PRAISE FOR The River Killers
“Conspiracy is alive and well in Burrows’s winning debut. There is plenty of technical detail for readers who love adventures like Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm or David Masiel’s 2182 kHz. Burrows’s prose can be dense, but his ability to bring a mixed cast into the tale is stellar.” —Library Journal
“Lovers of succinct dialogue à la Elmore Leonard and witty writing like Raymond Chandler’s will be impressed by Burrows’s style.” —Western Mariner
“A story that’s bound to intrigue anyone who has made a living from fishing . . . The dialogue, filled with banter and smart-assed commentary, captures the rough-edged style of 1950s mystery novels.” —The Fisherman
“Intriguing, insightful, and chock full of great humor.” —North Island Gazette
“A very good first book. Danny [Swanson] seems destined to return, which makes Burrows a writer to watch.” —Globe and Mail
“The River Killers is engaging and informative . . . It’s impossible not to be fascinated by the mess of fishing and fish stewardship.” —Times Colonist
THE FOURTH
BETRAYAL
BRUCE
BURROWS
To all the dedicated Canadians resisting the desecration of our country by radical developmentalists dependent on foreign money.
OLLIE AND DOUGIE'S GREAT ADVENTURE
One
1988
I WAS TOO DRUNK TO be of any assistance to Dougie, who was puking copiously all over his brand-new running shoes. Well, I thought, I guess he won’t be getting laid tonight. It was only when I tried to stand up and got no further than a wobbly kneeling position that I realized my prospects for sexual fulfilment were as dim as his. The girls would be so disappointed.
We had skipped the “dry grad” at North Island Secondary School, which resulted in the dry heaves at awkward locations and inconvenient occasions over the next two days. But prior to the penance, we had seriously enjoyed ourselves, watching the sun go down over Broughton Strait while quaffing deeply our drinks and thinking deeply our thoughts, on the eve of our entry into the adult world.
Doug Tarkenen and me, Ollie Swanson, had known each other for the entirety of our admittedly larval lives. Growing up among the 851 residents of Sointula had been a gift to us, for which our youthful oblivion precluded any thought of thanks. And whom would we have thanked? God was surely above gratitude, and Wilma Jarvenen, his local delegate, was too busy preparing for the rec committee’s bake sale.
Sointula was settled as a Finnish utopian commune, socialist and free-loving, but the first settlers never attained their Republic of Rapture. Such a thing could not be built, only discovered, entrance granted with the passport of youth. And so we reveled in our own utopian republic with its unwritten constitutional guarantee—no fear and no fetters.
We were granted untrammeled freedom, the run of the town, at the age of four. Our parents could grant us that freedom because every adult in town was a surrogate parent, and even the older kids acted as big brothers and sisters, gently discouraging us from our more egregious acts of stupidity.
We built forts in the woods that no adult ever saw and created adventures that needed no adult’s permission. Our scout troop went on camping trips more often than city kids went to the mall. We took for granted a natural splendor that was later packaged and sold to rich European tourists who seemed to need packaging in order to appreciate splendor. But for us kids, the ocean and the mountains and the forest and the bears and the deer and the fish and the whales were just part of our backyard.
And together, Dougie and I gloried in it. If Dougie wanted to chop down a tree, I would climb it first to enjoy the ride down. We scavenged wire rope from old logging sites to build zip lines and we built rafts from driftwood on the beaches. We built jumps for our bikes and raced go-carts down Boogieman’s Hill and gloried in the crashes. We played Tarzan, swinging from branch to branch with ease. Unease and disease were strangers to us. Were we blessed with some ever-present, all-powerful analgesic? We must have been, because I can remember the falls and the collisions and even the damaged body parts, but not the pain. When did that change?
As teenagers we had the pick of highly paid logging and fishing jobs in the summers, and we bought pickup trucks before we were old enough to take our driver’s tests. And because the natural speed limit on a gravel logging road is enforced by ever-present potholes rather than occasional cops, and because the density of vehicles per mile of road was about that of interstellar gas, and because all seven teenagers were always in one vehicle anyway, the possibility of a two-vehicle crash was remote. And vehicle-on-tree collisions at fifteen miles per hour have a low fatality rate, which explains the 100 percent survival rate for me and Dougie.
When all else failed, when the weather was too lousy for a real adventure, Dougie made up stories or retold the tale of some past escapade. He’d been a raconteur since I could remember. Lately he’d been writing stuff. The things he showed me were really good. He should be writing this story. I think at one time he meant to. But now I’ll have to write it. So, in honor of Dougie, I’ll throw in the odd bit of writerly descriptorama. “The evening sky imagined our fate.” How’s that?
And now we were emerging from the cocoon and we had plans. We didn’t think of them as dreams and aspirations. They were things we would do, goals we would achieve. Work awhile. Save some money. Probably university for Dougie. Travel.
It was all so simple.
And one of the simplest things we did was embark on a trip to investigate whether Vancouver nightlife was any more exciting than Sointula’s. It was.
We saved on hotel expenses by arranging a night in the drunk tank. It was upon awakening in that establishment that I discovered I had been tattooed: a badly drawn seine boat cruised the skin of my left bicep. Dougie, we discovered, had as usual been much more creative. His left buttock sported a Balinese fighting cock in full attack mode; the right buttock, a mirror image. The object of their aggression was evidently a large snake, which had been cleverly depicted so as to appear to be seeking refuge in a haven that I will leave to the reader’s imagination.
They say youth is wasted on the young. But it didn’t seem as though we wasted any of it. We extracted every precious nugget and converted each one into the currency of the future: stories, knowledge, strength, resilience. Maybe what we should have bargained for was prescience.
Two
SEVENTEEN YEARS LATER, WHEN DOUGIE went missing, it was the first fleeting shadow that fell across the sunscape of my life. We had followed our master plan. Dougie was now working as a reporter for the Ottawa Times. My contribution to the master plan was my wife, Oshie, and our two kids, Daiki and Ren.
Dougie had phoned me just after the New Year. He talked in vague terms about this big story he was working on. He would only say that it was about corruption in government, but I could tell he was excited about it.
Then I didn’t hear from him for a long time. I sort of knew he hadn’t written anything for a while, and his monthly phone call was overdue, but in between driving my kids to soccer practice and overhauling the engine of the Ryu II, I wasn’t really keeping track of time. Then Dougie’s aunt Helga phoned. The annual birthday cheeseball she’d sent Dougie had been returned. I refrained from asking if that had meant an extra-dangerous cargo run for the ferry. She was also perturbed that he hadn’t returned any of her phone calls. This triggered just a hint of unease, so I promised I’d e-mail him, reassured Helga that nothing could possibly be wrong and hung up.
His e-mail in-box was full. My unease increased somewhat. I phoned Dougie’s editor at the Ottawa Times. Three months ago Dougie had taken a leave of absence to work on some important b
ut rather vague “big story.” They hadn’t heard from him for a month. My unease now changed to concern that was edging closer to Helga’s level of outright worry. Mind you, Dougie had taken up canoeing recently. Maybe he was just away on a long trip. Of course, it was possible he’d gotten lost. Where we grew up, if you were lost you just went downhill until you reached the ocean. In Ontario, if you went downhill long enough you’d end up on daytime TV.
Oshie came in carrying groceries. “I have to run out again, Ollie. Soccer moms meeting. Why don’t soccer dads ever meet?”
“There are no soccer dads. We are all soccer moms now.”
“Even Don Cherry?”
“He wishes he was. Hey listen, Oshie. Dougie’s sort of missing.”
“Sort of missing?”
“His aunt sent him a present that was returned. His in-box is full. His boss says he’s on leave, but nobody knows where he is.”
I had her full attention. She considered this information quickly but, I knew, completely. “Ollie, you better go look for him.”
Spring break was over and the kids were back in school. If I had to go away, now was as good a time as any. So the next day I kissed Oshie and the kids goodbye and caught a flight to Ottawa. I tried to find an adult-sized seat—I was, after all, bigger than my dad, Big Ollie—but all the seats had been designed for kids or jockeys. After five uncomfortable hours of gazing down upon a beautiful and varied vastness, I landed at Macdonald–Cartier airport. Its international airport code is YOW, but it felt to me more like BLAH.
I took a cab to Dougie’s apartment in the old neighborhood of Lower Town. After giving the driver a generous but apparently insufficient tip, I considered problem number one: access. Fortunately, a well-coiffed and well-dressed matron turned off the sidewalk and proceeded up the walk toward the entrance. I graciously held the door for her before following her into the foyer. We ended up in the elevator together, where we both succeeded in avoiding eye contact, and I got off before her, on the third floor.
Dougie’s apartment was number three-five-one, and when I stood before the door I had reason to be thankful for all the cop shows I’d watched. The credit-card trick was easier than I thought it would be, and within twenty seconds I was inside Dougie’s apartment. It was also, I soon realized, his home.
Just inside the door was the photo wall. I saw pictures of Dougie and me at our high school grad, Dougie’s graduation from Simon Fraser University and lots of pictures of my wedding. There were a couple of really faded snaps of Dougie’s father, who had died in the Ocean Star sinking in 1966, and his mother, who had succumbed to some unexplained illness two years later, and lots of pictures of Daiki and Ren. Dougie’s aunt Helga, who had shepherded him through his teenage years, beamed from a framed eight-by-ten on the hall table. And pinned in the lower left corner, a curling, faded black-and-white, shot with a cheap instamatic, of Dougie pulling a log with a frayed piece of rope. In spidery handwriting, probably his mom’s, was the caption “Dougie with his pet log.” The memory ambled into my consciousness like an old friend you haven’t seen for a while. The log wasn’t Dougie’s pet that day. It was a log and Dougie was a skidder. I believe I was a dump truck. Playing Machines was much more fun than Cowboys and Indians.
Dougie evidently had no female friends worthy of inclusion on the wall. No male friends either. No one at all from his Ottawa life.
As I continued into the apartment, I was unexpectedly perturbed by the sense of Dougieness that overcame more concrete sensations, like the musty air and the grittiness of dust everywhere. Dougie had definitely lived here, but he hadn’t been here for quite a while.
The living room was obviously his office/work area. The computer stood on a long table against the windowed wall. Papers were scattered across the table and I examined a few of them—notes for stories and bits of research details.
I sat down at the desk in the corner, next to the TV. I opened and closed all the drawers. None were locked, so I went back to the top one for a detailed perusal. I found the expired insurance documents for a red 1999 Jeep. I assumed the current documents were in the Jeep. There were also some maps. I took them over to the table where I could spread them out.
They were all topographic maps of wilderness areas of Ontario. Many had lines drawn on them, presumably routes he’d taken, and printed comments, such as “Flooded in Nov.,” “Bridge gone,” “Huge trout,” “Fucking flies.”
On a map of Algonquin Park, next to Canoe Lake, he had written, “Okay to leave Jeep?” The question mark leapt out at me. He probably hadn’t completed that trip yet. Maybe that was the trip he was on right now. Idiot! I’d have to give him hell for getting lost in Ontario scrub. Not even real trees, for Christ’s sake.
I grabbed the phonebook next to the phone and looked up the number for the Ontario Provincial Police. It was now four thirty in the afternoon and I dialed quickly, hoping to get someone senior before they all left for the day. By the time I’d been routed through four different people, finally got Missing Persons and explained that I might have a friend missing in Algonquin Park but I had no idea when he’d gone missing, it was too late. But, displaying infinite patience, I managed to make an appointment to meet a Corporal Mayhew at eight thirty the following morning at the OPP detachment in Whitney, the closest detachment to the park.
Continuing my search, I opened the second drawer and found a key ring amid miscellaneous junk. One of the keys opened the front door. One looked like a vehicle ignition key, and the others were just so many small, jagged mysteries.
But I was feeling excited. I’d meet the cop in the morning. We’d go to Canoe Lake, find Dougie’s Jeep parked somewhere, and the cop would declare him an official missing person. A search would be mounted, a sheepish Dougie would be found, and I’d get to razz the shit out of him.
Didn’t work out that way. I rented a car, and after spending the night on Dougie’s couch, I left his apartment at four in the morning. I sure as hell didn’t want to be late for this appointment.
Heading west, I found my way to Renfrew and picked up Highway 60. The two-lane blacktop receded before me as the world revealed itself to a reticent sun. I was surprised by the amount of roadkill: skunks, raccoons, squirrels, and unidentified dead objects. Either there were a lot more animals in Ontario or they were stupider than their cousins in BC.
Billing itself as the east gateway to Algonquin Park, Whitney was well laid out in that Upper Canadian sort of way, and I had no trouble locating the OPP building. Unfortunately, I had made myself an early bird. Fortunately, I got no worm, but rather two cups of coffee and some pretty good corned beef hash.
Spiritually and bodily refreshed, I walked into the OPP building and asked to see Corporal Mayhew. Mayhew was, I’d say, six foot two and what you could call lanky. I almost expected him to drawl his words. I was disappointed. After I’d given a long explanation of who I was, who Dougie was, and why we thought he was a missing person, the corporal said, “That’s not much basis to mount a full-scale search.”
“Let’s at least go out and look for his Jeep,” I suggested. “I wouldn’t have come all the way here if I didn’t think this was serious.”
He looked at me, probably appraising my reliability as a Missing Persons reporter. He must have appraised me favorably, for he stood up and said, “You want to ride with me or follow me?” I decided to ride with him and we left.
Continuing west on Highway 60 for about half an hour, we turned north on Arowhon Road and followed it for about half an hour. Eventually, we came to the spot that Dougie had marked on the map, where the road crossed a narrow inlet at the northern end of the lake. It was an obvious canoe-launching spot. Mayhew pulled over and we got out.
We walked over the bridge and looked north to the head of the inlet, then south to where the expanse of Canoe Lake faded into the haze. The wind from the north chilled the back of my neck. There was sort of a cat road leading off into the bushes on the right. We followed it. About a hundred yards in
we found Dougie’s Jeep. I showed Mayhew the license number on the old insurance form to verify it. The doors were unlocked, typical small-town Dougie, so I got in and, using one of the keys I’d found, started it up. I shut it off and got out. We both gazed at the empty canoe rack.
Mayhew pulled out his cell phone and made a call. “We’ve got probable cause to assume there’s a canoeist missing on Canoe Lake, possibly for over a month. Can we get a plane up? Okay.”
He shut the phone off. “The plane will search until it’s dark. But, as you can see by the map, Canoe Lake connects to a huge network of other lakes. Lot of ground to cover. We might as well head back.”
Reluctantly, I agreed. There wasn’t much we could do here without a boat, and even if we had one, the plane could cover the area faster. But it didn’t have to. Just over a mile south they spotted a canoe, overturned and washed up against the beach. The plane landed, and they got a registration number off the canoe. Dougie had bought it over a year ago. They continued the search along the shoreline, looking for human traces: clothes, campfires, broken branches, anything. They found nothing.
When I left Ottawa I felt like a soldier abandoning his dead. I took Dougie’s photo album, the only remnant of him I could salvage. It was inadequate. I was inadequate.
When I got on the plane back to Vancouver, I was numb. Halfway there the numbness had worn off like a dentist’s freezing, exposing an array of painful emotions. Anger at Dougie for disappearing, at the searchers for not finding him, at me for letting it happen, plus grief, loss, and just a hint of puzzlement at how Dougie could have been inept enough to let this happen. By the time I arrived in Vancouver, I was just tired.
It was 9:00 PM when the cab dropped me at my front door. Oshie heard me and came out of the living room to greet me. As soon as she saw my face, she knew. She rushed forward to hug me. I hid my face on her shoulder and burst into tears.
The Fourth Betrayal Page 1