Wendigo
Kirk Bueckert
It was the summer of his twenty-seventh birthday when he set out from Fort McMurray. Never again would he see the sprawling tar pits, the columns of black smoke out on the horizon. Wandering wayward pilgrim, Eastbound aboard a Greyhound bus. This was a man in charge of his own destiny. The bus was headed for Treaty 6 Territory: land of the Cree, Métis, Ojibwe, Saulteaux, Nakota, Dene. Land of the Living Skies. That was what the billboard in the Greyhound headlights read. Welcome to the Land of the Livings Skies. His mother had grown up on these prairies under that same electric-green aurora. Perhaps her memory was what beckoned to him. Scanning the roadside in the predawn dark, Brandon thought of hunters chasing bison across a wild and stormy plain to the precipice of all creation.
“He found you there,” the voice continues. “Lost and alone in the dark. The pale demon. He smell’d you on the wind.”
Brandon turns his head and spits on the floor. His mouth tastes like cigarette smoke and whiskey vomit and blood. “You wouldn’t happen to have an extra smoke handy,” he says, “would you?”
“I never thought things would end like this,” the stranger goes on. “Always thought I’d go down in a blaze of glory. Like Bonnie and Clyde. Well, shit. Ain’t nothin’ glorious about Saskatchewan.”
Brandon squints between the bars. “Do I know you?”
The stranger smiles a too-wide smile. A yellow crescent moon in the dark of the cell. “Don’t remember me, huh? Well, I remember you. We met last night at the roadhouse. You’re the Zamboni man.” The words tumble from his mouth in a syrupy drawl. “Zam-BO-nee man. I say you’re on some thin ice now. I know who you are and I know what you’ve done. The man upstairs, he knows too.”
“The man upstairs. Who do you mean? The nightwatchman? Or God Almighty?”
“The pale demon. Are you even listenin’ to me?”
“I’ve been listening to a lot of craziness about devils and the like. You’ll forgive me if I’m not particularly well-versed on the subject. Now, are you gonna give me a cigarette or not?”
The stranger pitches a half-crumpled pack of Marlboro Reds between the bars. “That’s my last one.”
Brandon picks up the pack from the floor. “Cheers, Mister…?”
“The name’s Lewis. Lewis Manx.”
“Much obliged, Lewis.” Brandon pats himself down for a lighter or a book of matches. “You don’t sound like you’re from around here.”
“No, sir. I’m just passin’ through.”
The flare of a match, then the crackle. “We met at the roadhouse, huh?”
“Last night. At the bar.”
“Well, shit. What kind of trouble did we get into, then?”
“We talked. We talked for a very long time.”
“Riveting stuff, I’m sure. What did we talk about?”
“Oh, we talked about the weather. We talked about the game. We talked about your dead mama.”
Brandon pulls hard on Lewis’s last cigarette. “Nah. See, now I know you have me confused with someone else.”
“Why do you say that?”
“My mother’s not dead. She lives on the West Coast. Ran out when I was just a baby.”
“She played the pipe organ at Sunday services.”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that.”
“Then, one day, your daddy killed her dead. Sunk her body to the bottom of a pond.”
Brandon’s head jerks up. “What the hell did you just say?”
“What I said was: you told me your daddy killed your mama. Bludgeoned her to death with a length of pipe and sunk her in the pond behind the house.”
Brandon grinds out the filter on the floor of his cell. “You’re out of your mind, Mister.”
“Manx. The name’s—”
“Lewis Manx, yeah, you told me. Listen, Lewis. Maybe we just sit here quiet-like until the guard comes down to let one of us go. Probably me. More likely you’re headed for the nuthouse. What do you say to that?”
“You don’t get it, do you? You and I ain’t goin’ nowhere.”
“I’m going back to sleep. Enjoy the booby hatch, Lewis.”
“Fine, you don’t remember me. But I reckon you must remember the young lady.”
Brandon pinches the bridge of his nose. “Which young lady?”
“The young lady from last night. What was her name? Lydia? Loretta? Yolanda?”
Memories dance in slow circles through the haze of his delirium. “No,” he says. “No, not that.” Smell of drugstore perfume and cold, sour sweat.
“Lola,” he says. “Her name was Lola.”
He had stopped in late at The Blind Pig, ordered Pabst Blue Ribbon with a side of Jack Daniels. “P.B. and J” Peggy called it. Peggy was the kind of bartender who called everyone “darling” or “honey” with a wink and a smile. A string of red and green Christmas bulbs had been strung out above the wood where Brandon drank alone as per his nightly custom. The buzzing wires of a portable space-heater, which did little thwart the chill, augmented their meager light from the corner of the room. He set his varsity hockey ring down on the wood. His knuckles were swollen, still bloody from lambasting the wall of his kitchen. He consulted the subtle engraving like something written above a tomb.
He was angry that night. Angry about his custodial job down at the municipal skating rink which paid so little, the gas bills unpaid altogether, the pipes below his trailer now frozen as a result. Most of all he was angry that, in light of all this, the only thing Brandon Delaney could think to do was have a drink.
“Do you want another one, honey?”
He nodded without raising his head. Nor did his gaze pursue the seat of Peggy’s tight blue jeans, despite his unobstructed vantage. He was counting a pocketful of crumbled twenty-dollar bills, calculating just how many more P.B. and J he might partake in, when the jukebox changed its tune.
A young woman had come in from the cold. Nonlocal. Her boots, bound at the laces, hung dripping from the back of a chair above the space-heater. Dangling, he thought, like a pair of dead rabbits there in the red neon glow. Her pompom-tasseled toque was the same color as her wooly socks. Alone at the jukebox, she swayed to the rhythm of a bluegrass beat. Brandon watched in silence.
“What happened to Lola, last night?” says Lewis.
“Nothing happened,” he says. “We talked.”
They talked. They drank. He lit her cigarettes. At some point in the night, he joined her in the water closet and locked the door behind them. “I’m Lola, by the way,” she told him as she lifted a single bump of powder from a glass vile to his nostril and he snorted. The young people who drank at The Pig were always kicking in a little snow. His pulse quickened. Lola-by-the way. Her neck smelled of bottled lilacs. Her lips tasted like bubblegum.
Brandon stands up slowly. “What makes you think something happened?”
“All I know is you left with little Miss Lola last night, and today you’re down here with fingernail scratches all over your arms.”
“You’re talking out your ass.”
“See for yourself.”
Brandon rolls up his flannel sleeves one sleeve at a time. He beholds the long livid fingernail scratches running the length of both arms.
“Do you feel it now, Zamboni man? Do you feel that thin ice crackin’ beneath your feet?”
Brandon traces the wounds with his fingertips. “Maybe I slipped and fell,” he says to himself.
Lewis leans closer. “What did she do, huh? Did she rile you up? Did she snigger when your britches hit the floor?”
“You bite your tongue, you crazy son of a bitch. I didn’t hurt anybody.” Brandon drums on the bars. “Hey, let me out of here!”
“Quit your hollerin,’ would you?” Lewis hisses. “You’re only gonna make things worse.”
Brandon doesn’t listen, just calls louder. “You hear me? I didn’t hurt anybody!”
A noise comes down from the ceiling. The warbling high-pitch bugle of a full-grown bull-elk. He recognizes the sound from childhood, growing up across the lake from the dense Algonquin wilderness. It echoes around the room. Brandon cups his ears. The sound is coming from upstairs, and yet also coming from within his own skull. He wonders whether he might be losing his mind.
“You’re wastin’ your breath, brother. Ain’t nobody comin’ to save you. Not this time. You’re stuck, same as me.”
“I’m not a violent person.”
“You’re a drinker, ain’t you? ‘Alcohol related psychosis’, the doctors call it. How many mornings have you woken up not remembering what happened the night before?”
“You’re trying to confuse me. A man would remember a thing like that.”
“You’ve got your daddy’s blood runnin’ through your veins, brother. Same blood, same violent disposition.”
Brandon’s father cut a mirky figure, even under the soberest of circumstances. For as long as Brandon can remember, it has been as though the collective memories of his childhood were printed on magazine paper and someone with a pair of scissors had snipped John Delaney from every page. Hollow silhouettes are all that remain. A composite of empty spaces. A walking black hole in muddy crepe-sole boots. He remembers the detectives.
“Did your mama tell you where she was going, last night?” asked one.
“Did she mention going to live with her new boyfriend?” asked the other.
“You won’t get nothin’ out of that one,” said his father. “Can’t you tell by lookin’? The boy ain’t right in the head.”
“Do you know how to read and write? You do. That’s good. Would you like to maybe write it down?”
“Here, have my pen and paper.”
Brandon finds himself pacing the floor of his jail cell. He tries to remember. Walking home from The Blind Pig. The long dark road. The red lights of the police cruiser. The yelp of the siren demanding him to halt. His mother’s eyes, cold and crystalline, staring up at him through the frozen surface of the pond.
“What’s this word you’ve written here?” asked one detective.
“Let’s have a look,” said the other. “Wendigo.”
“What do you mean by this, young man?”
“Is that the name of your mama’s new friend?”
“Wendigo,” said Brandon.
“Wendigo. Right. But what does it mean?”
“My partner and I would like to understand.”
“Wendigo come,” said Brandon, “and steal her away.”
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you, gentlemen,” said his father. “That boy ain’t got the sense of a goddamned dog. Just like his cheatin’ whore mother.”
“I said stop talking!”
“Shit fire,” says Lewis. You’re the one mutterin’ to himself. I didn’t breathe a word. Which of us looks crazy now?”
Brandon bends forward with his hands on his knees. He wants to be sick, to purge himself of poisons, to crack open his brittle skull and let spill the brains like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, the better to reconstruct his mind. All the while, memories dance. The long dark road. Bubblegum lip gloss. A police cruiser in the night. His mother smoking alone at the kitchen table, a pair of suitcases beside her. His father’s muddy work boots. Lola’s wet wooly socks.
“You needn’t worry much longer, brother. This will all be over soon. The pale demon will be comin’ back for us both before too long.”
“Pale demon.” Brandon paces, round and round. “Pale demon.” He halts. “Hold up,” he says. “Why are you here, Lewis?”
The stranger smiles. “Brother, I’ve been on the run for just about as long as I can remember. I’ve robbed. Cheated. Killed. I’ve a son in this world I know now I’ll never see again. No man outruns his comeuppance. Sooner or later, the past catches up with all of us. Last night, mine caught up with me. I done paid my bill at the bar and I was drunk and alone in my motel room when there came a knock-knock-knockin’ at my door. Wasn’t no siren, but I could see plain as anythin’ the red light of his cruiser through the curtains. When I cracked the door, I was greeted by the stink of death on him. He sported a deputy’s uniform, his badge, his baton, but I tell you he wasn’t no deputy. Wasn’t even a man, truth be told. He spoke to me in the voice of my daddy’s daddy who died in the war. Asked me, “Do you know who I am?” And I said, “You son of a bitch, I’ve…”
Lewis trails off, and Brandon says, “Who was it? What was it?”
“Brother, it was the pale demon come to collect the bounty on my godforsaken soul.”
A long silence unspools between the cells. Then Brandon starts to chuckle. The stranger knits his brow. “Did I say something funny, brother?”
“You must think I’ve got shit for brains. Let me tell you what I think, brother. Starting with I don’t believe you are who you say you are. I think you’re one of them. We never met last night at The Blind Pig. You’re some kind of undercover operative. They send you in here so you can play-pretend like you’re my buddy. My trusty confidant. Then you start spouting talk of death and judgment. Try to convince me to repent my sins to the Lord Above. And maybe, just maybe, I cop to a crime I know damned well I didn’t commit.” Brandon spits. “Lola paid her bill at the bar last night and went home. End of story.”
Brandon waits for a response. What comes is the sound of the bull-elk. Louder this time. Closer. Brandon drops to his knees, covers his head with his hands. “What is that noise?” he cries.
Lewis doesn’t answer that. “Time to meet the monster,” he says.
Bootheels creaking down the pinewood stairs. A bolt sliding unseen beyond the door. The door swings open for the dark silhouette of the deputy. He stands there, breathing heavily. The slow, rasping breaths of larger woodland beasts. Like something with a snout. He steps inside.
Brandon turns his head. He looks down at the floor, supplicated by his own sudden terror. The deputy’s kidskin boots go clack, clack, clack on the linoleum, keys jangling on their keyring. He stops just outside the bars. Brandon’s heart clenches behind his breastbone. Still the deputy says nothing. Even from his height, his heavy bovine breaths warm the nape of Brandon’s neck where he trembles down below. Brandon can raise his head only slightly. At the summit of his gaze: the deputy’s leather utility belt, his keyring, a nightstick, his hands in dark leather gloves. The deputy selects a key from his ring.
No sooner does he unlock the door than something sprays the side of Brandon’s hand. Something warm and honey-colored, sharp and sour. “Yeehaw!” cries Lewis, one hand aiming his member, his other hand aloft like a man astride a bucking bronco. “You want my soul, Beelzebub? Well, step right up and claim your prize!”
The deputy bellows. That great warbling wail. He spins around against the current and pulls the nightstick from his belt. Lewis all the while reeling and pissing between the bars. “Blaze of glory, brother! Yippee-ki-yay!”
The deputy unlocks the door to Lewis’ cage. His nightstick falls with a sickening crack. Lewis Manx drops like a stone. Brandon has become the little boy he once was, peeking out from under the kitchen tablecloth, a scream lodged in his throat, his mother’s body limp beside her suitcase, her dark hazel eyes beseeching him to be strong, to be brave, his father’s work boots tracking mud across the kitchen floor. No, not work boots. Cowboy boots. The deputy is wearing cowboy boots.
The deputy swings his nightstick again and again and again until poor crazy Lewis is dead. Then he bends and picks up Lewis by the trouser leg and hauls him out of the cell toward the stairs. He pauses once more beside Brandon’s door.
“What have you done?” Brandon mutters. “What have you done to him?”
The deputy says nothing. Brandon looks up. All the way, this time.
The deputy’s hair hangs down his back in a long dark braid. His face looks like a thing made of cheap rubber. Like some bargain basement Hallowe’en costume. Like a mask of someone else’s face covering his own. When he smiles, the deputy’s rubbery skin stretches taut. Brandon holds his gaze. He looks up for what feels like a very long time before he recognizes the face as Lola’s.
“Wendigo,” says the thing behind the mask, voice deep and guttural. He looks down at Lewis. “Wendigo come and steal him away.” He turns and continues through the doorway and jerks Lewis up the narrow stairwell beyond, leaving a dark trail of blood behind him.
Brandon remains on the floor. Who can say how long he lingers? He chitters and mewls like a housecat during a thunderstorm. Balled tight and trembling, he thinks about Lewis and he thinks of his mother and he thinks about nothing at all. A cold wind blows in from upstairs and the big steel door swings loose on its hinges. The door to his jail cell hangs likewise ajar. A voice on the wind, far away but familiar. The first notes of a hymn accompanied by his mother’s keyboard. “What a fellowship. What a joy divine. Leaning on the everlasting arms.”
Brandon groans. “Mama? Mama, is that you?”
“Leeeaaaning… leeeaaaning… leeaaaning on the everlasting aaarms.”
He lurches forward. “I’m coming, Mama. Wait for me.” He crawls through one door, then the second, following the blood and the music and the silvery timbre of pipes, and he finds himself bizarrely numb, and he finds the numbness comforting. He sings along with the voice. “What a blessedness… what a peace is mine… leaning on the everlasting arms. Leeeaaaning… leeeaaaning… leeaaaning on the everlasting aaarms.” He crawls up the pinewood stairs and through the bulkhead cellar door out into the snow and the dismal blue twilight above. “Leeeaaaning…leeeaaaning…leeaaaning on the everlasting aaarms.”
The music ceases. Through frozen clouds of his own ragged breath, Brandon reconnoiters the terrain. The squalid remnants of what might once have been a farmhouse. A snow-crusted police cruiser out of the nightmare from which he now knows he never wakened. A crumbling barn. The sprawling white nothingness of the prairies with neither hill nor trees to mark the barren landscape, and not another house in sight.
Brandon rubs his hands together. A conspiratorial fog looms over the farmhouse like the collective last breath of a thousand nameless dead. Jangling above the front porch, pale windchimes constructed from the smallest specimens of human bone. A thin spire of smoke rises from the chimney.
Brandon makes for the front door and the promise of a flame. He tries the knob. The door is unlocked. The place consists of little more than a single room with a potbelly stove in the corner. Strange pelts, like heavy curtains, block out the meager sun. He goes quietly to the stove. There, amid the paler darkness, the deputy crouches naked beside his victim. He watches Brandon from the dark with glowing noctambulant eyes. Lunar pale, emaciated, ravenous. He smiles, or seems to smile, and the blood runs down his chin.
The cast-off deputy’s uniform lies crumpled on the floor like a snakeskin. Only now, divested of all pretense, does the demon reveal himself for what he truly is. His bovine antlers, his cloven hooves. Every rung of his ribcage, every knot of arching vertebra perceptible beneath a pallid membranous hide. He grunts and resumes his rummaging about the contents of Lewis’s open chest. Brandon looks at the monster’s claws then down at his arms. The long red fingernail scratches. They seem to pulsate in their maker’s presence.
“Come,” says the demon, his voice deep and guttural. Brandon lowers himself to the floor and crawls.
The demon reaches in and tugs and raises from the cavity the dead man’s dripping heart. He cradles it in his claw. With his other, he beckons Brandon closer still. Brandon obeys and warms his hands by the stove. He looks around the room. A buckskin splayed out beside him, spread with curious plunder. Trinkets, jewelry, pocketbooks, driver’s licenses. A gold varsity hockey ring.
He looks back to the demon. Somehow the dead man’s heart has changed, become a jar of clear liquid. The demon holds it out for him. Brandon touches his throat, terribly thirsty. He takes the Mason jar and unscrews the lid and sniffs the contents. A scent like turpentine. The demon smiles and nods his head. Brandon holds the jar to the firelight.
And there you are, down at the bottom of the jar, watching yourself watching yourself. Rise, now. Rise and heave the jar at the red-glowing mouth of the stove. Glass bursts on the grille and flames leap out across the floorboards, catching firewood, catching pelts. The beast rears his pale head and roars, deep and guttural, as you wheel and pluck the keyring from the discarded leather belt and scramble out into the dooryard.
You wipe crusted snow from the door of the police cruiser and try one key then another. Smoke rises from the windows and the doorframe behind you. The last key twists all the way and you open the door and plunge inside, pulling it behind you. No sooner have you slapped your palm down on the lock than the beast rams headlong into the side of the cruiser with a force that rattles you like a pinball. The cab is dark, the glass opaque with frost. You search for the fallen keys, listening to the crunch of snow just outside the door. You strike a shaking match. You find the keys on the matt in the passenger’s footwell. The shotgun lying between the seats.
The beast heads heads back toward the house with loping simian strides and readies himself to charge again. You search the backseat for cartridges, check under the seats, check in the glove compartment. Nothing. You check the rifle, find a single shell in the chamber.
“One last round for the road,” you say to nobody at all.
Once again the demon strikes, and the door crumples inward and you drop the flame, and once again the demon lopes away. You right yourself in the dark, stab the key in the ignition. The engine gives a long stuttering whine, but will not start and will not start. You try the radio, pluck the receiver from its cradle and toggle the switch. Nothing and no one. The line is dead. You twist the ignition key long and hard. This time the engine bites, and the demon drops down on the roof, the ceiling sinking beneath his weight as he commences raining blows down upon the cruiser. You gather up the rifle. Raise the muzzle to the dent. You steady your hand, place one finger on the trigger. You draw three slow breaths, one, two, three, then lower the muzzle and fire into the frosted windscreen, drop the gun and seize hold of the steering wheel and kick the pedal to the floor. The cruiser leaps, the demon toppling backward.
You divine the road through the hole in the glass. You drive and you drive. Likely the beast will follow you, bounding headlong like a snow-blind ape, but you don’t look back, must not look back. You drive until the tank runs empty. Then you ditch the cruiser on the side of the road and just start running.
Brandon looks into the jar and smiles. “Yes,” he says. “You’ll run. You’ll run like those bison ran in the time before time. You’ll run to the ledge of the world.”
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