Artie looked like holy hell when I visited him at St. Joes. He had tubes coming out of him in every direction. You could see the veins in his arms, throbbing, pushing his blood in a tired battle to keep him alive until the priest came to give him his last rites.
He tried to say something but all he could do was whisper. I put my ear to his mouth, heard him mumble, “It’s time for the truth to come out, Jimmie. I want to go to My Maker with a clean conscience.”
I expected that he’d lie to the priest, hoping for one last scam to sneak his way into heaven;. never expected him to get the police involved. But Artie was never one to do a half-hearted lie.
What can I tell you? Artie has always been a hypocrite and liar. Last rites? He hasn’t even been in church in the over fifty years since it happened. So, let’s get the record straight right now.
It was 1965. In those days smoking grass was against the law and kids I knew ended up in jail. But that didn’t stop Herb, Artie, or me. We got high almost every day, pissing away the opportunities given us. I got a reprieve eventually, a second chance, and eventually got a PhD and a job as a university professor. But Artie never stopped smoking dope and, after he got out of hospital, ended up working in his father’s garage. He took it over when his dad died.
And Herb, well Herb, is what I must tell you about.
Like I said, it was 1965. Viet Nam, the Beatles, Malcolm X and Watts. Hell, that was the year Ali beat Liston. But mainly, to us, it was all about the freedom of being almost twenty, in our freshman year at university, getting high and trying to get laid.
Come Christmas break, Artie had this great idea of the three of us driving to this remote cottage that his folks had up northern New Brunswick. We could camp out, enjoy the beauty of nature, and get stoned without having to worry that the cops would bust in.
He wasn’t lying that time, at least. You got to the place by driving a gravel road that wound off the main highway for a mile or two. Remote? Hell, there was nothing around except for pine trees. With the snow lightly falling, it was almost a fairyland. And remember, in those days there were no cell phones. We were totally cut off from “civilization”. In one way the feeling was exhilarating, but as a city boy I found the quiet unnerving, and the rumble in the nearby lake, “making ice”, as Artie called it, was, well, frankly scary.
We left Fredericton early in the morning, just as the sun was rising and didn’t arrive until around 4:30, with the velvet black of night already upon us. We had no sooner set out our sleeping bags when Artie springs a surprise. He takes from his backpack a pipe and a cake box full of hash. I had never seen so much dope before. The idiot was laughing as he told us that the bikers from whom he bought his dime bags forced him to keep their supply safe in case they got busted. They had left about a dozen of these packages with him, and he was sure he’d be able to skim a bit off the top without them ever noticing.
At this Herb goes bananas and starts moaning, “You’ve brought bikers down on us! We’ll all be killed.” And then his paranoia really ramps up and he looked around for something he could use to protect himself when the bikers arrived. As luck had it, there was this old shotgun in the storage shed, though I doubted it was even in condition to fire.
My suggestion was that we have Artie replace the box untouched, forget about a weekend away, and return home as soon as it got light in the morning. Herb, now also armed with a kitchen knife, agreed but by then the snow was falling heavily, and the wind whistling through the pines so hard you couldn’t see a foot ahead of you. We knew, whatever our plans, that by morning there might be a foot of snow on the road and that we might be stuck in the cabin for a day or two.
Herb jumped every time the tree branches scratched the cottage roof. Artie, in some other world, humming away, had already started carefully skimming some hash off the top.
Well, with the storm raging outside and with nothing else to do, we thought maybe a small toke would calm us down. It was good stuff, and we didn’t stop at just a few puffs. Each time the bowl emptied we’d fill the pipe up again. I think the bikers must have cut the hash with something because it was like no trip I had ever had before.
We each reacted differently. I became super-rational. Artie started singing as loud as his lungs permitted, and Herb, already paranoid, started seeing enemies everywhere, jumping up periodically and running to the window, saying that he saw shapes coming our way. Bears. And then bikers. And then a squad of cops.
I didn’t see anything but heard what I thought was a snowmobile. When I mentioned it, Herb said he heard it too. We were so stoned and even though Artie must have been as well, he kept shouting for us to shut up, that all we were hearing was the lake “making ice”.
And then Herb added to his list of people out to get us, “Mad Dog” Langlois. Remember it was 1965, and that year Langlois had been terrorizing cottage country, burning cabins after murdering the occupants. Just a few weeks earlier he had killed two cops and injured a third before escaping. Langlois knew the bush like the back of his hand.
Herb, holding the knife and gun, told us that he kept guard while we slept.
But Artie and I couldn’t sleep, kept awake by the howling wind and the tree branches brushing the cottage and a crazy guy locked in with us wielding a gun and a knife. About 3 am, we started the pipe up again and soon all three of us were floating in a never-never land in which a threat lurked behind every pine tree: hungry bears, cops, bikers, and Mad Dog himself. By this time, Artie was scooping the hash out of the box, no longer with any pretense of tricking the bikers when, or, if we ever returned to the city.
In my lucid moments, I could hear Herb screaming in fear and waving the gun at Artie and me. I tried to calm him down, but that only made him more belligerent. Artie started shouting at him to “shut the fuck up” and lunging, grabbed the gun away. Herb went after him with the knife and there was this crack and Herb was on the floor of the cottage, blood flowing from his chest and Artie holding the shotgun with a stunned look on his face.
I checked and shook my head. Artie and I just stood there with no idea what to do next, Herb dead, just crumbled. We had just agreed that another toke would calm us down, when Artie shouted that there was a face at the window. I looked but saw nothing in the overwhelming dark of nighttime. Then, bang, bang! There were thumps at the door like someone was trying to break in. Artie started shaking and shrieking that it’s the Mad Dog out to kill us and started to move the table in front of the door. But hell, I thought, how much worse can things get? Even stoned and scared I wasn’t going to let a man freeze to death in a snowstorm. And what the hell, Mad Dog could have kicked the door in if he wanted to get warm.
No doubt it was Langlois just as described in the news: well over 6 feet tall, dark curly beard covered with frost, and coal black eyes ringed with red, looking as if he had just taken a detour through hell. He looked around, “Nice and comfy in here.” He glanced at the bloody body on the floor and just snickered, “You boys have been naughty, eh.” And then he laughed. It almost sounded like a wolf howling at the moon. I can still hear that laugh, those nights I have trouble sleeping.
Slowly he sauntered across the room, sat in one of the kitchen chairs, took out a bowie knife and laid it on the table within easy reach. Then laid his rifle over his lap. “If you boys don’t do anything stupid, we’ll get along fine.” Snapping his fingers at Artie and rearranging the rifle so it was pointed at the two of us, Mad Dog said, oh so quietly. “I love the smell of hash in the cold air night. Bring the pipe here. Think I’ll take a drag.”
When he finished, he handed it back to Artie and the three of us took turns at the pipe. Well, we got really stoned, Mad Dog, Artie, and me. The wind screeching like a banshee. The tree branches scraping the roof. The night as dark as a witch’s bush. And Herb dead as a doornail on the floor.
The rest was a bit of a blur until the sun came out, and the storm was over. Langlois was snoring loudly. Artie and I were awake and whispering. We thought we could chance driving out and getting back to the city, away from Mad Dog and Herb. Artie was looking at the box of hash, now with a good third of it gone, repeating to himself that the bikers were sure to get him. Then he perked up, “If we bring Langlois in, maybe we could work out something about the hash and Herb’s death.”
Even then it was “we,” when it was him and not me, who had shot our friend and stole the hash. I told him to go to hell, but Artie, acting as if some force had taken hold of him, took the kitchen knife and threatened me, or else.
“Or else what?” I said, and the bastard took a swipe at me, cutting my arm. I cried out in pain and started to bleed, badly. The cry snapped Langlois awake and, grabbing his gun, motioned for me and Artie to move away from the door.
Mad Dog’s eyes were wild. “Idiot kids! I probably should just shoot you both. But, what the hell! You let me in from the storm and shared your stash. I’m going. If you tell the cops that I was here, I’ll find you both and cut your throats.”
Then, looking at me, “Get that arm looked at as soon as possible.” Followed by a deep chuckle. “Good luck explaining how your friend got killed!”
Neither Artie nor I looked out the window as we heard him start his snowmobile and leave. I wanted to get away as soon as possible and get to the nearest town, call the police, and have my arm stitched up. Artie had a “better idea”.
He ditched the shotgun into the woods on our way out. It took hours but we got the car to the main road and then smooth driving into town. Given what came out I think you know what we told the police, naturally never mentioning the hash: Langlois broke into the cottage, stayed until the storm was over, shot Herb, and knifed me. Artie and I managed to escape and hide in the woods until Langlois fled on his snowmobile. We figured that nobody would believe Mad Dog’s version over ours if it came to that.
It never did of course since Langlois was shot to death in a confrontation with police a few days later.
We were never charged with anything. Except for my arm, which healed cleanly, I got off scot-free though Artie, not surprisingly, had the hell beaten out of him by the bikers for stealing their hash. He spent months in hospital and was lucky they didn’t kill him. I dropped out, worked at McDonalds for a few years before going back to school and making it work this time.
That’s my story and I’ll stick to it. If Artie’s last words on his death bed were that it was my idea he bring along the hash or that I, and not he, shot Herb and that he stabbed me trying to stop me- well, he would just be lying.
It’s only his word against mine, really. And who are you going to believe – a dead man who was a druggie his whole adult life or me, a distinguished retired professor?
[Image Credit : Photo by Stanislav Rozhkov on Unsplash]
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Albert Katz
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- Setting the record straight - September 5, 2025
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