The Last of the Lumbermen Read online

  I’m dumbfounded. “You know how I feel about you,” I say. It sounds lame, and she doesn’t go for it.

  “I know you love me. But I also know you keep secrets.”

  “I had to. Or at least I thought I had to. Doesn’t everyone?”

  “Yes,” she answers. There is a long silence that’s more empty than tense. “Everyone keeps secrets. Maybe,” she adds, “that’s what’s wrong with all of us.”

  We don’t get time to talk about it. Gord comes in, moving like a cross between a wrecking ball and a whirling dervish, ordering people out of the room, including Esther, and demanding to see test results. It’s as if it’s not me lying on the table but a medical abstraction, a crisis, maybe an opportunity. I can’t read him at all, but I’ve rarely seen him this stressed out.

  “Not used to dealing with people who aren’t dead, I guess?”

  “You shut up,” he answers curtly. “For all we know you might be dead any second.”

  As I watch him peruse the data sheets the nurse gave him, I see his concern shifting to puzzlement. “Describe your symptoms to me,” he says. “And no jackassing around.”

  I give him the basics, but it doesn’t satisfy him. “Earlier,” he snaps. “What about yesterday, the day before?”

  I don’t want to tell him how fucked up I was after the Friday game, because he’ll be pissed. Then I remember Esther’s remark about keeping secrets. This doesn’t seem to me like much of a secret, and I’m certain it isn’t connected, but I tell him anyway.

  He interrupts me in the middle of it. “You silly shit,” he says, then hollers for the nurse, who is standing behind him. “I want X-rays on this man’s skull, upper back, and sternum. STAT!”

  He turns to me. “This might not be as serious as it looks,” he says. “But I’m going to give you something for the pain.”

  “There isn’t any pain,” I say.

  “There will be if you don’t button it and do what you’re told,” he says. I watch him turn to the nurse and say something I don’t catch. She leaves the room.

  She returns seconds later with a small syringe, and hands it to Gord. “This,” he says with a grin, “will make you relax.”

  I flinch as he punches the needle into my biceps. “Does this mean I’m not going to die?”

  “Who knows?” he answers. “If you are, I’ll try to let you know before your eyeballs roll up for the big plunge.”

  EIGHTEEN

  PALE WINTER SUNLIGHT IS streaming through the windows when I resurface from whatever it was Gord squirted into my arm. The twenty-four-hour wall clock claims that it’s seven in the morning, the sunlight and the unfamiliar windows tell me I’m in one of the wards, but it isn’t until I roll over that I discover why I’m awake. Gord is standing beside my bed, staring at me. I don’t think he’s been there all night, but somehow I’m not surprised to see him. The irritation is gone from his face, but he looks tired, and that reminds me that I’m not the only patient on his caseload.

  I don’t recall much after the sedative — bits and pieces of a gurney ride to X-ray, and later a moment when Gord pressed his big fingers into my chest around my breastbone. Even the load of painkiller he gave me couldn’t suppress the pain of that. But otherwise, there’s nothing. Not even dreams, good or bad.

  “I’m afraid,” he says, answering my question before I can ask it, “you’re going to live.”

  “What does that mean?” I want to know, still feeling groggy. “For how long?”

  “There’s absolutely nothing wrong with your heart, except that it’s as black and evil as it ever was,” he answers. “What you were experiencing were esophageal spasms brought on by a severely cracked sternum. Probably a present from Mr. Bellado on Friday night.”

  “Bastard,” I mumble.

  “Well, there’s another explanation, actually. None of these festivities would have been necessary if you’d admitted you were hurt on Friday night. We also uncovered,” he adds, “a reasonably serious concussion. You might have mentioned that as well.”

  “You know how it goes,” I say. “I had a few other things on my mind.”

  “So I understand,” he says, coolly. “Esther and I had a long talk after I figured out what your medical problem was. How does it feel to have that cat out of its bag after all these years?”

  It seems appropriate to play this with caution. “Which cat are you talking about?”

  Gord throws up his hands — a dangerous gesture in these cramped quarters — and sighs. “I’ve known as long as Esther has.”

  I can’t quite integrate this piece of information, so I change the subject. “Where is she?”

  “Here within the hour, I’d imagine. She didn’t leave until nearly four, but I can’t see her staying away much more than a few hours. I think,” and here his expression lightens, “she’s quite fond of you.”

  “Right now I don’t feel as if I deserve it.”

  “Maybe it’s time to start earning it a little more. Make some changes.”

  Before I can think of an answer — there isn’t one, really, and we both know it — he shifts topic.

  “Speaking of changes, I’ve got a few temporary ones you’re going to have to make.”

  “No more hockey, right?”

  He nods his head. “That’s one of them.”

  “For how long?”

  “Not as long as you deserve. A few weeks, maybe more. But that’s fine, because we’re going to need a coach. And a GM, until Jack is back on his feet.”

  “How is he?”

  Gord shakes his head. “If I let Milgenberger operate on Jack he might never walk again.”

  “Is Milgenberger that much of quack? I always thought he was okay.”

  “He is okay, for a GP. It’s Jack’s knee that isn’t okay. I’m having him flown to the coast.”

  “What about Junior?”

  “Oh, he’ll be okay. Nasty scar is about all. It isn’t like there was a whole lot of grey matter to damage in the first place. But he’s gone for a week, maybe two. Hard to tell with a concussion.”

  “We’re going to need players,” I say.

  “Yes indeed. I think that’s what a general manager is for.”

  WHILE I WAIT FOR Esther, I go over the list of things I’ve kept from her. It isn’t as long as it is fundamental: my identity, my finances, and, tied to my identity, where and what I did after I left Chilliwack.

  I’ll put them together for you. After I left Chilliwack I slingshotted across the continent to the Florida Keys, and sat on the beach staring at the ocean for a few months. Around the time the money began to run out, I realized my blood was too thick for tropical climates or for loafing around, and I headed north along the east coast. I stopped in New Brunswick, wangled a new social insurance card as Andrew Bathgate, and picked up work driving cab.

  I let the first winter go by without hockey, but in the end I couldn’t live without it. By the time hockey season rolled around I was playing in a semi-pro league that spanned the border. Things being what they were in those days — the end of the Vietnam War — I jumped to an American team in the loop halfway through the season, got myself a green card, and went to work for a development company in Maine while I worked on getting my realtor’s licence.

  After that I worked my way west through New York State, Ohio, and into Michigan and Wisconsin. It was pretty slow progress, maybe because the scars inside my head didn’t heal on their own. I felt like a leper, and my only real insight then was that I ought to keep to myself and steer clear of entanglements.

  Things started to come around in Wisconsin five or six years after I left Chilliwack. I went out and got myself an “A” licence and spent a winter doing exactly what frightened me most: I drove other human beings — school children, actually — in a school bus exactly like the one I drove that night. I’m sure you get
the picture.

  After that I went back to land assembly and development, mostly in small towns or in the suburbs of bigger cities in the Midwest. The money was good, the risks minor, and there was nobody interesting enough to get tangled up with. I took a few college courses, too. Some urban planning and architecture to help me at work, but also a little philosophy, and some psychology and history. Those ones kept me from thinking that the world is as narrow and stupid as real estate makes it look.

  My only other requirement — not hard to fill — was a decent amateur or semi-pro team to play hockey for. By the time I left the States I had an easily transferable realtor’s licence, and a quarter million bucks to invest. The success with real estate isn’t as impressive as it may sound. In the markets of the late ’70s and early ’80s a chimpanzee could have amassed that kind of grubstake, and the industry was full of people who couldn’t outwit a chimp.

  Back across the border I skipped from Winnipeg to Saskatoon, then northeast to Edmonton, and I started to recognize my final destination. I wasn’t sure why but I was going home, to Mantua. I highballed for two-and-a-half years in Edmonton’s quiet market, brought my grubstake beyond a half million, and I was ready.

  I arrived in Mantua at exactly the right moment. The local economy was in trouble, but the province was being flooded with offshore money from the Japanese and the Hong Kong Chinese. While I was qualifying for local accreditation (a process that amounted to learning how not to look like a monkey) I put together several parcels of industrial land north of the city and then flipped them to a Japanese consortium for double what I’d paid. Two years later the consortium noticed the dark clouds forming over Mantua, and I reclaimed both parcels under my original cost. After that I sold one to a Korean chopsticks manufacturer who went broke four months after his plant started up, and the other to a panicky Hong Kong doctor who gave it back to me with a two-hundred-grand profit when he decided that the Red Chinese were turning soft pink and weren’t going to execute all the capitalist lackeys who remained in the Protectorate after they took it back from the British.

  After that I quit, and invested my ill-gotten gains in T-Bills. Right now I don’t even have an office, and only my bank manager and Jack have any idea what I’m worth. The taxman comes around once in a while, but Canadian tax law being what it is all I have to do is scratch myself in front of the auditors, unloosen a few flakes, and off they go.

  Does that make sense? To me, it does and it doesn’t. I made a life, I made money, I played hockey. That makes sense because the alternative — doing nothing — hasn’t ever appealed to me. But the system I worked with doesn’t make any sense to me at all. The only real work I’ve done in the twenty years since I became Weaver Bathgate, the only work that actually helped anyone, was the winter I spent driving the school bus in Wisconsin. And outside of a couple stints driving taxi early on, that job was the most poorly paid I’ve had.

  As far as I can see, there was just one thing that separated me from a thousand other clowns who lost their shirts in real estate. I made it because I had just enough brains not to show around. I didn’t buy any Mercedes 450 SLs after I made deals, I didn’t wear silk suits, and, most of all, I didn’t party. Very little booze, no dope, no nose candy. I don’t want to sound puritanical, but I think that bus accident sobered me up about a lot of things.

  After I killed those four people, including my two closest friends, I couldn’t get drunk. For a while I tried — mostly in Florida right after it happened — but the only things booze released in me were waking nightmares about what I’d done. Sooner or later I’d find myself reliving the sight of Mikey Davidson’s head bouncing on the pavement.

  Sure, I’ll have a beer once in a while, or open a bottle of decent wine with dinner. But since the day I ran that bus off the road I haven’t gotten loaded on anything. Not alcohol, not women, not money or real estate. I figure I owe it to the world to be able to see what’s coming down the road. Or, at the very least, to be playing with a full deck when it comes at me.

  Maybe seeing people die because of what I did gave me perspective, I dunno. Like I said, I’m not one of those Safety Nazis who do everything by the rules, and I’m not what you’d call a total-philosophy-of-life kind of person the way Gord is.

  One thing I’ve figured out is that covering ourselves with all these private rights to protect ourselves from the government and all these corporations who are trying to turn us into dopes and slaves and automatons doesn’t work. I mean, things have gotten pretty nutty lately, with everyone thinking their ancestors are more real than their neighbours and bullying other people over things that happened two hundred years ago, or people wanting equal pay and equal access to this or that, public rights to private property, and private rights to shoot the public when they trespass. It just gets us fighting amongst ourselves. You end up calling everybody “Your Honour” in public, and thinking of everybody as “motherfucker” in private. And meanwhile, the rich get richer.

  Basically, we need just two rights. One of them is the right to be treated decently, by everyone and everything. People will fight like hell over what decency involves, but so long as we don’t divide ourselves up into gangs and tribes those kinds of arguments are what life is about.

  The other right we need to have is the right to make smartass remarks. If we have that right guaranteed — and if we practise it — all the other personal freedoms we’re whining about are guaranteed, and so is democracy. You know that because that’s the right that all those authoritarians want to take away, whether they’re in a corporation’s boardroom, or down on the street corner trying to prevent you from getting on a bicycle without putting on a combat helmet and body armour. Check it out if you don’t believe me.

  I guess the other thing is that we ought to wake up and realize that nothing is black and white. Life’s like a rainbow, for Christ’s sake. It’s always over there — until you get over there and discover it’s over here, and you just walked through it and missed everything.

  ESTHER ARRIVES AT EIGHT on the dot, carrying a fresh change of clothes. Before Gord left he gave me a fat bottle of muscle relaxants to control the esophageal spasms, which, he says, aren’t likely to return unless I decide to take up gymnastics or weightlifting — or hockey. He also told me to be checked out by nine.

  It’s an awkward moment. We have a thousand things to talk about, a hundred decisions to make, but no obvious place to start. So we start simple. She smiles at me, I grin back. I feel shy, almost. I thought I was hiding a stranger from her, and now I have to deal with the idea that the only stranger she had to put up with was the one she lived with every day — the one who didn’t open himself and his past up to her. The metaphysics of that one make my head spin.

  “Get dressed,” she says, “and we’ll go home.”

  This tells me one thing I badly need to know. I still have a home to go to.

  PART TWO

  NINETEEN

  AS WE CLIMB CRANBERRY Hill in the crisp winter dawn, it comes to me that it was less than twenty-four hours ago that I had that hair-raiser with the Explorer, and that, despite the two neardeaths, the mayhem and the revelations, the world is better now. My nervous system, no doubt helped by the muscle relaxants Gord gave me, lets loose a flood of endorphins, and an insight.

  It’s this: it’ll be the familiarities, and maybe the practicali- ties that have built up over the last six years that will carry things — if it doesn’t send them wheeling into the cosmic ditch. It’s not just the sunlight and the drugs, either. Subtly, Esther is letting me see that she’s prepared to go on with our life together.

  How do I detect this? First off, she’s talking about the day we’re about to launch into as if it will actually happen: she has appointments with several clients, Gord has asked her to go over to Jack’s apartment to pack a bag for him and get rid of the perishables. She’s already picked up Fang, his Jack Russell terrier. The other new
s is that Wendel has gotten word that the Cabinet report on the northern harvest cuts is going to be released at one o’clock, and he’s organizing a press conference with the Coalition — at one-forty-five.

  But the truest signal is that, as we cross the first intersection outside the hospital, she slips her right hand across the seat and onto my thigh. So there it is. Not just that she does it, but the way she does it. Esther touches in two distinct ways. When she’s pissed with me, she touches me with her fingers, like she’s handling a dead fish. When things are good, she touches me with the palm of her hand, a firm, comfortable touch that is both possessive and intimate. The touch of her hand on my thigh this morning is the palm-touch, so warm and electric that I can feel the emotional glue it exudes. I’m so grateful for it that I have to turn my head to the window to hide the tears.

  To distract myself, and her, I offer to take on the job of packing Jack’s bag.

  “That’ll help a lot,” she admits. “I’ve got my first appointment at nine-thirty, and I’d have had to scoot over between then and eleven-thirty. The plane leaves at one, so you’ll have to deliver the bag to the hospital. You up to that?”

  “Sure. Who’s taking him to the airport?”

  “Gord will be taking him out there, but his knee will have to be immobilized, so they’ll probably take him out in an ambulance. Not sure how they’ll handle that on the plane.”

  “Don’t they normally wait a couple of weeks before they do this kind of operation? To let the swelling go down?”

  “Gord wants Jack out of town before Milgenberger gets a chance to convince him that the injury isn’t serious, and that he can do the job here. You know Gord. He doesn’t pull strings gently. When he wants something done his way, he wraps the strings around everyone’s throat so they have to do what he wants. He had the specialist in Vancouver lined up by the time I got to the hospital this morning.”