The Cast Stone

by Harold Johnson

  “Tell you what.” The buyer picked up the first mink. The skinning and stretching skills were obvious. The pelt was perfectly shaped, unblemished, completely dried. “Because it’s you, I might go as high as sixty. But don’t you be telling anyone now.”

  Adolphus moved the mink pelt back to the pile.

  Hershel was not pretending to look at anything other than the transaction. He was impressed. The Indian knew negotiation, knew how to use time and timing, understood the art of it. He was a man of Hershel’s spirit, a reader of humanity.

  Three days later Hershel used his skills, sized up the town and its people until he found the man he wanted, someone with refined taste, who wore a good-quality coat, and clean shoes. There were a few around, in the hotel lobby or in the restaurants, who dressed well, who looked like they might have the money Hershel was looking for, but they were too flashy, too new, did not walk with the confidence he wanted: someone comfortable with his wealth, who did not have to show it.

  “Excuse me, sir. Might I have a moment of your time? I have something that might interest you.” Hershel began the sale. Invited the man to a quiet corner of the Avenue Hotel lobby, the finest hotel in Prince Albert. He sat in a stuffed leather chair with the leather case between his feet, felt its sturdiness between his calves.

  “It’s Swiss made, very fine quality. Something not appreciated so much over here it seems. I know in Europe it would demand a much larger price, but here I am in Canada, a fine place, someday this country will rival old Europe in fashion, but today very few appreciate quality. I don’t expect to get what this is worth. I am prepared to live with that.”

  Hershel sold his first watch. He built a neat jewellery store just off Central Avenue, where he worked every day from when he opened it in 1951 until he took some time off in 1993, feeling a bit tired. His family buried him two weeks later up the hill. A good quality plain marble headstone marks the grave, nothing fancy, nothing flashy.

  The store never did need customers. The heavy leather bag contained the wealth of a family that had presented itself modestly to the world for generations, but always with quiet dignity. Hershel’s older brother Marcel had been the exception, liked to show what he had. When the soldiers came to Marcel’s, before the paintings were stripped from the walls and an oberstleutnant drove away in Marcel’s polished black-and-chrome automobile, Hershel fled.

  Ben had attended Hershel’s funeral. He and his parents, Adolphus and Eleanor, had stood back from the small gathering around the fresh-torn hole in the sod. Shook hands with Hershel’s son John, such a simple name, and his sister Eleanor. The younger Eleanor had hugged the older Eleanor before they got in Ben’s little car for the quiet ride back north.

  Bells tinkled as Ben entered Rosche Jewellery and Collectables. He stood with his hands in his pockets looking into a glass-covered case as John came out of the back. Eleanor was with another customer and did not acknowledge Ben’s presence with more than a nod and the faintest of smiles. John held one finger pointing downward by his side, hidden from view as he passed on the other side of the glass case from Ben. Ben did not respond. John pointed two fingers downward and still Ben did not respond. As John passed, Ben extended three fingers on the glass case. John responded, his eyebrows raised slightly, and he went out the door, tinkled bells before he went up the street toward where the banks were clustered on Central Avenue.

  Ben continued to look at the selection of watches in the case, one hand in his pocket feeling the small soft metal bars that weighed exactly ten ounces each, until John returned. Without a word, Ben followed him into the back of the store.

  “I didn’t have that much money here.” John reached inside his jacket, inside the breast pocket. “Thirty thousand Ameros raises people’s attention.” He put an envelope on the worktable, knelt and opened a safe that was out of view under the table.

  “Is something wrong?” he asked as he handed over the money and took the three gold bars without looking at them and placed them in the safe, shut the heavy door and turned the brass handle, listening for the double click of the lock before taking his hand away.

  “No, not really. Just being careful.” Ben put the additional bills into the bank deposit envelope without counting either. “In case something should come up.”

  Ben felt a tinge of guilt as he drove past the building that once housed the Prince Albert Indian and Metis Friendship Centre, as though he had taken the people’s money. The envelope in his hip pocket felt thick, uncomfortable to sit on. He took it out, wiggled it around the seat belt for a second before extracting it completely. He went to put it in his shirt pocket. The shirt was damp and sticky, the envelope too bulky. Finally he threw it on the dash of the truck, just as safe there as anywhere.

  It wasn’t the people’s money. It was money that did not exist, erased money. In the first days of the invasion, annexation, everyone scrambled, everyone shifted belongings and assets toward more secure forms. Some people hoarded food, others converted their cash to carryables. The Saskatchewan Indian Gaming Authority wanted Ben on their board of governors, not because Ben knew anything about running casinos, but because he was a respected professor, an Indian with a position of prestige. They didn’t want him there, they wanted his image: honest, intelligent, educated, a class addition.

  While the planes were bombing the base at Trenton, when the 401 was jammed tighter than that multilane highway between Toronto and Kingston had ever known, Ben took a certified cheque to Sport Gold. He went alone, security guards attract attention, better to be inconspicuous with that amount of money. The exchange was quick, efficient, a heavy oak desk in a large, bare office, two uniformed security guards outside the door, another just inside, his back to the wall. They look thuggish, Ben thought as he entered. The official of the corporation handling the exchange looked too young for the job, close-cropped brown hair, glasses that made his nondescript eyes look larger than they were. His appearance, his choice of clothes, cargo pants with bulky pockets and a golf shirt, did not inspire confidence. Neither did the toothpick wiggling at the corner of his mouth as he spoke.

  “So even the casinos think this is going to last. Oh well. Today’s price is six hundred an ounce, ten ounce lots.”

  “Stock price this morning was down to four-sixty-nine.” Ben felt an obligation to the board of governors to take care of their investment.

  “It went up while you were out front with everyone else. How many lots?”

  Ben looked down at the cheque, made a mental calculation. “Forty- two.” He handed over the quarter-million-dollar cheque. The toothpick wiggled while the company official made his own mental calculations. “You’re short two thousand.”

  “Yes,” Ben faced him confidently, the older man across the desk from the young and anxious. Negotiation is about time. Whoever has the most time will take the hurried. Ben had time. There were still people in the outer room waiting, nervously, rushed, terrorized even.

  “All right.” He took out the toothpick, and Ben walked away with a cardboard box weighing slightly over twenty-five pounds. He had done well for the board, secured a large portion of their assets against the unforeseeable.

  “We’re done.” The voice of Timothy Bird, the chairman of SIGA crackled in Ben’s cell phone.

  “What do you mean?” Ben looked at the cardboard box on the car seat beside him.

  “A virus wiped us out this morning. Everything’s erased.”

  “I have to see the board. I have something to report.” Ben did not want to explain over a cell phone, didn’t know who might be listening.

  “There is no board. Don’t you get it? Everything is erased, absolutely everything. All of the casinos are closed, well they’re not even closed, abandoned is more like it. When people found out they weren’t getting paid, they just walked out. Everybody from the floor sweepers, the dealers, security, management, everybody just walked away. Nobody even had the sense to lock the doors.”

  “I don’t get it.” Ben nee
ded reason, rationality that was not there.

  “What’s to get? They didn’t like the idea of casinos so they used a military virus to wipe us out, targeted at SIGA. We no longer exist, you won’t find a single byte of information that refers to us. Payroll is gone, Human Resources does not have any records of employees, Security doesn’t exist. The board doesn’t exist. We have no minutes of meetings, we have no records, no financial statements to review. You don’t even exist Ben. The virus must’ve started with SIGA and spread to all of the directors, every employee’s name is wiped out. There is no evidence anywhere that there ever was a board, or a corporation.”

  “Listen Tim, you have to reconvene the board. It’s important. I have in my possession a sizable amount of board assets.” “Whatever you might have is nothing. Keep it. Use it for your retirement, consider it your severance package. And hey, Ben. You take care of yourself, and maybe we’ll see you around.”

  Dean Fisher stood on his farm, he just stood there, looking north. Six-thousand-four-hundred acres of mixed grain and cattle keeps a man busy, too busy to stop in the middle of the day, but he was doing a lot of that recently, standing there, staring, always north. Not that far, he thought, not that far from South Dakota to Canada. He could almost see it just there beyond the rolling parched yellow horizon. You have to find some feed for those cattle. The thought forced itself into his mind. He let it ride there a moment and went back to thinking about Canada; Saskatoon Saskatchewan Canada.

  Nothing happened there, nothing was supposed to happen there. Vicky had been so happy that their son Rick had been posted to Saskatchewan and not Quebec City. He would be safe there, quiet, rural, no population to speak of. It wasn’t that long ago, in the good days before all this, they had gone to northern Saskatchewan, drove up in the rented RV. Dean remembered Otter Rapids on the Churchill River, little Ricky, he must have only been eleven, twelve maybe — no, he was twelve — just finished sixth grade, the year of the excellent report card. Ricky swam the rapids, seen other kids do it and begged until Dean and Vicky bundled him in an over-large life jacket and stood on the iron bridge with the expanded metal deck and looked down on the rolling blue water, churned into sparkling white foam. They stood holding hands, their hearts racing, while little Ricky floated and bobbed down the rapid, waved up at them as he passed under the bridge. Dean could still see the big smile on his son’s wet face. It wasn’t that long ago.

  Ricky had to grow up, couldn’t stay the brave little boy forever. He turned eighteen and they drafted him into their army, not Dean’s army and certainly not Vicky’s army, that army that belonged to the others, those crazies, those stomping and yelling people, their army. Drafted Dean’s son, took him away from the farm. Dean was happy here. His Dodge pickup with the chrome stacks that rumbled when he drove it into Sioux Falls was still in the Quonset for when he came back. He could go to town with a nice girl, take her to a movie, marry her and bring her home to the farm.

  Dean kicked his toe into the dry earth, raised powder dust. Missing in action, how can that be? Missing in Saskatchewan; shee-it, they had joked with Rick before he left that where he was going there was no place to hide. “Keep your head down.”

  “Yeah, right, in a gopher hole, I’d guess.”

  Three weeks now, Ricky was missing for three weeks; there was hope. If something had happened they would have found him by now. No, as each day came and went, the better his chances, Dean hoped. That was all he had, hope. Hope for the best, hope that Ricky would come home. He kicked the dry dirt again, looked to the west where a promising cloud was beginning to build, maybe it would rain, maybe a thunderstorm would come by with a little moisture, as long as it didn’t bring hail.

  It was all over by the time Ben arrived in Saskatoon. Idylwyld Drive was open again and traffic flowed down its length over the melted and blackened pavement on the southbound lane. Someone had hauled away both trees, cut them into pieces, left sawdust on the sidewalk and a few small branches too small to bother with. Ester Kingfisher cried often, cried when she thought of those trees, the elms. Mostly she cried when she thought of the elm that had stood in front of her house. Elmer would miss them. Poor Elmer, at least he didn’t live to see this.

  Roger Ratte’s bullet-ridden Toyota Prius sat on its flattened tires on a low trailer in the government insurance inspection garage. The inspector didn’t have good news. He could have told Roger when the car was first brought in, but he wanted to hear the story, so he went through the motions of assessing the damage, even wrote figures onto the form clipped to a board. Then he invited Roger into an office, sat across an empty particleboard desk and asked an easy, “So what happened?”

  “I was on my way home, Northbound on Idylwyld, about twenty-eighth, twenty-ninth, somewhere in there and holy shit! a tree fell across the street right in front of me.” Roger had told the story a few times already, once to his wife over the phone to explain why he wasn’t coming home that night, once to the guy at the hotel. He had it down, had practised it again on the way here this morning, each time adding a little more detail, arranging it chronologically.

  “There was this old lady, I talked to her after, her name is Ester — she seen everything. I guess she lives right there, all her life she said. Anyway when the tree fell in front of my car there was this guy with his hood up and tied tight around his face so you couldn’t see it very well and the old lady, Ester, she was still trying to take the chainsaw away from him. That’s the tree on my side of the street. The tree on the other side came down just as I was getting out of my car. So they blocked traffic both north and south. I knew something was wrong then. I knew something was really wrong. The guy with the chainsaw on my side of the street, he gave the chainsaw to Ester, well he sort of threw it at her, or let her take it. I don’t know. Then he ran away, towards downtown, right past me; I was on the sidewalk by then. Weird shit, I figured. I went to see if Ester was all right, she was sitting on the grass, it kinda’ slopes down to the street there, she was sitting there holding the chainsaw where the guy pushed her down and the saw was still running, and traffic is piling up now if you know what I mean, on both sides of the street, nobody can go anywhere. I sure couldn’t have got my car out of there with all the cars behind me and the tree in front of me and the way the land slopes down on each side. I was stuck there. And I knew. I knew something was really wrong. I grabbed Ester, took the saw away from her and tried to get her out of the way of whatever was coming. Tell you the truth, I didn’t give a shit about my car at that moment. I was just getting out of the way, and getting Ester out of the way.

  Then Homeland Security, they must have been behind me, five, six vehicles of them, all together, you know the way they travel. Well, when the traffic got blocked they must have gone over the meridian there onto the southbound lane where there was no traffic and come up right beside my car on the opposite side of the street where they were blocked by the other tree and the vehicles piled up behind it on that side.

  They just opened fire, as soon as they came to a stop, they must have realized it was an ambush and they opened up first, shooting everything. My car got it the worst because it was the closest. They were just, fuck! there were bullets flying everywhere. By this time I got Ester back off the street. There’s kinda a cement wall there by her sidewalk up to her house. I held her down in there and laid on top of her. And you know what she’s crying about when those bullets are smashing into everything? She’s crying about the tree.

  Then all I heard was whoomp and the first HS vehicle, it’s all on fire. Must have been one of those Montreal cocktails we hear about, you know the one with diesel fuel and Styrofoam and oxygen mixed into it like an Aerobar; must have been something like one of those. I didn’t see who threw it. I seen one guy on the other side of the street up on the roof of a building come right out to the edge, right out into the bullets. He had some kind of machine gun or something and he was shooting at the first vehicle. Must have been drawing fire so his buddies could get u
p close enough to throw I figure. Well they got him. Yeah, fuck man, just like in a bad movie, I watched that guy come off that building, then whoomp and that front vehicle, you can’t see it anymore, all flames, orange, orange flames, and those HS guys never had a chance, whatever the hell they hit them with, it had some concussion to it. Felt it from where we were on the other side of the street. Then there’s more bullets and another whoomp, that one must have been the back vehicle, I don’t know, I got my head down and there’s shooting like you wouldn’t believe. Never in your wildest imagination man, you couldn’t imagine how many bullets, hundreds, no thousands, thousands of bullets from both sides. Just fuckin’ incredible.”

  Roger stopped, out of breath a little, looking at the inspector, waited for a response. The inspector sat there with the edge of the clipboard on his crossed leg, held it with both hands leaned against the desk, sat there with his mouth slightly open, maybe he breathed through his mouth instead of through his nose that was too small for his face. He sat there for the whole story, didn’t flinch even once, not even for the whoomps. He waited, possibly for more. But there was no more. Roger wasn’t going to talk about carrying Ester into her house, putting her on the old sofa, knocking things off the coffee table, bottles and bottles of medication, of finding a bottle of gin under the pillow when he propped her up and tried to make her comfortable.

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but SGI policy does not insure against incidents of war. It’s in every policy. War is something you cannot buy insurance against.”

  Roger put his hands on the edge of the desk, not threatening, not at all; he just needed someplace to put them after waving them around for so long, tracing bullet paths and mushroom clouds. He was tired, shocked and tired.

  “Incident of war.” His voice was flat.