George & Rue (12 page)

N
OW early, early morning of January 8, 1949, the boys felt compelled to trudge back to the gravel pit, open the car trunk, and diagnose Silver. They was hoping he’d sit up, teeheeing, asking what Sambo joke they were playing. Silver’s eye glared up at em. The brothers closed the trunk, but George, fumbling, couldn’t lock it. He couldn’t get the key to turn.

So Rue stomped on the trunk lid with one foot, then turned the key in the lock: “Joygee, go to Saint John and throw the keys in the harbour.”

Leaving Plumsy at the house with Otho, George and Rue wheeled to Minto. George wore Burgundy’s dark taxi cap. It felt good. Rue tried it on, rakishly, like a jazz man. The moon minted four copper pennies in four eyes.

In Minto, Georgie stopped at Junior Clarke’s place.

Rue knocked, yelled, “It’s me, Junior.”

Junior shouted, “Show your mug at the window.” Rufus stood at the window; a curtain swished. Then Junior cracked open the door. A big fat fellow.

Rue ask, “Got a game on?”

Junior said, “Show your stake.” Rue flashed his blazing bills.

Junior: “Okay. You cheat, I’ll bust your ass!”

Rue say, “What?” Junior weren’t amused.

Leaving Rue in Minto, George drove along the road back toward Fredericton. He saw a hitchhiker and stopped for him,
a large-built fellow, this French chap whose English was shaky. He was a giant version of the little man in the trunk.

George ask, on impulse, “Know where I can get liquor and a gal?” The hitchhiker—Willy Comeau, ex-lumberjack—was scared of George. He feared he was a cop cause of that official-looking cap. George said, “I’s a taxi driver! Ain’t no cop! Ya know any Negro cop?” Both him and the French man roared at that gag.

Willy told George to go down a side road and up a hill and into a driveway and turn his headlights off and on twice. He begged Georgie for ten bucks, and Georgie used the moonlight to figure out what a ten-dollar bill looked like and gave it to Frenchy. Willy rapped on a door and parleyed in Acadian. This other man, who never turned on a light and never left the shadows, went away from the door, then came back with a box and a bag. Willy returned to the car with a quart of whisky and two quarts of beer, or two quarts of wine and one beer. This was all the liquor Willy had in his hands. Between 2:30 and 3:00 on Saturday morning.

Then Georgie motored back into Minto, on a whim, to check on Rue. Willy tagged along. Back to Junior’s went Georgie, arriving to see Rue leaving.

Rue was glad: “Junior just put me out cause I quarrelled with his rules.” He saw the hulking, quiet Willy and ask, “Who the fuck are you in my brother’s car?”

Willy only knew rotten English: “I’s knows where fuckin booze is, chief.” Willy showed Rue his cache of liquor.

Rue got into the car, opened the quart of wine, and give the big man a drink and took one himself and asked George if he wanted one. George said no, then let Frenchy out on a little hill by a store which sits on the right hand side of this road. Then him and Rudy boomeranged to Barker’s Point, passing again through Fred Town. The moonlight rained like bleach—the way it cut through shadows.

Back home, at 4 a.m., the boys sat in George’s kitchen, listening to Plumsy snore and trying to decide where to put that sluggish form in the trunk of the car parked in the gravel pit. Rue said again, “Best bet is to take the car into Saint John and park it there.”

A
CUNOUS pilgrimage: to go into Saint John, used to receiving barrels of potatoes, barrels of apples, barrels of molasses, and barrels of rum, with a corpse that wasn’t in a barrel. To pick up Highway 102—the Lincoln Road—to Saint John, George swung north up the Richibucto Road, driving right by Jehial’s where Silver’d perished only a few hours back, to Marysville, headed east through the village, passing two-storey red-brick houses (accommodating Marysville Cotton Mill workers), to ford the Nashwaak River via Bridge Street, then turned south to cross the Saint John River and pass through Fred Town—and cross into a mug’s history.

He was sure to be recognized. Here he was a notorious “local colour” Negro, poor, in a literally bloody taxi-driver’s cap, driving a deadly new and new-smelling stolen black Ford sedan, a corpse in the trunk, and yet careering boldly along well-policed streets like ritzy Waterloo Row. Eventually, he veered onto the Lincoln Road, that nasty two-lane icy highway flowing windingly along the river to Saint John. And he did so half-asleep, half-drunk, and thoroughly spooked.

George talked to himself, explaining to the dashboard and the still slightly bloody upholstery that this, ahem,
slaughter
of Silver was really a kind of sacrifice to cleanse his own sins. Somehow those hammer blows were the death knell of his past errors and failures. He glanced at the cool, smooth
Crown-land—Government of New Brunswick—snow. It almost seemed to whisper as it slicked past in the moonlight, “You’re okay, Georgie. That body in your trunk is like vanilla ice cream, and ice cream is good. You’re A-
I,
A-OK, with a new baby girl who is just like chocolate ice cream.” Because Silver had suffered this accident (no hard feelings), George felt he could convert himself into a teetotaller, a hard worker, a faithful husband, and a respectable father. Blood might be flourishing in the trunk, but George still considered it a virtual velvet casket, much like the one in which his mother had been buried. Besides, to commit murder, you had to have intended to commit murder, and no one had lusted to see Silver die. That he did expire, well, that was just
Fate
acting up. After all, George now had the money to redeem Blondola and Desiah, his newborn. Apparently, Desiah’s birth had mandated Silver’s death. There was a balance here. George told himself that, having survived Silver, he should now take Blondola and his kids and go, maybe, to Cuba, start over in a warm place of rum and Christianity, where lots of Coloured people looked just like him, and he could thrive as a jovial, harmonica-playing fisherman. Certainly, it now seemed very agreeable to drive by Stanfield Jackson’s place, pay off a two-buck debt from three months ago, and put this ill-gotten cash to healthy use.

None of this philosophizing complemented Georgie’s screaming desire to see Lovea, to smell and taste her, to feel her wet and soft, to hear her sigh and moan. But tonight—or this morning—was an occasion for tests, for experiments. He could be forgiven for trying everything now. If murder could summon redemption, then adultery could invoke salvation. George now vroomed faster—first to pay off Jackson, then to pay Lovea.

George stopped in Lincoln to get gas but couldn’t rouse the B.A. garage man from a death-like sleep. In Upper Gagetown,
he drove to a B.P. man—Havelock Gerrard—he’d known before, wheeled into Gerrard’s yard, blasted his horn five, six times, until Gerrard come thumpin down from his bedroom above the gas pumps, bawlin Georgie out, and gettin, in return, only “Sorry” and a mollifying tip. George bought four dollars’ worth of gas and gave Gerrard—forty-five, white, grey, and tobacco-smelling—an extra buck. Gerrard then sank two quarts of oil into the car: a dry engine. Inside the service station, there was a string, one used to lynch bologna, hanging from the ceiling. George could see it through the window. Ominous paraphernalia. He bought a package of Player’s cigarettes, two Daily Double cigars, and a chocolate bar. George told scowling Gerrard to make the bill out to Elroy’s Taxi, so he could get his cash back. (He also hoped the bill would serve as an alibi, suggesting Silver had loaned him his car. Indeed, there’d been no complaint from Silver.) Gerrard spotted a dark stain in the snow where the car’d been.

South, south, south, and further south, George swerved toward Saint John. He’d fortified his brains with coffee doused with rum. Drowsy, he stopped at Oromocto, in the parking lot of Acadia Distillers, makers of amber Governor-General’s rum, and began to doze, his windows rolled up, the engine running. He was wakened ten minutes later by the distillery guard rapping on his window. Groggy, Georgie cranked the window a peep. Cold air hammered his face. The guard glared whitely in moonlight. “I thought you was dead. Shouldn’t snooze with the motor on. Poison builds up, makes you feel sleepy, and you sleep, but don’t wake up.” George thanked the guard for the warning and started back to the highway. He almost forgot about Silver drowsing peacefully in the trunk. It was peaceful.

Fields blurry with January snow. Night greasy with snow, slick.

Four miles below Gagetown, Georgie turned off the road, took the back road leading into the Hussar Farm, then took the road cutting through Elm Hill—that old black village where land titles were a spaghetti dinner. He stopped at Rocky Jackson’s house, woke up his buddy by honking, roused a barkative hound too, and did so just so he could ask befuddled, angry Rocky where his son Stanfield was, cause Georgie owed him two bucks. The dog kept lunging at the end of its chain and barking a blue-black streak in the night that was blue molasses with morning. Rocky yelled at his mangy mutt to shut up, but he could strangle Georgie for botherin him at this god-danged hour. No, he didn’t know where Stanfield was, but he guessed he was with a woman—just like hisself.

“I got no business with you, Joygee!” To pacify Rocky, George give him a buck for himself and two for Stanfield. He’d driven down from Fred Town with a flock of dollars after a “cash windfall, no, eruption,” he couldn’t give details about: Ask him no questions. No questions got asked.

There was snow bulked up round the pines. The dog barked again. George slid away in the comprehensive night, all its stars ablaze, and set his mind on Lovea, her asking him that last time, last month, “Is your heart on fire?”

Nearing Saint John, George saw the nickel-plated river melt mercurially into the town. He was traversing a Nouveau-Brunswick of white darkness and dark light, a matrix of blizzards and shadows.

Arriving in Saint John (lousy fiefdom of a lumber-baron clan who slew whole forests to satisfy familial greed) about 6:15 a.m., Georgie careened through a cliff-slippery, hilly city, dramatically shuddering, crazy, toward the Fundy. He saw churches mushroom from solid gravel; teeter-totter houses see-saw up and down steep, cascading hills. He felt sensations of vertigo and inversion because of the Leaning Tower architecture. It
was an interesting place to be drunk—like walking up a Ferris wheel. The two-storey-high Victorian wood-frame houses seemed set to tumble into the Fundy’d Atlantic. Here was a damn damp port. In town, he passed that true heart-of-whiteness, with dead citizens at its core: the Old Loyalist Cemetery, that graveyard crowded with traitors to the Republic. His engine throbbed,
failure: failure, failure.
Then he skidded down the long slope of King Street, capped by Birks, the diamond merchants, to the bottom corner suggesting a new Piccadilly Circus: the semicircle of the Canada Permanent building, its grey-brown cement face gazing paternally at the wharves and docks and tea-laden ships.

George considered that if he dumped Silver in the Saint John harbour, right beside him, it would constitute a burial at sea, a noble naval honour he’d seen practised frequently in the Merchant Marine. But he were scared to touch that dead body. No, let Silver rest, gleaming, in his come-by-chance tomb.

Georgie drove to Station Street, passing both the Lord Chamberlain Hotel and the Hum Tom Laundry. He crossed a gully to pick up Moore Street, right beside Paradise Row, a stretch of three-storey, dilapidated houses, well-designed for bootleggers and prostitutes.

George made a beeline for number 47. Where else to be on such a nightfall morning, save in the company of a woman in a house where men are expected to shut up or sing? The four-storey structure sat across the tracks from steaming train engines and the steaming, frigid harbour water, always indigo, perse, or slate grey. Right below Fort Howe, the hilltop cannon post loved by the British Navy when it was guarding New Brunswick from the grasping Yanks. Taxis’d always be at 47 Moore, so George’s—Silver’s—didn’t seem unusual. After he parked at the back, stood woozily, and trudged slowly toward the front of the house, George jumped back as two
humongous rats, squealing, flying, incisors and claws sweeping at air, fell from the roof and thudded into the snow at his feet. (In Saint John, the rats were so big that, when leaping from roof to roof, a few would miss and strike pedestrians, cars, or just the ground.) Then he had to sidestep stringy cats who streaked from shadows to bat about and maul and chew the struggling, gut-splattered rats. He turned and saw a mutt sitting under the Ford’s trunk, lapping at the suddenly brothy snow.

George went up to the front door, tired from stress, and rang the bell. Dutchy, mean-mugged, tar-eyed, and tattooed, auburn skin, peeped through a peek hole, seen it was Georgie, let him in. George asked Dutchy for a pail of water and two towels to clean the “throw-up in the car.”

George washed the floor of the car, the back of the car, the doors of the car. He ignored the trunk area, but had to keep shooing away that persistent, growling dog. The towel soiled with blood he threw away.

He took the empty bucket and the clean towel back into the house to Dutchy. He asked for and got a room with a window hinging on the harbour. The last moonlight glimmered. That moon seemed too white: the smell of Silver’s blood was still in George’s nostrils and its colour was staining everything. The very air was ramshackle; the walls papery, so he could hear colossal trucks mucking by, shaking beds that were already jittery from don’t-give-a-damn couplings. The toilet case was sweaty; the shower tiles mildewed. Just when Georgie began to feel he could relax, the wind came up against the building, heavier and heavier, like hammers.

A rap at his door, and suddenly there stood Lovea, a vixen with copper hair and sable skin, smelling of cinnamon. She wore a black dress—but was heart-stoppingly naked underneath. She rolled off her silk stockings and draped them sultrily over the lampshade. Her little purse held lipstick, compact,
rouge, and a mickey of rum, all of which she used briefly before slipping easily into the bed. George studied her hungrily. For twenty dollars and a pair of nylons, Lovea opened to him like a narrow, twisted grin: Lovea—a love. As his lust trickled into her acidly, so did Silver’s blood trickle slippery onto the snow beneath the trunk.

With morning, Georgie glimpsed a city of oil refinery fires streaking the filthy Saint John River a dirty orange. He felt dirty. Lovea rolled over funkily and he got a cigarette-and-rum breath into his nostrils that jolted him stiff. Despite the rooftop, outdoor noises of screeching, falling rats.

Later, Lovea brought Georgie a breakfast of corn flakes and scrambled eggs and sausages and toast with marmalade and hash browns and Red Rose coffee (“good coffee—as good
as
Red Rose tea”). He spooned up only a few cereal flakes, nibbled at the eggs, toast, and meat, but gulped down the hash and the coffee. Lovea ask George to drop her and her little Heinz 57 mutt, Martial, at the dog hospital.

First, though, Dutchy ask George to run him up the Main Street liquor store at 9:30 a.m. The trip was necessary because, of seven other men staying at 47 Moore, one was a boxer within inches of going to jail and one was a wino within seconds of going crazy. The guys’d asked Dutchy to spot em for First Breakfasts, and Dutchy declared it Georgie’s Christian duty to help. On Georgie’s last visit, he’d run up a tab Dutchy’d paid. Now, in return, Georgie bought the entrepreneur seven quarts of wine and Assyrian take-out.

Returning to 47 Moore Street, Dutchy was concerned to see a dog licking at a big red spot in the snow where Georgie’s Ford had been. Two small boys were shooing the dog away so they could make snowballs using the freaky, pinkish snow.

Dutchy ask, “Oil leak, Georgie?”

George nodded. “Uh-huh.”

Dutchy whooshed out with his liquor, and Lovea high-step from the house and sail into the car. She placed the leashed, panting, yelping Martial in the back seat. Lovea sat in the front seat beside George. But the dog went haywire, yipping, yapping, sniffing, whining, and scratching at the divider separating the trunk from the passenger compartment.

Lovea ask, “What you got back there, pig meat?”

Georgie teeheed: “Yeah.”

At the vet’s office, he got out and opened the door—like chivalrous Silver—for Lovea. After she descended from the car and retrieved Martial, Lovea kissed George. She smiled and began to sashay away, her boots pinking the snow, while Martial growled.

She yelled, “Better eat up that frozen shit in the trunk!” George removed Silver’s taxi-driver cap from his head and gave it to Lovea: a gallant gesture. She noticed dark stains on it, but thought it could be a snazzy prop. She kissed George again and then led the yelping Martial into the vet’s. George watched her progress, then turned, bareheaded in the snowing air, back to the hearse he had commandeered, snow crunching underfoot.
You murderer,
the snow squealed.
You thief,
crackled the ice. George saw a stream erupting—like Christ’s damning blood—down a close hillside. Eleven-thirty a.m. now.

Heading back northeast to Fredericton, he viewed torn snow, dry wind, harsh sunlight—then none. A vomit of white drifting snow turned the sun into a pale smear along the Lincoln Road. Flakes of snow were calfing. Winter heaped wind at the windows. The highway blanked out frequently. The road was a curse, snapping, snarling. Gloom and near-zero visibility.

Shook up, sleepy, Georgie lost control of the powerful sedan at Oak Point, caroomed off the road and smashed up the front fender by running into boulders. He’d been doin bout seventy
miles an hour in all that fog of snow and the fog of a head-bashing alcohol mist and the fog of no sleep and the fog of a disgraced conscience. Awake sharply now, he tried to back the car out of the ditch it were in, but couldn’t. The wheels writhed and howled and spat snow, but wouldn’t reverse the car.