“I’ll have a look.” Richard slid a slim wallet from his hip pocket. It was made with smooth nearly shiny material, light and strong. Slim because it did not have any cards or identification, no photos of loved ones, nobody’s business card or folded piece of paper with a phone number. It contained one commodity — cash, Amero hundred-unit bills. He gave five to the attendant for the fill. Lester was impressed.
When Lester was in the Suburban, listening to the very good stereo sound of powwow blended with hip hop, absorbing the chill of the air conditioner, reclining in the comfort of leather, Richard reached under his seat for a bundle wrapped in red cloth. “Here, something for you from head office.”
Lester unwrapped the cloth around the stainless steel semi-automatic, hefted the weight of the piece, felt the solidity of the grip fit to his hand, pointed it, found its balance, let it rest there, easy, so easy. He checked the magazine, fifteen rounds, pulled back the action, there was another in the chamber. Ready to go, ready to go anywhere with class.
“Nine millimetre Browning.” Richard looked back to the gravel and potholes. “Fast as you can pull the trigger.”
“Nice.” Lester held it to the light, away from the tint of the side windows to see the shine of steel in sun.
“I’ll have a look at what you phoned about. But that is not why I’m here.” Richard poured bottled water into a glass with his right hand, offered the glass to Lester. Lester declined. The pistol in his hand filled him. His thirst was quenched.
Richard eased back into the seat, drove left-handed; drank water from a glass, not the bottle, not like a wino. He didn’t like it here, on the reserve, on dusty rough roads. He didn’t like the houses — spaced, each in its square cleared of trees; these houses were cheap. You could tell just by driving by, nothing solid about them, cheap siding, cheap roofs.
No sidewalks anywhere, no pavement; there was nothing here that Richard wanted, and Richard did not want to be here; did not want to be reminded that this was where he came from — not Moccasin Lake, but from a reserve, a reserve just as dusty and poor and cheap. He was better than this now. He had class. He drove a Suburban, a GMC, with a full-size gasoline engine, not a hybrid — fully loaded, nothing chintzy, nothing routine, nothing working class, or worse — reserve class.
Lester was spinning the pistol on his finger, finding the balance of it; spin it, grab the grip, point, aim.
The music through the clear speakers chanted a song of resistance, banned lyrics; a song of rights, freedom, and homeland, a version or perversion of “Oh Canada”, depending upon your perspective. Richard heard the words and dismissed them, this resistance stuff wasn’t real fighting. Real fighting was north-central Regina nearly a decade ago. Now that was war. The enemy didn’t wear a uniform, you shot at blue bandanas or red bandanas or white and they shot at you for the colour of your clothes. Then killing was all revenge and honour and control, and you never slept.
Native Syndicate rose, became great, faded, and rose again. Now Richard had command and NS had purpose, it had place; and the respect they had fought for all those years in crumbling apartment blocks and slumlord rented collapsing houses was finally theirs. Native Syndicate was the battle arm of the resistance. It put more soldiers onto the streets than anyone. And, whether the resistance liked it or not, NS reaped the profits.
Everyone wanted to get high and hide. The war on the insurgents replaced the war on drugs. While the police chased the bombers and watched the marchers, cocaine flowed freely, morphine was almost as easy to supply as cigarettes, and the OxyContin Blues was becoming the most popular song on the streets. Richard and Native Syndicate were the link between the powder and the profit; and the police were busy elsewhere.
The best part, the very best part; no rats. No one was phoning Homeland Security because there was a crack house in the neighbourhood. And the RCMP, well most people saw them as just an adjunct to HS.
“So, what do you want me to do with this?” Lester toyed with the Browning.
“It’s business — not mine — I’m just bringing a message, an assignment for you.”
Lester rested the pistol on his lap, kept his hand on it, listened. “Yeah?”
“Someone for you to watch for us. It probably won’t go anywhere. Far as I’m concerned it’s someone pulling strings, getting favours, wants someone out here looked after.”
“You want me to babysit.”
“You have a problem with that?”
“No, no problem. You tell me what you want done. It’ll get done.” Lester tipped the pistol sideways, movie gangster style, and pointed it straight ahead.
It’s too early, Monica thought, at the sight of a single faded orange leaf on the maple that a city worker had planted, gouged a hole and plopped into the boulevard in front of the new apartment block twenty-seven years ago. It’s way too early for the leaves to change. But then she thought, well maybe because spring came so early they are just tired of it all, tired of the constant heat. Summer can become tiring, dust, daylight that comes way too early and wakes you, the buzz of flies, and that dry wind that keeps blowing up from the Arizona desert. Some days she thought she could smell cactus mixed with the grit. Maybe winter would be good this year, some snow, just a little, just enough to settle the dust and make the city look clean again.
Ben loved autumn, used to come back to the university after summer tanned a full shade darker, brought the wilderness with him into the classroom, brought energy and light. He used trees as metaphor to explain to the seminar class how an ecological society might function, how balsam and birch lived together, put thoughts in her head about how she might live. But Ben’s utopian society only existed there, in her head, maybe in his; it was not here, on the concrete where grass grew through the cracks beneath her boots, here where the boulevard ended and the busy 23rd Street — a couple more blocks and they would be at the bus depot.
Rick hurt, this was a sick he had never experienced before. It was more than the sick that might be expected from six weeks of confinement in a basement without light, more than the sick that might be expected from the beatings, the kicks, the punches to the temple. Why did he always hit me there? What was the damage he hoped to inflict with punches to the side of the head? Brain damage? No, the brain was functioning perfectly well. He knew where he was, knew that the explosive taped to the small of his back was armed, knew the woman behind him held an old-fashioned garage door opener in the pocket of her floppy jacket, knew that if she pressed ‘open’, the explosive would certainly smash his spine if it did not kill him. Rick’s brain was fine. It was the rest of his body that was having problems, serious problems.
“Do not get on the bus until I say so.” Monica’s voice behind him was indifferent; at first Rick confused it with kindness. Six weeks of anger can do that; make you believe that indifference is kindness. Sunshine and light can give you hope, keep you walking when your body wants to lay down, there on that bit of grass, or even here, right here on the concrete, just lay down for a moment. Rick kept walking, putting one foot in front of the other, promised himself it would be okay once he was on the bus. Buses have reclining seats.
At the station, Rick tried to stand away from the other people waiting to board. If this was all just a set-up, if she pushed the button anyway, he did not want to be standing close to someone who had nothing to do with this. He looked at her, standing in the shade, watching people getting off the bus two lanes over. She nodded and he pushed himself the three steps to the door of the bus, handed the driver the white stiff paper ticket, used the handrail to climb the narrow stair, turned left past where the driver would sit, waited for his eyes to adjust to the dim light, and made his way to the very back of the bus where the man was signalling him. He would have preferred to sit anywhere closer.
“Here, lift your shirt.” He felt the rip of tape removed. “Anywhere else?”
“No. That’s it.”
“Okay then, just sit tight and we go for a short ride.” The m
an sat back, turned away from Rick, toward the window where the light was better and disconnected the detonator from the explosive. “Everything is going to be okay now.”
Rick knew it wasn’t. Knew that the man with the dirty blonde hair and hawk nose had poisoned him. That was why he stopped the punches and kicks, stood there and grinned while Rick ate cold canned beans that tasted of grit. No, it was not going to be okay.
“Everything is going to be okay now, Abe.” Monica put her arm around his waist and helped him to walk to the depot.
“No it isn’t. Monica. I told them everything.”
“It’s okay, Abe.” She squeezed him tighter, reassured. “We’ll handle it. Let’s just get you out of here. You’re safe now.” Quickly through the station, past the ticket counter, out the street doors, into the taxi. “No, the other one.” She guided him to the third cab in the line, the one that Ed was driving.
“Where to?” Ed joked.
“You know fuckin’ well where to.” Monica was not in the mood for jokes as she slammed the door behind her. “Are you wired?” She had her hands under Abe’s shirt, feeling.
“No, nothing. They put me on the bus at Dundurn and told me not to get off.”
“Nobody rode with you?”
“Not that I know of. Monica, I talked. I told them everything.”
“It’s all right, we’ll handle it. You just take it easy.”
Abe wanted to talk, needed to talk. “I don’t know what I said, I just started babbling. They gave me an injection, fire in my veins, I don’t remember. I couldn’t concentrate, confused. That needle, whatever it was, and I couldn’t stop talking, babbling was more like it. It was like I was somewhere else listening to myself. It was like I was trying to put the fire out with words, trying to make the pain stop, anything to make the pain stop.”
“Bastards.” Monica sat back, let the taxi carry her, let herself go with it, wherever it was going. The resistance would continue and she was along for the ride, all the way. The taxi turned hard right, leaned her against Abe, shoulder to shoulder. She put her arm around him. “It’s all right, Abe. Like I said, we’ll handle it.”
Ed sped the taxi through the old warehouse area, the area that had once been converted to nightclubs, offices and restaurants, but was now deserted again. The once bright paint, the purples and oranges that had attracted people at the turn of the century now faded, peeling and empty.
Abe sat up straighter, his strength returning; he did not need sympathy, did not need Monica’s arm around him. He relied upon his own strength.
“What did you tell them about me?” Monica needed to know.
“I don’t think I did.” Abe turned slightly to look at her. “I rambled a lot. They wanted to know about the gathering on the farm, who was there, who said what, and the person that I kept talking about the most was that guy you brought, Ben Robe. Of everyone who spoke at the gathering, it was Ben Robe that stuck in my head, and it was Ben Robe that I gave to them. I don’t know if it was the drugs or what, but I remembered everything he said. In my babbling I gave them his speech word for word. I’ve got to find him and tell him.”
“I’ll take care of that.” Monica looked out the window, looked north.
The rifle kicked into Ben’s shoulder. Not the slam of a hunting rifle, more a push than a hit. He lowered it, looked at it again. It was shaped like a rifle, barrel, forestock, trigger, scope. But it was as different as it was similar. Ben was more familiar with walnut and blue steel. This was flat black and plastic, electronic rather than mechanical action.
“It fires three rounds for each pull on the trigger,” Monica had bragged when she showed him his purchase. “Laserscope tuned to four-hundred metres, put the red dot where you want, squeeze the trigger, and one dead bastard.”
Ben looked back at his target, a plastic bottle hung by a string from a tree branch two-hundred metres distant. He did not need to check, he knew it had three holes in it, saw it jump when he squeezed the trigger. Easy enough, but could he shoot a human? Could he put the red dot on a man? Take a life?
“In self-defence,” he answered, but the words were not his, they were his father’s: “When a man takes a life, that man takes that other man’s life as his own. If you murder a man you take that man’s sins. That man they electrocuted there.” The old man had pointed at the newspaper a young Ben was holding. “They took all his sins onto themselves when they killed him. The wrong that man did, they have to pay for it now — him, he goes to the happy hunting ground.”
“The one that pulled the switch has to pay?”
“Not just him, all of them. All of them that decided to kill this man, they take his sins. You watch, they keep doing this, they keep electrocuting and hanging people, all of them are going to pay. It’s going to come back on their people.”
“They’ve been doing this for a long time.”
“And look at the suffering it brought them. They still have murderers and rapists, lots of them. Just watch. It’ll keep getting worse.”
Ben put the rifle away. It did not hold any answers.
Rosie knelt, moved aside a branch to check the underside of the faded blueberry bush. There weren’t any berries there either. Nothing. She felt tired, wore out, more from disappointment than from exertion. In a good blueberry-picking year she could stay out all day, walk with a pail for miles, happily filling it and spend her evening cleaning the berries, picking out the occasional unripe green one and the very rare unwanted leaf, packaging them up, and stocking her freezer. Blueberries were Rosie’s staple. She depended upon them for the pies she baked over the winter, her famous pies that she could sell when she needed a little extra during the last days of the month when things were running low.
She had heard of years like this. Her mother had told her about the year they had a big snowstorm in June that killed all the young berries. But even that year her mother had found berries. The snow had come while her mother and father were travelling. They had stopped overnight, made a camp, the next morning when they started out they found the snow had come all around them but not the place they had camped. Her mother had gone back to that spot and sure enough there were berries there, not much, but enough.
Rosie wondered if she would be the first in her family’s history to ever get skunked. She picked up her pail and started walking, looking for that one spot where the sun had not burned away the berries, where there might be some, enough. Maybe in the shade of poplars. Maybe there were saskatoon berries on the island at the north end of the lake. Maybe Ben would take her there in his boat. Maybe Elsie and Benji would come and they could take Rachel. There was a nice beach there, a little cove of sand and driftwood. They could have a picnic. It would be good to be on the lake, on the cool of the water.
The hitchhiker looked like the Indians that showed up on movie sets, with a pair of long black braids tied with leather, darker skin; he could have been Indian, wore denim, and boots. Even the name he gave, Billy Thunder, sounded Indian. But the accent that accompanied the name was not Indian, not Cree, not Saulteaux. Ben suppressed a laugh at the thought, maybe he was Dene. He thought of asking, making a joke, but Billy Thunder or whoever he really was would likely not appreciate the humour, would not understand that the Cree and the Dene were once enemies and still teased and made jokes about each other.
The more Ben thought about it, the more honoured he felt that an Arab man would disguise himself as an Indian. It meant that there were a people more reviled than his people. Someone had said that the Arab in America was in as much jeopardy as the Jew was in Nazi Germany. Ben didn’t know if that was true. It might be. The average German did not find out exactly what was going on in the concentration camps until the war was over. Maybe, you never know. That was the thing of it, you never know.
He had found Billy standing at the junction. He looked undecided, like he was not sure whether he was going down the gravel road to the reserve, or up the paved highway to the north. So Ben stopped and asked. “Where
you going Bud?”
“To my reserve,” Billy answered quickly. He walked across the road toward the driver’s side door until he was close enough to get a good look at Ben. “Tanisi.” Billy said the Cree word that meant How are you? the way that it was written, instead of the way it was commonly spoken; without dropping the unneeded middle “i”. That was when Ben first wanted to laugh but kept his face deliberately stoic, very Indian. “Jump in, I’ll give you a ride.”
“You live here at Moccasin Lake?”
“Yes, I was just in town to buy some paint for my fence. Here let me get it out of your way.” Ben moved the four-litre pail from the front passenger seat to the back.
“You are not under arrest, Mr. Robe. There are no charges pending. We merely wish to discuss some matters with you.”
“I have nothing to say until you remove this hood.”
“The hood is for your own safety, Mr. Robe. When you were found you had a person in your company who gave the name Billy Thunder. What can you tell us about this person?”
“Remove the hood.”
“Only innocent people do not have to wear a hood, Mr. Robe. We found an M-37 assault rifle in your dwelling. You are not an innocent person.”
“Remove the hood.” Ben’s voice was as flat as the voice asking the questions.
“Mr. Robe, you attended a clandestine meeting on the farm of Abe Friesen earlier this summer. Do you recall this event?”
“Remove the hood.”
“Mr. Robe.” The voice beyond the hood might have been a principal speaking to a schoolboy. “Do you understand where you are? Do you know the seriousness of the allegations against you?”
Ben did not answer. He rested against his arms handcuffed behind him, shifted them into the lower part of his back. He knew the answers to the questions, knew where he was. He was in a prison, not far from Moccasin Lake; Prince Albert maybe, more probably Saskatoon at the old correctional centre out in the industrial section. His calculation of time under the hood was limited by his inability to see the sun, but he knew he had not travelled far in the back of the Hummer, bound underneath a tarpaulin, rattled down the gravel highway, then smooth pavement when the throb of diesel engine became a whine of turbo, to here. Here was a correctional centre from the stop and go of their movement when they dragged him in. Stop and wait, held up by his arms, his hands handcuffed behind him, his feet tied together so he could not walk. Stop, wait, listen to the sound of steel doors clang shut behind them, listen to the grind of steel doors open in front of them. Then dragged, one person at each shoulder, arms looped through his, his feet dragged on concrete, carried too low to get his feet under himself to stand, ankles bound together so that he could not walk in any event, and when he tried to stand, while they waited for doors to grind or clang, his feet were kicked out from underneath him. Dragged to here. Here was a table and Ben lay on his back, on his arms, on his numb hands behind him, and the hood kept out the light.
The Cast Stone Page 16