CHAPTER
One
When I was a much younger man, I drew a cartoon for Saturday Magazine that generated a lot of response, both positive and negative, from their readership. In the cartoon, an old man sits in a rocking chair on his front porch with a shotgun across his knees. A Girl Guide holding a box of cookies looks up at him with wide eyes. The caption reads, “Get offa my property.”
The cartoon ran with an article on the rising question of gun ownership in the nation and the controversy surrounding gun registration, which had popped out of the woodwork once again as a topic of discussion. I hadn’t meant to take sides, though. I was merely trying to be funny.
Now that I’m an old man myself, enjoying the summer sunshine in a rocking chair on my own verandah, I often think of that cartoon and do my best to regard the traffic passing on the road in front of my place with benign indifference. Since no one stops other than the occasional courier, Canada Post, or someone using the driveway to turn around and reverse course, I don’t really care who goes by.
Such was my mindset on this particular August afternoon. I sipped my bourbon, drew on my cigar, and only frowned slightly when a very noisy motorcycle approached on the road from the direction of town, slowed, and turned into my driveway.
I put my glass aside, stuck the cigar in the corner of my mouth, and waited. My driveway is fairly long, more than a hundred feet, and it’s lined with mature blue spruce trees on either side, so it took a moment for me to see the bike, a Harley, as it pulled up behind my Escalade and shut down.
I watched the driver lower the kickstand, dismount, and use both hands to get free of the big black helmet. I was somewhat surprised when I saw that it was a young woman, shaking out shoulder-length black hair as she put the helmet on the seat of the bike and walked over.
“Are you Mark Heron?”
She wore a black leather jacket despite the warm air, blue jeans that had seen better days, and scuffed cowboy boots. Her hair was straight, with a slight wave at the ends, and it stuck across her forehead in damp spears.
“That would be me.”
She took a folded newspaper out of her jacket pocket and held it up.
“Did you draw this?”
I leaned forward. I knew right away what she was referring to, but for whatever reason I decided to be a bit of a dickhead about it.
“I can’t quite see it.”
She thumped up the stairs and tossed the paper onto my lap.
I pulled out my reading glasses. It was a copy of this week’s Sentinel, which had published today and would be in my mailbox this evening along with a bunch of flyers and other junk delivered by someone who went door to door in a beat-up Toyota for the few bucks it paid them each week.
“Yep. This is mine.”
It was an illustration of a young man with his head down and his hands folded between his knees. His hair was in disarray and his expression was sad, almost sorrowful. I’d sold it to Patrick for an article he was running on local homelessness. I turned to the editorial page where my weekly cartoon would also be printed, but she snatched the paper out of my hand before I had a chance to squint at it critically.
“Where is he? When did you last see him?”
“Who?”
“The guy, dammit. The guy.”
“Nineteen ninety-one,” I replied. “February.”
“Fuck that. Couldn’t have been more than a couple weeks ago. Stop lying and tell me where he is.”
I took off my reading glasses. “I think we’re talking at cross purposes, my dear. Who are you, by the way?”
© Michael J. McCann 2026