When Is a Man

by Aaron Shepard

  P: You were among those who tried to take Monashee Power to court.

  E: It was a sham. The courts wouldn’t even discuss land value.

  P: Was Hardy Wallace involved in the lawsuit?

  E: Oh, Hardy. No, he did things his own way. A bit unstable, you know. It’s a shame, he might have been a good voice. Well, in the end, nothing worked. And maybe there was no point to it. What you’ve put into the land, you can never be compensated for.

  P: Gina mentioned you burned down your house . . .

  G: That’s about the only thing she’s told me.

  E: Everything was getting torched. It was just a matter of who lit the match. Monashee had a scorched earth policy. They said it was to prevent squatters from moving into the abandoned houses.

  P: What about the negotiators? I’ve heard different things.

  E: There were one or two good men, at first. I think one suffered a nervous breakdown and moved God knows where. I had to deal with another fellow, a thick-set sort of ape. Him and his thugs.

  P: The short man? No one seems to know his name.

  E: It’s because his family wasn’t local. But I made a point of remembering. Caleb Ready. He was Monashee’s thumb pressing on the valley.

  P: That name—you’re sure about that?

  E: Of course.

  P: You know Caleb Ready drowned recently . . .

  E: Is that right? I hadn’t heard. Isn’t that something. I set fire to our house just to deny him the satisfaction. I wasn’t the only one. When the people of Lambert burned the whole village down, you couldn’t see across the lake for the smoke.

  Paul waited for Constable Cliff Lazeroff to finish talking to the old couple seated in the opposite booth. He seemed to know everybody in the A&W, even the girl behind the counter who’d botched his order. Paul fidgeted with his paper cup, breathed in the deep fryer smells and took in the yellow walls, the orange and brown trim. Bleary-eyed teenagers served sour-faced men covered in engine oil or sawdust. Outside, trucks in the queue for the takeout window carried snowmobiles, sleek machines sheathed in bright plastic and metal.

  “Thing is,” Lazeroff was saying, “you have to drive all the way to Grand Forks to get a decent bowl of borscht, let alone real lapshevnik.” Then he turned to Paul and followed his glance outside. “Boys and their toys. That kind of guy, he’s worked his ass off since high school—he’ll buy an ATV and sled for himself, his wife, and each kid. Then the mill shuts down and he’s screwed.” He took a bite of his breakfast sandwich. “You ever dream about those bull trout?” he asked.

  “Sure,” Paul said. “Not what I’d call good dreams.” Blinding rain, the traps filling with infinite numbers of fish, a sort of horrifying, biblical miracle.

  “Me, I have this recurring dream—well, a fantasy—that I actually have time to go fishing.” He was counting the months until retirement, he explained. Trying to wrap up a few last things.

  “Like Caleb Ready’s death?” Paul asked.

  “Him? No. Odds and ends. You know what I spent October doing? Busting grow ops. We incinerated a million bucks’ worth of pot in the beehive at the mill.”

  Paul had read about it in the paper but hadn’t paid much attention. “Gangs?”

  Lazeroff nodded. “All sorts. Gangs, teenagers. Parents. Grandparents.”

  “Kind of ironic, all that money going up the burner when everyone at the mill is laid off.”

  “Probably the most action that place will see all winter,” Lazeroff agreed. “Anyways, it was Ready you wanted to talk about.”

  “Yes. Any progress?”

  “None. It’s pretty much been written off as a suicide or accident.”

  “Any signs to say otherwise?”

  “Such as?”

  “Maybe he was pushed.”

  “Did someone tell you that?” Lazeroff leaned closer, his blue eyes peering sharply through unruly grey eyebrows. “On the phone, you told me his name keeps coming up in your interviews.”

  “Not his name, mostly, just who he was.” Paul recounted the stories. The threats and intimidation, the houses and barns that were torched by the short man and Wallace’s crew. No one Paul had talked to had actually seen him set fire to their buildings. Most of the people Ready had allegedly victimized were elderly at the time, long dead by now. But participants knew relatives and neighbours who had suffered from his fires. They made it sound like a long reign of terror, a dark smoke that hung over the valley for years. But according to Monashee’s archives, Ready had been employed as a land agent for less than eighteen months.

  “Listen to this—one of my interviews.” Paul fumbled with his backpack, and the constable frowned at the notebooks and folders. Paul flipped through a transcript. “Here it is. ‘They did this funny thing with some landowners. You know, the man who came by with the expropriation papers would pretend to feel bad for you. He’d negotiate a private sale, buy you out with his own money for a better price than Monashee Power’s. Pretend he was doing you a favour and then he’d turn around and sell the land to some developer for three times the price.’” He looked up. “What do you think?”

  “Pretty thin.” Lazeroff ran a napkin across his lips.

  “Maybe that’s how Ready bought his summer cottage. Dirty money.”

  “Come on,” the constable scoffed. “He had a good job, you know. Lived in Abbotsford most of his life, supervised different hydroelectric projects around the province after the McCulloch Dam was completed. Brief stint in local politics, sat on city council in the eighties. Father. Grandfather. No mention of burning houses anywhere.”

  “He made a lot of enemies.”

  “I see where you’re going.” Lazeroff shook his head. “Ready was seventy-five when he died—that’s a little late for revenge, don’t you think?”

  “But it’s possible.”

  “It’s a hell of a stretch,” he said. “Forty years later, all these people still hate him?”

  “Hated might be more accurate,” Paul admitted. “No one knew he’d drowned just recently. For them, he stopped existing once the valley was flooded.”

  “Or they’re lying to you.” The constable sighed.

  “People must have known he owned a cottage in Bishop.” A thought struck him. “Donald Wallace’s crew had worked for him. It’s bizarre that Hardy didn’t know who it was that drowned. Don’t you think?”

  Lazeroff shrugged, then brushed the crumbs from his lap. “Well, this is all good information. Much appreciated.”

  “Okay. Right.” Paul raised his hands in surrender. “Just a theory.”

  “Didn’t say it was a terrible one.” Lazeroff handed back the papers. “About Hardy. You need to make peace with that man.”

  Paul stuffed the pages into his bag, flustered. “I am at peace. I mean—why?”

  “You’re telling me you’re researching—what do you call it, the displacement, relocation, of Lambert—and you haven’t talked to the son of Donald Wallace?”

  “What, lecture him about gun safety?”

  “Yeah, he’s not easy to talk to.” Lazeroff picked his teeth and then stood, more crumbs falling from his barrel chest. “But without him, I’d say you’re just pissing around the margins.”

  The film began with a slow pan across a landscape of fireweed and black earth to settle on three broad, burnt stumps, a woman dancing on each. They bent and rose in wavering, arching stretches, in apparent mimicry of the missing trees. Someone in the audience coughed a single time in exasperation. Paul was very aware of Gina beside him. He’d forgotten how intimate it was to watch a film with another person—especially a bad film. The earlier documentary on Icelandic geological heat vents had been visually stunning, at least, and the story of a rubber raincoat filmed in stop-time animation was made bearable, at least, by its brevity and lack of dancers.

  The choreographer’s entry had been preceded by a film short—more of a political ad—about a proposed small dam project on Spry Creek. Most of the shots were of pristine
wilderness, the eponymous creek flowing through a corridor of cedars and spruces, interspersed with quick flashes of slogans: RUN OF RIVER = RUIN OF THE RIVER; TRANSMISSION LINES ARE NOT WILDERNESS CORRIDORS. A few boos, countered and silenced by pockets of applause. Paul remembered Tanner mentioning Spry Creek and bull trout habitat but nothing about a potential dam.

  The audience around him—mostly middle-aged artsy types and a handful of wool-scented twentysomethings fiddling distractedly with their dreadlocks—frowned or smiled, nodded in appreciation or squinted in bewilderment, according to their tastes. The dancers had leaped off the stumps and were now cavorting through the clear-cut.

  Paul squirmed in his chair, too hot in his bulky sweater, and feeling somehow responsible for the film’s cheesy earnestness. If this was a date—but this was not a date, just a way of thanking Gina for her help. She leaned toward him and whispered in a faux-British accent, “It lacks in subtlety but compensates with its obviousness.” Hopefully that meant she was enjoying herself.

  She hadn’t been easy to track down. She tended to disappear from his life for two or three days at a time, and then would show up out of the blue with Shane. The boy was an enigma to Paul, both affectionate and elusive, hugging his leg one moment, indifferent the next. As for Gina, she often looked rundown, with sallow cheeks and chapped, peeling lips. Before he could ask how she was, really was, she’d be whipping up a chocolate bundt cake or soup, and there’d be blenders and food processors buzzing and whirring, drowning out his questions.

  Outside, he looked skyward and let the snow melt on his face. He sighed in relief, too loud. Gina was grinning, studying his face. “Not exactly the Vancouver Film Fest?”

  “I wouldn’t know—never went,” he said.

  “Kind of a missed opportunity.”

  “That’s my life in a nutshell.” Thinking about Vancouver was strange. The Immitoin Valley was a black hole—nothing got in or out, especially in winter. On grey days, the light was so flat that the mountains blended into the sky, no depth, no dimension. Time had frozen to death on some dark slope. His past life existed somewhere beyond the status updates of friends and colleagues on social networking sites: they had achieved something remarkable, gone somewhere exotic, or eaten, cooked, or bought something ethically laudable. Or their child had done something adorable and video-worthy. Where did his project, scarcely begun, fit in with all that?

  “There’s an after-party at the pub,” he said. “Did you want to come?”

  She shook her head. “I’ll have to leave you here.”

  “Oh, come on,” he said lightly. They’d fallen behind the rest of the crowd.

  “The bar’s a bit too well-lit for me. I liked sitting there in the dark with you.” Translation: one of Billy’s friends—or Billy—might see us. She glanced at the windows, and for a moment it was as if the orange light coming from inside caught and held her.

  “I guess everyone knows everyone in there,” he said.

  “It’s just a bad idea.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “See you tomorrow, maybe.” She gave his arm a quick squeeze, glancing around her. Paul watched her until she disappeared around the corner.

  Inside, dozens of conversations melded into a river-like babble. A broad set of dark wooden stairs divided the pub into two levels, the upper with its bigger tables, better lighting, and plusher chairs, and the lower with dart boards and pull-tab machines. He spotted Tanner among a group of men and women—festival organizers, the board of directors and their spouses, he guessed—whose tuxes and black dresses stood out from the sweaters, denim, and ski jackets. Tanner broke away from the group and met Paul at the counter, handing a twenty to the barkeep with a grand flourish and passing Paul a beer. “Where’s your ladyfriend?” he asked, tipsy, grinning like an idiot. “Saw you sitting together in the theatre.”

  “Had to spell the babysitter,” Paul said.

  Tanner winked grotesquely. “I knew there was something weird going on at camp.”

  “We’re just friends.”

  “Sure,” said Tanner. Then his grin slipped. “I guess friends are about all you can be, unless—are you back in the saddle?” He raised his forearm until his clenched fist was erect, the obscenity of the gesture in bizarre contrast with his concerned expression.

  Paul blinked, dumbfounded. “Congrats,” he said. “On the festival. Wonderful stuff.”

  Tanner beamed as he looked around the crowded pub. “You said hi to Beth yet?”

  “No.” He spotted her among a circle of women, tall, almost his height, her blond hair gathered and held by something glittery. The women looked like they’d been at the opera, all sheer dresses and glittering necklaces. Completely out of place, though he could appreciate the effect it had on the regulars of the earthy pub. There was definitely a buzz in the air. Tanner dragged him over, but two giddy young men intercepted and swept Tanner off to their table, and Paul found himself alone with Beth. She gave him an unenthusiastic hug. “I heard you’ve been sick,” she said—was he imagining the vague tone of distaste? Of course Tanner would have told her everything.

  “Getting better.” He sipped his beer self-consciously. He started to bring up the old days, but after stuttering along he could sense those things—favourite hangouts from years ago, mutual friends—weren’t wanted here. She rattled off a list of what was keeping her busy, how she taught yoga and helped run the daycare for the ski resort. Took a pottery class in the evenings. Trying to get pregnant, if Tanner hadn’t mentioned it. After an awkward few minutes, talk petered out, and Beth turned toward one of her friends.

  Flustered, he pointed to his empty glass, a gesture Beth half-acknowledged, and he headed back to the bar. His fault, he thought sourly. During their undergrad, he’d more or less ignored her. The roommate’s piece of fluff, while he was off trying to get his own. He should have invited them over this last month, tried to make amends for the past. Interesting, though, the aggressive and emphatic way Beth located herself here, rather than Vancouver. It took unrelenting effort to become a local, he supposed.

  A group of men, middle-aged and older, hunkered around a small table in the far corner by the dart board, ill at ease with the film fest crowd that had invaded their watering hole. He recognized one of them from his last day at camp, a long-haired fisheries technician named Daryl who’d led Paul’s team up Basket Creek to count redds. He’d talked in a raspy voice about the spawning habits of bull trout with a wry intimacy, a bit of fish-gossip mixed with science.

  Paul weaved his way through the crowd to the table. “Rasmussen, sure.” Daryl shook his hand. “Pull up a chair. We’re just shooting the shit.”

  “Rasmussen,” an obese and bespectacled man said. “No relation to Ken? The welder?”

  Paul shook his head, and Daryl laughed. “In every Canadian town lives a handy fella named Rasmussen. He’s the one I told you about,” he said to the man, a Monashee technician named Morton. “Same cancer as you, in remission.”

  Morton had a mop of grey hair and an easy, toothy grin. He shook Paul’s hand. “Gleason Score 7,” he said and was delighted when Paul repeated the same. “It’s a great life, isn’t it? Every time I fart, I pee myself.”

  “Sounds about right,” Paul managed.

  Morton apparently spent part of each day in online chat rooms and forums for men recovering from prostate cancer. They’d run through the vast gauntlet of prostatectomies—unilateral and bilateral nerve-sparing, laparoscopic radical, the da Vinci robotic—and other treatments. Transurethral resections, radiation, and hormone therapies. A lot of talk about the relative strength of one’s urine stream—one either pissed like a race horse or like a kitten—or how keenly they missed the sight and sensation of their own ejaculate. Yes, Paul had skimmed similar forums, thinking this was an ethnographic study tailor-made for him—he could study his participants covertly, develop an instant rapport, because he would be one of them.

  What kept him away was the language. Brutally
explicit, filled with raw emotion—and courageous, he admitted, like when a forum member would joke about the best post-op underwear or announce his own imminent death. Their stories brought his own experiences swinging into queasy, too-close focus. He couldn’t read a full page of discussion without feeling faint. Talking to Morton right now was making him nauseous.

  Morton turned to the others. “Wife still wants sex, right? We talked about me using a strap-on. I said, you sure about that, honey? ’Cause you know I’ll buy the biggest goddamn one there is. Great life,” he repeated while everyone laughed. He didn’t sound entirely insincere.

  “How’s the research?” asked Daryl. “Taking shape?”

  “What’s he doing?” another man asked, a hand up to his ear. “More fish stuff?”

  Daryl filled him in, somewhat inaccurately. The man nodded. “Tell him about Joe Pilcher,” he said with a great deal of satisfaction. “Joe fuckin’ Pilcher.”

  Daryl rolled his eyes. “My old man,” he explained to Paul. “We had a trapline and a squatter’s cabin in the woods north of Lambert.”

  “Before the dam?” Paul asked.

  “Definitely not after. It’s sitting below the high water mark by about twenty metres.”

  “I should be talking to your dad, then.”

  “Not much chance of that, I’m afraid.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Could talk to me, though. It’s a great story.”

  “If you knew what I was doing, why didn’t you contact me before?”

  “Waiting for you to ask,” Daryl said, eyebrows raised in a hurt expression. He grinned. “No. I had to make sure of your politics. People come here, say they’re doing historical research, and it turns into anti-dam rhetoric and nostalgia. Oh woe, the steamships are gone. Like we’d still be using fucking steamships if there was no dam.”

  “I’ll mark you down for definitely not anti-dam.”

  “Doesn’t matter.” He waved a hand toward the window. “There she be, whether you like it or not. There’s good and bad in everything, right? You and I wouldn’t have had jobs this fall without it.”