Trolling Lures
By Steve Vernon

They call me Troll;
Gnawer of the Moon
Giant of the Gale-blasts,
Curse of the rain-hall,
Companion of the Sibyl,
Nightroaming beast,
Swallower of the loaf of heaven.
What is a troll but that?

(taken from the Eda,
an ancient Norse poem
by Bragi Boddason)

The forest is where all maps end
and all possibilities begin
(old Mi’maq saying)

Prologue

The boy trembled in the tight darkness, waiting for the trapdoor to swing open. He knew he’d be beaten. He heard the troll’s footsteps thumping like rocks against the floorboards. He crouched and curled like a pill bug in the darkness.

“Help me god, help me god, help me god, help me…” Over and over, a tightly whispered prayer bleeding into litany. “God help me god help me.”

The footsteps hammered closer. God, it seemed, wasn’t listening.

The sliver of light that marked the edge of the trapdoor widened. The boy blinked against the sudden brightness. The trapdoor swung open. A face looked down. At least he was wearing the father mask.

“You lose her?” The troll rumbled.

The boy nodded.

“Why?”

“She was thirsty. I tried to give her a drink. The cup wouldn’t fit through the willow bars, so I opened her cage. She flew like a bird right out of the cage.”

“How’d she slip the chain?”

“She pulled it off. She left some skin behind.”

“Come on,” The troll said.

The boy clambered eagerly out from his hiding spot. He knew better than to ask questions. He followed the troll to the truck and climbed on to the back.

“She’ll head for the road,” The troll said. “We’ll pick her trail up there. Put your chain on. We’re going fishing.”

The sun was shining, but the boy trembled harder, because fishing was worse than a beating.

He put the chain on, like a dog, eager for the leash. While he was doing that he noticed a coyote squatting on the verge of the camp.

The troll saw the coyote too.

“Are you going to give me trouble?” The troll asked, fixing the coyote with an evil dark eye.

The coyote wagged his wild bushy tail and promptly sicked up his last meal.

CHAPTER 1 - The Running Girl

Morgan Hillman leaned out of his parked Volvo and puked. The mess splattered hot and funky upon the gravel of the roadside.

“You stink like a mile of dead skunks,” The dead woman said.

Hillman mustered a fart that he knew would streak his skivvies. It hurt coming out, same as the puke. Cancer did that to a man.

“Smell that,” he said to the dead woman. That was the good thing about being haunted. You didn’t have to bother being polite to phantoms.

He wiped his mouth and managed a smile. With cancer gnawing in his belly, thoughts of suicide percolating in his brain, and the spirit-memory of a dead woman in the backseat of his Volvo station wagon, he figured it was a damned good day to die.

He looked down at the mess in the gravel. There they were. Chopped carrots. It seemed like no matter what he ate there were always some chopped carrots in the mess that came back up. He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d ate chopped carrots.

“Are you on the right road?” The dead woman asked.

Hillman looked up at the road sign. It read 106.

“It’s the road I’m on,” He said, cranking the key and nudging the gas.

The dead woman had been with him for as long as he could remember. He didn’t know if she was real or not. He could see and hear her. She was beautiful in the haunting way that native woman often are. The cave of her skull, opened by a .38 caliber skeleton key, writhed with a glitter of maggots. On the unmarked side of her face a single dark eye stared out, frozen like a shard of broken green glass. As delusions went, he’d painted her up in a fine old style.

The Volvo thundered over a heavy iron bridge, heading west down the 106. The radio spoke of clearing skies, high temperatures, and a chance of rain. Hillman smiled. It was perfect weather for the end of the world - absolutely undecided.

“Have you got enough nerve for this?” The dead woman asked.

“Just watch me,” Hillman said.

How fast a world can end, he thought. It seemed like yesterday he stood at a Halifax lunch counter, serving out coffee. Now look at him. Driving down a Nova Scotia rural highway, counting off the minutes until self-extinction.

“I know who you are,” the dead woman said.

“I wish I knew who you were,” Hillman replied.

He couldn’t remember when he’d started seeing her. She’d been with him for as long as he recalled. Delusions followed that sort of pattern. Like a nervous habit, you were never quite sure just when they started. One day you were normal, the next you found yourself talking to invisible gods and sticking your tongue out, Maori-style, every time you heard the mention of Paris Hilton’s name.

The landscape slipped past like an unspooling movie reel. The early October sunshine, determined to make the most of these last few weeks of heat, cast shadows darker than burned black. Patches of rolling dry thatch mixed with bursts of third growth forest. Great joints of granite thrust up from the soil. Leaves hung grimly upon heat-withered branches, their colors running from vivid green into the gasoline of autumn, ready to flutter into mulch like a legion of moldering paratroopers.

A portion of Hillman’s waking mind appreciated the stark beauty, but a deeper part of himself absently listened to the sound of Big Billy Tumor clawing his finest fiddle bow, deep within the windings of Hillman’s gut. Big Billy Tumor was a hungry little booger. He never stopped eating at Hillman’s insides, turning the cells one by one.

“Who is nibbling on my house?” Hillman ruefully muttered. “Who is nibbling like a mouse?”

He bounced along the road in his black Volvo station wagon, praying that the suspension would live up to the abuse, keeping half an eye on the photocopied map that he’d taped to his dashboard. He’d highlighted his chosen route in black marker with a bright red X designating his end destination. It was good to know where he was going to die. He’d mapped everything out to the very last detail. Careful plans were a lonely man’s final form of prayer.

He traveled light. A fiberglass fishing rod, a bright red tackle box, a haversack stuffed with a couple of tins of beans and beef jerky sticks, a creel and a net.

“Who do you think you’re fooling? Insurance companies never pay off on suicides.” The dead woman taunted. “You’re living in a web of lies, spun by yourself.”

She was wrong. He would fool them. His camouflage was perfect, right down to the battered fishing hat and the many-pocketed camp vest. It was hunting season. No one would question the presence of the shotgun stowed behind the seat.

“What do you need insurance money for anyway?”

What indeed, Hillman wondered. He didn’t have anyone to leave anything to. He wouldn’t be missed. Somebody else could easily make a better cup of coffee. Why was he doing it this way?

He didn’t have a clue. A few slices of truth lay stuffed in the brown manila envelope resting on the passenger seat. A handwritten prognosis and the X-rays that he’d grabbed from the doctor’s office. He’d burn the note and the envelope and the X-ray photographs in his campfire, make his peace with the world, and then go out into the woods and find a fence to tangle up in while crossing over. An accidental discharge. It happened all of the time. He’d checked the statistics.

He wondered where the dead woman would go. Would she find someone else to haunt? Or maybe she’d just linger over his carcass as he forgot himself back into the dirt.

His stomach made sounds like a bubbling cauldron. Big Billy Tumor gnawed into his viscera like a multi-mouthed worm working in the darkness. He felt his cells playing Star Wars games, one by one surrendering to the dark side.

That’s how cancer worked. The doctor had explained it. A single cell wakes up one morning and decides it doesn’t like the way it’s been growing. It was the ultimate midlife crisis. The man inside the man tried to work his way out, cell by cell. The escape artist, mutating in a misguided attempt to remake his very being.

“Nibble, nibble, have some kibbles.”

Cancer – the original clone wars. It was funny how funny it seemed. The walking dead tell the best jokes. The doctor spelled Hillman’s obituary out in a handful of dirty multi-syllable words.

“Malignant. Terminal. Inoperable,” The dead woman taunted. “Give yourself time. You’ll look as bad as I do. The shotgun will be an improvement.”

“I heard his words,” Hillman said. He wasn’t bothered by the diagnosis, any more than he was bothered by talking to the spirit of a dead woman. It was easy to accept a lot of things when you knew you were going to die.

He wasn’t alarmed anymore. He felt peaceful, like watching a forensic medical show on the television. How fast can a body decay?

Death happened to everyone, sooner or later. There was really no need to get upset. The old croupier had reached out and raked Hillman’s chips a little closer to the bank. It was time to cash out.

“I’ll wait for you over there, on the other side of the bridge,” The dead woman taunted. “Death’s no escape for the likes of you.”

“What’d I ever do to you to earn such an honor?”

“You’ll remember,” The dead woman said.

“Is that a prayer, a promise, or a threat?”

He wondered again where she’d come from. He knew she belonged to him, the same as the cancer.

He wondered if the cancer knew what he was up to. If the malignant growth suspected that its host might somehow terminally interrupt its long slow feast.

“Sing Hallelujah, Big Billy. The anvil chorus is about to drop on your head.”

Big Billy was the name that Hillman had given his tumor. It made the whole thing kind of friendly, like death was nothing more than a permanent pass-out drunk-up with a really good buddy. Hillman thought of his cancer with the face of a mutated Billy Graham painted across its septic features, preaching faster as the end came on, a sub-molecular televangelist trying to convert each cell.

Hillman closed his eyes. For a half an instant he saw the woman and the gun going off. Him standing there, just watching like it was television.

“Why did you shoot?” The dead woman wanted to know.

In the reruns of his endlessly broadcasting imagination, Hillman saw the coffee shop, the door opening wide like a mouth, the jingle bells hung on the door ringing...

“ LOOK OUT!” The dead woman shouted.

Hillman snapped open his eyes, jarred from his reverie just in time to see the coyote leap in front of his Volvo. His fist was already hard down on the horn, working it instinctively.

He twisted the wheel, veering straight into the path of the running girl.

* * *

Hammurabi Road
(novella 2)

The moon was a stone’s throw away from the Jack Pine Stretch and the lights of the town were nothing but a distant memory and the three of us were bunched together in the front seat of the pickup on account of the back seat being crammed full of Tyree. He was kicking up some, trying to shuck himself out of the duct tape, snare wire and rope we’d tangled him up in, but other than that he wasn’t making much of a sound. The gag helped some and fear of retribution did the rest.

“Moose are the worst,” I said.

“Worse than cows?” Donny asked.

The thing about Donny was he didn’t always care about hearing the answer. To him talking was a little like table tennis. The object of the game was to snap that ball right back at the other guy just as fast and as hard as you can. Donny had an incurable habit of asking questions because it pretty well guaranteed an answer. Words just felt good coming out of his mouth, I guess. I didn’t mind. Donny looked up to me and made no secret about it. I did my best to live up to his respect. Bert and Ernie couldn’t have done it any better.

“Worse than bears,” I said. “Usually a moose will just bounce, but man alive when they get their hooves tangled up in the tracks the engine will drag them a mile before letting go. You’ve got to hose their carcasses out of the locomotive’s wheel trucks. I’m telling you that nothing stinks like dead moose. Not even Irvin.”

Donny liked that. He grinned me that Donny smile of his. Half cocked to one side, all bright and innocent. Looking at that Donny smile I knew that nothing could ever change between us. Donny and I were arguing about what kind of track-kill stank the worst after it had been pile-driver-pureed by a half a mile of freight train. It happened more often than you might think.

“You’re sure about that, are you?” Donny asked.

“Sure as shooting,” I replied.

“Shooting isn’t sure,” Donny pointed out. “Sometimes people miss.”

Donny had a point in his own weird kind of way. That was Donny’s magic. He wasn’t slow or retarded or what ever you want to call it. He just had a different way of looking at things, was all.

“You know what I mean Donny.”

“I know what you figure you mean, but you’re only guessing. There’s three sides to every story,” Donny said. “Yours, mine and the truth.”

I smiled and nodded, preferring not to argue, but I did know what I was talking about. In my twenty years of railroading I’d shoveled and swept and hosed more track-kill from off of the CNR rails than the rest of this pickup truck combined, including Tyree. There was something magnetic in those rails that called for the kill more surely than the north wind calls the wandering wild goose home.

“Do you think there are any bears out here?” Donny asked nervously.

Donny gets antsy when you mention bears, even the Winnie the Pooh stuffed kind. He’s got what you might call a history with bears.

“All of the bears will be down to the town dump by now, feeding off of the weekend leavings,” I said. “And here we are out here, missing the show.”

It was as true as train tracks. The bears hang around down at the old town dump and waited all week for the garbage trucks to roll in with something good to eat. It was easy pickings, sure, but I think it was also just something for them to do. Just the same way we’d go up there to the dump on the weekends and watch the bears picking through the garbage. Sometimes life was just a way of making the time go past.

Donny had his own way of passing the time. He used to go down to the dump with a pellet rifle when he was a kid and even older, taking pot-shots at the bears. He liked to plink those bears with his bee-bee’s, figuring they were so damn big they couldn’t even feel it. Except one day one of them bears took it into its shaggy mind to prove Donny wrong. I never saw a grown man climb a tree so fast. Too bad the bear could climb too. If I hadn’t pulled the pickup truck under the tree while Donny jumped for it the story might have ended up with what was left of Donny coming out of the bear’s asshole in slow dark chunks. Ever since then Donny just didn’t care much for bears.

I guess I could understand that, just fine.

“Dead skunk smells worse than bear,” Donny looked nervously out the window, as if he expected Smokey the Bear to come running up from out of the darkness to break the window glass with a well-swung shovel. “Way worse. Don’t you think so, Irvin?”

“Shut up and let me drive,” Irvin said, speed-jittering his Players filterless from one corner of his mouth to the other and back in an irritating kind of fuck-you-and-the-caboose-you-rode-in-on way. Irvin was like that. Dead focused on the task at hand. He didn’t care for distractions of any sort, which was understandable given that we were driving down a dirt trail in the dark of a moonless night with our headlights turned off. That Irvin had good eyes, I guess. He leaned right over the steering wheel, his face practically jammed up against the windshield glass, just staring into the darkness and driving at it straight on.

“What the hell are you steering by?” I asked. “You sure as shit can’t see a thing.”

“I can see the starlight glinting off of the rail tracks,” Irvin said. “That’s all of the compass I’ll ever need.”

I looked hard. It was true. You could see the rails glinting in the darkness. I guess the trail was always there if you looked hard enough for something to follow. Maybe that’s what the railroad tracks were for. To let us know where we were going and where we had been.

“I still think a cow is worse,” Donny said. “When their guts blow up and all of that fart gas honks out. I seen two cows get it once, up around west of Wawa. They were humping on the track and I guess they didn’t hear the train coming. They got creamed while they were creaming. Pretty damn funny, I think.”

“Wouldn’t that have been a bull and a cow?” I asked. “If they were doing what I think they were doing?”

“I don’t know,” Donny said with a shrug. “Maybe they were lesbian cows.”

I nodded. It almost made sense if you didn’t stop too long to think about it. Most things did.

“Scratch a cow, find a lesbian,” Irvin observed. “Pretty girls put it out the best.”

Irvin was always the deep thinker of our bunch.

The three of us had been together since we were kids. Irvin had six years on us, but he’d flunked grade twelve twice before his old man got him hooked up on the section gang. Irvin learned a whole lot more from diesel and steel than he ever learned in school. He followed the rails and he never looked back.

“Man, there’s nothing worse than cow farts,” Donny said. “They stink like rotten grass gas.”

“Rotten ass grass gas,” I suggested, stringing one more box car onto his line.

“Rotten ass grass gas, passing fast,” Donny elaborated, with a silly little giggle. Then we both started to laugh. It wasn’t that funny, but the giggling and the gag-cracking helped keep our minds off of what we were getting set to do.

“I’m trying to drive here,” Irvin announced, in a louder than usual voice. “Do you fellows mind holding it down, or am I going to have duct tape the two of you shut up as well?”

We both shut up. Not that we usually listened all that hard to what Irvin had to say, but we both knew what he was thinking about. It had been our buddies, who had died in that Hammer Abbey Hotel fire, and we had plenty to beef about with Tyree for setting the blaze, but it had been Irvin’s big brother Gilbert who died there as well. Blood counted more than anybody’s buddy in any book you cared to name, and some that had no name at all.

There wasn’t proof that Tyree did it, but the whole town knew it as a fact. Tyree had been royally pissed at the hotel ever since they threw him out for scratching up the snooker table the time he used a leaf rake for a pool cue. So I guess everybody just plain figured that Tyree had set the fire, and that was all the judge and jury we needed in these here parts.

The real truth was that most folks just didn’t care for Tyree’s family. You see, Tyree came from Norman Township, where the roads were all dirt and you got your water from an iron pump. That wasn’t all that bad in itself. In fact the fact was nearly half of the local crew came from Norman township, but Tyree’s family came from the side of Norman that folks on the other side of Norman loved to talk about the most, the wrong side of the wrong side of the tracks, so when somebody dumped a couple of quarts of gasoline in the backroom of the Hammer Abbey Railroad Hotel and threw in a lit book of matches after it, Tyree was the first usual suspect to be considered.

Now the Hammer Abbey wasn’t that much as hotels went. The rooms were small and you could smell what your neighbour ate for his supper at 3am in the morning when the night farts kicked in, but it was where the traveling men would hang their hats. The rooms were cheap and fairly clean and it was ice cube handy to the bootlegger’s shack. So when it went up in blazes folks around here decided that they’d miss it.

Still, there wasn’t all that much in the way of material evidence so the courts and the cops didn’t do much about it. The police just shrugged and Pontius Pilated their donut-stained hands into the air. Life moved on and the sun kept going up and down and the trains kept rolling.

So it was up to us.

We drove on in silence for a minute or two. That was about as long of a silence as Donny could hold on to.

“Cow farts are bad,” Donny allowed. “A piggery smells worse, though. You ever drive past one?”

“There’s a pig farm out by Coniston,” I said. “You can smell the damn thing for miles.”

“Ain’t that funny?” Donny said. “Pig shit smells so bad but bacon smells so good. How’s that work, you figure?”

“It’s the smoke that does it,” I allowed. “They smoke and salt the pork. That smoke drives all of the pig shit out of meat, I reckon.”

“I wish to hell somebody would smoke and salt you, Hanny,” Irvin growled. “Maybe that’d do something about all of the shit you’re so full of.”

That was my name, Hanny. It was short for Hanlan, my grandpa’s name. My folks gave the name to me back when I was born and unable to protect myself from such abuses, figuring I could hold onto it after grandpa finally died. That’s how it worked in our family. Names were handed down like old clothes in a kind of living memorial. Just as soon as somebody grew out of one name somebody else got to wear it.

I figured on saving my money and buying myself a brand new name someday. I had in mind something snazzy, like Trick Magnet H. Flash, but first I figured I’d better learn how to rap. I figured that if I could just change my name it might just change my entire life outlook. I might grow a longer dick, and go up a whole tax bracket, and maybe even bag me a cheerleader or two.

“I smoked Labrador tea once,” Donny said. “It didn’t do a thing for me. I never tried smoking bacon before.”

“You’re not supposed to smoke Labrador tea,” I said. “You drink it. It’s good for farts, not that you need any help in that department. Your back door works just fine and dandy.”

It was true. Given enough hard boiled eggs and home brewed beer Donny could single-handedly lay down a counter-barrage on any Saturday bean supper you cared to name. It was kind of his calling in life. The man was made of methane and had a low and sonorous fart tone that always reminded me of a foghorn sounding out, somewhere far out to sea. The sound of his flatulence gave him a kind of a mysterious appeal that was strangely lost on most of the women we tried to hang around.

“Well I smoked that Labrador Tea just the same,” Donny said. “On account of Billy Three-Legs Tootoosis told me I could. I smoked it and then I said I was sorry, because Billy Three-Legs Tootoosis said that you had to apologize to anything that you killed in this life, even if it was only a tea bush.”

“Ha,” I laughed. “If Billy Three-Legs Tootoosis tells you that shit is ham, are you going to fry yourself up a turd and slide it on in between two slices of fresh buttered bread?”

Billy Three-Legs Tootoosis was our town’s resident Indian. It was an honorary position and Billy took it as seriously as if it were something big like the Nobel Peace Prize or the Stanley Cup. People would point at him and make jokes about him. He was kind of upholding a tradition representing the kind of backwoods stereotype that let folks imagine that things didn’t really ever need to change.

“Who else would they tell their racist jokes about?” Billy Three-Legs Tootoosis had asked me once after I’d asked him if being the town Indian bothered him any. “I figure I’m taking one for the tribes. So long as I keep grinning and taking it nobody else gets that racist Indian crap dumped on them.”

The truth was, most of the real Indians around here preferred to stay on the reservations. They just didn’t want to live anywhere close to town on account of the kind of people who lived in towns. Speaking as somebody who lived in town, I figured there was no accounting for taste, I guess.

“Billy Three-Legs Tootoosis is part-Cree,” Donny said. “He told me so. He knows a lot about the wilderness and things.”

“Billy Three-Legs Tootoosis knows shit,” I said. “The closest he ever got to the reservation was all those lonely Saturday nights he spent playing tepee with his wickiup in the back seat of his grandma’s Ford pick up truck.”

“Do you girls mind shutting up?” Irvin was plainly pissed. “I got something more important on my mind than the fiddling proclivities of Billy Three-Legged’s never-to-be-trusted right hand.”

Irvin didn’t take his eyes off of the trail ahead, he just laid a track out for us to follow; a trail as cold and hard as frozen turds.

“I can still smell that goddamn Hammer Abbey hotel smoke,” he said, and we all knew what he was talking about. “And it isn’t from any goddamn Labrador tea. I smelled it three goddamn weeks ago and so did you two, if I recollect correctly. And I can still smell it reeking off of that goddamned sad bastard stretched out in our backseat.”

“Goddamn, Irvin,” I said, trying to lighten the mood. “That’s four goddamns in as many sentences. That’s got to be some kind of goddamn record. Are you fixing on starting up your own goddamn religion?”

“Why the goddamn hell not?” Irvin asked. “Maybe I will. Call it the High Holy Tracklayers Bullshit-Flinging Church of the One-Eyed Pig-Fuckers complete with clog dancing and free liquor every Saturday night. I reckon it’d beat the hell out of what that old boy upstairs has been dishing out.”

It was well said, but I couldn’t believe any of what I was hearing. Firstly, I was amazed that Irvin had thought of a name that out-did Trick Magnet H. Flash, but secondly I couldn’t believe that somebody could speak so sacrilegiously in the middle of what we were up to.

“Don’t tell me you’ve got a grudge against God?” I said. “Irvin, I know you can get pissy but how in the hell can you get worked up about somebody we only talk about once a week, excepting hockey season?”

“Just because we don’t talk about him, doesn’t mean he isn’t still hanging over our heads, nosing into our business and butt-fucking our destinies.”

“Damn it Irvin,” I said. “You could say that about the Prime Minister or the President and you’d be just as right. Why pick on God? He’s a good old boy, hung his son on a cross and all that happy puck-shit.”

“Do you think so?” Irvin asked. “I’ve been hearing about how good and kind and merciful that old boy is upstairs, but I’ve read the Old Testament. You just take a look at all the folks that Jehovah decreed needed to be burned and sacked and smited out of their homes. That old fellow is a psychopathic serial killer, you just check the facts.”

“I like cereal ever since I was a kid,” Donny said. “Especially the sugary kind, but not Captain Crunch. I like my cereal soggy.”

Irvin and I both ignored Donny. Sometimes that boy just insisted on driving in the wrong direction on the wrong side of the road using the Saturday funny pages for a road map.

“Irvin, those are just bible stories,” I said. “They don’t mean anything.”

“They’re parables is what they are,” Irvin said. “The preacher will read them to you once a week at Sunday school, trying to indoctrinate you into their way of thinking. It’s like brainwashing, only dirtier. You got to face up to the facts, Hanny. What happened in the before colors the here and now like permanent oil paint.”

“Indoctrinate,” I said, going for a grin. “That’s a real good word, Irvin. You look that up in your Reader’s Digest?”

But Irvin wasn’t in a grinning mood.

“That’s the trouble with you, Hanny. You look at me and all you can see is dumb old Irvin, but I’m a whole lot smarter than you’d think. You can’t go on just an appearance. House paint and home improvements don’t mean shit.”

Here it comes, I thought. Irvin hardly ever said anything, except when he wanted to say a whole lot.

He kept on talking. I figured he’d run out of steam soon enough, but you never could tell with Irvin. Usually he said so very little, that when he started it was kind of like he had to empty out what ever crap he’d been holding back.

“That’s the whole problem. Folks are just relying on what they hear about this old fellow God. They look at the pictures and they see this big old Santa Claus-like looking fellow leaning down out of a cloud and cum-showering us with milk and honey and manna-o-manna and they figure he’s no worse than Grandpa Walton.”

Oh shit. Irvin was getting set to filibuster.

“Well what’s so bad about God?” I asked. I knew I was opening a door to a diatribe, but if I didn’t open that door he was just going to kick it down all the same and talk all the more. I was his friend. It was part of my job to hear out all of his bullshit, no matter how irritating it got to be. So I let him let it fly, figuring maybe he had a point. Besides, I never did truly trust Will Geer.

Irvin pointed his favourite rude finger straight up at the truck cab’s roof.

“I’ll tell you what’s wrong. Where was that old bastard when this peanut-fart dumped gasoline all over the back room of the Hammer Abbey Railroad Hotel? Where was he when Gil was sucking smoke and chewing on hot cinders? Where was he when the bolts gave way on that rusty old fire escape that should have been replaced back when Christ wore short pants. Where was we when they were hanging out of the windows like fucking Christmas decorations? Where was he and what the fuck was he thinking?”

“Are you done?” I asked.

“Just about,” He answered.

With that Irvin bounced the pick-up over a rut that I swore he drove straight through on purpose. I left a Hanny-sized dent in the top of the pick-up can and Tyree bounced hard off of the back seat and wedged down onto the floorboards of the truck. Next thing you know he’s jammed down hard and he’s making strangled scared noises like he was trying breath through the mud-stained upholstery, which I guess he was.

“Fish him up out of there before he chokes to death,” Irvin ordered. “Smothering is just too damned easy for this bastard. I want him to pay for what he done, old school Hammurabi-style. An eye for an asshole, fucker. God has spoken.”

Donny and I turned around and reached over the ridge of the seat backs to try and haul Tyree up. It was an awkward enough stunt, bellying over the seat backs and reaching down to pick up somebody who didn’t want to be picked up. What made it harder was Irvin didn’t even bother slowing the truck down.

Tyree didn’t help matters any once he started kicking and bucking like a freshly landed muskellunge.

“Stop that bastard’s kicking before he dents up the track cab,” Irvin commanded. “I’ve got one dry nerve left and that rotten eyed prick with ears is pissing all over it.”

Right about then a part of me wanted to ask Irvin just when the hell he was going to stop giving us orders and start giving us a hand, but the part of me that stays away from meat run green and dating close cousins decided to shut up for a while and just say nothing. Irvin was a bad man on a good day and tonight was no time to be fucking around.

I reached down for Tyree but in the dark I was grabbing at the wrong end. He jammed his boots up against my hand, catching all four of my fingers against the side of the truck. I invented a few creative new names for Jesus and all of his saints and a couple of trailer park angels, all the while trying to rise philosophically above the pain.

Which was about the time that Tyree chewed his mouth clear of the duct tape gag we’d wrapped across his lips and sank his dirty uncolgated yellow teeth into the knuckle-hinges of Donny’s left hand. Donny let out a noise that sounded a little like Whitney Houston stump-fucking a three year old beagle hound. While Donny was working on the high notes Tyree stomped at my other hand and I sang out in harmony. The Vienna Philharmonic Boys Neutron Choir didn’t have a good goddamn thing on us, for sure.

Which was right about the time that we hit the bear.

* * *

The above excerpts are taken from the two novellas appearing in my latest novella collection, Hard Roads. The book is being released by Gray Friar Press in the summer of 2007. The first novella, “Trolling Lures”, takes place in rural Nova Scotia. The second novella, “ Hammurabi Road”, is set in the deep backwoods of Northern Ontario. I grew up in Northern Ontario and moved to Nova Scotia when I was 17. I’m somewhere out there in both places, walking those hard roads that lead everyone of us back on home to where we first began.

I hope you enjoy these excerpts and hunt up a copy or two. Hard Roads will be available in hardcover or soft cover, depending on the depth of your pocket. You can preorder these books at Shocklines or directly through the publisher, Gray Friar Press.

http://shocklines.stores.yahoo.net/harotwonobst1.html

http://shocklines.stores.yahoo.net/harotwonobst.html

http://www.grayfriarpress.com/catalogue/hardroads.html