A Ditchpig Moment

           
Len shoved the gear shift into park and his truck jerked to a stop, rocking drunkenly against the curb. The engine sputtered out with a clumsy, but not unexpected, death rattle. Steam rose from the hood in the unseasonably cold rain. Len peeled his right hand off the gear shift and tugged a deck of Export A’s from his shirt pocket. He shook the penultimate cigarette from the crumpled pack, his gaze lingering on its lone survivor. It was doomed to end up between Chuck’s nicotine-stained thumb and forefinger. The sinewy wraith in the faded yellow hard hat paced the neatly manicured boulevard a few steps away. Chuck would stop only to give Len a curt report on the leak repair, then snatch his last smoke without a shred of guilt. As if his by birthright, or in the least, payment for being ambushed by the Foreman. Worse, Len was too broke for cigs, coffee and a piece of the Tomahawk’s two-storey banana cream pie. It was his Monday morning ritual; he’d been stopping by the diner tucked behind a screen of cottonwoods off Marine Drive for nearly twenty years. It eased him out of the weekend and back into the grind and he hated changing it, whether through insolvency or unwelcome civic emergency.
            Len scratched a match and coughed violently while his arthritic left hand struggled to cup a weakling flame. He shook the match, shoved it through the just-cracked driver’s window and blinked through smudged, George-Burns-eyeglasses that sat high across the bridge of a lumpen nose. The broken veins beneath the blotched skin betrayed his unquenchable thirst for Canadian Club. A thirst that dogged his boots from Juno Beach, through French clay and Dutch topsoil to a cold afternoon in February 1945 on the German side of the Rheine- two days after his twentieth birthday- when mortar fire ripped open his hide and ended his grand European tour. What began as a way through the terrible boredom of camp life in Winnipeg and Hampshire became a distraction from incessant artillery fire, then an anaesthetic for the shrapnel in his hip, and, finally, an amnesiac against the nightmares that plagued him thirty-two years after the war. It was better than therapy. Or maybe it was therapy. There’s only so much fight in any man.

            Len watched his crew through a rain that fell harder with each passing minute. Dispatched from the larger platoon to suss out the leaking water pipe in the boulevard, they’d wasted no time on planning or strategy- Chuck’s signature approach, the hard-ass. He’d rather his boys dug in the wrong place, than allow them a minute to get their bearings. A poorly-aimed shovel out of muck was better than standing around, even if in the end it took twice as much time, effort and money.

            From where Len sat Chuck either didn’t know, or- more likely- didn’t care that the old wood stave water main that served Montroyal Avenue was less than three feet deep, for the muddy hole carved through the sod and topsoil was deeper than a foxhole; it already bore the rough outline of a grave. Deeper than the safety regulations allowed. The kid in the hole had to reach above his shoulders to toss out each sloppy shovelful. Most of it ran down Eddie’s arms, under the sleeves of his rain gear, or splashed up into his face. All he got for his troubles was another earful from Chuck, who prowled the edges of the excavation like a starved dog. It would be funny, to some, but that kind of humiliation made the shrapnel in Len’s hip hot. 
            As he pushed open the truck door Len coughed up an oyster of phlegm and spat, simultaneously jamming his glasses flat against woolly eyebrows. He let his left foot drop heavily onto the wet asphalt. Today’s rain was no different than yesterday’s. So much for April showers bringing May flowers. It was November-cold on this, the fifteenth of May, especially high up the evergreen slopes of the North Shore. A distant patch of blue sky winked between the roofs on the downward lee of Montroyal. It would be sunny- warm, even- in Tsawassen. Barely ten miles as the crow flies. But against the granite walls of the Capilano watershed the clouds piled up like derailed freight cars, spilling their miserable cargo onto the mountains. Enough to seize up an old man’s hands and good humour both. In North Vancouver moss grew in places Len had never believed possible: not just along the north side of his roof where the gutters leaked, but in Marjorie’s stubborn attempt at a kitchen garden on the south-facing sliver of lawn. Hell, it would grow on the Chev if he didn’t drive it to work five days a week.

            He hiked himself gingerly out of an upholstered driver’s seat that smelled of old diesel, hydrant grease and cigarettes, wincing at the Nazi souvenir in his hip. The doctors of the day weren’t able to dig out the deepest shrapnel fragments. So it rode shotgun wherever Len went, objecting with a bone-gnawing reminder at any motion that troubled its barbed communion. It was at every job site, every late night emergency, each taxpayer’s complaint, as stubborn as his shadow in summer. He was getting too old for this shit, but it wasn’t like he had much choice. At fifty-three with twenty-nine years of service his numbers didn’t quite add up. He was still four years shy of penalty-free retirement. He needed that time, along with his small army pension, for him and Marjorie to make it the rest of the way. That is, if Roy could be convinced to move out and, most importantly, if Marjorie’s condition got no worse. Big ifs, otherwise retirement was out the window. No trailer in Mesa, no winters in the sun. No relief from the cold, the rain or the pain.

            Christ, never mind winter rain. Len drew hard on the cigarette and flipped it onto the ground, squashing its angry red eye as he ambled to the crew. He hitched up his cuffed workpants as he walked. It was getting harder to disguise the limp, and frankly, he didn’t know why he still tried. Years ago, when he thought himself young, he would will his left leg to behave like the other; force his body to remain board-straight in front of strangers, but now it no longer mattered what others, even co-workers, thought of him. He was becoming invisible to most of them. And really, what was a limp, with Marjorie staring into the black jaws of lung cancer? Besides, plenty of guys came back from Europe missing a leg or an arm. He’d got off easy, compared to all them.

            The mud-streaked and steaming figure of Eddie scrambling out of the hole reminded Len of one of the boys who’d bunked with him in the spring of ’44. The name was gone, but not the face. Fresh off some farm in Saskatchewan. So young, always smiling, so eager to please. So unprepared for the bullet that waited for him beyond the foggy English cliffs where the bluebirds soared. Len grunted, shaking off the memory as if it were another unwanted guzzle of rain down his collar. Eddie’s Helly Hansons still had that store-bought, picked-out-by-his-mother shine on this, his first day of work. The dubbin hadn’t sunk into his new boots yet.

            In the army they’d called the newbies Shiny Bums, at least the boys in his unit did. It still made him uncomfortable, God knows why. He always preferred Daisies, what Granny Crabbe (God rest her unselfish soul), called the first year labourers when they arrived on the farm to take in the hay. Daisies. It fit anything new and shiny. Granny Crabbe would repeat it-singing some nonsense rhyme- as she shovelled each unused knife and fork into the cutlery drawer beside the sink, but not before giving them a hard look and a good wipe with a dishcloth just in case. In 1977 the North Van Water Works wasn’t the army, but it sure wasn’t shiny. There were days, Len thought, when a German sniper bullet would come in very handy.

            “Chuck,” Len said, offering his last cigarette to the lead hand. Eight years Len’s junior, Chuck was a bullwhip of a man, mean as they came. Worse than any officer Len served under. Having the misfortune of being born too late for the fighting in Europe had grown a chip on Chuck’s shoulder, long before he started in the North Van Water Works. And seventeen years in muddy ditches had turned that chip into a callus, tough as an oak root and stubborn as blind faith. Besides Len’s last cig, Chuck was always scrounging up another argument.

            “Len,” Chuck growled, snatching the cigarette and pulling his own lighter out of his faded green workpants. He stabbed the teardrop of flame against the cig, pulling hard. Smoke flared from his nostrils as he plucked the fresh cigarette from his lips with narrow fingers whose curved and ridged nails resembled dirtier, harder versions of hazelnut shells.       

            “How’s it goin’?” Len asked, peering around Chuck to the mud-lined excavation.

            “It’ll be fixed this morning.”

            “If I knew you were gonna start a repair I’d have found you a machine. To speed things up.”

            Chuck barked a hasty laugh, and then coughed onto the back of his hand. It was crisscrossed with ropy, blue veins beneath skin darkened by coarse, black hair. “Don’t need a machine, Len,” he said, stiffly, “if you got me somebody who can dig. Chrissakes, where do you find these guys?”

            “Eddie?” The new kid was hanging on to his shovel as if it were his only friend.  “Useless as tits on a bull,” Chuck said, and coughed some more. He jammed a thumb against each nostril to clear the snot from his nose.

            “Seems like a hard worker,” Len said, scratching his jaw. He resisted the urge to deny any involvement in Eddie’s hire. George had done that on his own.

            “Not gonna make it.”

            “Then I guess you better spend some time in the hole, ‘til he gets his sea legs,” Len said quietly. “’Specially if you’re gonna dig twice as deep as you have to.” His shoulder brushed past the Englishman’s chest as he leaned over the edge of the trench. The bottom was close to seven feet deep, filling quickly with water boiling between a drift of rock.

            “You know the main’s shallow here?”

            Chuck’s jaw tensed. “Doesn’t mean the service is,” he said. He drew hard on the last of Len’s cig.

            “That don’t make any sense. You should have found the service first.”

            “This is my job, Len.”

            “Maybe George’s got a better idea if you don’t care to follow my suggestion.”

            “We’re nearly there,” Chuck said. “I know it.”

            “Sure,” Len replied. He stared into Chuck’s close-set eyes.

            “Then call him,” Chuck said with a shrug, and his round head topped with the yellow hard hat bobbled like a Slinky toy.

            “Good idea,” Len said.

            He stamped back to his truck. He shook the rain from his hard hat and tossed it behind the seat. He fired up the engine to blast heat at the fogged windshield. He dragged a rag from under the seat and wiped his glasses between throbbing fingers. Too many years immersed in the forty degree water that leaked from iron, wood and asbestos pipes had turned his knuckles into barnacles and warped his fingers like sidewalk panels heaved by tree roots.  

            “Four. Six-Four,” he said into the radio.

            “Four.” Len sensed George’s annoyance. His chest constricted, an old habit.

            “Wondered if you could stop by Montroyal. Chuck’s chasing a leak.” Code for Chuck doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing.

            After a long silence the Superintendent answered. “Be there in fifteen. This better be good.”

            George pulled up a half hour later. The amber dome light on his truck flashed dully in the rain. Len watched Chuck hurry to intercept the superintendent. There was a time, once, when George wouldn’t make a move without talking to him. Now Chuck was squeezing in, priming the pump, (kissing George’s ass, to say it plainly), elbowing Len out of the picture. Let him try. All it would take is for Prospect pump station to pack it in and they’d be all over him, begging him to help figure out how to get water to half the city.

            The ache in Len’s hip worsened.  There was still the Roy thing to work out. George had promised he’d hire his boy; offer him steadier work than he’d been getting at the dockyard. Len’s hopes had risen a few weeks back, but last week George went and hired Eddie and another college boy for the summer, with not another word about Roy coming on. The hell Marjorie had given him! For not standing up to George, for not pushing Roy.  Tough to do with a clear conscience.  But the thought of Roy sprawled on his living room couch drinking Len’s last beer pushed him out of the warmth of the truck.

            “George,” Len nodded.

            “Chuck tells me the leak’s right there. He had it figured until you showed up.”

George glowered at Len through bloodshot eyes.

            You’re coming off another binge weekend, Len thought. “This is old wood stave, only a couple feet deep. The leak’s near the property line.” He pointed to the landscaped rockery fronting the boulevard.

            “Then why’s the water showing up here?” Chuck argued.

            “Following the rock. They used tons of Capilano river rock when they built this subdivision.”

            “For Chrissakes,” George hissed. “I got two estimates on my desk and a paving superintendent with shit for brains and you guys are bickering over a service leak?” George’s face turned a cardiac shade of red. “Fix the fucking thing!” He stomped back to his truck, muttering under his breath. As he jerked the door open he glared at Len.

            “I need to see you in my office.”

            Chuck scratched the side of his mouth. It was a piss poor job of disguising a sneer.

            Len limped back to his truck. He felt eyes on the nape of his neck: Eddie, resigned and still struggling in the hole, and Chuck, basking in a righteous gloat. He stared straight ahead, not seeing the hole or the road but Marjorie, waiting for him at the end of the day, her lips drawn thin, her skin the color and feel of old newspapers, fighting the good fight because that was the only way she knew how to do things.

            It was Monday morning and he’d already let her down, again.

Chapter 14

            “You need dessert,” Carole said, laughing as she led Maureen between crowded tables to an empty table beside a stucco-covered pillar.

            “I can’t feel my toes,” Maureen said, falling into a chair. Three glasses of wine since two PM and she could barely stand. She leaned sloppily on Carole’s shoulder. “This is a strip joint,” she said, slurring her words.

            “I think you’re right,” Carole said with a smile. “You know the drill. When in Rome?”

            The music was loud, pounding inside her head. They sat near a stage, empty save for the flashing lights on each stubby wing. Random clusters of men leered at her as she scanned the room. She felt feverish and queasy. This was all wrong. She needed to get back to the quiet of her hotel room before things went totally off the rails.

            “A red wine for me. Better make it soda water for the lightweight here,” Carole said to the waitress.

            “Sure.”

            The waitress wiped her hands on a short, off-white apron tied around her jeans. She leaned over the table to clear away the empties left by the previous occupants. She smiled at Maureen. “I’m Sandy, if you need anything.”  She slapped down a pair of cardboard coasters that boasted the crisp, clean taste of a beer made from a moose’s head. Or so it seemed to Maureen.

“You’re just in time,” Sandy said. “Another five minutes and there won’t be an empty seat.” She winked and grinned, revealing the wad of chewing gum between her teeth. Her breath smelled of spearmint. She vanished in the direction of the bar.

            One of the three men seated around the nearest table leaned close and nudged Maureen’s shoulder with his arm. “Sorry, Sweetie,” he said, and bumped her again to a chorus of laughter from his two companions.

            Coarse, blond hair hung to his shoulders, spilling out the bottom of his ball cap like a spray of wind-blown, sun-blanched straw. He clamped a crooked cigarette between his teeth and waved. His lean face was smudged by a late evening beard that shaded a mottled, pasty complexion. Old tattoos decorated both arms.

            Maureen skidded her chair closer to Carole’s. As the bar filled it got harder to breathe. She couldn’t move without bumping somebody.

            “Don’t mind us, ‘kay?” The tattooed man lifted his ball cap, scratched a sparsely sown scalp and sent another lopsided grin in her direction. “We just come for the show. A real good friend,” he said, gesturing toward the stage. He had to shout over the music and the swelling crowd.

            Maureen looked to Carole for rescue, but she was busy lifting their drinks out of Sandy’s tray.

            “I’m Larry, FYI,” the man said. He tipped back in his chair and stuck out one hand.

            Maureen avoided both his glance and his hand. A roaring like the surf filled her ears.

            Larry smiled as he tweaked the cigarette from his mouth and held it under her nose. “Hey Sweetie, gotta light?”

It happened too quickly- a reflex- or maybe it was the alcohol. It impaired her usually sound judgment. Her hand dove into her purse and came out with her lighter. Its gold case glowed in the smoky light. She ran her thumb lovingly across the engraved letters that marked the case with a fine, flowing script:

            She kept it with her, everyday, filled with fluid, though it had been almost six years since she’d last needed it to light a cigarette. She used to leave it at home, safe in her desk, but felt strange- even lost- without it. Sometimes, away from home, alone in her hotel room, she would run her fingers over the butter-soft case, flip open the lid and roll her thumb across the flint to see if it still worked. It lit on the first try, every time.

            “Nice lighter,” Larry said. “Can I see it?”

            His hot, damp hand enfolded hers. He seemed to will the lighter from her unsure grip even as he smiled at her muted protests. He opened the case, snapped his thumb across the flint and stuck the flame to the end of his cigarette. Two puffs of smoke rolled through the air toward her. He leaned into his friends to show them his prize.

            “Hey, a Zippo. It’s gold, too. Where’d you get it?” Larry’s companion said. He reached to grab it out of Larry’s hand.

            “It’s mine,” Maureen said, and put her hand on Larry’s arm. His skin was hot yet slippery to the touch. She recoiled, shivering.

            Larry turned and blew smoke in her eyes. “That’s one nice Bic you got, Darlene,” he said, fondling the case.

            “I need it back,” Maureen said, but her words died against the crash of the sound system as the DJ began to shout.

            “Put your hands together for last month’s Men’s Club cover girl! Star of seven hit films, Hustler Magazine’s 2005 Adult Film Star of the Year and winner of Penthouse’s Up And Coming Award for 2006. Gentlemen and Ladies, give it up for the Raven!”

            Larry and his friends were on their feet. They stomped and whistled and pounded the table as a tall, athletic woman appeared from behind the smoked glass of the DJ’s booth. She wore tight silver shorts and a sparkling silver halter too small for her breasts. She carried a folded blanket over her shoulder and tossed rolled up posters into the crowd as she climbed onto the stage.

            Larry held up the lighter like he was at a rock concert. Raven saw the flame, stepped close to the edge of the stage, grinning at Larry. She crouched on her heels and reached for the lighter, her eyes fixed upon the gold case. Larry flipped the top, snuffing the flame, and shoved it into Raven’s cleavage. His buddies hooted. Raven grabbed for the lighter as she came out of her crouch so quickly she stumbled, had to grab onto the brass pole for balance. Larry and his buddies shouted, pumped at the reaction they’d got out of the dancer.

            The Raven glanced from the lighter to Maureen. Maureen felt as if she were being examined head to foot. She looked away, embarrassed, suddenly afraid.

Raven retreated to the back of the stage, returned with a scrolled poster and aimed it at Maureen, but Larry leapt in front to intercept it. He almost dropped the lighter as he blundered into Maureen’s chair. Raven threw Larry an angry look and glanced back at Maureen. She tugged at the brim of a glittering silver ball cap jammed low over her forehead. A single, jet pony tail sprang from the hole in the ball cap. It hung, thick, glistening, to the middle of her back. The soles of her boots flashed as she walked. An earthquake of hip hop music shook the beer bottles nearest the speakers.

            Each time Raven circled nearer and met her glance Maureen had to look away. Beads of perspiration gathered on her scalp. She started to hyperventilate in the stale, clotted air. She had to get out of here, but she couldn’t go without her lighter. She leaned across Larry, but he twisted away from her.

            “That’s my girl,” Larry shouted, shifting the lighter to his other hand, twisting away from Maureen’s reach.

            Raven blew kisses as she danced. When she moved to the far end of the stage Larry turned in his chair, grabbed his beer and leaned close to Maureen. “Say, why don’t you and your friend stick around after the show? Maybe my gal can show you a move or two. Then all of us,” he gestured to his buddies, “can get something to eat? Party on in cozier quarters?”

            Maureen felt sick. She steadied herself, her arms planted on the table top. “My lighter. I need it back,” she groaned.

            Larry blinked. He cupped one hand around his ear and leaned closer. “What?”

            “Give it back.” She had to summon all her strength to shout.

            “I already did,” Larry said, shaking his head with a sudden look of hurt and surprise. “Didn’t I, Rick? I gave this chick back her fire, right?”

            A hand touched her right leg. Maureen jumped. “Isn’t this cool?” Carole shouted. Her face glistened under a sheen of perspiration.

            “He’s got my lighter,” Maureen said, but Carole either didn’t hear or understand. She nodded and smiled and toasted the thickening air with her half-empty wine glass.

            The music grew louder and the crowd rowdier as the Raven removed her halter. She swung the scrap of silver fabric at the end of one hand like a lasso. Her perfect breasts perched on her chest with gravity-defying pride. She licked her fingers and fanned them across her nipples, then cupped each breast as she leaned over the stage to push them into the rapt faces of the men who crowded the rim of the stage. Her tongue became a prop. She let it roll slowly across shining, pouting lips.

            Larry hammered his beer bottle against the table. Raven came out of her deep crouch and danced across the front of the stage to squat directly in front of him, her gaze fixed instead on Maureen. His friends jostled each other for a better view as Larry leaned forward, one knee on Maureen’s table, to get his face close to Raven’s breasts. His boot flashed sideways and kicked over the soda water. Carole slid out of the drink’s path.

            Maureen snatched up her purse and scooted backward, but the jam of chairs stopped her. Cold water flooded across her legs. Laughter erupted behind her.

The Raven moved to the far end of the stage, watching Maureen as she retreated.

            The shock of ice water across her thighs cleared Maureen’s head. She jumped, gripped Larry’s shoulder and pulled him toward her. “Give it. Now.” 

            Larry stumbled, sagged to his knees. His tee shirt tore in Maureen’s fist.

            “Hey. That was my best shirt!”

            “Sit the fuck down, Larry!” A voice called out behind Maureen.

            “Get your ugly head out the way!”

            “Take off your clothes or siddown!”

            Maureen let go of the fabric and dropped into her chair, into a puddle of cold water. Her face burned. “Let’s go,” she said but Carole was helping Sandy mop the table top, her glass of wine raised up against the flood.

            “Shut the fuck up!” Larry wheeled toward his accusers, his fists waving in the sticky air. He squinted into the lights. “Me and the lady here are negosheeatin. You know what negosheeatin is, dontcha? Sure you do. Ya fuckin’ Rez Rats!”

            Larry’s friends laughed.

            A brown glass bottle pinwheeled out of the lights and struck Larry on the collarbone. He staggered against the stage.

            “Fuckin’ dick-smokin’ red bastard!” Larry propelled himself into the crowd. His friends followed, diving across tables.

            A roar filled Maureen’s ears. She glanced to the stage. Raven had backed from the edge of the stage. She clung to a second brass pole near the back, an anxious expression accessorizing the ball cap, silver thong and high-heeled boots. One hand rested on her flared hip, the other shielded her eyes from the glare of stage lights. The white light accentuated the sinewy contours of her arms, emphasized the outline of a tattoo on her left shoulder: a jagged lightning bolt that ended in a plunging, barbed point surrounded by a circle of red flames.

            “Let’s get out of here,” Carole said. She tugged on Maureen’s arm.

            “My lighter-”

            “Now!”

            A beer bottle crashed against the back wall. Raven ducked, swore and stalked to the stairs to gather her blanket and discarded clothes. The DJ cut the music. Three bouncers with arms like fence posts waded into the scrum. They levered Larry and his friends off their adversaries. It was a fight nobody wanted to quit.

            “I’m going to be sick,” Maureen said.                                                   

            “Follow me,” Carole said.  She dragged Maureen past flailing arms and legs, past leering faces appearing like ghosts through the flash of strobe lights.

            They ducked past the DJ booth as the Raven fled behind the smoked glass. Their eyes met once more. Maureen could not look away, she was transfixed, lured by the pinpricks of light- tiny stars that shone out of the obsidian depths. Carole pulled on her arm and Maureen stumbled over an outstretched leg. Carole caught her, and by the time Maureen steadied herself Raven had disappeared.

            Carole leaned into the double metal doors under a glowing, red Exit sign. A chorus of Why Can’t We Be Friends? crackled through the speakers as the doors swung shut behind them.

      Josephine pushed Raven sideways and scrambled clear. She was breathing hard, hands on knees.

      Maureen bent to pick up the black-handled steak knife, but stopped short. Agony radiated from her knee, shot up her leg to the ache in her hip. She clutched at the splintered stair rail to keep her balance. Her stomach churned in a sudden, nauseous surge and she doubled over to vomit onto the carpet of crushed dandelions.

     “He’s stabbed her,” Josephine said. She crouched over the Raven. Blood welled out of the dancer’s left biceps, above the cast, but it was the right arm she cradled. She moaned in pain, rocking on her side, staring at Larry. He hadn’t moved since Maureen’s home run swing.

     “I think I killed him,” Maureen said. She forced her body to take slow, deep breaths to settle her stomach. A thin film of cold sweat formed on her skin. She wanted to kick him, to prove to herself that Larry wasn’t dead, but when she released the broken railing her arms shook badly and her teeth began to chatter. She gripped the railing with both hands and leaned against the house. “There’s a First Aid kit in my car,” she said, but the words were messed up and Josephine did not react.

     “In my car,” Maureen said carefully through clenched teeth. “The First Aid kit.”

     “You okay?” Josephine said.

     Maureen shook her head. “My knee. It’s screwed.”

     “I’ll get the kit,” Josephine said. She stood. “Watch her. Maybe we should tie her up.”

     “You got no right.” Raven rolled onto her knees and struggled to stand. She used her left arm to pull her tee shirt over her hip bones. Her right arm hung useless against her body. “You can’t be doing this shit to me.”

     “You started it,” Josephine said. She grabbed Raven’s right arm, lifting it above her waist.

     The dancer screamed and sagged to her knees.

     Josephine forced Raven onto the stairs, beside Maureen. “Wait here. I’ll be back in a sec.”

            She stayed in the car, listening to the ticking of the engine and waiting to be sure her tears were done. She peeked in the rearview mirror and, with a wadded tissue, dabbed at the hot, puffy skin beneath her eyes. With two deep breaths she crossed the parking lot- briefcase in one hand tissue in the other- and ducked between the open hotel doors.

            Carole Simons intercepted her before she reached the elevator. “You okay?”

            “I’m fine,” Maureen said.

            Carole blocked her way. She wore a sleeveless white t shirt featuring a wrung-out photograph of the Sex Pistols. It was tucked into a short leather skirt as black and shiny as her open-toed sandals. Her lipstick and toenail polish sported the same wet, apple-red enamel finish. “What gives? Your boyfriend dump you?”

            “No. Not that it’s any of your business,” Maureen said. She sidestepped but Carole moved with her. “What are you doing?”

            “Helping. You look terrible. We need to talk.”

            “This morning would have been useful. Right now it’s the last thing I need,” Maureen said. She tried to slip by but Carole’s compact frame prevented her.

            “I’ll call security.” Her voice was strained, an octave higher than normal.

            “Do that. I’ll buy them a drink too.”

            “I’m going to my room,” Maureen said. “It’s been a tough day and-”

            “And you don’t want to be alone,” Carole said. “Trust me. I’ve been in this business too long. The bar’s a dozen steps that way. Let’s have a drink and maybe by dinner you’ll qualify for solitude. Or maybe I’ll have to resort to drastic action.”

            “Leave me alone.”

            “Methinks you’ve been alone too often.” Carole grinned and gripped Maureen by the elbow and steered her across the lobby, through an archway of tall, potted palms whose browning leaves drooped from thirst.

            “I don’t drink,” Maureen said, balking at the lounge entrance. She was surprised at how easy it was to be led where she didn’t want to go.

            “Then don’t,” Carole said. “It’s still early. Have a coffee. Or milk. Hell have Ovaltine for all I care. I can drink enough for the both of us.” She led Maureen to a table in the corner, behind a screen of small-leafed bamboo.

            “Here.” Carole dragged a rattan chair away from the table and pointed for Maureen to sit.

            “Why are you doing this?” Maureen plunked herself down in the chair, her briefcase clutched in her lap. Her spine arched away from the chair back.

“You’re like a cornered animal,” Carole said. “Relax. I’m not going to bite.”

            “I don’t need your pity and I don’t need rescuing.” Maureen gripped the handle of her briefcase until the flesh on her knuckles went white.

            “You’re in no position to say,” Carole said. She tapped the glass-topped table with a scarlet fingernail. “Most people don’t know when they’re in too deep. When they need help. Or even how to ask for it.”

            “Not me,” Maureen said.

            “What? You don’t need help or you don’t know how to ask for it?”

            Maureen’s eyes fixed on the exit. “Neither. I manage fine.”

            “Not from where I sit- with all due respect.”

            Maureen turned to meet Carole’s stare. “What does that mean? You think I’m lousy at my job too?”

            “Yes, actually. I do.” She glanced away to signal a passing waiter.

            Maureen was half out of her seat when Carole grabbed her arm.

            “Let me finish. It was cruel what they did in there. I should have said something. I wanted to. I expected your people to step in, but this morning convinced me. They’ll let you dangle by your thumbs. You’re lousy at a lousy job, but you’re not incompetent. Far from it. You’re just inexperienced. They’re walking all over you and you’ve nobody watching your back.”

            A film covered Maureen’s eyes. She brought one hand across her forehead and exhaled in short bursts, struggling to hold back tears. “And you’re offering or what?”

            “That would be hardly appropriate. But we’re a little more removed than the other two parties. The Feds just write most of the cheques, we don’t have to live here.” Carole passed her a napkin. “It’s been, what, a month? Since Lee-Anne quit?”

            “Nearly six weeks,” Maureen said, snatching the cloth without looking up.

            The waiter appeared beside Carole, appearing from behind the bamboo screen. Carole ordered a glass of wine. “A nice Okanagan red,” she said.

            “Soda water,” Maureen said, pressing the napkin into the corners of her eyes.

            “Bring the bottle and two glasses and we’ll take it from there,” Carole said with a dismissive wave.

     A string of profanity blistered the air. A body charged from the house and drove Raven backwards, screaming, off the top step. Jo cried out as Raven knocked her into the railing. The two-by-four bulged and split under their weight. Maureen jumped backward off the third stair. Pain ripped through her as she landed stiff-legged, hyper-extending her right knee. She rolled onto her side and brought one arm up to shield her head from the bodies pin-wheeling after her.

     The Raven and Josephine went through the railing, landing hard. A cloud of milky dandelion seeds filled the air as a third body fell onto the women. Maureen scrambled to her hands and knees, her fingers sweeping through the tufted weeds around the house for the jack handle. She scraped the back of her hand on the corner of the foundation as she dragged the handle out of the weeds. Broken glass lined her knee joint. She used the side of the house as a crutch.

     Larry Arnold lay on top of Raven. His bare, thin torso was covered with old tattoos, the designs long-since faded to tired blues and blotchy reds. He gripped a knife in his right hand.

     Josephine screamed, masking Raven’s unbroken string of profanity. Her fingers were claws in Larry’s face. She clutched at his wrist as the knife arced downward. Blood sprayed Raven’s neck and shoulder.

     Larry twisted to shake loose from Josephine. His toes slipped and skidded across the grass, searching for solid ground. He could not break free. His hair hung in matted strips, handfuls of wet straw glued to a bone-pale scalp.

     Maureen swung the jack handle. It skipped off the top of Larry’s head. Before Maureen could swing again the knife in Larry’s hand reversed, slicing the air a whisper away from her side. She struck again, harder, with two hands on the jack handle in her best imitation of a baseball swing. The metal bar connected just above Larry’s ear with a sound like a boot crushing a snail’s shell. The jack handle flew out of her hands. Larry dropped his knife and pressed his hands against his head, his foot twitching as his body went limp. Blood leaked between his fingers.

     “You fucking killed him!”  The Raven began to cry.

            Maureen shared the kitchen table with Josephine, Taylor and a mountain of papers that had been pushed to the furthest corner to make room for everyone. Piles like square pancakes with sticky notes for butter pats threatened to topple into their plates. Taylor grinned at her between bites of potato and leftover pork roast. Maureen was convinced the girl was kicking the table leg to make one of the taller stacks fall.

            Maureen ate her potatoes and beans in guilty silence, her back bent and shoulders hunched and her left hand wedged between her knees. It had started after she’d held up her hand, refusing the slice of meat Josephine offered. “I’m Vegetarian, sorry. Should have mentioned it.”

            Grandmother and granddaughter shared the same look- lips pressed thin beneath a single, arched eyebrow. Josephine forked over an extra potato and dumped a heaping spoonful of baked beans onto Maureen’s plate.

            “Wash it,” Josephine said as Taylor jumped out of her chair and dashed for the kitchen door.

            “I’m late,” Taylor said with a protest in her voice. “I’m going to Shawna’s.”

            “You know the drill. And take Bitch with you,” Josephine said.

            The girl stamped back to the table and grabbed her plate, her lower lip curled in anger.

            “Don’t argue. I’ve got Council and it’ll go late.”

            Taylor had to stand on her tiptoes at the sink to turn on the water. Her plate and cutlery clattered against the old porcelain.

            Josephine mopped up the last gravy with a crust of bread. “Just like her mother,” she said without looking up.

            “Where is her mother?”

            The torn crust stopped as if stuck fast to the plate. Davis raised her head and stared out the window. “Cynthia’s gone. It’ll be two years, this October.”

            “I’m sorry,” Maureen said.

            “Taylor keeps asking when Cyn’s coming home.” Josephine’s eyes met Maureen’s. They were hard, flat, like the raven mask in the hall. “I’m getting tired of making things up.”

            “Like what?”

            Josephine abandoned the bread crust and drew the back of her hand across her mouth, twice, swiping at stray crumbs. “You’re not a parent, are you?”

            “I-”

            “Cyn kept running away to Vancouver. Lived with hookers and addicts until she became one. She was on the street most of the time. Went through methadone treatment- twice- then vanished. Just when I was ready to believe that this time things might turn out good.”

            “Sorry,” Maureen said. “That’s got to be very hard.” She set down her fork and pushed her plate away.

            “Until the fires started seemed every newspaper had nothing to report ‘cept stories of that psycho bastard they caught. Every day I wake up and wonder if it’s gonna be today they call and say they found her shoe, or something else of hers, under a pile of pig shit.” Josephine turned and stared out the kitchen window, blinking hard.

            “I had no clue, sorry.”

            “Not as sorry as me,” Josephine said, exhaling. She stacked their plates and hurried to the sink. She leaned over the counter, the slight crook in her nose parallel to the window as she turned to see the side of the house.

            “Did she take the dog?” Maureen asked.

            Josephine wiped her eyes on the fringe of a dish towel. Her mouth creased in a sudden smile. “They’re like sea and shore, never one without the other,” she said. “No way Taylor would’ve gone without Bitch.” Josephine slapped the handle of the hot water faucet. “She deserves a better life than her mother had,” she said over the stream.

            “I think she has it,” Maureen said.

            Josephine did not turn around. “There’s no guarantees, for us. I was lucky. Had enough to eat and a place to sleep. I worked in a cannery a couple of seasons, the money was there if I needed it. Then I went to secretary school in Nanaimo, my grandmother paid the tuition, forced me to see it through. Otherwise we lived off what this land gave us. You want coffee?”

            “No, I should go.”

            “You haven’t told me why you came, but I can guess. The recess. And only two months to the deadline.” Josephine pointed to a paper calendar hanging off the side of the fridge. It was the kind that displayed all twelve months on a single, rectangular banner. The top two-thirds was west coast rainforest- a lithograph oozing fecund greens and browns, banded by a ribbon of grey-white sea. “October thirty-first is marked on my calendar, too.” A careless red oval encircled the last day of October. “And not ‘cause I got a Halloween party to go to.”

Josephine moved to the back door. “Let’s go outside. There’s a bit of shade now.”

“Was that your screw up?” Josephine slipped through the kitchen door clutching her deck of smokes.

            Maureen stepped onto a narrow deck, swallowing hard to keep down the denial that rose in her throat like a bad taste. The unpainted wood had weathered to a pale, smudged grey extending the breadth of the house. “Dee-Faz screwed up.” She exhaled wearily. “Guess that makes it mine.”

            Josephine grabbed a pair of collapsed deck chairs and carried them to the far end, away from the stairs that led down to a sloping back yard surrounded by fir and cedar. “It’s not the first, won’t be the last,” she said as the chair frames rattled against the railing. She set her cigarettes on the rail and pulled open the chairs as if pulling apart an aluminum wishbone.

            Maureen looked over the rail onto a series of raised beds set in neat rectangles between pathways of crushed gravel. She counted six beds, each at least twelve feet long by four feet wide. They were brim full of staked tomatoes, runner beans that climbed cris-crossed poles and rows of lettuce whose leaves spilled over the cedar-framed sides. One bed seemed dedicated to potatoes.

            “Can’t grow anything else in that one,” Josephine said, following Maureen’s glance.

            “That’s not what I was thinking,” Maureen said as she sat in the empty chair. “How can you keep up?”

            “I don’t. Too much work, it’s falling apart,” Josephine said, and made a gesture of surrender with her hands. “Taylor’s father built them. Portuguese. But that’s another story. They sure do love their vegetable gardens.” She rolled her eyes. “This was how he tried to fit in. His way of fixing the world’s problems is to fill every sunny slope with tomatoes and zucchini.” She shrugged. “There’s worse, I suppose, but it doesn’t play here. After he left I took them over, but I only get half the yield he used to. Thank God he put in irrigation or everything would be dead.”

            “Puts my sorry garden to shame,” Maureen said, her eyes sweeping across the yellow-green fruit of the tomato plants. She caught a whiff of mulch in the warm air.

            “Then marry a Portuguese. Better yet, just live with one. Now what about my Federation?” Her left eyebrow froze at the peak of its arch like a cat stuck mid-stretch.

            “Not your Federation,” Maureen said. “It’s Brown, Martin and Houseman.” She shifted in the chair, afraid for the aluminum frame beneath her. A weight in her chest made it harder to breathe. “They would be thrilled to miss the deadline.”

            Josephine scratched one forearm with blunted fingernails. “That was Matthew’s biggest victory. They seem to forget, it was so long ago, but it was huge. The papers always leave out that part- that we’re on the hook for all our legal costs. Matthew figured we could save thousands- millions- by forming a negotiating federation and using the same legal firm. Whatever cash we eventually get from a settlement, the first piece goes to repay the lawyers. With interest.”

            “You’re not getting good value,” Maureen said. She recounted what had happened in the morning session.

            Josephine kept her eyes on the garden, or on something further away.

            “I know I’m out of line here,” Maureen said. “But the deadline is closing in. And Templeton couldn’t get out of there fast enough.”

            “If we lose the lawyers we lose the Federation. I can’t hold twenty-two chiefs by myself.”

            Maureen sat on the edge of her chair, her spine stiff. “You think the public is against you in this, but they’re not. They’re against lawyers getting rich with their dollars.”

            Josephine crushed the butt of her cigarette under her foot. She reached for another from the package on the rail. “Smoke?”

            “No.” Maureen held up her hand.

            “Thought so,” Jo said. She struck the match head against the underside of the deck rail and held it off the end of the cigarette. “You don’t like lawyers very much.”

            “Some of my best friends are lawyers,” Maureen said.

            “You don’t seem the type to have a lot of friends,” Josephine said, snuffing the match with a flick of her wrist. “No offense.”

            “To use your line- that’s another story.”

            Josephine coughed, cleared her throat and spit over the railing. “Brown, Martin and Houseman have been ours since ‘Ninety-five. Since we filed for Intent. The Federation came along later.”

            Maureen stared into the shaded fringe of hemlock trees. Why had she come? What had she wanted the Tse Wets Aht chief to say? “We both want the same thing,” she said after a long silence.

            The lines around Josephine’s eyes deepened. She plucked the cigarette from her mouth. The muscles at the hinge of her jaw bunched. “Don’t pretend to be better than the lawyers you trash. You have no clue what I want.”

            Maureen blinked. Josephine’s outline seemed to swim in the heavy, afternoon air.

            “People like you have been our biggest problem for more than a hundred years.”

            “That’s not what I meant,” Maureen said, but her tongue seemed to swell inside her mouth. She propelled herself from the chair and leaned against the railing. “I meant the deadline. We both want a Final before the deadline.”

            “For you and every other bureaucrat it’s a Final,” Josephine said, rising out of her chair and stalking to the kitchen door. She jerked her head in the direction of the front door. “You want signatures, then you’re done, bonus time, another trophy for your Goddamned display case. By now you should know that it’s not like that for us. Until you know that you can stay the hell out of my house.” She drew hard on the cigarette and exhaled a plume of blue cigarette smoke. It hung in the air above her head, as if bound there by her angry words.

            Maureen could not think of anything to say. She ducked past Josephine and hurried through the house, avoiding the raven’s black eyes as she fled. She fished her car keys out of her handbag as she walked. She blinked, blinded by the afternoon sun. The front of the house baked in the heat. Perspiration itched as it rose out of her skin.

            Josephine followed her to the front door. “This negotiation is only the beginning. When you cross us off your To Do list,” Josephine called from the top of the steps, “we’ll be here still, and our children will ask: Didn’t you know they were taking all the salmon, all the herring, all the trees? Weren’t you watching? And we have to answer them. That’s when the real work starts.”

Chapter 9

            Candy’s head snapped back. She screamed; the door slammed shut. Something heavy hit the floor, made the thin walls shake. A scuffling sound of the safety chain being set.

      Maureen twisted the door knob, but it was locked.

     “Maureen. Maureen!” Josephine’s shouts ricocheted between the houses.

     She took the stairs two at a time and sprinted through the weed-infested side yard. She rounded the corner of the house and glimpsed Josephine picking herself off the grass near the back steps as a shape barreled toward her. Maureen lowered her shoulder as the figure turned, wide-eyed, too late to avoid the collision.

     Impact knocked the Raven backward, her legs buckling beneath her. Car keys flew out of her hand, striking the curling shingles of the house. Raven’s landing launched a cloud of dandelion seeds into the air. Josephine tackled Raven, tried to pin the woman to the ground. Her bare legs thrashed under Josephine. Her left forearm was in a cast, and she was using it like a club.

     “This bitch fights dirty,” Josephine said, ducking under a second wild swing.

     Maureen dropped the jack handle and fell to her knees near Raven’s head. She grabbed the arm near the wrist and wrestled it backward to the ground. A black, jagged lightning bolt decorated the length of the cast. With her free hand Maureen cupped Raven’s chin and wrenched it toward her. She glared, tried to spit. Maureen released her chin and slapped her, hard.

     “Oww!” Raven went limp. Tears formed in her eyes. The dark rings around her eye sockets had become sickly yellow bruises. With the bandages off her face looked different, familiar- almost.

             “We need to talk to you,” Maureen said.

     “Fuck you. This is assault,” Raven said. “I’m pressing charges.”

     “So am I,” Josephine said. “You tried to break my jaw.” She rubbed the side of her face.

     “This is Chief Josephine Davis of the Tse Wets Aht First Nation,” Maureen said. “She has some questions for you. About the boys who died on Pipeline Road.”

     Raven’s nostrils flared. “Screw that. I got nothing to say ‘cept fuck the both of you.”

     They dragged Raven upright. She did not try to run. She slapped at the dirt on her legs. Her hair stuck out from her skull in thick, stubby cords, greasy from sleep. Jo twisted Raven’s good arm behind her back. Maureen held Raven’s left arm, just above the cast. It was adorned with smaller lightning bolts and blood-red crucifixes. At the end of the black lightning bolt someone had drawn a red tipped arrow that pointed at the middle knuckle of her hand.

     “It matches the tattoo on her shoulder,” Josephine said. She nodded to the ink above the Raven’s right biceps. A single, jagged line- either a bolt of lightning or broken spear recalling one half of the Nazi SS symbol- was surrounded by a circle of red flame.

     “Let’s get her inside.” Maureen glanced toward the neighbour’s house. She expected curious faces in the windows. “It’s too early for this.”

     It was a climb of a half-dozen steps to a small, covered porch and a back door with a ripped bug screen. Maureen had to release the Raven’s arm to follow. She thought she heard sirens. Dandelion seeds drifted across the backyard, suspended in the sunlight that shone between the trees.

Chapter 8

     The highway cut through downtown Port, past tired, Norman Rockwell storefronts lining a sorry main drag. Too many windows with For Lease or Closing Out Sale signs, lingering shadows from last year’s layoffs. The mill might be busy again, but that hadn’t brought everybody back. Too many downs and too few ups in the prosperity roller-coaster of the last decade to put trust- let alone money- into a town so fresh into what the local paper had christened A Fragile Mini-Boom.

            The big muscles in her shoulders began to ache, sent tremors down her arms, her wrists and into her fingertips. She gripped the steering wheel harder but that made it worse. She glanced over her right shoulder and swung across the inside lane, the front wheel blundering against the high, concrete curb alongside the Esso gas station/Mini-Mart/Lotto-Centre. She leaned her forehead against the steering wheel. The skin around her knuckles was drum-skin tight, translucent as greasy paper where it stretched over bone. She forced back her tears with loud, gulping breaths and raised her head, catching a glimpse of her face in the mirror. Red-rimmed eyes stared back above pale, blotchy cheeks. She swatted the mirror sideways and sank back, pressing the back of her skull into the headrest before twisting to stare out the driver’s side window.

            She was hoping for a view of the Slough- that slender, sharpened fingernail of Pacific Ocean where the Little Man River tumbled out of the mountains, but in this place the mill obscured any hint of the water beyond. Its smudged stacks and metal-clad bulk squatted uncomfortably behind scores of halogen spotlights that blazed with amber light, even on the brightest, hottest day. Jewels in the sunshine. To hear the locals tell it there was a time in Port’s living history they could have been real jewels.

            Maureen wiped her eyes and with a darting glance over her left shoulder swung back onto the road. On the far boulevard an eight foot chain-link fence divided the mill from the rest of town. Maureen raced it to the municipal boundary but the fence kept pace. One building followed the next: Admin, Fuel and Marina, Physical Plant, Incinerator, Garage, Stores, and finally, the Timber Bins, where raw logs lay in two-storey high piles. At a weed-choked ditch near the rocky bank of the Slough the run of chain-link jack-knifed away from the highway. It was a relief to be past the procession of asphalt and concrete, metal and wood. The fjord that had shouldered its way past steep-sided mountains from the open Pacific here narrowed to little more than a vigorous river, its adolescent waters surging around rocks and the low-hanging branches of leaning hemlock and cedar.

            Maureen crossed the fjord at the Little Man Bridge. It had been built where the Slough ended- or where the Little Man River began- it depended on which locals she met. When Lee-Anne quit she’d stopped asking about Port- its people, its history, its customs. It took too much out of her. When negotiating sessions ended- even those few sessions over the previous month that had ended well- she emerged too exhausted to act on the curiosity that collected like crib notes on the margins of her day. The question marks, like thirsty, clutching vines, shriveled in the fever burning behind her brow.

            On the other side of the bridge the highway branched. A right turn led to the West Coast and the open Pacific- after another sixty miles of twisting, rock-dinted asphalt. Through rain forests of towering cedar, giant salal, drooping hemlock and graceful fir to the posh, ocean-side resorts built by consortia of ex-hockey players, promising miles of sandy beach, breaching grey whales and pounding winter storms. She’d taken that road- once.

            It was April, more than three years ago, the day after the official signing of the Agreement in Principle. Between the Pacific Coast Tribal Federation and two governments who together became the negotiating triumvirate that had toiled seven hard years to hammer out a framework land claims deal worth half a billion dollars in land and cash. She was the only one on the Dee-Faz team who hadn’t rushed back to the big city to celebrate. What did she know? She was just a junior research analyst, a rookie still finding her way after three months on the job. What nobody told her was that on the West Coast- at the end of April anyway- she could expect a wind so fresh from a Siberian ice-field it bit into the exposed skin of her arms like a spoiled nephew. She was forced indoors, banished to the five foot radius around her fireplace. When she wasn’t sleeping or gorging on junk food she watched foaming breakers pound the deserted beach through rain-spotted windows and counted the hours to checkout.

            Maureen took the left turn, the road that doubled back to stalk the far bank of the Slough. It was the road into the Tse Wets Aht First Nation Reserve- the Only Rez Left on the Left was an old joke in town. Tse Wets Aht IR#1/1: the Government of Canada’s official land reserve catalogue number for the property; the only indigenous-held land still fronting the Slough that could be reached by road. That triggered another maxim she’d learned, one of which the town fathers liked- off the record, of course- to remind land claims negotiators from Ottawa and Victoria: go ahead, be generous with the land nobody wanted, the tough-to-get-to spots, but hold onto the good stuff close to home like it was gold or we’ll put you down like a mad dog.

            The pavement ended at the reserve boundary. It didn’t end so much as expire. She steered between potholes larger than mattresses, some so deep she imagined bomb craters. The houses here were close to the road as it curved upward, away from water. Sunburned grass and plastic buckets filled with exhausted geraniums or gangly rose bushes- the kind with flailing, thorny arms crowned with washed out pink blooms- were the prevailing landscaping features. The few windows that faced the road were like blinded eyes- lidded with limp, brown curtains or patched with sheets of creased aluminum foil- anything, it seemed, to repel heat and glare. Untended fires burned inside circles of soot-stained rocks and sent coils of limp, white smoke into the overheated air. The dried grass nearest the fires was scorched black.

            Three hairpin turns off the highway the road leveled as it entered the centre of the community. This settlement, barely a century old, was still considered new to the Tse Wets Aht. Their elders told of The Relocation- when their village on the Slough was sold off by the government in Victoria to the original owners of the Western Mill Company. It was late fall, a year after the shouts of Fifty-four Forty or Fight had died, after the border was redrawn, receding from the banks of the Columbia River to the Forty-ninth parallel, after the last salmon had been dried and the oolican harvest had been pressed into grease when the British soldiers came with the government land officers and the mill owners’ representatives to escort the entire village from their homes. To protect them, was the official line. To protect the bespectacled and nattily-dressed bureaucrats was more like it.

            Tse Wets Aht translated means People from the Place at the Beginning of Things. Yet they were forbidden to return to the only village they had known. Columns of soldiers led men, children and women to the new village, high off the water. They camped for two months less than a mile away to make sure the Tse Wets Aht made no attempt to return. Even then, before the serious logging began and the belching smoke of the mill issued from polished brick stacks, it had been a dusty and dry place. When the Chief asked about water, the Senior Land Agent strode to the cliff edge. He jumped onto the remains of a fallen cedar giant and pointed, past the drooping tips of hemlock that covered the lower slopes, to the fine view of the Slough where the Little Man River joined it. “There’s your water,” he said. Jocularity and contempt vied for mastery of his voice. “You have all day to fetch it.”

            It had taken forty years to get a well drilled and pumphouse built, but for a century the mill that rose over the trampled ruin of the Tse Wets Aht village remained in clear, full account, and on early mornings in the fall, when gluttonous rain clouds touched the hilltops and a grey mist blanketed the world, the mill’s steaming, bejeweled bulk seemed to float above the trees.

            The Tse Wets Aht Council Office stood behind the new government-funded and built Community Centre and Elementary School, and from the road a faded sign propped against one of the towering cedar logs at the centre’s entrance was the only clue to its location. The uniform opinion on the reserve was that an opportunity had been missed when the Community Centre was built- one that would not reappear for a very long time. But if they couldn’t tear down the soon-to-be-derelict Band office the Tse Wets Aht were content to conceal it from plain sight.

            The Band Office was a single storey, wood-framed house that rain and sun were gradually dissolving to the foundation. The roof needed repairs: blue tarps, long faded, had been draped over most of it, secured to each other and to the chimney with lengths of frayed rope and held flat at the edges with stones that threatened to roll off the roof at the least provocation. The windows were dust-streaked, their lower portions heavily caked in a rind of dried mold. When it wasn’t blistering hot on the reserve it was oozing damp.

            Maureen pulled on the doorknob. It wiggled like a loose tooth. The door shook on its hinges, locked. She’d half-expected it to be. She stepped off the landing onto gravel and moved to the nearest window. She leaned close, cupped her hands to either side of her face as she peered past the grime. A wood-paneled counter jutted from the near wall and cut the office into two, unequal parts. Nearest the door, in the larger share of the office, was a sofa as worn as the building in which it squatted. A couple of rough-looking armchairs were wedged apart by a small table buried beneath a stack of magazines. A fan hung from the ceiling, stirring the air above the chairs. Two desks filled the space behind the counter. Both were swamped under heaps of papers. Even the spindly chairs behind the desk had been enlisted to keep documents off the floor. On the counter- as bare and neat as the desks were cluttered- an answering machine winked from its round, red eye: three quick, three slow, three quick. A distress call to the nearby fax machine, but its single, green light glowed steady, unmoved.

            Maureen got back into her car and drove further into the village. The few people who had reason to be in the open glanced up, then quickly away as she passed. Every Tse Wets Aht, it seemed, had memorized Directorate staff and their cars. Most avoided her. That was what they paid their Chief for. She didn’t blame them. On the contrary, it was a luxury she envied, most days.

The gravel on the next turn had never known pavement. It was grooved by spinning tires and gullied through the last rains, a faded memory in most of British Columbia and Washington State. Her car bumped over the ruts and nosed down a sharp decline. On one side was forest, thick to the road’s edge. The road took back most of the elevation she’d gained on the way in, insisting on the refund in half the distance. The houses here squatted only on the waterfront half of the road, spaced as if proximity to water lessened the need for the intimacy of encroaching neighbours.

            Maureen turned into a driveway that ran toward a cedar shake house that someone had recently painted forest green; she could almost smell the paint in the hot, dry air. White trim, toothpaste bright around large windows, attracted sunshine as flowers attract butterflies. She parked behind a dusty Ford pickup. From its resting place beneath a single, gigantic Douglas fir, a dog charged, barking in rage even as the rope attached to its collar tightened. It maintained an eager tirade a dozen feet from her car door. Maureen hesitated only long enough to be sure of the rope. She stepped over a flowerbed whose bright yellows and alpine blues mocked the dull browns and dusty greens surrounding them. Marigolds, lobelia and geraniums sparkled from a recent soaking.

            “Quiet,” Maureen said as she walked a hand’s span from the dog’s snout. She’d never liked dogs, and this one confirmed her long-held suspicion that the species was at the core nasty as well as mentally deficient. This one in particular, with its blue-tinged coat and black ears, would not have been out of place in documentary footage of the hunting dog packs of the African savannah.

            A girl burst from the front door and flew past her on the steps without a second look. She ran to the dog and grabbed its collar and dragged it back to the tree. The animal relaxed, its fight gone, and panting, followed the girl into the shade. It glared at Maureen once, over its muscled shoulder, but the girl scratched its chin as she scolded the animal and its ears came up, its tail wagged, happy to be attended.

            “Good dog. Good Bitch,” she said. She looked back at Maureen. “You can go in, Gramma’s out back. I won’t let Bitch go. Unless you come for money.”

            “No,” Maureen said. “I’m not here for money.”

            “You’re from the government,” she said and smiled. Her fingers kept moving across the dog’s spotted coat.

            Maureen’s jaw clenched. “Sort of. I’m from the Directorate.”

             “Same thing, Gramma says.”

            “We’ll see,” Maureen said and turned to climb the front stairs.  

            It was cool inside. It smelled of cigarettes and of smoke- good smoke, cooking smoke-drifting beneath the tobacco scent. On the wall opposite the front door a sharp, curved beak thrust outward beneath black, almond-shaped eyes. The wood of the mask was smooth, the color of deerskin and as supple to look at. Black feathers had been set into the rim above thick, red-painted eyebrows. Maureen moved closer and let her fingers caress the beak. The wood was new; she smelled a lingering hint of cedar in the air around the mask. She’d been mistaken, it was Raven watching her, not Thunderbird as she’d first thought. Raven the Trickster. Raven the Wise. Raven the Mischief-maker. She squinted at the subtle facets of carved cedar, came back to the detail around the bird’s eyes. She was drawn into the flat blackness of each orb. The hairs on her neck stood on end, as if surprised by a sudden chill. She shivered, blinked and stepped away.

            Bare wood floors, smoothed by time and traffic, creaked under her weight. The hall ended at a kitchen. Through the windows Maureen glimpsed the Slough and beyond it, the boxy structure of the mill.

            “Chief Davis?”

            Music played softly, she heard it as she crossed into the kitchen. Fats Waller. There was a low purring in front of the melody, on key, husky- a blues singer on her day off. It grew louder, heckled by quick footsteps. A woman appeared at the back door. She was tall, very thin, her denim jeans snug across hips and thighs. The sleeves of her black cotton shirt were rolled to the elbow, revealing scarecrow-thin forearms the hue of oiled teak. Her hair was pulled back into a long, grey-streaked braid, so tight it teased the lines beside her eyes into razor-thin checkmarks. She could have been thirty or fifty. An open can of beer and a lit cigarette wedged between two slender fingers in one hand. In the other she clutched a small pail of potatoes, their lumpy, oatmeal flesh smudged with drying soil. She appeared untouched by the heat.  When she saw Maureen she stopped humming and the house became, between the notes of the music, completely still.

            “What are you doing here?” The music careened on without her. She put the potatoes down next to the sink. She leaned against the counter, took a sip from her beer and folded her arms across her chest.

            “I’m sorry showing up like this,” Maureen said.

            “You will be if you keep me from making lunch. I gotta lot of work to do this afternoon and there’s council tonight. How’d you get by Bitch? Taylor.” She nodded as she answered her own question.

             “Good watch dog,” Maureen said. “Not crazy about the name, though.”

            “She’s a mean bitch of a dog,” Chief Davis said. She raised her cigarette. “Been that way since she was born.” She coughed. “Figured why not call her what she really is? Anyway, she’s what we need around here.”

            “Protection?”

            “Conviction, more like,” Davis said.

            She propped the cigarette over the lip of a narrow shelf behind the sink and took another sip of beer. She set the can next to the cigarette and turned on the tap. Water splashed over the potatoes. “She reminds me to speak up for myself.”

            “Chief Davis, I-”

            “Josephine. I’m not working. For a few minutes anyway.” A wet sound, nearly a cough, lodged in her throat as she laughed. “Friends call me Jo.”  She began to scrub the potatoes with a brush fished off the bottom of the sink.

            “But Josephine,” Maureen said. “I am. Still working, that is.”

            Davis’ shoulders straightened, but she kept scrubbing, her back to Maureen. “What do you want?”

            “You’re President of the Federation, so I’m coming to you. It’s your negotiating team.” Heat poured off her skin, settled under her arms and below the collar of her blouse. Perspiration collected like dew on her eyelids. She passed a hand across her face to wipe it away.

            “My team?” Davis turned, ignoring the water running in the sink. “Exactly what part? Twenty-three First Nations, each with its own representatives. How am I supposed to keep them together? Half of them forget to show up on their days and the others bitch ‘cause they want all the meetings scheduled for Vancouver so they can stay in a good hotel and order room service and watch pay-movies all day and send their per diems back to their families. And I don’t blame them- any of them. Not when you live in a house without running water- some don’t even have electricity. It all gets to be too much.” She sighed heavily. “They forget there’s supposed to be an end, a finish line. That there’s an agreement to finalize. See this?”

            She gripped the end of her braid and twisted it toward Maureen. She pointed to the pewter strands threaded between black. “I get more of these every bloody month. It killed Matthew. I’m trying to keep it from killing me.”

            “I didn’t know him,” Maureen said.

            Davis met her glance, held it for a long moment. Her right hand traveled toward the cigarette on the edge of the sink. Maureen thought she saw a tremble as it hovered over the half-finished smoke.

            “He was a good man, Matthew Ray. Before your time. The best,” she said, exhaling heavily. The smoke curled above her head then broke apart in the breeze that came in the window. “He built this Federation out of nothing. That was how we got us a Framework.” She shook her head, and the braid rippled. “I try not to let him down, but sometimes I think I should break us up and go it alone. Let the bastards win.”

            “Which bastards?”

            Davis’ eyebrows arched. “Good question,” she said. She found a knife in a drawer near the sink and carved the potatoes into chunks. “You got a decision to make, Maureen Cage,” she said over her shoulder. The cigarette wagged between her lips. “Lunch’s in fifteen minutes, if the damn stove works. You gonna stay or hit the road?”

Chapter 7

            “What the fuck do you want?” The door opened just wide enough for a pale face to lean around.

     “I need to talk to Raven,” Maureen said.

     “She’s not here.” The door started to close. “Fuck off or I’ll call the cops.”

     “I already did,” Maureen said.

     The door stopped short on its arc. A woman’s face emerged from the dimness. She blinked in the sunlight. Her streaked blond hair hung lank to her shoulders. She squinted and licked her lips. “What the fuck for? She hasn’t done nuthin’ wrong.”

     “I need to talk to her, Candy.”

     “How’d you know my name?” The voice became shrill. A sour smell leaked through the door, the ammonia smell of dirty diapers, cross-stitched with just-lit pot.

     “The Raven told me,” Maureen smiled. “Can I come in?”

     Candy shot a glance over her shoulder. She shook her head. “This isn’t a good time.”

     “She knows me from Port. It’s very important.”

     Candy sniffed, rubbed a hand across her face. She leaned against the door frame, nodded once, then shook her head. “Just fuck right off, okay?”

     “I can’t, Candy,” Maureen said. She inhaled. “I need to know what happened to Henry. Go ask her. I’ll wait.”

     Candy began to cry. Her head sagged against the edge of the door. Her body shook. “I can’t do this,” she said. “Please, don’t make me do this,” she whispered.

     Maureen grabbed the door. “Tell whoever’s beside you to leave you alone.”

Chapter 4

            Maureen’s indrawn breath sounded like it was forced through a bellows. “Sarah.”

            “Don’t look at me, I don’t handle courier shit.” Cohen threw down her pen and raised her hands, palms out, like a shield.

            “Well it’s not me, if that’s what you mean,” David Chen said from the other end of the table.

            “Forget it,” Maureen said. “Let’s try figure out what happened.” She slid into her chair and with hooked fingers clawed at the itch in her scalp. “Either way, we’re wearing this. I just want to know how one of the Principals’ major position papers can get missed. Sarah, why did I waste my time analyzing an outdated report?”

            Sarah stared at her hands.

            “Figures,” Maureen said.

            “What does that mean?” Sarah’s head snapped upward. She glared at Maureen through thick-rimmed glasses that reminded Maureen of the ‘Sixties and black-and-white televisions. Her thick blond curls quivered when she was offended, which was pretty much every time she spoke to Maureen.

            “It means I think you tried to screw me. I think you tried to make me look bad at this table. Again.”

            “I got news for you,” Sarah said, sweeping a loose strand of hair off her face. “I don’t have to lift a finger to make you look bad.”

            Maureen shoveled the heap of papers in front of her into her open briefcase. She stood over Sarah, Templeton’s copy of the latest report rolled into a baton in her hand. “Here’s how it goes. You and David will break down the clauses. Finish the analysis. Then you’ll make up twenty-six clean sets. You have until five tomorrow.”

            “I don’t think we-” 

            Maureen’s hand sliced through the air above David’s head, silencing his protest. The rage bottled up inside her from the morning session filled her lungs.

“It’s been five weeks since Lee-Anne quit,” her voice rose toward a shout, “and I’m trying my best but I can’t do everything and you’re not giving me a chance. Nobody misses her more than I do. If I knew where she was I’d drag her back myself. You don’t like it? Tough! Call RG. Cry to him, you’ve done it a dozen times since he promoted me! But until he fires me you both have a helluva lot of work to do!”

Slamming the door behind her was the high point of her day.

Chapter 5

            Maureen stepped out of the car. It was a beautiful morning despite the pounding in her head and the queasiness in her stomach. She stepped around the back of the Subaru and popped the rear hatch. The spare tire filled the well beneath the carpeted floor. She fished the jack handle out of its plastic case and laid it along the length of her forearm, its angled end cold in her hand. The hatchback door closed with a soft snick.

     “What’s that for?” Josephine nudged her door shut with her hip and ducked to avoid trailing blackberry canes.

     “Crucifixes for vampires,” Maureen said, making a short, chopping motion with the jack handle. “Blunt objects for crazies.”

     They crossed the street. Breathing became difficult, as if a solid mass had formed in Maureen’s chest. The jack handle suddenly seemed too heavy to lift.

     “I’ll go to the back,” Josephine said and disappeared around the side of the house.

     Maureen eyed the front door. It was badly in need of fresh paint. Set at the back of a deep porch it lingered in a shade that morning had not yet routed. She set her right foot onto the lowest step and shifted her weight forward. The dry wood pinched; it groaned and relaxed as Maureen climbed. She pressed the doorbell and waited. Nothing. She exhaled. Nobody home. If true, she could do it again, to be sure, with the same result. She held her thumb against the button. The chime brayed endlessly into the silence. Relief flooded through her, dissolving the weight behind her ribs. She was about to kill the chime when the walls shivered. Something inside moved. Her thumb jumped off the button. Her hand tightened on the jack handle as footsteps pounded toward the door.

 
Chapter 6

            Sweltering. Muggy. Sauna. She’d used those words with Helen and Anne, trying to describe to two confirmed and stubborn city-born women too busy to travel what summer in Port McKenzie meant. The words had seemed wholly inadequate inside her drafty living room two blocks north of West Broadway, where they drank Earl Grey tea and listened to the rhythmic tap of a spring rain against the windows. She’d found Helen a sweater and draped the limp wool over the woman’s bony shoulders and told stories of the hotel’s broken air conditioning system and the airless meeting rooms on the Tse Wets Aht reserve.

            “It stinks,” she’d said. “The whole valley smells like a chemical factory.”

            Maureen hesitated under the hotel awning, scrounging her sunglasses from the bottom of her purse. “And it’s dirty. No matter what time of year,” she said aloud.

            The acidic tang irritated her nose. It got into her clothes and under her skin. Her eyes itched. She stepped into an asphalt parking lot whose surface radiated stored heat. She bowed her head to minimize the glare. The scuff of car tires and the pock-marked dimples of stiletto heels scarred the sun-softened bitumous. The weight of the air made breathing difficult and reopened her pores, immersing her in sweat. She took quick, timid steps across the lot, her toes curling to grip the insoles of her shoes.

            The parking lot was halfway to deserted. Her ‘91 Subaru hatchback waited near the wide sidewalk that cleaved hotel property from Main Street. Maureen opened the rear driver’s side door, turning away from the rush of oven-hot air. She placed her briefcase on the back seat and fished her keys from her purse. A blur at the edge of vision made her step back.

             “Sarah.”

            “How crazy are you?” Sarah’s voice was strained, edgy. She partially eclipsed the sun.

            Maureen shielded her eyes against the blinding light that encircled Sarah’s face. A dazzling halo a la Michelangelo or Botticelli.  “Who’s stalking who?”

            Sarah stepped closer, brushing against the Subaru’s fender. She yelped and sprung away from the hot metal. She rubbed her hip. “Lee-Anne never treated us like this.”

            Maureen tore open the driver’s door. A river of heat swirled past her face. “Maybe because you weren’t after her job,” she said. “Maybe because Lee-Anne didn’t have to watch her back every day.”

            The upholstery burned the backs of her legs. She slammed the door. Dust motes catapulted off the side-view mirror and hung in the air, so white they burned her retinas. When she looked at Sarah a film of tiny spots floated in front of her angry features. “I’ll see you at eight-thirty tomorrow.”

            “Lighten up for fuck sakes. Stop trying to change everything.”

            Maureen twisted the key in the ignition. Her foot pressed too hard on the gas pedal and the engine howled. “Lighten up?” Her voice was tinged with hysteria. She gripped the gear shift and wrenched it into reverse. The front wheels carved matching capital C’s into the asphalt as they scythed past Sarah’s knees.

            “You got no goddamned clue,” she said, biting her lower lip to hold back the banshee struggling to tear free and plunge screaming into Sarah’s throat.

Chapter 2        

            This kind of silence had humiliation written all over it. She stood, exposed before her peers- the lawyers, professors, scientists, the high-priced consultants. Naked couldn’t feel worse. Maureen scanned the document for its file number. Breathing was difficult. Her eyes read the heavy, black numbering in the upper right-hand corner but she didn’t believe them. They had to be wrong. FN010801.091, so far so good. Rev. 0408.1. There. It’s what she’d worked from, prepared for. And they were telling her it was wrong? No way. She didn’t know a second revision even existed. Her throat was as dry as ashtray sand. She reached for the water glass at her hand but it was already empty. Only nine-fourteen in the morning and perspiring already. Most days she could make it to noon before the stress sweats appeared as black crescent moons under her arms.

            “You’re working off the old proposal, Ms. Cage,” Keith Templeton said with exaggerated patience. He smiled, picked up his copy and set wire-rimmed reading glasses across a wide, boxer’s nose. He read to the assembled delegates who formed an uneven rectangle around the banquet room. “Pacific Coast Tribal Federation. Subsurface Mineral Rights. F-N-Zero-one-zero-eight-zero-one-point-zero-nine-one, revision zero-four-zero-eight.  Point two,” he said, with extra emphasis. “First item on the agenda- unless today isn’t Thursday.”

             Half-suppressed laughter rippled around the room. Templeton glanced over the top of his glasses. “We sent it out ten days ago.” He let the report slap against the table and dropped his glasses onto the cover.  He sighed, shaking his head like a weary grandfather whose well of patience had gone dry.  “I suppose we could make copies here, if we have to,” he said, to scattered chuckles.

            Maureen blinked. Her skin itched beneath her blouse, where her bra strap rubbed against her shoulder blades. She coughed. “May I see it?”

            She stepped sideways, between her chair and the table, conscious of the dampness welling in the creases of her armpits, behind her knees, at the small of her back. Her hand trembled as it received the report. “Thank you,” she whispered, her voice deserting her. Her tongue was swollen in her parched mouth. As she crossed back to her end of the conference table she locked her vision onto the pattern embossed into the carpet. A flaming whip, just cracked, with orange sparks and yellow embers leaping from its tip. Maureen thought she would melt from the heat building inside her. A scarlet haze fell across her eyes.

            She scrambled behind the section of table reserved for Directorate staff. Directorate For Aboriginal Settlement. Or Dee-Faz, as everyone in the Land Claims Business called it. She snatched up her copy of the report and matched it to Templeton’s. Hers was different, the file numbers trumpeting obsolescence from the footer. Her briefing notes, claims analysis and supporting documentation were practically useless. She swallowed.

            “Perhaps- while we wait for copies of the correct version- we could isolate the common clauses,” she said, “you know, work off them.” She heard the catch in her voice and a fresh, scalding rash bloomed across her throat. They’d never go for it. It didn’t work that way.

            “Ms. Cage,” Templeton said, “my clients have put many hours of review into this document. I couldn’t even contemplate summing up the changes. We’ve done everything Dee-Faz  requires. Now I’d hate to waste the table’s time negotiating the wrong information because your office wasn’t better organized.”

            “My apologies to the Principals,” Maureen said. She did not dare meet their eyes. From the pinched, dry features of Leonard Thorne in his gray suit, Senior Provincial Negotiator and Deputy Minister who commanded proceedings from the right side of the room, to Carole Simons opposite him, Ottawa’s Chief Settlement Officer whose short matt of platinum hair was matched only by the unconventionality of her wardrobe. They hadn’t brought their teams to Port McKenzie to witness Amateur Hour.

             “We’ll straighten this out,” Maureen said. “The proper sets can be ready in an hour.”

            Templeton cleared his throat. “I’m sorry to belabour this, Ms. Cage, but that won’t do. The analysis alone will take hours, days perhaps. I trust the Directorate hasn’t changed course this far into the treaty process?” His smile tightened his jaw and made him appear- momentarily- younger than his sixty-seven years.

            “No.” Heat dripped from every pore. She felt she was dissolving before their eyes, soon to end up like the Wicked Witch of the West: a puddle of empty, rumpled clothes. “We’ll have supporting documentation ready by Friday’s session.”

            “Better make it Monday,” Templeton said. “Give the Principals some confidence your office has done due diligence.”

            A lone, fat bead of perspiration tracked down the side of Maureen’s face. It started above a faint, puckered scar at the verge of her hairline and at her left ear detoured toward her jawbone. She swept it away angrily with the fingers of her left hand.

            “Excuse me,” she said, clearing the shards of broken glass that lined her throat. “Cancel two days? It has already been a short week, what with the Monday holiday. We shouldn’t lose more than one day over this.”

            Templeton shrugged, turning to face the room. He raised his arms. “What say you?”

            Thorne nodded. “Monday. We’ll expect copies by Friday afternoon, to give us a chance to review them. Use the email directory.” He signaled his staff to gather their papers.

            Simons smoothed the front of a green paisley vest. “We’ve come a long way for nothing,” she said. “I’d prefer to sit tomorrow, but not if the paper’s raw. I can live with a Monday restart if the Federation’s counsel can.”

            “And we can,” Templeton said as he sorted his papers. “Keep that copy for now,” he glanced at Maureen, “but I want it back. Dee-Faz’s copy is somewhere. I’m sure you’ll find it. Eventually.” He snapped shut his leather attaché and led three Brown, Martin and Houseman associates toward the exit. He paused at the door. “In all my years I don’t think I’ve been party to such a performance,” he said. His tongue made a clucking sound against the roof of his mouth. “Unforgivable, really. What with so much at stake.”

Chapter 3

            Maureen pulled over to the side of Nelson Road, opposite the bird sanctuary entrance. Hers was the second car in line. The sun had climbed above the oaks on the eastern boundary of the marsh. It shone unchallenged into her eyes. She lowered the sun visor. The slanting rays caught a cloud of insects zigzagging through the air, rising out of the wolf willow and blackberry fringe. Birdsong as bright as morning drifted through the windows. She shut off the engine, left the keys in the ignition, picked up her coffee and cradled the cup with both hands.

     “The red house. She’s been there at least two days.”

     “But you haven’t seen her?” Josephine leaned back to get a better view.

     The place was small, more cottage than house, with faded white trim around old-fashioned windows. The curtains were drawn and through the smudged glass looked worn and stained.

     “No.”

     “Why here?”

     “Candy’s a friend, from awhile back, I’m guessing. Raven’s got a gig, later this week. She needs the cash, so maybe she intends to dance.”

     “Let’s get this done,” Josephine said.

     “Fine by me. I still have a ferry to catch.” 

The Raven Effect

A Novel

“All the world was in darkness...Raven plucked up the ball of light in his beak, flew through the smoke hole in the Sky Chief’s lodge and disappeared into the dark sky. Raven threw the sun high in the sky and it stayed there. Raven stole the sun from the Sky Chief and gave it to all the people, though his snow-white feathers were burned black by the heat of the sun. And the people looked into the sky in wonder, for they could see their world for the first time, the trees, the rivers, the animals.”

- Adapted from Raven Steals the Light,

Legends of the First Peoples of the Pacific Northwest.

_____________________________________________________________________________

BOOK ONE

Heat Stroke

Chapter 1        

            The August sunrise blazed through curtains thinned by age and careless, greasy hands. Maureen moaned softly, ground her palms into grit-caked eyes and crawled off the sofa bed, careful not to wake the man sleeping next to her. She snatched her clothes off the floor and locked herself in the bathroom. Her head hurt and her body ached. She shivered, scrubbed her bare arms with her hands. The face in the mirror was pale. Not just pale: she looked old. Bloodshot eyes dull, craving sleep, stared back at her, begging for comfort. Or was it rescue?

She leaned into the mirror and probed the skin along her jaw. It was puffy and loose. Another disappointment. Her fingers trembled. She was surely coming down with something. Or getting over someone? She shut her eyes tight, desperate for darkness.

     She needed a shower but couldn’t stand the thought of the spray rasping her flesh. She settled for brushing her teeth- without turning on the tap- without opening her eyes. Not yet on speaking terms with her reflection. She brushed her hair, sitting on the toilet, pausing often to rest her head between her hands. She wondered: if she barricaded herself in here- how long before they’d leave? How long before she’d have her room back, her solitude returned to her like a favorite sweater salvaged from the Lost & Found. But they wouldn’t and she knew it. They needed her. They’d gone miles out of their way to find her. Billy would break down the door if he had to. To stop her from abandoning them.

     She thought of slipping out. They were both still asleep. Maureen opened her eyes and stared at her dismal reflection. Hadn’t she done enough? She’d showed Billy the Raven’s hideaway. Let him take her on; let him be the hero. That was his job description- Big Time American Environmental Activist- not hers. Just quit Victoria and go home, hadn’t Helen and Anne begged her over and over? It was as good a time as any to start cleaning up the mess. She’d made a damn fine one the past two weeks; it would take months- years- to clean it up, to get back on track.

She stood back from the counter, unsteady on her feet. Her hand slapped the wall, searching for balance. But which track? Which life would she reclaim? The one she thought was hers was on life support. And the few options remaining weren’t great.

     Her legs wobbled as she stepped into her clothes, rumpled khaki shorts and a cotton tee shirt that stank of old cigarettes. She tossed her toothbrush into a cosmetic case bulging with shampoo and hand lotions and make-up and eye liners- stuff she hadn’t use for, anymore- and opened the bathroom door.

     Josephine was awake and sitting up in the double bed, her back pressed against the headboard. She glanced at Maureen, sniffed, picked up the remote and turned on the television.  “He’ll fuck anything with a hole and a heartbeat,” she said.

     “You’re speaking from experience?”  Three steps and Maureen skirted the sofa bed. Billy slept on his stomach, naked. Maureen picked the rumpled cotton blanket off the floor and flung it across his back. She retrieved her suitcase from the corner, beside the motel room door and tipped it over.

     “Where’s my boots?” Josephine watched the procession of channels as she stabbed the remote with her thumb.

     “End of the bed,” Maureen said. She tugged on the sloppy bureau drawers and dumped her clothes into the open suitcase. No folding, no arranging, just a pile in the middle heaped to overflowing.

     “Leaving, Cage?” Josephine crawled the length of the mattress to fish her boots from beneath the bed. They were black, sharp-toed and dusted with a fine, white grit. She used a corner of the top sheet to polish each one.

     “Why do you care?”

     Josephine spit on the sheet, kept cleaning her boots. “Just making conversation. We’re the ones what barged into your room without an invite.”

     “Billy told me. About what you tried to do. I’m sorry. That it didn’t work out, I mean.”

     “So am I.” Josephine slipped her right foot into a boot. Intricate stitching outlined a large bird on the outside panel, its wings outstretched, sharp beak gaping. Thunderbird. She pounded her heel against the carpeted floor to force in her foot.

     Billy flinched with each thudding blow. He rolled over but did not wake.

     “What burns me is they’re going to lie through their teeth, like none of it ever happened.”

     “You got nothing in writing?” Maureen crouched over her suitcase, clenching her teeth against the pain in her hip.

     Josephine snorted. “Not even a napkin. They shredded it all as they ran away.”

     “Billy said you got them to agree to an inquiry.”

     “Among other things. Let’s drop it, ‘kay?” Josephine tucked her jeans neatly into her boot tops.

     “I found the Raven,” Maureen said. “I showed Billy.”

     Josephine stood. She unwrapped her braid and dragged hooked fingers through greasy plaits. “Show me.”

     “Want a brush?” Maureen unzipped her cosmetic case and stood to hand hers to Josephine. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

     “I’m going to jail when they find me,” Josephine said. She took the brush and plunged it through rafts of black hair salted with grey. With each stroke her hair glistened, as if it, too, was emerging from slumber. “If I can’t get official answers I’ll get my own. This bitch knows.”

     “Leave it for Billy. Or the RCMP- Legare wants her too.”

     “No.” Josephine tossed Maureen the brush. “We need the truth. Not just the families, all of us. It’s our story now, and it needs an ending, not a line in a police report or on some bigoted, lazy-ass newspaper editor’s by-line. Then the Tse Wets Aht people can move on. We always do.”

     Josephine’s lips formed a thin, bloodless line linking the hollows in her cheeks. The hot, white light of morning deepened the wrinkles radiating off her upper lip and at the corners of her eyes. Scalpel-thin lines etched into her skin. She looked older than her thirty-eight years.

     Maureen hesitated, tapping the back of the hairbrush against her leg. She dropped it into the cosmetic case, snapped shut her suitcase and dragged it to the door. So much for the early ferry to Vancouver.

     “I’m finished in this business,” she said, sweeping her cigarettes off the table. She pulled a smoke out of the deck and offered it to Josephine.

     “So am I when they catch me.” The Chief of the Tse Wets Aht cupped her hands around the match Maureen struck. Her palms shone like warm honey at the verge of matchlight.

      “I’ve lost my job, my house is next. The RCMP think I’m a criminal. I’ve broken every blood oath and promise I made to myself.” Maureen plucked a smoke from the pack and waved it in the air between them. “Look at me! I smoke, I drink. Christ, I slept with him and I’m older than his fucking mother!”

     “Stop feeling sorry for yourself, Cage. Makes you more pathetic than you are.”

     “Screw it.” Maureen grit her teeth. She blew a plume of smoke into the air above her head and stuffed the deck into her shorts. “There’s a place near here we can get coffee to go,” she said, as her thoughts fled to when this nightmare began, and where she’d gone so wrong.

                 Upon retirement, Russ stopped.

Ceased. Desisted. Halted. Discontinued.  Ended.

Not just work- which had been his personal code for waking at five AM, shaving, knotting a striped tie over a hastily-ironed white shirt, downing one slice of dry toast highlighted with a skiff of peanut butter, driving the old Volvo wagon to the office, stopping en route at the tired-looking Tim’s for a medium black coffee, attending meetings, writing reports, approving expenditures, putting out office fires, sifting through dozens of emails, listening to dozens more voice mails, handling grievances, drinking ten cups of coffee, developing policies for his staff to ignore, scarfing a sandwich at his desk- usually around three- arranging the next day’s schedule, commuting home by six-thirty, eating dinner, often with only Jean for company as the kids were elsewhere committed, puttering in his garden until dark and falling asleep to the late news- but the rest of life along with it.

            At age sixty-four Russ quit.

            He didn’t take up remote control airplanes, auto mechanics, growing English tea roses, old-timer’s hockey, fishing, swimming, jogging, cycling, hang-gliding, stamp collecting, bird watching, RV-ing or line dancing: none of that. When Jean announced that his first pension cheque had appeared in their joint account Russ drove the venerable Volvo to the liquor store and stood in front of the single malt scotches with one fist jammed into the pocket of his baggy jeans as the other hand rubbed his unshaved chin. It was a decent selection for a small, suburban outlet, so he took his time, choosing at long last the fourth-most expensive bottle on the shelf: a twelve-year-old McCallans that retailed for eighty-nine dollars and ninety-five cents. He placed the liquor store bag in the back, carefully, next to the earthquake survival case (complete with flashlight, waterproof matches, first aid kit, spare batteries, bottles of God-knew-how-old water, spare underwear, brown socks, woolen toque and a serviceable golf shirt from a long-ago software consultant) and aimed the car in the direction of the mall and the tobacconists. There he selected a box of handmade cigars- Dominican, not Cuban- for one hundred and ninety-two-fifty, a guillotine cutter and a plain, pewter Zippo lighter that added eighty-four dollars and thirty-three cents to the bill.

            Once home Russ poured three fingers of scotch and a splash of room temperature water into his favorite coffee mug, the one he used only when on vacation (it had been given to him by Rebecca, his youngest, featuring one of his childhood comic book heroes slashing through the Universal Studios logo, a souvenir from the family’s last vacation together, some twenty-odd years ago), and parked himself on the cedar swing near the front door with a cigar gingerly plucked from its cedar-lined box, his freshly-fueled Zippo, the cigar cutter and a grin sloppily pinned to his oatmeal face.

            The next day was Tuesday. Russ returned to the swing with another scotch, another cigar and Monday’s recycled smile. Whether he noticed the dandelions poking between clumps of daisies and black-eyed Susan is uncertain: what is certain is that he was still grinning well after dusk, when Jean leaned out the window to ask him when was he coming inside and did he still want the plate of dinner she’d put in the oven three hours ago?

*

            Russ was parked on the swing when his flowers melted in November’s rains and the birch leaves had fallen, clogging the eaves. Terry the letter-carrier no longer spoke to him, just a quick, nervous nod as she retreated up the drive. Small birds accidentally brushed his uncombed hair as they zigzagged through the forgotten garden. His only concession to the changing seasons was a pilly, rancid wool sweater and a greasy, Sixty and Still Sexy ball cap that Jean had given him four birthdays ago. She let him be, figuring those forty years in government entitled him to some unwinding time. The window ledge of his workshop disappeared beneath a carefully ordered procession of empty scotch bottles from the renowned distilleries of Banffshire and Dufftown, but if Russ was conducting a taste test he kept the results to himself.

            Christmas came and the children returned home, anchored by their willing but wary families. News of Russ’s change had preceded their arrival. The adults formed a line at the laundry room window to watch him drink and smoke.

            “What the hell’s he staring at?”

“He doesn’t even read the paper.”

            “He’s lost it. Completely lost it.”

            “Maybe he’s sick. You know, cancer. Doesn’t know how to break it to us.” That offering from Benjamin, the middle child. His siblings glanced at each other, then rolled their eyes.

            “Dad hasn’t been to a doctor in thirty years,” Rebecca said. “How would he know he’s terminally ill?”

            Benjamin shrugged. “You know Dad. He just knows. Remember when you were in the car accident? Dad lives a thousand kilometers away, but he knew before the paramedics.”

“Quit it, you’re creeping me out,” Rebecca said, punching Benjamin in the arm.

            On his second day home David, the eldest, arranged two weathered Adirondack chairs around an old patio table in a dry spot under the back deck. He dragged a small electric space heater from the basement, placed so it blew warm air onto his father’s bony shins. The chairs were set so that Russ- and perhaps an occasional companion- could view the remnants of the garden, the raised vegetable beds he had tended carefully during his working life but which, since retirement, had been completely neglected. Withered tomato vines sagged against blanched bamboo stakes, gangly, limp limbs grateful for even indifferent support. Clumps of parsley had sprouted seed heads and sported an unruly, woody look.

            “Maybe guilt will snap him out of it,” David said. Jean shrugged and kept busy chasing after the grandchildren.

            Russ did put in an appearance Christmas morning. The kids held their collective breath and kept their fingers crossed. He played with his grandchildren, asked his grown children what was new in their busy lives. Hints of the familiar shimmered through his spare, halting speech, like some timid woodland creature coaxed into the open. But after the turkey dinner Russ fled back under the deck. A battered lantern on the table leaked a harsh, unflattering light. Jean slipped from the gathering to peer through the darkened laundry room window. Cigar smoke softened the view, smoothed the ragged furrows on Russ’s cheeks and smudged away the watery bruises beneath his eyes.

She clamped a trembling hand to her mouth and hurried upstairs.

             “It’s his voice I really miss,” she told her kids on Boxing Day. “He used to drive me crazy, his worrying about anything and everything.”

            “Is it Alzheimer’s?” David’s partner asked.

            Jean laughed, like glass breaking in the quiet of the kitchen. “No. He knows what he’s about.”

            “Then what?”

            “Why don’t you ask him?” Jean said, rising stiff from her chair to refill their coffee cups.

            The three kids made a pilgrimage. Benjamin set up two folding camp chairs under the deck. Rebecca took the empty Adirondack. The heater whirred under the table near their feet. They exchanged looks every time Russ’s hand, trembling faintly, lifted the tumbler to his chapped lips. Three cold cigar butts formed a lopsided triangle in the bottom of the ceramic ashtray.

            “We’re worried about you, Dad.” Rebecca spoke over the heater fan.

            “You look awful,” Benjamin added.

            “Mom’s worried too,” David said.

             Russ raised one mangy eyebrow.

            “She’s scared. She’s been crying,” David said.

            Russ held his empty glass. “Fill ‘er up,” he said, his eyes on David.

            “Get it yourself.” David’s cheeks reddened as he spoke.

            “Okey-dokey.” Russ pushed himself out of his chair and banged the back door behind him.

The rain that had started in the morning intensified, pounding the deck above their heads. The kids stared into space, as if out of the sudden quiet shyness came and settled over them. Russ returned with a fresh scotch and a new cigar. Russ lit the Dominican, his cheeks a flapping bellows as the cigar tip began to glow. He settled himself into the chair back, rolling his narrow shoulders as if trying to reach an itch.

            “What about golf? You used to love your Saturday games,” Benjamin said.

            “You used to have all these hobbies. Interests,” Rebecca said.

            Russ cleared his throat. He nodded. “Got pretty good, too.”

            “Then why stop?”

            Russ started to smile, held each child’s gaze in turn. “Look at those tomatoes.” He used his chin to point out the lifeless vines; their scatter of stunted, mucous-green fruit split and scabbed by the cold. “Pretty fair harvest this season. But those stragglers there, they missed the sun. Late fruit. No good for anything but the worms.” He sniffed, wiped his nose with his sleeve.

“People are no different. Their fancy holidays in Tuscany and their fishing boats and their bank accounts are the bamboo, propping them up. Fooling them into believing they still got some living to do. Truth is they’re already dead. Just like those tomatoes.”

Russ slurped his scotch, set down the glass with a contented sigh and smiled brightly at each of his grown children.

“Late fruit, plain and simple.”

*

The kids and their families escaped the day before New Year’s, one day before the blizzard. It was a bad one, lasting a week, the worst in twenty years. It buried the city under five feet of snow. The airport shut down, Transit Authority canceled the buses, even the ferries were stranded, unable to load or unload at either end. Only David blamed the storm for his father’s death; he’d still be alive but for the impassable roads that bogged down the paramedics. After awhile Jean gave up arguing with him.

            Jean found Russ. It was long dark; he’d missed his usual bedtime. She thought he was asleep in his chair, but the neat cylinder of ash on the concave slope of his chest and the spilt scotch around his slippered feet told her otherwise. The paramedics turned their gurney into a sled to get Russ up the driveway, feet first, their bulky, mute silhouettes splashed red by the flashing beacons on the ambulance roof. Jean watched from the front window, her eyes puffy, her arms criss-crossing her chest as if her heart might break out through her ribcage. As the paramedics struggled up the drive with their load she remembered the last big storm, how Russ had towed David and Benjamin up the street on their toboggan, all howls and tumbles and laughter; three blond boys, their happy faces slapped by the cold, by the careless joy that comes the morning after a snowfall.

            After the ambulance left Jean went to Russ’s cabinet and poured a generous scotch. Its peaty aroma flooded her nostrils. She lifted a cigar out of the humidor, plucked it from its neat, cedar-lined nest and bit off the cap with her front teeth. She used Russ’s lighter to transform the end of the cigar into a dime of glowing ash. A tornado of grey smoke rose to hold up the bedroom ceiling as she dialed David’s home number with her free hand.

      James used his considerable allowance to buy fireworks, passing over the candy bins on our twice-weekly trips to the store. I was confused. How did other working class revolutionaries fund their acts of disobedience, if not for benefactors among the Capitalist class? I had a lot of questions to ask Grampa. James also won access to his father’s considerable supply of Guy Fawkes fireworks. They were intended for his staff at the mine, to be divvied out the night before the celebrations. James siphoned what he could, at considerable personal peril. We stored them in a sack in the garden shed. James stuck a padlock on the rusting hasp and on breaks from digging and reinforcing our tunnel we would go to the shed, unlock the door, dump the sack and spread the explosives on the stone floor and examine them like archeologists drooling over a mother lode of fossils. When we grew tired from digging we scrounged lumber from around the property to reinforce the tunnel roof. Our Parliament began to take shape out of birdhouses that had blown down in the last big wind and were waiting for a handyman’s attentions. Our results  looked more Frank Lloyd Wright  than Tudor-Baroque opulence, but for James and myself our efforts were exactly what we wanted and deserving of every bit of Cherry Bomb Justice we could muster.

                                                                        *

            My mother chose to make her mark by marrying my father, an immigrant she’d met in the Ocean Falls of 1958.  Then it was a booming coastal town of five thousand, clustered around the Crown Zellerbach mill. Today there’s scarcely two hundred hardy souls there, living in the few homes not bulldozed in the ‘seventies by a shameful government who tried to erase the town from both the map and the province’s memory. My father was a married immigrant when he arrived by seaplane in 1953. But he divorced Helga and she moved to Vancouver Island where I hazard she never forgot him, no matter how hard she tried. Just like my mother never forgot him, until the cancer took her; though she’d stayed with him twelve years longer than Helga and had his children so it’s no wonder the cost for her was much greater. Seventeen years of exposure to his unfiltered malice.

            When my parents got engaged my grandfather refused to let my father into his house, until he had done the right thing by his daughter. I wondered if it was because my father was the son of aristocrats, too bourgeois for Grampa’s socialist leanings. It wasn’t that complicated. When my father arrived on the doorstep my grandfather saw an adulterer first, bourgeois second. When they got married my grandfather’s house was theirs, and he swallowed his misgivings of my father’s politics. He never stood between them, not even the first time my mother appeared on his doorstep with a savage redness on her face: that ‘just-slapped’ look we took turns wearing when we made the mistake of talking back, speaking out, or laughing too loudly.

            It was my father who nursed the grudge. He never forgave the Blacks, as a family. Maybe for being a family. In his mind they were immigrants too, recent ones by Canadian standards.  He often wondered aloud how it was that every descendant of Scottish blood knew it like gospel that Scotland was special, as different from England as the thistle is from the rose, but refused to see a similar relationship between Austria and Germany. I think it was those newsreels of adoring Austrians lining the wide streets of Vienna in 1938 that caused the confusion.

                                                                        *

             The afternoon of the bonfires James and I had much to do. We met under threatening skies at the wall that skirted the orchard. Our excavation gaped like a yawning, toothless mouth. Six feet high, three feet wide, extending as deep into the slope so as to swallow James and I both, lying head to toe. It was a miracle it never collapsed as we dug around the single, doubtful post we’d found to hold up the plank roof. The temperature dropped and it hadn’t rained for a week. Cracks began to show in the earth near the edges of the roof, where the boards ended. There was no telling how long it would hold.

            It took three trips by wheelbarrow to get Parliament, Westminster and Buckingham Palace to the high side of the wall. We pushed our structures into the centre of the undercut, using shovel handles so we wouldn’t add our weight to the thin crust of earth above the tunnel. James donated a half-dozen French Dragoons from his tin soldier collection. They guarded the central courtyard of our doomed government, though none very proper. We were too afraid of collapse to risk righting them. James did up Parliament in leftover yellow house paint. The oily smell stuck to my hands as we lifted Parliament off the wheelbarrow and set it at our feet. We  couldn't stop grinning.
      Throughout our mission we argued only once. Which flag should fly from the spire above Parliament? I’d suggested  the Union Jack, as we were in England. James, when it came down to it, couldn’t bring himself to demolish anything flying his country’s flag. We got drawing paper and drew the American flag, but when I observed that there were no kings in America, we copied the Italian flag from one of James’ father’s history books. It bored us. I suggested we try and draw the old Nazi flag and James’ eyes flashed. With great care we drew the black, four-legged  spider in its white and red web onto a pilfered pillow case. We stuck the flag to a bean pole and secured it with bent nails to the side of Parliament. The pillow case hung limp, nearly invisible on the bean pole, so we painted two more copies onto sides of the clock tower. We were satisfied we’d established a villain worthy of civil disobedience.

            When all was in place we rushed for the fireworks. It was growing dark and I was overdue at home. James was to meet his father at the Bellis bonfire near the river, over at the furthest end of the estate. We worked fast, sorting packets of fireworks. That afternoon James had bought four hefty Fat Boys that singly would have blown off a limb, had any of them misfired. We’d spent the day before braiding wicks together, wrapping different combinations in newspaper. Our plan was to demolish the roof support at the same time as the smaller bombs blew the birdhouses. Simultaneous explosion and collapse. There could be no survivors. In the chaos that followed a working class government would emerge to end all suffering and injustice. I could hardly wait to tell Grampa.

            We set the tunnel explosives in a crate James had painted red to look like a box of dynamite, and together we loaded, then steered the wheelbarrow over the bumpy, damp ground to the orchard. I slid the smaller packets onto the roofs of Parliament, while James wriggled into the tunnel to set the dynamite box. Once the wicks were laid out in serpentine trails we covered the tunnel entrance with old boards and set stones from the damaged wall to wedge their feet against the ground.

            I badly wanted to blow it up at once. Fat, intermittent drops of rain fell. A downpour would be the end of our plot. James disagreed, saying that we needed night, and that the fireworks would be dry inside their paper packages. We had to wait until the grown ups were at the bonfire singing and drinking and watching Guy Fawkes burn, so we could linger over the devastation and enjoy our triumph over evil.

            I hardly touched my supper, expectation ballooned in my stomach. As my family gathered for the hike to the bonfire, I slipped upstairs for my blotter and pencil. I needed to write about the sputtering wick, the blast, the shower of debris and the tunnel’s collapse. I would send the account to my grandfather, along with my artist’s rendering of the cataclysm.

            Mrs. Bone led us through the open gates to the Bellis bonfire. She called her flashlight a torch, and she used it to light the uneven ground before our feet. My father carried my baby sister. Our breath trailed behind in tattered plumes. Much of the neighbourhood was invited. Mrs. Bellis handed Barb and me mugs of hot cocoa, James’ father stuck glasses of rum-laced coffee in my mother’s and father’s gloved hands. James and I kept near the fringe until Guy Fawkes’ makeshift gallows ignited. The crowd cheered. Roman candles went off, galaxies of shooting blue sparks. James tugged on my sleeve.

                                                                        *

            I wriggle on the cold stones. My bum is freezing. James fumbles with the box of matches. We have no flashlight, no other light than the flare of the lit match and the faint glow of the bonfire on the other side of the house. James stabs the sputtering flame to the first wick, the one that climbs the bank to the buildings. The wick accepts the fire, begins its race toward Parliament. The second wick lights, vanishes between the old boards stopping up the tunnel. James hurries next to me on the wall. I stick my pencil between my teeth and plug my ears.

            The first wick is faster. There is a flash, then another, and the beanpole holding our flag whizzes past. It clatters against the wall, the first of many pieces of splintered wood to shower us. They are still falling when the boards burst from the tunnel ahead of a belch of orange flame. I feel a rush of air, cry out as something slams my shoulder, knocking me off the wall. I am looking up at blackness. I hear the ocean inside my head. I’m sure it’s James shouting that this was much bigger than we’d planned.

            Mrs. Bone’s flashlight is in my eyes. My father’s hands pick me up roughly, stand me on wobbly legs. James is sitting on the ground, his mother is holding a handkerchief against his ear. Broken boards fan from the blast, as if punched outward by a gigantic fist. Parliament is gone. There is a crater where the government once stood. I start to grin- what a blow for the revolution- but my father slaps me to my knees. He chases me home with the toe of his polished shoe.

            Our last chore Saturday morning, after picking up every fragment of wood, will be to fill the crater and pile up the stones. James and I will spend all day at our penance, speaking hardly a word. James has had a small piece of flesh taken out of his left ear. I have a bandage on my arm, beneath my coat, but that hurts far less than the three purpling stripes across the backs of my thighs and bum. My father’s punishment is swift, carried out in concert with the interrogation while my mother weeps behind her closed bedroom door.

            Mrs Bone, as soon as it is clear there will be no stay of execution, takes my sisters back to the bonfire to witness the remains of Guy Fawkes blacken and rise as ash into a starless Yorkshire night.

      If you have missed the first two installments, see previous posts! below is part 3 of 4....happy reading....!

     My grandfather ended up a socialist because he couldn’t afford to lose his teaching job if it were learned he was a Marxist. Tough enough being a card-carrying member of the CCF. He marched in strikes- didn’t really matter whether it was longshoremen or machinists or postal workers, the working man’s struggles crossed vocational lines. He attended union meetings and was elected president of the BCTF for a stint in the ‘fifties. My grandmother lost her teaching job as soon as they got engaged. That was 1930. Inequity angered him, whether the cold-heartedness of big business or the slap in the face of flagrant government patronage. He wanted fair wages and a decent standard of living for the working man. Growing up in a farmhouse in Trail- where winters meant shaking the ice off his blanket and hair every winter morning- solidified a notion that nobody should have to go without. He forever carried the shame of throwing rocks at the Italian boys who lived in the Gulch as evidence that class distinctions were evil, and that oil heat and indoor plumbing and a good education shouldn’t be the preserve of the rich.

            My grandmother told me that when they were young, before my mother was born, evenings were spent in their kitchen, the lights dimmed by smoke as they relived the critical debates that wracked, weakened and ultimately doomed the International Socialist Movement. They would chain smoke, drink too much cheap rye whiskey as my grandfather pretended he was Friedrich Engels. His best friend Archie was Karl Marx. The most raucous debates centred on how to resist Franco and Mussolini and Hitler. Fight or passive resistance? My grandfather wanted so badly to fight, in spite of his librarian ancestors. Into his eighties his face still glowed when he spoke of the courageous Mac-Paps in Spain; the guerilla tactics of the IWW during the ‘twenties, the glory days of Syndicalism. When the subject of the Great Depression arose, his voice got husky and his eyes glittered with tears. He showed me the secret signs that wandering, jobless men left at the ends of driveways and along the sides of country roads: three rocks in a triangle-shaped pile meant a good chance of finding a place to sleep. I forget the rest, or which configuration was which, but through those signals even the uprooted became brothers. His one regret was his age: he was nearly forty when the war against Hitler began. He was too old for the front. He quit teaching to join the army, but had to settle for a quiet anti-aircraft station at Boundary Bay.

                                                                        *

            James and I became best friends. We explored the orchard and the formal garden and the woods that made up the Bellis estate. When I mentioned the horrible condition of Yorkshire miners he just laughed, which made my ears go red. It’s the prime minister’s fault, James said. They make the laws. My dad never breaks the law.  So we hit on our plan. We would blow up Parliament. Make new laws for everyone. Just like Guy Fawkes. We raced through the property, looking for the choicest spot on which to construct our doomed Parliament. We found it on the bank that separated the rose garden from the orchard, where a stacked stone wall had crumbled away over the years. Nobody had bothered to rebuild it.

            We cleared out the loose rocks and began to excavate. We borrowed shovels, a mattock and a bucket from the garden shed to remove the soil. Every weekend day and weekday evening, until dark, we laboured. There was a sense of urgency: Guy Fawkes Day was less than three weeks away. No matter the weather went sour. We dug, widening the tunnel so that only the thinnest earthen roof remained, upon which our Parliament would perch. My hands got blisters. We swore my sister to secrecy. James’ parents showed no interest in our undertaking. Each evening at supper time we returned to the main house covered in dirt, to wash and change, but no explanation was demanded and none given. My own mother was less liberal, as I had few clothes, but James loaned me gray shorts and another white shirt. Except for my shoes, which I had to polish every night before bed, my school uniform remained unharmed.

                                                                        *

            My father’s one regret- besides getting married and having children before he earned a PhD and landed a principal’s position at a Vancouver high school so he could join the Arbutus Club and drive a Chrysler New Yorker- was that he was too young to fight in World War II. On the side of the Wehrmacht, defending the Reich from the Stalinist hordes. He’d been sent to live on the estate of a family friend near Budapest, but in 1944 was forced to flee the advancing Russian armies. Stories of his teen years were of air raids and occupation: stealing mouldering cabbages from the Russians after the fall of Vienna. The conquering army were young men from Siberia who had never seen flush toilets, let alone heard Mozart or Puccini. They were curious, even friendly with the Viennese. Then the occupation force came, many who called the Ukraine home; men who had seen what the Germans had done to their towns and villages. They were not so gentle. Thousands of Viennese women were raped and died. For my father the winter of 1945 became an ordeal worse than five years of war. He survived by smuggling half-decent food and firewood from the Americans to his mother trapped in the Russian zone.

            Then his stories changed, they became bitter lectures on unfairness; how the undeserving grew rich without ever having to read Goethe in German or hearing Brahms or Beethoven. The fix was in. As his children we would never finish in the medals. My sisters and I endured, staring at our dinner plates, hoping that perfect posture would save us from a sudden, ferocious slap. As if we were part of the conspiracy. At bedtime my mother came to us to apologize, exhausted, her eyes puffy, her breath smelling of contraband cigarettes and rye, then, closing the bedroom door, she went alone into the night to face him.

        Before I met James I was lonely in Cudworth, with only Barb, my twin sister, for company. We tried catching robins in Mrs. Bone’s backyard by using the bottom of a wooden apple box, leaning it against a pencil around which I tied one end of a string. The pencil propped open the apple box, we sprinkled a few cookie crumbs on the ground- we couldn’t find any bird seed. We hid behind Mrs. Bone’s roses to wait. A robin came- once- and sat in the trap to eat the cookie bits. When Barb tugged the string, the pencil got stuck in the soft ground, the box fell sideways and  the bird flew away.  I yelled at Barb and she yelled back saying she didn’t want to play such a stupid game anyway.

            I drew pictures for my grandfather. Pictures of the brick row houses and the slag heap and of the tall iron-and-stone fence around the mansion across the street. My mother took my drawings, she ran her fingers lightly over the waxy bumps where I’d pressed too hard, leaving too much black crayon behind, and folded them over the letters she’s written to my grandparents. He’ll love them, she said. I felt duty-bound to keep Grampa informed of the working man’s struggles.

                                                                        *

            Of the nine offspring of  James Black and Margaret Griffiths only Albert- my Grampa-  produced children. By the time I was six the Blacks were a clan of grey-hairs with dark, shining eyes; past middle-age, their bellies showing the contented, well-deserved spread of retirement. The four eldest were born in the Old Country, when Victoria was still Queen. They made the ocean crossing with their mother to meet my great-grandfather, already ministering to his Baptist congregants in Olds, Alberta. The younger siblings- the three, including my grandfather, who survived infancy in rural Alberta and the family homestead in Trail- knew Britain and the monarchy only by the stories their elder siblings told. The women were teachers, all of them. Liable to break into verse without warning. Minnie, Dorothy, Nellie, Jean could recite Robbie Burns’ poems in Gaelic or as easily reel off verses of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats and Tennyson. They knew every tartan from Aiton to Young, and each of them delighted in plucking slender threads of Black family lore from the tangled cloth of Scotland’s past as much as they enjoyed tweaking the raisins from their scones at tea time.

            The men of the clan were educators also. Wiry men whose bodies hinted at a strength far beyond their compact frames. Men who could recite from memory:

He me relieved from my strong foes

An such as did me hate;

Because he saw that they for me

Too strong were, and too great-

or recount the clan killing at Glencoe and Bonnie Prince Charlie’s defeat at Culloden. Powerful were my grandfather’s hands: able to cut and stack a cord of green alder faster than men half his age, then handle an old vellum page of the Family Bible like it was a fragile petal brought home to his wife. These men were the not the sons of warriors; they were the sons of librarians and ministers, with a toughness twined around their bones that church and school had made presentable without extinguishing.

                                                                        *

            My father teaches at the Primary School, a brick island in a sea of black pavement. It’s where the older children go. My mother stays home with the baby. We never call her by her given name- Joan. We call her Schnecke, which means snail in German, ‘cause she crawls so slowly. My father has animal pet names for us all. Barb is Igel (hedgehog) on account of her hair is always pointing in every direction. My father baptized me Loewe, the lion. It’s a cruel joke. I’m scrawny and near-sighted, with dark hollows under my eyes and knobby, scraped knees from falling regularly at morning recess.  My scabs give my father an excuse to rail at my clumsiness and my mother another reason to rub my back as he floods my scrapes with iodine. As I bawl like a baby the muscles along the sharp ridge of his jaw tighten.

             I read somewhere not long ago that doctors did a test and found that iodine drizzled on an open wound actually slows the healing, compared with antibiotic cream or even just clean water and air. I think iodine as antiseptic was conjured up by men like my father, by Austrian Nazis drunk on green wine. If it doesn’t hurt like hell it’s not good for you. And even if it’s not good for you it’s fun listening to your pain.

            My father sometimes hunts us down at recess, gives us chocolate even as he finds something to lecture us on; his disappointment du jour. His eyes are Aqua Velva blue and too close together. When I see him without his eyeglasses I think of a mole,  with blue eyes the same colour of the ice the time we went to the Athabasca glaciers and I leaned over the rope rail and stared down the throat of a crevasse. White becoming blue turning to bottomless black. My English playmates linger a safe distance away. They don’t like how he tips his head back so he’s looking at them down the flat of his cheekbones.

            My father was eight when the Nazis annexed Austria. His favourite stories were of summers spent in the Hitlerjungend, stringing telephone cables. To him it was summer camp; a chance to get out of the city and sleep outdoors. He got pleurisy  in1942 and nearly died. But his uncle, a surgeon as well as a Colonel in the Luftwaffe, came back from Italy where he was stationed and stuck a needle the size of a bicycle pump between my father’s ribs and drained the fluid from his around his lungs so he lived.

            I know I should be grateful, retroactively. 

            James’ father is the general manager of the mine at the edge of town. James lives, by some quirk in the town’s development,  across from our row of houses. The Bellis house faces the river and is set far back behind a high iron and brick fence, but the main gates open directly across from Mrs. Bone’s house. A month or so after we arrived James saw me on the street, walking with Mrs. Bone to the corner concessioners. She went everyday, but on Saturdays she took Barb and me and bought us each a Crunchie. I’d never tasted the brittle toffee and smooth chocolate together; how the toffee melted on my tongue and the milk chocolate coated my mouth. Heavenly. Anyway, he came to call. I was invited to the house and must have made a decent impression, for James was allowed to have me over whenever he liked.

            My father was thrilled: we’d been noticed by the Cudworth elite. We were, somehow, special. But after a few weeks his tone changed. How had James’ father come by his wealth and standing? He was an unspectacular man, not particularly well educated or bred, which twisted my father’s guts with envy, and from envy it was a short, easy hop to ridicule. I was more worried about what Grampa would say: I remembered enough to know I was fraternizing with the son of a Capitalist. I told myself he would have encouraged the connection, for I was learning the workings of Free Enterprise. How else to discover its Achilles heel?

Guy Fawkes Day

          I am thousands of kilometres from home, shivering in a jacket no match for a Yorkshire November. James and a moonless night are my only accomplices. We are planning the utter destruction of Britain’s Parliament. Closer to the truth: Parliament is a rickety assortment of discarded bird houses perched above a tunnel carved into the slope that keeps James’ mother’s rose garden out of his father’s orchard. Six of James’ expendable, die-cast Napoleonic Dragoons are its only security, and they lean drunkenly at their guard posts. As a match flares I see into their flat, unblinking eyes. They know they’ve been betrayed.

            Ours is a plot three weeks in the making. It’s drizzling and cold the evening of Guy Fawkes Day 1966, in soot-tarnished Cudworth; a village comfortably lodged between the coal heaps south of Leeds. Rotherham, the place where Little John is said to be buried, is only a short car ride away. I’m six-going-on-seven, and am sitting on the broken stone wall next to our tunnel and would record every detail of this act for my grandfather if the light were better and my hand didn’t shake so badly from the chill. He waits in Vancouver for my report. It is for him- more precisely it is for him and the future of the International Socialist Movement-  that I risk so much.

                                                                        *

            When my father accepted a teaching exchange through the Vancouver School Board none of us knew he’d consigned us to a year of rain, itchy school uniforms and a sing-song Yorkshire accent that hung around my sister and me like a lost puppy three years after we’d left England. He’d dismissed my mother’s fears as typical Canadian parochialism, but barely two weeks into our stay it was his continental sensibilities that were offended by the damn rain, the screeching old women in the market and the ubiquitous soot of a village barely emerging from the business end of the Industrial Revolution. His complaints circled the air above our supper table, mingled with the steam rising off Mrs. Bone’s mashed potatoes. Our landlady said nothing in defence of the weather or her village, but smiled, the veins that criss-crossed the backs of her pale hands throbbing darkly as she served up seconds.

            Mrs. Bone was widowed a year before we arrived. There’s pictures of Mr. Bone in the drawing room, him with his woolen cap pulled low over his brow, unable to disguise his prominent nose and chin. I wonder if he sniffed out the collapse before it came down on him and six others as they packed in their shift? Mrs. Bone thinks so- she said he’d had a bad feeling the day before the accident. Mrs. Bone’s son lives in Sheffield, has a new baby, but they don’t visit often so she’s thrilled to have us. She tells my sister and me this everyday as we pass through the kitchen. We’re her first international tenants, and the first since she had the plumbing done. The old outhouse still squats in a corner of the backyard in the shadow of the high, brick wall that divides her property from her neighbour’s, but the door’s been nailed shut by the handyman down the row.  To keep us from falling down the pit, was her reasoning. Wouldn’t that be a nasty shock for your parents, seeing only your feet there wrigglin’ like the dickens when they looked down the hole? You wouldn’t stay long after that now, would you?

            Last June we packed three steamer trunks and six suitcases and rented our house and took the train to Toronto, a bus to Buffalo and, eventually, a liner out of New York bound for Southampton. It was one of my father’s dreams: crossing the Atlantic by luxury liner, so he booked us a cabin on the S.S. France, the longest passenger ship in the world, though not quite long enough for me.

            It took five days to cross the ocean, but less than one day for my father to find fault. Rich Americans, they quickly became the bane of his ship-board existence. Or more specifically, the family from New York at the next table. It was his mantra of discontent, listing their faults- and by extension- the suffering they inflicted upon him. They were loud, uncouth, uncultured, obnoxious, spoiled. Completely unworthy of their wealth. When my parents undressed in the dark of our cabin my father would reel off the day’s evidence to my mother’s slumping shoulders, as if she were judge and he the ambitious prosecuting attorney.

*

            It was my mother’s family came to the train station to see us off on our adventure. For the record, my father has a brother in Toronto, and his mother lives in Vienna. That’s all the family he’s got. She lives in a dingy apartment in Grinzing, a leafy suburb of Vienna best known for sheltering the middle-aged, stone-deaf Beethoven while he composed his Ninth Symphony, and for its Heurigers, vineyards that serve their just-pressed wine in cobblestone courtyards hemmed by chestnut trees, peeling stucco and old, shuttered windows. They were the favoured haunts of Austrian Nazis who congregated in brown-then-black-shirted mobs and drank wine out of heavy glass carafes and sang German folk songs with nostalgic bluster. My father longed to be home.

            My grandfather held my hand until the conductor herded us aboard. He crouched beside me and in my ear whispered of Yorkshire coal; how there were miners still working fourteen hour shifts underground, in bad air, inhaling coal dust. Silicosis is their only future, he said. He told me the way I could help them was to look and to learn and bring back my observations. He’d take it from there, he had connections in the unions. When you grow up you’ll fix that and more, he said. The working man needs new heros. Then, my mission objectives established,  he kissed the top of my head and pushed me into the confluence of my father’s impatient, windmilling arms.

Ditchpig Summer

            The biggest complaint of the Italians who work in the sewers is that waterworks is full of Canadians. What they really mean is we’re useless; that we’re a bunch of whining, pussy Ditchpigs. They may be right- not one of us likes working in shit- sorry- wastewater is what its called in the business, the technical term for everything that gets flushed, drained or dumped down the sewer.

For as long as anyone can remember Italians and Portuguese have exercised a monopoly over the North Vancouver Sewer Department, doing work the rest of us- sons and grandsons of Englishmen and Scotsmen, perhaps an occasional Norwegian, Ukrainian or misplaced Teuton- refuse to do. Nobody asks why this is; why the stiff-upper-lipped types drifted to waterworks while hot-tempered pilgrims from Calabria, Sicily and the Azores demonstrated an affinity for sewers. The guys say it’s because they’re good with cement. Every Ditchpig knows Italians are great at mixing cement and setting bricks. We’ve ample proof. Fidele, Franco and Pasquale can set a manhole base into a muddy hole eighteen feet below road grade in under an hour. You could eat off it when they’re done. They’re machines.

            I look at it the other way around. A short-list of incumbent Waterworks Superintendents and Engineers around Vancouver: Campbell, Miller, MacDonald, Graham, White, Johnson, MacDonald (again), McBride, Dunham, Robinson. So the question is less why Mediterranean Sea equals sewers, than why the North Sea equals waterworks? Like attracts like.  If the Ditchpigs didn’t have a Superintendent named Koenig I’d have spent my summers delivering pizza. Thanks to George I became the first Muehldorfer to gain membership to the North Vancouver Waterworks. To the Ditchpigs.

            The Ditchpigs call me Mully. There’s nicknames for everyone, some based on a name- like mine or Karl Burgermeister’s (Bergman)- others for an attribute or event (Johnny Too Tall, John the Elder or Ground Chuck, on account of our foreman running over a dog, a picture-perfect Shi-Tzu complete with ribbon and vest, as it waited in a crosswalk with its mistress). If they don’t like you the names are less flattering: Carlo Thick Lips or Fever- Brad’s, short for Saturday Night Fever because he performs at the local bars on Ladies’ Nights. Those ones rarely get used when the owner’s in earshot. Unless somebody’s really pissed off. One of the worst: Company Man. That’s Ron’s and he hates it. But the names- like most myths-contain some kernel of truth and Ron is in George’s office a lot and someone is usually in shit after. I won’t get into the names reserved for the Supers. None can be repeated around children.

            The Italians love it when Ditchpigs have to fix a broken sewer,  when the contents of a plugged pipe wash over our boots. Big men holding their noses against the reek, tip-toeing frantically from clinging shreds of toilet paper or getting the dry heaves over bundles of limp condoms and discarded feminine protection. To the Italians it’s sewer tinsel. It adorns the gravelled edges of the trench like beach treasure after a high tide. That’s why they call us Canadians. They shake their heads, muttering curses- Stronso, Testa di mingha- and shove us out of the way; jam another Rothmans between their dry lips as they go bare-handed to work.

                                                                        *

            When the regulars take summer vacation things fall behind, so Joop’s paired up with me. Joop- aka Magilla because he wears flannel shirts cut at the elbow,  revealing massive forearms so long he can scratch his kneecaps without bending over. He sports the same white hard hat as the cartoon ape and is nearly as smart. Joop’s a building-block of a man with wrap-around ears stuck to a cut-granite head. When George hired and assigned him to the sewers he must have been thinking melting pot, his small way of lowering the cultural divide between the two branches. Sure. He figured that Joop, being a little slow upstairs, might stand a chance with a crew of Italians. Joop’s impervious to the machine-gun insults and non-stop arguments. Water on rock, everything washes over Joop and he’s as happy, as easy-going as before.

            George was right. They kept Joop, hate it when he gets loaned to the Ditchpigs. He’s grown fearless in the surge of an unstopped sewer. He can rod a rancid sewer main, make the repair and sit down for lunch without washing his hands. There’s advantages to a little granite between your ears. Maybe in your guts, too.

            The two of us inherit Company Man’s truck and territory. We cover the East Side- from Lonsdale to Deep Cove- while he’s vacationing in Osoyoos. Company Man is twenty-nine and still lives at home. He’ll spend the week drinking beer on his powerboat as it drifts on the lake, while Marta, his fifty-five-year-old girlfriend- an artist refugee from Poland- sunbathes nude beside him. The only time he’ll start the engine is for emergency refills of beer and cocoa butter. I know this because next Monday he will tell me every detail as he’s inspecting his truck for damage. Company Man is very particular; he’s fastidious, a trait carefully disguised behind a rust-tinted mullet, Spinal Tap handlebar mustache and a wrestler’s upper body, complete with tattoo. A cobra entwined around a scimitar. He fainted when he got it etched onto his left shoulder, but claims that was on account of sunstroke and hangover. His last words Friday afternoon are to threaten severe bodily harm should I lose any of his tools.

            At five past eight Monday morning I grab a stack of complaints from Ground Chuck. Joop sticks his feet- he shows up to work in the rubber boots he’ll wear all day- on Company Man’s dash and settles his square ass on the bench seat. He sticks a hand down the side of his boot. He frowns at his wrist where it disappears into his boot, then his tongue gets into the act. We’re halfway into Lynn Valley when he grunts and removes his hand. There’s a stone the size of a robin’s egg in his fist. He must’ve driven in from Surrey with it biting at his heel.

            It’s a fair climb from the sliver of level ground on which our worksyard sits, into residential neighbourhoods chewed out of the mountain’s bony flank. Company Man’s truck coughs and wheezes on the hills. The address we want is mid-block, but water running over the curb gives it away. It’s a fair leak. This street is an older one, with plantings of mountain ash, holly and juniper crowding the curb. So many leaks happen under people’s gardens the department could start its own landscaping business, but most Ditchpigs will settle for a beer or three at the Coach House come quitting time.

            The leak is somewhere beneath a cluster of messy firs and an overgrown rockery.  The digging is worse than we thought. A single, low-lying juniper has overtaken even the weeds and its roots are everywhere we need to dig. Joop wants to cut it down, to widen our work area. He complains and curses at every branch that slaps him, every fir bough that sticks into his back.

            “It’s how we do it in sewers,” he says.

            “But not in water,” I say. “Somebody planted this stuff here for a reason.”

            Joop grumbles and is rougher than he should be with the branches.

            After an hour we give up and reluctantly I tell Joop to grab the Swede saw.

            “Told you.” He hacks off extremities of juniper until the shrub is a raw nub.

            “That’s better,” he says, kicking the stump. He squints at me. “You Canadians are too soft. Wusses.”

            “Maybe you should go back to sewers,” is all I can think to say.

            But the juniper’s roots are still firm in the rocky soil. We struggle to keep ahead of the water. Our pump- Ron’s pump- burns oil and quits regularly and one of us has to stand guard to keep it running. It dies a third time and when Joop gets it going our pathetic trench is full of water. Roots trip our shovels and bare, dead fir branches stick in our backs and faces and generally torment us, seeking revenge for Joop’s assault with the saw.

            Ground Chuck makes one drive-by. He stops long enough to lob a smirk from behind a curtain of cigarette smoke. He rolls his own. The thumb and first two fingers of his right hand are tar-stained. They match his teeth. Our suffering confirmed, he bobbles his head in our direction and speeds away. Ensuring his crews are simultaneously miserable requires much of his time and is the first line in his job description. Ground Chuck makes it a high priority.

            “We’re going to have to shut this main down,” I say after another hour of futility. It’s not something we’re supposed to do, but if we’re fast George will defend us to the housewives whose laundry is ruined. Officially he apologizes and when we’re back in the yard he’ll enjoy reaming our butts in front of the others, but secretly he loves inconveniencing taxpayers.

            Joop grabs a key out of the back of the truck and disappears down the street. I’ve found the leaking service, it’s close, but too much water and too many roots make it impossible to repair. I wait for the water pressure to die.

            “Is it down?” Joop asks over my shoulder.

            I didn’t hear his approach. “Both valves, Joop,” I say.  I straighten, unkinking my back. “You gotta kill it at both ends of the block.”

            “O yeah,” he says and retreats with the key to the far end of the street. Our shut-off keys are welded iron, five feet long, with hollow squares stuck to the business end. They fit over the operating nuts of valves that squat patiently under the road, waiting years for just such an emergency to malfunction, break or freeze shut and further complicate our lives.

            This time they work. The water pressure lessens, then stops. There’s a sucking sound, and the water in the hole vanishes. We’re pulling dirty water back into the system. Not good. I’ve never heard of anyone getting sick, but it might be luck or the Law of Statistical Averages in action and I’m not that good at math. I wave and crouch in the hole with my cutters and a hacksaw.  I struggle with roots, trying to find good copper past the worn and damaged section. The pipe is bright green- the green of cathedral roofs- and wedged tightly between stones.  I need tools, but Joop’s nowhere I can see. I climb out of the hole, check the back of the truck. He’s not there. I grab a bar, cursing him. I break out a rock outcrop to scrounge some space. The repair’s nearly done when a shadow falls across the hole.

            “Where the hell were you?” I shout without looking.

            Joop blinks. “I had to take a dump, Mully,” he says. “The old guy next door was nice enough to let me use his bathroom.”

            One day men will write songs about Joop’s bowels. When he’s on the construction crew no-one will use the portable john for hours after. We lost one traffic girl for good. We warned her not to go in, but she had to, she was doing a fair Flashdance impression when we saw her last. We think it’s the pickled herring or the butter cheese Joop eats everyday. Whatever the source, the result is the most unpleasant sensory experience life has to offer. His nickname should have been Two-Flush. I dread what that neighbour must be thinking, if he survived.

            “Jesus, Joop, couldn’t you wait ‘til we got back to the yard?”

             “No,” he says, and turns his back on me. “We do it all the time in sewers.”

            “Don’t touch anything!” I shout. “Get some pump gas on your hands.”

            “I washed ‘em,” Joop shouts, his shoulders hunched. I’ve offended him.

            “How?” I shout back. “The water’s still off.”

            Joop freezes.

            “Christ, Joop. The guy does you a favour and this is how you repay him?”

            He shrugs, grins. “I was wonderin’ what was wrong with his toilet.”

            “Turn the water back on. Then go back and apologize.”           

            “Sure.” Joop’s easygoing, never lets a setback get him down.

            I’m half-way through the back-fill when Joop returns. “Everything okay?” I stretch to ferret out the kinks in my back. I hurt it on the job last year and it’s never been the same.

            “Surely.” Joop’s wearing a satisfied smile. “He’s a Vet. Was in Holland.”

            “Great,” I say. “No hard feelings?”

            “You worry too much, Mully,” Joop says, and walks away with the Swede saw in his hand.

            “Quit giving me reasons to. Where’re you going?”

            “His tree’s too close to his water shut-off. His plumber told him to prune it. I said I’d trim it for him. Save him the trouble. No charge.”

            “I should hope not. Hurry up,” I say, and finish filling in the trench. The one good thing about working inside a jungle is nobody can critique your clean-up efforts.

            I’ve loaded the juniper branches and am brooming the boulevard where the pump belched mud when Joop returns. He hangs the Swede saw on its hook in the back of the truck.

            “Done,” he says with a smile.

            “Where’s the branches? Shouldn’t we take them with us?”

            Joop blinks. “I was thinking we should call Parks.”

            “Parks?” Alarm bells go off. “How much did you trim?”

            Joop’s face remains impassive, calm. He shrugs. “You couldn’t get a key on the valve at all.”

            A dozen strides down the boulevard and my stomach flips. A holly tree lies across the neighbour’s front lawn. All thirty feet of it, on its side. Its massive crown rests on the crushed lattice of the neighbour’s fence. The tree’s bigger than Company Man’s truck. It had to be a century old. Next to a white-fleshed, oozing stump is the freshly painted water shut-off cap, a bright, wet, fire engine red.

            “You can turn the water off now without getting scratched,” Joop calls from the cab.

            My legs are suddenly weak. “Did the homeowner give you permission?”

            Joop blinks, like I’ve hurt his feelings. “I wanted to surprise him.” He sniffs, wiping the back of his hand across his nose.  “You know, for stinkin’ up his bathroom.”