Jericho

by George Fetherling

  “I’ve just got a lead on his whereabouts,” she said.

  I’d never seen her so excited, and I tried to imitate her tone with necessary conviction. “Tell me!”

  “He was seen in Bella Coola.”

  “Who saw him?”

  “A woman had a vision.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I just sighed appreciatively. I fear I knew whom she was referring to, but I held my tongue and let her unwrap the story. That cretinous psychotic Bishop had befriended the woman who calls everybody riff-raffs. She’s a well-known local character, one of the harmless homeless I call them, sometimes delusional but not actually unstable and certainly not dangerous or potentially violent like Bishop, the phony. I could hear what had happened between the lines as Beth told me her version of the events Bishop had related. The oracle, as he called her, can slip into another dimension if you believe in her. I once heard her say in this very office that she could predict earthquakes. (She thought a big one was coming, which is how the subject came up.) Bishop got to talking to her about Beth’s quest and “the oracle,” as Beth was now calling her, apparently said, “I know of such a man,” or words to that effect, and then recounted the missing man’s life in intricate detail such as she could not know except by extra-empirical means: at least one and maybe two daughters (one of them certainly named after a place in the Bible), his alcoholism, his desertion of the family and his drift over the mountains into the flophouses and beer parlours of the Downtown Eastside. According to Bishop, she said things about Beth’s father that she couldn’t have known if she was not telling the truth about what she saw in her head—for example, how when he was a kid his father used to tie him to a chair and read the Bible to him, both Testaments and the Apocrypha. Beth said that was one of the few details that her mother ever offered in trying to explain why her husband had acted the way he had.

  “Are you taking all this at face value, or has the woman herself repeated it all to you?”

  “I wanted to find her right away, of course, and show her the photograph and see if she recognized his features. But I went to Victory Square and some of the other places where I usually see her—in the doorway of the Dominion Building and outside the old cinema, and so on—but I couldn’t find her. But I will. Anyway, I think I’m going to head up to Bella Coola and make first-hand enquiries.”

  “Oh, Beth,” I said. “Beth Beth Beth.”

  I gave her a big hug but did not know what to do after that.

  The first dead person I ever saw wasn’t in a funeral parlour. It was on the street over in Deetroit and there wasn’t much to see. The cops had covered up the body and made a chalk outline on the sidewalk, right next to where some girls had chalked out a hopscotch thing. I only got a glimpse for a second or two. I can’t say how old I was except that I was walking between the grown-ups, with one of them holding my left hand and the other my right. They hurried me right along, almost lifting me off my little feet; the red lights on the cop cars were going round like they had something to brag about. I haven’t thought about this for years and years, but it comes back to me now because of what happened in Yaletown that night. Everybody’s still talking about it. What a mess.

  Sometimes your first reaction to news like that is really your instinct warning you to move on to the second or even go straight to the third. At other times, though, the first thought’s the truest because it’s won the race to the surface. Learning to tell the right one from the rest—that’s the trick. I’m talking experience here. Judgment.

  I never knew his real name till I read about him on the front page of that copy of the Province left behind by the last guy having breakfast. Everybody just called him Boots. I think he probably told me to call him that the first time we met.

  “How can I find you?”

  “People know where to find me.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “People call me Boots.”

  His left eye had a nervous tic, it was always twitching. Talking to him was like trying to carry on polite conversation with the Point Atkinson lighthouse.

  At the time, I hadn’t really found what you could call my niche and I’d already had a lot of different jobs, usually in the kind of places where everybody else is in the country illegally, including the owner. There was this little weasel that ran a landscaping outfit. A lot of property management companies in charge of West End condos used him. You got paid at the end of each day. Another time I worked with a really bad-tempered Chinese guy moving reconditioned stoves and fridges. He couldn’t decide if he wanted to steer from the front or the back. Either way put him in a mood. Once he almost dropped a Maytag on my goddam foot. When I pointed this out to him, he spit on the front lawn. It was a spit of indifference but it was also a spit of contempt.

  Anyway, one afternoon I’m down in the part of town where all the no-fixed-address people live, and I’m just standing there, looking at the action that’s going on across the street, kitty-corner. As it happens, I was in the market for some quality home furnishings at that time as I had to get out of my Strathcona place cause the cops turned it into a circus after one of my neighbours suddenly died and I just left everything there when I went, to confuse whoever might come around. So I was watching this guy set out an assortment of junk on the sidewalk like he was having a garage sale. He had a turntable and a lamp and then a broken-down chair—but no, he then started using the chair to sit on, so you didn’t know if it was for sale or not. He had really a lot of stuff, little pieces of this and that, spread out along a six-or eight-foot stretch of concrete, and I went over to take a look. Up close, the turntable looked like someone had lost their temper at it and the lamp didn’t have a cord. It was all like that. Something strange was going on. This was in the middle of summer. I went back to the shade where I’d been before and waited, figuring I’d scope out things. I didn’t have any appointments to keep.

  I know now that at one time Hastings Street was the centre of bustle in Vancouver, what you might call the hometown of play, locally. Gambling, you see, is what people did before there were a lot of drugs to take: it’s the same story everywhere. Every cigar store made book and in olden times there were really a lot of cigar stores, as I understand the situation. There was a lot of action at the tables too because there was an endless supply, year-round, of guys with their pockets full of cash coming from logging camps and fish boats up the coast, looking to get their hair cut, get drunk, get laid and get lucky at cards. The first two were easy and the third pretty simple too but the last one was more or less impossible. After all, this was the part of town that originally took off when shopkeepers started selling tennis rackets and necessities such as that to suckers on their way to the Klondike gold rush. Pretty expensive tennis rackets, too. On the West Coast, this was the place to be, I think, right through the forties and fifties, when the world was still lit by neon. There was also another little island of Civ down Granville by the bridge. (Now it’s all pawnshops, sex shops and other legitimate businesses.) Lonnie would have felt at home here as long as he didn’t look up and see the mountains. This was his kind of place and that was his time to be alive. As always, the main problem was the cops, but not in the way you think, cause here they were competition. That’s how it had been for a long time. In the twenties, I guess it was, the chief of po-lice was shot dead by somebody who was a little too fond of the Chinese molasses so common in them days. True story, though a lot of details were hushed up.

  Fifty, sixty, seventy years on and Hastings was still full of people on a hot summer day, but they weren’t going shopping at Woodward’s or the Army & Navy (though the Army & Navy was still going strong—still is). They were shopping for all different kinds of brain jewellery, starting with Vitamin H and going down the periodic table from there. The cops had pretty much abandoned the neighbourhood. Now and then a prowl car, as Lonnie used to call em, would swim by, watching the quick deals completed with a minimum of words and a handshake lasting a second and a half
. But they didn’t do much of anything about it. The scene was like a busy farmers’ market except it didn’t have anything to do with agriculture.

  Everything being so out in the open, I was naturally curious about the guy with the big square second-hand face with the hash marks on one side of it. What was he doing over there exactly? He wasn’t no student at the end of term, selling off all the temporary possessions he didn’t want to drag back home to Kelowna. He was a good bit older than even me and he didn’t get those scars on his face from acne. I had to smile. Guys would come up to him and inspect his loose garbage with great interest. Then, after looking up and down the street, they’d take, say, a fondue pot with a big hole in the bottom over to Boots and give him what I could see even from where I was standing was a wad of dough for it. He put the fondue pot (none of the little forks were left) in a plastic Safeway bag and handed it back to the customer. That’s what the cops saw if they played back some surveillance tape, assuming there was one, which I doubt.

  Later, when I got to know him a bit, I said I admired his technique. He didn’t take well to compliments but he did explain his thinking.

  “This place is pretty famous. People even come up from the States. A lot of em aren’t really low-lifes, they’re people out for a kick. They want the thrill. They like the blood pounding in their thighs when they think there’s danger. But they get scared easy. I was making it simple for em.”

  This was part of his thinking: to make it easy for Citizens who ordinarily wouldn’t come any closer to the Life than reading editorials that denounced it. Boots wanted to bring back the seventies, when straight people with cash would go slumming in their bloodstreams. He was some sort of business genius, and that’s why I wanted to go to work for him, but I never really got that close. Pretty soon he wasn’t working on the street any more and he probably had a zillion guys like me who were his Avon Ladies and Fuller Brush Men. Any two of us might pass each other in the street and never be the wiser except by the look in the eyes. I knew what he was up to, though.

  He had many ideas. But the one about selling drugs to people who actually had money for drugs—that was his best one. Like the roulette wheel, the fulcrum, the vibrating plane and all the other great ideas of the ancient Mesopotamian types, it was brilliant because it was so damn simple. In the early stages, before their dopamines got blown out like breakfast, a lot of these people doing dreams and speedballs were naturally enough really concerned about the strong possibility of an overdose—a problem in amateur circles especially. The answer was to sell em Narcan too so that they or their needle buddy can get the heart and lungs started again real quick. Boots got the idea when he stole some of this shit, or somebody else did and he wound up with it. Then he had his people working on how to make it themselves, in some lab he had somewhere.

  What he had all of us selling was Adam and Eve (that’s two different things—there’s Adam and then there’s another one called Eve). This was the dagga weed of what that guy, what’s his name, called the X Generation. Everybody wanted it, girls and guys, cause it takes the scariness out of having sex (which is scarier when you’re young, I guess—I guess I remember that if I try hard enough). They get the energy to go all night for only twenty bucks a pop, but it probably cost less than a penny to make once you’ve got the set-up, especially when it’s cut with speed or strychnine or what have you. Boots had a squad of people like me selling it to the kids in the clubs where they go to dance. No two batches look the same, which tells me that it was made in a lot of different places so that, if one gets pushed over, the business doesn’t have a recession.

  Sometimes the kids told me afterwards what they liked or didn’t like about the little brown ones that looked like laxative and the white jobbies that looked like thin aspirins. “Dude, I gave my girlfriend the one with the light purple spots and like twenty-four hours later she’s still curled up naked on the floor talking to herself and sort of giggling.” I collected all this info like a good field rep and was planning to pass it up the line to—who? I have no idea. No one saw Boots any more. Suddenly he wasn’t in a position to let himself be seen. I assumed this was mostly because he couldn’t afford to have his fingerprints on anything, but looking back it might have been fear of a turf war too. A person heard stuff. In the old days, I guess, the ethnic groups, they hated one another because they were different. But now, ever since Brian Ef Mulroney, it’s all about hating em for business reasons. I don’t know which is better and which is worse.

  I rose late that day, as I hadn’t been keeping regular hours. I went to this place where I often ate breakfast and grabbed a booth. While I’m waiting for the eggs to come, I pick up the paper, which was lying back to front. When I turned it over, you could have knocked me over with a coke spoon. MURDER AT RAVE CLUB is what it said. The story was about how Boots was with two others, one of them female, ID still unknown or withheld (but I figure it might have been Annie, that straight girl he liked). They were standing outside this club on Hamilton Street like they were waiting for something. I know the joint well. It’s in an old warehouse. If you put back all the original filth, it would fit right in along the river back in Windsor. It’s the kind of building with a roof, turned up at the end, that extends out way over the front, to keep the trucks out of the rain in the old days. These days the insides are a big open dance floor with a bar running almost the whole way down one wall and really bad loud music all the time: the kind of place where they stamp your hand and the bouncers have cell phones. Seems Boots and his friends were standing out front at two in the morning on what used to be the loading dock when somebody guns him down from a car. The paper said witnesses—maybe his old lady, maybe the other guy, or maybe just some twinkie who happened to be watching from the wrong spot at the wrong time—told the cops it was Chinese or Vietnamese guys (ethnic Chinese from Vietnam is probably what they meant).

  The news really put the fear into me, man, and not just because I was probably out of work all of a sudden. I liked observing Boots or at least how he built things, but I didn’t like dealing in chemicals instead of what you actually grow. I’m old-fashioned that way even though I’m not a back-to-the-land type. Organics had always been part of my retirement plan, part of the Project. What worried me about the situation was I knew how somebody would checkmate somebody else and then a third person would retaliate right back at em. Eventually the damage starts to trickle down like water dripping through the ceiling. Hey, I grew up listening to Lonnie talk about stuff like this.

  Over the next little while I read the papers really close. The story got worse and worse, with hints that the politicians might be mixed up in it somehow. When I wasn’t busy doing that, I was thinking hard, even when I was busy at something else. What I figured was that it was time to cut out. So I was selling the inventory, quietly, and getting rid of my stuff. Like a Boxing Day sale in springtime. I knew I should be gone before summer came up north and everybody started killing everybody else and the parents of customers start pressuring the city to clean house. I had a plan. I even had the Stick. My trusty Stick.

  What makes lesbians different from other persecuted groups is that we are discriminated against because of how we are supposed to look rather than on the basis of the way we’re accused of talking. The insensitive may think this sounds nonsensical. What about the racially disenfranchised, they will say. So permit me to explain it to you.

  What lies behind white racist attitudes towards African-Americans in the United States? Not skin complexion as such, for there is no standardization with regard to either race, no universal standard or set of charts that are consultable. The point of entry for the white racists is how black people are shown talking on television and in movies. That is, in oral fashion. All that jive-talkin’ mutha hoe upside-the-head stuff signals to the white ear: here is the enemy. So too with prejudice against First Nations people, which begins with reaction against their poetic language—soars like eagle and all of that. It always reminds white racists
of that Canadian Native actor, what was his name, Chief Dan? Anti-Semitism is not unsimilar this way. The specifics of Jewish speech as practised in eastern Europe in, say, the late nineteenth century—initial w’s becoming v’s, the hard final g in words like long and the liberal use of certain supposed phrases uttered by Jews in show business entertainments—are the things that activate the alarm in anti-Semites. Wit French Canadians it’s da same t’ing (though of course anti-Catholic hatred is also a major factor in that case).

  Following along those lines, what triggers homophobia against gay men is that fey diction you commonly hear in the real-life West End and with even greater certainness whenever fags are featured in pop culture. But there’s no such thing as lesbian speech. Instead there’s only the stereotype of the large bull dyke dressed like a biker.

  That leaves me the most discriminated-against of all. I do not conform to the image, being neither butch nor femme in how others see my appearance. I’m nowhere near imposing enough for the former—to have such a thought is to laugh. Nor, which is humorous in its own way to the same extent, am I fluffy enough for the other one. In fact, not fluffy at all. I’m small and blonde with this pointy chin like an upside-down piece of fruit. People used to mock me about having to buy clothes in the kiddie department, and I never let on that it was true, or used to be so, well into very very late adolescence. I have no body art or piercings, for I am of the wrong generation. More importantly, I have few discernible curves beyond my face. Looking at me, one could not say with certainty where my centre of gravity is. So homophobes intolerate me while fellow lesbians do so as well, gratuitously and with calculated effect. Always have done. But if my free-time study of the science of the mind has taught me anything, it is that it doesn’t matter what people think of me because they wouldn’t like me anyway.