Pontypool Changes Everything

Well, actually, nothing, it’s always been a volunteer thing, but hey, that’s not the point. It’s not a matter of economics, it’s really a matter of what nature wants, and somehow I don’t think she spends a lot of time caring for a surplus of weakened animals at the expense of a healthy population.

2 A Healthy Population

Deep in the woods a female deer lies on her side as thirty baby deer slide easily from her birth canal on an immense sluice of effluence. As the moon appears above the trees its tidal effect on the afterbirth is visible. In the morning, children in full hockey gear skate across the purple and red ice, weaving around an obstacle course of tan corpses. Several of the deer stand frozen, and the children cut down all but two. They become the opposing nets of a makeshift hockey rink. A heart thawed over a small fire is used to draw the centre line and goal creases. A great deal of time is spent disembowelling the baby creatures so that their frozen feces can be used as pucks; however, having never eaten, their little bodies are as clean as packaged straws. The children settle for the mother’s hoof, which twists off easily.

As the sun climbs to a height that the clouds can’t reach, its rays smooth down the amniotic ice, turning it silver around children who slide out of control. The hockey players drift horizontally, like beads of mercury, losing the hoof, while they grab at the exposed backs of baby deer to keep themselves from being drawn along on their bellies toward some remote, invisible cliff.

Les pulls his truck onto the highway and, flicking off the radio, lifts a cell phone from his side to dial a number.

“Mary, howdy, Les here. Yeah, they’re good. Hey, what do you think of doing Ovid?”

Les makes a right up a long ice-covered driveway and stops halfway between the highway and a brick farmhouse that stands alone on a white hill in a field. Long rows of dark soil break intermittently through the snow.

“I know, but we could adapt them.”

Les reaches over and pops open the glove box and pulls out the book. Encircling the steering wheel with his arms, he turns to his marked pages. A powder of crystals swirls in through the driver’s window he’s cracked open again, glittering the book. Les tries to blow the pages clean but his warm breath melts the ice that sinks through the letters.

“A horror story? They want to do a horror story?”

Les tosses the book onto the dash and pulls off his toque, letting loose a six-inch whip of grey hair that he pulls back over the top of his balding head.

“I was thinking about Orpheus. Now that’s a horror story.”

Les stares out the side window while he listens, occasionally rolling his eyes, and at a distance he watches a man with a rifle emerge from the woods.

“Ed Gein? Now who the hell is Ed Gein?”

While Les listens to the story of how Ed Gein redecorated his farmhouse with body parts, he can’t shake the story’s dramaturgical inevitability as a home-shopping network sketch. Besides working for a livestock farmer, Les plans to direct the Campbellcroft High School yearly theatrical production. His ambition is to elevate a small troupe of drama students to a recognized regional company. He has printed flyers for productions of King Lear, Oedipus Rex, The Rez Sisters and Artichoke. Flyers that no one has ever seen. Les Reardon now believes that he is also destined to write the play he will direct. He wants to adapt the mythology of Orpheus into an outdoor spectacle — to include the music of the forest, the photosynthetic process, its colours and its honey and the trembling of stones, the abdomen of bees and the shadows of snakes. He wants to conjure an Orpheus, be possessed by him. And you know, Les thinks, people love outdoor theatre. Like in Toronto, the Shakespeare-in-the-park thing. I could have an annual Orphic festival. Except. Except now these kids want to do a serial killer. These kids think they discovered the low brow thrill allegory. So, it’s the Ed Gein Home Shopping Network-in-the-park.

“OK. Listen, if they wanna do this cannibal thing, God help us, I wanna write my Orpheus into it.”

Les grabs his Ovid by the spine, spilling several pages to the floor.

“Shit! OK. Listen, I can do it. It’ll work. It’ll be great. Look I gotta go. I got a hunter on my property, and I gotta chase him off. I’ll call you later.”