Jericho

by George Fetherling

  The three of us kept moving to the right as the fire jumped the street and one place after another, on both sides, got destroyed. Finally the flames forced us to put our stuff in our laps and slide on our bums down the steep bank on the east side. Only about two hours after it all started, Jericho was a bunch of charred bits of lumber sticking up at funny angles. It was enough to break your heart. Once the fire was done destroying the place, the wind died down and then there was nothing left to ruin. Everything was quiet. Clarence asked if we wanted to go home with him. But we said no, and he left. Later we made a little camp for ourselves maybe fifty metres away, out by the track we’d come in on. The next day is when the police came.

  I should make this long story short, partly for your sakes but for mine too. It’s very painful for me to talk about, the scariest and most humiliating time of my life. A pair of RCMP officers, both male, came up the clearing from the canyon. The tower of smoke made us easy to find. They started to ask us a lot of stuff about Bishop and our relationship to him. At least I’m supposing that they asked Theresa the same things they did me, since they made sure we couldn’t talk together or overhear one another. I told them the truth, but about halfway through decided not to give them anything they didn’t ask for. They knew about the truck, of course—they could see it sitting out there in the grass, this big dead green thing waiting for the rust to start. I told them I didn’t have anything to do with it except for being a passenger. They knew about the video store too but I told them, honestly I think, that I didn’t know what I was doing, that I just stood there like I was told and read the movie names to myself. Then the officer who was talking to Theresa came over and had a private conversation with my guy. Then my guy started to ask me about the convenience store. I replied to all his questions but that’s when I decided not to say any more than I had to. They looked through our stuff or what we’d been able to save, and they seemed to pay a lot of attention to Theresa’s diary, though she yelled her head off. They said we were in custody, and they marched us to the police car, holding our right arms just above the elbow, and put us in the back, and drove us all the way to Williams Lake. It was sure a lot faster going down than it was coming up, but of course we stayed on the main highway and these guys knew the way. When we got to Williams Lake, I was looking out the window at the rail line and the Stampede grounds and the rest of it, and I felt freedom disappearing.

  At the detachment a woman officer searched us, first me and then Theresa but not together. I never felt more worthless before or since, even though this was only the first of many times I’d have to submit to this. Almost more than I can count, even though I remember every one. I’ve never been more naked in my life, with absolutely no control whatever over what was happening to me. She wasn’t like the ones you read about or see in movies; she didn’t seem to be enjoying herself especially; she acted kind of bored to tell you the truth, but this made it even more degrading. I don’t know how Theresa felt. We never spoke after that, never even exchanged a single word—our lawyers, once we had them, did that for us. But if she felt like me she was sad that women could treat other women like this. If she was like me, she never quite got over it. I don’t want to say any more about it. All I’ll say is that it was a relief that first time when they ordered me to take a shower because I was certainly dirty on the outside but now I felt dirty on the inside too—this even though I wasn’t crazy about having people with all their clothes on watching me shower, but that was the least of my problems.

  Eventually they charged me with “breaking-entering and theft” (I thought those were two different things and the first of them even Bishop didn’t do; he walked right in, like he was a customer). They also charged me with “theft over one thousand dollars” because of the truck, though I kept telling them that Bishop was alone when that happened and I was as surprised as anybody when he turned up with it. In the end, Theresa and Bishop, once they captured him, got the same treatment, and all three of us were also charged with “conspiracy to commit theft.” I thought of what my mother and sister would say if they saw me having my police picture taken. Or being sent to Vancouver in handcuffs and anklecuffs, which I found out to my horror they did see on television. I slowly realized that this whole—what would you call it? joyride? camping trip?—with Bishop was a big deal in the media. Before they finally caught him, people had been making up stories about him being a genius criminal who lived off the land out in the woods, robbing people, outsmarting the policemen. They were stories about how he’d been living a life of crime with his two—I want to use the right word here … lovers, mistresses, prostitutes, “female companions,” something like that.

  After eleven horrible days in that place they put me in, the lawyer got me out on bail. When she did, she told me about what people thought and even showed me some of the things the newspapers had already printed. I was just amazed. First I was angry and later I was frightened all over again, but all through it I stayed amazed. Among the amazing things was the fact, if you believed the media, that Bishop was almost fifty. He sure didn’t look that old. For one thing, people fifty usually take better care of themselves. But it did explain a lot when you figure that he was growing up in the sixties.

  Then the funniest thing I could ever imagine happened. All the time I was in jail I couldn’t dream. In fact, I’m not even sure that I slept long enough at one stretch to have a dream if I could have done. When I was back in my own clothes and in my own place, though, I seemed to start right away. They were long colourful dreams.

  In one of them, I was walking down Main in Vancouver. It was exactly the way it was the first time I saw it, when I was emotionally just a kid, a girl just out of Alberta. People keep calling it a slum, you know, and it is, but it was people’s home, too, at least in those days. There were all different sorts of people, some of them whose lives were getting better, not just ones whose lives were worse. I’d say the music you heard was ska as well as punk. You know, it was diverse.

  Anyway, I’m going along and either people keep stopping me to talk or else I’m seeing what I don’t really want to see and I go by fast. I’m headed towards Hastings but it takes an awful long time, especially with all these interruptions. Now it’s true that Main is pretty long all right, but Hastings never seems to get any closer. You know how things can be in dreams. I remember that somebody, a woman, came up to me and started talking about where she could get “cheap” cigarettes. She kept saying the word over and over. Later, when I was awake and my brain was turned on, I figured out that she meant ones that had been stolen. I guess she thought a thief like me would know.

  The longer I walk, the worse the street gets. It starts out with little shops run by families, but it turns into a place with second-hand junk stores and a Money Mart. For two whole blocks every building is all boarded up. The pavement out front is still alive, with groups of young guys standing around looking like they’re waiting for trouble, but the buildings they’re leaning in front of are dead. The boards they’re shut up with aren’t new ones, either. They’re old and rotten and brown like the lumber at Jericho.

  It starts to get creepy, like the dream is turning into a nightmare. All of a sudden there are maybe a hundred people around me. They’re like the characters in that movie Night of the Living Dead that I saw on video once except that they’re very active. They’re the most destroyed people I’ve ever seen. I end up screaming at them, “No, I don’t have any money. No, I don’t have anything for you. If I had money I’d be taking the bus home but I don’t, so I have to walk.” Then it hits me: why don’t I take the bus? There’s a bus stop right in front of me. One comes along. When I see it coming, I say to myself: “I don’t care which one it is. I’d get on even if the sign on the front says BETHANY,” which as you know is my full name but it’s also a place in the Bible. I looked it up later in some religious books we have at work and found out it’s where Lazarus was from, him and his two sisters. When the bus gets close, I see what it actually say
s is ALMA. Now there are buses that say that—it’s a street way over in Kits—but that also happens to be Mother’s name. Weird, huh? I ride along a few blocks and get off at the Steenrod Funeral Home. I go down into the prep room and who should be there waiting to see me but Bishop. He’s wearing a suit that doesn’t fit him very well and he’s nervous, pacing back and forth. He says he’s going to court and he needs my help: he doesn’t know how to do up the necktie. I tell him I’ve never tied one for anybody who was alive. So he stretches out on the table and I do the knot for him.

  When I woke up, I said to myself: “What does this dream mean?” Then it hit me. It means he’s going to prison. Of course.

  They forced me to become a victim of celebrityism. However, I refused to be dictated to by their behavioural imperatives. It was a difficult time for me on multiple levels.

  I don’t know where my two co-defendants got their lawyers. I thought Bishop’s must have been assigned to him by the court, but later I wasn’t so sure. He looked pretty expensive. I asked my lawyer about it but he only gave me an odd look. He was hired by my family. This is what I mean by problems.

  Father and my brother visited me in jail. My brother was scared but pretended to be supplying support for Father—who looked old and sad with his fat bald head and sounded that way also. He told me that he had canvassed lawyer acquaintances on the Island, men he knew from church and the K of C and groups of Dutch people, and they suggested various other ones over here, and that the best one of them would be in communication with me soon. (He came the next morning and I was out on bail the day after that.) I asked how Mother was coping. I thought that is what they would expect me to ask, the sort of data I should be soliciting from them. Father seemed relieved that I mentioned it. That’s when he told me she was ill. I could see in his eyes that he wasn’t telling me everything. Later he said that she was very ill. For a few seconds I wondered whether he was breaking the news of her death to me a little at a time, which is a standard technique known to every person in my discipline. But he stopped there.

  “She’s sorry she can’t come to see you,” he said, “but it’s better this way.”

  I thought what he meant was: this place is awful-looking and loud and dirty and depressing at the same time and this poor devout woman who always sees the best in people would be so shocked that she might not experience any recovery. Later, as I have rewound the conversation in my mind and then replayed it over and over again, I think he must have been telling me that Mother would have been ashamed of me, which I have difficulty believing to be true. Long have I been embarrassed by this because they have no right to be ashamed of me. At other times, though, it did to me seem obvious that what he was saying was literally true and no more than that—that she was just too sick to get on the ferry. I sometimes make the mistake—I admit it openly—of not recollecting how uncomplicated and simple of speech my parents and their friends are. But at the time I was also upset because my idiot brother was staring at me with actual pity, which made me furious with him.

  The bail hearing was a blur, over before I knew I was really awake. The outcome was the one of which I had been assured. I was told I was free to go home, and as soon as I could I went over to the Island. Mother was sitting up in bed. She kept coughing—a dry cough—and putting the fingers and palm of her right hand flat above her breastbone like she was going to say “Mercy!” or gently tap out the illness inside her, like Father emptying the ash from the bowl of his pipe. I thought: This is not just healing by the laying on of hands (very Protestant) but the laying on of her own hands on herself. Aunt Jo was there for a while, in and out of the room. She looked much the same as when I had seen her the last time. Too, there were neighbours and church people I was supposed to remember but really didn’t. I wondered if the priest had come for a visit but I didn’t want to ask and I caught myself in time. I got there in late morning and stayed all afternoon until the patient got tired. We had the longest talk we had ever had. One of us would remember something about the past and then it would be the other one’s turn. Her thoughts weren’t always connected in ways obvious to me but I guess they had their own logic system inside her mind. I was expecting the worst when she started talking about the Church, but it wasn’t too bad.

  “The worst part was the way Marian devotion changed,” she said. “But me, I never changed in my heart. Mary was the part of the Church that a woman like me found a home in.”

  I suppose she was trying to tell me something she considered important. I guess she was trying to reach out across the sexuality gap. If so, it didn’t work. She just seemed sad to me. That pretty much summed her up, I guess.

  I spent the night in my old bed in my former bedroom. My brother, who had come down from Nanaimo, had his famous summer porch back (where I think he used to jack himself off a lot; maybe he did again, for old times’ sake). It was freaky living in the past, for the experience is contrary to nature.

  The lawyer and I didn’t seem to like one another all that much but I think he was good at what he did. At first I had to keep telling him to explain to me what he was doing. It took a while but finally he started behaving. He didn’t like doing it but he did it all right. I found the process quite interesting. Partly this is because the law turned out to have much in common with my own profession. I mean helping others even when they didn’t deserve it.

  He went to the scumbag’s bail hearing and told me what happened. Bishop’s lawyer, the mysterious one, made a case for letting him out of jail, pointing out he didn’t have a criminal record and had a co-operative attitude and that no weapons were used in the “pan-province crime spree,” which is what the Vancouver tabloid kept calling it.

  “The Crown’s argument,” the lawyer told me, “is that Mr. Bishop had no known job or profession and that he had been in a rehabilitation program. There was apparently no suitable reply to the first point. The second one, counsel said, simply showed his client’s ability to be reformed, because the treatment was obviously successful, as he has had no further problems with drugs, alcohol or other substances. The judge wasn’t convinced. Often the judge’s mood is a determining factor.”

  So they kept Bishop locked up.

  Over time the lawyer let me in on our strategy. “It’s tricky,” he said, “because Ms. Hubbard’s intentions aren’t known to us.”

  I asked him what exactly he was referencing by this remark. His tone altered. He switched over to the language of the poor, because I suppose he figured that, as we both had to deal with those people in our careers, this was a tongue we had in common, a kind of secular Latin.

  “The Crown looks good if they get him to plead guilty. They look better if they convict all of you. Maybe a plea bargain can be worked out. His counsel might be working on a deal to have his client cop to the truck theft in return for the other charges being dropped.”

  I asked him where that would leave me exactly.

  “Hard to say. Probably the Crown would do a deal like that if the defendant agreed to implicate you and Ms. Hubbard.”

  I must have had horror written all over my expression, as he then tried to be reassuring. “And of course it could work the other way round as well. You and Ms. Hubbard could give testimony against him. Obviously they don’t have a case against you in the vehicle matter. As for the conspiracy charge, that’s only there to frighten you. My own feeling is that the rest is pretty shaky too. We might be able to make everything disappear if you agree to testify. Of course we’d have to get Ms. Hubbard to testify as well. From the point of view of the Crown’s case, it has to be both of you or neither one, so that your testimony doesn’t cancel out hers and vice versa. I’ll start talking to her counsel. Then, if it looks like it could happen, I’ll approach the prosecution.”

  That made me feel better, but I either didn’t trust him or I didn’t hold confidence in him, I don’t know which. Maybe first one and later the other. Whichever way I looked at it, it meant that I still found a methodology of working with
him. He probably felt identically to me. What matters is that agreement was constructed, although it took a while.

  For once I was not bashful about giving expression to my opinion. It didn’t seem fair to me that the bastard Bishop should have a say in any of this, even indirectly, but he did. You always hear television police complaining that they take the evil villains off the streets but the system puts them right back again. I have come around to this viewpoint too after realizing the similarities between that profession and my own. (You work your brains out helping the disadvantaged and then they just go out and get wretched all over again.)

  It seemed to me that, despite my own lawyer’s work, the whole thing depended on what Bishop and his person wanted to do. As I understood the situation, he could choose to plead guilty or go to trial. He picked the second one. That pissed me off because anybody who knew anything knew he was guilty. He was guilty of stuff that’s not even against the law yet. Yet he wasted everybody’s time and other resources by letting other people decide. I thought this was typical of how he rejected the taking of responsibility. Exactly the sort of low-life morality-abandonment you’d expect of a known thief/kidnapper/pervert/drug dealer. My lawyer and I got into an argument about this. He said it was “a fundamental right” of the accused to elect to be tried and to put up the best defence he could. In this case, he said, it was only a question, if he went that way, of whether he’d ask for a trial by the judge-and-jury or a superior court judge (Smithe Street right downtown) or by the Provincial Court (Main and Cordova, a locality with which I was more familiar than anyone should have to be—but that was my job, correct?). If he picked the higher court he’d even get a preliminary hearing in the other one first. Liberal bullshit, of course. Being a creep himself, Bishop took the creepy old building at Main and Cordova. Probably it reminded him of home. Right in the middle of everything, my mother died. But they didn’t have to stop the trial like I thought they would. The trial just carried on without me for a while. Being a trusting individual I didn’t find anything suspicious in this action.