The next afternoon the old Polish man came over. We got troubles, he said.
What?
Troubles, the old man said. A sod company from out in the city is buying up the valley.
What’s dat? François asked.
Sod? It’s grass. Roll-up grass. Bright green. Sells for a bundle. It’s this alluvial soil they want. Moist. It’s good for sod. Perfect conditions. They want to strip this all down to nothing and put in sod just far as the eye can see. If I’d of known when I was younger, I’d of done it myself.
What’s de trouble den?
Oh, the old man said, mortgage and foreclosure and that company bought us up and wants us off the land. Like as you’d about expect.
But François couldn’t take seriously goons who wanted to make rolled-up grass. The old man told him some neighbours were being bullied into selling, that men were going around and to be careful. That night François saw what looked like a shed burning across the valley. The next he heard a few intermittent gunshots.
One afternoon, as he was walking to the gas station to renew his supply of oatmeal and withered apples, he saw a Buick coming down the road and he remembered that it was Wednesday though he couldn’t possibly think why that might be important. The Buick glided silently through the shadows of occasional trees, its grille flashing like teeth. It stopped across the ditch from where he stood. The window slid down, warping the reflection of mountains. The driver had a nose long ago broken into two distinct steps and thick, brooding lips.
François, he said as if they knew each other. I’m supposed to be telling you you got to vacate. It’s not owned by the old folks no more. Time to clear out.
I don boder no one, François said.
What’s that? the man asked.
Don bother no one.
He tapped the ash off his cigarette against the side-view mirror and paused as if considering his reflection. You fucking with me, François?
I don ’ave nowhere to go. What I suppose to do, hein?
Look. I don’t know about all that. I’m just here to tell you to get lost. Otherwise I’m supposed to break your fucking legs. You got it?
He crushed his cigarette and rolled the filter against his thumb. He stared until François looked away, then he drove off.
Two days later, François woke in the cabin from an overlong afternoon nap. He hadn’t seen the Polish couple around and so had no work to keep him busy. The fading sun was in the window, and he was sure he’d heard something. He stood and listened. He had to pee and maybe it was just that. As he neared the doorway, he saw someone outside. He tiptoed. It was the man from the Buick, much bigger than he’d appeared sitting down. He wore a suit and was staring into a piece of mirror François had put above the washbasin. The man looked bored and tired and had clearly been waiting. He dipped his fingers in the water and touched his hair, then glanced up.
Jesus, he said, man, you almost gave me a heart attack. He thumped his chest and took a breath and belched. Goddam, it’s like an instant case of heartburn.
He looked around as if someone might be watching. Then he drew himself up. Come on, he said in a different tone. We gotta talk.
Having witnessed the display of vanity, François wasn’t too worried. He followed down the grassy ruts towards the road.
Look, the man told him, you got to get off this land. Nothing more complicated. You’re a little guy, and I don’t want to hurt you. In fact, you got a likeable mug, but I have my reputation at stake. Can’t you appreciate that?
Oh, you know, François said, I t’ink I like to stay. It’s nice here.
The man stopped and inhaled and glanced off as if trying to get into character. He took a boxy pistol from inside his jacket. He poked François in the chest with it.
Turn around. They told me nobody gives a shit if I kill you.
As François was prodded through the shrubby pines, his legs began to jerk so that he pranced forward like a jester. I need, eh tabernac, I need, he repeated though he had no idea what. Every part of him shook until he felt his bladder let go. The barrel pushed into his back, and his leg worked as if at a sewing machine, slapping the wet denim of his pants. Then he gave into full spasm and leapt forward, fumbling and kicking and crying.
You got to leave, the man said. You get the point.
When François made it back to the cabin, he felt as if every inch of him was being chewed on by a different insect. He plunged into the stream and wrung out his pants. He sat on the steps, short-circuiting all over. The kerosene lamp inside was off. The sun was setting and something with a hoarse voice called from below the mountain. He tried to imagine what his parents had felt when he was born, a tiny, happy boy probably. But maybe they’d felt nothing, too caught up in their own lives. He could almost understand that. He wished he had one certainty, that he’d been the son of a smarter, stronger man than himself. If he’d been shot that day, if he were to die now, what difference would it make? The world would go on. No one would miss him. He was nothing. He’d chosen nothing, not his language or scrawny body.
He watched the garden earth darken as if absorbing the blue air. The forest was hushed, the road, the entire valley. Not a single houselight dimmed the stars.
He was still there at dawn and again the next evening. His body cramped with fatigue, and hunger gave way to numbness. It spread through him. His head lolled. For periods it seemed he’d gone blind. Or was it night? He never lost consciousness, but there was no desire to stand, no impulse to care or preserve the self that he was seeing now for what it was, incidental, petty, unremarkable. The dull sun propped itself on his head, and he was no longer sure how many days he’d sat. Rain fell, and he couldn’t move from the doorway.
Imperceptibly, a sense of hatred filled him. A flame began to twist inside his silenced body. Mountains reeled up into night, trees and stones and the backward reaching line of a lit stream. Moonlight rippled as if it were water and lifted him. Veins stretched like cables. He drew himself into that point of heat. There had been stories of strength and violence, but the only person to kill was himself.
Then he began to run. Stiff at first, he stumbled through underbrush. But the rage of each fall propelled him and he was soon racing against the gauntlet of branches, striking at trees, leaping stones. He came into clearings where animals stood in patches of moonlight as if on coins. Beavers, moose, bears. Watching, tense with fear. From a ridge he howled until his voice pressed back on him from the valley in wave upon wave of overlapped echo, a purity of sound, an animal fury. Houselights came on in a ragged string across the dark distance below.
Some time before dawn his hunger possessed him. It was more real than pain. He ran, leapt fences, kicked a farm dog until it yelped and fled. He raided fields of cow corn, blueberry farms, groped like a demon in silos. He knew the ravaging of hoed earth. He ate dog food from the can or bag. Night after night carport freezers went empty, gardens pawed of tubers, vines stripped. Each day, more and more men sat on stumps with rifles or studied tracks, bowels loose with terror of the Sasquatch. Fanatics drove out, measured prints plowed through speed, not the full-grown variety, they determined. Then it all stopped. The beast had moved on, its final crime unreported, men’s business suits taken from a widow’s closet, a bar of soap and some razors.
When the Buick pulled up, its window sliding down on the air-conditioned interior, the man was doing a routine check. His work here was almost finished, and he’d seen no one in weeks. He drove towards the cabin, shocks complaining on the rutted, grassy trail. He was lighting a cigarette, watching himself in the rearview mirror when the figure emerged from shabby pines. He groped on the seat for his pistol but he’d put it underneath. There was a moment of nauseating stillness as François loomed in the man’s terror-dilated pupils, his reflection that of a businessman bending at a bright surface to adjust his tie.
British Columbia
1981–1986
François had finished with nature. Let them paint the valley with
fluorescent sod. The man in the Buick had complimented him on his suit and offered to drive him into the city, though he’d had one nearby foreclosure to rough up, to which François had lent a hand. On the highway, the man complained about wanting a job working for the real bad guys instead of being a ruffian for a sod company. Downtown, after saying goodbye, François went to a newsstand, and for the first time he bought a paper. He studied job listings, trying to hear each title: manager, clerk, longshoreman. He took a room in a boarding house and washed dishes for fast cash. Alone he read aloud, attempting for the first time to improve his pronunciation. He paused often to do push-ups. In the end he had to give credence to what he’d been, an offer in Miscellaneous. A scientific firm was looking for a person who’d let his big toe be cut off and sewed back on with only local anaesthesia. Compensation: three thousand dollars. Not much but fast, easy in a sense, and enough for a little business capital. At the hospital there were forms and interviews, close inspection of his feet, a makeup artist and a pedicurist.
That’s the problem with finding someone, the head clinician told him. Not a lot of people are willing to do this. Mostly bums want the job, but they don’t have photogenic feet. We see everything from fungus to missing toes to whitlow and spoon nails and anonychia.
Ano-what? François asked.
The congenital absence of nails. But you, your feet are okay.
François was kept a few days under observation. There was hesitation on the part of a sponsor who thought a Québecer would be bad publicity, but that passed. François’s toes were X-rayed and washed. The operating room had the energy of a modelling session. Blond and Asian interns with stylish glasses lined the walls, cameras beneath lighting umbrellas. He was hooked up, strapped in and injected with a new anaesthesia. His heart blipped. After the cold steel of incision, a man approached with a miniature circular saw. François set his teeth. A fiery jet pinged into a metal dish. The clinician nodded. He’s a tough little guy, someone whispered.
The laser mending, a specialty technique also on trial, didn’t feel great either though some gland in François’s pulsing body had poured heroin into his veins. It had happened when he’d seen his toe on the tray, red as a pork hock. Then it had been reattached. It swelled, ached, but, they admitted, practically healed overnight, leaving only a line like that on a soldered pipe. Laser therapy was continued for two weeks, and they credited this with the quick return of sensation.
Every moment left to himself François read, Time, Newsweek, anything up-to-date, and, of course, the paper. He saw his grandmother’s outmoded beliefs now for what they were. He read business and politics. Watching TV, he learned expressions. You’re trying to fleece me, he muttered alone, imagining gritty business deals. Weakness angered him. Newspapers predicted a decade of innovation. In the Travel section he came across snippets of history. The Holy Roman Empire, he thought, this is it, business now, corporations, the future, not some hippie dream but another kind of paradise. He was ready for the normal life.
During his convalescence they fed him well. They weighed each entree, classified its nutritional contents and watched it disappear. By the time he left, he was more than when he’d arrived, not limping either. The head clinician showed him his picture in the paper, the headline: Human Body Mere Mechanics. François was interviewed. Speaking well, he decided, was the product of deep breaths, a guard-dog propensity for looking in the eye. He made people squirm on pauses and over-articulated words that were hardest to say. When he left the hospital, there was even, waiting on the steps, that sudden Western phenomenon, a fan club. He accepted numbers from pretty girls, though he had no time for this, not yet.
He hitched a ride downtown. He looked in the paper for a cheap room. The only one that wasn’t a dive was in the home of Dr. Eduardo Wee, a Peruvian-born Chinese man who’d been raised in Illinois and immigrated to Vancouver in his teens and who, with his Midwestern accent, sounded exactly like Reagan. He even had the Reagan coif, a modest pompadour. He told a little about his history, that he’d never fit in with the local Chinese. He spoke their language poorly, but he’d chosen not to abandon his parents or, later, his wife, who’d become his link to the community and who would never leave. When they all passed away, she too young, his parents too old, he found himself alone, a doctor with a dwindling following. He spoke of a passion for inventing, could manage a few words of sympathetic French though François asked that he speak English—the future world language, he’d read. The house looked somewhat like an English manor and was just out from the downtown, on a scenic stretch. Eduardo lived in the basement. It had low ceilings and cottage-like windows, and he rented it from the woman upstairs, who herself took on boarders. All that François heard of them were their constant comings and goings drumming on the floorboards.
The only problem, Eduardo informed him, and the reason this place is so cheap, is that there’s no bathroom down here. She has the only one. He indicated the upstairs with a lift of his eyes. From the back door he showed François where a trail led through the grass to a clump of trees on a rise. There, an outhouse of ancient though sturdy timbers remained from some other era. François didn’t like it, and Eduardo admitted he didn’t either, especially not in winter. Being an amateur inventor, he’d tried to make an incinerator that would work like a toilet but had almost burned the house down.
If only bodily waste could be eliminated, he said as though facing the critical dilemma of the age.
Those weeks François set to work. He wore a sports jacket with suede patches at the elbows, jeans and polos and tennis shoes. Girls noticed. He honed his projection with daily visits to the fitness club, where women in striped tights, ankle warmers and headbands did aerobics behind a glass wall. Weights gave the Sasquatch a modern allure, though he’d signed up as much for the showers as for the gym. Once he’d walked in on Eduardo standing naked in a ceramic bowl and pouring water over his head.
François planned the practical aspects of earning a fortune. He went to a printer and had seven hundred bumper stickers made. He came up with them on the spot. He’d had a hunch. It was the right time for weirdness. He set up on the street that evening, in Gastown, couples out dining, musicians playing blues and sit-com themes on corners. Within two days he had a thousand more made. They said things such as I Brake for Ice, Love My Dove, A Flower for My Power, any good mix of sounds he could come up with and often their opposite. People laughed at lines that wouldn’t have drawn a smirk from him. Often he took newspaper headlines word for word, and passersby bought them up, seeming to find in them some hint or expression of the ineffable. His picture appeared in the paper again. Stickers were flying around town. Young people and married couples forked it out. He upped prices and bought himself a used van. Only when the rage lulled did he hire students. He gave each one a post, had them on commission and told them, square in the eyes, You run on me, I’ll break your knees.
Still, for all his effort he had capital for neither house nor commercial space. Those crisp evenings when he crossed the yard, a new roll of toilet paper held close to his sleeve, the life he’d renounced didn’t seem so far. As he sat in the outhouse, on the wooded rise above the bay, there were no ambitions, just land and the steep water the Indians had long ago mediated, the mountains massive and invisible above the night.
All that winter and through the next four years he learned. He had a modest library and studied tax and zoning loopholes. He read books on business, bought magazines on money. He played at anything reasonably legal with low overhead. He made friends and financed a buying trip to Guatemala for gaudy cotton. He had people selling fireworks from booths, fresh-pressed juice and exotic smoothies in the downtown, avocado and banana. He backed a clever young man who’d found a way to buy designer clothing labels, and now sold them on the street, lucrative, since many a generic garment could become stylish. François even hired high-school kids to sell No Soliciting signs and stickers in residential neighbourhoods. People appreciated the irony. He had
a network for distribution and collection.
But on bad days, he feared that he would never be good at this. Loneliness crept into him and settled so deep that he smelled the staleness of his lungs when he exhaled. The meaning and happiness he’d envisioned seemed too far, and he recalled that old gentle nature, or a picnic with Ernestine near the river, the skyscrapers lit like petals in a refracted sundown and the way she’d looked at the sky, her smile in her front teeth. But he didn’t want to suffer over an ugly prostitute. Instead he cut hard deals just to see if he could. He worked his body lifting weights. He even bought a wide girdle fitted with electrical nodes that gave mild shocks that repeatedly flexed the muscles of the belly, resulting in an amazing washboard. As a test of will he wore it day and night, practising holding himself steady. One evening Eduardo noticed François’s vibrating midsection. I wouldn’t use that if I were you, he said. The body has its own electricity, rather fragile, too.
January brought fog and wet squalls, days of cold rain that never quite became snow. Street business was bad, and on his way back from a collection François again felt his heart go out of it a little. Wanting to get warm and dry off, he stepped in for a drink, but he misjudged the front. Inside was starkly elegant, glass tables and tabourets, a sombre bar, servers in jackets and a woman turned to take him in, alone, a martini in her fingers.
You look cold, she said. Sit down. I’ll buy you one.
It was the kind of place where he could imagine himself in some detached future when success verged on bored decadence. Right now it made him a little shy. He’d been avoiding dating, had Prioritized, as his business books said, and didn’t want anyone to see his transition. But this woman, though petite and busty, drew on her cigarette as if she’d been resurrected from the shadowy streets of some imagined Paris. It was an act, no doubt, but he had great respect for acts.
Are you expecting someone? she asked.
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