The Last of the Lumbermen Read online

  The girl on the phone recognizes my voice — or maybe it’s just the beginning of the order.

  “This Mr. Weaver, right?” she says, and reels off the rest of it.

  I admit that she’s got me, and she says, “You come in fifteen minutes. We very busy tonight, but you are special.”

  I thank her without feeling special. The chef at the Lotus knows what he’s doing, and that makes him a civic asset. My kind, anyway. Towns like Mantua are generally a hell of a lot less notable for the quality of their Chinese restaurants than for the number of drunken after-hours diners who barf up their dinners in the restaurant parking lots on their way to their pickups. At the other Chinese food restaurants in Mantua, parking lot puke can get a foot thick by this time of winter. The parking lot outside the Lotus stays pretty clean — maybe because it’s the only Chinese restaurant in Mantua whose chef knows what black bean sauce is and cooks dishes like mu shu pork.

  Gord and I change in silence, another habit we’ve gotten into. If there’s nothing to say Gord doesn’t talk, and I’ve learned to respect that.

  Tonight, neither of us bothers to shower — the leisurely skate cooled us down to no-stink temperatures. I park my gear in my locker, flip the padlock shut, and twirl the dial.

  Gord is standing at the door waiting. “I’ll walk out with you,” he says.

  I nod without saying anything, and we walk to the front doors and look out. It’s snowing again, the relentlessly calm kind of snowfall I’ve never quite seen anywhere else but Mantua. It might add another twenty centimetres to the snowpack before morning but not a single flake of it will drift. You move through this kind of snowfall or you move it out of your way, but it never comes looking for you the way it does in the East.

  “Pretty out there,” Gord says, gesturing at the snow. “It might give you some problems getting up the hill.”

  “I always seem to make it up somehow,” I answer. “See you around noon.”

  “Have a fine evening,” he says.

  I squeeze out a laugh I don’t much feel. “I should be so lucky.”

  Gord glances at me, sees that I don’t want to explain why, and lets it go. He opens the door, waves at me without looking, and wanders off into the snow to the rear of the Coliseum and his truck. As I watch him go it occurs to me that he’s off to do the autopsy on that kid who was killed last night.

  I’m already late, but I pause for a moment by the case that holds the team photo of the 1972 Chilliwack Christian Lions. There’s Mikey’s handsome, dark face smiling through the veil of lime green, and Neil with his more serious expression. For a brief second I can’t find Billy Menzies, but no, there I am, second row centre, with one hand on the Mantua Cup, and a wide grin on my face.

  I’D PARKED THE LINCOLN in the VIP spot next to the front door, so I don’t have as far to walk as Gord. I park the car illegally all the time, actually. Not just here, but all over town. The police and metermen tolerate it because the car still has the old City Hall Limousine sticker on the windshield — and I keep telling them I bought the privilege with the car. They know better, but what the hell.

  I make my own exit from the building, and by the time I’ve reached the car my shoulders are spotting with white. As I’m dusting off the car with my elbows, I spot Wendel’s wallet lying on the passenger seat. Dumb. I left the car unlocked.

  At least it’s still there. Another of the advantages of small town life, although this particular advantage isn’t quite so automatic in Mantua as it once was. I’m lucky, really. Not a fabulous piece of luck, but I’ll take it.

  While the Lincoln warms up, I turn on the dash light and flip open the wallet to inspect its contents. It contains the usual: the driver’s licence in the window pocket, and behind that two bank cards, one of them a Visa. In the pocket across from those, hidden, is a plastic-covered birth certificate, and a couple of business cards from Wendel’s suppliers. Inside the billfold is twenty-nine dollars — a twenty, a five, and two twos — all fairly crisp. Behind them, folded several times and half-concealed by a flap, is a piece of paper.

  I pull the piece of paper out — what the hell, I’ve gotten this far — and unfold it beneath the dash light. It’s another birth certificate, and from the look of it, the original: name, Wendel Alan Simons, born, Mantua, December 13, date of registration, February 17 the following year. I refold the document and put it back where it was, open the glove compartment, and push the wallet inside.

  I’m a couple of blocks away from the Coliseum when it hits me: The dates on Wendel’s birth certificate make him twenty-one, not twenty. He’s a year older than he’s supposed to be. I slam on the brakes, pull the Lincoln over to the curb, and reopen the glove compartment. I check the birth certificate again: same data. Then, on a hunch, I check it against the plasticized one. That one reads December 13 too, but a year later. Wendel was born nine months after the last Mantua tournament.

  By the time I pull up in front of the Lotus Inn, my heart feels like it’s trying to crawl out of my throat. Who am I kidding? Now I understand the Freudian Slip: possible, hell. It’s probable, and from there the complications stick out like quills from a porcupine’s backside. Every time I try to get my mind around the probability, I get a muzzleful. They sting, each one, and the more I paw at them, the more certain it is.

  “Sonofabitch,” I say aloud. No, that’s exactly wrong. The “bitch” involved isn’t a bitch, she’s Esther. And her son is my son. This afternoon’s upset takes on an entire new dimension — and so do my chippy remarks about Wendel.

  I pick up and pay for the Chinese food with two twenty-dollar bills, by now completely distracted. I’m two blocks down the street before I realize I gave the cashier a seventeen-dollar tip. No wonder she knows me by name.

  ESTHER AND I LIVE near the top of Cranberry Ridge, just west of the city. It’s a good place to live, barely developed until recently, with fine farmland further west and deep, rich soils. The ridge is one-hundred-and-fifty-or-so metres above the river, and a little colder than down below, with more snow. And this winter, the drive up there has been more of an adventure than it usually is.

  The reason getting up Cranberry Ridge is an adventure is the same reason it’s good farmland. It, and the entire plateau that runs twenty miles to the west of town, is composed of fine, soft clay up to two hundred metres down, alluvial fan laid down ten thousand years ago when the glaciers receded. Left undisturbed, Cranberry Ridge looks much like any other piece of real estate in the North, except that its deeper soil supports deciduous trees, mostly poplar and birch. But if you mess with this kind of soil it turns into quagmire, and if it’s disturbed, it will slide downhill. Because of this, the original road up Cranberry Ridge was built carefully and at small scale, and it was steep. Even then it had its share of problems — shifting grades and the occasional mudslide.

  That changed a couple of years ago after the City conned the government into building a university in Mantua. Since every- one involved, locally or otherwise, was a certified idiot with delusions of grandeur, they set out to make appropriately grand, idiotic decisions. The first one — and the biggest piece of idiocy — was to choose the least stable building site within a hundred-kilometre radius. They chose the top of Cranberry Ridge instead of the derelict downtown where everyone with half a deck knew it should have been. The result is what aesthetes without common sense usually deliver: a nice viewpoint for visiting dignitaries to see how bad Mantua’s air pollution is, and a flood of cost overruns.

  The fun started when the government’s contractors tried to build a four-lane highway up the side of the Ridge. The Ridge didn’t co-operate. The road-bed slipped, so the government contractors licked their lips and rebuilt, gouging deeper into the clay, which slipped again. Since then it’s been the Chinese fire drill: underground springs opening up, new creeks emerging, the Ridge slipping more, and so on. The site where they’re trying to build the u
niversity buildings is nearly as unstable. Let’s just say that the announcement that a university was coming to town may turn out to be unintentionally prophetic.

  All this would be amusing as hell if the road hadn’t already cost fifteen-million dollars they could have used to rebuild the downtown, and — not incidentally — if it weren’t making getting home a royal pain in the ass for Esther and me. I’ve had to take the long way around more often than I’d care to count since they started, and that entails almost forty klicks of gravel road — mushy, muddy gravel when it’s been raining. When spring breakup comes this April, after the latest round of construction, the long way around is likely to be the only route we’ll have.

  Tonight, though, the road isn’t too bad — at least until I’m closing in on the hairpin curve near the top. Right there, an overconfident moron in a Ford Explorer loses control in the curve and does a one-eighty-degree four-wheel drift in front of me. A second or two elongates into an eternity, and I actually close my eyes because there’s no way to predict which direction the Explorer will go. Okay, I think, fine, this is it, I’m toast.

  My life doesn’t pass before my eyes like it’s supposed to. I merely understand that in a second or so I’m likely going to be dead. There’ll be the pain of impact, the Ford Explorer stuck in my gullet, and a mess of Chinese food splattered all over me like puke in a parking lot.

  But there’s no impact, and when I open my eyes I catch a glimpse of a frightened man’s face whizzing past, and I see the Explorer straighten itself on the road — only backward. In the rear-view mirror I watch it brake, spin a second one-eighty, and skid to a stop.

  I don’t stop to console the driver. I’d like to do it with a tire iron, but I’ve got — and suddenly I’m recalling that Robert Frost poem Esther likes — miles to go before I sleep. Even if I didn’t, it isn’t a good idea to stop a car on Cranberry Ridge to recite poetry.

  IT’S FIVE AFTER EIGHT when I pull into the driveway and turn off the ignition, still bathed in that strange, resigned calm I felt when the Explorer was about to do me. It’s a relief to see Bozo, looking like a black bear, sitting on the front steps waiting for me and for her dinner. Esther must have whispered the magic words in her ear, because this time of day she’d normally be on one of her nightly romps with her pal Sweetie, the neighbour’s Newfoundland. Until two years ago last fall there was a third Newfie in the neighbourhood, Camille, but an American hunter decided she was a black bear, and shot her in her owner’s front yard. Since then, Bozo and Sweetie have spent hunting season with the word “DOG” painted across both sides of them in day-glo pink. So far, so good.

  I know, I know. Anything but dealing with the matter at hand, right? Well, here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to walk into the house without a plan, just like I’ve done all my life whenever the crap gets close enough to the fan that I can smell it. That seems right. There are times in a life when the world moves too fast for even the illusion of control. I got lucky with the Explorer, so maybe I’ll get lucky again.

  I click off the car lights, slip Wendel’s wallet into the inside pocket of my jacket, gather up the bag of rapidly cooling Chinese food, and slip out of the car. As I close the door and take my first step toward the house, Bozo greets me with a flying tackle, and I find myself lying in a snow bank with one hundred and twentyfive pounds of black Newfie slobbering in my face.

  At least she wasn’t going for the Chinese food. And she isn’t a Ford Explorer.

  ELEVEN

  LYING IN A SNOWBANK forever with Bozo isn’t an option, tempt- ing as it is. For sure, she’d be happy about it, provided I gave her the chow mein. But Esther’s dinner is getting cold, and if I let Bozo sit on my chest like this much longer I’ll drown in dog drool.

  I place the food bag as far from me as I can, push Bozo off the other way, and climb out of the snow bank. When I’m almost clear, she grabs the tail of my coat and pulls me back in.

  “Cut it out, you stupid slobber-bag.”

  These are words she’s heard before, but she knows they don’t always mean the same thing. She cocks her head as I glare at her, picks up the signal that that I’m serious, and sinks back in the snow, disappointed.

  “It’s okay,” I say, softening my voice. “Just let me get the bag here, and we’ll go inside and have dinner.”

  Dinner is a word she understands perfectly, whatever tones come with it. Along with romp, it’s her favourite part of human language, and she leaps out of the snowbank in one graceful bound to stand, attentive and still salivating, in front of me, ready to follow me respectfully anywhere in the universe I — and the chow mein I’m packing — care to lead her. As she hopes, I lead her into the house where her food dish is.

  Inside she sits patiently as I remove my coat and boots, and she doesn’t fuss when I wipe her jowls with one of the towels Esther keeps by the front and back doors. I also retrieve Wendel’s wallet from my coat before I hang it up. Bozo follows me into the kitchen with her snout pressed devoutly against the bag, sucking in the fumes.

  Esther has two places set at the table, but there’s no sign of her. I take the food out of the bag, turn on the oven, and put the covered aluminum containers inside to reheat. Bozo lies down to wait beside the table with her snout between her paws.

  Esther is sleeping. Her ability to fall asleep anywhere, anytime, is only a little less remarkable than how oblivious her slumber is, and how swiftly she can pull herself out of it to complete alertness. Being able to sleep deeply in an unlocked house is partly Bozo’s gift, of course. Short of a grizzly, nothing and no one she doesn’t know can enter this house without Esther’s or my consent.

  Bozo isn’t exactly a normal guard dog. She doesn’t bark when strangers come around, and she doesn’t bare her fangs if they approach the house. What she does do is sprawl in the doorway and grab their ankle or their pant leg in her jaws if and when they try to get past her, after which she holds on until one of us tells her to let go. Last summer, a mail courier spent three hours on the front porch after he tried to slip past Bozo to place a package between the screen and front doors. By the time I returned home, the courier and Bozo were best pals, but Bozo hadn’t let go of his ankle.

  As I lean over to plant a kiss on Esther’s cheek, her eyes open. “Ah,” she says. “You’re back. What time is it?”

  “Just after eight. Are you hungry?”

  She ignores the question, pulls herself upright, and stretches languidly.

  “I’ve been out for almost three hours,” she says. “I didn’t think I was that tired.”

  “I could run you a bath,” I offer. “That might cheer you up.”

  “Who says I need cheering up?” She’s fully awake now, and we’re right back to the impasse we were at when I dropped her off.

  “Well,” I say, “Come into the kitchen, and let’s eat.”

  WE EAT QUIETLY, WITH bursts of small talk that quickly trail off into silence. I’m about to feed the chow mein to Bozo when she drops her bomb.

  “I think you should know,” she says, “that Leo Simons wasn’t Wendel’s father.”

  There it is. She’s confirmed the probability that has been cook- ing in my brain since I saw the dates on Wendel’s two birth certificates. And I’m hearing much more than she believes she’s telling me. I know more than she does now. And that’s bad.

  First, there’s danger in my knowing more than she thinks I do. Yeah, most people play the game of letting on they know less than they do, and the worst thing I might find out in the next few minutes is that she doesn’t much like Billy Menzies — some- thing I’ve lived with for years. That’s not the danger. This is about us, and the reciprocal trust we’ve built up. Aside from the Billy Menzies stuff and what I do with my money, I’ve kept very little from Esther. About as much as it now turns out she’s kept from me. But now she’s dropped a major secret. Why tonight, and for what reasons, I’m not
clear.

  If you’ve ever lived in a place like Mantua, you’ll understand why reciprocity makes sense. You rely on the people around you for things city people either don’t need, or that they get from the big, anonymous systems that rule their lives. Around here, a lot of those systems don’t exist, and when they do, they don’t work all the time.

  So not lying about important stuff is common sense. It keeps you from giving into all those lowest common denominators that are always inviting you to screw up or lie to yourself about how low the denominator is. More than once in the last few years that small rule has kept me from chasing around. It’s also earned me the one close friend I’ve ever really had as an adult: Gord.

  Gord says that if you lie to people about important things it damages their ability to decide what’s true or false right across the board, and makes it impossible for them to care about you accurately. Point is, Esther knows nearly everything about Andy Bathgate, and everything about Weaver Bathgate. But if my early life comes up, I say I don’t remember much, and that isn’t a lie. The fact is I remember only four or five of Billy’s days with any detail, and those are the ones I can’t tell her about.

  But now those four or five days are smack at the centre of what she’s revealing, and unless I can think of something fast, our system of telling the truth to one another is about to come apart.

  “As a matter of fact, I was wondering about that in the last hour,” I say, truthfully.

  Esther’s eyes narrow. “What do you mean by that?”