Chapter 1
NOT A FACELESS BASTARD
A BLACK plastic garbage bag lies crumpled atop a faded yellow line that divides a rain-wet, pot-holed highway—a two-lane road stretching as straight as a ruler from east to west for six kilometres. The rain has stopped, but the wind continues, alternating between breeze and bluster. A sudden gust, and the bag flies into the air and sails across asphalt and ditch. It snags on the top strand of barbwire of a falling-down farm fence that parallels the highway.
The wind-gust that arose from nowhere dies, then rises again, now constant. The garbage bag flaps and strains like a captive bird, but cannot escape. Above the garbage bag, the barbwire, and the wind, heavy gray clouds ripe with the potential of more rain blanket the sky.
As if also a victim of the wind, a large, rattletrap, smoke-gray van appears suddenly, farther down the highway, right where countless dark fir trees begin to crowd each side of the road, and do so for a good distance until they peter out and farm fields claim the land again.
The speeding van, its old diesel clattering, swerves through a gap in the barbwire fence, onto a weedy farm lane, not far beyond the fluttering, shackled garbage bag. The driver’s face is not visible in the deep gloom of the van’s cab, but very conspicuous through the rain-splattered windshield, the hands on the steering wheel—lean, bony, working-man’s hands—are slick with blood.
VIC MULLER notices the blood when the van stops ten metres from his kitchen window, although he almost missed seeing the man’s hands because his first instinct was to duck and hide the second the van turned onto his property.
Since dawn he’s been watching the sky—that was when the wind rose and the house started creaking and he awoke and felt the storm brewing. Because his eyes are chained to the sky, he hasn’t moved from the rickety chair beside the broken kitchen window of the tumbledown farmhouse at the end of the weedy lane. He cringed when the thick storm clouds first ganged together, forced the sun from the sky, and the rain fell. He’s been cringing ever since, waiting for rain to fall again, and listening to the back screen door, which hangs by one hinge, thump in the wind against the rotting clapboard.
He saw the black bag catch on the fence. He saw the smoke-gray van on the highway and watched it veer onto the lane leading to the farmyard. At first his chaotic mind told him the van was a low, fast-moving, dark cloud, and that he must hide, but he didn’t move fast enough. Now it’s too late to hide.
As a kid he’d liked clouds; he would lie on his back somewhere, anywhere, staring at the sky. At wispy clouds. White puffy ones. Black stormy ones. …Not anymore. Not anymore for a long time.
This used to be his farm until bad weather, bad luck and bad decisions brought ruin, and because the world is the way it is, people judged him a failure. The bank foreclosed on the mortgage; the implement dealer seized the good equipment; and his wife, Janie, drove off in the good truck and never returned, wrote or phoned. Now here he is, forty-five years old, two decades after his mind unraveled, hanging out at the Salvation Army each winter, and during the summer, here in what was once his house. No one ever bought the farm; the bank still rents the land to the farmer whose land backs onto what was once Vic’s dream. All that’s left of that dead, long-departed dream are the falling-down house, barn and granaries, and rusty, hulking tractors and combines—the crappy ones the dealer didn’t want.
A thought sifts through Vic’s mind—maybe the bank sold the farm—his farm—and here stands the new owner.
…But why are his hands all bloody?
A shiver shakes Vic’s spine. The wind blowing through the gap in the kitchen window feels cold this early Friday morning with a week and a half left in May. For an instant he wishes he’d lit a fire in the still-usable wood stove in the living room, but a second thought settles atop the first one—the man with the bloody hands in the van would notice the smoke blowing flat out of the tilted metal chimney before it blended in with the dark gray blanket of sky. And then the man might have come into the house and told him to leave because it’s no longer Vic’s house. Okay, he admits to himself, it hasn’t been his house for a long, long time. But he’ll have to take his other set of clothes out of the bureau drawer where he put them only last month, if this man owns the house now. All of these are rare logical thoughts, birthed perhaps by cold fear.
A chug or two from the bottle of Bacardi would warm him right now. One of the three bottles he managed to steal from the Argus Liquor Store last night. A drink is what he needs. A blood-warming shot of hooch. Like the ten or so swallows he had after the long walk back here from town in the cool, clear night. Except, he doesn’t dare move because the guy in the van, whose face he can’t see might be looking at him right now. He crosses all his fingers for luck. Hooks his thumbs together for extra luck. He dares not cross his arms because he’d have to move his body to do that, but he does cross his ankles and now feels somewhat safe.
Maybe the guy doesn’t have a face.
It wouldn’t be the first time. But before, it always happened in dreams. All those bastards who repossessed his life. For some reason, they were always faceless in his dreams.
Maybe this is a dream too…
No, doesn’t feel like a dream. Feels real, and I’m gonna lose my house again. No! I’ll kill the guy. His hands won’t be the only parts of his body shiny with blood.
Now the van moves ahead. Past some of the machinery and the house the smoky-gray van chugs. Chipped white lettering on the van’s doors offer a clue as to the driver’s identity:
Raven Renovations
Argus, Sask.
993-3284
Raven Renovations. Eliot. Eliot. Eliot. Raven. He’s come to fix my house for someone. Oh shit shit shit shit shit—what’s he doing now?
The van bounces on through the ruts, past a corroded tractor, its big tires flat and rotting. It halts again before backing into a space between a combine and the tilted barn.
The van sits there, but Vic has a bad angle to view from now. The driver’s still not visible. But his blood-covered hands remain on the steering wheel—the one splash of colour on this dull, dark morning.
The rain comes again. At first just a few big drops that splatter here and there. Then, an instant deluge. The van continues to sit there—those crimson hands now vanishing behind the rain that pelts the windshield.
It’s a dream. It is. It is. No, it’s not. This is real.
Vic remembers the red pills Doctor Carter gave him, the ones that helped to keep the I told you so’s and the billowing darkness away, the pills that made things real, except real was sometimes too much of a burden, so he threw the pills away, and relied on crossing his fingers. Right now isn’t the first time he’s wished to have the pills back, or wished he’d returned to the doctor for more because too often he’s never sure which is the real world and which isn’t. …Like right now.
In his dreams the clouds that rain on him look like heavy, black wool curtains, horizontal curtains above him and vertical curtains all around him, curtains that ruffle as if a wind pushes them from the other side. These clouds he’s been watching since dawn don’t look like that; they look like a gigantic braided rug.
So… clouds like a braided rug mean they’re real, right? Who are you saying ‘right’ to? Who? What if braided rug clouds are part of a new bad dream?
While he debates the reality of dreams new thoughts creep to the periphery of his awareness and then burst in and silence the debate.
Where’s Eliot Eliot Eliot Raven? I can’t see the bleeding hands no more. And why’s he bleeding? …What if it isn’t Eliot?
Curiosity mixed with fear gets Vic to move from his chair by the window. From the back door—if he opens it just a crack—maybe he’ll be able to see more. He eases from the chair as if the slightest noise will betray his presence, not comprehending that distance, plus wind, plus the hissing rain will drown out any noise that he could make short of a gunshot.
Vic twists the doorknob and pulls the inner door ajar. Just outside, the wind still bangs the screen door against the siding. This view is actually worse—his rusted John Deere combine blocks the van. Vic’s not too anxious to go outside, under those oppressive clouds that crowd the ground, but he wants to know why Eliot’s here, and with the combine blocking all sight of the van, all he can do is sneak closer.
The barn. All those windows in the barn. I could see good from one of them.
He slips out, pulls the back door shut behind him, and scurries for the barn, all his fingers crossed, staying low through the tall weeds, hating the clouds that press down on him like a dark giant hand, hating the rain that quickly soaks his clothes and skin. He tries to imagine himself as an Indian sneaking up on a cowboy in a half-remembered movie from his childhood. The barn is easy to enter from this side—the big sliding door lies warped and twisted in the dirt, having been ripped away a dozen years ago during a windstorm.
His entry startles a large crow from its perch at the top of a stall board. The crow also startles him when it caws and flaps its way up to the loft. Safe in the loft, it becomes mute again.
The barn windows are all uniformly small, with the glass still intact in about half of them, including the one with the most direct view of the van. Vic creeps into a stall and up to this window to peek out.
The van sits there, its diesel engine banging away, but Vic sees no sign of the driver. Then, with a sputter, the engine noise stops. The two sounds left—Vic’s ragged breathing and rain pelting the barn’s roof and walls, the rust-ravaged machinery outside, and the van.
The van’s rear doors burst open and give Vic such a fright that he stumbles back and has to grab the top board of the stall to avoid falling on his ass.
From within the dark barn, Vic watches the driver step out and into what has become instant mud. Vic bends closer to the barn window—
That’s not Eliot. Not Eliot Raven. Where’s Eliot? Who are you?
For the moment the driver ignores the pelting rain. His eyes scan the abandoned farmyard, but there’s no one there to stare back at him…or so he might think. In addition to the bloody hands—bloody clothes. Worn, ragged, gray, bloody work garments.
The driver has long, fox-red hair. A bushy moustache of the same colour hides his upper lip. Young, lean and lithe of body, he moves furtively. His right forearm glistens, slick with blood. And now rain. He presses an oily rag to a gash on his right elbow, scowls at the sky, then jams the bloody rag into the right back pocket of his work pants.
Vic peers beyond the lean, red-haired driver, into the van’s cargo space. The van contains three toolboxes, ceramic tiles in cartons, waterproof side panels strapped to the passenger-side wall, a bulky, lumpy, rolled-up rug, and what appear to be blood-splatters all over the floor. His eyes dart from the van’s floor back to the driver.
From the van, the driver drags the rug. He struggles with it in his arms over to the combine, shoves it beneath the rusting carcass and straightens up. After glancing around, as if checking again to see if he’s being watched, he gives the rug a final kick to drive it farther beneath the combine.
He yanks the rag from his back pocket again and turns his attention once more to the gash on his elbow. After a few seconds of pressing the rag against his wound the driver drops the rag onto the van’s blood-splattered floor. He rummages through some small boxes in what proves to be a fruitless search. He gives the last box a hard shove. It skids across the van’s metal floor and smears some of the blood into streaks.
“No fuckin’ first-aid kit? Jesus Christ.” These words are shouted, and Vic, two metres away, has no trouble hearing them, despite the wind, the hard rain splattering on everything, and the barn’s rotting wood wall that separates them.
The driver stands hunched half into the van, fists clenching and unclenching. With a sudden catlike movement he spins around, and Vic pulls back from the barn window, afraid the red-haired guy will see him. But the driver’s eyes are drawn as if by magnet to the rug beneath the combine.
Vic checks his fingers. Good. Still crossed. He crosses his arms and his legs while he continues to watch.
The rain pounds down, pinging like BBs on the van’s roof and the metal machinery. The driver scowls up at the dark clouds. Raindrops hammer his face. He keeps scowling at the sky.
Just then the rain diminishes enough in force and noise for Vic to hear the distant roar of a big truck on the highway, and he watches the van driver creep forward, out in front of the van, away from concealment. The van driver’s head swivels one way, then the other, eyes scanning the highway in both directions for the vehicle that can be heard, but not yet seen.
Once more Vic inches closer to the window.
The semi rumbles and clatters by on the wet pavement, heading in the direction the van came from not too long ago. As it speeds past, the truck driver looks toward the old farmstead, with the red-haired van driver standing there, easy to see.
From Vic’s perspective the truck seems to speed up.
The van driver stands in the rain and follows the truck with his eyes. When it disappears in the gloom he hustles to the back and squints through the rain at the rug beneath the combine as if trying to make a decision.
Afraid of being seen, Vic retreats from the window again, but remains close enough to observe the red-haired guy drag the rug from under the combine, lift it with some difficulty and carry it back to the van. There the guy muscles it into the van, except it hangs about an arm’s length out over the bumper, so he jumps inside and yanks the lumpy, now-wet rug all the way inside.
Remaining in the van, the guy pulls the oily, bloody rag from half-under the rug, ties it tight around his upper arm with his teeth and one hand, inserts the shaft of a screwdriver between arm and rag and twists the tool, thus creating a crude tourniquet.
The bleeding appears to be stopping, from what Vic can see. He’s impressed. He’ll need to remember that the next time he cuts himself. He’d cut his hand last summer here on a piece of glass. It dripped blood and took all day to clot. Sudden movement in the van rips him from his memory. The van driver has leaped from the back of the van and approaches the barn window.
Vic lunges to the side of the window, far enough away that even when peering in at an angle the guy won’t see him. He makes sure all his fingers are crossed, his thumbs, and his legs. He even considers crossing his eyes, but he’s done it before and he dislikes that blurry, double vision of his world.
The guy’s head and shoulders fill the small window and block what little light the day offers from coming in. Then the guy moves in the direction opposite to where Vic has pressed himself against the wall, looks in the next window and moves on.
A new thought makes Vic wonder if this stranger who’s driving Eliot Raven’s van could be more dangerous than the clouds he’s feared and watched for two decades.
The guy heads for the far end of the barn, so Vic tears out of the barn, back the way he entered, through the wide-open doorway, leaping over the fallen door’s rotting boards, back through the neck-high weeds, around the corner of his house. There he drops to his knees and watches, fingers crossed, thumbs crossed, ankles crossed.
Thumps and bangs emanate from the barn’s interior, followed by a crow’s caws and squawks. What the guy’s doing Vic can’t be sure of; there are no rooms with doors to smash in, no hiding places, just livestock stalls. After about a minute the red-haired guy comes out the big open doorway, stops and looks around, his face dark with malevolence, darker than the cave-like doorway that surrounds him like an aura. Then Vic notices, gripped in the man’s left hand, the crow hanging upside down by its feet. Dead. Its wings hang low and flutter in the wind.
The rain becomes a downpour again, and Vic shivers when hit with an endless barrage of big cold drops. He needs to squint to see the driver of the van at the barn.
The guy drops the crow, strides along the outside of the barn, stops to peep again in a couple of windows, and then Vic loses sight of him behind the combine. Seconds later, Vic thinks he hears the diesel engine start, and sure enough the van lurches from rest and bounces and splashes through the quagmire the rutted lane has become, toward the side of the house where Vic kneels.
Too late to run, Vic cringes into the mud and vegetation, thankful he isn’t wearing the tomato red t-shirt the Salvation Army Major gave him when he moved out in April. That shirt lies crumpled in the bureau drawer in the house. The clothes he wears right now are dull and blend with the mud and the dull green weeds, and for this he also feels thankful.
He keeps his fingers crossed, and his ankles. Don’t look at me don’t look at me don’t look at me don’t look at me. It’s my dream. You can’t look at me.
Daring to sneak a look, Vic opens one eye as the van chugs past. Like bullets, the large raindrops pound the van roof. He sees the frozen snarl on the driver’s face, a snarl that tells Vic how much the driver hates the world and all that’s in it.
THE VAN bounces from the muddy farm lane onto the pot-holed highway and clatters off in the same direction as the semi that sped by a few minutes earlier. It roars past a signpost that Vic could find in the dark, while wearing a blindfold, a sign that he knows from memory:
ARGUS
Population 9,250
10 Kilometres
So wet his muscles feel spongy, Vic runs to the other end of the house for a last look at the van.
He notices the black garbage bag still caught on the fence and flapping in the wind. Beyond that, he sees the van on the highway. From Vic’s perspective, his one-time farmhouse, the other buildings, the land close by, and the van exist by themselves in a dark liquid tunnel, with no light at either end. In an instant the van and its driver disappear behind a thick veil of rain. What the hell? The van can escape this shitty, frightening day-mare but he can’t?
Vic races back to the barn and the rusted, derelict John Deere combine, not looking back over his shoulder like a man fearful of danger from behind, but up, as if expecting a giant finger of cloud to extend from the sky and squash him like a bug. He keeps his fingers crossed, knowing he could run back in the house and be safe, but just as he needed to sneak to the barn and watch, his need to find evidence that what he witnessed might have been real shunts aside his irrational concerns for safety.
As he runs and stumbles through puddles and ruts, he shouts at the clouds, “Don’t kill me don’t kill me don’t kill me.”
Also, while running, he notices that the downpour has already obliterated the van’s tire tracks along the rutted weedy lane, and when he gets to where the van parked beside the combine, there are no tire tracks there either. He bends and looks beneath the combine, but there is no evidence of a rug ever being there. So there never was a van and a man and a rug? Maybe no semi driving past either?
In his trembling mind there can be only one conclusion: It’s a new dream a new dream not just scary clouds like before but now a scary man with bloody hands in a death van. And unlike those other times this man’s not a faceless bastard.
He runs for the house, fleeing the swooping clouds, the chaos of the storm. While running, he sees a mangy coyote trot away into the weeds with the dead crow in its mouth. Are they real? He knows what is real—the rum bottles. He reaches the flapping screen door and the safe, dry house, intent on finishing the dregs of one rum bottle and then draining the other two bottles, knowing it will be difficult to hold a bottle while his fingers are crossed.
