Jericho

by George Fetherling

  When the three of us finally got to where we were going I started to feel much kinder towards Bishop and his plans and all the work that he’d done. For one thing, he didn’t seem as tense. He seemed smarter, too. He really did know a lot of stuff. It wasn’t just the stuff he needed to live in Vancouver or make the trip all the way up to his beloved Jericho—which, I have to say, was at first glance not much to look at. A surprise for sure, maybe even amazing in a way, but not much to look at, though pretty soon it started to grow on me—a little.

  It was a weird place. You hiked for a while from where the trail or track ended by the rock. Suddenly on your left was this narrow slit in the earth, a canyon I’d guess you’d have to call it, like the ground had been unzippered. Maybe an earthquake hundreds of years ago. Could be. I don’t know. It startled me because I wasn’t expecting it, nobody would have. It was completely out of character with the country up there, except maybe in the sense that it was a surprise. The gap was too wide to jump across but not wide enough so that you’d notice it if you weren’t paying attention. A person could easily fall over the edge.

  Bishop was ahead of me with a load of stuff. T was lagging a good ways back with a small bunch, talking to herself, I thought (I’m pretty sure she wasn’t humming).

  “Come over and take a look,” Bishop said. He was standing right on the lip, with his heels on solid ground but his toes in outer space.

  I said I was afraid of heights, which I am. Then he did a sweet thing. He took my bags and stuff and put them down, then took my left hand and helped me onto my knees first and then on my stomach in the weeds as he did the same thing, so that the two of us were lying on our bellies peering over the side. He made me feel safe. I don’t know how far down it was. I’m not good at judging heights like that, but gee, it must have been fifty metres, I’m not really sure. I just naturally thought there was going to be a river or stream at the bottom but there wasn’t. It was dry and overgrown. Wild-looking.

  “That’s something, isn’t it? A shame it doesn’t run east-west or I could build part of the defences round it.” I didn’t yet have a clue what he was talking about. “Come on,” he said, “you’ve gotta see this. You won’t believe it. Just leave the stuff here.” Theresa had caught up with us now, but he didn’t ask her to come along. I could almost feel the heat of her disapproval on my back as Bishop and I crossed the field or clearing or whatever it was. On the other side was this huge pile of gravel, flat on top, with some old wooden buildings on it. He was excited to be there again, and as we got closer I saw what he meant. The hill was an oval-shaped gravel deposit, maybe forty metres long and fifteen or so from front to back. The top was perfectly level, so it looked like a giant ironing board or something. The sides were steep slopes but not steep enough that I couldn’t climb up. Under the vegetation, the soil all around this gravel place was very sandy. Later I saw there were long stretches of nothing but sand running through it, twisty-fashion, like the marbling in a marble cake.

  I didn’t know what to make of the dilapidated buildings. There was one place, near one of the rounded edges, where the gravel had given way in a kind of miniature rock slide, making a sort of driveway that let you get up to the top without huffing and puffing. I was surprised how much you could see from up there. Trees hid most of the view at the back of the property, farthest from the way we came in, but the tops of the mountains way off filled up the sky. Not a cloud in sight. On that side, where the trees were, where the slide had happened, a tiny stream ran past, just a trickle really.

  Out the other way, the way we came, Theresa was coming towards us. Her load was a lot lighter than ours, but then of course she was pretty tiny. Anyway she’d put it down in the bush about halfway to the hill of gravel and was hollering something. I could make out her saying, “If you two aren’t going to carry your share, I’m not either.” I was surprised she said “you two” that way. Bishop yelled back down to her to tell her where the entrance was. She went around and trudged up, and Bishop gave us both the tour.

  My heart let out a gasp when I saw the building down at the end of the row. It was a tiny version of the place I grew up in, a little runt of a construction-site shed, not more than four metres long, with three plastic milk crates for steps and the wooden runners underneath all rotten. In fact the whole thing was rotting away.

  He took us inside and showed us all the stuff everywhere. It was really quite amazing what he’d been able to store at a place this remote. Old wooden crates were nailed to the walls. He took the lid off one and showed us hundreds and hundreds of fried-noodle packages and lots of rice and flour and powdered milk—staples like that—laid up in containers with tight tops.

  “If you pack it right, it’ll last forever,” he said. I guess he was right. On the wall at the far end he’d put up an old bathroom medicine cabinet he’d found somewhere. He opened it up to show us. This was his spice rack. It turned out all the buildings were full of stuff. Second-hand clothes—men’s, women’s, kids’, all sizes, every kind—in green garbage bags hanging from the ceiling in one of the places, which looked like a big lemonade stand but which he told me a friend of his named Clarence had “found in town” at a used car lot. It had a let-down front, like one of those old-fashioned hotel beds, I forget what they’re called.

  I can’t remember if there were eight buildings or nine. I keep recounting them in my head. I suppose it depends how you count the rusty old car turned upside down and half buried in the gravel. “This is where I lived when I first found this place,” Bishop said as he gave us the tour. His next words were: “I remember all this before the Europeans came. It was paradise.” Then he let out one of his squawky laughs. Anyway, there were two buildings made of logs. One was a perfectly decent little cabin (he called it the miner’s cabin) but the smallest I’d ever seen, just big enough to have two log bunk beds for kids or very short grown-ups with their knees bent. The other had some of its logs missing and sort of leaned back and to the right. “Like a lot of log buildings, this one has been used for chickens or some other kind of animal,” Bishop said. “It’s contaminated. You can’t stay in it or stuff’ll get in your lungs. I haven’t quite figured out how to fix it.”

  The others, including a partly converted woodshed, were made of old grey boards. They were set up as a sort of street—two sides facing each other, with a kind of alley crossing them in the middle, just wide enough for me to squeeze through.

  “How did you get them all here?” Theresa wanted to know. Maybe she felt she had to ask something. “Are you bringing them in with a helicopter?” I couldn’t quite judge her tone of voice as she had such a funny one to begin with.

  Bishop just laughed but not the ornery laugh he used to answer himself with. “Clarence is kind of an agent, my real estate scout. He keeps his eye open for abandoned buildings in the bush and in town.” I wanted to say: What town? But I knew that if you interrupted Bishop, especially with another question, especially when he was calmed down and talkative like this, you’d never get to the end. “Sounds incredible, but sometimes people just throw broken buildings out in the trash. Clarence takes em apart and hauls in the pieces and I put em back together. Sometimes he helps. With the hotel”—he cocked his head to point down the street to the place that reminded me of Mother’s—“it damn near took me most of a summer. That was after it laid there all spread out for a whole winter and spring. Clarence, he disassembled the frame and dragged it a bunch at a time by Ski-Doo. It looks pretty good considering, don’t you think?”

  He seemed surprised when I told him it reminded me of where I lived when I was a kid.

  Theresa called the place “hepatitis-specific” and said, “Why don’t you burn this slum and build a real home?”

  She didn’t understand, but that didn’t matter because he pretended he didn’t hear her and went shooting off on one of the fantasies he hoped would scare people he was afraid of.

  He nodded towards the portable toilet that he and this Clarence person
apparently stole from some building site or outdoor concert. He was using it for its original purpose but had made it into an outhouse, with a pit dug out of the gravel. Next to it was the place he meant, another tiny building, a log thing that looked like a dead dollhouse that some giant foot from the sky had stepped on and broken into splinters. “That,” he said, pointing, “will be the Interpretative Centre.” Theresa shot him one of her meanest looks like he was truly crazy. He paused and said, “Someday a city rises here in the bush.” He looked back at Theresa like he knew what she was thinking. He probably did, too.

  “You think this is nuts,” he said. “I can tell. But there are two ways cities begin, right? You’ve got ones that just spring up out of nothing, like during the gold rush, and you’ve got handmade ones, like over in England or in Europe. Why can’t you put together the best of both? Set an example? Plant the seed? Lay the foundation for the other guys to build on when the time’s right? That’s all I’m saying. In the meantime you raise your own garden and wait for events to happen.”

  Over the next few weeks whenever I asked Theresa where she was going or where she’d put something I was looking for, she’d say “The Interpretative Centre” and put on an expression just to make sure I got it. I got it.

  The downfalling rain is by me unexpected. I thought this locality was designated as dry: that’s what the Object assured us of. At least I can collect water for bathing, for the stream is deficient in depth for this purpose. Also very muddy and unclear anyway, full of bacteria I am certain. Maybe we can heat some rainwater. Object will likely protest the “waste” of fuelwood, such as he does the use of drinking water for washing, but if said water were used for consumption it would have to be boiled. I despise the black plastic container bag I bought in which the sun is supposed to heat water. It must be moved hourly as the sun goes across the sky. I find it too heavy when full and the water never hotter than luke temperature. Also, no privacy, which is lowly regarded in this place apparently. The other day I went for a walk in the sick forest around here looking for a place with hot sun and came to a clearing. Saw Object stringing keys on a long wire between trees and Beth, in the nude, hoeing his illegal plants. How do I feel? Silenced to think of them ecstacizing together. I have issues with it clearly. It never occurred to me to believe that she and I had a future tense together, but even so, it galls me that she is really such a donna after all! I am reminded of the broadness of her hips. Probably made for fecundness. I am put off further contemplation of this.

  The other day the crazy dyke was taking a shower when a hummingbird saw the red nozzle hanging on a hose from the end of the solar water bag and dove right at it. Thought it was a stamen. The funniest thing I ever saw. Sister Theresa kept swatting it away with one hand while hiding her nonexistent tits with the other one. But the bird kept nose diving at the thing and then hovering there just above her head. She tried to swat it again but missed and down came the clothesline and the old blanket she’d rigged up on a piece of cord between two trees. Her priceless privacy. She spied me and went running off screaming into the bush, her two ass cheeks the only part of her that’s not a straight line, including her personality.

  She has issues with this and issues with that. Well, she does have issues with the English fucken language. There’s probably nothing to be done about that. She’s not the type of person who could get into the simple language of Walt Whitman for instance. Me, I’ve been obsessed with Walt Whitman since I read him in the Facility. Maybe that’s from growing up right on the border or maybe it had something to do with Lonnie, though of course he’d never heard of Whitman or probably any other writer either (he never read anything except the Windsor Star and the Daily Racing Form, though he stayed very well informed). I’m haunted by old Walt because—why? Maybe because I am valuable in the same way cash is valuable because like cash I do not acknowledge my parents. Maybe because I’m studying to be a refugee! Because I remind me of a younger version of myself! Because I am a found-in in my own life! I take the end as my starting point! You see, I am the basic social unit! I am the building block of all living stuff! I am a harbinger! I have no parameters! Or perimeters! I am the leading edge and the bottom line! I am the resurrection and the Life! You’ll find no moss growing on me, boy! That’s for sure! I am Immortal America! I embarrass myself and vomit! You contradict me? Very well, I contradict you back! Don’t try to stop me! I am Self! I contain Multitudes! I am redundant! Ha!

  Bishop wanted to plant a garden even though we didn’t know how much longer we’d be staying and the ground was pretty worthless anyway (though fine for marijuana apparently). I don’t do drugs but pot probably does a lot more good than harm, so every day I’d go out to water and cultivate the little rows. I carried the water in a plastic bucket that had a hole in it but fortunately way up near the top. Bishop said one day it might be possible to dig a ditch that would carry the stream right into the clearing where both my future vegetable garden and his were. It was sort of downhill. “But first I’d want to loop it all the way round the townsite, and that’d take an awful lot of work to do by hand, an awful lot.”

  I didn’t know what he was getting at until he explained it to me.

  “You can’t plant a city without building defences,” he said. “All the great cities—Jerusalem, Deetroit, Tokyo—started as a set of high walls to keep invaders out till civilization took root and flowered. When the cities grew up higher than the top of the walls, the walls were torn down, then the city expanded out over where the lines had been. The part that was always kept empty so they’d have a clear line of fire at anybody who attacked—that became the suburbs.”

  All this was new to me, answers to questions that I’d never thought of, let alone asked anyone, but the more he talked about it the more sense it seemed to make. I can admit this now. When he wasn’t kidding around and being obnoxious, he was a good talker.

  And as he talked, he kept filling those post office bags with sand and lugging them straining, dragging them by their drawstring ropes, to make low walls joining the buildings together. I could help him drag the things once they were full (they were too heavy for Theresa, almost too heavy for Bishop and me). Mostly, though, I helped by holding their mouths open while he shovelled in the filling or whatever you call it. At least near the top of the hill there was a lot of sand mixed in with the gravel, which he first dumped onto a contraption he’d made out of half an old screen door. The holes in the mesh weren’t the right size, and anyway it kept getting tears in it because the gravel was so heavy. It wasn’t a very efficient system, we both knew that. I thought the job would never end. But I could see how much pleasure he got out of figuring a way to make do with what we had.

  “I keep expecting to find flints in here,” he said to me at one point after two or three days of shovel work and sifting and lugging the knotted sacks into place on what he called the palisades. “I don’t care what Clarence says, people were here before us. We’re building our city on top of somebody else’s. And who else could it be, right? His people were the only ones here.”

  Bishop had obviously taken a lot of trips or knew someone who did, because in with all the junk crammed into three or four of the buildings—and it was amazing all the stuff he’d managed to get into that God-forsaken place and also the care he’d obviously put into wrapping everything so well—I found dozens and dozens of teeny bottles of shampoo and shower caps and plastic combs and shoeshine cloths and sewing kits too and also those flimsy little sleeping masks from Air Canada.

  It looked like I needed all the sewing kits because, aside from an old tee or two, I couldn’t find any clothes that fit Theresa. She and I got the smallest one of everything and cut them down as best we could, with me doing the sewing because she didn’t know how (I guess her mother never taught her—I never asked). Remaking a pair of jeans was just too much work. I know because I broke several of the cheap needles trying. But we did a skirt that worked out pretty well and found some material (curtains at o
ne time, I think) that I made into a couple of others. This meant that T ended up always looking more formal than the rest of us. She complained that insects bit her bare legs, but Bishop had lots of repellent stocked away. Mosquito coils too, but she said she didn’t care for the way they smelled. I respect other people’s allergies.