Windwhistle Bone

by Richard Trainor

“Yeah, I’m okay. I shouldn’t have done that last acid though.”

  “Come on, Le Doir. Shank of the evening… Or morning, as the case may be… no, certainly is!”

  Shaughn and Jonas shared a laugh.

  “Right… right you are.”

  “Of course, we are.”

  Below, the horn of another hidden freighter sounded and floated up the mountain, mournful and dolorous, somber as a cello.

  “I love this place, Jonas… and I love this time,” I said. “I’ve never felt more alive. Do you think I’ll have any problem getting landed?”

  “You? Nah. Don’t sweat it. Just play it cool, man. You’ve already gone through the screening. Didn’t they say it was a knock?”

  “I scored a 66.”

  “Well, you only need a 50. Shank of the morning, Ram, shank of the New Morning,” Jonas said, emphasizing the latter so I would get the reference to the new Dylan album.

  “Shank of the New Morning,” I echoed in a tone louder and even more enthused sounding than Jonas’s was. My eyes drifted to the landscape and took it in, then an inspiration seized me and I spoke.

  “Listen, listen, guys, I got an idea. Look, look at the city,” I was standing now, sweeping my hand across the vista below. “Look. There’s Stanley Park, and over there, the slate mansards of The Vancouver Hotel, and, over there in back, there’s the fourteen-story rectangle of The Ritz, although it’s really thirteen, and then closer in at a distance downhill from that and still in the fog, there’s Gastown.”

  “…and over there on the hill,” said Jonas, “there’s Queen Elizabeth Park… and over there, it’s Shaughnessy, but not the living breathing Shaughnessy, not—”

  “The Human Shaughnessy!!!” Jonas and I both shouted.

  Shaughn turned from his spot along the cliff and looked back quizzically, then came over and joined us in laughter. We were in sync again, that mutual goading of divine inspiration, planting ideas in each other, feeding off one another like it was in Deerville upon Shaughn’s return from Europe. Again, life and all we’d done during the long nights in the spring in Deerville when Jonas arrived after deserting the Army; speaking in shorthand, in semaphores, taking the serendipitous as signs directed solely toward us, which would point us, draw us, inexorably to Vancouver. For in that exhilaration which we mutually felt and drew from one another, which was in unequal parts youth’s high adventure and the sweet taste of bridge-burning exile and its attendant risk and fear and a certain finality, Vancouver was our promise of a new land rich with ‘possibilities’ restricted only by our imaginations. We would build a colony of higher consciousness there, congratulating ourselves on the revolutionary ardor of such an idea, believing we would find willing backers and acolytes to aid us in our endeavor. One Sunday morning, we had gone so far as approaching the door of a millionaire art patron out in Point Gray, Vancouver silk-stocking district, before turning back in fear. We weren’t ready, we said.

  Initially, it was Shaughn and Jonas when they first headed north, driving up through the Okanagan Valley east of Vancouver and stopping in Penticton where they sold the pound of acid that Shaughn had carried north with them in the Riviera GS. Then Shaughn returned to Sagrada, and a month later, it was Jonas and Walt and I until Walt left for Alaska.

  It wasn’t simply ‘the war’ that drew us all to Vancouver, but, rather, the hopelessness of doing anything about it, the hopelessness of affecting substantive political change in America, no matter how many millions marched in the street, the hopelessness of creating anything that wasn’t shot through with despair, which seemed the only honest emotion that humanists, such as we saw ourselves, could logically express in the face of that tide of repression. So we took our high spirits and our ‘vision’ northward to Vancouver, arriving in that fresh heat of expatriate fervor, quickly assimilating all we could: the native expressions and mannerisms and dress and culture of what we felt it was to be truly and simply Canadian, as if any of us could have had any real clue of what that truly was.

  “Wouldn’t it be great, Jonas,” I said coming back to the present, “to be in all these places simultaneously? Look, the city’s waking up, and we’re waking up with it. There’s False Creek, and there’s Chinatown, and way over there is Queen E! To experience the entire city, the whole thing, to swallow it all simultaneously?”

  “I’m with you, Le Doir. Let’s do it,” Shaughn said.

  “Jonas, listen to Ram,” said Donnie. “Come on, let’s do it, let’s go.”

  “Jonas grinned sickly and smiled.”Alright, Le Doir, you’re on. Let’s do it."

  …by late afternoon wearied from the attempted inhalation of Vancouver, Jonas and Shaughn and I sat by the picture window in the pub of the Sylvia Hotel. Donnie had tired after Queen Elizabeth Park and went home. The three of us had given up an hour later and first went to a coffee shop on Seymour called The Peter Pan where we had breakfast. Outside, a junkie in drag was calling out to somebody in the apartment above the coffee shop, “Come on, Randy, open up, it’s me. Randy, oh please open up.”

  We had nearly completed the circle—a circle that was more an ellipse, a ricocheted orbit of folly—and when we fled the depressing scene at The Peter Pan and entered the Sylvia, we collapsed, weary and defeated, into a leather banquette. Shaughn held up three fingers. A waiter brought the tray of schooners which we sipped quietly in the near darkness.

  Out in the roadstead, a dozen freighters lingered at various angles and distances across the horizon. The cloud cover seemed to be breaking, the sun, sinking through the stacked clouds just beginning to show its lower half as it made its way toward the ridgeline north of Victoria.

  “Cheers!” Shaughn offered. His voice was cracked from cigarettes, whiskey, laughter, and the hangover of psychedelics.

  “Cheers,” replied Jonas and I.

  The glasses clinked and we returned to silence. On the chalk blue water, a band of orange oscillated that at first inspection looked like a spire of flame. Eventually, the oscillating flame on the water became a woman, a belly dancer undulating to the rhythm of the water. I finally blinked it away and now it was twilight. The lights on the ships out in the roadstead were on now, which made them seem somehow less heroic.

  “Final final at the Ritz, Ram?”

  “Yeah, sure. Why not?”

  We drained our schooners and walked out into the cold air, wandering about until Shaughn remembered where he had parked the car.

  Inside the Ritz’s cavernous main room, we wandered about until we found an unoccupied table close to the middle. Jonas held up both hands—six fingers in the air—and the waiter deposited six schooners. Looking about the room, I didn’t see any of the regulars. Shaughn got up to make a phone call and Jonas raised his glass in salute.

  “To your success at the border, Le Doir.”

  “You really think they’ll take me?”

  “Sure. Why not? Oh yeah, you’re in… and, if you’re not, well, hey, you’ve always got other options. You always do, Le Doir.”

  Jonas was sneering when he said it and I thought about confronting him but put it aside for the moment. We’ll get to that sometime, I thought, but not here.

  When Shaughn returned to the table, he had a couple of pretty girls in tow.

  “Jonas, Ram, this here’s Cindy and…”

  “Marcia,” the dark-haired girl said.

  “Cindy and Marcia, this is Ram Le Doir and the famous Jonas Allen.”

  “We’ve seen you in the play, and on TV in that plumber commercial,” said the blonde one. “Marcia’s a big fan of yours.”

  “Oh really?” said Jonas, the sneer dissolving into a welcoming grin. “Well, sit down and join us. Henry,” said Jonas to the passing waiter, holding up both hands with all fingers outstretched.

  “Ten more.”

  “No, make it six,” I said. “I’m leaving.”

  “You sure, Ram? The more the merrier. Shank of the evening, stick around a while.”

  I looked down at Jon
as, taking in the unconvincing welcome. I put on my leather jacket, said goodnight to the ladies and Shaughn, and looked back to Jonas.

  “I’ll see you at the house tomorrow. There’s A few things we need to talk about before I head south on Sunday.”

  “Whatever you say, Ram. Tomorrow sometime, but not too early,” he said, scanning the table, catching Marcia’s eye and leering at her. She blushed, laughed, and returned his gaze in a reciprocal fashion. “You know how it is. Something always comes up.”

  The four at the table laughed until I joined them.

  “Okay. Late afternoon, maybe. But sometime tomorrow for sure?”

  “Oh, yeah. For sure, Ram.”

  Out on the sidewalk, the cold air hit me and sobered me slightly. The clouded sky was clearing and white stars were shining against its blackness as I turned west on Burrard, heading for Granville.

  I scanned about, taking it in. My teeth chattered against the mid-December chill and my cheeks stung; that peculiar psychedelicized flesh melt smell of my too-alive body reached my nostrils, momentarily nauseating me. The buildings seemed to breathe, heaving arrhythmically. The street then shifted, as if in strobe blips, its elevations and dimensions changing between blinks. Taking a deep breath, I started unsteadily up the Water Street hill, past the steam-powered clock at the corner of Cambie, and past the old Hudson’s Bay where panhandlers and junkies and winos walked about. I saw a drunken Indian beating his woman, watching them from a distance. The woman broke free, running toward me and then turned right at Cambie while my eyes followed her. For a moment, I thought of asking if there was anything I could do to help her, but the belligerent stare of the Indian man dissuaded me, so I turned north, heading into the heart of Gastown. I was exhausted and hungry, but moved ahead nonetheless, knowing I could sleep all day when I got home.

  There is something to be said for the kind of fatigue that is so overpowering that it becomes a buffeting force, tossing you about without your being able to assert yourself and resist it, and I felt that force as I moved through the cold night, drawn into the heart of Gastown where the expatriate adventure had begun six months before, although it felt like years had passed since then. I moved through the streets like a sleepwalker, impelled by this force, which seemed to recognize and realize the extent of my fatigue and welcomed me as a guest, treating me with a gentleness that allowed me to float on the quicksilver of the whip that it lashes of those who resist it, reeling me down toward the Dominion, where the adventure began back in June with Jonas when Walt and I arrived. I entered the pub and had a beer and a Cubanette sandwich, remembering those June nights. The moment flashed for a second, and then I was back in the other. The pub was filled and getting noisy, and I looked about for someone I knew. There was no one familiar, and I got up to leave, heading west toward Stanley Park.

  I took the path I had walked a hundred times before, as though by dead reckoning. Into the heart of the park, then down the cliff path and over the rocky shore to Brockton Point. On the beach, a wool-like mist was beginning to lift. The sky was black with stars of white. I looked east, the highrises glowing with lights ablaze, massed and pulsing. Closer in, the headland of the park was black, and nearby, the strung gold necklaces of Lion’s Gate Bridge stretched over the inlet.

  I found a nook out of the wind, wrapped my coat around me and dozed until dawn, wakened by passing hikers who thought I might be dead. They nudged me with the toes of their boots. When I came to, I stretched out, raised myself, and looked out to the roadstead to the ships still there. Some had passed beyond the horizon and those still left had changed their angles. The clouds were smoky bands interspersed with streaks of salmon, bearing a faint promise of good weather.

  On Davie Street, I hailed a cab and told the driver where to take me. “1570 Queen Street, West Van. Wake me when we get there,” I said to the driver.

  I slept the rest of the day and woke to an empty house. There was a note from Jimmy on the kitchen table about a party at Cliff’s house. I dismissed the idea, put on a kettle for tea and reheated the chili from the previous night’s party, the electric version. In the living room, I built a fire and looked out on the city.

  The morning’s promise of good weather was now broken. It was foul with shards of rain flung against the picture window. A black sky was moving in from the south. It was the reverse pattern for this time of year; usually, it came from the other way, from the Arctic down. I put some records on the turntable and watched the flames, drinking pots of spearmint tea and popping handfuls of vitamins. Jonas wouldn’t show; he’d be at Cliff’s. Besides, what did it matter now? I would be gone the next day, heading for the border and then to Sagrada.

  “It’s true that all the men you knew were dealers, who said that they were through with dealing,” sang Leonard Cohen. I laughed while simultaneously a chill came over me, remembering the scene at the San Francisco airport when we were getting ready to board the flight to Vancouver and Fran came up too late to warn us that the place was crawling with the FBI. The Weather Underground had threatened to bomb every major American airport that weekend, and looking about the mezzanine surrounding the terminal, I could see there were agents everywhere. It was too late now to reclaim the bags I’d checked in loaded with two pounds of mescaline…

  …I blinked back into the now that was me driving through West Marin and saw it was just past noon. I felt tired, so mentally drained that I thought it best to stop for coffee before continuing any further. At the Dogtown cut-off, I headed west to Bolinas, parked outside the hotel, walked into the bar, and ordered cappuccino. The bartender looked at me, seeming to register something, a recognition maybe, but then decided to drop it or figured that he was wrong, and pushed the cup in front of me. Then I remembered the place. This was one of my hideouts during the Verde story when I was on the run. I sipped my drink, listening to the locals make small talk while I burgled their conversations.

  It was the same old California story, the fight to keep development forces at bay and preserve what was still left of the land that had largely ceased to be. At present, the locals were fighting some out-of-town millionaires from down south who wanted to put in a luxury hotel and a high-end ‘village-oriented’ shopping center. The locals were cooking up a strategy of how to stop them. It was the same kind of skull session that I had taken part in a hundred times before—in Refugio at first, then Sagrada, then Sonoma County, Mendocino, and elsewhere, the same sort of fight we thought we’d won in Sagrada many years before, until our allies sold out to the developers and accommodated their agenda in exchange for a few bones. Some got appointments to regulatory boards, meaningless centers of powerlessness where they could do no harm, but now had a title and a salary and benefits to protect. I listened with one ear open for a while, then I tuned out the conversation and played the jukebox, playing Boz Scaggs doing ‘Harbor Lights,’ and Rod Stewart, ‘First Cut is the Deepest,’ then Van Morrison singing ‘Street Choir.’

  “…why did you leave America, why did you let me down?”

  It came on over the Dominion’s loudspeakers as Jonas sat opposite Walt and me. It was around nine at night, early June, and we had just hit town.

  “Things are different here in Canada,” Jonas said. “Sort of like what we thought it might be like in Deerville. More open, less hassle.”

  “Can we find work?” asked Walt.

  “Not without papers. You’ll need papers first. I know a guy—200 bucks and you get a whole set of Canadian ID.”

  “What about without?”

  “Without? Day labor, mostly. You can get work raking leaves, maybe some house painting. Do you have a trade, Walt?”

  “I can weld.”

  Jonas swallowed the last of his beer, held three fingers up, and the waiter arrived. When it was obvious that Jonas couldn’t pay, I peeled off a five.

  “Let’s talk about this later back at the house,” Jonas said. “The evening’s young, and the fillies are out to play. Take a look around. You ever see
anything like this in California?”

  I scanned around the filling pub. Long-haired guys gathered around tables and pretty girls in cotton dresses gathered in different conversational knots of twos and threes, shooting pool and drinking beer. In the corner, a group of four was huddled around a table, alternately leaning over it.

  “What’s going on there?” Walt asked Jonas.

  “Hold on. Be right back.”

  When he returned, Jonas produced a small black pellet and began flattening a cigarette. He lit it, hot-boxed it until it was cherry red, and placed the black pellet atop the ember while Walt and I looked on. After a minute, the pellet started smoking. Jonas leaned over and inhaled until he turned away and coughed.

  “Try it,” he said. “Nepalese hash. Hit it while it’s smoking.”

  An hour later, we were wasted. The bar had filled even more. A tall, elderly white-haired man in top hat and tails came over to the table and started talking to Jonas.

  “Gentlemen, I give you Roderick Sample, Esquire,” said Jonas. “He’s the honorary mayor of Gastown.”

  The mayor sat down at the table as four more schooners arrived. Sample sat at the end of the table and Jonas made the introductions. Sample pulled out a tin of something, tapped some powder out onto the back of his hand and inhaled.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “You’ve never taken snuff before, young man?”

  “No,” I said as Sample took my hand and shook some snuff onto it.

  “Well, by all means, you must.”

  I inhaled the powder as the mayor had done and the world around me accelerated from ten to two hundred miles an hour. It lasted only a moment. Still, I was sold, and for the rest of the evening, we sat with Roderick Sample, the Mayor of Gastown, sniffing snuff, smoking hash, drinking beer and chasing it with shots of rum that the mayor had inside an ebony cane whose top screwed off. It was close to midnight, when His Honor got up and excused himself. The noise was down to a level where we didn’t have to yell at one another to be heard.

  Back in the Bolinas barroom, the voices shifted to sotto voce discussions of development. For a moment, I thought about throwing in my two cents, then I balked, remembering Sagrada and how that message was received. I wandered outside and walked to the end of the street where waves were pounding the beach.