The Fourth Betrayal
Page 22
We cruised out of the mouth of the Fraser and into the Strait of Georgia. Maybe three miles out, with the sun getting low over Vancouver Island, I shut off the engine and we drifted in silence. The four of us just sat on the hatch cover and existed for a while. Then I uncovered the barbecue and put some steaks on, along with foil-wrapped potatoes. We ate while the western sky brightened into yellow, then violet and red. The sun seemed to expand dangerously as it transformed into a fierce red globe at the edge of the world. The four of us sat shoulder to shoulder, leaning together just enough to feel each other’s presence. We stared at the darkening horizon as the evening sky imagined our fate.
Nineteen
DAIKI WILL GRADUATE FROM HIGH school this year. Ren has taken over his role as a normally troublesome teenager. We are fortunate that both of them have been able to vent their adolescent spleens on the rugby field, which has made home life pleasantly spleenless.
Oshie is still young, still beautiful, and still, apparently, in love with me. I no longer am—young, beautiful, or quite as much in love with me.
Dougie still lives in my thoughts, where he has upgraded himself from mere memory to de facto ghost. He is welcome there, because echoes of his words and thoughts have always bounced around my brain. I might as well have the whole personality, which exists quite independently and usually happier than he was in life. He had, after all, succeeded in severely discombobulating the activities of the Committee—with some help from me. But he was not happy this morning. He had read the newspaper with me, and he was not pleased.
“Ollie, what the hell’s this all about? They’re talking about running a pipeline into Kitimat and then loading supertankers to run down Douglas Channel. I thought you killed all that when you made your deal with the Chairman.”
“Dougie, the Chairman died three years ago. I don’t even know who these new people are. Tap Dickens is not part of it. He went into agriculture futures, sowbellies or something.”
Dougie fumed, which was unfortunate because it always gave me a bit of a headache. “It’s the same people, Ollie. It’s always the same people. They clone each other, or reproduce through zombie sex or something. They never die!”
I tried to placate him. “I don’t think they’ll get regulatory approval. The tankers are just too much of a risk.”
“Remember that bet I made with the Chairman?” Dougie said. “He guaranteed he could make the bureaucrats roll over and ignore all the risks. The Committee still rules Ottawa and they still control the bureaucrats.”
Sadly, Dougie’s ghost was as prescient as a good spirit should be. During the environmental review of what they were calling the Northern Gateway pipeline, the powers that be in Ottawa delivered a completely quiescent set of bureaucrats. Transport Canada signed off on a report that said of the proposed tanker route, “There are no charted obstructions that would pose a safety hazard to fully loaded oil tankers.” Dougie was furious. “Have they looked at a fucking chart?”
Fisheries and Oceans Canada could see absolutely no “unmanageable” risk to critical fish habitat in the thousand or so miles the pipeline would cross, or in the thousands of square miles of highly productive ocean that the tankers would cross. Environment Canada chose what Dougie dubbed the Alfred E. Neuman approach. (What, me worry?)
As this depressing information dribbled out over the next few months, the arrangement of my synapses that Dougie had commandeered for his ghost became increasingly disturbed. Finally, I did as well. “I can’t believe it,” I said finally. “The bureaucrats delivered a report that was exactly what the oil companies wanted them to, thousands of pages of extremely expensive toilet paper. Were they stupid or just cowardly, or were they bribed?”
Dougie’s rage threatened to materialize him, which would have been okay if he had been out of my head at the time. “Bewildered, bullied, or bought. Doesn’t really matter. They failed.”
Oshie came in and saw me moving my lips. “Talking to Dougie again?”
I sighed. “Remember when I blackmailed Tap Dickens and the Chairman into abandoning their pipeline plans? Well, someone has resurrected those plans.”
“But that’s ridiculous. It was a stupid plan then and it’s stupider now. Aren’t the bureaucrats going to stop it?”
I sighed again. It was the only reaction I was capable of. “The bureaucrats, for reasons unknown, have acquiesced.”
Dougie spoke more calmly now. “You know what you have to do.”
“What?”
“You have to write the story. All of it.”
“Jesus, that’ll mean months of two-fingered tapping away on my laptop. It’ll take forever.”
Dougie pointed out that there was no use in being able to type faster than you could think.
“Ha ha ha.”
Oshie asked me what I was laughing at.
“That was an ironic response to Dougie’s cheap sarcasm. But we’ve decided on an action plan. I’ll have to write the story of the Committee’s betrayal, all their betrayals, and get it published.”
As you can see, I’ve done that, at great pains, which would have been greater without Dougie’s help. But I could only write to the end of the past and the beginning of the present. The future remains unwritten, but not, I hope, unchangeable. Because if the future becomes the present that the Committee is lurching toward, slavering and blindly grasping, I fear for all of us. That was Dougie speaking. This is me. I am a little older and somewhat mellower, but I am still and ever mindful of the effectiveness of a good punch in the mouth.
And never mind the evening sky. Or imaginations. Or fate.
The map of “no charted obstructions that would pose a safety hazard to fully loaded oil tankers.”
A freighter was obstructed by shallow water and went aground.
A freighter somewhere near here was obstructed by an “uncharted reef” and suffered a 12-inch gap in her hull.
Grant Point proved to be an obstruction to a freighter that veered sharply and hit it. This could happen anywhere along the route, which is as narrow as 4/5 of a mile in some places. The tankers can be more than a ¼-mile long.
Gil Island, which proved to be an obstruction to a BC Ferry. Two dead.
Shallows that would ground a loaded tanker.
More shallows that would ground a loaded tanker.
Caamano Sound—a minefield of rocks and shallows.
Acknowledgments
This is a work of fiction, but what is not fiction is that there are at least three real live authors who have shed a great deal more light on some of the facets of this book. My cousin-in-law Donald Gutstein (Not a Conspiracy Theory) has written about the right-wing propaganda machine, the money behind it, and the effect it has on our lives. Andrew Nikiforek (The Energy of Slaves) has written about how the people who fought for the continuation of slavery used exactly the same arguments as do the oil pushers of today. And Stevie Cameron (On the Take) writes about the corruption that existed in Ottawa during the Mulroney era.
My first thank you must go to my publisher, because without the initial opportunity and then the ongoing encouragement of Ruth Linka at TouchWood Editions, this particular arrangement of words on paper would never have occurred.
I also need to thank my editor, Linda Richards, for dragging me kicking and screaming back across the boundaries of good taste and into the realm of decent writing.
Jim MacDougall, ex-Calgary detective, corrected all the errors (I hope) relating to police procedures, and my old friend John Sutcliffe corrected errors related to Ottawa. (Geography only—Ottawa-related errors in general are, unfortunately, impossible to correct.) Jeff Jones provided valuable legal advice, my daughter Carmen and granddaughter Carlee provided a Kaleva Road perspective, Robbie Boyes provided a Mitchell Bay perspective, and Stephanie Eakle provided a First Street halfway-between-the-library-and-the-breakwater perspective. And, finally, thanks to Heather Graham for the perspective of a local and very professional editor.
Vic Rhitamo has,
over the years, told a number of fishing stories in the tradition of Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill. I mashed several of them together to form the bedtime story that Ollie tells his kids. Perhaps one day Vic will write all his stories down. They would make a great book for anyone who has children or grandchildren or friends not totally committed to being grown up.
Most of the nicknames in this book belong to real people. I have changed their last names, however. In any case, the characters in the book are fictional and the real-life characters are only characters.
The quotations on pages 79–80 come from the following sources:
Norman Bethune, “Wounds,” Daily Worker, February 19, 1940.
Randall Jarrell, “90 North,” in The Complete Poems (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1969).
William Carlos Williams, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” in Journey to Love (New York: Random House, 1955).
BRUCE BURROWS is the mystery author of The River Killers and The Fourth Betrayal. Having spent years working as a fisherman, commercial diver, and, most recently, at-sea-observer, he is a true man of the sea. During his time as a fisherman, he wrote a weekly column called “Channel 78, Eh” about fishing on the West Coast. His collected columns can be found in Blood on the Decks, Scales on the Rails. Bruce lives on a small island off the northeast coast of Vancouver Island.
Copyright © 2014 Bruce Burrows
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (ACCESS Copyright). For a copyright licence, visit accesscopyright.ca.
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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Burrows, Bruce, 1946–, author
The fourth betrayal / Bruce Burrows.
ISBN 978-1-77151-097-4 (html).—ISBN 978-1-77151-098-1 (pdf)
I. Title.
PS8603.U7474F69 2014 C813'.6 C2014-902768-0
Editor: Linda L. Richards
Proofreader: Vivian Sinclair
Design: Pete Kohut
Cover image: Island with trees—PhotoRx, istockphoto.com
Orca pod—Lazareva, istockphoto.com
Tanker—Pley, istockphoto.com
Illustration on page 87: Rebekah Pesicka
Author photo: Chris Black
We gratefully acknowledge the financial support for our publishing activities from the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and from the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.