“That’s not part of the bargain, Randy.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that, unless you’re Truman Capote, you don’t write a book in order to become a celebrity. You write a book to communicate the ideas you have committed to the text.”
“This is the part where you call me naïve again, isn’t it? Because I don’t care; I think people really do want to be able to recognize their bards on the street. Movie stars parroting someone else’s words are celebrated, so why not those who wrote the words in the first place?”
“I suppose you want to know what Thomas Pynchon looks like, too.”
“Damn right. And I want to meet J.D. Salinger.”
Guy snorted. I think he was letting me ramble to work through the shock. He probably had seventeen different arguments to prove that the author is insignificant in the true course of events. I stared into my Styrofoam cup, trying to divine an answer to the universe.
Guy’s voice startled me because it was so unexpectedly soft. “I was sitting in bed reading and listening to the radio when the news came out that Borges had died. The announcer stumbled over his name—it came out something like Georgie Louise Borgia—but I just started shaking my head because it couldn’t possibly be true. Borges wasn’t dead, he was right there with me! I’d been re-reading ‘Death and the Compass.’”
I looked up at Guy. He was sitting across the table, looking vulnerable and hopeful and so damn nice. The greatest new Canadian literary voice had been silenced, and any hopes I’d had for eventually meeting her were shattered. I felt like someone had taken a cookie cutter and punched it through my chest.
“Guy, please get me out of here. I think I’m going to cry.”
I don’t remember much more of that day. I probably cried, and it probably wasn’t pretty. Guy hovered a bit, then once he was sure I was just going to wallow in my sadness for a bit, left to get on with his writing. Back then, it was all about the work; we just fit our awkward little personal lives in between the chapter breaks.
And speaking of awkward, my next meeting with Dr. Quinn could probably win, hands down, as My Most Embarrassing Moment. We were sitting stiffly, as usual, in her office, the large desk between us. I honestly didn’t know what to say. I had mentally attributed to Quinn my grief tenfold for each article she had published on Ahlers. Since she’d really been churning them out, by all rights she should have been prostrate. It said a lot about her sense of dignity that she hadn’t cancelled our meeting. I was, however, beginning to think she was made of ice; she didn’t even mention Ahlers’ death.
Finally, I figured I had to say something. “I caught your interview on CBC this morning.”
Quinn tensed slightly.
“I thought it was very respectful of her work, very dignified.”
“Thank you.”
“It seems so awful to think there won’t be any more.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Any more books. It’s tragic to think there won’t be any more writing by Ahlers.”
“Well, I think the scope of your thesis will suffice on the three texts available.”
It was like milking an icicle. I couldn’t believe the chill in her voice. Maybe it was true what Dr. Ross, another prof in the department, had said: Never choose the writer you adore the most for your thesis work, because eventually you’ll wind up hating them. Did Quinn feel antipathy toward Ahlers’ writing after all the work she’d done on it? Or did she hate Ahlers herself?
I blurted out my next question. “Did you know her?”
Quinn looked at me for several long seconds without blinking, but I had the feeling I’d hit a nerve somewhere. “Margaret Ahlers? Yes, I was acquainted with her. The Canadian literary community is, after all, not that large.”
Quinn was trying to bluff me, I could feel it. After all, I knew from experience how hard it was to get past Ahlers’ publishers to gain access to the woman. Somehow I couldn’t imagine her just happening to rub elbows with Hilary Quinn at a wine and cheese party.
“What was she like? Was she shy? Did she enjoy the writing process?”
I wasn’t prepared for the sudden attack. If I’d been a cartoon character, my features would have melted under the blast. Now I have a standard by which to measure when people say that someone has “laced into them.”
Quinn laced into me. “Really, Miranda, this is a literature department. Surely you don’t expect to turn a thesis seminar into an excuse to indulge in coffee-room gossip. Perhaps we should curtail this meeting until you’ve had a chance to re-examine your priorities. Your confusion at this time is perhaps understandable, but that in no way condones your lack of intellectual rigour. Goodbye.”
I collected my notes and blundered out of her office, into the hallway. Somehow, in some way I didn’t quite comprehend, I suspected I had just diminished myself in my advisor’s eyes. I wasn’t sure what I had said to trigger it, but it felt as if Quinn had found me dreadfully wanting.
Quinn cancelled our next two meetings by leaving terse notes in my pigeonhole. While this made life a little simpler, it also meant I was falling behind schedule on my thesis research. I thought about looking into a change of advisors, but the potential fallout had me worried. The further you go up the educational ladder, the harder it gets to say, “My teacher doesn’t like me.” Even couched by terms like “personality conflict,” it still smacks of pettiness and failure. Besides, in April, absolutely everyone is complaining about something.
The halls were filled with people sobbing quietly on benches. Others were sobbing quietly in bathroom stalls; the lucky ones were sobbing quietly in the privacy of their offices. The unlucky ones did their sobbing on the High Level Bridge. Going crazy in April is common practice in academe; it’s the way intellectuals measure the seasons from inside their climate-controlled buildings.
It seemed, though, that Dr. Quinn’s sudden antipathy to me was not merely a product of my imagination. Dr. Peters, the graduate chairman, stopped me in the lounge one day. After looking over his shoulder, he asked in a muted tone, “Is there something wrong between you and your advisor?”
The only inheritance I ever collected from my pioneer ancestors was an inordinate desire to conceal my innermost feelings from strangers. I often suspected that a burning ambition to clean my house weekly would probably have been more useful, but my heritage nonetheless kicked in as I looked into Dr. Peters’ sympathetic face. “No, not as far as I know. Is there something I should be aware of?”
“No, no—just checking.” Dr. Peters’ voice seemed to precede him nervously out of the lounge.
The very next day, the associate chairman of the department smiled at me for the first time ever, but I put my unease down to paranoia—until Guy cornered me.
“What has happened between you and Quinn?” he asked brusquely.
“I’ve been telling you for three months, she’s weird. Haven’t you been listening?”
“I’m talking about just lately. Did you two have a fight or something?”
“Not really,” I said, recalling Quinn’s tightly pursed mouth at the conclusion of our last meeting.
“Maybe the things you’ve been saying about her have got back to her somehow, then.”
“Wait a second, what do you mean by ‘the things I’ve been saying about her’? The only person I’ve talked to about Dr. Quinn is you, Guy.”
“All right, all right, don’t look at me like that. I haven’t said anything, so we can cross that idea off the list of possibilities. I just don’t know…”
Guy could be a sweetie. He could also be extremely annoying, especially when holding one of his conversational games for one player. I felt my temper beginning to fray. “You just don’t know what, exactly?”
He looked slightly startled. “I just don’t know why Quinn would turn down a full Summer Research Assistantship for her MA student to help organize a projected biography on Margaret Ahlers. Didn’t you know?”
It’s lucky
I don’t have an alabaster complexion, or my face would have shattered as my jaw hit the floor. I couldn’t believe it. No one could be that malicious. No one turns down a free slave, especially not when that slave would be absurdly grateful for the job. What did Quinn have against me anyway?
“You’re kidding.”
“Sorry, kiddo. That’s the buzz among the office staff, and if anyone knows anything around here … need I say more?”
“Who is she giving the job to?”
“No one, apparently. Says she can handle it, although the powers-that-be believe than an RA would help get the book published all the sooner. They offered, but the little red hen said she’d much rather do it herself.”
“And so she did. Well, that puts the kybosh on my working with Quinn.” One glimmer of hope began to shine in my brain. “Hey, with all this happening, maybe no one would question me about changing advisors. Peters seemed pretty worried about me the other day. Whaddaya think, Guy?”
“Can’t hurt to try. Watch out you don’t get stuck with Martin, though. I think there’s a sale on him these days; Carrie just got saddled with him as a second reader on her thesis.”
“Why would they do that? He’s a medievalist, isn’t he?”
“Yep.”
“But Carrie’s working on Norman Mailer.”
“Go figure, eh? Maybe they thought there’d be enough of a scatological connection.”
I winced. Spending time with Guy when he was in one of these moods could keep you buoyed up for hours if you were already in good spirits—but if you were in low gear, he could be as aggravating as a telephone solicitor—and about as persistent.
I mumbled something about the library, gave him a kiss on the nose, and beat a hasty retreat. I needed time to think about what Quinn had done to me and to my research. I would have given anything to work the biographical angle on Ahlers with her. It would fit right into my personal research, and I’d likely have got a credit on the biography when it did come out, which would bolster my slender curriculum vitae when I began looking for academic work later.
Not to mention, the money would have helped. I was running my prior savings pretty close to the bone. Just to not have to worry about each item in the grocery basket as I budgeted would have been a luxury.
I managed to get a measly two-month RA looking up citations for Dr. Bella Spanner, the chair of the department, who was writing her seminal book on Thomas Pynchon, but her short lists in my pigeonhole came only every other week. I had a feeling the money was a gift from a department looking on at the weird relationship between my advisor and me. I didn’t care for the pity, but I had no pride when it came to paying my bills. The research didn’t take up too much of my time, and I needed money, so I figured I’d better look farther afield to supplement my income.
I tossed a couple of resumés into bars and cafés between the campus and my basement suite, and landed three nights a week waiting tables at The Library, a basement bar under what had been a high end restaurant in a residential tower just south of the Law Building. The atmosphere was dark and leathery, with bookshelves lining the walls. The books themselves had been picked up in bulk from secondhand stores and auction houses, and were about seventy years out of date, but local businessmen, professors who couldn’t be bothered to walk across campus to the Faculty Club and some of the more louche grad students patronized the place, because the conversation was good and the drinks reasonably priced.
Brad, the bartender, was a musician saving up to head back to grad school. I had bought his EP and personally thought he should become the next musical superstar, but he had a thing for James Joyce and perhaps he had looked the chance of long-term security in the eye, like I had. Now that I had chosen academe, though, it seemed far less likely to provide the security I had craved.
Guy would come in at least one of my nights each week, and sit at a table and read or scribble in one of his coil-bound notebooks. We considered this a date night. On my days off, I researched critical work on place in literature, applied for graduate monies, and pored over Ahlers’ books, as if I would find an answer to everything between the lines somewhere. I dithered on whether or not to start the proceedings to change supervisors, torn between looking like a whiner and becoming orphaned. It wasn’t as if supervisors were thick on the ground, and I couldn’t see too many people on faculty wanting to get in Quinn’s bad books.
By late June, I had enough in wages and tips saved up to make it through till the end of December, rent and foodwise. I also received a magic envelope containing a $500 travel grant from Grad Studies to visit the area Ahlers had written about in her novels. Now, I just had to figure out which direction to take.
I felt like Trixie Belden, girl sleuth, as I revisited the notes I’d made. Anything that made a specific reference to place was copied onto an index card people normally used for recipes. If the reference seemed to be fictional, I jotted it down on a pink card. If it was descriptive of an area, it went on a green card. If it was bald fact, it went on a white card.
So far, the only bald fact I had identified was the section in Two for Joy where the two fat American tourists make the hitchhiking girls sit on newspaper in the backseat of their El Dorado and yammer on about the fact that there’s no sales tax. That was enough for me to get started. I bought a wall-sized map of Alberta, the only Canadian province without sales tax, and set my mind to narrowing my horizons. That can be hard to do in Big Sky Country, but I had determination on my side—determination, and three ambiguity-laden novels.
Throwing caution and care for my security deposit to the winds, I covered one wall of the kitchen with cork tiles from Canadian Tire. The map was tacked to one side, and various-coloured recipe cards kept it company. While the pink ones moved around a lot, the green ones began to seep upward, consistently moving above Red Deer, the bellybutton of the province. There was no mention of ranchland, badland, or scrub, and very few mountains, except for those sometimes mentioned as “looming on the horizon.” The descriptions, as far as my well-thumbed copy of A Nature Guide to Alberta was concerned, seemed to be parkland all the way. My focus was heading north and west.
It was the river that clinched it. I’d initially been certain that the river mentioned was the North Saskatchewan, probably because it was the biggest river I’d ever seen. Any river that needs a bridge half a mile long to span it rates right up there in my personal “big” category.
That was before I read about the Peace River.
To give you some idea of how big the Peace is, let me quote a few facts. In graphs of annual water flow, most of the rivers of Alberta are measured in terms of cubic metres. While the graphs occasionally rise to the 200 mark, in July most of the rivers clock in around nil. The Peace River, alias the Mighty Peace, has a graph measured in thousands of cubic metres—all year long.
My reading turned up the fact that the Peace River Valley was one of the last areas opened up for homesteading in Canada. There were still people up there who remembered building the log cabin, let alone the sizable number who had been born in one and were still around to tell the tale.
I had no real proof, but something at the back of my brain niggled at me when I thought about the Peace River area. I couldn’t quite dredge up the connection, but I knew I was on the right track. I needed actual connection to Margaret Ahlers’ books, and I couldn’t get that from flipping through the Canadian Encyclopedia.
Brad wasn’t too happy to see me packing in my apron, but he understood the reasons. After all, he was planning to head to Dublin for two weeks before classes started in the fall, himself.
The day after Canada Day, I rented a car and headed up Highway 43.
9.
Every time I get behind the wheel of a rented car I question my decision not to own one. I love the sense of power it gives me to know I could point this sturdy machine in any direction and just head off into the great unknown. Of course, most of the everyday elements of car ownership involve getting tied up in gri
dlock on the Whitemud Freeway, so I was better off renting. A couple of weeks of temporary car culture meant I could get where I needed to go or haul what I needed to haul but not have to worry about annual parking fees. Sometimes the places you needed to get to were a little off the beaten trail, and a bus pass just wasn’t going to cut it.
Back then, I wasn’t sure what the trail I was heading to find even looked like. All I knew was that I needed to head north. Just thinking back on my naïveté and haphazardness during that whole endeavour makes me want to cringe. Nowadays, I make a list before rearranging furniture. Then, I just grabbed a map of the province and turned the key in the ignition. Even with my general notion that Margaret Ahlers had been writing about the Peace River Country, I realized I was headed for an enormous haystack with only a vague idea of what the needle looked like. With my luck, when I did find it, it would be embedded in my foot.
I stopped in Valleyview for a coffee and reconnoitered with the map I’d found in the rental car’s glove compartment. The highway split here, and I had to choose between going north to Peace River or west to Grande Prairie. There was another loop from Grande Prairie through Dunvegan and Fairview to Peace River, so it came down to a choice between travelling clockwise or counter-clockwise. I tossed a coin. Heads—Grande Prairie it was.
At that time, the only place I’d ever seen a live Canada goose was in Kew Gardens in London. The incongruity of it all had surprised me at the time, but not half as much as seeing swans all over this small, northern Alberta city.
Apparently, trumpeter swans migrate to nest in the lakes around the area, and the city council sure seemed dang proud of it. I passed three statues of trumpeter swans on my way to book into the Swan Motel, which I chose simply because it was in the centre of town and looked clean.
After a shower, I decided to stroll down to City Hall to see if I could access the archives and dig up a little local history. The weather was sunny and mild, a perfect summer afternoon. The sun was deceptive this far north, though. I’d mentally estimated the time at 3 p.m. or 3:30, tops, but I was greeted by locked doors and a sign announcing that City Hall closed at four. I checked my watch to find it was closer to five than three. I made a mental note to be back at nine the next morning and headed to the library.
Another Margaret (The Randy Craig Mysteries Book 6) Page 5