Nov. 28, 2011

Carrie woke up before the dawn, troubled and nervous.

“We just can’t be the only people left alive,” she said. “We can’t be. I thought about it all night. I can’t stop thinking about it. I just don’t believe it.”

I agreed with her. “It’s like UFOs… extra-terrestrial life,” I said. “Considering the unyielding enormity of space, how could we be the only life forms that watched hockey, deep fried chicken and expressed love through artistic genius and dexterous bendings of our thumbs? No damned way, man. We’re Australia in space for some cosmic brothers and sisters and our time has come.”

“Then why,” Carrie asked through clenched teeth, “are we the only people, apparently, left? What did we do that was so wrong that we got left behind when everyone else… disappeared?”

“Or right,” I suggested.

“Right? What do you mean right?”

I explained that we might have been left on Earth because we had been “good.

“We haven’t been bad people. Sure, I’ve had my moments where I pushed the envelope but overall I have tried to be moral and decent. And I know you have been. So maybe we’ve been left here for another reason our puny mortal brains cannot come up with right now.”

I needed coffee. This early morning contemplation of life and why we are here was taking a toll on my patience. I was also suffering from flashes of guilt and shame as I remembered many of my less-than-stellar moments as a human. Good?

“We’re out of coffee,” Carrie said, sounding almost frightened.

“Son of a bitch,” I growled, letting the cupboard door, behind which the daily resuscitation would normally await my fumbling grasp, slam shut.

“Guess I am off to town. Do we need anything else?”

Carrie asked if I should go in alone.

“Why not? I am heavily armed and I have not had any coffee. Who would dare fuck with me?”

She then clipped me with a smart one across the cranium.

“It’s not about you. It’s about me. Are you going to leave me alone here?”

I smiled and walked to the area by the back door, where the guns were stacked.

I grabbed the Mossberg 935 and handed it to her.

“It’s loaded. Here’s the safety. Just click it to ‘off’ and point and pull the trigger if anyone or thing comes while I am away. Remember, it kicks like a mule, so hold on tight.”

Carrie grabbed the shotgun like it was a slab of road-kill that I had just handed her.

“Okay,” she said softly, indicating to me that she really was scared about being left alone.

“I mean, I know we’re all alone but it’s freaky being alone.”

“Or you can get your coat and boots on and came with me,” I huffed, letting my caffeine addiction get the better of me.

“Oh, I’ll be fine. Just don’t be long and don’t go about shooting things like a maniac.”

I stepped outside, feeling the weight of the 357 magnum that was in my coat pocket.

“Won’t be long. Don’t need anything else?”

Carrie said no — “just hurry back.”

Ointment was covered with the thin dusting of snow that fell the evening before and I swept her free before climbing in and arching her around the driveway onto the loop road that led back to Highway 95.

The grey murk of early morning was giving way to the softer prelude of sunrise as I turned north on the highway and sped cautiously toward Sandpoint. Behind Ointment the snow cover swirled and danced, leaving faint, occasional white lines on the pavement.

I slowed down for the maze that the lake causeway had become and picked my way across to Sandpoint, which cast a soft hue on the northern horizon. White stripes traced down Schweitzer Mountain, Sandpoint’s winter tourism destination, but no lights were shining. I wondered if power supplies were going to start cutting off now. Made sense they would, I thought, passing by a Hummer crumpled against the concrete abutment separating the highway from the causeway’s sidewalk.

I headed for Safeway, weaving through the downtown cluttered with the vestiges of a rapidly yoinked away human strain.

As I was prying the front doors of the store open and holding my breath, for fear of waves of rotten smells, which didn’t greet me thanks to the cold, Carrie heard what she thought was an approaching truck.

She looked out the kitchen window, which faced the road, and looked in both directions. Nothing was there and she wondered if I had forgotten anything. She laughed when she thought that I was coming back because I had forgotten my bank card.

As she stepped back from the window her jaw dropped as a black pickup truck skidded to a halt on the road.

Carrie stared outside and watched a burly, bearded man — about 70 — step from the cab of the F-350. Her eyes latched onto his eyes, dark beneath the ball cap he was wearing.

The man raced to the cabin and Carrie raced to the back door to grab the shotgun.

As she grabbed the gun and, shaking, clicked the safety off and pointed it at the door, the man appeared outside — his hat tipped back on his head, a vast smile cracking across the curly foliage that covered his face.

“Hello!” He shouted. “Hello? Hello?!”

Carrie could see he was crying. She then realized that she was, too.

“Hello,” the man shouted, pushing the cabin door open. “Hello?”

Carrie whooped in shock and mumbled, “stay there or… stay!”

The man froze, just inside the door, and with a voice battered by tearful emotion, blurted, “lady, I… I… who are you? Where did you…” and he took a step forward, his arms stretched out.

Carrie whooped again… “Don’t move!”

As she directed the man into the cabin and politely asked him to sit at the kitchen table and “let her think for a moment,” I was snatching a large bag of coffee from a store shelf and wondering about what else I should take.

“Who are you?” Carrie demanded.

The man, his voice still shaking, replied, “I thought I was all alone.”

Carrie, fighting the tears welling in her eyes, tossed back, “well, me too. Who are you? Where did you come from?”

The man identified himself as Vincent. Carrie didn’t catch his last name… thought he may have said something like “Birdleeny.”

He said he was on his way home to Sandpoint.

“Been to Spokane and Coeur d’Alene and was looking for friends at Priest River — looking for… anyone,” he said. “You are the first woman I’ve seen in weeks.”

He asked if he could take his hat off and Carrie nodded.

I was pulling away from Safeway when she sat down at the table across from Vincent and told him who she was. She leaned the shotgun against the cabin wall – fear flooding from her, pushed out by the enormous realization that she – that we were not alone after all.

“My husband will be back any second,” she said, a bit too loudly.

Vincent nodded. “There are two of you?” He gulped. “Oh dear Jesus. Are there more?”

Carrie said there weren’t and stared at the big man, who had a thick trickle of sweat coursing down from his temples to his speckled beard. His light eyes quivered in their sockets and tears continued to well in them. His eyes rampaged over Carrie. Vincent believed he had seen an angel when he first saw Carrie.

“Do you know what happened?” Carrie asked.

He said he wasn’t sure but “I have my suspicions.”

“What?” Carrie pressed.

“Well, it sure seems like some kind of apocalypse has occurred. We are at the 11^th hour,” he said.

“The what?”

He explained to Carrie that he believed “the soulless had been removed from the world.”

Vincent was shaking and breathing hard. Outside his truck idled on the road, the driver’s side door still ajar and beeping. Several crows hopped in the back dining on the scattered remains of something edible to starving carrion.

“Do you mean to say that we are the only ones with souls? That seems kinda weird,” Carrie said. “I mean – billions of people…”

“Not at all,” Vincent said with a flourish of animation in his voice and in his face. “The mongrels are all gone! We always knew they’d be taken away. Didn’t think it would be like this and I can’t explain why the deer and cattle and birds and whatnot are all gone, but I guess it just means they don’t have no souls, either.”

“What do you mean ‘mongrels,’” Carrie asked.

“The Jews and their nigger mongrel offspring… and the Asians — the weak and the useless and the mindless all those who belong to Satan. They’re all gone,” Vincent declared. “It’s the only thing that makes any sense. And they said I was crazy, Zionist scum. And now that I see you – like an angel – it’s all so… confirming.”

As I was picking my way across the causeway, a light came on in Carrie’s head and it shone on a word – SHOTGUN – and another word became illuminated in her reeling brain – GET.

She looked at Vincent and began to wonder if he was “one of those crazy white supremacy nuts” she’d been hearing about all these years since we bought our cabin.

She recalled Morris Caligun speaking about them, noting Priest River as a hotbed for them. She also recalled me telling her a story about a confrontation that I had in Priest River when I was delivering tourism magazines, a number of years ago.

I stopped at the Priest River information centre, located off the highway beside the railway line, and stacked magazines and brochures into the outside racks. It was past 5 p.m. and the centre was closed.

As I stepped back from the rack, I noticed a beat up old white 4×4 parked lengthways behind my truck — a Ford F-250 belonging to the newspaper I worked for. At first I didn’t think much of it. I returned to my truck and hopped inside and looked in the rear view mirror. The truck didn’t move. I could make out two figures in the truck. They appeared to be looking right at me.

After a few seconds, I grew impatient and put my truck into reverse, hoping my taillights would prompt them to move out of the way. They continued to block me. Another 10 or 20 seconds went by and I put the truck in park and hopped out. I walked to the back and stared up at the white truck. I could make out a gun rack in the back, with two weapons in it, and could see two young skinheads in the cab. They didn’t say anything or move but just stared at me with mostly vacant, baleful eyes.

“Do you mind moving?” I yelled and returned to my truck cab. The Spidey-senses were tingling big time as I climbed back up into the truck.

It would have been about 1996 — four years after the Randy Weaver standoff and firefight at Ruby Ridge, where a federal marshal was killed and Weaver’s 14-year-old son Sammy and wife Vicki were also slain. Vicki had been holding their 10-month-old daughter when she was shot in the head by a FBI sniper.

As a journalist who worked just north of the border, I was relatively well informed about the white supremacy thing down in northern Idaho.

As these clowns would surely think that Canadians were part of the package designed to obliterate whitey’s reign on the world, I began to fear that the skinheads blocking my passage would ratchet up their behaviour, so I put the truck in reverse again and revved the engine.

After I backed up a foot or so, I stopped and revved the engine violently. It howled and all that was in the way of me t-boning the snot out of the belligerent skinheads was the pressure of my foot on the brake.

They got the hint and slowly drove away — laughing, I am sure, like shrill hyenas gassed on putrid meat. “We shore skeert that guy,” I imagined one of them saying.

I stopped at the exit to the info centre and looked back in my side mirror. The skinheads just sat in their truck – looking forward. The gun rack was empty.

The Winnipeg slug that still lurked in me, a distant past character who took no shit from ‘bubbles and lugans,’ did the street math and any further contemplation of ‘oh ya!’ was tamped down when my foot pressed the gas pedal and the truck jerked away. I snarled my way south to Newport and then further south to Spokane, fantasizing all the way about how sweet it would have been to t-bone those “skinhead pukes.”

Carrie swallowed hard and thought Vincent might be an old nut, but he was the first person she’d spoken to, other than to me, in weeks. Her brain was wobbling at the thought that all life wasn’t gone on Earth. Even if the only other person we’d found was a racist freak, he was another person.

Carrie was also never one to beat around a bush.

“You aren’t one of those nuts are you?” She asked. “Because if you are, I don’t think I want to hear it so keep it shut,” she said, rising from her chair and grabbing the shotgun.

Vincent smiled and with a croak in his voice said, “Nuts? I am here aren’t I? You are here, too, and that means you are also one of Adam’s children — you are also pure… you are chosen.” He smiled widely. “I just cannot believe I am talking to you, sister.”

Carrie blurted, “My husband went to get coffee. I’d offer you cup otherwise.” And she stared hard at him. The shotgun felt hot in her hand and she wondered why it hadn’t felt that heavy earlier.

Carrie’s striking blue eyes delivered ferocity in their gaze when she wanted them to and Vincent, more relieved to be speaking to someone else than focused on his dogma, thanked her for her kindness again. His eyes didn’t even lock on the shotgun, he was so ecstatic.

At first I didn’t notice his truck.

There is a long straightaway with a slight dip in the road leading from the highway to the subdivision where our cabin was located. It took about 100 yards of blinking and thinking before my brain registered acceptance of the truck being on the road — which had been clear half an hour earlier. My stomach thrust upwards into my throat and my heart rolled in my chest as I crept past Vincent’s truck and turned into the drive.

The back door was still open and I was out of Ointment before she was fully stopped.

“Carrie!” I bellowed frantically, pounding into the cabin.

I saw her seated at the table, with the shotgun across her lap, leaning forward.  And there was a large old man looking at me, grinning widely.

“Uhh… hello,” I said.

He reached out with his right hand and said, “Hi, I am Vincent.” I switched the .357 to my left hand and thrust my right hand toward him.

I am still not sure why, but the first thing I said was, “You are parked in the middle of the road.”

And then I shook his hand. It was still meaty, despite his advanced age, and moist and trembling.

“Hello Vincent. It is really freaking good to meet you!” I laughed machine-like as I spoke.

Carrie still held our guest at gunpoint and said, “I’ll put some coffee on. Coffee Vincent?” She handed the shotgun to me. It ‘clacked’ against the hand gun and for a moment I thought I might drop them both.

Vincent croaked a happy “yes please” and the world had three people left in it.

I placed the shotgun on the kitchen counter and with a glance that said, “I need to speak to you,” walked to the far end of the cabin and we disappeared behind the bathroom door.

Carrie blurted out what had happened and filled me in on Vincent’s eccentricities.

“I am not so sure about him,” she whispered. “Keep your gun on you.”

I visualized the shotgun sitting on the kitchen counter – free for Vincent to scoop up. I spun around and bolted back out to the kitchen. The gun lay on the counter and Vincent was still seated at the table, grinning largely.

I finished preparing the coffee and asked Vincent if he was hungry. He said he was, so I busied myself preparing hash browns, eggs and bacon. Carrie re-emerged from the bathroom and asked Vincent if he’d park his truck in the driveway.

He rose slowly to his feet and said, “Yeah, guess I shouldn’t be such a dummy. Someone might run into me.” Smiling, he stepped outside.

“That is a crazy old man, Rob. He’s one of those white separatists.”

“White supremacists?” I corrected.

“Whatever, he’s a fucking old racist. He something about Jews being mongrels and some other deranged crap.”

I didn’t want to believe her. Too clichéd for our location, I thought. We couldn’t be that unlucky and if we are, what does it say about us, that we’d be left on the Earth with such a person?

Vincent reappeared holding a shiny silver handgun.

“My turn,” he croaked. “Sit down.”

Carrie was a few feet from the shotgun and he noticed her edge toward it.

“Sit down, sister, and keep clear of the cannon.” He clomped across the kitchen floor in his big bush boots and grabbed the gun.

“Nice. Good gun,” he said, holding it up to admire it.

“This ain’t for ducks and chickens,” he cackled.

We sat at the table.  I felt a sickening wave of heat course through me, my large coat too much for the fire-warmed cabin. The revolver in my pocket did not bring relief; panic tried to seize me.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked. “What makes you think we’re going to hurt you old fella? We’ve all been through…” He barked at me to be quiet.

“Something altogether fantastic has happened and you two are the first people I come across? A couple of immoral Canadians? Mercy, the lord works in mysterious ways,” he said, pouring a mug of coffee, then another and a third.

He carried a mug to me and one to Carrie and after grabbing his cup, sat at the head of the table and let out a large sigh.

“I haven’t been able to find any of Adam’s pure bloods. Not a one,” he whispered, blowing at the steam rising from the mug of coffee and slurped noisily.

“So why, I must ask my lord, did I come upon you two? I’ve been to Coeur d’Alene… Post Falls… and Priest River, as well as Athol and other places and not a one — no one is left. All I saw were ravens and cats, for mercy sake.”

I noted that the old man spoke like an educated man and wondered how one could become so horribly waylaid on the road of life that they actually believe they are of a master race and all the others are “mongrels.”

The gun felt like a watermelon in my pocket. I wanted to take my coat off because I was overheating but didn’t want to lose a chance to even things up.

Carrie told him we’d been to Calgary and other cities and hadn’t seen anyone, either.

“I’m sorry I pointed the gun at you… but I was frightened. Rob wasn’t… and I was… and…” she trailed off and looked imploringly at Vincent. “For God’s sake — relax you crazy old bastard!”

Vincent, while half a decade or more past retirement age, was a large and imposing man. His eyes expressed a demeanor that was both jolly and sinister.

“Be quiet now, sister. Looking at you and your dark hair — both of you, actually — I see Zionists. It could be that we are on different sides of a holy war that is raging as we speak. Probably over in the Middle East. Those Zionist weaklings in Washington and their nigger president have no doubt lost America. At first, I thought it was the government. But not even the government could mess things up this good.”

He set the gun down on the table with a clunk and took a large gulp of coffee.

“I haven’t had a good cup of coffee in… many, many days,” he said, sighing.

I wanted to reach into my pocket to grab my revolver but both my hands were wrapped around the mug of Joe and I feared a rash move would incite this crazy old man to commence to shooting.

“Thank you for your hospitality and all but there is something about you two that tells me we’re on opposite sides. For starters, you got a Jap vehicle out there and then there is the fact you drew down on me sister, like some kind of bitch federal agent.”

I slid a hand away from the mug and inched it as naturally as I could to the edge of the table. I leaned up against the table and snarled, “There’s no need for that. Don’t speak to her like that.”

Vincent looked at me with dark, tired eyes and lifted his mug to his lips.

He was about to say something when Carrie lunged from her chair and lashed a hand out, striking him in the eye. Hot coffee splattered him in the face as he clutched wildly for his revolver but Carrie’s momentum knocked his reach back a couple of inches.

As he struggled to move forward, with Carrie striking him wildly against the face again, I snatched the .357 from my pocket and screamed, “Don’t!”

Carrie halted her attack and jumped sideways, as Vincent took stabbed his meaty fingers toward his weapon again. “Bitch!” He shouted and then with one eye closed, he stopped still. His open eye saw me pointing the magnum at him – two or three inches from his open eye.

He slumped down into his chair and his head tipped forward. He looked back up and offered a weak smile that became washed away by a sullen, defeated sigh.

Carrie grabbed his revolver and lifted it, as if she would smash him with it, and screamed, “You son of a bitch!” She looked wildly at me and shouted, “Why, for God’s sake, do we finally meet up with someone else and this happens?”

I said I didn’t know and that we all needed to calm down. I wasn’t as mad at the old man because we’d done the same thing to him, albeit not as intrusively or frighteningly.

“The lord works in mysterious ways,” Vincent said. “Look at how he got rid of all the children of Zion… of all Satan’s sick brothers and sisters.”

Carrie shot back, “Well he didn’t get rid of us so what is your goddamned point?”

Vincent asked her to refrain from using “such language” and I interjected by snarling, “You’re in my fucking house now asshole and if you speak to my wife that way again I’ll shoot you in the fucking knee.”

Vincent said something about me being “just another cowardly, godless” something or other when I squeezed too hard on the trigger. A deafening blast erupted, making Carrie scream. A second later I realized that Vincent was lying on the floor.

“Oh fuck!” I bellowed. “Vincent?” I looked at the gun; smoke impishly tittered from it.

I handed Carrie the gun and moved to check on the old man. He was breathing and I couldn’t find any blood. As I continued to try and find an entry wound, Carrie said, “you’ve shot a hole in our kitchen wall.”

Directly behind Vincent there was a hole the size of a dime in the wall. The outside wall, I noticed later, was torn open with a hole the size of a fist.

Luckily, my shot just missed Vincent’s head by an inch or two but the shock from the gun blast sucked the air out of his old lungs and he passed out.

Carrie insisted that we tie him up and when he awoke 20 or so minutes later, we now had a crazy old white supremacist prisoner. The world does take wild twists and turns as it barrels through space. One day you’re devising a communications strategy for a small, thriving business and the next you are pointing a large hand gun at a barking nut job in a world that keeps getting freakier by the half hour.

We spent the day discussing what we’d seen and experienced, as three civilized people who had somehow dodged the apocalypse should have been doing. But Vincent’s biases continued to flow out.

He ranted about how Jews had gotten hold of America soon after the British were driven north to “that godless cesspool Canada” and how they’d freed the slaves.

“I thought it was the result of the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln and what-have-you,” Carrie said.

“Abraham — the father of Zion,” Vincent spat. “I guarantee you that whatever has happened, it has something to do with the mongrel president.”

“Wasn’t Abraham also a descendent of Adam?” I countered. “You fucking crazy bastards. You know what? I am an Irish-Viking by descent. She’s an Irish-Ukrainian mix. We’re as white as the driven snow. You actually have fairly dark skin and dark hair, or had dark hair. You don’t look so purely white to me, so what gives you the gall to be so righteously white? ” I pushed.

Vincent closed his eyes and laughed.

“I am Italian. Proudly so. And we are just as white as the Irish or the Norse or those mongrel dogs from the steppes.”

And the discussion raged into the early evening, continuing as we cooked supper and even after we untied Vincent to allow him to eat and go to the bathroom. It wasn’t much fun standing in the open doorway of the bathroom while this large old thing took a dump, but we weren’t going to give him any more outs.

We tied him up again and put him to bed in the kids’ bedroom and he actually said a prayer for us as he curled up on the creaky old bunk bed, his hands tied behind his back to his ankles. Carrie and I argued as to how to best tie him up, neither of us ever having had to do such a thing.

I argued he’d be uncomfortable and she responded, “I don’t care.”

Old habits: she won the argument.

---

Article Share

---