The Vanishing Track

by Stephen Legault

  He smiled, put the come-along on the floor and stomped on it has hard as he could, snapping the tool from its wooden base. He scooped up the wood and hid it behind a set of legal texts on the shelf. He hefted the tool by its handle. It was perfect.

  Next, Sean went to his parents’ bedroom. It smelled close, like a room where someone had lain dying for many years. His mother was back in the hospital; Sean imaged that she was in the grips of a spell of raving lunacy once again. He went to her dressing room and opened her jewelry box. All of her most precious items were locked in a strong box, but he knew he could pawn a handful of these lesser items for enough money to allow him to sleep indoors for another month or two. He also found a wad of cash in his father’s sock drawer. Next he went to Adelaide’s room, where he quickly searched through her things, finding two pairs of earrings worth taking and a small white envelope of cash that was labeled “for Christmas gifts” in a drawer in her writing table. He slipped it all into his pocket. Finally, he went to his own room, grabbed a sweater and a jacket and a couple of pairs of socks and underwear, wrapped the come-along in them, and pushed everything into a blue backpack he hadn’t used since high school. He stepped back into the hall and listened. The house was quiet.

  He was about to head back downstairs when he felt the urge to use the toilet. He smiled, stepped to his father’s study, went to the corner farthest from the door, unzipped his pants, and relieved himself on the heavy carpet. He re-zipped his trousers and locked the door behind himself.

  Adelaide was waiting for him in the kitchen. When he entered, she looked up from cleaning the counter.

  “I’ve prepared some lunch and dinner for you, Sean,” she said.

  “Wow, that’s really great!” he said, finding the right inflection to seem genuine.

  She handed him a large paper sack. “Did you get your things?”

  “I did,” he took the bag and put it into his backpack. “Look, I should get going. I don’t want to have a run-in with the old man.”

  Adelaide stepped to him and embraced him warmly. He put his arms around her and studied the far wall of the kitchen, wondering what time the next bus would arrive.

  What, where, and how had now been determined. All that remained was the when.

  SEAN FINALLY REACHED the front of the queue at the Carnegie Centre kitchen. A large woman heaped rice, vegetables, and chicken onto his plate. He smiled, paying the dollar seventy-five to the cashier.

  Sean looked around the crowded room for a place to sit and eat, but his stomach twisted with the thought of being cramped together with all these people. He took his food and found his way back outside, taking a place on the steps. He ate the meal, eyeing a ragged-looking man with a greasy ball cap who studied him intently. Still sitting, Sean finished and put his face down onto his folded arms, supported on his knees, and let himself drift. He must have fallen asleep, because he woke with a start.

  “I’m sorry,” said a young woman’s voice.

  He cleared his eyes and looked around. She was hunched down on the steps next to him. She was older than he was, maybe early thirties, and wore a plain gray hooded sweatshirt that zipped up the front, and had a bright orange backpack on her back. He had seen her just a few days ago when he had been following Overcoat Man. She had given the vagrant a package of first-aid supplies. Sean remembered that same package was now in his backpack.

  “I’m sorry to have woken you,” the woman said again. Sean focused on her, his flat eyes scanning her face. “My name is Juliet. I work for the Health Authority. I’m a nurse. I wanted to check in with you and make sure everything was alright.”

  Sean set his composure. “Thanks,” he said, blinking the sleep from his eyes. “I’m okay. I just ate for the first time in a couple of days. I guess I drifted off.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Sean.”

  “How long have you been on the street, Sean?”

  Sean paused a moment to give the appearance of calculation. “I think about six months. Maybe a little longer.”

  “Are you from Vancouver?”

  “No, Toronto.”

  “How did you come to be in Vancouver?”

  “I came out to go to school, but my father cut me off when I didn’t get all A’s after my first term. I couldn’t afford to go it on my own.”

  “How old are you, Sean?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  Juliet regarded his face. She knew that living on the street aged people beyond their years. “Sean, can I ask you a few personal questions?”

  “Sure, I guess.”

  “Do you use any drugs?”

  “Oh no,” he said. “Even if I could afford them, I wouldn’t do that sort of thing. It really messes you up. I still really just want to get back into university. I was studying physics and chemistry. I want to be a scientist some day.”

  “I have an even more personal question, Sean. I hope you’ll understand it’s just my job. Have you had any unprotected sex while on the street?”

  “What do you mean?” Sean asked, tilting his head innocently to one side.

  “Have you had sex without a condom?”

  Sean looked down at his hands. “No,” he said.

  “That’s good, Sean. That’s good.”

  “I’m not like these people,” Sean said, looking back up at Juliet, his eyes meeting hers. “I’m not a vagrant. I’m not a bum. I come from a good family. It’s just that my father was really hard on me as a kid. My mother died when I was little. I just want to get my feet back under me so I can go to school. I’m smart. I know I can do well,” he said.

  Juliet looked into Sean’s eyes. In her years working on the street she had become adept at reading people’s intent and their sincerity. Sean was hard to read. He seemed to be genuinely in distress, but she just couldn’t see anything in his eyes. His voice, his words, his body language all cried out for help, but his eyes betrayed nothing.

  “Can you help me?” he said, mimicking the emotion he had seen so many homeless people employ as they pleaded for assistance.

  She regarded him. “I think I can, Sean.”

  With that sentence, Sean felt his purpose shift. Felt his purpose deepen and expand, giving new scope to his arrangements.

  FIVE

  ON TUESDAY MORNING DENMAN SCOTT woke at six, and as was his custom, went immediately to the small sunroom on the back of his Mount Pleasant home and meditated for half an hour. He sat in the lotus position on a low cushion centered on a bamboo mat, clearing his mind of thoughts. It had taken him ten years to reach the point where he could sit for thirty minutes each morning without fantasies or stories or to-do lists cluttering his mind.

  When the tiny bell on his meditation timer chimed, he opened his eyes. He rose, stretched, then stepped from the sunroom into his kitchen to brew a strong cup of tea. As the kettle boiled, he retrieved the Vancouver Sun from the front stoop, and standing at the counter, opened it and read the headlines.

  One caught his eye: “Violence Expected at Today’s Anti-Poverty Protests.” He ate his breakfast at the counter, the paper spread in front of him.

  The Vancouver Police Department is warning anti-poverty activists not to use today’s planned rally, to be held in the Downtown Eastside, to advance a radical and violent agenda. The VPD says it has received information that the End Poverty Now Coalition will use the event to further its own narrow aims, so the VPD will be posting additional officers along the route of the march. John Andrews, Division 2 Commander for the VPD, says: “We’ve learned that members of the End Poverty Now Coalition plan on turning today’s event into some sort of venting exercise and that we should expect violence and hooliganism. That sort of behavior is not acceptable in the fair City of Vancouver.”

  The rally, originally organized by the Downtown Eastside Community Advocacy Society to highlight the plight of the homeless and those living in poverty, is to start at 1:00 PM at Pigeon Park, and will include a parade through some of the city’s poore
st neighborhoods. “The purpose of today’s rally is to demonstrate to the people of the City of Vancouver first and foremost that the Downtown Eastside is a community in crisis,” says Beatta Nowak, Executive Director of the Community Advocacy Society.

  Advocates for the homeless say that the City of Vancouver must build up to two thousand units of community supported housing a year for the next three years in order to house all of the city’s homeless.

  Andrews says that the VPD is sympathetic to the needs of the homeless, but violence will not be tolerated. “The VPD will make a proportional response.”

  Nobody from the End Poverty Now Coalition could be reached for a comment.

  Denman finished his breakfast and cleared his dishes away. He looked at the clock on the stove in the neat, orderly kitchen. It was just after seven. He took his jean jacket from the hall closet, put on a comfortable pair of leather shoes, donned his flat cap, and slinging his computer bag over his shoulder, headed out into the morning. He walked west to Main Street, then turned north along the rejuvenated main artery of the old city, heading toward downtown. Most mornings he would stop and catch the #3 somewhere along the way, but this morning he decided to walk the entire distance. He needed the time to contemplate the day ahead, and the complex challenges that he might face.

  There were many. It seemed to him that John Andrews was inviting a confrontation with the End Poverty Now Coalition. In a little over six hours—Denman looked at his watch—little old ladies and mothers with kids in strollers and small businessmen would be gathering in Pigeon Park to hear a speech or two, sing a few protest songs, and march five or six blocks into the Downtown Eastside as a show of support for the work being done there to solve homelessness and end poverty.

  It wasn’t news to Denman that the more radical elements of the anti-poverty movement thought that peaceful marches did little to solve the problem. He had become a lawyer and started Priority because the mainstream groups working on homelessness had fallen into a trap of complacency. Denman used the law to address homelessness the way he applied aikido in a confrontation with a street thug: use as little force necessary to get the job done, and try to make sure nobody gets hurt.

  The skyline of downtown Vancouver came into view. He considered his next challenge: what Juliet Rose had told him over lunch the previous day.

  Juliet believed that people were disappearing from the Downtown Eastside. There hadn’t been anything about it in the media, but if Juliet said that people were disappearing, then people were disappearing. For the last eight years, she had been one of a handful of people who knew just about everybody who made the streets of Vancouver their home. She had the best information around; the VPD often turned to her when they received a call from a family member claiming that someone had disappeared.

  Juliet not only kept tabs on her flock, but she had a network of people she could check in with just by picking up the phone. Primary among those was the Welfare office; you want to find someone living on the street, thought Denman, find out where they are picking up their check. Juliet had told Denman that she knew of two people who were missing—two people whose routines she had known for months, if not years. Two people who, in the space of a few weeks, had suddenly stopped doing what habit and convenience had dictated they do for years.

  Denman couldn’t help but wonder if there would be more. He would have to raise the issue with the VPD. He thought about the man in charge. Divisional Commander Andrews was forty-five, and had risen quickly through the ranks of the police force. He had a reputation as a hard-ass, a “get the job done no matter what it takes” sort of man. That meant cracking skulls if need be. And for Andrews, that need seemed ever present. It was a doctrine that got passed down from the Divisional Commander’s office to the beat cop on the street.

  People were disappearing. And people were being harassed and assaulted by police. Denman’s office had more than a dozen cases of complaints filed with the Police Commissioner against officers in the Downtown Eastside for harassment, wrongful arrest, and assault. Was it possible that an officer had gone too far? Had someone on the force taken John Andrews’ “kick ass and take names” attitude two steps over the line?

  As he made his way toward his office, the doomed façade of the Lucky Strike came into view. Denman now remembered his third interrelated challenge: Cole Blackwater.

  THE LONG WALK meant that Denman reached his office later than usual, although still early enough to wake the three men who were sleeping on the front step. Denman offered them coffee and made a few calls to try and arrange rooms for them at one of the nearby SROs. One man needed to have a gash on his left hand attended to, so Denman called him a cab and phoned ahead to a nearby twenty-four-hour medical clinic.

  That daily routine finished, he sat down in the tiny room that was his office, turned on his computer, and checked for messages on his phone. Today, Denman told himself, he would focus exclusively on the rally and on the disappearances. He scribbled a plan of action on a legal pad with a stubby pencil. He was about to pick up the phone to start making calls when it rang.

  “Priority. Denman here.”

  “Denman, this is Trish Perry from the City calling.”

  “Good morning, Trish. You’re up bright and early. How are things at City Hall this morning?”

  “Pretty good.”

  “You’re taking a bit of a chance calling me this morning of all mornings, aren’t you?”

  Her laugh was girlish. “I guess I am. I’m on my cell phone in the garden behind City Hall.”

  “Really?”

  “No, not really. Well, I am on my cell phone. Until you and the mayor make nice, I’ve got to be careful. Look, I’m calling you with a heads-up. A courtesy call, really. Verbal brown envelope.”

  “What is it, Trish?”

  “The Lucky Strike sale is going to close today.” Denman was silent. “You there?”

  “You know, it’s funny. I must have had some kind of premonition about that. I just walked by it this morning on my way into the office.”

  “Yeah, well, the sale has been in the works for a month or so. It’s closing today.”

  “Frank Ainsworth?”

  “Yup.”

  “Evictions?”

  “Afraid so.”

  “How long?”

  “People will get forty-eight hours.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “It’s better than two hours.”

  “Not by much, Trish.”

  “What do you want me to do, Denman? The new owner is exercising his right to evict and make renovations. Like I said, this is just a courtesy call.”

  “Okay. Well, thanks. I don’t mean to be pissed at you. But this is going to hurt a lot of people. And the timing couldn’t be worse.”

  “I know. I’ve already had Andrews on the phone this morning. He’s calling out the riot squad.”

  “Good God.” Denman put his bald head in his left hand, his right hand cradling the phone. “Okay, well, I’ve got to go. It’s going to be a busy day.”

  WITHIN AN HOUR twenty people were assembled in Priority Legal’s windowless boardroom.

  Denman stood at the front of the room, a whiteboard behind him, dry-erase marker in his hand. “We’ll coordinate the legal challenge,” he said loudly over the three or four other conversations taking place around him. “Patrick Blade—” he acknowledged one of the lawyers in the room with a nod “—will be leading our response.”

  “I’m heading over to the Lucky Strike in about fifteen minutes to start collecting affidavits. If anybody wants to hop a ride, be out front in ten. There’s going to be a lot of upset people,” said Blade. “If the Advocacy Society can spare a few bodies, that would be helpful.”

  “I’ll make a call,” responded Beatta Nowak, her dress billowing around her voluminous body as she rose. “They’ll likely meet you there.”

  “Does anybody here have access to the people at End Poverty Now?” asked Denman.

  “I
do,” said a young woman at the back of the room.

  “I’m sorry,” said Denman, “We’ve not met. Lots of people coming and going this morning.”

  “I’m Francine Lanqois. I’m working at the Carnegie Centre as an outreach worker.”

  “Francine, are you able to contact the Coalition and ask them if there is any way of dialing things down today? With this news breaking, I’m worried about the police response.”

  “I can try. They seem to keep their own counsel.”

  Denman smiled. “I’d be happy to talk with George Blunt if need be. I don’t know if he’s still the ringleader over there.”

  “He is and he isn’t,” said Francine. “Some of the younger members of the Coalition are trying to push him out. Not radical enough.”

  “Denman, I just got off with some of my people.” Nowak shut her phone. “We’ll have some folks meet Patrick over at the hotel in about twenty minutes. We’ll coordinate the effort to find new housing from our office.”

  “Great.” Denman looked down at his notes.

  The room started to break up.

  “Listen, folks,” Denman called out over the chaos. “This is going to be a long day. Let’s just remember that if it’s a long day for us, it’s going to be even longer for the residents of the Lucky Strike. Those people won’t be able to go home for a hot shower and a cold beer after they’ve put their day in. So let’s keep them in mind. My staff, if you want to take time this afternoon for the rally, that’s cool. But if the Coalition shows up, your job is to document and steer clear. No doubt we’re going to be getting calls about police brutality and what have you. Take your cameras and keep your eyes open.”

  People began to leave and Denman sat down. He heard his name and looked up, then smiled.

  “Juliet.” She was standing at the door.

  “I heard the news on the radio. I thought I’d walk over and see how you were doing.”

  “I’m fine. I’ve got a place to sleep tonight.”

  “Can I buy you a coffee?”