Murray is on the second landing of the fire stairs going up the clock tower. There are no windows, but people are going up and down these stairs all the time and he asks them about what’s happening. He was wounded last Friday. He had come to Main Street from Pine. He was going to get a coffee when two children with pitchforks jumped out of the back of a van and lunged at him. One of the forks went into his knee and the other into his ribs. They had him like this, trying to pull his leg off and push his heart out. A man came from somewhere and he struck one of the kids in the face with a bat. It was a real fast swing that curled the kid back and dead before he hit the ground. Murray saw one of the kid’s eyes on the lawn. The other kid dropped his pitchfork, or rather, left it in Murray and ran. God knows where.
Murray saw bits of things. It was a nice day. The sun was shining, and it was hot, but Collingwood has all this shade on its sidewalks so, rather than oppressed, you feel pampered. But this was crazy. The man with the bat asked Murray something that Murray couldn’t make out. He was terrified. He seemed to know what Murray didn’t at this point. The people of Ravenna had gone nuts. They had invaded Collingwood over night. They were trying to kill Collingwood. The man managed to get the pitchfork from Murray’s ribs, but before he could free his leg, something scared him off. He ran up over his front lawn and down the side of his house. The holes in Murray’s chest didn’t feel deep, not mortally deep, but he had this fork fully driven through his leg above the knee. The man with the bat had completely abandoned Murray to the sidewalk. The child on the grass was dead. The sky so clear. Why was this happening? Murray tried to pull the pitchfork out, but it was angled down. He just couldn’t move well enough to get a hold of it. He didn’t want to cry out for help because he was so uncertain about what was happening. Time passed. The clouds were lengthening, like white canoes drooping down over town. What was all this? Murray began to fear that there had been some kind of evacuation or something. He couldn’t hear cars or people or anything. But in Collingwood? Why would people invade Collingwood? Those kids had jumped out of a van. Someone had been helping them. The driver had seen him walking along and slowed down, stopped and sent those kids out to kill. The van had pulled away again, he thought. When that man killed the boy. Murray’s chest has stopped bleeding. There are three black clots on his shirt. His leg, though, it’s still bleeding. Not pouring, but oozing. He can’t be completely still, because of the weight of the pitchfork. He feels like a piece of food sitting on a plate.
“Help!”
He has to. He has to cry out. He didn’t even know why he was being quiet.
“Help!”
He hears a door open at the house where the man disappeared. A woman’s voice.
“No! No!”
Then the man:
“I have to tell him what to do.”
Murray thinks this is crazy. He calls out:
“Do what? What do I have to do?”
A shadow closes the sun. The man stage whispers:
“Can you walk?”
“No. Not with this in my leg. Help me.”
He puts his hand hard onto Murray’s leg then hauls on the pitchfork. Murray whines as it slides out. Murray sees the blood rising up and spilling out. The man pushes his hand on the holes. Murray screams and the hand darts away.
“No. No. You have to be quiet. Okay. C’mon.”
An arm slides under Murray. The woman’s voice from afar:
“Leave him. There’s a truck coming. Leave him.”
Murray is dropped.
“Pretend you’re dead. Sorry.”
He’s gone and now Murray can hear the truck. It’s coming down Pine Street towards Hurontario. Why does he have to pretend to be dead?
The truck stops beside Murray and he lies still. He’s lying on the sidewalk pretending to be dead.
Do I close my eyes? he thinks. He doesn’t even know how to act dead. He finds a cloud and stares at it, however it’s moving quickly and he’s aware of his eyes drifting upward. He locks them open and blank. Dead. Pretend dead.
He hears the truck door open and moments later it slams closed. The truck idles noisily. Two men talk. He can see the blur of them at the periphery of his dead vision.
“He’s breathing.”
He stops breathing. His eyes sting.
A face closes in on him. A wrinkled face. A little scar on his chin. Bright grey bristles.
“Are you playin’ dead?”
He’s doing what he was told to do.
“I’ll tell ya.”
He has a wobbly orange ball in front of him, filling the sky. He thinks his eyes are burning out.
A shape cuts into the ball. He smells gas. His lips open and gas flows between them. The orange balls explodes in his lungs and he rolls over but pain has arrived in his leg now. “Jesus!”
“He killed this boy. Kill him.”
He presses his face to the sidewalk and is surprised when he falls asleep.
He can’t recall being asleep like this ever before in his life. He has left the situation, but is still aware that things are very dangerous. He tries to feel his way back. If I’m being killed now, he thinks, I want to know. He pays close attention to how he feels. If I am unconscious, he thinks, how will I know when I shift from being asleep to being dead? Where are my hands? He thinks they are flopping upward. Either limply as his body is being transported, or weakly because he’s still trying to protect himself. He can’t tell. Limply, weakly. Then they get solid again. He drives his elbow up to knock them away, but they are not there. He stands up and looks at the empty street. No blood. No boy. No pitchfork. Had he imagined all of that? Had it happened?
What is it with this war? The fighting goes on and every day that passes gets us further and further from the day before it all started. The things that were normal. The Fernwood Farms corn maze on Airport Road. The used car lot in a cow field on Fairgrounds Road. The ancient barn on the Poplar Sideroad, so overgrown by vines that it looks like a giant green oven in the middle of a flat field. Things you see and say to your friends. “Well, it’s nice. A little out of the ordinary.” And nobody disagrees. My God, this is a place where nobody disagrees. If someone, the mother of the woman who owns the barber shop, say, does disagree, she says, “I don’t think they should breed coon hounds in town.” But, you know, Barry Little breeds coon hounds at the edge of town. Does he still fall under some by-law code against breeding? Yes. Yes, he certainly does. But we all understand that he’s at the edge, and if we can’t come to agree that people who are at the edge can’t do a little more than us at the middle, then we have become ruled by the rules. We bend a little. She was not bending. She wants to catch us all. This big woman with a face like a tire, she can just go fuck herself today.
“Hey, Mr. Man.”
Murray puts his gloves on a Maclean’s magazine.
“How are ya?”
“Well, we’re just fine, I bet.” He smiles and sit beside Barry Little. In the mirror.
Annie is the barber. She’s got a face like the sun, only made out of margarine. Ugly, sunny woman. “You need a haircut, Mister.”
Murray rolls his eyes around. She treats all the men like children. Barry Little rubs his nose and gives Murray a look.
The door opens and a small man enters. “Hey, Annie.” He nods to Murray and for some reason ignores Barry. “Hey, Annie, does your mom have cancer?”
Annie pauses, adjusts her scissors in the air over the boy’s head.
“‘Cause two people now have told me she’s got cancer and lost all this weight and I figured I’d just come ask you.”
“Mom!” Annie calls, continues cutting, ignoring everyone.
“Hey. You don’t have to call her. You can tell me. Jesus.”
Annie’s mother is bigger than Annie and is built like a government dock. “What? Oh, it’s busy. Hi, Barry. You wanna hand, Annie?”
“Sure, mom. Hey, Mr. Jonstad here is asking after your health.”
Mom looks at Mr. Jonstad. “It’s fine.”
Mr. Jonstad is embarrassed.
“Did you want a haircut?”
Mr. Jonstad mumbles no. Apologizing, he backs out of the store.
Mom slings a thin apron across her watery middle. “Everybody thinks I got the cancer. I don’t have the damn cancer and if I did it would be my business.”
Annie is cutting air around the boy’s head. Trimming a halo she can see. Mom signals to me.
“I think Barry’s first.”
Barry speaks finally. “Oh. You go first. You get your haircut first.”
All the time Mom’s cutting my hair I can see Barry’s face.
“Hey, Barry. How’s the Blueticks?”
He looks up. “Did you complain about my dogs to George?”
“Joseph George?”
“Yeah. By-law.”
“Nope.”
Barry slaps his knee and grabs his chin. His face is bright red.
“You bet somebody did. And I want a last name and a first name off somebody.”
When these people die, that is, now, there is so much glass breaking and screaming. The shot from five guns enters the front window at the same moment. It is enough for now to say that they are dead. The street is long and many, many more will die in the minutes ahead.
