by Jack Hodgins
Was he mad as well as drunk? Weins didn’t know where to look. “Don’t be a fool, put on your shirt.” Soseki-san had lowered his gaze to the floor, and backed away.
But Conrad seized one leg by the knee, lifted it slowly up as far as it would go — just horizontal — then brought it down.
Mabel grabbed at a dish which tottered. “You’ll break things.”
Again Conrad went into his crouch and snarled at Weins. “Come on, you. Come on. You think I’m just somebody to leave behind. You think the whole world is holding its breath while you decide what to do with your stupid life. You think nobody else around here matters. Come on, let’s see what division they’d put you in. Or if they’d toss you right out.”
Hiroshi came up and put a hand on the nearer shoulder. “Perhaps we should wait until later, after we’ve eaten our dinner.”
But Conrad threw himself forward like a football player going into a tackle and rammed his shoulder into Weins’s chest. Staggering back from the sharp pain, Weins had to struggle for breath, while Eleanor shrieked and dishes crashed to the floor. Now Conrad had his hands into Weins’s belt and was trying to hoist him. Was he about to be cut in two by the crotch of his pants? There was nothing that Weins could do but push with both hands against the head that pushed into his chest. The dark hair stood up in spikes like a little child’s. Grunting, snorting — just to lift his weight up off the floor? Weins felt anchored safely enough, but wondered how long he could keep backing up. A few steps more and he’d be against the wall and bring those pictures down. He wasn’t prepared to hold his ground forever — surely someone else would help, instead of gawking. When Conrad jerked to strengthen his grip on the belt, he twisted his head and laid his face against Weins. It was red, unnaturally red, and covered with sweat. If he ever managed to lift Weins up off the floor would he toss him outside on the gravel, or over the edge?
Hiroshi broke them apart. How, Weins couldn’t tell. The gesture was far too quick. It flipped Conrad flat on his back on the floor as if he’d been shot with a few hundred volts of electrical power. Bent over and gasping for breath, Weins wondered how something could happen too fast to see.
But Conrad was quickly back on his feet. “Bastards,” he hissed. And turned to rush out through the open wall into the garden. Now what? Now what? Would the damn fool jump?
If so, he stopped first to pull off his pants. At the edge of the garden he let them drop down his legs and kicked with one foot then the other until he was free. In socks and jockey shorts, did he make Eleanor think of the day she’d met him in that pub? There was no understanding what a woman would find appealing. To Weins this creature looked like anyone else in a catalogue underwear ad, except for the red furious face.
The underwear ad climbed onto the rail, then turned and dropped onto the grass. He headed towards the flagstone walk along the bank of the moat. Was Weins the only one who knew what would happen next? Nobody said a word. Eleanor’s only contribution was a groan when Conrad leapt the fence and started down the steep stone side of the moat. Out of control, he leapt, slid, flailed his arms, and finally flipped into a dive that took him into the water. The green velvet surface rippled in circular waves.
Had he dived for the bottom with the intention of staying awhile? Weins’s own hands were clutching at remembered weeds. He knew how it felt. Everything in him was straining to rise while he strained with his will to stay down. It wasn’t easy. He doubted that Conrad would have what it took to hold on. A fool going in, he was bound to be more of a fool coming out.
Had he looked this much of a fool himself perhaps? Only Mabel could tell. Conrad, surfacing, spluttered and yelled for help. Why? Since he was already on his feet and the water came only as high as his thighs, he could easily walk to the shore, his body streaming greenish clots of slime. Like a baby he chose to stand where he was and holler. If Eleanor was reminded now of the jockey-shorts contest she wasn’t letting on. If she felt any pity for the boy-man in the moat she was hiding that as well. With one hand over her mouth she asked for the ladies’ room. No one was left who could tell her. Hiroshi and Soseki-san had bolted when Conrad dropped. They reappeared on the grass below, leading a posse of excited, jabbering people. Customers or employees, they huddled a moment, then sent two of their crowd along the path to the top of a staircase that led down the face of the bank.
What in the scene below would show up in Mabel’s sketches? He would bet on Conrad’s sagging underdrawers for sure, his stance of a helpless child, his wide-open mouth. He didn’t know what to do with those slimy hands. If artists saw what they wanted to see, as Weins suspected they did, you could expect her to draw a few dozen snakes on the water’s surface, and give the outstretched rescuer’s hands the look of skeletons, so that you wouldn’t know if he was being rescued or coaxed into the arms of something worse. If he himself were given free rein with a pencil on an artist’s sketch-pad now, he’d have the Emperor down to watch the commotion from the opposite shore. Standing amongst the bushes, he would raise a hand in greeting to someone he thought he recognized on this nearer side. “If we go to Ottawa,” Jacob Weins said, “we’ll fix up one of the rooms in our house as a studio.”
“What?” She wrinkled her nose. Preoccupied with Conrad’s rescue she may have thought this had something to do with that. “What do you mean?”
“For you.” Should he have kept the sudden idea a secret? “I’d have an office in the Parliament Buildings to work in, but you’ll need your working space too.” He would be famed not only for the colour and originality he brought to the country’s politics, but for his talented wife as well. At formal balls she could be pursued by the artsy type, even people from the National Gallery, wanting to talk, wanting to buy her work, asking when she would have another public display. Already he could see it happening, her very first big-city show. “We’ll rent a hall when you’re ready. Classy, with chandeliers. With guards at the doors and waitresses carrying trays. Dignitaries and politicians and embassy people from other countries will come dressed up in their furs to admire your work, to sip at a glass of wine while they decide which sketch to buy to hang on their walls.”
“So it wasn’t only a joke. It wasn’t a joke at all.” If it wasn’t a joke, why did she find it funny? Or was she laughing at Conrad, being coaxed from the greenish mud. When he reached the bank would his flesh fall away from his bones, like the rotting corpse in her play?
“Maybe I’ll give it a try and maybe I won’t. We’ll see.”
She raised one eyebrow. “And maybe I’ll just refuse to go with you if you do.”
A teasing edge to her voice but still, the idea had never occurred to him. “What do you mean?” Would a woman who’d let herself be dragged from campsite to campsite all over the continent be likely to balk at a chance to live in the nation’s capital, as the wife of an elected official? If she was going to claim that play had changed her life he would tell her to get some sense. What could an ancient ghost story have to say to a woman today?
“Well, never mind now,” she said, and put her hand in his. “There’s plenty of time to talk.” She even rested her head against his arm. “And there’s always the chance you won’t get elected at all.”
That wasn’t true. She squeezed his hand to show she was making a joke. He knew the voting habits of the Island. If he showed up at campaign rallies dressed as a Haida chief he was sure to be voted in, no question about it. If he went to public functions as a samurai and spouted a word or two in Japanese he’d be in by a mile. If he went on television to tell the story of Port Annie’s tragic disappearance off the map, dressed in a newer version of his Captain Vancouver costume, he’d be in by acclamation. It was only a matter of deciding whether he wanted it. There were other ways of being the person he’d been learning how to be for sixty-one years. Maybe he could find some television company that would snap him up and give him a part in plays. Or turn him into one of these colourful interviewers or a news announcer. It didn’t matter wha
t he did, the important thing was that now he knew he had to do something quick or die, he had to find something to do that used the gifts he’d spent a lifetime of instincts and choices developing.
Even in this whirring racket of cicadas and the tangle of voices, the oversize ears of Jacob Weins could pick up the familiar hum of bicycle tires on pavement. Around the curve of the moat came the ancient cyclist who’d nearly run him down, pumping down the track beneath the trees. Still wearing the same white pants, still carrying the yellow towel around his neck, he strained ahead as if he saw his goal at last and feared it would elude him if he wavered. Not a glance at the bawling boy-man in the moat, not a peek at Jacob Weins in the garden, not even a flicker of interest in the direction of the crowd that jabbered excitedly along the bank, or those that hurried out of the building to join them. He stroked right through it all as if this type of thing happened every day within his field of vision. And maybe it did. The streets of Tokyo could be crawling with tourists who were destined to end up in the moat or gawk in horror from a garden at someone else who did. If you spent your whole life circumnavigating the Emperor’s palace grounds, it stood to reason that sooner or later you were bound to see everything there was worth seeing in this world, if you bothered to look, and plenty more besides. If you raced unstopping like this man with the certain knowledge that some worried family member was on your tail, you might become blind to things that happened within the range of your vision and obsessed with things that were not — the invisible finish line ahead, for instance, or the constant hiss of the pursuer’s tires behind you. Weins knew that as well.
This time the pursuer was not the pretty young woman Weins had talked to, it was a child. A boy. Unlike the old man, he hadn’t seen everything yet. A man being fished from the moat by a noisy crowd was a reason to stop. He even swung off his bike and walked to the edge for a look. When two men up to their knees in green slime were trying to drag a third one out of the muck to the staircase and up the bank, a boy could quickly forget an eccentric old man. Especially now that police had arrived, and seemed to be hollering orders. And a photographer snapping pictures.
“Hey, kid!” Weins shouted down. Left unpursued, the old man would probably escape. Weins saw him whirring off forgotten and lost in the world. “Hey, kid!” But his voice, even if the boy understood English, was lost in the confusion of sounds.
Too late, too late. By now the old man was half a mile down the track. The boy would never catch up. Just about now the old cyclist would become aware of his pursuer’s absence. You could sense these things. Would a grin break out on his face, as if he’d accomplished something? Or would he start to worry? Weins, whose heart was pounding for him as it hadn’t for Conrad, guessed he would leap on the chance to escape. The slightest turn of the handlebars and over the grass he would go, across the sidewalk and bump, down into the street. Into the heavy traffic. Cars would honk, arms would wave, drivers would yell out their windows. Unused to paying attention he would cycle carelessly through. Did he know what traffic lights meant? It didn’t matter. His chances for survival once he got off his track were practically nil, but that wasn’t something that mattered to a man who was free.
And yet it was Weins, his supporter, who continued to warn the boy. “Hey, kid, ” he shouted. “Hey, somebody tell that kid to get back on his bike.” Nobody paid attention. The boy continued to stare at the spectacle unfolding below. While somewhere out in the largest city in the world — Weins could imagine it — the old man went whizzing down a busy street of traffic, pedalling fiercely, hearing nothing but the child’s heavy absence behind him, seeing nothing but his far-off impossible goal, whatever that was.
Given a choice between being a Conrad dripping slime and being an old man pumping pedals through hazardous traffic, did he know which choice he would make? He’d choose the old man’s chances, no question of that, but he knew how Conrad felt. Being a man of similar experience himself, he could hardly avoid the knowledge. Between the moment he broke the surface of that lake in Oregon and the moment Conrad dived to the bottom of this, surely something important had happened, surely something had changed. If nothing else, he could afford to feel some — what? compassion? — for this fool, having once been there himself.
What good would it do to give a name to what had changed? Instead he would give it direction. For a man who’d spent a lifetime becoming an actor, he’d spent his retirement being an audience instead. He’d been nothing more than audience since he’d arrived in this city. It wasn’t natural. It wasn’t natural, at least, to him. Standing here in this garden he was being an audience now. When was he going to act?
“Have you got your camera here?” he said.
Mabel glanced back at her purse. “Of course. You know I have.”
“Then get it out. I want plenty of pictures of this.”
Plenty of pictures of what? Mabel looked ready to panic. “Now use some sense.”
Of course he wouldn’t use what she liked to call sense. He had something better than that. And it didn’t matter whether she took pictures or not, that photographer was still below, with his fancy equipment. No doubt he would be happy to take a photo of this, several photos in fact. Jacob Weins on the edge of the Emperor’s moat. A photograph in a Tokyo daily was bound to be reproduced in every paper on the coast when he took it home. Port Annie’s colourful mayor, the captions would read, still had his well-known flair — look what he was doing now. Given to wearing unusual costumes in public, he’d made this newest one of nothing more or less than his own wife’s scarf. Tied at the waist it was just big enough to suggest a loincloth and cover his undershorts. A splendid series of photos. Jacob Weins on the edge of the moat, the imperial palace gardens in the background, the Emperor himself could be imagined in the trees and looking this way, just as curious as the reader of the newspaper was to find out what was going on here. The other half-naked fellow would be identified as someone that Weins had only moments before helped save from the moat, someone nameless. What Weins and this stranger were doing for the sake of the crowd, for the sake of this camera, was having a little fun to celebrate the rescue, a very close call. In the middle of one of the largest cities in the world they were bent over nose to nose with their fists on the ground, prepared to demonstrate for all this laughing crowd — which incidentally included a former sumo champion — that North Americans could have some fun with this sport so closely identified with Japan. A sport that every boy who wanted to call himself a man could engage in — and every man who liked to risk looking a fool. Upon his return to Canada, the story would say, Jacob Weins had announced his intention to begin a new career immediately. Not as a sumo wrestler, of course, he was a little too old for that, but something more in keeping with his well-known gift for cutting a colourful figure wherever he was in the world. If his grin in the photos reminded you of a little kid, it was probably because he was sure, like a child, that his future was securely gripped in his own two steady hands.
The Plague Children
MAYBE THIS YOUTH is dangerous and maybe he isn’t, nobody knows for sure. What’s known is that he’s running up the entire length of the Island, end to end. With his track shoes dipped in the Strait of Juan de Fuca he is pumping knees and elbows towards Port Hardy. If he isn’t dangerous maybe he’s just plain crazy. A sweat-band keeps that long pale hair from getting in his eyes; a beard that looks like rusty wire fans out across his chest; a wrinkled cotton shirt, embroidered like a table-cloth with daisies, flaps and flutters around the waist of his track-suit pants. Whether you see him flicker past behind a screen of trees or catch him stroking head-on up the highway, the effect is much the same. The rhythm of his footsteps never changes, his bone-jarred breaths maintain an even beat, no sweat breaks out across his forehead or soaks that flapping shirt. Maybe this youth is dangerous and maybe he isn’t; there are some who even think he may not be human.
Here in Waterville they think they know this youth and what he means: a spy, a scout,
an advance guard for a swarm of others. While those legs and elbows pump him north, those eyes are reconnoitring, the brain behind the sweatband taking notes. In Port Hardy where the highway ends he’ll catch his breath and make a phone call south to launch this year’s attack. These people have seen it all before. When he passes through this small community of farms they brace themselves for war.
Yet only Frieda Macken acts. Even before the youth is out of sight, she hurries out to the lean-to shed behind her house and roots around in a clutter of rusty machines and broken tools for a sack of lime. In all that settlement of part-time farmers, only Frieda Macken and her husband Eddie get out in their fields to spread the harsh white powder with their hands, squinting into the dust that burns their eyes. The others, seeing that youth thump past with his covetous eyes and his rusty prophetic beard, move inside to wait for what they know is about to happen and still refuse to believe. Not only scout, this youth is harbinger as well. The invading horde is only a day behind.
Read the papers. Find out where they’re from. Holland, California, Rome. The Philippines. Some from as near as Vancouver, others from Kathmandu. All of them could be here from another planet. A few every year get caught by police and fined. Copenhagen, Tallahassee, Nome, nobody wants to believe the addresses they print in the papers. Nobody believes their names.
For the people who live in Waterville there is something a little incredible in all of this. The place has never wanted to be part of anyone’s map. This collection of thirty hobby farms along a four-mile stretch of highway has never wanted to be anything at all but what it is: a general store and post office, a community hall, and houses you pass on your way to somewhere else. They don’t even ask you to reduce your speed as you’re driving through. Everyone here has been here for fifty years at least, everyone here is middle-aged or older. It’s not easy for them to believe that people in Holland, Colombia, Rome, when they hear the name of this settlement, pack their bags and immigrate in order to take part in this annual assault.