five
I’M NOT MAKING THIS UP: its name is Downtown Mountain, I don’t know why. Maybe it was called that by somebody who was homesick for Civ. I just about fell over the first time I saw the words on the map, way out there in the absolute middle of nowhere in particular. I always related to it. Which is why I avoided it now and went the other way. By the time you twig to a pattern of behaviour in yourself you can bet your ass the cops have already done the same thing. I could see these bastards in my mind’s eye, flying low in light aircraft, looking for movement or little dots of unusual colour, reporting every once in a while to some command post, saying things on the radio like “Hotel Whisky Whisky, do you copy?” I thought: If this was the States they’d have thermal sensors, probably ones that can screen out deer and pick up on heat blooms from human-size critters. Later I read that this wasn’t true. The Mounties do have infrared but the bush canopy where I was is too thick for it to work. Maybe I knew this all along without knowing that I did. Which is why I kept under cover when I could and tried to blend in when I had to cross open country. The damn backpack was bright blue nylon, the blue of sparks from an electrical fire. In a little creek I emptied it out and then covered the outside with mud, rubbing it in like I was washing it with mud because in Bizarro World that would make it clean. Then I stuck a few twigs through the webbing. I tried not to use any shiny objects, especially when it was light out.
I headed towards the big lake. I had a plan and this was it—to go towards the horse cops when they’d think I was moving away from em. There were a lot of places down there. I suppose you’d have to call em cottages, though to me that sounds like an Ontario word and it ain’t a nice one either. Cabins where people didn’t live year-round cause it’s so bleak in the winter that the country can’t hardly support human life. Some of them had quite a few luxuries. Rich people from the city, dumb-ass Citizens who think they’re getting in touch with the primitive. Ha!
The nights were wet and cold. I’d put on all the clothes I brought with me, topped off with a green plastic poncho which I’d sort of wrap around me from the inside. No matter what kind of shelter I found I’d always wake up in the middle of the night because my ass was wet. I’d roll over onto my side but then that side’d be wet and I’d have to switch. This would go on all night. I thought I found the perfect spot one day when I came upon this rock overhang so deep it looked like the mouth of a cave. Invisible from the air, invisible from just about every angle, and dry, I thought. It was only the afternoon but I decided to stop there anyway even though I usually waited until dark. It turned out to be worse than being out in the open. Trickles of water, big enough so that you could hear em not just feel em, ran all night like a broken toilet. I got soaked. I didn’t like making a fire if I could help it. You think I was being paranoid but I wasn’t. I didn’t have enough information to be paranoid. I didn’t know if they were after me—yet. I was just being careful.
Anyway, I ate cold food from the pack. The good news was that the pack got lighter and lighter. So did I, come to think of it. I could tell by the way my clothes were starting to get a little looser, even when I had all the layers on at night. The bad news was that I didn’t know if the food would hold out until I got to the lake. So I cut way back on how much I ate. Every morning I’d move some food from the pack to my pockets. I had a breakfast pocket and a dinner pocket, and I had to fight hard with myself to keep from raiding them early as I trekked up and down, staying in the shade and the shadows, looking both ways (and up) before crossing a place without cover if I couldn’t get around it any other way. I tried to stay filled up with water to take the place of food but this makes for pretty uncomfortable walking all day. It makes you the slave of your bladder, which is something you don’t want to be when you think the horsemen might turn up any minute.
I honestly don’t know how many days it took me. I lost track and never got the count back. Actually I started thinking in different terms. Instead I just counted the sleep-camps. Let’s see, I’d say, when I waded across that river, that was two sleep-camps ago. I’m too old to be wishing time away like you do when you’re a kid. But I just wanted the thing to be over. And I wanted there to be some destination I could be at when I stopped. I was wet and my feet hurt. Not just sore. Hurt. There was some invisible point I passed when the backpack seemed to be getting heavier even though I knew it was really less heavy all the time as every morning I buried the empty wrappers and cans the food came in.
The last stream I followed fed into the lake. The first look I had at the water was through the tops of trees but I could tell way before I caught sight of it that there was water there. I could tell from the sky. I’d learned that sky over water looks different from sky over land, like the sky was a mirror that reflected what it saw down below. I hid the pack and moved away from the stream and snuck down to the shore. The lake was quiet except for birds, who were squawking out loud, knowing nobody was around to hear em. The only evidence of humans I could see from there, lying on my belly, was a broken-down little jetty on a point way off to the right. I figured there had to be a cabin just out of sight with a view of the water. These guys build with a view of the lake. That’s a big deal to them. Not like it was to me—to see who might be coming—but to show people that they could afford the scenery.
There wasn’t any point in waiting till dark to look around. Inside in the dark I’d need some kind of light, which sort of defeats the whole purpose of sneaking around. So I crawled a bit closer, stopping every now and then to make sure there wasn’t anybody behind me—or in front of me or off to the sides. I approached it zigzag fashion. Even when I got pretty close the place looked empty. Not abandoned, just empty, like whoever owned it hadn’t opened it up for the season yet. I was like some animal deciding whether or not to trust the humans enough to take the food they were offering. When I got close enough I saw the door was padlocked. I took out my knife and tried to pry off the hasp. But it was a no-go. Around the side, by the spot where the stovepipe came out in an elbow, there was a window that was open just a crack so that the place wouldn’t freeze. I got the blade in and jimmied the window open and climbed inside.
I was amazed later when the lawyer gave me all these Zeerox copies from the newspapers. There was this big front-page story about how I sent a tape to some radio station in the Interior after making off with somebody’s cassette recorder. They printed what I was supposed to have said about how I was playing some game with the cops and how I bragged that I could change form by magic and turn myself into a wolf. Crap like that. Complete garbage of course. I never stole any tape recorder. Never saw one, so the idea never crossed my mind, and the voice wasn’t mine, as the cops had to admit later on. Obviously just some weirdo that got a thrill from pretending to be the Sasquatch Bandit as one of the papers started calling me, a name the other ones picked up. They didn’t mean it as a compliment but it did make me legendary in the major media, which meant that there were people in two camps. The newspapers and television blew me up into this “Robin Hood figure,” as they kept saying, the “folk hero” who stole from the rich owners and sport fishermen from places like Portland and Seattle and gave to—well, to myself, I guess. The reporters found a whole lot of people to say things they wanted to hear said out loud. People who wanted to be on TV said what they knew the TV people were looking for, whether they—the TV types, I mean—knew what the audience out there wanted to hear or not. That’s how come things got out of control. I’m lucky they did, cause that was the only way I got the kind of sharp lawyers I needed—they wanted a piece of my high profile too. Then there’s the other side of the coin. I wouldn’t have been in all that much trouble if I wasn’t a celebrity—which I didn’t know I was, being up in the bush at the time. (How did people think I could have mailed that tape anyway?) On the other hand—wait, how many hands is that? Oh hell, I don’t give a damn—what they were calling “public fascination” with me “no doubt had some bearing on the outcome” of the case. Here I’m quoting from one of the columnists. What they’re saying is that I would have been in less trouble without all the hype but I would have been in more trouble too. Go figure.
I was a long time piecing together what happened. Not in getting the details. (The information was thrown at me from all directions right away. It was like a bunch of kids pelting me with water balloons.) But a long time in sorting everything out and figuring out what it meant. Here’s how it went down. Despite what the tiny perfect dyke said, the cops were right behind us just like I figured they were, just like Clarence knew they were. You can’t fool Clarence. It didn’t take em long to find Jericho and nab the girls, who were scared even after the cops lost interest in em except to use them against me (and maybe Clarence too though they seemed to forget about him pretty quick, maybe because of what they call sensitivities).
As I see it, the dyke, who never got any jokes—she would call it something like “a humour receptor deficiency”—took everything I said straight and then told them all this stuff about me being an ex-con, maybe an excaped con, and being in organized crime and a dope pusher and one thing and another. Nobody in their right mind would have fallen for all that shit. But at the time there’d been stories about our “pan-province crime spree” (now I’m quoting from one of the papers in Vancouver that I have in my scrapbook). They seemed to be interested first of all in how I’d made off with the truck. After all, nobody likes Canada Post, and the truck was proof of how feeble they were. That’s the way I figure it. When it came out that I was travelling with my two “female companions” it set up the whole sexual theme song, like we were a three-way menagerie. If only they’d known what the situation really was. Anyway, you’d have to be an idiot not to see all the sex stuff between the lines in everything that was written, especially after Beth and the other one got picked up and the media said that I’d abandoned em. Later on they got pictures of them coming and going to court. Until that day with the bear, which I’ll tell you about in a minute, they didn’t have any picture of me. Maybe that made me seem like an even bigger mystery, I don’t know. I think it was early on when they tried to get an old one of me from Correctional Services they found out absolutely and for sure that I’d never been in custody and the dyke couldn’t be taken seriously. Anyhow that’s what I suspect. So the media used its head and managed to dig up an old snapshot from back in Windsor. I was real young and skinny and had an Adam’s apple the size of a fucken baseball. Even I wouldn’t have recognized myself unless I looked real close for a long time. I sure didn’t resemble any sasquatch.
The day after Bishop left Jericho, I tried to talk to Theresa about what we should do. She thought we should see if the truck would start and make our way back through all the logging roads somehow until we found the highway. I said I thought that wasn’t a good idea. For one thing, it was almost out of gas, and there were other reasons too. “What if he’s right and the police are coming to arrest us all? What’s going to happen when they find us driving a stolen truck?”
“I had no part in his crime modalities,” she shot back.
“The walk out of here will do us good,” I said. “I don’t know about you, but I need exercise after sitting here doing nothing.” I was trying to jolly her along but when I said that she went all stiff, the way a cat does when it sees danger and tries to act tough, with the hair on its back sticking straight up. She never took well to me (or anybody) using humour.
Then, stupid me, I did it again. “Anyway, it might be easier if we don’t use the roads. We don’t have the magic Stick. He took it with him.”
She almost got violent. “The idiot and his goddamned stick. If he was here now I’d like to insert it up his ass and set fire to it.”
I’d never heard her talk this way. It sounded like something a really dumb guy would say. But I held my tongue, as Mother always used to say, though things were pretty chilly between us after that.
Truck or no truck, we had to get ready. Fortunately I had pretty good shoes on that morning in Vancouver in what felt like a long-ago period in my life. Theresa only had runners, which did mean that walking the whole time would be hard on her even assuming that we found our way and didn’t keep wandering around in circles. I was confident, though. It wasn’t as if we didn’t know where the sun sets, it wasn’t as if there weren’t landmarks.
After getting my clothes together, I started to worry about what food to take and how much we could carry. She and I didn’t speak that night, though we probably should have, as we still had a lot of stuff to discuss. Instead we sort of retired to opposite ends of Main Street, which was kind of silly when you think about it because Main Street was of course the only street there was and it was so short you could throw a rock from one end to the other.
The sun couldn’t have been up very long at all when I smelled smoke and flew out the door. I yelled for Theresa to wake up as I ran down the row of buildings towards one end of the clearing. The grass between the clearing and the townsite was on fire, and saplings started to crackle and spit as the flames surrounded them and then went tree-climbing. It was like dozens of low fires were suddenly joining together in one big one. I just about died when I got closer and saw this big wall of fire a ways off. The air in front seemed to go all crinkly from the heat. It was getting pretty grey and I was afraid it would soon be black. Theresa was standing beside me under the gravel knoll, half dressed like I was, saying something under her breath, I don’t know what: I wasn’t paying attention.
A shape, a figure, was coming towards us. It looked like somebody staggering out of an orange-and-yellow mirage. The figure was coughing a bit, a low throaty cough. It stopped within easy shouting range. “You better get your stuff out of there. The wind’s starting to blow this way.” Clarence’s voice was calm-sounding as usual, but it seemed out of place right at that moment. I looked over at Theresa, who ran back for her bag. I called after her, “Get mine too. And the food I picked out.” Then an afterthought: “And the rest of my clothes.” But she was gone by then.
“The wind is a surprise.”
That’s what Clarence said as we stood there. I must have looked like I didn’t know what to do. He looked like someone who did but had decided to keep it to himself.
The fire wasn’t getting any wider but it was still headed in our direction and fast. What I remember now is the snapping sound of green trees going up, whoosh, and I can still see the black smoke up above. We both stayed there just staring at it, not saying anything. I was starting to get scared. Couldn’t tell about Clarence, though. He was always a hard one to read.
Theresa came back down the ramp, carrying her big bag and kicking mine ahead of her. I guess she didn’t hear what I said about bringing the food, so I went back to get it myself. When I got up the so-called ramp—you sort of had to walk bent forward, that’s how steep it was—I turned around to look at the fire from higher up. The air was all wavy from up there too and I could see that the flames were sure coming towards us, no doubt about it. I had an idea and yelled down for Clarence to join me in town. He didn’t hear me. It was almost as though he was hypnotized by what he was looking at. Theresa heard me, though, and poked him in the ribs. The two of them were talking, and I saw her point to me up top, using her whole arm stretched out straight.
The first temptation—to simply run away—didn’t make sense once I’d had a second to think what we were doing. Running away from the town wouldn’t be running away from danger, it would be running away from safety. The town was protected. So I ran down to talk to Clarence. “Maybe we should all come up?” I asked him. “The fire’s got to stop when it comes to this big gravel pile, right? There’s nothing to burn.”
“Worth a try.” Then sort of matter-of-factly, talking to nobody in particular, “Sure.”
I said I thought we should use the time we had to collect all the water we could and bring it up to the town in case the fire trapped us in there for a while. T agreed as well. So the three of us went tearing through all the buildings looking for as many empty pots and bottles as we could find. Any kind of container would do. Right then I wasn’t too worried about how clean they were, knowing that later we’d have to boil them anyhow, not just the water. Theresa, though, carried hers using her fingertips only, the way you’d carry a dead rat or some other diseased thing. We weren’t all that organized, I guess. We made a big pile of jars etc. down by the stream. Then, as they got filled up, one of us would walk up to Jericho with them. I say walk because Clarence was the one person who could actually run up the steep path and keep running; he never seemed to get tired. Of course, he was a guy who could run without really hurrying, and this wasn’t great because all of us were racing against the clock. “The temperature is ascending,” Theresa said with worry in her voice. Clarence said something more alarming, especially because he wasn’t the sort of person to overreact (or underreact either).
“Looks like the wind’s blowing the fire this way fast,” he said.
I watched the flames reach the little stream and leap right over it. The fire was burning weeds and grass and tiny trees now, whipped up by the wind from the west. I couldn’t help thinking this wouldn’t be happening if Bishop had been able to do his long-term project and make the stream wider and deeper and dig it all the way around the knoll like a moat around a castle in a storybook. Instead, what happened is that quick gusts sent flaming twigs and even small branches flying up onto the townsite. It was only a question of time until one or another of the buildings on Main Street caught fire. When it happened, we ran down to try and put it out. We used a lot of the drinking water but couldn’t get enough of it up high enough to do any good. “What you need is sand,” Clarence said. But except for what was in the mailbags, we didn’t have any, and at that moment I didn’t have a knife to cut the things open with or the wits to go find one. What we had was only gravel, enough of it to be a lifetime supply for everybody I knew. These old buildings had been dried out and falling apart for years. The wood was soft and punky anyway. It burned with a bright orange-and-yellow flame, spitting at us. It was like the fire was laughing or making fun of us.
The next building on the same side was Theresa’s. She ran in to get her other things, including her diary, and I went with her. It was pretty scary. When we came out again, in a minute or two, the roof of the end building had burned through and collapsed with a big noise. The wind was even stronger than before, and it didn’t shift like I was hoping it would. You can guess what happened then. Theresa’s place went up like old balled-up newspaper. We kept trying to save the next one along and then the one after that and the one after that but we didn’t really have the equipment we needed. Clarence was using the shovel but it wasn’t doing much good. I think I might have been crying, just a bit, when the hotel went up.
The three of us kept moving to the right as the fire jumped the street and one place after another, on both sides, got destroyed. Finally the flames forced us to put our stuff in our laps and slide on our bums down the steep bank on the east side. Only about two hours after it all started, Jericho was a bunch of charred bits of lumber sticking up at funny angles. It was enough to break your heart. Once the fire was done destroying the place, the wind died down and then there was nothing left to ruin. Everything was quiet. Clarence asked if we wanted to go home with him. But we said no, and he left. Later we made a little camp for ourselves maybe fifty metres away, out by the track we’d come in on. The next day is when the police came.
I should make this long story short, partly for your sakes but for mine too. It’s very painful for me to talk about, the scariest and most humiliating time of my life. A pair of RCMP officers, both male, came up the clearing from the canyon. The tower of smoke made us easy to find. They started to ask us a lot of stuff about Bishop and our relationship to him. At least I’m supposing that they asked Theresa the same things they did me, since they made sure we couldn’t talk together or overhear one another. I told them the truth, but about halfway through decided not to give them anything they didn’t ask for. They knew about the truck, of course—they could see it sitting out there in the grass, this big dead green thing waiting for the rust to start. I told them I didn’t have anything to do with it except for being a passenger. They knew about the video store too but I told them, honestly I think, that I didn’t know what I was doing, that I just stood there like I was told and read the movie names to myself. Then the officer who was talking to Theresa came over and had a private conversation with my guy. Then my guy started to ask me about the convenience store. I replied to all his questions but that’s when I decided not to say any more than I had to. They looked through our stuff or what we’d been able to save, and they seemed to pay a lot of attention to Theresa’s diary, though she yelled her head off. They said we were in custody, and they marched us to the police car, holding our right arms just above the elbow, and put us in the back, and drove us all the way to Williams Lake. It was sure a lot faster going down than it was coming up, but of course we stayed on the main highway and these guys knew the way. When we got to Williams Lake, I was looking out the window at the rail line and the Stampede grounds and the rest of it, and I felt freedom disappearing.
At the detachment a woman officer searched us, first me and then Theresa but not together. I never felt more worthless before or since, even though this was only the first of many times I’d have to submit to this. Almost more than I can count, even though I remember every one. I’ve never been more naked in my life, with absolutely no control whatever over what was happening to me. She wasn’t like the ones you read about or see in movies; she didn’t seem to be enjoying herself especially; she acted kind of bored to tell you the truth, but this made it even more degrading. I don’t know how Theresa felt. We never spoke after that, never even exchanged a single word—our lawyers, once we had them, did that for us. But if she felt like me she was sad that women could treat other women like this. If she was like me, she never quite got over it. I don’t want to say any more about it. All I’ll say is that it was a relief that first time when they ordered me to take a shower because I was certainly dirty on the outside but now I felt dirty on the inside too—this even though I wasn’t crazy about having people with all their clothes on watching me shower, but that was the least of my problems.
Eventually they charged me with “breaking-entering and theft” (I thought those were two different things and the first of them even Bishop didn’t do; he walked right in, like he was a customer). They also charged me with “theft over one thousand dollars” because of the truck, though I kept telling them that Bishop was alone when that happened and I was as surprised as anybody when he turned up with it. In the end, Theresa and Bishop, once they captured him, got the same treatment, and all three of us were also charged with “conspiracy to commit theft.” I thought of what my mother and sister would say if they saw me having my police picture taken. Or being sent to Vancouver in handcuffs and anklecuffs, which I found out to my horror they did see on television. I slowly realized that this whole—what would you call it? joyride? camping trip?—with Bishop was a big deal in the media. Before they finally caught him, people had been making up stories about him being a genius criminal who lived off the land out in the woods, robbing people, outsmarting the policemen. They were stories about how he’d been living a life of crime with his two—I want to use the right word here … lovers, mistresses, prostitutes, “female companions,” something like that.
After eleven horrible days in that place they put me in, the lawyer got me out on bail. When she did, she told me about what people thought and even showed me some of the things the newspapers had already printed. I was just amazed. First I was angry and later I was frightened all over again, but all through it I stayed amazed. Among the amazing things was the fact, if you believed the media, that Bishop was almost fifty. He sure didn’t look that old. For one thing, people fifty usually take better care of themselves. But it did explain a lot when you figure that he was growing up in the sixties.
Then the funniest thing I could ever imagine happened. All the time I was in jail I couldn’t dream. In fact, I’m not even sure that I slept long enough at one stretch to have a dream if I could have done. When I was back in my own clothes and in my own place, though, I seemed to start right away. They were long colourful dreams.
In one of them, I was walking down Main in Vancouver. It was exactly the way it was the first time I saw it, when I was emotionally just a kid, a girl just out of Alberta. People keep calling it a slum, you know, and it is, but it was people’s home, too, at least in those days. There were all different sorts of people, some of them whose lives were getting better, not just ones whose lives were worse. I’d say the music you heard was ska as well as punk. You know, it was diverse.
Anyway, I’m going along and either people keep stopping me to talk or else I’m seeing what I don’t really want to see and I go by fast. I’m headed towards Hastings but it takes an awful long time, especially with all these interruptions. Now it’s true that Main is pretty long all right, but Hastings never seems to get any closer. You know how things can be in dreams. I remember that somebody, a woman, came up to me and started talking about where she could get “cheap” cigarettes. She kept saying the word over and over. Later, when I was awake and my brain was turned on, I figured out that she meant ones that had been stolen. I guess she thought a thief like me would know.
The longer I walk, the worse the street gets. It starts out with little shops run by families, but it turns into a place with second-hand junk stores and a Money Mart. For two whole blocks every building is all boarded up. The pavement out front is still alive, with groups of young guys standing around looking like they’re waiting for trouble, but the buildings they’re leaning in front of are dead. The boards they’re shut up with aren’t new ones, either. They’re old and rotten and brown like the lumber at Jericho.
It starts to get creepy, like the dream is turning into a nightmare. All of a sudden there are maybe a hundred people around me. They’re like the characters in that movie Night of the Living Dead that I saw on video once except that they’re very active. They’re the most destroyed people I’ve ever seen. I end up screaming at them, “No, I don’t have any money. No, I don’t have anything for you. If I had money I’d be taking the bus home but I don’t, so I have to walk.” Then it hits me: why don’t I take the bus? There’s a bus stop right in front of me. One comes along. When I see it coming, I say to myself: “I don’t care which one it is. I’d get on even if the sign on the front says BETHANY,” which as you know is my full name but it’s also a place in the Bible. I looked it up later in some religious books we have at work and found out it’s where Lazarus was from, him and his two sisters. When the bus gets close, I see what it actually says is ALMA. Now there are buses that say that—it’s a street way over in Kits—but that also happens to be Mother’s name. Weird, huh? I ride along a few blocks and get off at the Steenrod Funeral Home. I go down into the prep room and who should be there waiting to see me but Bishop. He’s wearing a suit that doesn’t fit him very well and he’s nervous, pacing back and forth. He says he’s going to court and he needs my help: he doesn’t know how to do up the necktie. I tell him I’ve never tied one for anybody who was alive. So he stretches out on the table and I do the knot for him.
When I woke up, I said to myself: “What does this dream mean?” Then it hit me. It means he’s going to prison. Of course.
I don’t know where my two co-defendants got their lawyers. I thought Bishop’s must have been assigned to him by the court, but later I wasn’t so sure. He looked pretty expensive. I asked my lawyer about it but he only gave me an odd look. He was hired by my family. This is what I mean by problems.
Father and my brother visited me in jail. My brother was scared but pretended to be supplying support for Father—who looked old and sad with his fat bald head and sounded that way also. He told me that he had canvassed lawyer acquaintances on the Island, men he knew from church and the K of C and groups of Dutch people, and they suggested various other ones over here, and that the best one of them would be in communication with me soon. (He came the next morning and I was out on bail the day after that.) I asked how Mother was coping. I thought that is what they would expect me to ask, the sort of data I should be soliciting from them. Father seemed relieved that I mentioned it. That’s when he told me she was ill. I could see in his eyes that he wasn’t telling me everything. Later he said that she was very ill. For a few seconds I wondered whether he was breaking the news of her death to me a little at a time, which is a standard technique known to every person in my discipline. But he stopped there.
“She’s sorry she can’t come to see you,” he said, “but it’s better this way.”
I thought what he meant was: this place is awful-looking and loud and dirty and depressing at the same time and this poor devout woman who always sees the best in people would be so shocked that she might not experience any recovery. Later, as I have rewound the conversation in my mind and then replayed it over and over again, I think he must have been telling me that Mother would have been ashamed of me, which I have difficulty believing to be true. Long have I been embarrassed by this because they have no right to be ashamed of me. At other times, though, it did to me seem obvious that what he was saying was literally true and no more than that—that she was just too sick to get on the ferry. I sometimes make the mistake—I admit it openly—of not recollecting how uncomplicated and simple of speech my parents and their friends are. But at the time I was also upset because my idiot brother was staring at me with actual pity, which made me furious with him.
The bail hearing was a blur, over before I knew I was really awake. The outcome was the one of which I had been assured. I was told I was free to go home, and as soon as I could I went over to the Island. Mother was sitting up in bed. She kept coughing—a dry cough—and putting the fingers and palm of her right hand flat above her breastbone like she was going to say “Mercy!” or gently tap out the illness inside her, like Father emptying the ash from the bowl of his pipe. I thought: This is not just healing by the laying on of hands (very Protestant) but the laying on of her own hands on herself. Aunt Jo was there for a while, in and out of the room. She looked much the same as when I had seen her the last time. Too, there were neighbours and church people I was supposed to remember but really didn’t. I wondered if the priest had come for a visit but I didn’t want to ask and I caught myself in time. I got there in late morning and stayed all afternoon until the patient got tired. We had the longest talk we had ever had. One of us would remember something about the past and then it would be the other one’s turn. Her thoughts weren’t always connected in ways obvious to me but I guess they had their own logic system inside her mind. I was expecting the worst when she started talking about the Church, but it wasn’t too bad.
“The worst part was the way Marian devotion changed,” she said. “But me, I never changed in my heart. Mary was the part of the Church that a woman like me found a home in.”
I suppose she was trying to tell me something she considered important. I guess she was trying to reach out across the sexuality gap. If so, it didn’t work. She just seemed sad to me. That pretty much summed her up, I guess.
I spent the night in my old bed in my former bedroom. My brother, who had come down from Nanaimo, had his famous summer porch back (where I think he used to jack himself off a lot; maybe he did again, for old times’ sake). It was freaky living in the past, for the experience is contrary to nature.
The lawyer and I didn’t seem to like one another all that much but I think he was good at what he did. At first I had to keep telling him to explain to me what he was doing. It took a while but finally he started behaving. He didn’t like doing it but he did it all right. I found the process quite interesting. Partly this is because the law turned out to have much in common with my own profession. I mean helping others even when they didn’t deserve it.
He went to the scumbag’s bail hearing and told me what happened. Bishop’s lawyer, the mysterious one, made a case for letting him out of jail, pointing out he didn’t have a criminal record and had a co-operative attitude and that no weapons were used in the “pan-province crime spree,” which is what the Vancouver tabloid kept calling it.
“The Crown’s argument,” the lawyer told me, “is that Mr. Bishop had no known job or profession and that he had been in a rehabilitation program. There was apparently no suitable reply to the first point. The second one, counsel said, simply showed his client’s ability to be reformed, because the treatment was obviously successful, as he has had no further problems with drugs, alcohol or other substances. The judge wasn’t convinced. Often the judge’s mood is a determining factor.”
So they kept Bishop locked up.
Over time the lawyer let me in on our strategy. “It’s tricky,” he said, “because Ms. Hubbard’s intentions aren’t known to us.”
I asked him what exactly he was referencing by this remark. His tone altered. He switched over to the language of the poor, because I suppose he figured that, as we both had to deal with those people in our careers, this was a tongue we had in common, a kind of secular Latin.
“The Crown looks good if they get him to plead guilty. They look better if they convict all of you. Maybe a plea bargain can be worked out. His counsel might be working on a deal to have his client cop to the truck theft in return for the other charges being dropped.”
I asked him where that would leave me exactly.
“Hard to say. Probably the Crown would do a deal like that if the defendant agreed to implicate you and Ms. Hubbard.”
I must have had horror written all over my expression, as he then tried to be reassuring. “And of course it could work the other way round as well. You and Ms. Hubbard could give testimony against him. Obviously they don’t have a case against you in the vehicle matter. As for the conspiracy charge, that’s only there to frighten you. My own feeling is that the rest is pretty shaky too. We might be able to make everything disappear if you agree to testify. Of course we’d have to get Ms. Hubbard to testify as well. From the point of view of the Crown’s case, it has to be both of you or neither one, so that your testimony doesn’t cancel out hers and vice versa. I’ll start talking to her counsel. Then, if it looks like it could happen, I’ll approach the prosecution.”
That made me feel better, but I either didn’t trust him or I didn’t hold confidence in him, I don’t know which. Maybe first one and later the other. Whichever way I looked at it, it meant that I still found a methodology of working with him. He probably felt identically to me. What matters is that agreement was constructed, although it took a while.
For once I was not bashful about giving expression to my opinion. It didn’t seem fair to me that the bastard Bishop should have a say in any of this, even indirectly, but he did. You always hear television police complaining that they take the evil villains off the streets but the system puts them right back again. I have come around to this viewpoint too after realizing the similarities between that profession and my own. (You work your brains out helping the disadvantaged and then they just go out and get wretched all over again.)
It seemed to me that, despite my own lawyer’s work, the whole thing depended on what Bishop and his person wanted to do. As I understood the situation, he could choose to plead guilty or go to trial. He picked the second one. That pissed me off because anybody who knew anything knew he was guilty. He was guilty of stuff that’s not even against the law yet. Yet he wasted everybody’s time and other resources by letting other people decide. I thought this was typical of how he rejected the taking of responsibility. Exactly the sort of low-life morality-abandonment you’d expect of a known thief/kidnapper/pervert/drug dealer. My lawyer and I got into an argument about this. He said it was “a fundamental right” of the accused to elect to be tried and to put up the best defence he could. In this case, he said, it was only a question, if he went that way, of whether he’d ask for a trial by the judge-and-jury or a superior court judge (Smithe Street right downtown) or by the Provincial Court (Main and Cordova, a locality with which I was more familiar than anyone should have to be—but that was my job, correct?). If he picked the higher court he’d even get a preliminary hearing in the other one first. Liberal bullshit, of course. Being a creep himself, Bishop took the creepy old building at Main and Cordova. Probably it reminded him of home. Right in the middle of everything, my mother died. But they didn’t have to stop the trial like I thought they would. The trial just carried on without me for a while. Being a trusting individual I didn’t find anything suspicious in this action.
Except when I had to be in Victoria, I was in court every day. Or rather, out in the corridor most of the time, looking at the low-lifes. It was interesting to watch the proceedings inside but often hard to hear: the people do not speak clearly the way they do on TV shows and in movies. Beth was there some of the time but there was only one day when we were there together: I caught her looking over at me once or twice. I thought she mostly stayed away because she was afraid of me. Homophobia.Her face had that blank expression of someone who’s that way. Later her lawyer said to mine that she was “suffering” from having her name on TV and in the newspapers with one of those ugly drawings they make. Personally I wasn’t bothered by this type of thing, and right after the case was over I had to screen requests for interviews. (I thought I owed it to our society to distribute my ideas through the major media.) In the witness box, though, she didn’t have any reservations about performing. She told them exactly what they wanted to hear and she made herself look innocent and good while doing it. The judge was male, which explains a lot on a number of levels. She flirted with him by not flirting. I came around to realizing that I can’t stand the slut after all.
The prosecutor was interested in my diary. I had to read parts of it out loud and then they made me explain what I’d just read. Once they made me say what I’d just read but in everyday language, then came back and told me to repeat it in an even simpler version that anybody could understand. I was insulted. When I was cross-examined, Bishop’s lawyer in the shiny suit (shiny tie too) started to try to show that I wasn’t qualified to make the kinds of observations I had noted down in the field. But I told the court about my degree in social work and my job experience and the decision I’d just made to go back for my psychology degree and open a practice as a therapist and get out of the rathole of the Downtown Eastside. After I got through, the issue seemed to evaporate. It seemed to me that this was happening all the time. At one point there (I know this from my reading of the media) they were trying to show that Bishop was a major marijuana supplier, which of course he was.They were getting around to saying that he caused the fire by trying to destroy the pot crop, destroy the evidence, but his lawyer pointed out that the chronology was all wrong and questioned Beth about Clarence, the First Nations guy. But Clarence didn’t testify. As far as I know he never came out of the Interior. They left him alone. I don’t know why. Lack of evidence, I suppose.
It was funny how the lawyers made Beth and me into allies. At the time I still half believed that this was a case of destiny-fulfillment. Now I’m sure it wasn’t. Just a corrupt system that victimizes people who think it should be changed.
Of course, I am out of all that now. I have a practice in Kitsilano four days a week. I have to delimit it to four in order to get a break from hearing people’s problems. I’ve had no trouble attracting patients, not since becoming familiar to all through exposure via the media. My late mother was forever looking for the moral in the story and the silver lining of the moral. I remember her sometimes. Often. The silver-lined moral here, I would inform her if I could, is that all the adversity I have been through has permitted me to make my life repurposed.
The first thing you notice about prison is that there’s no advertising anywhere, only signs with rules about one damn thing and another. The language always makes me think of Theresa the social-working lesbian. But no ads at all and no bright colours. Looking back I see that this was a mistake I made at Jericho. I should have been bartering with Clarence for old metal signs. Sweet Caporal cigarettes, the original Coca-Cola jobs shaped like big buttons with the old-fashioned lettering on em. A beverage-room sign would have been great: LADIES AND ESCORTS. I didn’t even think about a beverage room. Should have had one laid out for the hotel as a project down the line. Hell, I didn’t even have street signs, simple black-and-white street signs, easily heistable by anybody. College boys steal em all the time. I only needed two after all, one at each end.
Of course looking back over your career is what you’re supposed to do in jail. It’s what they want you to do but it’s also what you start doing just naturally because you have a lot of time on your hands to catch up on your backlog of thoughts and besides it helps short out the noise sometimes.
So I think about old Windsor and Deetroit. I think about Lonnie and I retell myself all the stories he told me. I’ll probably be retelling em for the hundredth time before two years is up. I think about Beth too. Her background isn’t any better than mine but it’s a whole lot different, that’s for sure. Anybody can see what a good person she is. Smart too. I thought for a while up at Jericho that her and I might have ended up stepping out together long-term. There were a couple of days there when I thought she wanted to. That’s the way it is with women. You have to know how to read the tracks and move fast once you’re sure, if you ever are sure. I was too wrapped up in my own enterprise. Idiot. I hope I showed her how I felt when I told em I wouldn’t testify against her in exchange for a deal on certain charges. I hope her briefcase explained that to her. I knew what I was doing all right, knew what she’d say when they called her to the box. She’s probably never told a lie in her life and she wouldn’t start then. She’s the straightest person I’ve ever met, in the good sense of the term—and until I met her I didn’t know there was a good sense. Don’t get me wrong. She’s no Citizen. She doesn’t see the world as a straight or bent proposition, but she has her own set of codes you might say. My biggest mistake wasn’t Jericho, it was maybe not having good communications with her when I could have. Course, in my own defence, I have to point out that her travelling companion made me jumpy. Ha! They almost blew their case, calling her to give evidence. She’s so allergic to the English fucken language that nobody can make out what comes out of her mouth, so they have to listen to her personality and it’s like a jackal’s.
And I think about skulking around the lake. I always knew I was going to be on the lam, but I never thought it’d be out in the woods, with mountains everywhere you looked, hemming me in on all sides.
They say I used all those cabins like they were a big supermarket. It wasn’t like that at all, it was more like somebody’s damn poor back garden. I’d get inside one place and see what they had to eat. If I didn’t find anything much, I’d try the next one. Some days a few carrots, you might say, and the day after two turnips down on their luck: I never knew exactly what I’d come across. I wasn’t living like a potentate. And I never broke-and-entered a place. I’d just let myself in if it wasn’t locked. It’s like the law of the frontier that you leave your cabin door open for strangers who might be in trouble. When the door wasn’t open, I’d go around to a window that was. There always was one. What I’m saying is there was no smash-and-grab going on and no cat burglar situation. I only took what I needed to keep going and tried to take a little bit from everybody so it was fair, so fair that maybe nobody would notice anything was gone. Of course, with the publicity and the cops looking for me even out of province (they thought I might have gone over the mountains towards Banff) and even people across the American border talking to the cops as part of their insurance claims, I was playing into the hands of this crime-spree stuff, though of course I didn’t know it at the time. Sheeeet. If I was “eluding capture” like they said, it was because they weren’t very hot on capturing anybody. I remember reading once in a magazine about the missiles in Russia or somewhere. They’re on rail cars that keep going on a sort of loop from one cave or covered-up place to another, making a circle that’s miles and miles across. That way the satellites can’t be sure which cave has the goods. It’s like playing three-card monte with the end of the world, but using the full deck. I was only operating on the same principle. Never went from one cabin to the one next door, never hit the same one twice in a row. Some I never hit at all. One place I didn’t find anything, nothing at all worth taking, so it must have looked like I skipped over it altogether. All the same, I did at least inspect all the ones around the lake and then up the hillside on the south side and even in a few small places way back in the bush, though they were pretty poor and not worth an all-day or overnight hike. I wondered whose places those were, being so far from the lake and the boat ramp. Nothing in em, which told me that people didn’t stay long cause they lived on whatever supplies they could bring in on their backs, which I knew better than anybody wasn’t very much. One was just barely big enough for four homemade bunks and an axe. Nothing else. Not a match, not a plate. Not the evidence of staples I’d find in some of the richer ones, big wide-mouth plastic containers that still had a little spaghetti in them, or dried beans, or cereal with dried fruit slivers in it, or milk powder, that kind of stuff. My guess is that the little shacks were hunters’ cabins. In fact I know it, cause one of them had a kind of cross-tie, very strong, seven or eight feet off the ground, between two trees. It was for hanging up the kill to bleed it and skin it. Fishermen’s cabins are different. Judging from the insides of their places, you could tell fishermen were almost settlers who went back home when the good weather started to peter out. The hunters, though, they were there to reconquer. Just visiting.
I scraped my arm on a piece of glass and went under the tarp of one of the boats. Just as I was hoping, there was a first aid kit and I got myself cleaned and fixed up. Hurt though. And I’d left blood on the window which I didn’t think about till later: DNA. Nobody had DNA in Lonnie’s day of course. In the boat I also found two flares. Unfortunately they weren’t the kind you shot with a pistol, they were the kind you held away from your body and hit on the rear end. Those I took. They were safety equipment and that’s what safety equipment is for.
I was starting to think about how I was going to have to get outta there. I’d almost used up the food and to tell you the truth didn’t really know what to do except maybe get into a town, but that seemed pretty dangerous. Course, once in some town I could hop a bus to go somewhere else and get out of the whole region, out of B.C. maybe, go to Alberta, ship down to the States: all the places I now know they were thinking I’d go. The States wasn’t a bad idea if you could get across the border. I’ve heard of places there where asking people questions is considered rude, dangerous even. But I stalled, I admit it. I just couldn’t make up my mind to go, even though I knew I couldn’t stay. Recollecting it now, the way a person is supposed to do in here, I wonder if I wasn’t just too weak to move much. By this time the Sasquatch Bandit was still losing weight, was barely able to scrape together enough to keep a rabbit going, not living high off the hog like the people Outside thought. Maybe it wasn’t only my blood that was low. Maybe my head was run down too. I was like a bear caught in the headlights. I know, that’s supposed to be a deer caught in the headlights but I couldn’t get out of the way fast like a deer and I must have smelled more like a bear.
To get to the point, I was pretty much worn out. One morning I was down at the lake, standing ankle deep, splashing really cold water on myself to wash. I heard some noise far off, a light thumping sound like somebody’s heartbeat, but it didn’t register and I guess I didn’t look up right away cause I knew I was still surrounded by the same goddam mountains, like every other day. Then it got louder and that’s when I got sight of the helicopter slapping the sky around. I was spooked! I was out in the open and it was just sitting up there in the sky like a cat waiting for the rat to come out of its hole. It wasn’t a big one but it didn’t look civilian to me, though it didn’t have any markings one way or another, not that I could see. The machine just stared at me for a minute or so, then turned its belly to me in contempt and flew off sideways and backwards at the exact same time as I shook off my shock and made a break for cover.
I had absolutely no fucken way of knowing that it was a TV chopper. I couldn’t see any people inside. Maybe the sun was in my eyes. I sure didn’t see anybody with a camera. I didn’t know anything about the public having a hard-on for the Sasquatch Bandit. Even those two words together didn’t mean anything. I didn’t know I was playing right into their arms when they got this video of me standing in the water looking up at them, this dumb bearded dirty-looking longhaired guy who stumbled out of the bush like a drunk coming back from a beer parlour. I freaked out. I ran after my pack, then freaked out some more and disappeared into the undergrowth.
I had a flashback to fucken Moses, going around in circles for forty years. That’s what it felt like. At first my pulse was making a racket just like the whirlybird did. The further away I got, the more it settled down, but I was disoriented. I mean I knew which direction I was headed in—nobody changed the place where the sun comes up in or where it goes down—but I’d lost hold of the sense of where I was going cause to be honest I didn’t have a place to go any more. I didn’t have time to finish thinking my escape plan through. I went up some hills and down other ones. One of the few high points in my flight into Egypt was a big ridge that looked like a single piece of grey rock running in an absolutely straight line for miles, with trees and other green stuff fighting for centuries to grow up out of the cracks and overcome their upbringing by lighting out for the sky. I huffed and puffed a lot to get up there, let me tell you, and I didn’t know what I’d see from the top. But standing there looking down into the valley I thought to myself, “What a place for a city!” Why wasn’t there one there already? It was a mystery to me. As I was climbing back down, my feet went out from under me. I fell and rolled down in a kind of mudslide, part of the way on my ass, another part on my back, a few feet near the bottom on my face. It’s a wonder I didn’t end up hurt bad. I’m not that young any more; I’ve lost that chicken-bone flexibility young guys have. Probably what saved me was having the backpack on as a kind of cushion. It would have made an even better one a few days later when I was almost out of food again. This time I didn’t know where I was going to find any more.
I lost track of time. Maybe that’s part of losing your way. It sure didn’t help none. I was a man without time to measure where I was in my life. Once you’ve lost track, it’s hard to pick up the count again. So I don’t know how many days I was out there. I thought I was in trouble when I was on my way in to the damn lake. But when I was running away from it is when I knew I was really in for it. All the same I was very calm, not hopped up at all. Guys say they get rushes pulling a job. I was the opposite. I slowed right down. My head got more clear than it ever was. This is the way I am now. Sizing up my past errors like I’m supposed to do, I understand that this shows how much hot water I was in. It was like those stories you read about people suddenly getting warm when they’re actually freezing to death.
Day seven, day eight, I don’t know when it was exactly, a week at least, is when I saw the bear tracks. You couldn’t confuse em for anything else: they were goddam bear. I know I’m no woodsman but they were fresh. I followed em through the mud for a while. Hell, I was lost anyway, a lost soul for sure, maybe a lost body too; it was starting to look that way. But then I thought: What if I come up behind him? (Or her, though the paws looked pretty big even though I didn’t have anything to compare em to. To be on the safe side I’m going to say it was an it.)
I tried to figure out where I was, but I couldn’t. I wandered around for maybe an hour. Who knows how long? In our brain, I guess, we like to turn to what’s already familiar, and it looked like I was turning to the left all the time, like a supermarket cart when a spot on one wheel wears flat; I was making a half-circle back to my own path. Then I saw more tracks, even fresher ones I could tell, cause the mud they were in was still squishy. Looking at em next to mine and seeing how deep they were told me how big it was: pretty damn big. A few of these indents and then no sign. Then I’d find some more. It was behind me now. It was following me. I was being stalked for Christ sake. This couldn’t be happening. I shot off to one side but I guess I smelled pretty bad, so it didn’t have trouble figuring out which way I’d gone. I didn’t want to run and make too much noise and go flying again. So I walked quick but steady, at least as fast as a bear would, or so I was hoping, so at least it couldn’t gain on me. Every so often, needing wind, I’d stop for a couple minutes, take the pack off and get down on my haunches to look around in all directions, scouting.
Did I hear it coming for me? Well, I thought I did. Heard something there all right, outta sight but not all that far off. Then shots rang out way down the opposite side of the hillside.
There were three of em. Shots from a shoulder weapon, not from a handgun cause I knew what those sound like. The fucken cops are closing in is what went through my mind, for I was shook up but still had my wits. Three shots spread at least three seconds apart. That seemed funny when I thought about it. Whoever was doing the shooting was either aiming at three different things or doing target practice. I just about jumped outta my skin when I heard another three, same gun, same way. Long echo this time, though—couldn’t quite figure out why the sounds were more run together like. I said: Now I get it. A signal. A distress signal. I got out my flares to send a signal back. Whoever was there could get the bear off my back. Now I know what you’re thinking: sending up a flare in the woods is too stupid for words. But these things shoot straight up. That’s the whole idea. What falls back to earth, and it takes a while cause you’re trying to light up the sky, isn’t much. Besides, the countryside there was pretty wet at the time; everyplace I stepped I made a mess of the earth.
I pointed the thing and hit the back of it hard like you’re supposed to. Nothing happened. Tried it a second time. Nothing happened again. So I took out the other one. It took off all right—I was going to say like a rocket but that’s what it was, a rocket, right? High up over the hill it busted open, sending out big blooms of yellow smoke in all directions. I know they had to see that, whoever they were. I bet the bear saw it too. The bear! I was already unarmed. Now I was unarmed with a fucken bear looking to have me for breakfast. A weird situation for a city kid to be in.
I hustled myself over the hill. I wouldn’t be gone very long before I’d find em or they’d find me. By now I know they wasn’t cops, though I don’t think I would have cared so much if they had been. Three guys, middle-aged, outdoorsy clothes, work clothes, no Day-Glo hunter ponchos or anything like that. Only two of em had rifles. They saw me and one of them got all excited and started saying something about Sasquatch Guy which naturally I didn’t understand. One of them pointed his rifle at me! I guess he thought he might get a reward, that’s how I read it now. At least the cops’d look the other way at hunting bear out of season. It was way too early for deer too. Later, when the Mounties had me, the first thing I said to em was “In ceremonies of the Horseman even the pawn must hold a grudge.” They didn’t get it. They’re not music lovers, not educated people in the Civ department of life, not folks who appreciate the olden days, even their own.
I’m a changed woman, no doubt about it, and sometimes when I’m going to work in the morning I think about my first days in Vancouver, when I was naive and thought I should be looking for my father on the Downtown Eastside. That’s the only place I knew to look. But look for what? Now when I walk the streets they feel like home. They’re probably no better than they were before. In some ways they’re worse, I think most people would agree, because the drugs are much worse and the poverty and crime. The midnineties seems like an innocent time. Who would have thought that? When I cross the intersection as I’m walking to work in the morning, the same old corner looks different somehow.
They forced me to become a victim of celebrityism. However, I refused to be dictated to by their behavioural imperatives. It was a difficult time for me on multiple levels.