We passed a boring night talking and in the morning saw how really hideous the damn truck looked. You could see every brush stroke. It looked like we’d sloshed on the paint and then gone at it with garden rakes. We now had the most conspicuous-looking truck in Canada. It looked like hyperactive children had painted it. Hyperactive and colour-blind. The paint was enamel and was still wet. Not tacky. Wet. About as wet as when it first went on. Bishop held another council of war and said we’d have to stay camped there until it dried. He didn’t know how long that might be. If we started driving with it this wet we’d pick up splashed mud and wet leaves and stones, and who knew what the thing would look like then. “Okay, so maybe it’s not camouflaged the way we’d like. But it doesn’t look as much like a mail truck way out in the bush.” No, it looked a lot sillier than that. Theresa was steaming with anger. We were stuck there another whole day waiting for the paint to dry enough for us to go on. Talk about watching paint dry.
“There’s a saw up at the Project,” Bishop said.
His point was that he didn’t think to bring one with him now or buy one when we were at the store. We had to go looking for non-rotten wood on the forest floor, stuff that was big enough for a decent fire but small enough that Bishop could break it into lengths by putting it between two rocks and jumping on it. Theresa said, “The methodology is reductively stable, obviously.” I didn’t know what she meant exactly but I knew from her tone what she was trying to say.
I carved out a little pit, surrounded it with small rocks and started to build a good fire for boiling up a bigger supply of safe water. I wanted it at a raging boil for ten or fifteen minutes before I’d add the Javex; I wasn’t taking any chances. If only we’d had a big pot, it wouldn’t have been such a chore. Also, we didn’t have enough things to store water in. I was looking around for plastic bags, anything that would hold liquid, since I didn’t want this to become a daily routine. Theresa said she’d take care of it and disappeared up the road. Just then Bishop came over with little logs stacked up in his arms like Christmas presents. “The maple’s the best for burning,” he said as he let all the wood fall to the ground at my side. It was all spruce except for some birch. I was coming round to Theresa’s point of view; I said to myself, “Good Lord, I’m out in the woods with a guy who doesn’t know one tree from another and thinks he’s in charge.” I burned the spruce anyway. It sputtered and crackled.
I guess that was another big difference between Theresa and me. She had men all figured out. Of course she had brothers or at least one that she mentioned. Most important of all, she’d had a father. Mine was hiding in Bella Coola or somewhere, I wasn’t sure where, and to tell you the truth my desire to track him down was already starting to disappear. Looking back on it after all this time, I can see that wanting to find my father was like wanting to get pregnant. Sometimes the desire crept up on me and I’d be completely taken over by it. It would make me blind and deaf to everything else I might want to do instead. Then the feeling would go down and the sun would come out, and I’d soon get a little angry with myself for falling for the trick again. What suckers we are.
[Then with time running out I’d get one really bad bout. Later, long after this whole ugly scene with Bishop, when I was back in Vancouver and leading a respectable life helping people, I made a decision to go to a fertilization clinic. Whatever you do, don’t say sperm bank. The point was to get the job done without having to think too much about where the sperm came from, and the best way to do this is to not use the word at all. Being settled in the funeral industry by then and happy in my life and with enough money for the first time to think that raising a child would be an option, I went so far as to have a no-obligation introductory interview and take home all their literature. I kept it in the bottom of one of my dresser drawers. Every once in a while I’d pull it out and read it over again, but I never got up the nerve to actually do anything more about it. Maybe “nerve” isn’t the right word. Maybe “need” is better. Whenever I’d feel the wish come over me, I’d read through the literature and remind myself what was possible. That would make me feel better and the same night I’d put it back in its drawer. Having it there in a manila envelope under my lingerie was almost the same as having it flat against my skin. My sister Annie always says how much luckier women of our generation are over Mother’s and of course she’s right. No matter how lucky we are, though, it’s never as lucky as we could be, which keeps us all yearning. I mean here I was living in an age when I could go to a clinic and have my eggs fertilized but still just short of being able to choose the gender. I suppose I am more influenced by all those talks with Theresa than I thought at the time.]
Theresa had walked up the road to the general store and come back with a pretty large aluminum cooking pot with a lid, two more jerry cans and a pair of collapsible plastic water jugs. One of the jugs was see-through and had a plastic spigot, the other was black and had a hook in the handle. The black one used solar power to heat the water you put inside. She also had a few more foodstuffs. That was just about all she could carry. She only weighed 102 pounds, she said. (I always thought Dutch people were bigger.)
“How much was all this?” Bishop’s tone was pretty angry. I guess he was still thinking he didn’t want her to be seen, so the three of us could be identified together. Either that or he was mad that she went off without his permission. She didn’t take well to his tone of voice.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“No, how much? I’m curious. Our money situation is getting a little dangerous.”
“I said don’t worry. I put it on a credit card.”
“Jesus, you’re a fucking idiot.”
She gave him back as good as she got and it was pretty ugly on both sides.
“Haven’t you got the brains to know that the last thing you do when you’re on the lam is use a credit card? Soon they’ll know our movements and exactly where we’re at. Unbelievable.”
“That’s ridiculous. How would they ever know that I’m up here with you, or Beth for that matter?”
I thought it very interesting that being with Bishop for a while made her willing to use “they” instead of a particular name. Who were “they”? I didn’t know much about him, but I got the idea that Bishop meant somebody other than just the police.
“Naive!” He blew the word out of his mouth, raising his voice another notch. “What do you think happens when you didn’t turn up for work or whatever? Even someone like you has friends, at least acquaintances maybe. Some body reported you missing. And somebody has tied you two together, you can count on it, sister.” He called her sister, that’s right. “When you’ve been gone a certain length of time, the first thing they do is run your credit cards.”
“They can’t get that kind of information. The banks don’t give that out.”
“You’re the most ignorant person I’ve ever met.”
“And you’re the kind no one who’s comfortable with her sanity would ever take seriously. Plus you’re a fragmented personality, not reality-driven. You’re a creation of your sickness. You don’t even believe yourself. No one believes a word you say, either.”
At that moment I remember noticing how Bishop’s anger was a constant, an underground stream that came to the surface now and then. Not always when you expected to see it. On the other hand, Theresa only attacked somebody she thought had problems. Normally she was just a little condescending. But at other times, like this—maybe when she thought being rude wasn’t getting through—she was real snarly. The madder Bishop got, the louder he yelled. The madder she got, the funnier she talked. At one point she screamed out that Bishop was “narrowly compressed” and “a retrograding volatile.” I’m not sure exactly what that meant but I got the general idea and so did Bishop. He said that in a more intelligent country there would be a bounty on people like her, like the bounty on wolves.
Personally, I was worried that there was already a bounty on all of us. Bishop had a way of thinking out l
oud that after a long enough time made you fear that maybe he was right, maybe everybody was coming for us. After all, being the way he was didn’t automatically mean that he was wrong all the time. Even if you believed only half of what he said, he still had more experience at this kind of thing than Theresa and me.
When the truck was drier but not exactly dry, he decided it was time to pack up and get out of there. I could almost hear him thinking that he’d leave T behind but then thinking better of it because he knew she’d go to the police. “The posse’s too close” were his exact words. (So I was right, that is what it’s called.) This caused Theresa to say to me later that “the asshole and I have rhetorical differences that form the basis of our communications brownouts.” But having made the decision for us to go, Bishop changed his mind. The damn truck (even I loathed it more and more, and Theresa—don’t even ask) wasn’t quite dry enough, though I couldn’t believe it would look any better when it was. Bishop put a fingertip to it, as though testing a steam iron to see if it was hot. He left a fingerprint that he then rubbed out with his shirt-tail.
Bishop said we couldn’t leave until we found a few places on the truck that were tacky instead of sticky. We were packed, and the renewed waiting was painful because everybody was mad at everyone else and had nothing to do. It was a miracle we hadn’t had any rain to really make an even bigger mess of things. When I look back it sounds ridiculous, but that’s how it was. We gave it one more night. It was a night of silence. We didn’t even hear anything outside even though we listened hard for insects and animals or even a little wind.
Theresa and I were jostled off our mailbags at daybreak by Bishop stripping the gears and lurching us forward in the next stage of our getaway to wherever we were going. The project called Jericho, I guessed, which Bishop, when he spoke of it at all, talked about like it was some great solution to the problems of the world. I began to sense that it was more than a hideout but I didn’t know what.
Entry. Mythomania of Object becomes more apparent as he ignores the impacts and eventualities of his actions. The protocol of his dementia would appear to reside in an underlying cycle of depression marked by pathetic bouts of rogue masculinity and self-destructive behaviour. Delusions of adequacy alternating with meaningless secrecy, the latter a serious impediment to any normal human interaction. Apparently Object has no clinical history whatever. Stunning indictment of rest of health care profession? but also opportunity to observe action in field—no control.
The rain beating down on the half-blue half-green roof made a sound like pebbles thrown against a window and drove Bishop into the back of the van with us. He snored again and would start up just when you thought that he’d stopped. Like before, I thought I knew what to do and would gently roll him on his side. And like before, he’d stop for a while but then flop onto his back with his mouth open and wake us up one more time. Every time we got woken up like this, every hour or so, the rain seemed to be coming down harder. By itself the rain would have been relaxing and made us sleepy. Alternating with the noise Bishop made, it was just another thing to keep us up. I’d look over at Theresa next to me in the dark and could make out this small dark shape tossing and turning, left side to right side, right side to left, sometimes making a noise that sounded like an angry sigh. That’s what the night was like.
In the morning, Bishop was refreshed and putting out energy, repeating another of his grandfather’s phrases the way he liked doing: “Great sleepin weather. Makes you feel chipper.” Later he added what had to be one of his own: “The kind of morning that makes you want to steal a car and take a joyride!” Theresa said that considering our situation the remark revealed a lot and was—what did she call it?—“imbecilistic”? Or maybe “imbecilistical.”
All three of us sneaked looks at the paint job. In a few places—the areas we’d done first, when we were still putting the paint on pretty thick—the rainstorm had made an even uglier mess of it, leaving overlapping circles that made it look like we were driving a hippie wagon.
Getting underway that morning was an experience. We made Bishop stop a little ways up the road. Just leaving the truck to go to the washroom got us soaked right through. Brushing our teeth was easy, though. You held out the brush for a couple of seconds and it was wet, and when you were done you held it out again for a few more and it came back clean. We ate breakfast in the truck as he barrelled along. A can of devilled ham split three ways on three slices of bread.
T and I both offered to take over some of the driving but Bishop refused. A masculine ego thing, I guess. We got tired of being thrown around in the back and took a big pile of mailbags up to the front, and he didn’t seem to mind the company—the “audience” maybe.
“Bring up some of the A-7s too. They’re more comfortable.”
We didn’t know what he meant.
“The normal ones are called A-3s in the trade,” he said. “The giant-size ones are A-7s. More comfortable.”
“How do you know that?” Theresa sounded like she was accusing him of knowing something he wasn’t allowed to know, so he didn’t answer her but just started talking, going straight into his act. But I knew what he meant. Every now and then he’d slip words into the conversation that made you think he’d researched everything to a T. Just when you felt this way, he’d do something to prove that he hadn’t given much thought to what he was doing at all.
In an hour or so the rain let up but certainly didn’t stop. Bishop was the kind of driver who drove too fast and made it seem as if he wasn’t in control. Now it really looked that way. He had a tight grip on both sides of the wheel, a big black thing, much bigger than the one in a car, and was staring through the windshield with his forehead scrunched. I knew he was concentrating hard but a person who didn’t know him might think he was very near-sighted. I thought: This is how I must have looked driving one of Steenrod’s coaches. Bishop had this strange effect on me. I saw right through him, thanks partly to Theresa, but every once in a while I’d feel my old affection for him, the kind that comes when you think you understand a person. Sometimes even more than just affection. [In the beginning, the police were calling me an accomplice, which I didn’t much like. Once they even called me a “known associate,” which sounded even worse.]
“Here’s the situation.” These were unusual words to hear from Bishop. I figured that he’d been injured in childhood back east so that he didn’t understand normal privacy but just secrecy. “We can’t avoid going through the interchange at Williams Lake. That’s where the Mounties will be waiting if they’re waiting. The Four Mounties of the Apocalypse will all be there. Pestilence and the other ones. If we can get through without being made, we’ll be fine. They expect us to go north on the big highway to Quesnel and all the way up to Prince George maybe or even Fort St. John.”
“I thought we were going that way.” Theresa speaking.
“That’s what we’d let them guess we’re doing. They expect us to keep heading north because that makes sense if you’re looking to get lost. Less people, more bush—vast. We’ll go west if we don’t hit a trap. The road that ends at Bella and salt water.” My heart jumped a little at the thought of Bella Coola the way I thought maybe it always would do a little bit, but even by then it was already jumping less than it used to. “Eventually the road turns to gravel, but before that happens there’s a turnoff that goes north. That’s where we’re going. That’s where Jericho is. You won’t find it on the map.” He tossed over the ragged old service station map, British Columbia Road Map and Parks Guide. It was as if he was finally letting us in on something.
I opened the map. It was out of date and had been folded and unfolded so much that the creases were becoming tears. Somebody long ago had an accident on it with ink from a fountain pen. The thing had been refolded with smears of ink still wet. On two of the folds there were long pale blue stains that looked like the tall spruce that we could see on every horizon, through the drizzle. They—the stains and the trees—had pointed edge
s all round like sharp little teeth.
T and I kept studying the map, which wasn’t easy with all the bouncing and jerking going on. We had certainly left the south and not just the coast. We were way up beyond where all the cities and towns were clustered. Down there the thick red lines were in a crazy tangle. Further up there were only two red lines forming a jagged cross: one going north from Williams Lake all the way to the Yukon, where it disappeared off the paper, the other coming over the Rockies from Jasper a world away (sweet Alberta) and pointing straight across B.C. to Prince Rupert and the ocean. Once the east-to-west part got past Prince George there were lots of lakes but not many towns on the top side. On the other side, down below, you could see only a couple of small lakes but lots of streams and no towns at all, at least not that I could make out, nothing in big print. The Interior for sure. The Inside you might call it. The Inside was more or less empty, though of course not as empty as the real north. On the worn-out map it looked hollow. I was beginning to get Bishop’s idea. Or I thought I was anyway.
Theresa kept on looking at the map with a leery expression on her face. Then she refolded it slowly and pursed her lips in what looked to me a sort of prim way.
Entry. I feel a sense that danger is near, the result of being in such proximity to someone this insecure. Object’s motives still appear unfixed. This is my premier experience of such actuality. Down through the ages, all the great social scientists have put themselves at risk for the sake of knowledge.
Jericho Page 14