The Extinction Club (37 page)

When I reached the rectory with Moon clutched to my chest the door was wide open. I walked in slowly, stepped through the kitchen, my boots crunching on glass. I set her down on a blanket on the kitchen table.

“Céleste! Are you all right? Céleste!”

No answer. How could there be? She couldn’t speak … I flew up the stairs and into her bedroom. “Céleste!” She wasn’t there. Down the hallway to the very end, to an unpainted door that looked like the door of a linen closet. Through it to a half-flight of steps.

I heard the revving of an engine out front. Through the attic window I watched a snowmobile roar off. With two riders. Or was it three? Was that Céleste sandwiched between them?

Another sound, from the direction of the grandmother’s study. My wet boots made squeaking sounds as I raced down the attic stairs and along the hall.

The room was severely agitated, in pain: chairs and filing cabinets capsized; books ousted from their beds, splayed, spines broken; shattered pictures and frames, smashed radio and typewriter and globe. Disorder on the scale of an airplane crash. Nothing breakable was unbroken, nothing slashable unslashed—including the flag of the Anglican Church of Canada and the photo of Céleste and her grandmother.

I found Céleste rolled into a ball on the floor, beside the stone ledge of the fireplace. Her eyes were wide open, but her expression was not one I had seen before. It conveyed no recognizable human emotion. Her face was filled with abject, bestial fear. Above her, on the mantelpiece wall, were words she said were written in animal blood:
CHILD-FUCKING YANKEE GO HOME
.

XXV

I tried to act like a grown-up in front of Nile. But I couldn’t stop the tears, I just couldn’t. It seems like I’m crying all the time these days. It’s a very recent thing. I never used to cry, even when I was a baby.

Nile helped me write an epitaph — he came up with the best bits—and said he’d get it chiselled in stone.

MOON

2004-2009

Where are you now, my gallivanting

Girl, who so happily dwelt with us,

Played with us, fed with us, felt with us,

Years we grew fonder and fonder in?

You who just yesterday sprang to us,

Are we forever bereft of you?

And is this all that is left of you —

One little grave, and a pang to us?

How I wish we were in ancient Egypt, where they had the death penalty for anyone who killed a cat …

Nile said he never knew a cat like Moon and felt very sad. After the burial the sadness turned to anger. He was torqued, totally. I could see it in his eyes. And he wasn’t drunk either. Was the pin finally out of the grenade?

   XXVI   

W
e buried Moon the next morning. Céleste spent half the night crying, and the other half composing an epitaph. I spent the night maniacally cleaning up the study. And when that was done I cleaned up the kitchen. And when that was done I started on the bathroom, trying to ignore the blotched and bleary man in the mirror, the sound and stench of engines and chainsaws in my head. Neither one of us slept a second. Anger-—or rather rage, red blindness—can do that to you. In my one hour in bed I counted diminished joys, counted sheep on their way to the slaughterhouse.

It’s only a cat
, I kept saying to myself,
it’s only a goddamn cat
… High-minded individuals, of whom I used to be one, feel that those who are cruel to animals are just ordinary human beings. They’re not criminals; they’re just sick. They don’t need prison; they just need a doctor or drugs to straighten their bent neural pathways. But now I feel that those who commit these acts, like those who commit murder or rape, have cancelled their membership in the human herd. They must be culled.

Céleste didn’t see the intruders. She was watching me from the attic when she heard the back door being bashed down. There were two of them, she said. Her voice had half-returned, badly rusted, a shade above a whisper.

“Who were they?” I asked.

“I didn’t see them.”

“But you heard their voices.”

Céleste hesitated.

“
Tell me
,” I said.

“The Dérys,
père et fils
.”

“Shit. Did they … What were they after?”

“Me. And when they couldn’t find me, they went after other things.”

“Such as?”

“Videos. My grandmother kept some in her office. Hidden, like.”

“Did they get them?”

“Some of them, but I’ve got copies.”

“In the attic?”

She nodded.

“That’s it. The end of the line.”

She stared at me, hard. “What do you mean? You bailing?”

I stared back, trying to form words.
Sometimes you’ve got to jump head-first into things:
my father’s words. I opened my mouth, released a kind of sickly quack.

“Nile? Are you bailing?”

I’ve never jumped head-first into anything; I was a breech baby, born feet first. I was feeling light-headed, and the room began to turn.

“Nile?”

Sometimes you’ve got to put your head in the lion’s mouth:
the same voice. “It’s time.”

“Time to do what? Report them? Call the cops? Tell them that they trespassed on land that doesn’t belong to us? That they killed a cat?”

“Time to put my head in the lion’s mouth.”

Céleste pushed her glasses a little higher on her nose. “You all right?”

“Hunters, like water, seek the line of least resistance. Animals are easy to brutalize.”

Céleste pondered this to the count of three, her eyes half-closing. “You want to run that by me again?”

“It’s the end of the line.”

“You already said that.”

“It’s time.”

“You already said that too. Time to do what?”

“Hunt the hunters.”

“Track them down, you mean? Kill them? We don’t have to track them down. They’ll come to us. And soon.”

I waited for the room to stop turning, waited for the words to register. “I … I told Gervais if he came anywhere near this place again, I’d kill him. Literally. In the undertaking sense, in the Sixth Commandment sense. And I meant it.”

Céleste squinted at me, sizing me up, as if I were a suspect stamp she was examining through a magnifying glass. “He’ll be back. Except next time he won’t be giving the orders.”

“No? Who will?”

“Alcide Bazinet.”

I wondered why I even asked the question. I was about to ask another but was distracted by lines on Céleste’s brow. Thinking was a visible process for her—ideas chased across her face like wind across a pond.

“I have a plan,” she said.

“I thought you might.”

Alcide Bazinet, it’s no secret, was a rabid psychopath on the loose. But neither the QPP nor the RCMP seemed overly concerned. Why? Because his violent psychosis was taken out
on animals, not humans. At least until recently. Was I going to gather up evidence, submit it to the Quebec and Canadian police, try to get him charged with attempted murder? No. I was going to murder the man as soon as he got out of the pen. Céleste’s plan, however, was subtler and safer—and when my mind was clearer I agreed to it.

By now the entire community assumed I was a wildlife officer, so I wore the uniform everywhere. On patrol in my painted wagon, trolling the streets and forests in quest of the elusive bear truck. At the post office looking for extinct animal stamps and letters from Brooklyn. At Earl’s looking for new shipments of micro-greens. At Walmart looking for the witch who beat the dog with her broom. At the vet’s looking for … the vet.

Céleste promised to stay put in the attic while I was gone, to keep watch with her telescope and mayday me at the first sign of danger. But I was having none of that. I was not going to leave her alone again, ever. She would be travelling with me, I instructed her, from now on.

“Uh-unh,” she replied, shaking her head. “Veto. First of all, I’m not well enough to bounce around in that rattletrap van of yours. Second, I don’t want anyone to see me, ’cause I don’t want to go back to the foster home where everybody’s a ’tard. Third, no one will be coming back here before Baz gets out.”

I looked at her as if she needed my help and protection. She looked at me as if I needed her help and protection.

“Trust me,” she said.

I had learned to trust her eyes, the light in them, emeraldine and topazine and shades there were no names for. “When he gets out, where’ll he go first?”

“To his cousin’s. Here, take this. Can you get these things for me?”

She handed me a piece of paper ripped from her scrapbook, a list of items required for “The Plan”:

• clay (5 one-pound boxes)
  
• flour (2 bags)
  
• gesso (1 bottle)
  
• acrylic paint (one tube of white, ivory, red, blue & green)
  
• clear mat acrylic (one bottle)
  
• ski poles (1 pair) • hockey skates (girl’s size 36 or 6-1 2)
  
• new tires for the van (studded)
  

“Do you mind?” she said. “I know it’s a lot of money but I’ll pay you back. Do you know where to get the art supplies?”

“Walmart?”

“No.”

“Earl’s?”

“Yes.”

“And Canadian Tire for the tires?”

“No, for the skates. And poles.”

“And the tires?”

“I’ll draw you a map.”