“Um, um, what is that?”
“What is what, Fred?” asked Badger as he clicked his lighter, puffed and got the cigar tip glowing again.
“That defining thing.”
“The Queen,” said one of the fans.
“Wrong,” said Badger.
“Our weak dollar,” said another.
“No,” replied Badger.
“We’re bilingual,” said another.
“Who is?” asked Badger.
Suddenly Fred threw his hand in the air. “Um, um, I think I remember.” Everyone looked at Fred and waited. Fred fought hard. It wasn’t until he let out a big sigh that everyone knew he’d been whipped. “Okay, shhh.”
The other fans stood expectantly. One finally spoke up. “So, what is it, Badger?”
Another fan snuffed out her cigarette. “Second period’s starting.” Everyone headed back inside, leaving a few trampled cigarettes smouldering in the cold air.
The ewe swayed in the corner of the barn with her head tilted back. Jack crouched not far behind. A young, sturdy man in overalls stood stiffly nearby, arms folded, watching. “How long has she been doing this?” asked Jiri, with a thick Czech accent.
“I noticed her a few hours ago.”
The ewe suddenly pitched forward and rolled onto her side. She began kicking frantically but was unable to rise.
Jack usually referred to Jiri as “that young Czech fella.” Jiri had come to the farming fields of Canada to escape troubles in Prague. He had been running with a gang of skinheads who spent their weekends tormenting Vietnamese workers and foreign tourists. It wasn’t until Jiri saw his friends toss a gypsy off a bridge that he decided to go back to school and get his veterinarian’s licence.
Jiri’s face wore a stern expression. He had dark brown eyes that never revealed what he was feeling and a body that other young men could only dream of inhabiting. He wore long-sleeved shirts to hide his tattoos. He liked his new home, and not just because Jack’s neighbours treated foreigners better than Jiri’s friends had. He also liked the fact that they were white. Not that he would have thrown anyone off a bridge; he was never too keen on maiming people, but he secretly resented folks who weren’t like him. This malice, however, was slowly being shaped and rounded into tolerance because it was Jiri who now had the funny accent, an accent his Canadian wife adored, almost as much as his body and his love of animals.
“Okay,” Jiri said, sitting on a hay bale. “There is three possibilities.” He held up a finger. “One, hypomagnesaemia, but if you say that none of the other ewes have symptoms then not so likely.” Jiri raised a second finger. “Two, cerebrocortical necrosis.” He held up three fingers. “And three, I could please have your flashlight?”
Jack followed him outside the barn into the corral. Jiri moved forward carefully, scanning the light back and forth across the ground.
The cramped room at the back of the house had been Badger’s office for the past twenty years. A row of filing cabinets, some open with the corners of frayed folders poking up like old cheese slices, stood against one wall. On another hung Badger’s law degree from New York University.
Badger waded into the office, a blanket over his shoulder and a pillow under his arm. Fred enjoyed the smell of Badger when he came into a room. He smelled older and wiser, like a grandfather should.
“Um, um, tell me again why you came to Canada?”
“To get away.”
“From what?”
Beside the law degree was a quote from John Maynard Keynes: Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all.
“Um, um, never mind.” On a small table stood several figurines, each about three inches high. Fred picked one up and inspected it carefully. “Who is this?”
Badger had to come closer to see. “Vladimir Lenin.”
“Head coach of the Central Red Army team?”
“No, Russian leader of the Communist Party.”
“That was my second guess, buh, buh, you hang on to those little Russians and one day they will be worth a lot of money, wowee, I wish I would have saved my Evel Knievel jump bike and ramp because I was told it is worth two hundred dollars now.” Fred stuffed Lenin in his pocket.
Badger noticed. “He gets lonely if he’s not with his friends.”
“Me too.” Fred put Lenin back on the table alongside Gorbachev, Stalin, Yeltsin and Brezhnev and wandered over to a crumpled and stained photograph of a young woman tacked to the wall. Fred gazed at the woman’s face as he had every time he stayed at Badger’s. She had the most striking expression, conveying something so transparent, so haunting, that Fred whispered, “Buh, buh, your dead wife?”
Badger unnecessarily folded and refolded the blanket. “A farmer’s daughter.”
“You little devil, um, um, she looks like someone from an old movie, buh, buh, still hot to trot.”
“I never met her,” said Badger quickly.
“And yet you have her picture so tell me why and keep it short because your stories run a little long and put me to sleep and I’m not quite ready.”
Badger coughed and angrily fluffed Fred’s pillow. “Her father tried to strangle me.”
Fred’s eyes blinked rapidly. “Um, um, you were in France.”
“Caen.”
“Just like I used when I learned to walk again, um, um, the bombs from you guys killed his daughter and the Frenchman tried to murder you and your friends shot him deader than a stick,” exclaimed Fred.
“Yes.”
“And from his stiff fingers you plucked the picture and headed west to …”
“Cherbourg.”
“Instead of east to Berlin. I think they call that desertion and you would have been blindfolded and puffing a cigarette in front of a firing squad if they found you, buh, buh, I don’t think you were scared at all, I think you were fed up and wanted to go home.”
Fred turned around. Badger had buried his face in Fred’s pillow. Fred could still see his forehead; it was redder than the Soviet flag that hung behind him. Fred had forgotten how upset Badger became when he asked too many questions about the young woman in the photograph. “Hey, hey, hey, what is better than winning a medal at the Special Olympics?” Badger didn’t reply. “Not being retarded.” It took a few seconds, but Fred finally heard the deep chuckle from behind the pillow. “And only I can say something so awful because I am handicapped.”
Fred knew it was safe to move on, so he pointed to a yellowed newspaper photograph in a cracked frame. “Hey, hey, come here for five seconds and answer a question. What is this?”
Badger didn’t need to walk over. “Chicago, 1968.”
Fred looked at Badger and shrugged his shoulders.
“There was a convention. And a protest.”
“Why?”
“The world was watching. We stopped a war.”
“And this fellow got hit on the head? How come?”
“I think he called a policeman a fucking pig.”
Fred shot his arm in the air and squealed. “I love it when you really pronounce the ing in that swear word because most people would be content to say f’in’ pig, buh, buh, not you, he is a f’ing pig. High class.”
The man in the photograph had shoulder-length hair pulled back in a ponytail. His hands were cuffed behind his back. Blood trickled from his forehead. If Fred had looked more carefully at Badger, he might have been able to see the scar. “Okay, so where do I sleep and please, please, please, don’t tell me outside.”
Badger led Fred into the living room. He tossed the blanket and the pillow onto a couch. Fred sat down and yawned. “Thank you, thank you, for taking me to the hockey game and I am such a lucky ducky because there is another one tomorrow night.”
Badger locked the front door. “Now, don’t you go wandering off into the night.”
Fred gazed around at the stacks of books. They were piled everywhere. The room had a deep, musky smel
l of old cigars and there were numerous burns on the carpet. A thin layer of dust covered tables and lampshades. The walls were a pale yellow and one wall showed swaths of white, as wide as a sponge, as if someone had tried to clean and given up.
Fred felt as if he were in a library so he kept his voice down. “And you are a hot-shot lawyer who escaped the long arm of the law when you were blowing up trucks and never got convicted so you must have made big bucks to buy this nice house and even still you seem either mad, mad, mad, or sad, sad, sad, how come?”
Badger settled into his chair with a groan. “I didn’t make that much money. Most of my clients never paid me.”
It was true. Badger took on cases that nobody else would. That’s because Badger was a soft touch when it came to eight-year-olds wanting to see a hockey game or impoverished people needing a good lawyer.
“You look tired, buh, buh, tell me a war story or two, Mommy, and I will fall asleep just as fast as I can.”
Badger rubbed his fingers on the leather arm of his chair and thought for a moment, or at least made it appear to Fred as if he was thinking. “Once upon a time …”
“Hey, hey, hey, hold your horses.” Fred pulled his right leg up, stretched out, propped the pillow under his head, yanked the blanket up, crossed his hands over his chest and looked up at the ceiling. “I think I just figured out why I like you. You are just like Taillon because I feel safe when I am with you and you let me say anything I want, buh, buh, I don’t have much to say, Mister Sandman, so sprinkle your dust.”
Badger appeared genuinely touched by Fred’s compliment. He smiled affectionately at Fred, who was staring at the ceiling, waiting. “Once upon a time there were four men and a woman driving in a van in Manitoba.”
“Um, um, if they were driving in a van then it was not ‘once upon a time’ it was more recent.”
“Nineteen seventy-one.”
“So just say that and I didn’t know of any wars in Manitoba when vans were driving around.”
“Are you going to interrupt me all the way through?”
“I will shut up now.”
Fred noticed that Badger was having trouble breathing but he didn’t want to ask about it. He didn’t want to know if Badger was sick.
“They were in search of a city named after a grocer.”
“They named a city after a grocer?”
“Josiah Flintabbatey Flonatin built a submarine and explored a bottomless lake, found a sunless city filled with gold and fell in love with a princess.”
Fred’s brow wrinkled. “What happened to World War Two?”
“Just wait.” Badger pulled himself out of his chair, went to a stack of books and started running his fingers down the spines. Finally he yanked out a dime novel, blew the dust off, had a short coughing fit and handed the book to Fred, the cover barely hanging on. Fred read the title.
“The Sunless City by J. E. Preston Muddock.” Fred opened the book. “Nineteen-oh-five.” He whistled and flipped the pages. “Buh, buh, this doesn’t look like a true story because there are no pictures. I like your war stories better.”
“I’m not finished yet.”
“Okay, okay, we’re just getting started.” Fred yawned.
Badger returned to his chair. “A copy of the novel you are now cradling in your lap was found by a gold prospector back in 1915.” Fred glanced down at the book, a little more impressed. “The prospector named the lake and his camp after the grocer who travelled to the bottomless lake.”
“And he had that long name.”
“Josiah Flintabbatey Flonatin, and once the Hudson’s Bay Company came out west the name stuck.”
“Did you say it sucks because that is such a long name I could hear it a million times and I’d never remember.”
“They shortened it.”
“To what?”
“Flin Flon.”
Fred blasted his double-barrelled laugh and the chime on Badger’s clock above the fireplace vibrated. “Why didn’t you say so, that’s where Bobby Clarke was born and they told him he would never play hockey because he had diabetes and he proved them wrong just like me, buh, buh, back to your van and driving all the way to Flin Flon because it was named after a grocer from an old book, which means you must have been smoking lots of drugs and been high as kites and then crashed to the ground when you got there because it is a dirty mining town, not a city of gold.”
Fred looked over as Badger’s eyes lit up. He seemed to lose thirty years in an instant. “It was a great beginning. There were five of us. In 1956, Castro set sail from Mexico on a small boat called the Granma with eighty-two men and started a revolution.”
“Buh, buh, you have talked too much about Fidel Castro although I really like the name of that boat because it reminds me of old women stooped over ovens pulling out trays of pies, okay, your four comrades, were they angry Americans just like you?”
“Three were Canadian. One was French. They saw what I saw: Canada being swallowed up by the United States just when she was mature enough to make a significant contribution to the history of the world.”
“This is turning into a speech, not a story.” Badger scowled at Fred and Fred shrugged. “Sorry, buh, buh, stick to the script.”
“They met the same Canadians I did, the ones who looked jealously across the border and seemed almost embarrassed to be Canadian, like they didn’t have a right to exist, a right to stand up against the hidden hand and fist that is used to protect McDonald’s because there’s no McDonald’s without McDonnell Douglas.”
“Um, um, that hand and fist must be hidden so good that I don’t even see it or know what it is.”
“United States army, navy, air force, marines.”
“Okay, okay, I have heard of them, buh, buh, you went to war? Wowee, five against the U.S. army, navy, air force and marines. That must have been some better-than-good marijuana you were smoking.”
“We holed up in a cheap basement apartment and, using Flin Flon as our base, we fought back.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere. Tell me about the fights.”
“We fought everything we didn’t like.”
“Such as?”
“Uranium.”
“Huh?”
“Mined in Saskatchewan and used for American nuclear bombs.”
“Why would Canada sell uranium to kill children?”
“We didn’t like U.S. war planes being tested on Canadian soil, we didn’t like Alberta being sold to the American oil companies in the early seventies, we didn’t like Canadian television sets being swamped by American dreams.”
“Except All in the Family. That was a good show, buh, buh, cut to the gory stuff, Edith, and tell me the stories that make Papa Joe not trust you as much as the next guy.”
“He doesn’t know the half of it, Fred. There were worse things, things I can’t talk about because he’d never let me take you to another hockey game.”
Fred thought for a second. “Tell me anyway and I will forget.”
“Like heading west to Cherbourg instead of east to Berlin.”
“That was a lucky guess, buh, buh, Papa Joe said the RCMP broke up your over-the-hill gang and scattered you to the wind.”
“Don’t believe everything Jack tells you.”
“You two are like little peas in a pod because he says I shouldn’t believe everything you say.”
“Nor should you,” barked Badger, louder than he had intended. “Think for yourself for god’s sakes.”
“I always do, mister up-too-late and turning into Oscar the Grouch.” Fred smiled mischievously. “So I shouldn’t tell him that the Flin Flon Five might be touring again.” Fred detonated the second measure of his double-barreled laugh. The sound of the whoopee cushion rumbled through the house. “Just like the Rolling Stones.”
“It’s just a rumour.”
“Okay, shhh.”
Jiri worked his way around the outside of the corral. He stopped, tipped a can over. It was empty. He continued o
n with Jack and Pearl following. “Can’t believe nobody’s put the moves on Marilyn Feniak. She’s got nice tits, Jack.”
“Isn’t she a little old for you?”
“Oh yes, but she’s a ripe age for a senile sheep farmer.”
“We’d have to kill her dogs first.”
“Yes, the gangsters, and maybe her eldest son as well.” Jiri came to the end of a fence. The two llamas clucked their tongues. Jiri clucked right back. “Everyone’s speaking about his broken ankle.”
“Yeah, there’s not much else to talk about I guess.”
Jiri grinned and shined his flashlight on the llamas. They shifted restlessly in the light. One of them spat at Jiri. “Oh, don’t worry, Jack. The bad words aren’t for Fred. Most of them think that Ryan is a shithead.”
“He’s just a kid. Fred should know better.”
“He’s got great strength in that good arm, no?”
“Be nice if he had a little more in his brain.”
Jiri guided his light down the flank of one of the llamas. “You see? You’ve got to brush these guys.” Jiri waved his light across the matted hair. “Oh, I just remembered something important. What’s the difference between a woman and a sheep?”
“The sheep doesn’t get upset if you screw her sister,” dead-panned Jack.
“You have heard that one.”
“I’ve heard them all.”
As Jiri doubled back to the barn, Taillon stood on top of his snow mound, watching his every move. Taillon’s eyes looked fierce in the glare of Jiri’s flashlight. “Ah, magnificent.” Jiri whispered at Taillon. “You don’t like me at all. And you’re not supposed to because I do bad things to your friends.”
The Horn of a Lamb Page 9