The Fourth Betrayal

by Bruce Burrows

  My wife and I are having cocktails at fourish and would be extremely gratified if you could drop by. There will also be some other interesting people that I think you should meet.

  Thank you again for your support. There are never enough resources in the struggle to preserve the capital that this country needs as we go forward.

  Regards,

  Cliff Ernhardt

  “Well, that’s something,” I said. “Dougie managed to show a link between Ernhardt and Steadman.”

  “Yeah,” said Alex. “But why isn’t there more?”

  I shrugged. Ten minutes later Alex came across a handwritten journal. He looked through it for a minute or so and then handed it to me. “You should look at this,” he said. “It seems sort of personal.”

  I looked at the first page. It was definitely Dougie’s careful script, formed under the strict attention of Miss Prendergast back in Grade 3. The first paragraph was a little chilling.

  The story is coming together, but my enthusiasm wanes. These people are such slimeballs, but why is it me who has to deal with them? I feel like a washroom attendant, knowing every day that he has to go out and deal with shit. I’m so tired.

  I put the journal in my pocket. I would go through it later. After another hour we had looked at everything and found nothing else of interest. I picked up the desktop computer. “Let’s go back to my room and go through this.”

  Half an hour later I was hooking up the desktop computer to the television in my room when the phone rang. It was Capital Investigative Services, reporting that two men had entered the storage container using a key, spent two hours and twenty-seven minutes inside, left with a computer and were now in room 842 of the Hotel Chateauvert. “You’re very good,” I said.

  “I suspected it might be you,” Mr. CIS said. “We should talk about our ongoing surveillance. Right now we have two watchers, each taking an eight-hour shift during the day, and a team of two at night. It’s expensive. A cheaper option would be to attach tracers to some of the items inside, and if they’re taken we’ll know exactly where they end up.”

  “Thanks for the option,” I said. “Carry on with the current plan for now and I’ll let you know if I want to change.”

  Alex and I turned our attention to Dougie’s computer. Two hours later we had found nothing of interest and I was starving. “I need food. But before I pass out, where can we take this, plus Dougie’s laptop, and find out if anything important has been deleted? I’m thinking particularly of e-mail.”

  Alex nodded. “There’s a really reliable outfit that we use. The cops have used them too. If there’s anything retrievable they’ll get it.”

  We left with the two computers and dropped them off at Custom Electronics. We instructed the technician carefully, then went to a pizza joint. I had the meat lover’s special, Alex had the animal lover’s special, and we split a half liter of merlot.

  After the third piece of toasted animals on a crispy crust, I felt revitalized enough to talk. “I think we’re making progress, Alex. We know a few things I didn’t know before I came back here. But I’m a little perturbed that we haven’t found any trace of the story. Dougie must have written large chunks of it. Where is it? If he hid it, why? I can understand not leaving it lying around on the kitchen table, but he seems to have buried it completely beyond reach.”

  Alex didn’t have grease on his chin but dabbed it anyway. “I agree with you. It’s strange. But maybe we’ll understand when we finally find it.”

  I thought of something. “I suppose we should go through his clothes. I told his landlord to give them to the Goodwill. Maybe we can track them down.” I phoned the landlord and he confirmed that he’d given the clothes to the Goodwill establishment on Elm Street. “Everything?” I asked.

  “Yeah, everything. Wait a minute. I tell a lie. There were some things, a bunch of shirts that were too grubby to give away. They had paint stains all over them. I put them in a bag, and they may still be in the basement.”

  “Can we look at them?”

  “Come on over. I’ll try to find them.”

  I explained the mission to Alex and we used his car. Before I was ready for it, we were in front of the familiar apartment building, Dougie’s last residence on this blighted earth. The landlord was waiting for us. “You’re in luck. I forgot to throw them out.”

  We were standing in the basement, and he handed me a green plastic garbage bag. Feeling slightly uneasy, I dumped the contents onto the concrete floor. There were five or six T-shirts, all the type Dougie would wear, sporting band’s logos or political slogans. One was typically Dougie. You’re only young once but you can be immature forever. The odd thing was that every shirt had a bright red paint stain in roughly the same place, right in the middle of the front.

  “Was he doing any painting?” I asked.

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Okay if I take these?”

  “Sure.”

  I put the shirts back in the bag and we left. “Let’s check out the Goodwill. They might have some of his stuff left.”

  As it turned out, they hadn’t even processed Dougie’s things. When I explained to the woman what we wanted, and the date the clothes had been collected, she said, “Those will still be in the back room. We’re so far behind. Not enough volunteers.”

  I asked if we could look at the clothes and she led us to the back room. As well as being in the back, the room was large and permeated with the smell of mothballs. As my sinuses threatened mutiny, we threaded our way through piles of fabric that sullenly hinted of stories for which there would never be an audience. We came to a rolling rack that stood beside three cardboard boxes. Even before the women consulted a tag on the rack, I recognized Dougie’s office clothes hanging there. The jackets seemed naked without him.

  “Thanks,” I said to the lady. “I just want to go through the pockets. We’re looking for mementoes for his relatives.” She nodded and left. I started on the stuff in the boxes and Alex began working his way through the stuff hanging on the rack. After half an hour we’d discovered nothing except that, in contrast to his left-of-Karl-Marx political alignment, Dougie was a sartorial conservative. With one exception. As incongruous as peas on pizza, a package of three brand-new string ties was nestled in with Dougie’s other accessories.

  “Interesting,” Alex observed. “People can be so contradictory.”

  The mothball atmosphere and universe of unoccupied clothing accentuated the strangeness of it all. String ties? Dougie had not been what one would call a fashionista. But string ties were to fashion what Cheez Whiz was to the world of gastronomy, and Dougie didn’t even use ketchup, if you follow me.

  “Why don’t you drop me back at the hotel,” I said. “I need a good night’s sleep. We’ll resume our investigative activities in the morning.”

  But I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed and read Dougie’s journal. It frightened me, which was silly, because Dougie was beyond harm and beyond help. Perhaps I could comfort his ghost.

  The journal was a series of undated entries consisting of random thoughts, scraps of poetry, and depressing quotations.

  Pain comes from the darkness and we call it wisdom. It is pain.

  —Randall Jarrell

  It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

  —William Carlos Williams

  How beautiful the body is; how perfect its parts; with what precision it moves; how obedient, proud and strong. How terrible when torn. The little flame of life sinks lower and lower, and with a flicker, goes out. It goes out like a candle goes out. Quietly and gently. It makes its protest at extinction, then submits. It has its say, then is silent.

  —Norman Bethune

  And Dougie’s contribution: Journalism is not poetry, but I wish it was. Even the exploration of the ugly should have an audience more appreciative than the five o’clock commuter.

  I flipped through thirty or forty pages of Do
ugie’s writing. The last entry was:

  Resolution is its own reward. Finish the job, tie up the loose ends, secure the deck. Pray the anchor holds.

  Oh God, oh God, oh God. Dougie had been drowning, and I’d had no idea. When he’d phoned I’d chirped happily about Oshie and the kids and my wonderful fucking life and Dougie had been slipping slowly beneath the surface of a stinking cesspool.

  Why hadn’t I seen what was happening? This was my closest friend, almost a brother. More than a brother, because we never fought. And he’d been in pain and I’d failed to see it, failed to protect him from the bad things.

  I went to the minibar and poured a vodka, waved a bottle of juice over the glass, sat down and berated myself for five minutes. Then I phoned Danny. Louise answered the phone. She was bright and cheerful. Danny came on and he was bright and cheerful. I blinked away tears and tried to suppress the sobs gathering in my throat.

  “I’ve just been reading Dougie’s personal journal,” I told Danny. “He was having very negative thoughts. He was depressed, and I don’t think it was just a short-term thing. Did you see any signs of it when you were hanging around with him?”

  “Not really. He was always working hard and sometimes he was pretty intense. But nothing twenty-six ounces of vodka wouldn’t cure. You sound a little shaky. I think you’ve found Dougie’s three-o’clock-in-the-morning journal. You know, the dark-night-of-the-soul thing. I’m sure Dougie wasn’t like that all the time.”

  “Christ, I hope not. I wanted life to be as good for Dougie as he was for it. Know what I mean?”

  “Yeah, Ollie. You two were really close, and I know you miss him, but don’t let it become more than that. The best requiem you can produce is to finish that story he was working on. Okay?”

  “Yeah, okay. Talk to you later.”

  I poured another vodka and offered up a toast. Resolve to be resolute and resolution will follow. Long live the resolution!

  And the evening sky imagined our fate.

  Nine

  1991

  DOUGIE AND I FOLLOWED OUR master plan to the letter.

  In January we dug up the bodaidoe patch, threw our belongings into my truck and headed for Vancouver. We had enrolled at Simon Fraser University, so we rented an apartment in Burnaby.

  My new brilliant idea for stashing the cash truly was brilliant. The auxiliary gas tank in my truck had developed a leak months before, so, ever safety conscious, I had stopped filling it with gas. It was the work of but an hour to crawl under the truck, hacksaw a six-inch-square hole in the tank and sluice it out with the garden hose. The cash almost but not quite filled the tank. Duct tape closed the hole, and our cash was now secure as long as no one stole my truck. That was laughably unlikely. Once a month I crawled under the truck, which struck no one as unusual because it was the type of truck that looked like it needed to be crawled under frequently, and removed fourteen thousand dollars. We each kept two thousand for living expenses and deposited five thousand in our new savings accounts at the Gulf and Fraser Credit Union. Thus we managed to launder one hundred and sixty-eight thousand dollars a year.

  University was fun. There were girls everywhere. I studied them and Dougie studied journalism. Not to say that I took no interest in my courses. Margaret Mead’s books about the sex lives of the Trobriand Islanders were revelatory, and I used her examples of unrestricted sexual mores in many attempts to talk girls into bed. Unfortunately, candy is dandy, liquor is quicker, and anthropology is neither.

  A couple of other courses were interesting, but somehow not pertinent. The pertinent aspects of my life had been things like what time does the tide turn at the Glory Hole, and which way is that snag really going to fall? The kinship system of Basque sheep herders piqued my interest, but in a vicarious way. I wasn’t personally involved.

  However, I always managed to pass, and one night while we were celebrating one of my brilliant passes and another of Dougie’s routine A-pluses, we added to our tattoo inventory. I opted for a heart with an arrow through it and the name of my one true love: Sockeye. Dougie wanted a portrait of George Orwell, “arguably the most important writer of the twentieth century.” The tattoo artiste didn’t have Orwell in his repertoire, so Dougie told him to just “do Hitler with a thinner face and looking a bit more English and a bit less German.” Amazingly, the artiste got it pretty close, although I’m sure he didn’t appreciate the irony that Orwell hated Hitler almost as much as he hated Stalin. And on a pennant around the portrait, Dougie’s favorite Orwell quote: “All art is propaganda, but not all propaganda is art.”

  One night just before mid-term exams, I was drinking at the Princeton in hope of seeing someone from home. I ran into a dragger and he offered me a job and I took it. Draggers fished the year round, made decent money, and it wouldn’t be long before I could reasonably claim to have saved enough money for a down payment on my own boat.

  Dougie stayed in school because it was where he belonged. He lived and breathed ideas: the mechanisms of twentieth-century Western society, and how things connected. When I had a few nights onshore, we’d drink beer and eat pizza and Dougie would spill out his latest treasures from the castle of learning. “And when the US went off the gold standard, money became a psychological artifact. It only has value because we believe it does. It’s like a quantum particle. It only achieves the parameters of existence if we observe it to. The universe exists because we think it. We’re God, Ollie. Imperfect and lazy and selfish, but we’re God.” And I understood him. Because it was Dougie and he was almost my twin and his thoughts were at home in my brain.

  Two years later I bought a shrimp dragger from Otokichi Tanaka, who lived in Steveston. Kich had built the Ryu II as a bigger version of the Ryu I, which he had built after being released from an internment camp at the end of the Second World War.

  He was a very interesting man. He built boats with attention to line and shape, like an artist, which I guess he was. He was a small man who spoke quietly, and he was completely without bitterness.

  His youngest daughter, Oshiro, was not. By the time I convinced her I bore no direct responsibility for anything that had happened during the Second World War, she decided I was worth marrying. My family was ecstatic, their joy dampened only by our decision to live, at least for the time being, in Steveston. Her family was noncommittal, their reserve tempered only by our decision to live, at least for now, in Steveston.

  Dougie and I were the only guys at my stag. We decided against falling-down drunkenness and opted instead for only a few beers to wash down the powdered mushrooms, which were a gift from George in Mitchell Bay. When the hallucinations started, we were walking through Deer Park. I’d had the foresight to bring my camera and ten rolls of film, which I managed to use up while laughing hysterically at Dougie, who acted as my spotter. By the time we had focused down to shooting individual blades of grass, it was almost dark and I was out of film and we were hungry, so we retired to spend my last night at the apartment.

  A year later I attended Dougie’s graduation ceremony with my very pregnant Oshie. SFU graduations were a little more formal than our high school grad had been, the speeches a little less corny but just as meaningless, the graduates just as ignorant but in different ways.

  I had brought a case of beer for old time’s sake. After the ceremony we drove to the nearest beach to watch the sun go down. Oshie sipped fruit juice out of a bottle while Dougie and I drank beer. I clanked bottles with Dougie. “You’ve come a long way, baby. From unemployable small-time hick to honors graduate in English and Journalism.”

  “And a job as well. The Vancouver Sun is putting me on the police beat. Crime and punishment in Section B. You’re doing pretty well too, Ollie. A wife who puts up with you, and family on the way. Finances okay?”

  I put my arm around Oshie. “We’re doing okay.” At our wedding reception Dougie and I had had a serious talk.

  “I know you love her, Ollie. And you’re not going to want to have any secrets. Bu
t for my sake, please don’t tell her.” So I hadn’t, and I felt a little guilty about it. But guilt is a given. It’s happiness that is the variable, and Oshie and I had seized happiness like a sword from a stone.

  So we lounged on the beach and bantered about single versus married life, and talked more seriously about Dougie’s career, and about our child to be and our disparate familial communities.

  Soon the sun was just barely above the horizon and its acutely angled rays turned the ocean to gold. The silhouettes of homewarding boats were arranged tastefully over the bay and the black vees of their wakes tied the whole picture together. Nice job, God. When the sun disappeared it grew cool and we went home. There were still four beers left.

  Three years passed, as they do when you have children, in a blur of frozen moments. The birth of our first son, and not quite two years later, our second. Birthdays, Christmases, teeth falling out and coming in—milestones on the path of life. But they were markers left in the rearview mirror, guidance for whatever ghosts followed us. The road ahead was devoid of signs, but we navigated with the compass of confidence.

  When Daiki was ready to start kindergarten, and Ren chaffing to join his brother, Dougie moved to Ottawa to cover politics for the Ottawa Times. He was really in his element now, tracing the lines of power, their sources and end points and intersections. I subscribed to the paper so I could read his stories. I got them two days late but that didn’t matter, because all I cared about was sharing his thoughts. And his words came off the page like he was seated across from me. “Preston Manning criticized the Liberals today for catering to Quebec. It’s unclear whether Mr. Manning is also against subsidies to other provinces, past or present.” I could read Dougie’s mind. Canada subsidized Alberta for decades. At least with Quebec we get poutine and maple syrup. All we get from Alberta is oil-soaked birds.

  Not long after his move to our nation’s soporific nerve center, Dougie ran into my cousin Danny, who had gone there to work for DFO. The two Sointulians produced a few tremors on the city’s sin recorders, by virtue of staying out past nine and eschewing herbal tea as their libation of choice.