Jericho

by George Fetherling

  That was the first time I ever heard him use the word. I didn’t know where it referred to. I still don’t, though I now think I understand what it is, if not where exactly. The scar wasn’t recent but it was still very obvious, a large pinkish-white band of raised flesh like a parasite worm sleeping on his hand or something that should have a zipper underneath it.

  He was smiling. “I got it playing anarchist poker. Have you ever played anarchist poker?” This wasn’t a question exactly and he didn’t give me time to answer. “In anarchist poker there’s no face cards. But there are twenty-six jokers. Everything else is wild. The first person with a winning hand enjoys the privilege of shooting out the lights.” He made that sound way back in his throat that sounded like it was coming from a baby or a crow.

  We spent about an hour in there. A waiter was starting to give us looks. All the caffeine wasn’t doing Bishop much good. “Let’s get out of here,” he said finally. “I’ve been stood up without apology or explanation.” He always talked that way, which is why I don’t have any trouble remembering his words exactly. He started to leave and I left with him. Following him on the street was pretty crazy when I look back at it. But leaving with him was a turning point in my life—I can see that clearly now. I guess he hadn’t finished telling me whatever he was going to say, or I hadn’t finished listening. That would be weeks away. The waiter’s eyes locked onto mine as Bishop and I left in a hurry. The waiter seemed to say, “Good riddance.” I smiled back and made my eyes go as wide as they could and sort of shrugged, as if to say, “One never knows, eh?”

  We walked and walked, I wasn’t sure where we were going; I thought maybe we were going in circles looking for the other person. Bishop’s long legs made him walk like someone in the country pacing off the property line. I had to keep pushing myself to keep up. Bishop paid absolutely no attention to the traffic that tore by. He was telling me things about himself that he thought I should know even though we had only just met and he hadn’t even asked my name yet.

  “Like minor diplomats and the better sort of gigolo, I own my own tuxedo,” he said. “Someone gave it to me on his deathbed. Another thing. You’d find this out sooner or later. The increase in violence in our society exactly parallels the rise of painless dentistry. No, it’s true. You look back and plot the timelines. When anesthetics became available they started killing people’s souls.”

  We turned onto Granville Street and hurried down the Mall past all the old theatres with crafts-sellers lined up outside with their goods. A couple of them recognized me and waved or nodded, which seemed to make Bishop suspicious. Then we were going down the hill towards the harbour but went east on Hastings, the street of broken dreams (and lost fathers?). Bishop took me into an alley off Carrall Street where old Chinatown, sad old Chinatown, began. It was a typical Vancouver laneway, the backs of old brick buildings, the street paved not very well and sort of listing to one side, hydro wires running every which way overhead. I was brought up short by the sight of two homeless men stripping a third one. The two doing the robbery scattered as we came near, leaving the naked man moaning on the pavement. I wanted to see if he was all right, but Bishop grabbed my hand—it was the first time he ever touched me—and dragged me along, fast.

  At the far end of the alley was something even worse: a young woman, a teenager I’d say, sitting on a bare, stained mattress, wearing only her bra and panties and rings through her ears and nose. A user obviously, and keeping business hours right out in the open in the middle of the afternoon. I expected Bishop to pull me along even faster this time, but I was amazed and a little frightened when he stopped to talk to her instead. He asked her where someone named Cynthia was. They had an appointment but Cynthia didn’t show up. The girl was too high to give a coherent answer.

  “Tell her we’ll wait for her in the square, up there, you got it?” Bishop pointed, not very accurately but in the general direction, and began half dragging me again (I didn’t like it) back along Pender and towards Victory Square.

  There was the oracle woman again with her Safeway buggy.

  “How old do you think I am?” she asked us, or rather Bishop. She answered herself in a slightly different voice. “Well, it’s an age. I’ve got awards, citations.” She drifted away to different topics all the time. Listening to her was like trying to find a station on the radio that never really existed: little snippets of conversation every half-twist of the dial, all coming from different places in the universe. Now she was giving the news in brief. “They say the crime rate is going through the roof. They say there’s going to be war in the Middle East somewhere.” She let herself float away to different topics all the time. “They say pastels are fighting back this year. What do you think?”

  I didn’t have a chance to answer even if I’d known what to say. The oracle shouted at a passerby, an innocent man walking up the path. “Hey, buddy, you got change for an egg roll? I’ve been craving for some Chinese food.”

  The man ignored her and she shouted after him. “You riff-raffs are all alike. Afraid you might put me in a higher tax racket.” She resumed her normal (!) tone. “Wouldn’t want that. She’s a genius with a penny, people used to say that about my mother. Think what she could have done with a dollar if she was alive today. But they’re all gone.”

  She was starting to wander across the radio band again.

  “My husband was a fine-looking man. That’s what everybody said. He always behaved in a very caviar fashion. Wore a hankie in his pocket and a pocket watch on a chain. I love a man with a pocket watch. It makes them look so extinguished. He hurt his head. Got it beat to a pulpit, all black and bloody, praise Jesus.”

  She lowered her voice and whispered towards me, “The cops said they suspected it might have been foreplay. That’s what the papers said at the time.”

  She pulled out some recent pieces of newspaper from somewhere inside her clothes. “Oh, it was very prominent in all the publications. I have my scrapbook here somewhere.” She scratched at herself. “I had a photograph of him with some visiting dignitarians. I can’t find it right now. Anyway, he got the dissipations after our boy went crippled. I prayed to the cross on Mount Calgary. That’s where he was born. This was in the polio epidemic of the fifties. He was never the same after that. A tragedy like that, something like that when it happens to you, it gets you right here, in the solar breakfast.” She pounded her chest with her fist, more like a bully boasting in a bar than like a person feeling grief (for I later trained in identifying and handling different levels of grief). “Anyhow, I’m just here so my feet can give the rest of me a rest. That’s all the reason any of us are here. All day every day it’s the same routine. Up the upscalator, down the downscalator. Looking for stuff, maybe getting rid of other stuff to make room for it. I’m really a person on the way up, you see. My stuff runneth over.” She bent, poking in her shopping bags again. “I keep all my data here. This is just full of data. The doctor said I was a Polaroid, but you know what I say back to him? We only go round once, I say. Counsel may approach the bench. Now I lay me down to sleep.” She pretended to read from a torn piece of newspaper. “The dollar continues its slide on world money markets. The sanctions aren’t working. I told you they wouldn’t. Please return your seats to the full upright position.” She looked over at Bishop, stared at him. “You know what I mean, don’t ya?”

  “This is what I’d tell the doctors,” he said back at her. “I’d say, ‘Your world is not located in my physicality.’” And he let out a laugh at how clever he was. The oracle suddenly looked as though she was feeling better, and began laughing too.

  The three of us waited for this Cynthia person, who never showed up and who I never met or even heard of again.

  I never know that a relationship isn’t going real good until I get served with the restraining order. Ha! Don’t I wish. It’s never that easy. Relationships come in a lot of different flavours but only two kinds. There’s the long con and the short con. The short con’s
probably best, but the trouble is you can’t ever find one when you’re really in need. They sneak up on you every now and then, usually when your mind is somewhere else, fully occupied with an event or episode or accident you’re trying to make happen. The long con, that’s a different story. Keeping one on the go all the time, like a pot of police station coffee perking away in the corner, can fill a purpose but it usually turns ten kinds of bitter. I’d have to say it’s all a question of temperament.

  When I was still a baby, long after my father left her, Mother took me to live in a little prefab house that one of the oil companies had simply forgotten about when they moved on to the next place. It was made out of plywood and two-by-fours and had only two rooms, which Mother insulated by nailing up the papier mâché egg cartons she got all the people over in the village to save for her. The house didn’t have a foundation but rested on old hydro poles laid lengthwise on a bed of gravel. I remember that these had big iron rings stuck in them, so chains could be hooked on whenever there was a new strike and all the houses would be dragged off, following the riggers.

  I was too young to know what being embarrassed meant, but I can remember how I felt living in this house—more of a shack really—out in the grass and weeds beyond the edge of what had once been a town. Mother sensed how I felt, and she told me to pretend that I was actually living in a doll’s house. “You’re much luckier than most little girls,” she would say. “They only have dolls’ houses to play with that they can’t get inside of.” That’s how Mother was. A wonderful woman in ways I didn’t have the words to express when I was young. One day my little sister and I (half-sister really, but we’ve never called one another anything but sisters) were working in the salon. Annie was giving a customer a perm while I had another one bent backwards over the basin for a shampoo. She came in every month, and this time we got to talking. I told her how Mother had been deathly afraid of mice and rats. The memory made me stop scrubbing the client’s head for a minute. I remembered that the doll’s house was infested with field mice, especially in early spring, when it still turned cold at nights. Mother always told me not to be scared. “If you go back to bed and stay very still and pretend to be asleep, a mouse may come in and visit us. But you have to be very quiet.” She’d put out bits of food and a little saucer of water in the middle of the floor in the other room, as if we were expecting Santa’s reindeer. She didn’t let any of her own feelings show.

  By ‘93 the recession got so bad that Annie had to lay me off from the salon, which she later had to shut. These must have been two of the hardest things she’s ever had to do. I looked and looked for work, but without anything solid I decided to go over the mountains. She came soon after me, though she wouldn’t stay on very long. She couldn’t adapt, so she never really settled. The times were better in Vancouver and everyone was so good-looking that I knew there must be a lot of work for graduate estheticians. What’s the worst that could happen? I could cut men’s hair in a place where the TV was always up too loud. Well, I had quite a time adjusting. By going to B.C. I was really just paving the way for Annie, but she wasn’t ever happy there, she told me, and that’s why she didn’t stay all that long. Of course I know there was more to it than that. We weren’t sharing a place or anything, but I felt kind of lonely much later when she all of a sudden pulled up stakes and went back home to Alberta.

  What I found when I got out here was that economically B.C. was a lot like Alberta but with rain all the time, and the people were very strange. Finally I tried to find part-time work. One ad I answered turned out to be from a funeral director. I was afraid of what to expect but I thought of our mother and the mice and went off to the interview. When I ended up getting the job, I was relieved but I was terrified too. I’d never seen a dead person before. I had to keep telling myself it wouldn’t be any different from working with live people’s hair except that you didn’t have to listen to their troubles and keep saying uh-huh as you did your job. I couldn’t have imagined what was ahead for me. Like doing their makeup too. Like deciding that Mr. Steenrod, my boss, was right, I did have a way with the no longer living and would I consider letting him teach me about the business. He was a white anglo funeral director in this really run-down part of Downtown that seemed to have less white anglos in it all the time. He had had offers from other funeral directors, I found out later, but he wouldn’t sell to Asians (Mr. Steenrod wasn’t really a bigot, I don’t think; it was mainly just because he was old), and in those days at least he didn’t like the Chain either. Unlike every other funeral director I would ever meet, he didn’t have grown children who could take over the business. I think he felt he was adopting me.

  Months and months went by and I studied hard from some books he loaned me. It was much harder than anything I’d ever done before. Harder than the Wild Rose Beauty College, my alma mater. I sold my jewellery during the day and at night studied a book all about Grief Facilitation and the Grief Process and Effective Utilization of Therapeutic Communication to Facilitate Grieving, then worked for Steenrod’s either Saturday or Sunday or one other day whenever I was needed. Most people would have quit while they were ahead. That’s how I probably would have talked in those days, before I knew better.

  Like I say, I was hired to do hair and makeup, but before too long a time I got promoted to being a sort of very unofficial apprentice. One day Mr. Steenrod, as he liked me calling him, announced he was going home and leaving me by myself. I was left with a suite full of visitors, five phone lines and the coffee pot. It was only a long time afterwards I figured out this was a test to see if I could cope. I coped.

  Another time, not long afterwards, I was doing the vacuuming. Vacuuming is one of the two major chores in the funeral-directing business. It never ends. The other one is washing the cars, the coaches and the transfer vehicle (they don’t say hearse any more). Mr. Steenrod was down in the basement, next to the prep room, in another room almost the same size where he had all his toy trains set up. That’s how he relaxed, he said: modelling. Anyway, he came in, said I’d done real well, and asked if I wanted to observe a funeral the next day. We went upstairs, where he started to shut off the lights, and he asked me to give him a hand. Walking over to the casket, which had been closed during the visitation, he lifted the lid and asked me to hold it up. He removed the ring and watch, saying that the family had requested them. I studied the body. I didn’t bat an eyelash when Mr. Steenrod adjusted the hands a little bit.

  The next day at the cemetery, when people were waiting to get into the cars, the family seemed slightly more relaxed than they’d been before, and one of them kept asking me questions. “Why do you only lower the casket to ground level? And why do you take flowers to the graveside?” I had on my best manner. “Most loved ones don’t want to see the casket lowered completely,” I ad libbed. “It can be hard on them, and our job is to make the experience less of a burden. And the flowers add some brightness to a very sad situation.” I went on: “The committal is so final, and that brings the sense of closure that members of the family are hoping to find.” He nodded. I thought: Hey, I have some talent for this after all.

  Mr. Steenrod must have thought I had some ability too because before the month was out he asked me, “Would you like to go on a death call? It’s a trauma case.” I said sure. This was how I got better acquainted, you might say, with James Randall Weese, evidently known as Boots, the boyfriend Annie left behind when she went back home to Alberta. I recognized the name on the tag, but though I let out a little gasp to myself, I had the sense not to say anything out loud.

  As you can imagine, the first time in the morgue is pretty scary, and I was no superwoman. But I wasn’t going to disgrace myself. Mr. Steenrod was all business when he pulled into the back of St. Paul’s and took out our gurney. He showed me how to sign in and pick up the morgue key. He unlocked the door and the cool air hit us in the face. I’d expected it to be cool but not this cool. I suppose I was imagining it colder than it really was, because
I was nervous. As soon as we walked in I could see a stretcher with a plastic bag in the shape of a person. It was right in front of us. I took a deep breath and charged ahead. Mr. Steenrod checked the card and we moved the stretcher out of the cooler into the hall, parking it next to ours so we could slide the body over. The hallway smelled like chemicals and disinfectant, a lot stronger than that stuff high school janitors always use. The body was cold and there was blood on the green sheet under the plastic. “Autopsy,” Mr. Steenrod explained. We zipped the bag up tight as it would go and strapped it to our cart. I felt pretty strange, knowing that I’d seen this person when he was alive but not being in a position to mention that. It made me feel like a liar.

  I guess I’d finally earned the right to observe the prep room. Or maybe Steenrod’s was even more short-handed than it looked. In any case, my first reaction was shock. I mean, I could accept that autopsies are necessary to establish the cause of death, but it seems like such a violation. Mr. Steenrod explained everything he was going to do, but I only saw the very start of the embalming. Then I had to get out of there, but then I’ve heard of medical students who got sick or fainted at their first sight of a body in the morgue, much less an autopsied one.

  After he’d done his work, Mr. Steenrod asked me to go style the deceased’s hair while he ran an errand. The deceased had some bad scarring, not recent, on one side of his face, and he wore his black curly hair down past his neck. These were sort of like trademarks apparently. I knew the visitation was the next day, so I turned on the buzzer for the front door (I was alone in the building by then) and quietly went to work. First I had to wash and set the hair. It was just like drying children’s hair even though I knew pulling out the tangles wasn’t going to hurt. When I was all finished it didn’t look too bad, but I wasn’t completely satisfied. So the next morning, a few hours before the visitation, I brought in a curling iron to do some finishing touches. It probably didn’t matter as the casket was going to be closed, but I never took that attitude and besides, the family is encouraged to spend a few minutes alone with the casket open. That way, they know they’re getting their money’s worth. Anyhow, that’s what a cynical person would say.