Jericho

by George Fetherling

  four

  NOTHING BAD HAPPENED AT FIRST. What we saw of Williams Lake from the interchange made it look big, but maybe because the highway is big and the valley is wide there and the sky enormous just like back home. I could see the lake and the rail line coming into town and smell the pulp mill. Oil company names in big red letters on high poles looking down at their service stations, large yellow fast-food signs towering over parking lots. Motels, and truckers and their rigs, in a long line either side of the highway, and other places to stay built up on the hill. That’s the way I remember it.

  By some miracle, no siren started screaming and Bishop found the turnoff to Highway 20, which was well kept up for forty or fifty kilometres. Theresa and I were in the back again, trying to get comfortable and stay that way. She was telling me about being Catholic. I had to prod her—I’m always interested in other people’s beliefs and how they grew up and what the origin of their name is, things like that. She said some weird stuff. Her mother, she told me, said out loud once: “I always remember the terrible day President Kennedy was shot, because it was the Feast of St. Cecilia.” Catholics were from some other continent than this one.

  Bishop stopped for gas at a place called Riske Creek. He said it was pronounced Risky. There were just a few buildings scattered around. While he pumped the gas, Theresa and I went into the combination store/café with a shiny metal roof and a lot of small trucks parked out front, all of them kind of new-looking. I guess, what with the big argument about the credit card, he figured he couldn’t trust her, thought I’d keep an eye on her while we were in there, so she wouldn’t send a signal to somebody or write HELP with lipstick on the bathroom mirror. (She didn’t wear lipstick, but he wouldn’t have noticed that.) I wasn’t at all comfortable in this role but it didn’t matter because the situation didn’t come up. I couldn’t figure her out. Looking back, I can’t even figure myself out. I mean I thought at the time I knew why I was there: there was something about Bishop, I would have said if you’d asked me. Now I can only guess that I was discovering a side I didn’t know I had (and haven’t had since). I was looking for romance, sure, but maybe for danger too. Also I wanted to see how the whole mess would turn out. I was scared but I was sure it would be okay, because I’m an optimist like Mother. But T? She didn’t seem frightened in the least. Nothing scared her as far as I could see. She barged through life with her bony little elbows sticking out, demanding to see the supervisor.

  Beyond Risky the road wasn’t as confident and the whole atmosphere got pretty spooky for long stretches. You’d be in the light and then suddenly drive through a dark patch full of shade and shadows even though when you looked there was really nothing blocking the sun. You suddenly got the sense that this was an aboriginal place. This was literally true, of course; there are a lot of First Nations people up around that part of the world. But I mean it in another sense. Even though you never actually saw them, you got the feeling that they’d been there forever and weren’t thrilled about having visitors—or at least some weren’t anyway.

  There was a surprising amount of traffic now. Bishop would always nod at the other drivers or take his left hand off the steering wheel and do a wave for a second or two. The other drivers always returned whatever gesture he made but some of them were staring at us pretty hard (I can’t imagine why!). This went on for a hundred kilometres or so until we hit a place called Alexis Creek, another wide spot in the road that I bet grew up around somebody’s old ranch: I know that look all right. After that, traffic stopped coming in the other lane. It was almost as if there was some important sign up ahead that we didn’t know about. WORLD ENDS 20 KM. Something like that.

  We sure weren’t making good time on that road. We bumped around on and on. Another hour and a half or two and we charged through another little village, no it was smaller than a village, a place called Redstone. This time I couldn’t imagine what kind of people decided to live there or why the little cluster of buildings existed at all. Maybe they built it while they were drunk or maybe they were born there and just stayed put. Looking back now, as a long-time Vancouverite (I love my neighbourhood with its old houses and run-down businesses), I find being stuck for years in a tiny isolated place hard to understand but of course it could have happened to me and Annie as I guess it did to our mother. I think that was the tragedy of Mother’s life even more than the way men treated her.

  When we’d gone maybe as far from Risky as Risky was from Williams Lake, Bishop suddenly pulled over to the side, throwing us forward like the dummies the car companies use in those safety tests. I didn’t know you could make the same terrible tearing sound with the gears when you stop a car or truck that you can when starting one up if you don’t know what you’re doing, but this is what he did. “It’s time to recon,” he said. He seemed pleased with himself for announcing this.

  “What in Lord’s name are you talking about?”

  He ignored Theresa whenever they weren’t actually arguing.

  He bent down and was pulling something out from under his seat. It made scraping sounds as he tried to get it loose. It turned out to be a piece of wood, a stubby stick, a little shorter than an umbrella and about three or four times thicker than a broom handle. He held it up to the light with his right hand and started running his thumb up and down it. He did this in silence for a minute or so while Theresa looked at him in disgust and shot me a look that said “Can you believe this guy?” When he opened his eyes there the three of us still were, in the pea-soup truck, pulled off on what would have been the gravelly side of the road if the road had been in a little better shape.

  “It’s called a message stick. The Aborigines in Australia used them to record information about where to hunt, where to find water. It’s like a map. They passed it on to the next generation.”

  I had no way of knowing if this was true but it sounded good to me. I guess it was the state I was in.

  “You see where we turn off up there.” He nodded his nose to someplace farther along, using his head the way a collie would, or a person with her arms full of grocery bags from the supermarket. “That’s where the logging’s pretty heavy on the north side. It’s not as busy as it used to be. A lot of it’s been logged out, but they’re still at it in other places.” And then a little later: “The logging roads change every year. Sometimes you even hear dynamite going off. That’s them starting to build a new road, blasting out a place where the trucks have to pass.” He paused. “If you ask me their engineering is deplorable—deplorable.” You never knew when words like that were going to come out of his mouth. Theresa gave the look again. This time it was so big and obvious it practically made a loud noise. “The Stick tells me the way. Writing it down’s too dangerous. It might fall into the wrong hands. You never know. This is best, believe me. It works, too. Nobody can read it but me. It’s all in the fingertips. Lonnie used to tell me about this old safecracker he knew called Cappy. I always wonder if that wasn’t a nickname, short for Blasting Cap. He had the power in the end of his fingers. It was like being able to see through the steel, Lonnie told me. I’ve got it too. A little bit anyway.” T’s eyes were getting narrow like the lens on a camera when you snap the button. Bishop started the engine again. We bobbed along a few metres like the brake was still on and then finally we smoothed out. In a minute we turned right. North.

  He would stop every so often to feel the Stick or to “listen to what it tells us”—that’s how he put it. Then he’d have to hold it right up to his face and study its little squiggles. When I first saw it, I thought it was an old stick that worms had gone after, but when I had a chance to study it I saw he’d traced a map on it, showing roads, turnoffs and stuff, then carved the lines into the wood using a penknife from the looks of it. The information swirled around the wood, like the red layer in a peppermint stick.

  “It’s telling me to keep right and not take the bridge,” he said. “But that part I remember on my own.”

  Later he said out loud (to h
imself?): “Bear left. Don’t take the right fork.”

  He was right about the landscape. There were big mountains in the distance—one big one in particular, I don’t know how many kilometres away but far off—but they didn’t look like they were connected to one another or even part of the same scenery. Up close, though, there were huge patches of clear-cut land, bare places as far as we could see out of one side or the other and sometimes both at once. Sometimes nothing was left but branches that had fallen to the ground and hadn’t been hauled off with the rest of the trees. Most times, only tiny pieces the size of your hand or smaller were left lying on the ground. There weren’t any birds and for sure there weren’t any animals.

  We drove along, moving this way and that, taking orders from the Stick. Soon it told us to turn onto a logging road, which had a lot of other logging roads pouring into it. They were all marked with plastic ribbons tied to stakes driven in the ground to about eye level. The posts had three-digit numbers on them but I didn’t know what they referred to. Couldn’t have been kilometres from anyplace as this was literally the middle of nowhere. They must have meant something, though, because they were all in order—139, 147, 151, 162, 194. I figured they must have referred to a map (I mean a real one, not one whittled from an old branch) that the logging people had.

  Looking at one of the yellow strips hanging limp from the post, Bishop said, “Any time I see one of those I keep expecting it to say POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS. Sometimes I get homesick.”

  I looked at Theresa but she didn’t seem to hear him; she was writing in her journal. She had it perched on her knees and was writing slowly but with a lot of concentration, cursing under her breath every time a bump made the pen jump.

  We kept heading in the same direction but suddenly the numbers were going down instead of up. We turned off somewhere. I didn’t know where we were. That didn’t bother me so much. What mattered was that Bishop didn’t seem to know where we were either. He kept relying on the Stick and his memory. Hard to say just which was less reliable. “The place isn’t supposed to be easy to find. If it was, then it’d be easy for Them to find it too.”

  We wandered around like this most of the day, backtracking some of the time, taking wrong turns, ruining the truck which was in perfect running order when we left the city but seemed to be coming to pieces now. No, really, I actually expected chunks of it to start falling off in the dirt and mud, leaving a row of tailpipes and fenders and things, like the trail of crumbs in Hansel and Gretel. I was sure we were running low on gas. The ice was almost gone and I could see that the food supply was starting to spoil in the heat. Most of all, Theresa was running out of patience, and I must tell you I wasn’t too far behind on that score. Just when everything was at its blackest, and noisiest, just when people and machinery were about to explode and erupt, Bishop let out a yelp of joy. “That’s it,” he said. “Jericho Rock. We made it.”

  Way off to the left a big old knob of rock, like a bald man’s head, stuck up out of the ground, two or three, even four metres high and probably just big enough for one person to stand on. It was porous like a sponge. Like a giant sponge that had turned to stone. I couldn’t see beyond the trees behind it but I soon learned to think of the rock as the gate to a truly weird world, a strange creepy place. I mean, it would have been creepy even if Bishop hadn’t had anything to do with it. In fact, it had probably been creepy since the world began. That’s how it felt.

  Bishop stopped the truck, grinding the gears a little bit again, and then there was quiet. “Through the birch and over that ridge,” he said, “is Jericho.” He opened the back door so we could start to haul the stuff in the direction he was pointing. We’d pretty much been living in the same clothes for days and Theresa’s had big splotches of paint on the front and back, like she was wearing an old school map on which the British Empire was shown in green instead of red.

  Nobody knows how old Jericho is, only that no one’s ever uncovered a burg that’s older. No, not this place here: the one in the Bible. The one Joshua fit the battle of and the wall came atumblin’ down. Do you know what that means? Can you even comprehend it? That was the first city. That’s where civilization began. Before that there were only people but no Civ like you and I have today. If it weren’t for what happened at Jericho, the whole world would be like—what? I dunno, Saskatchewan. It was permanent. That was the revolutionary idea. People over there in Palestine, people in China, people everywhere, were nomads, always pushing their animals round to where they knew there was water to drink and grass to eat. But Jericho was something different. It was this trippy place, you know. It’s way below sea level, hundreds of feet lower than the Dead Sea. Water just naturally gravitated to it from the Jordan and a lot of small streams and tribs. Here was this place with grass all year round. People didn’t have to keep moving all the time. Some of them were bright enough to stay put there and let their animals get fat and healthy for a change and make their living selling stuff they raised to the poor bastards who were still wandering. This was—can you dig this really?—about eight thousand BC. All the other places near there—Bethlehem, Nazareth—are recent compared to Jericho. Even Jerusalem seems a damn suburb compared to Jericho. Amazing. Can you begin to take in the enormity of what happened there? Do I convey it to you? My God. Something got started there that’s only begun to die in our lifetime, or my lifetime anyway. This thing Lonnie based his life on. Cause the Jericho-ites, the Jerichoans, they started to build houses and then stores. Maybe even places we’d recognize as hotels and beverage rooms. Probably made of mud and straw and maybe a little wood, cause there’s not much usable rock for building there, not stuff you can cut. No, I never been to Israel but I’ve read a lot, especially in the Facility. I know it wasn’t until about three thousand BC that the Sumerians invented a mould for making bricks in an oven, maybe mankind’s first important invention in terms of the spread of Civ. If they didn’t have enough fuel to fire them, they just left em out in the sun for years. That sun over there would bake em pretty hard all right.

  Even then, thousands of years before the United States of America, there were so many enemies of cities and civilization that Jericho had to put up high walls to keep the developers and the barbarians out. It got warm inside a city with walls like that and a new kind of life form developed, like something in a glass dish in a lab. I mean the downtown life form. People that made everything they needed or had it brought to them, right. I’m talking about the invention of room service. They weren’t farmers who lived back of nowhere and worried about if they had enough manure. They weren’t nomads either—what we’d call commuters. Eventually they even stopped being straight city folks, Citizens. They lived by their wits, doing a little of this and a little of that. You go to some of these places today—no, I already told you, I haven’t done that personally—and you see Citizens doing stuff the exact same way as ancestors in the Bible did, like shepherds herding sheep by throwing stones at them instead of using dogs. That’s what David of David and Goliath fame was doing walking round with a slingshot and a few pounds of rocks. Rocks are better than dogs cause they don’t expect to get fed. Well, it’s like that with people in the Life too. You probably had people in Jericho selling gold bricks made of lead. You see what I’m saying? At some level, nothing ever changes and that’s what keeps us sane and satisfied.

  Jericho had already been in business fifteen centuries when Joshua pulled up out front with his Jewish army. This was during the reign of a pharaoh by the name of Airerbotep the Third. (Great name.) The Book of Joshua, which I had to wait until I was in the Facility to read because all they give you in hotels is the New Testament, tells you all about the Canaanites living the Life in their city when the Israelites came on a search-and-destroy. Joshua picked Jericho because he thought he could pick it off. Sure it had walls. It had wall after wall, like the mountains between here and the Coast, always another range just when you think you’re over the last one in the chain. Some of them were built ove
rtop of the rubble of even more walls (lots of earthquakes). So maybe it didn’t always look like much. Joshua skipped Jerusalem because it looked too tough. Right nearby there was Ur (Abraham was born there, they say) that was surrounded by a wall seventy-five feet thick at the base and had over a hundred towers. Jericho had only one tower, because it was a loose place, you see, it was a wide-open town, it made its living off the plankton that floated past: other people’s Citizens, the suckers, the rubes, the farmers. It was, you might say, open for business. Like the sign on the greasy spoon says: ALL DAY BREAKFAST. This made it an easy hit. Especially on account of a woman called Rahab. (When I first read that, I thought she was called Rehab which was funny cause that’s where I was at the time.) Rahab sold out the town, leaving the doors unlocked you might say, in exchange for immunity from prosecution. The yarn about the trumpets making the walls collapse? Sure, why not, that’s what I say. Trumpets and earthquakes and treachery bringing the joint down only a week after Joshua turns up at the gate, threatening folks. He wrecked the place and it never grew back. As I picture it, though, it died slow, so that some people spent their whole sad lives living with moral decay, feeling the oxygen seep out through a tiny hole in the balloon. One day you’d wake up and the all-night diner wasn’t open at all. The next time you looked a tae kwon do school had taken over the space upstairs. Finally the hotel got turned into a group home for homeless individuals, with a retraining centre in the lobby where the Posh Room used to be—the place where all those band singers got famous on the radio broadcasts. You can look all this stuff up. Run a search on my memory. Read about all this the next time you find yourself in a Facility. That’s one way of telling it. What I’m giving you here is the Book of Joshua according to the Bishop New Unauthorized Version.

  Object truly is the most ignorant character I have ever encountered in any capacity that I recall. The book of Diagnostic Criteria describes him to a T in the section on schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders. Section two-ninety-something point something else (note to self: look this up) is clear about the symptoms of a Brief Psychotic Disorder, of which there are four. To be classified, a patient needs to exhibit only one or more symptoms for more than a day and less than a month. The Object displays several at the times of my observing and probably has revealed these his whole life. In the name of clinical accuracy, I must state that I haven’t known him for one full month as yet and hope I will not, but I can extrapolate from what I have seen thus far. A) Delusions. Well Jesus Mary and Joseph he has deluded himself into believing that he is intelligent and that this pathetic collection of rotting shacks is a city rising up from the savage wilderness. At the very least, my mother would have diagnosed him as having the Error of False Pride. In any case, he has issues with reality. I could go on. B) Disorganized speech. He has no other type. Thoughts skip but words continue emitting. C) Disorganized behaviour. He virtually does not show familiarity with any other type. Item: the way he raged at me with reference to the credit card incident. Item: his erratic path to this desolated place. Item: the way he oscillates back and fro. Etc. D) Hallucinations. I thought he was hallucinatory when we came out of the woods and he pointed to the tumulus or whatever it is and said “Behold Jericho!” But perhaps that was more delusional and disorganized speech. Object is rich study who I find often fits more than one category. I am certain that he is ingesting controlled substances, tho’ until now have not observed such practices directly. Could I be mistaken, could symptoms devolve from direct physiological effects of such substances or possibly Schizoaffective Disorder? No. I am an independent social therapist. If anything I am too lenient in my diagnosis. Look at this place and tell me he is not meeting criteria related to psychotic and delusional themes. Look at this mess and tell me I am not correct.