Disappearances (8 page)

Rat reached out a long arm and snagged a passing waitress. “Fetch me a double shot of straight gin,” he said.

I had never drunk beer before. I didn't like the bitter taste, but whenever Uncle Henry took a drink from his glass I sipped from mine. Meanwhile my father was looking keenly around the room. “I know most of these fellas,” he said. “We won't have much trouble finding out what we want to find out.”

“What do we want to find out?” I said.

“Whatever we can.”

In a few minutes the band stopped for a break. My father approached the fiddler and conferred with him. The fiddler nodded his head and handed his instrument to my father, who sat down and began to play. A man in a red-checked shirt and calked boots began to do a Canadian stepdance. Another logger joined him. Soon twenty-five or thirty men were dancing to the medley of jigs and reels my father was playing in his inimitable style compounded of old-time French, western and Cajun techniques. When he stopped the crowd cheered for more. Some of the men called out his name. He played again, smiling, nodding ingratiatingly, doing an intricate clog dance with his feet, shouting out the name of each new song: “‘St. Anne's Reel,' boys; the old ‘Devil's Dream'; ‘Maple Sugar.' Here's a little bit of the old ‘Rubber Dolly.'” He leaped up and held the fiddle triumphantly over his head, still dancing. Slender men with trim mustaches and brightly colored shirts crowded around him to shake hands. He mentioned many of them by name. They all wanted to buy him a drink, but my father laughed and declined; his drinking days were over, he said.

He circulated around the room shaking hands and talking and laughing. My head was starting to spin from the beer and smoke. I leaned over to Uncle Henry. His face looked as though I were observing it through a magnifying glass. “I thought he wanted to get some information,” I said.

“He's getting it,” Uncle Henry said.

 

Back in White Lightning my father bounced around in the seat like a jack-in-the-box, clapped Henry and Rat on the shoulder, played his imaginary fiddle. “Did you see them people flock around me, boys? They hadn't heard the violin played like that in years. The whole place was up jigging. I ain't seen jigging like that since I set a crew of drunk lumbermen over Coaticook way to dancing so hard the bunkhouse floor caved in.”

“It's past midnight,” Uncle Henry said.

“Well, Henry,” my father said, putting his hand on my uncle's shoulder, “this keeps getting more and more interesting all the while. It appears that there was two rival gangs of hijackers up here. One was a family of eight brothers named LaChance. They was well known and respected in these parts for years.”

“La Chance?”

“Yes. According to what I was told, up until last fall they had a monopoly on all the local moonshining and hijacking. Then Carcajou showed up.”

“Carcajou?”

“That's right. He calls himself Carcajou, which is Indian for wolverine, so I'm told. A crazy man that likes to dress up in costumes, with a gang of them white albiner fellas with pink eyes. Carcajou and the albiners, they commenced to hijack whiskey trucks right in broad daylight. He'd pull up alongside a truck dressed like a policeman and signal for the driver to roll down the window. Then he'd lean over and toss a lighted stick of dynamite through the open window and drive off fast. When the cab blowed up them albiners would swarm out of the back of Carcajou's truck and transfer the whiskey.”

“What is this that you're telling me?” Uncle Henry said. “They did this in broad daylight? Albiners?”

“Certainly. They seemed to have a sixth sense that told them when a whiskey truck was coming. A couple of times they mined the highways. The Mounties laid for them and the township police laid for them, but nobody could catch them. Nobody knowed where they come from or where they hid out. But them LaChance boys, Henry. Carcajou was cutting into their business. So they set out to hunt him down. They tracked him to a cabin away off up in the Megantic Mountains near the Maine line. All eight of the brothers and their pa and two uncles surrounded the cabin. Just at dawn they fired her. But Carcajou and the albiners wouldn't budge. The roof fell in and then the walls fell in and the LaChances figured the gang had burned up inside. After the fire died down they went up and poked around in the timbers. And Carcajou and his white boys sprung up out of the root cellar where they said no human man could possibly have survived and mowed down five of them on the spot with machine guns, including the father and uncles. The ones that made it to the woods said all the while the machine guns was a-clattering Carcajou was laughing a laugh like they never heard before and never wanted to again. They said the laugh was worse than the machine guns. But not all the ones that got to the woods got away. They split up and Carcajou run four of them down. A deer hunter found one with his throat slit from ear to ear. Just last week a fire warden come across another one hanging by his feet from the top of a lookout tower. It looked like the top of his head had been smashed in, but when they cut him down they see he'd been scalped. The other two they still haven't found. Only two out of the eleven got away.”

Uncle Henry started White Lightning. “We're going to get away right now,” he said.

My father grabbed his shoulder. “Wait a minute, Henry. There's more you ain't heard.”

“I don't want to hear no more. It's off. First thing Monday morning I'll put a lien on White Lightning and we'll buy you hay enough to last a year. This run is off. Canady ain't a safe place no longer. I never heard of such doings. Not over across, not nowhere.”

“Shut off that key and hear the rest, Henry Coville. Then go ahead and make up your mind.”

“I'll leave the car running. Talk fast.”

“All right. When you hear this next I'm sure you'll want to continue. All winter Carcajou laid low. Everybody figured that he'd cleared out. Then last week they found an empty Seagram's truck on a back road between Cowansville and High Water. The cab was blowed completely off it and the driver was splattered all over the field. First they figured it was dynamite again. Then a Mountie found something at the far end of the field that changed their mind. You couldn't guess what in a million years.”

“I ain't a-going to try,” Uncle Henry said as he shifted into first gear.

“Just take one guess, Henry. I want someone to guess. Look here. It was round and about this big.”

Uncle Henry had a subtle sense of irony from which nearly every trace of sarcasm had been refined; but I am positive that it was with mordant sarcasm that he said to my father, “A cannonball.”

“Right you are,” my father shouted, grasping Uncle Henry's head and wrenching it around so hard I could hear the joints crack like a giant knuckle. “You didn't know I was a chiropractor, did you?” he shouted into Uncle Henry's face. “Ain't you convinced now that this is the run for us?”

“Good Christ, Bill,” Uncle Henry said, as close to nonplussed as I had ever seen him. “Did you actually suppose that tale about the cannonball was going to convince me? What can you be thinking of? We don't know who owns that whiskey we're supposed to pick up tonight. We might be walking right into a bear trap. Them albiners and LaChances and Carcajous: if we run onto them they'd as soon shoot Billy here as you or me. And that would be plenty soon. I don't want to be found hanging without no hair from a fire tower. We're going home.”

“Right again, Henry. We're going home with four thousand dollars' worth of whiskey.”

“It's off, Bill. There's no way in the world you could get me up there near that barn now. I said not to worry about the hay. We'll get the hay if we have to hijack it. But we ain't hijacking no whiskey up here.”

“Maybe you ain't, Henry. Maybe Ratty here don't want to go. But I and Wild Bill are going if we have to go alone.”

“What do I have to do to make you understand I ain't letting you go? I couldn't ever face my sister again if I let you go up there.”

“Listen to your uncle, Wild Bill. Be there a man in Kingdom County to tell Quebec Bill Bonhomme what he can and cannot do?”

“No,” I said doubtfully.

“Then I'm no man,” Uncle Henry said equably. “Because I can tell you no and mean it.”

“Sit tight, Bill,” my father said. “A dreadful manhandling is about to take place.” He opened his door and got out in the street.

Uncle Henry got out too. I didn't know what to do. I couldn't believe that two men who were closer than most brothers, the two men I loved and respected more than any others, were actually going to fight each other. If they were, I was very worried for my father. As quick and tough as he was, I didn't believe he was any match for Uncle Henry, who despite his lost lung competed in and usually won the annual chain-fighting event at the Kingdom Fair, in which two men linked wrist to wrist by a six-foot log chain fought in a ring with their bare hands and feet and the chain itself until one man succeeded in dragging the other to each of the four corner posts in succession. If my father did beat Uncle Henry he would have to use his feet, in which case he might knock out one of my uncle's eyes or give him a concussion.

They stood close together in the mud. I could see them clearly in the light from the paper mill windows. The car was still running.

“I hate to do this, Henry,” my father said.

“I know you do, Bill.”

Without any warning Uncle Henry struck my father so hard that he left his feet, slid across White Lightning's hood and landed in the mud on the other side of the car. Later Uncle Henry said that it was as powerful a blow as he had ever delivered—that in fact he had not meant to hit my father so hard, but knew he would have to hit him plenty hard to knock him out.

Uncle Henry went around and bent down by the right front fender. He stayed bent over quite a long time. I was afraid my father was badly hurt. Uncle Henry straightened up and looked around. “That's most curious,” he said. “He seems to have disappeared.”

Before those words had completely registered with me my father slid up from under the car on the driver's side and scrambled in behind the wheel. He was coated with mud and laughing hysterically. With a terrible rending of gears he gunned White Lightning forward past Uncle Henry, whose face remained solemn and inscrutable.

Under my father's management White Lightning bucked and shook worse than our old Ford. I grabbed Rat from behind to prevent him from flying forward through the windshield. The gears clashed as we shifted into second. I realized that my father's legs were too short to depress the clutch all the way to the floor. Also he was too short to see over the rim of the wheel, and had to peer out between it and the dashboard.

I looked back once. Uncle Henry was standing in the street between the tavern and the paper mill. Again the gears shrieked out. We slued along, throwing mud six feet out to either side. My father was steering with one hand on the bottom of the wheel. We went faster and faster. Frequently he turned back to beam at me, taking his eyes off the road for several seconds at a time.

“Look out,” I yelled.

We had driven off into a church lawn containing a lighted manger scene. “These people still think it's Christmas,” my father said, sideswiping the crèche. “We'll have to set them straight. Spring is here.”

“Stop,” I shouted. “What are you doing? We can't steal Uncle Henry's car.”

My father turned around again. The red speedometer needle was hovering around one hundred. He began to laugh. “Wild Bill,” he yelled with enormous delight, “I think my Christly jaw is broke.”

According to my father the abandoned farm where we were supposed to pick up the whiskey was a quarter of a mile off a back road running from Magog down to the border through the mountains on the west side of the lake. It was approximately opposite the cliff where we had eaten supper and waited for Uncle Henry, and about four miles inland. My father said he had been there when it was a going farm. He thought that a back approach leading over a ridge from an old cedar still on the dirt road might still be open.

The cedar still was gone, but the woods road over the ridge looked as if it might be negotiable. Moments later we were jouncing up the steep side of a small mountain. In places the road had been washed down to bare shelving ledge where a higher car would probably have tipped over. Suddenly I saw the long combing drift of a snowbank directly ahead of us.

As we accelerated toward the drift I held tightly to Rat and shut my eyes. There was a tremendous crunching impact. When I looked again we were leveling a new right of way through a stand of small firs. As we mowed down the trees the branches sprang back up and whipped against the underpinning of the car. My father laughed out of his shattered jaw. He said we would put White Lightning through her paces and see what she could do. I only hoped she could get back on the logging road again. My father said he loved a detour. He declared with feeling that more people should get off the beaten path and see the countryside.

We emerged from the ravaged softwoods and careered along at a high speed through some young maples, which played a more peremptory tattoo on White Lightning's underbelly. My father was knocking over small trees. Somehow we got back on the tote road. We were driving close beside a rushing torrent in a deep ravine. Then we were charging down a precipitous incline. “Bridge out,” my father announced.

“I have heard the angels and archangels singing my name,” Rat said without waking up as we hurtled over the chasm.

We landed with a terrific jar. It was all I could do to hang on to Rat. His head almost hit the dashboard. Before I could pull him back he belched and vomited on the white carpeting.

“There's his drinks,” my father said as we tore along. “There's his supper. Good Christ, is he still at it? That must be day before yesterday's breakfast. Henry ain't going to be pleased about this, Wild Bill.”