No one likes having offended another person; hence everyone feels so much better if the other person doesn't show he's been offended. Nobody likes being confronted by a wounded spaniel. Remember that. It is much easier patiently -- and tolerantly -- to avoid the person you have injured than to approach him as a friend. You need courage for that.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value
Scott considered himself to be a good leader, as opposed to an egomaniac. Playing well with others was important to him, and he tried to teach the kids to learn how to deal with different groups, different authority figures. You couldn’t always pick your allies. Work with what – and who – you’ve got. Be reasonable. Don’t play power games.
Nevertheless, he found it hard to work with Brazeau and the other RCMP officers. It seemed like the Prime Minister had done a bit of arm-twisting, because Inspector Brazeau was cool towards the X-Men, and kept trying to assert his own authority.
Like with the jackets. Obviously, black leather was out of the question for Ottawa on the first of July. The three X-Men would have been dead of heat stroke by mid-afternoon. Instead, Scott had them wearing Kevlar under civilian workout clothes, standard Danger Room fare. But Brazeau had lent them RCMP windbreakers and insisted they wear them.
“You’re not worried we’ll be mistaken for your guys?” Scott said.
“That’s what I want,” Brazeau explained, in his curt way. “You’re here officially, so you’re going to look like it. And at least the CFH will be expecting Mounties. American mutant militia might be a different story. I don’t want to spook them.”
“Right.”
“Anyhow, it might rain. You need coats.”
Scott decided it would do no harm for the X-Men to go in under the aegis of RCMP authority, and the point about spooking the kidnappers was a good one. And they were on Brazeau’s turf, so it made sense to do things his way. They were even using real names, because the Inspector had just looked at them blankly when Scott introduced Ororo as Storm.
“Hippie parents?” he had said.
So they were Summers, Grey, and Monroe. And also Brazeau, Fortier, Kelly, Waters, Thibeault. Scott memorised those names as they drove down the green country roads towards the grey-blue hills in the distance. It was almost noon, blazingly sunny.
Scott leaned over to Ororo. “Do you think you can cool off this sun a bit?”
Uncertain, she looked to Brazeau. “Will that help you?”
“Cut the glare. Sure.” Brazeau watched her eyes go white with a sort of cautious curiosity, the kind you’d display while your older brother lit off fireworks in a plastic Batmobile in the backyard.
The sun cooled as white clouds filled the sky, and the officer driving flipped the sunshade back up.
“Beauty,” said Brazeau, apparently trying not to look impressed. “We’ll stop just up ahead. On a gravel road like this, we’d be heard long before we got close to the house. I don’t want to give them too much time to fix their hair.”
Jean was being very quiet, Scott noticed. What’s wrong? he sent.
I have a bad feeling.
What is it?
I’d tell you if I knew, darling.
But she gave him a small smile, to show that it wasn’t personal. They needed that sort of thing, lately, and he was grateful. He squeezed her hand.
Scott had a bad feeling too. It was a gloom that felt out of place: they weren’t facing Magneto, after all; they weren’t trying to save the world, or even part of it. The goal was one person, and not even a particularly important one. Well -- in the political sense of things, anyway. Not the President’s daughter, for instance.
But something nasty was in the air, some cruelty and mistrust and bad luck. Scott could feel it, same as Jean. He had never liked dealing with fanatics, human-supremacists. And he had never liked being out of control.
They stopped the van just ahead of a deep bend in the road, behind some low-hanging trees. Storm gave Scott a look and deepened the clouds to fog, the kind she knew he liked best for cover.
“A bit unseasonable, isn’t it?” said Brazeau, joking. He was nervous; he felt the bad luck in the air too.
“Rain?” she suggested.
“That might be better.”
A cool rain began to fall, sweeping in with a fresh breeze as they opened the back doors of the van. Brazeau gave instructions.
“The X-Men will go in the front, and we’ll wait in the back, unless there are any objections. You guys’ll flush them out, and if all goes well they’ll try to escape out the back and find themselves surrounded.”
“I thought we were trying not to spook them,” Scott said, realising too late that he could have phrased that in a less aggressive way.
Brazeau, though, didn’t react to the tone. “Yeah, but imagine us going in first. What are we going to do if they freak out? All we have to work with are guns. You, on the other hand, have a telekinetic, you have energy blasts with multiple gradations…you can disable, but all we can do is shoot.”
Scott thought about it both ways, and decided that disaster was about equally likely no matter which way they went in. The cold rain drummed on the roof. Brazeau spoke to his men in what seemed like deliberately technical language, and then ordered them to go around the back through the trees.
“You three take the road, come in from the side. There’s a small deck, and a door—”
“We saw the house plan.”
“Okay.” Brazeau hesitated a bit, then offered his hand to Scott. “Bonne chance. Good luck.”
“Good luck.” Scott could not remember feeling so superstitious before a mission. He even directed one of his rare prayers to the improbable God of his childhood. If you’re up there, keep an eye on us.
The Mounties ducked out of the van, into the broken-down green woods at the side of the road. Scott counted sixty, to give them a head start, and then lead Jean and Ororo out along the road. They stayed in the ditch below the soft shoulders, trying to stay out of sight, even though Jean said, “They’re not watching the windows.”
“No?”
“They’re watching TV.”
The rain was grey and relentless. Somewhere to the west, Scott heard thunder, and he turned to look at Storm.
“That wasn’t me,” she said.
They were within earshot of the house now, so they shut up – the element of surprise was crucial if they were to avoid a bloodbath. Scott kept his hand by his visor as they crept towards the deck and the aboveground pool, with Jean behind his right shoulder and Ororo behind his left. The door was about eight steps away, but if they made noise as they stepped on the deck it would all be over.
But they’d be all right, Scott told himself. The God (who perhaps existed, more likely than not) would keep an eye on them.
The door opened.
He was a thick, burly man in boxer shorts, with copious back hair, and he held a newspaper over his head as he ran to get a lawnchair that was standing on the deck in the rain. In that first moment, he didn’t seem to register that there were people on the lawn, but that moment was soon over. He dropped the chair and the newspaper and darted inside with a yell. “FUCKING COPS!”
Scott ran after him, at a speed he usually only achieved in dreams, but somehow it wasn’t fast enough. Back Hair Man had the same damn assault rifle that had been used in the kidnapping: a fully automatic U.S. military M16, Scott judged, and how that had gotten over the border he didn’t want to guess.
Here, things dribbled to a stop. Scott and the other two halted just inside the door, but Back Hair Man didn’t seem to want to shoot, either.
“Just stay there,” he said, unnecessarily, his voice shaking.
Jean made her move then. Jean didn’t have the professor’s gift for confusion, calming, and planting outright falsehoods in people’s minds; she needed a lot of concentration for that, and it was so much easier to just pluck the rifle out of the man’s hands with her mind.
It was completely unexpected, at least for Back Hair Man, and he looked scared shitless for a second before he yelled out another warning to his hidden compatriots. “It’s muties, they’re dressed like cops, but they’re muties!”
That was when Scott realised what was going to happen. Realised it, and couldn’t stop it. He heard the sound of a door opening at the back of the house, and then gunshots and horrible male screams, and then below them a single shot.
One shot.
Jean went out back to offer what medical assistance she could, and Ororo held Back Hair Man, kneeling on the hairy back itself. Scott found the stairs and went down to the basement, knowing that he wasn’t going to like what he found.
A very tall and thin young man emerged at the foot of the stairs. He was white, and held a small handgun in a slack grip. “You’re too late,” he said. “You’re too late.”
Scott ignored him. There was a dark hall with a small door at the end of it, and the thin man followed Scott to the open doorway.
“It’s over, it’s too late. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking right.”
Scott had never met the Senator, only seen pictures. In those, the man had looked handsome in a craggy way, a lined and bony face with wiry grey hair, rather like the elder Wittgenstein. The body lying on the mattress on the floor looked a bit like that, he supposed. When Scott thought back over the scene later, he couldn’t remember blood, but it must have been there: the man had been shot in the neck. The little room was dark except for some light seeping in around the edges of the window, which was covered up with plywood. In these cracks of light, Scott could see the body’s sharp profile, and the way its lips were drawn back from the teeth, as if it were smiling.
It, not he.
“What’s your name?” Scott asked the thin man, not very interested in the answer.
“Henri-Michel Marchand.”
“And you really wanted to go away for murder, I guess?”
“No, I – I got scared. I just got – I didn’t know what I was doing.”
Scott wondered how that would hold up in the courts here. The Senator probably would have known.
Scott found out later that the other man, Sean Ferguson, had been in the back of the house, where another automatic rifle was kept for emergencies. You know, the kind of emergencies where your backyard is full of cops, or mutants, or both. When Back Hair Man, one Timothy Marks, yelled out that the attackers were “muties dressed as cops”, Ferguson happened to look out the back window and see five goddamn muties dressed as cops, and promptly went out to open fire on them. Probably he had decided long ago to be a martyr to the cause, and probably he’d also encouraged the others to cut their losses if cops ever showed up. Shoot the hostage and go down with guns blazing, before you let society devolve into a chaos of mutual tolerance and respect.
Three officers were wounded, and one died en route to the hospital. Scott was actually pleased by these figures: one of the terrorists had died, sure, and one of the RCMP officers, and the hostage, but he had actually been expecting worse.
Summers, Grey, Monroe.
Brazeau, Fortier, Kelly, Waters, Thibeault.
McCree.
And Marks, Marchand, and Ferguson.
So McCree was dead, Thibeault was dead, Ferguson was dead. Fortier shot in the upper thigh, Waters in the shoulder. But the X-Men were unscathed. Could have been much worse, right?
No. God, no. That was just rationalisation, his mind trying to pad the hard corners of his failure. He kept replaying the scenes in his mind: if Storm hadn’t rained on the lawnchairs, if they had kept Marks quiet somehow, if the X-Men had stayed in the back while the Mounties went in first, if someone had immediately gone downstairs to look for the Senator, if they hadn’t fucking got involved in the first place, if everything had been different. Scott thought of the sour old maxims his grandmother used to spout: if wishes were horses then beggars could ride.
The house in Manotick was cold and smelled faintly musty, as if the windows had been open during the rainstorm. Scott and Jean sat on the worn brocade couch in the sitting room, and Ororo was perched on the edge of a wing chair by the door. Ready to leave the moment things got too personal, as she didn’t know the McCrees even as well as Scott and Jean did. Ororo had immense social grace that way: she was never long in a place where she wasn’t wanted, and she had a knack for appearing when people needed her.
Joel and his mother sat on the other couch, next to the piano. Mrs. McCree looked like she wanted to put her arm around her son, but he was sitting too far away, not entirely visible but not quite absent either.
Scott did the talking, he narrated the story in the most calm and reasonable way he could muster, but there were still those wide holes, those things he didn’t understand. He tried to fill those with his opinions about Ferguson’s martyr complex, Marchand’s weird panic, Marks’s mistaken warning. But it all felt like blind stupid luck, like the improbable God had His eyes somewhere else.
Mrs. McCree cried a little, tears coming down silently. Probably she’d already resigned herself to this, and maybe it was a relief to know for sure. To know instead of guess, that was always comforting.
But Joel was just sitting, and in his half-invisible state, it was hard for the eye to focus on him. Scott found his gaze continually sliding back to look at the couch, at the floor, at the wall. It was frustrating. Scott wished the Professor were here.
“I’m very sorry for your loss,” Scott said, unable to think of anything better to finish with. “I wish we could have saved him.”
“Oh, Lord…I wish you could too,” said Mrs. McCree, smiling through her tears. She was that generous a person, Scott realised. She wanted to comfort people even while they were trying to comfort her. And Scott wondered again why her son was keeping his distance.
Joel seemed to realise that his half-presence was making people uncomfortable, so he faded into full view. He looked sick, but Scott had seen him sicker. “He was dead already when you got there, you said?”
Close enough, Scott thought. “Yes, he was.”
“He was wrong, then,” Joel said, almost to himself.
“Wrong about what, honey?”
“What he said on the phone. He didn’t get Last Rites.”
“Oh!” His mother drew back as if she wanted to hit him, and instead made an impotent motion with her right hand. She seemed completely disgusted. “Don’t be such a – a ghoul!”
“I’m not,” Joel said, sounding genuinely innocent. “But Dad said on the phone, he said he knew he wouldn’t die there because he’d done the First Fridays. I’m just saying he was wrong.”
“No one wants to hear about that now.”
“Sorry.” And Joel retreated again into invisibility, all the way this time. Mrs. McCree said the same thing (“I’m sorry too,”) and left, unable to take it – and Scott suspected that it was her invisible son that she was escaping, more than the three people who had given her the bad news.
Joel felt like doing something radical, like cutting off one of his hands – he wasn’t sure why. It just felt like a good idea. That’ll show 'em, his brain was saying to itself, but the rest of him wasn’t really listening. The rest of him was busy thinking about the sentence he was going to have to say out loud to people for as long as he lived: My father was murdered.
He added and subtracted the specifics: when I was seventeen. Just before my eighteenth birthday. On Canada Day. In rural Quebec, north of Hull. By anti-mutant terrorists. In a police shootout. None of these sounded very plausible, and yet they were true. He imagined his future audiences rolling their eyes, assuming he was making it all up.
Mr. Summers and Dr. Grey were still downstairs; his mother had reappeared and Aunt Carmel was coming over in a few minutes to drive them to the hospital. Ms. Monroe had gone somewhere; ducking out of view when things got awkward and emotional.
Joel himself was in the bathroom, visible and too too solid. Sullied and sallied too, if you wanted to interpret it that way. He was sitting on the edge of the tub with the cordless phone in his hands, debating whether to call Father Gilles now or later.
Now or later. At the moment his brain was made of rubber, except for that odd, persistent desire to cut off a limb. If Joel called now, he would have nothing to say. But later he might not have the – what? – presence of mind to make the call.
No, now was better. He might score some points by making the call early, in fact. (Who’s resisting therapy now, huh?) Dr. Xavier would have been his first choice, but that was a long way to call, and Joel was reluctant to disturb the Professor. Mr. Summers would do if Father Gilles wasn’t available.
He dialled the number for St. Rita’s, which was still in the phone’s memory from the days when he’d lived there. At the switchboard, he asked for Dr. Visineau’s extension.
Voice mail, in English and French. Usually Joel just hung up when he got voice mail, but this time he left a message, testing out the sound of his explanation. “Hello, Father, it’s, um, Joel McCree. We just…we just found out that my father was murdered, after all. So he’s dead. And…I guess I’d like it if you could call me back. Soon. You have our number, so…okay. Bye.”
It sounded pretty stupid, even to him.
Joel went to the sink and washed his hands with the old stained cake of Irish Spring in the dish. He washed all the way up to the elbow, bent and washed his face too, and when he came up he looked in the mirror and saw his father’s face again. It was the nose, the line of his nose.
His father’s shaving things were still on the bathroom counter. The old brush, which he didn’t use anymore, and the newer electric razor. Joel turned it on, to hear the high-pitched buzz that was so familiar from seven-fifteen every morning. He played around with the trimmer attachments, and then impulsively lifted it up and began shearing the hair from his head.
It felt dangerous, as if he might cut straight through to his brain, so he stopped. But it was too late, because the razor had eaten up about four inches square, exposing a tantalising section of bristly white scalp. Combing over that wouldn’t hide anything. Curls of reddish-brown hair lay in the sink, looking unfamiliar and strange, and Joel picked them out before he continued.
When he was finished, he ran his hands over his head, to find the remaining long pieces, and was satisfied. Less than two centimetres long all over, unsophisticated, brutal.
Cliché, actually. He’d got it from Dylan.
I married Isis on the fifth day of May,
But I could not hold on to her very long.
So I cut off my hair and I rode straightaway
For the wild unknown country where I could not go wrong.
Joel loved Dylan, loved him young and withered both, and Dylan (anachronistically enough) was the reason Joel had grown his hair out in the first place. His father had not approved of it, although he wouldn’t say so; but he talked about “hipster boys” who looked unkempt and shaggy, who looked depressed, which was more serious. He kept telling Joel to get a haircut. “Take some care with yourself,” he would say. “Take some care.”
But this wasn’t for his father, not entirely. It was penance. And it would grow back.
The phone, lying on the back of the toilet, chirruped. Joel checked the Call Display before answering.
“Hello, Father.”
Quotes and Notes: The Bob Dylan quote is from "Isis", on the 1976 album Desire.