Chapter 110

They drove with his face pressed down against the carpet, the whole time. It smelled like dust and wet dog fur, cigar smoke and dog food. They drove for about ten minutes, mostly uphill, and partly on a viciously pot-holed gravel road.
Rawle thought they must be heading up either South or North Mountain, based on the inclination.
They stopped. Rawle was immediately picked up and shuffled outside.
He found himself standing in front of a timber-frame house with board-and-batten siding, siting on several acres of green farm and orchard land, with dense woodlot all around the property, as far as the eye could see. There were no neighbours.
Rawle immediately felt his breath come back a little when he saw where they were.
Not because he thought he was going to be safe now, quite the opposite, but at least he knew where he was.
He knew where he was.
This was Dee Lee’s Valley farmhouse.
Little kids, teenagers and younger kids with long-hair and no helmets were booting around on the rolling acreage on snowmobiles. Dee’s kids and their friends, having a blast.
It was Monday afternoon at about 1 p.m., Rawle thought lamely, and none of them were in school.
Maybe he just wants to talk, Rawle told himself. If Dee Lee is killing me, they wouldn’t bring me to Dee Lee’s house. But what the fuck do I know?
Dee himself came bursting out the front door now and walked jauntily down the long path toward the van.
He looked like that old WWF wrestler ‘Hacksaw’ Jim Duggan, except his beard and his hair was blond instead of brown, and it was always pulled back in a pony tail.
He had the same thick body frame and smooth face, like Hacksaw, but was thinner.
He also had very clear, creamy skin and a fine complexion, rosy cheeks and very light blue eyes.
A lot of the Valley bar chicks had huge boners for the guy and slept with him all the time, even though he had a colostomy bag. He was the boy who needed saving. Plus, he used to own the only dance bar in New Minas. Riddlers.
He stood inches away.
Rawle felt like he might shit his pants. His stomach felt nervous and sick, like he was going to have diarrhea.
Up close, Dee was disarmingly handsome and there was a warm, reassuring tone to his tenor voice.
“Ra-oul?” he said.
He extended one of his arms to shake Rawle’s hand. His forearm was covered in blurry, blueish tattoos, the low-quality tattoos you get in prison, Rawle thought, inked with charred Bible paper and spit.
Rawle shook the square, rough, red hand. Dee’s grip was machine-like, dry and calloused.
“Sorry,” Rawle said, sheepishly, “It’s Rawle. My name is Rawle. It rhymes with Wall. You said Ra-oul…”
Dee gave a slight grin. His eyes flickered, with their light blue, weirdo colouring.
“I don’t care if it’s Raul Julia. I kidnapped you, remember?”
Dee suddenly lunged forward and wrapped a powerful arm around Rawle’s neck, getting him in a headlock, easily.
A mug of prickles splashed down Rawle’s stomach and gave him the feeling he was wetting his pants. Maybe he did a little.
“I want you to come to my place, talk awhile, Raoul. Okay?”
He led him briskly up the steps of the stone path toward the front door.
Rawle was facing down. The stones of the path were ‘picture rocks,’ he noticed, with dark marbling running through them. Some of the marblings almost looked like First Nation’s pictographs.
“So, you’re a buddy of Jacky? Well, guess what? I wouldn’t trade that for a pinch of ‘coon shit,” Dee yelled as they staggered together toward the house.
Dee’s arm was horseshoed tightly around Rawle’s ears, muffling the sound of his voice. “I’m through fuckin’ around. OK? Especially with little faggots like you. From this day on, Raoul, you’re going to cooperate with me. Believe me.”
Dee tightened his grip, even more, doubling Rawle over until he began to choke. All the blood blushed into his face and forehead to the point where the skin hurt from the pressure of blood underneath it.
Instead of going up the steps, they turned left at the front door and Dee continued to lead him by the neck down a mulch path, toward an old-fashioned red-and-white barn, about 50 metres behind the house. A huge, old barn, solidly built out of the thick old boards a hundred years ago.
Dee Lee has me in a headlock and he’s taking me out to the barn, Rawle thought.
He could scarcely believe what was happening to him. The fear gnawed at his belly from the inside out.
God, I’m such a coward. After everything I’ve been through.
He was going to start crying. His head ached. The bandages were gone but not the effects of the gun shot. His skull felt weak whenever he felt stress.
He needed to cry to be able to release some of the pressure, but he couldn’t or risk provoking more anger from his captor.
Once they reached the barn, Dee piled him through a thick wooden door hard and let go of the headlock. Rawle tumbled onto a straw-covered floor and found himself looking up inside a small room.
Dee and the cream-skinned black kidnapper followed him inside, shutting the door behind them with a creaky groan of old wood.
It was dark in the room, but Rawle’s eyes adjusted quickly.
The inside of the barn was divided into several rooms and animal stalls. Four squat, fluffy brown cows stood in thin stalls in front of Rawle’s feet. The animals stared at him warily. Their necks were secured in elongated, rusty iron loops chained to the floor and ceiling. The loops swiveled from side to side, allowing them to move their heads back and forth slightly. The cows were munching on three big bales of wet hay covered with patches of white mold. The rusty metal loops squeeked as they turned their heads, back and forth.
The black guy picked Rawle up off the floor by his elbow, as if he were no heavier than a bag of downhill skis, and dragged him down a short hallway, past more empty stalls into a much larger room, then dumped him roughly on the floor.
He was on his back, looking down at his chest. His coat was open and it looked like the wind was blowing up his T-shirt, billowing it outward, but there was no wind in the barn. The movement was his heart beating, hard.
He could see a stack of chicken roosts with wire screens across them on his left.
Along the far wall, there was a porcelain sink and a rough wood counter and a chopping block made from an enormous Dutch elm stump about four-feet in diameter.
A cast-iron woodstove was pumping out thick shivers of heat. There was a big cauldron pot on top of the stove filled with steaming water.
Several steel buckets of water were scattered around the floor under a metal clothesline with six or seven dead chickens hung on it by their shriveled feet.
One or two of the birds had no feathers anymore, and all of them had their necks broken.
Somebody had been plucking them, recently because the water in the buckets was still steaming and there was a pile of white down and brown wet feathers in a nearby plastic garbage bin.
The black kidnapper grabbed Rawle’s coat and stood him up, then immediately sunk a left hook into his obliques. Thum.
Despite being only 29 and in decent shape, Rawle spent much too much time at a desk. He was not built to take a punch like that. It broke through whatever meager defenses he could offer. It shook his organs. He fell down and felt like he was literally dying.
The pain rolled like a boulder up his chest and squeezed all the oxygen out of his lungs. Rawle writhed on the ground, unable to breathe, shaking like a fawn floundering around on broken legs.
The black kidnapper grabbed him up and carried him toward the chopping block, then flopped him face-first onto the pink-stained chopping block.
Dee walked over to the clothesline, where the chickens were and pulled a few clumps of feathers off one of the birds. The chickens had already been dipped in hot water and the feathers peeled away like lint from a clothes dryer screen.
Dee blew the feathers out of his hand in a big puff, then walked over to a collection of sharp, steel knives and thick-bladed cleavers hanging tucked in an orange leather belt hanging above the sink.
He selected a large meat cleaver with a solid black handle.
“Raoul,” he said, breaking a long silence. “Sit your ass up.”
He walked until he was right in front of Rawle and crouched down. Rawle sat up but stayed on his knees, keeping the chopping block at eye level. He could feel his heart beat start to go irregular, and air bubbles of pain began to press slowly through the arteries of his chest. Oh my God.
“I’m pulling together all kinds of resources, Raoul. Including you. But I had to read in the fucking newspaper that Kurtis Missions is a police suspect? I don’t think so. I will not be kept out of the loop. After all I’ve fucking done for you, this is the thanks I get?”
He stood up again and lit what appeared to be a cigarette. He was enraged. “Are you going to fill me in or NOT!?”
Rawle felt himself start to choke on a bit of saliva. He was trying so hard not to cry. He felt a flu-like feeling in his nose and lungs, a feeling of dread. He was terrified that if he cried, Dee would stick his body in the deep-freeze, with the rest of the chickens.
“Are you going to tell me something, you little nig, or not?” Again using the N-word, or part of it, despite the presence of the black kidnapper and the fact that Rawle was white.
But the word didn’t seem to offend the black kidnapper, at all. And Dee Lee didn’t seem to be using it for a racist meaning, more like it was just a word he was using to express incredible hatred. Like it was the worst word he could think of.
“I need you to fucking fill me in. On everything you now. From now on. From now on, I own you, Raoul. Is that undertstood?”
Rawle nodded. He was trembling.
Dee stood up and began to stalk back and forth, squeaking on the old barnboards with his heavy rubber boots. He was smoking his cigarette and swinging the cleaver aimlessly, back and forth in his other hand.
“What information does the police have that I don’t know about? I want to know everything they’ve they told you?”
The black kidnapper went over to an antique Coca-Cola fridge next to the deep-freeze and got out two bottles of Molson Golden with brown labels, popping them open on a bottle-opener built into the metal fridge.
He gave a beer to Dee and sat down again on a stool to watch the proceedings with his massive arms crossed.
“Nothing,” Rawle said. “Except what I weaseled out of a cop friend of mine. Everything that was in my story.”
“You have a friend who’s a cop?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. That comes in handy, eh?”
Dee set his beer down and started asking questions. Every time he asked a question, he whipped his meat cleaver into a wall of the barn, punctuating himself with the cracking boom sound of heavy steel sticking into ancient barnboard.
“There’s a big dude who came to my pig roast, last August. He’s got red hair, red beard. Shaped like a whale. His name is Bill Tiffen, from Plympton. He’s got a couple of fishing boats down there for smuggling cocaine. You ever hear Jack mention that name? Or ‘Shining’ Bill?”
KaBoom! The cleaver bit into the creaky wall. Rawle nearly jumped out of his skin.
He stared blurry-eyed at the pink wood in front of his face. The chopping block had all kinds of deep knife grooves in it. Many chickens before Rawle had died there.
Why can’t you ask something I know the answer to? I’m incredibly eager to squeal.
“I’m sorry,” Rawle answered with a crackling voice. “I don’t know that person.”
“Did Jack ever mention him? That’s what I asked you.”
“No.”
Dee strode over to the wall and pulled the cleaver out, his pony tail flinging through a beam of dusty sunlight that was coming through a crystally brown window.
Dee held the beer bottle and another cigarette between the square fingers of his left hand and was alternating long pulls on the bottle and the smoke.
“Did Jack or Tee mention anything about a guy Tee went to school with who had a thing for her, named Dale Pinch? Jack took a photo of him at his assault trial a couple months ago?” Boom. The cleaver again.
“No…. I’m sorry. I don’t remember him saying anything about that.”
Fifteen minutes of this. It seemed like there was nobody Rawle knew in the entire Valley.
He could barely believe he was still breathing, answering no to question after question. Finally, through the sound of the blood rushing in his ears, he heard the names he recognized. Thank God. He was sweating all over.
“Now, the Missions. Wid Missions Junior. Jack ever talk about him? Willard Missions Senior? Watermelon Missions? Melonhead? Jello-head? Popular? Jack? Darlene? Darroll? Kurtis?”
“Yes,” Rawle said. “Popular, Jack, Kurtis, Darlene and both Willards are ‘persons of interest’ now. I got that for my story. But that’s all the cops told me. And Darlene has been stalking me.”
Dee stopped pacing and wrenched the cleaver out of the wall again. He came over to Rawle, striding like a giant. Rawle felt another mug of prickles spill down into his bladder.
“That’s not what I asked you. I said: Jack ever talk about them? You think I don’t know that old bitch was harrassing you?”
Rawle looked up, surprised.
“Who do you think put a stop to it?”