ssou hanst not 'are ssem whiss are ehil…ye fuh'r.'

‘You know that I was robbed,' the man says accusingly. Voice raised to be heard above Isaac. His tone insinuating a connection between past and present.

‘I'll come back later,' Pope announces. Recalling the man's name from the radio dispatcher, ‘Mr. White.'

Blanc.

‘Okay,' Mr. White allows. His breathing steadier now. Reasonable, ‘I'll be here waiting.'

Isaac Tuttle shifts his jaw, one side to the other as they step up the path, alongside the dense cluster of trees and onto the open dirt road. No longer blocked from the wind, their clothes are cooled, their faces freshened.

Startled, Tuttle turns to squint into the gust. Emily Hawco stood by the police car, her grey hair, once a beautiful black lustre, swirling around her head, her white arms twisting listlessly like flimsy tentacles moving to a song sung by her perished children, her body still young beneath her gauzy gown, her expression one of compassion, of pity. She beckons to him with a vile grin.

Isaac strains back from Pope's grip, stops himself from moving closer to the car.
T'was a wind like dis dat took her
, he chews out from his tongue,
da screech of her dead infant
. But only he makes sense of it. A gurgle of mush and blood, his mouth sticky.

‘This way, please.' Pope pulls him along. Opening the rear door. He settles Tuttle in the seat.

Turning to gape at the window across the seat. Emily Hawco bent close to the glass, her grey face dusty and greyer in patches, her parched lips opening and closing, opening then closing, rotted, splitting pink, like a blossom, a bloom, she feeds like a fish effortlessly
swallowing minute specks until – revitalized by the sight of him – she is made girlish again.

‘Isaac,' she whispers, ‘what have you done to me? Not as I was. What you have done to me, to Karen?'

Isaac Tuttle bursts out sobbing. Hears the driver's door open, a uniformed man shifting in, then the door shutting. Captured, he warns himself,
detained fer me beliefs
. He will be executed. A child's voice calls, wild, escaping, fleeing toward the cruiser, ‘I want to take a picture,' one hand slapping the glass, her small face pressed into the window.

‘Hey,' says the child, banging the glass with her hand. The city child. Her mother lifting her off, further ascension that rises with Isaac's heart, now stolen away. A camera to the child's face.

The engine is engaged. The cruiser pulls out. A blur of shifting landscape speeding up. Only Emily Hawco in focus beyond the glass drifting along with them. Her palms filled with heartbeats that echo into the cool glass.

II

Out of the woods and out of place in a locked, antiseptic room

The hospital door is shut. Karen has been admitted.

Her brother, Glenn, at the door now. The private room he had taken care of. Turning the metal lock to hear it softly click.

‘One last look,' he says. A heavy bag on a strap over his shoulder. He lays it on the chair. Fresh air coming off of him from outdoors. He pulls the long zipper. Takes out the video camera, balances its weight on his shoulder, and aims at Karen. Lying back on the bed in her blue hospital gown.

‘What're you doing?' She gently shakes her head. Not believing.

‘Smile.'

‘No, Glenn.' She holds up a hand.

The video lens draws nearer.

‘Glenn!' She nearly laughs. Wanting not to be seen this way. By the camera. No make-up. No jewellery. ‘No, okay?'

‘Tell us what you're here for,' Glenn says, eye to the eyepiece. Interviewing the stranger.