Primal Scream (14 page)

Thank God the Force had recently signed a marketing deal with Disney.

Now surely all this Mountie commercialism would be reined in.

Dream on, Sergeant Preston . . .

"The Queen," said Nick, downing the dram, before he cleared his desk and spread out the North Vancouver Detachment pedo-files on Wren.

The DSO proceedings against the pedophile had been but the tip of a chilling iceberg. Nick made a list of the victims' addresses from the files. The six sex assaults that surfaced in court twenty-five years ago had all been committed near here. An Indian boy on the reserve along Burrard Inlet. Twin sisters by Grand Boulevard east of Lonsdale. A boy beside the Upper Levels Highway to the north. Two brothers west by Mosquito Creek.

Nick opened the album.

So many innocent faces.

All but six, victims who hadn't surfaced in court.

The mass of the iceberg.

Hidden below.

Kids buggered, raped, and deeply cracked by Wren, before he snipped a lock of hair for his fetish book to masturbate over later.

Humpty Dumptys in a sordid nursery rhyme.

Where all the Queen's Horsemen and all the Queen's shrinks couldn't put their fractured psyches together again.

Did one of you kill Wren?
the Horseman wondered.

Road Kill

University Endowment Lands

Tuesday, January 9

Boys will be boys.

So the Boys were out to get fucked.

A cock has no conscience, as the old man liked to say.

Because they'd lost the lottery at the frat house tonight—"Christ," said Sean, ripping the pull tab off another Blue, "some lowly pledge is balling Miss Lovey instead of me!"—the Boys, each as horny as hell from the lap dance the stripper had laid on all four at the monthly frat stag, were forced to abandon hearth and home-away-from-home in the wee hours of this inclement morn if they hoped to get their ashes hauled, as Sean's dad liked to say.

It wasn't always so.

Not in free-love days.

Back when nooky grew on trees, as the block liked to regale his chip.

In the late sixties, when Sean's dad had tickled the tit of this alma mater (That's Latin for nourishing mother, son. Hardy, har, har), Engineers in red jackets ruled UBC. To hear the old man tell it, Sean imagined a campus like H. G. Wells's
The Time Machine
. Long-hairs and no-bras were the gentle Eloi, all peace, love, and have a nice day, with their drugs and flower power and hippie-dippy zonk. From throbbing machines in the loins of a faculty almost exclusively male, Engineers crawled out like Morlocks to prey on them. A freshman caught by Sean's dad and his ilk was de-panted and tossed into a pond. One year a frosh president decreed that had to stop, and called for a massive Arts rally in front of Brock Hall. When the pres failed to show, the freshmen began to disperse, and that's when a red VW Beetle with E on each door rumbled up to the Thunderbird totem in front of the hall. A sheet tied to the bumper was thrown over the totem and a bundle was trundled inside; then off drove the Beetle, to tug away the sheet. Crucified naked with both arms lashed to the Thunderbird's wings, there hung the frosh president with his shortcoming on view.

Hardy, har, har.

The story Sean loved most was the Cookie Caper. To hear the old man tell it was to hear the tale told like this:

"Every Engineer Week began with a prank. First we published
The Red Rag
to grab attention, the filthiest, funniest jokes you ever read, son, which got the Artsy-fartsy types buzzing like wasps. Then we hit them with the Lady Godiva ride. Long-haired wench, buff bare and built like a brick shithouse, led around campus on the back of a horse. Letters to
The Ubyssey
fumed we were horses' asses, and having primed the pump, that's when we pulled the prank.

"One year there was a hullabaloo when UBC erected cocklike signs at all the gates. Cost the university an outrageous amount, $100,000, as I recall, so out we went with chainsaws and bucked them up. It was a hoot how the shit hit the fan. Everyone was screaming we had gone too far, demanding the faculty be sued in court, and that's when we returned the original signs we had switched at three one morning for the dummies we later cut up.

"The
real
dummies were the Arts we sucked in every year.

"Come next Engineer Week, we ate humble pie. Told the alma mater we'd behaved like jerks, and from now on they'd see the New Engineers. At every door to all the buildings where Arts hung out stood one of us with a plate of cookies offered for peace. Good cookies, too. Chocolate chip.

"Unbeknown to the Arts who gobbled munch-munch was those cookies were baked by
Chemical
Engineers. Laced in the batter was a compound that turned piss the color of blood, and that night the campus hospital was overrun with freaked-out freaks sure they were hemorrhaging internally."

Hardy, har, har.

But tonight, primed by Miss Lovey having squirmed in his lap, Sean O'Connor's beer-addled brain foamed over the old man's tales of tail:

"When I was your age, son, nooky grew on trees. It was the time of free love, and babes put out. Some shit about taking back their sexuality, and that meant every swordsman got to saw off a piece. A certain kind of woman goes for an Engineer, the hard-hat babe in cowboy boots with jeans painted tight on her ass. For her the Mechanical boys designed The Hog, a Harley with this special seat molded like a saddle, with a built-in nub to catch her you know where. A little country and western and a lot of beer, then spread her legs behind you and gun The Hog up the mountain, she got the vibrator buzz of her life and tore your pants off in the meadow. Then there's the kind of woman who avoids an Engineer, the tree-hugging babe with hairy pits who goes for guys who look like girls. For her the Chemical boys whipped up MDA. The hips called it the love drug. We called it panty-remover. They used to hold these dances in the Armory, Procol Harum, Vanilla Fudge, crap like that, so we'd dress up in Arty rags and hippie wigs, wolves in sheeps' clothing, you might say, son, and spike the drinks of babes when their backs were turned, then ease them outside under the moon, listen to Age of Aquarius babble, and bang 'em in the bushes ..."

To hear the old man tell it, those were the good old days, and UBC was the place where any big man on campus could get fucked. . . .

So Sean went into engineering and here he was, but instead of hazing and panty raids and Spanish fly, he found himself mired in homogenized pap policed by the very P.C. The engineering faculty was rife with studious broads, and
The Red Rag
and Lady Godiva were long gone, son. Before a guy could get a woody as stiff as pasta
al dente
, he was up in feminist court on a sex-harassment rap. Meanwhile, those getting the tail were bogus Trojan horses, the oh-so-sincere-I'm-a-feminist frauds who breached the sexist barricade in panties instead of jocks, the sort of guy who'd don a bra stuffed with two bottles so he could experience the joy of breastfeeding tits, and once inside, where I Sean yearned to be, aimed his limp third-stage-male dick where tricks have always gone.

For throwbacks like Sean, this frat was all there was.

And so tonight the four Boys plowed their way down Wesbrook Mall from fraternity row, past Beta Theta Pi and the psychiatry building, windshield wipers smearing snow and breath fogging the windows.

Across University Boulevard, they slid by the student union building and school of theology, the car skating and fishtailing all over the road, bumping the curb on the far side as it pinwheeled onto Chancellor Boulevard, skidding toward the law school, where it zagged seaward down the sharp incline of Northwest Marine Drive, the Boys hooting and hollering to Hootie and the Blowfish as they popped beer after beer.

"We need a tank of blowfish at the frat," giggled Sean. "Slap one on yer pecker and there'd be no need to brave this blizzard, guys."

"You want a blow job. I want a
Cracked Rear View
," tittered Mike, cracking a pun that cracked up Sean off the CD's title.

"Cool down, you two," said Pagan Pat, covering the spout of his beer can to give it a shake, then turning in the passenger's seat to spray the Boys behind with foam.

"Easy for you," Sean howled, spraying Pagan back. "A trip to the Sheep and Cattle Unit and you got your relief."

"Whooooaa!" said Fred, who was driving. "Hang onto your balls."

When UBC first opened its doors in 1915, academe had been the Fairview Shacks at Tenth and Laurel, its library two rooms in the tuberculosis wing of Vancouver General Hospital, with a collection of twenty thousand volumes purchased in Europe prior to World War I. Following the "Great Trek" of 1922, students parading behind a float bearing a huge sardine with the sign: SARDINES . . . VARSITY BRAND . . . PACKED IN FAIRVIEW, UBC moved west to the bluffs of Point Grey, under which Captain Vancouver had sailed in 1792, and up which Simon Fraser had climbed to end his overland journey in 1808, and down which the Boys were about to toboggan to reach the Basement Brothel near Locarno Beach to get their oil changed, as the old man liked to say.

The Basement Brothel was actually home to a single mom, desperately fighting deportation from Canada, who fucked the frats in the bedroom while her kid slept on the kitchen floor, to pay a shyster under the table to bribe an immigration judge to let her stay.

Head was thirty dollars.

Butt was sixty bucks.

And for an extra ten the other Boys could watch.

It was quite pathetic.

But what can you do?

For a cock has no conscience, as Sean now liked to say.

Point Grey is a tongue licking Georgia Strait. The Fraser River wets the underside. Wreck Beach (the nudist beach) and Tower Beach (gun turrets once aimed at the Japanese) grit the tip. The sea salts the upperside as Spanish Banks and English Bay (names marking a showdown between rival explorers Valdes, Galiano, and Vancouver on the brine below), across which, on a clear night, you could see DeClercq's North Shore home. But now, as the Boys chuted down the seaside cliff from tip to inland root, they could see nothing but snow, snow, snow. Snow caked the windshield and tire treads, the car picking up speed as it slithered down the snaking road, the curb on the left preventing it from plunging over the cliff, the curb on the right bumping wheels to keep it on Marine.

"Yeeeeeehaaaaaa!" yodeled Sean as the horny drunks tobogganed the run, a bone in his pants from excitement and expectation of what lay ahead, bare trees? closing in just before the straightaway along the hidden beach, Pacific Spirit Park the woods beyond the drain-f age ditch to the right. "Wake up, mama!" hollered Sean. "The Boy wants a fuck!" And that's when-SLAMMMM!—the car hit a tree felled across the road the angle such it flipped upside down in the ditch.

Too many brew!
was Sean's reaction to his spinning head, before that head hit the roof which was now floor, followed by his tumbling body crumpling down top.

Sean and Mike were a tangle of arms and legs it the backseat.

The car was a two-door, so neither could scramble out.

The car was a beater that belched exhaust at the best of times, and now, tailpipe plugged, began to fill with carbon monoxide.

"Cut the engine," Sean coughed to Fred in front, but the driver was already clambering out through his door.

"It's gonna blow," Pagan cried, rattling his door but the passenger's side was pinned against the slop of the ditch.

Inside, the car was a claustrophobic coffin. Eerie green glow from the dashboard was carried on the fumes. The overhead, now underfoot, lamp had smashed. Outside, the headlights were beacons knifing through the curtain of cottony snow. Glancing out the window as he crawled on hands and knees, mind befuddled by drink and hitting his head, the image distorted by fog on the glass from gasps of fear, Sean thought he saw the lower half of an angel of mercy parting the screen of heavenly white, a wand in hand as it approached the driver's door of the overturned car.

Swooooshh . . .

Was that an owl?

For owls did swoop in these woods.

Then black splashed the window, obliterating the angel from sight.

And Fred's leg went into spasm as it vanished out the door.

"Me next," Pagan bellowed, scampering across the roof beneath the front seat to wriggle out the exit, as—
Swooooshh
. . .—that goddamn owl took another swoop at the car.

Now Pagan's leg did the funky chicken, his hoedown foot thump, thump, thumping the doorframe, exit stage left.

Black splashed the window encore.

As Sean was crabbing through the space between the roof and the inverted front seat, hand reaching for the doorframe to pull himself out, Mike grabbed him by the belt and yanked him back. "It's gonna blow!" his frat brother freaked, echoing Pagan's refrain, as he punched Sean hard in the nose to stun him, crawl over him, and take the lead.

Swooooshh . . .

"Fucker!" Sean snarled, grasping Mike by the seat of his pants to reel the front runner back in a deadly game of tortoise and hare. Bunching his other hand in a fist to give the asshole as good as he gave, Sean swung a roundhouse in the cramped quarters aimed directly at Mike's head ...

. . . which wasn't there.

Instead, his cowardly frat bro was spouting like Old Faithful, geysers of black blood fountaining from the mess of tubes in his severed neck, spraying the window inside that had been sprayed outside when Fred and Pagan got
swooooshed.
. . .

Suddenly a hand shot in to grab Sean by the hair, hauling him out of the car into a wasteland of white, where two headless bodies lay sprawled in a drift, and three bodiless heads stared vacantly at him. Then Sean caught sight of something
swooooshing
toward
his
head. Not a wand, as he first thought, but the most vicious blade imaginable.

Two feet long, the cutlass was akin to the sort of machete used for hacking sugarcane, except along the back of the blade behind the cutting edge ran a rounded ridge that jutted out to both sides. Close to the grip and loosely clamped like metal fingers under the rounds of the ridge was a six-ounce weight. While the cutlass swung in an arc toward Sean's head, the weight slipped down to the tip of the blade to augment the centrifugal force of the slice by arithmetic proportions. One cut from the sword in the angel's hand would slice a head clean away.

Sean's angel of mercy was an angel of death.

But not yet.

For angels grant wishes.

The side of the blade, not the edge, clipped the Engineer's head. As he lay stunned, the cold steel of a handcuff clamped around his wrist. By that wrist Sean was dragged deeper into the trees, where, face pressed to bark, his wrists were locked together around a cedar trunk, reminding him of those tree-huggers the old man doped to bang.

Before he could scream, a rag was stuffed in his mouth.

Then . . .

Riiiiiiippp!

... the seat of his pants fell victim to the blade, exposing the Boy's cracked rear view.

Sean got his wish.

Sean got fucked.