There was a droning coming from beneath him. Eddie opened one eye as best as he could, the other stayed swollen shut. His head was ringing and for a few sick seconds, Eddie thought he was in a coffin, and that the droning was a backhoe dumping mounds of black earth burying him alive.
He heard the dim rattle of metal on metal as the floor below him rose and fell. He could feel metal under his bound hands and when he tried to roll over his shoulder wedged against something. Eddie focused and realized he was in the trunk of a car as it moved down the highway.
He knew better than to try breaking his way out or shouting. He was in hot enough water, he didn’t need the driver pulling over to end him on the side of the highway. He needed time to think. He stayed still after the car stopped. Eddie knew if he tried to spring up he’d probably get a bullet in the belly for his trouble. When the trunk lid opened, cool rain soothed the heat from his face and he stared back at the two guys from Esposito’s. One stood with a shovel in his hand, the other with Eddie’s Colt pointed at him. Behind them, pine trees and white birch reached out of the landscape to the cloudy skies as if begging the heavens to intervene.
In the headlights of their maroon Plymouth, the one with the shovel thrust it into Eddie’s hands and pointed to a spot beside a knoll where a white pine stretched into the night.
“Start digging.” He spat.
Eddie fumbled with the shovel, trying to grip it with his hands bound in front of him. It took some doing but as he went to break ground the wooden handle slipped from his grasp and the shovel lay useless at his feet.
The guy who handed him the shovel was covering him with a machine gun. By the time Eddie dropped the shovel the guy swore and reached into his pocket. He tossed a small set of keys to Eddie and leveled the gun at him.
“Take 'em off, makes no difference to me just get to digging.”
“Louis, you sure we oughta free his hands? What with him being a fighter and all.” The one with Eddie’s gun asked.
“This chump?” Louis pointed the gun barrel at Eddie. “He cost me a grand two years ago against Diesel Danny James. Far as I’m concerned he couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn then, and now he’s older. ‘Sides, we got guns and I don’t hear you volunteering to muddy those wingtips.”
“James had loaded gloves, the fight was fixed before I stepped in the ring. You got sharked.” Eddie remembered the fight: taking a punch from James was like getting hit by a locomotive, but he’d tried like hell to knock him out anyway.
“Shutup and move dirt. And Stanley for Christ sake quit jerkin' around like that. What, you got someplace to be?”
“It’s these damn black flies Louis. Great outdoors nothing, you don’t know what’s out there. Give me fresh linen and four walls, a decent wet bar, and a cigar. Remember that place in T.O? Talk about a hot streak.”
The two went back and forth over Eddie while he cornered off the grave. He stopped to stretch at one point, looking into the clouds as the rain ran down his collar. He hadn’t prayed in a long time, but he came damn close in that moment. His mind raced trying to figure out how to get out of this. He could feel his heartbeat thumping in his temple, and smell the deep black stench of earth.
Louis paced the rim of the grave. He looked the machine gun over and checked the clip but Eddie could tell Stanley’s jitters were contagious. Stanley would watch Eddie for a time and then peer into the darkness. Turning every snap and rustle into childhood monsters from campfire lore.
“Coyotes.” Eddie said as he tossed a load of dirt and root fragments over his shoulder.
“How’s that?” Stanley asked, jerking the Colt at Eddie. The barrel end blacker than the darkness surrounding them.
“That noise, it’s coyotes.”
“You got no clue what you’re talking about. Quit shootin' your mouth off and keep digging. I wanna be outta here before sunrise.” This came from Louis. He was doing well keeping his voice even, but his eyes scanned the shadows around them, the barrel of his machine gun tracing lazy arcs from his hip. Eddie let the silence hang while he tossed more dirt.
“When their numbers are low, they have a special howl. Kind of a signal to the females that the pack needs to grow. That’s why you never see a small pack of coyotes. When they find a kill, the meat doesn’t last for long. Happened at Clear Lake campground a few years back. Couple kids in the woods screwing around. One gets a nosebleed, and by the time the rest of the scout troop heard their screams, nothing but gnashing teeth and claws.” Eddie snapped his fingers, the sound was immaculately clear in the silence.
“Hey ah, maybe we better hurry this up huh Louis? he’s bleeding all over the place.” Stanley stole another look into the darkness behind him.
“They stick to the shadows.” Eddie added “moonless night like tonight, you won’t see em till they’re right on top of us. Makes no difference to me, but you two.” Eddie shrugged underneath the protest of his stiff neck.
Louis moved then, the butt of the machine gun raised to strike just as Stanley turned again at a sound his imagination trumped up to be dozens of coyotes, red-eyed and frothing at the mouth. Eddie catapulted the shovel full of dirt and rocks at Stanley and swung the empty spade like the Great Bambino cracking a fastball to the third deck. The spade bit into Louis shin and swept his legs out from under him just as Eddie ducked for cover in the few feet of earth he’d hollowed out. The blast from the machine gun was short but it echoed through the rain like a thunderclap. Through the ringing in his ears, Eddie could hear Louis labouring to get to his feet, breathing hard through his teeth. Eddie couldn’t hear Stanley anymore, but he wasn’t full of lead yet so he took that as a good sign.
He poked his head over the lip of the grave and saw Stanley motionless. Eddie crawled to the end of the pit and climbed out. Louis was writhing in the mud trying to reach the machine gun that had bucked from his grasp. His fingers just brushed the trigger guard as Eddie bent down and landed a jab below the brim of his Trilby. Eddie remembered the fight against Danny James, even with the loaded gloves Eddie had him on the canvas to a six-count. Standing over Louis in the dead of night, he allowed himself to go back to that fight. To show Louis what kind of competition Diesel James fought against. After a few minutes, Louis’ hand stopped grasping at anything.
Stanley lay against the knoll breathing wetly through a chest wound. He had his hand pressed tightly to it in fear that moving it would end him quicker. He didn’t make for the pistol when Eddie bent down to grab it, his eyes just searched Eddie’s for mercy he’d lost in a fireball. The echo from the Colt moved through the dark wilderness, leaving a blend of peepers and raindrops in the silence that chased it.
Behind the wheel of the Plymouth Eddie followed the road they’d come in on. The light from the radio bathed the driver’s seat in a heatless orange glow. Eddie watched the landscape through the swish of the wiper blades. His thoughts were a slow boil of the past. The clouds inside his mind had finally parted fully and he remembered sitting with Bert on his balcony feeling his heart drop as Bert sputtered through Margaret’s disappearance. Bert had been right about them having history. Eddie had taken her to dinner a few times, and they were close friends since ‘39 but only recently started getting closer. Whenever he was around her Eddie felt like he’d trip over his chukkas if he wasn’t careful. He wanted to give her something money couldn’t buy, he didn’t have a lot of money to buy it anyway. He thought he’d have more time to find out if she wanted to give him the same thing. The wipers scraped against the windshield, and Eddie swallowed a gulp in the lamplight.
Eddie shifted his attention to Bernie Oliver, and what a semi-connected trucking and scrap iron businessman was doing with backwoods booze and truckloads of heavy firepower. Eddie knew Bernie was involved in something bigger than fixing boxing fights and organizing union strikes, but nothing lined up. Eddie needed information. he couldn't use strength alone to win this fight, so Eddie had to outsmart his opponent. He eased the gas pedal closer to the floorboards as the crushed gravel turned to blacktop.
Michael Ferguson sat in his study. The mantel clock ticked away seconds as the night moved at it’s usual glacial pace. He’d abandoned the radio after finding nothing but static and gazed at the half-finished clock tower model in a bottle. He nursed his glass of milk and willed his stomach to stop burning. A small belch rolled up his throat and tumbled from his mouth. On its heels, he felt the stiff fire of acid reflux climb halfway up his chest and settle in his rib cage. He took another sip of milk as the minute hand ticked closer to his 7:00 am shift. His head lolled against his chest for a moment until a crash from the living room jolted him awake. He made for the commotion and cursed Sarah again for buying the cat. For all the complaining about it he’d done Michael never dreamed it would be Sarah that would leave and not that damn nuisance on four legs.
He strode through the kitchen, his slippers whispering across the linoleum. “Damn it Chester I’ve told you to stay off the mantel!” Michael snapped a table side lamp on and let out a small cry, the glass of milk slipping through his hand and soaking the living room carpet. There was a man wedged into his favourite chair. He was soaking wet and had saturated blooms of blood soaking through the collar of his shirt. His face looked like it had seen the wrong end of a meat grinder. Underneath the wounds, Ferguson recognized the galoot from Jennings' office the day before. Now there was something missing in his eyes, curiosity was replaced by a sharp indifference that chilled Ferguson as much as the pistol pointed at him.
“Start talking,” Eddie grunted as he took a nip from a crystal glass half full of Michael’s best brandy.
“He’ll kill me if I do.” He whispered, eyeing the meaty finger touching the trigger. There was no point in hiding the truth. This was the moment that had kept him up for months, the eventuality that lodged a nightly inferno in his chest.
Above the relentless pendulum sounding off from his study, Ferguson heard the click of the pistol hammer.
“I will if you don’t.” Eddie said, taking another sip of brandy.
Ferguson filled in what he could. Oliver paid him to stir unrest in his competitors, covering stories of union strikes organized by Oliver. The stories were meant to keep Oliver's competition in line, lest it happens in their own business. Lately, Oliver wanted him to oust who had been feeding the paper information about his alcohol and weapons operation, and stop it cold when it came in.
“He wanted me to find an obituary too, a woman.” Ferguson eyed a copy of the Parry Sound North Star He’d had couriered to the house that afternoon. Eddie kept the pistol on Ferguson as he scanned the short paragraph on Margie Hessen, laid to rest in a small cemetery outside McKellar.
Michael swore on his life that was all he had. Eddie told him that oath wouldn’t mean a whole lot if any of their chat made the Tribune’s morning edition. Before he left Eddie took care of correcting the clerical error made regarding him and Albert Jennings' murder.
When he pulled through the gates of the cemetery the sky behind him was lightening. Soaked to the bone he stood in front of Margie Hessen’s grave marker trying to cling to the warmth of the brandy that he’d savoured in the forced comfort of Ferguson’s living room. He wished he’d brought flowers, wished a lot of things as he stood in the grey light of dawn trying to see through blurred vision. He blinked letting the emotion fall from his eyes as the inscription on the headstone cleared.
Margie T Hessen
Born October 11, 1910 Died June 22, 1942
Returned from wheres’t she came
Psalm 23 was engraved below it but Eddie was stuck on the sentence. It was so unlike her. Margaret kept her shorthand sharp and rolled her eyes at anyone who chose to use poor grammar, so why had she chosen a blatant spelling error on her epitaph? Eddie pinched the bridge of his nose bringing a wave of pain that he used to sharpen his focus.
Think Banner, use your head for something other than catching a beating. He thought.
In a memory of their first dinner together something broke free and shifted behind his eyes. A single throwaway fact about her past that he’d almost missed if they hadn’t both grown up in similar places.
He read the phrase again, re-read it. A grin spread through the bruises and splits on his face. Eddie got back behind the wheel of the stolen Plymouth and, bathed in the golden light of dawn, drove east.
