Holiday of the Dead (55 page)

“What did you do?” he managed to say, though it came out all as one syllable, slurred together.

“This is your big chance,” I said. I leaned him up against the front fender of the Suburban, reached into the driver’s side window, and turned up Janis Joplin’s ‘Take Another Little Piece of My Heart.’

Janis was singing
never never never hear me when I cry
.

It ain’t easy being the manager for the biggest rock star on the planet. Sometimes you gotta get your hands dirty. But what the hell? I mean, the show must go on, right?

THE END

WABIGOON

By

James Cheetham

I can still picture our surroundings. Above me the sun sparked bright while in the distance the sound of songbirds painted a picture entirely innocent and removed from the horrors of the day. Today should have been filled with fun, fish, and brotherly bonding; a beer in my hand, a line in the water, sunscreen on my nose. Things don’t always turn out the way one expects them to however – and I can appreciate that, but never would I have believed a day as beautiful as this one could have ended as tragically as it had.

Even now, the cloudless sky remains a constant reminder of normality. The beer still waits in the cooler and my line remains forever in the water, along with my tackle box, my rod, and my cell phone.

The boat still has power too, but the outboard refuses to turn over. I’ve done everything in my limited mechanical ability to change that fact, but it has not been enough. I am not blessed to be so inclined, and the person who did have that know-how – my brother, Jerry – lay on his back in the hull of the boat, inhaling tiny gasps of air, his skin slowly turning a shade of shocking blue as his eyes gazed past the infinite sky above.

I was uncertain what to do with Jerry, my mind snared by thoughts of our mother – God rest her soul. She’d have rolled over in her grave if she knew I’d considered rolling my only sibling over the side of the boat.

The last time I heard Jerry say anything coherent he’d been directing me on how to get the motor started again while he busied himself applying pressure to a gaping bite taken from the meat of his left hand, just below his thumb.

“Take the filleting knife, and dig that shit out of the propeller,” Jerry had said as small streams of deep red trickled down his forearm only hours earlier. He removed the towel he’d been using on the wound and held it over the lake, squeezing the blood from it the way one might squeeze a chamois while drying a car. The motor was heavy but I managed to pull it up and tilt it back, bringing the propeller blades out of the water. I was repulsed by what I saw as shades of fleshy pink and crimson dripped back into the lake and tiny remnants of the morning’s catastrophe floated upon waves of water so crystal clear, you could see to the very bottom.

“Dig it out with the knife. It won’t turn over because it’s blocked up with all that … crap.”

The filleting knife wasn’t enough however. It was sharp certainly – which was fine for cleaning Pickerel, but was useless when utilized in the process of digging, like a spade or a spoon. The blade was too thin and it bent to the point I worried it might snap altogether, the blade-tip lodging in my eye leaving the both of us injured – two helpless fools drifting along in a boat that refused to start. Perhaps that was our punishment for wandering off the beaten track.

Jerry had mentioned Raindance Island on the very first night spent in Wabigoon, Ontario five days earlier. Our wives were inside our rented cabin getting the kids off to bed while my brother and I sat in the screened porch enjoying a few drinks as the sun set over Wabigoon Lake.

“I wouldn’t mind taking a look – might be interesting,” Jerry said after mentioning the isolated island with strange anticipation in his voice.

Jerry motioned for me to be quiet. I looked up to see our wives, Andrea and Jackie, coming out through the patio doors – Andrea still nursed the vodka cooler she’d had with our late supper of barbequed hotdogs.

“They all tucked in?” I asked, watching Jackie – my brother’s wife, pull the patio door closed behind her.

She smiled. “Sort of … Jonathon has Joshua convinced there’s a deranged lunatic in a hockey mask lurking in the woods. I wouldn’t be surprised if he crawls into bed with you guys tonight.”

“That’s my boy!” Jerry said, toasting his son with his glass while the rest of us shared a laugh.

“Some things never change.” I said. How ironic, Jerry’s son had my kid terrified – we hadn’t even unpacked yet. “You think he’ll be alright?” I asked, as Andrea sat down on my lap and wrapped her arms around my shoulders.

“We’re here for two weeks, I hope so,” Andrea said with a chuckle.

Jackie pulled up a plastic chair, sat down, and rested her bare feet on Jerry’s legs. “I feel so bad. Jonathon’s become a horror fiend – no thanks to his father.”

“Ah, it’s just first night jitters – tomorrow night will be easier,” Andrea said, waving Jackie’s worries away with her hand before turning her attention to me. “You guys planning on unloading that boat at some point tonight?”

That was of course not what we’d been talking about, not exactly, but it was enough to make the girls groan nonetheless. I could imagine their reaction had my brother told them the honest to God truth.

Jackie – struggling to get the twisty cap off her beer, shook her head. “Tomorrow’s our first day here … you guys aren’t getting off that easy!”

My brother’s ambitions were left in the porch that night along with several empty beer bottles. Jerry was smart enough not to push his luck. There would be plenty of time to get out on the lake, though I could still see his mind churning as we continued to enjoy our vacation together. By the time Monday rolled into Tuesday and we’d spent the day with the kids hiking, and Tuesday rolled into a Wednesday full of swimming off the local dock, I’d all but forgotten my brother’s anticipation of Raindance Island …

Back on the boat still trying to dislodge the mess in the propeller, I realized I’d been right about the blade of the filleting knife too. The tip snapped off leaving me little blade left to work with, and in the process of breaking it, I knocked my tackle-box into the lake along with my cell phone. Not that the phone had worked worth a damn on the lake anyway. Though beautiful and cloud free, service remained unwilling to cooperate with my obvious distress. Not wanting to risk getting the phone wet and after numerous futile attempts to call the girls at the cabin, I’d finally stuffed it in one of the many plastic drawers of my tackle-box – one of many terrible decisions I’d made that day.

It wasn’t until Jerry suggested I try the broken paddle instead of the filleting knife that I noticed how truly pale my brother had become.

“I don’t know if the paddle would do any good,” I said disgusted. “Its wrapped in there pretty good.”

“From when we hit the–”

“Yeah,” I said, interrupting my brother as I studied the mess lodged around the blades of the propeller. My stomach climbed up into my throat as I tried to understand just how we ended up in such a horrible situation in the first place …

I know by Thursday I’d forgotten about the island altogether though I’d not forgotten about going fishing with my brother. In fact, I was chomping at the bit to get out on that beautiful lake after the six of us had dinner at a local restaurant called The Lakeshore Inn. They served the best pickerel I’d ever tasted. Even Andrea, who refused to acknowledge fish was even edible, enjoyed the mouthful I insisted she at least sample. Breaded in a delicious beer batter, it took all my strength not to get in Jerry’s boat the moment we arrived back at the cabin.

Jerry was suffering from the same itch that Thursday evening, I could tell. “Saturday is Man-day,” he’d said cracking a beer open while our sons set up a game of Monopoly in the screened porch. Moths danced on the screen walls, attracted to the light of an antique lamp as I listened to my brother tell our wives of our plans to spend Saturday fishing. The girls gave us a hard time, but it wasn’t long before we realized they were taking great pleasure in pulling our chains.

“You go have fun with your little boat,” Jackie had said sarcastically, “while we do our woman work, cleaning and a scrubbing, and a tending to the children …”

After the kids went to bed, and the wives retired to the living room to watch a movie, Jerry and I reminisced over past fishing trips – finishing off one of two twelve-packs that had been sitting in the fridge. It was good to be with my brother again, and it truly felt just like old times. Thinking back now, I guess I realized for the first time in my thirty-nine years alive that he was not only my brother, but my very best friend as well.

Though both born and bred in Manitoba, my brother had since taken a job in Boulder, Colorado. He worked for a group called Genecore Cryonics, a company that took the money off those who could afford it, and offered them the possibility of immortality, freezing the deceased’s body with the anticipation that they might someday be reborn once technology found a way to catch up. This was right up my brother’s alley of course – though to meet him, you’d never know the intelligence he hid under the guise of a simple man, who still found farts funny and the last beer in the fridge irresistible.

It had been two years since our families last rendezvoused, and I was happy that night to finally be with him again, only then realizing how much I missed him. The beers flowed freely and our wives appeared willing to give us a distance they suspected we required to reacquaint ourselves – the last time Jerry and I were together was our mother’s funeral two years earlier.

Still lying in the boat, Jerry moaned – tearing me from my thoughts. My mind was wandering when I should have been trying to get us out of our mess. I brought a flask of water over to where he still lay in the boat. “Here,” I said, lifting his head up as I held it over his dry white lips. “Drink something, you’ll feel better.”

Jerry let out a cough and water splashed onto my hands. He was no longer able to swallow. I pulled the flask away, frightened by the strange colour of his eyes then gently, I lowered his head back down.

I took some electrical tape I’d found earlier while searching for tools I could use to unclog the motor, and taped a fresh towel around Jerry’s bite. The bleeding had stopped but I wanted to protect him against any infection, surprised that I could think straight at all after everything that had happened. Not far from the boat a fish jumped – a flash against the sun, before disappearing once again.

The lake itself remained hauntingly peaceful throughout the horrible ordeal and as we drifted along, serine waves licked the hull while I searched the shoreline of distant islands wondering if I could get to one of them using the paddle still available. The question was: what waited on those islands? I’d seen enough on Raindance to change my mind immediately for as they say – once bitten, twice shy. In the distance, a loon cried out, breaking my concentration. I chewed nervously on my bottom lip, debating what I should do and pondered just how much time I had left to do it. The daylight wasn’t going to last forever, and I was becoming frustrated.

“It wasn’t worth it, Jerry,” I finally mumbled to my brother frustrated, but silence answered me and nothing else. For a man who loved to talk, my brother had so little to say now – a far cry from his excitement only days earlier when the fishing trip still seemed like a good idea.

“They have what’s called a body farm on the island,” Jerry had said Thursday evening when he was still very much alive and well. Midnight soon came to pass while we drank in the screened porch. Jerry turned on a small transistor radio and found a station broadcasting Coast To Coast, a paranormal talk radio program we’d both been fond of over the years.

“What the hell is a body farm?” I’d asked, as host George Noory talked through radio hiss about unidentifiable flying objects spotted above Phoenix years earlier.

“Well, they study the environment’s effect on corpses,” my brother explained. “At one time, they used dead pigs; they even dressed them up in clothes to make them seem more realistic, more human … but now they’re using actual bodies.” He rocked in his chair, balancing on the back legs when he slapped his neck suddenly, bringing the annoying buzz of a mosquito to an abrupt end.

“Who are
they
?” I’d asked, feeling light and inquisitive – a perfect buzz with perfect company. Everybody inside the cabin was fast asleep by then, and we did our best to whisper our slurs.