Tony Burgess: Pontypool Changes Everything

They are getting through. Les lets go of the door and tears down the driveway. The zombies grab at the flesh of his buttocks and the backs of his legs. Dozens of clumsy pincers spring him into the air. They are just below him, still pinching the ghost of his ass, but out of reach. Les has never flown before and when he notices that his feet are flailing at the tops of bushes he collapses. He waits for the shale to hit him, but it doesn’t, not until he drops through two feet of frigid water. Les looks up across a lake. The shore behind him holds the zombies at a distance of two metres. Les dunks his head below the surface. He removes his shoes and lays them side by side on the bottom of Lake Scugog. A layer of slush hangs just beneath the surface and it bites, cold, into Les’s ribs. Within seconds he feels his own death in this water. He sees a small boat down the shore at a dock and begins a mad dog paddle.

If his illness is acting up a little bit, it’s only to be expected. It does not really compromise his ability to discern much of his immediate physical dilemma. In fact, he dismisses the delusional worms gathering in each of the cottages he can see with far firmer resolve than any historically sane person could. The sky is harmlessly transformed into the underside of a table, and the clouds lengthen and thin into the wicked webs of spiders. The sun flattens and hardens into a round seal of pink gum pressed under a corner of the table. Les does not think that the menace his atmosphere represents is overstated, and he rightly thanks his illness for peeling back at least one layer from the hideous stop of the sky. Underwater he can hear the shuffle of feet beneath a table, the tapping of a signal, the little music of coins in a pocket. Since he feels he has the option, he rises from the water to Handel.

As he flops onto the dock, Les decides that, whatever it eventually means, for now at least he is a fugitive. Uncurling the rope holding the boat, he drifts in it, on a current that will take him to Port Perry. The sun is warm enough to break the ice in his veins into painful throbs. The card table has dissipated and a less likely blue sky has taken its place. Les lies in the bottom of the boat.

I have never been an organized man. I will never know what the inner life of other people is like. That can never matter again. In Port Perry I will steal a car. I’m going to Parkdale.

From the shore a loon offers Les both its name and its Haunting Cry. He turns his head in the bottom of the boat, bunching his cheek against aluminum rivets, and smiles.

None of you has anything for me anymore. I am Ed Gein. I want my wife and child.

At his nose is a dead worm, glossy and hard; it forms an almost audible S. Les flicks the brittle lower loop, creating a question mark. Stupid. He flicks the upper loop, creating a bar of worm that appears to have shot off its ends in a centrifugal action. Better. Better question.

For the next four hours Les lies freezing in the drifting boat, turning away from, and then back to, his worm. He pictures his son in little screens that open up in the aluminum just above the watermark. He names the child. He changes the name. The baby has a face like a walnut, a uniform surface of wrinkles, and Helen wipes yellow food from his chin. Les tilts his jaw toward the bait-littered bottom of the boat, and Helen reaches up and cleans three tiny crayfish legs from the side of his face. Her hand slips back beneath the brackish water an inch deep beneath Les. They live in an inch of water. No air. They can’t see. The fins of pickerel and the snouts of summer frogs hide the light. A rusted fish hook has just fallen in the baby’s food.

Detective Peterson pulls a rental car up into his driveway. He sits with his face in his hands. When he asks himself What’s happening? he’s not thinking of cannibal drama teachers and their flying passengers. Peterson is thinking about the difficulty he has had all afternoon. I can’t seem to speak properly. An understatement. I don’t feel any different. I can think clearly. At least I think I can.

He’s right. There is nothing detectably wrong with his thoughts; however, he has struggled all afternoon with a strange inability to control the words he uses. At the car-rental outlet the young attendee didn’t want to give him a vehicle. Peterson limited himself to single-word prompts: car, rent. But even these simple words betrayed him. He could find them but couldn’t repeat them easily — car, cove, tummy… It was only when Peterson showed his detective’s badge that the teenage boy proceeded, silently, suspiciously, to rent the car.

Peterson lays his hands on the dash and says, “Dash.” He grips the steering wheel with both hands and says, “Messy car.”

Messy car? Messy car? He looks at the steering wheel. The image of a car is on the horn bar. A sort of medallion of the rental place. Messy car? Is that it? The steering wheel is messy with a car? Peterson attempts to slide a key into this and says, “Bad boy Walt Whitman.” His heart sinks. Yes, he thinks clearly, there is a mess in the car. I just can’t say it.

Peterson steps from his car and carefully closes the door. The wet brown lawn runs down to the road. A crescent-shaped garden with rocks. Spring is coming. Today. The snow has melted since this morning. Peterson admires these things. Nothing resists him. He traces the perimeter of the garden with his eyes. Across. Long. Down. Up. These are lengths and directions. Peterson feels agitated. Angry. His house has something that he doesn’t. He looks at the front door. White metal, with a bronze knocker and a black knob. He says, “door.” In the upper left window he sees his wife pass. He thinks her.

In this simple word, spoken, though not aloud, he slips another key carefully into a lock. He turns it, gently. Her. The lock clicks and he applies a light pressure. Her fault. Aloud: “Her fault.” He stands in the hallway at the base of the stairs, armed with his first complicated phrase of this long afternoon, and he removes his coat. Out of the corner of his eye he catches himself in the hallway mirror. He feels encouraged by the image — a man opening a closet door, a gun belt slung across his back — a complex person, integrated by his own actions into a complicated world. This appears even more obvious by the controlled way he removes the gun belt and hangs it on an ornate hook beside the closet door. He turns and looks at himself directly. He watches his mouth and thinks: Her fault. Closed mouth. Her coat — mouth open. Closed — fault. Open — fault.

Ellen Peterson lowers herself onto the couch in the TV room. The television is off and a macramé throw hangs in front of the screen. She sets a mug of coffee onto a table beside the couch.

Ellen Peterson is forty-two years old, tall, with handsome short grey hair. Her eyebrows are rigged to set off her expression with irony, and her mouth operates with the quick lips of a young person. Her hands are hinged with a loose agility, their gestures can accommodate the approximate and the exact. In short, Ellen’s anatomy is a perfect compliment to intelligence.

She raises the cup to her mouth but stops halfway. The gesture is not surprising, an index of intellectual life: her face twitches once to release the pause, and she brings the mug to her lips. She pushes the rim with her tongue, breaching the sipping seal, and coffee flows across her chin. It turns in a black braid down her neck and fans out through the fabric of her red T-shirt. Ellen Peterson is the reeve for Pontypool, Bewdley and Caesarea. She married Detective Peterson twelve years ago when he was just an OPP officer and she was a real estate agent. She managed to become successfully elected reeve because of her passion and familiarity with the rural life of the area. Ellen has never lived in a city, and her sophistication and intelligence are considered by her constituents to be the best of their own. She has pioneered a sensibility for rural Ontario that will carry it into the next millennium with as much wit and ability as her urban counterparts. And what’s more, she will bring the mystery of the backroads to sluggish minds in boardrooms. Ellen Peterson is also a member of a local sisterhood of Wicca, and the Bewdley Seers’ Festival is a project that she lovingly organizes, with some anonymity, at a careful distance from the office she holds. This past year of Ellen’s life, however, has been shot with a tragedy of devastating proportion.