Fall from Grace

by Wayne Arthurson

  It was a decent neighborhood, full of old houses, three- and four-story walk-ups, and mom-and-pop restaurants and stores. Newer developments such as the college, condos, and a plethora of franchises were starting to gentrify the place, but that pace was still slow north of the old railway line. Despite these changes and the emergence of a vibrant African spirit to Kush with restaurants and stores offering food and goods from East Africa, it was still considered a rough part of town with johns trolling for streetwalkers along 107th Avenue, homeless folks pushing shopping carts filled with empties, and the odd gang-related shooting.

  For someone like me, it was perfect: close enough to walk downtown and to other amenities, but still dangerous enough to keep the rents low. Unfortunately, there was one area of my walk home that always gave me pause. On the corner of 101st Street and 104th Avenue, just at the edge of downtown, there was a casino, an industrial warehouse of a building dressed up with neon and three-tone paint to give it a garish look.

  Casinos were nothing new for Edmonton. Outside of Nevada, this city had more gambling space per capita than any other city in North America, a fact that some people in the chamber of commerce liked to celebrate, while others didn’t. The proliferation of casinos and video lottery terminals, those electronic gambling machines throughout the province, was another legacy of the Klein era, those fourteen years when a beer-drinking, cigarette-smoking, gambling politician ran the province. It was nice getting private liquor stores but having more casinos than anyone else and VLTs in almost every single bar in the province made things a little difficult for someone like me.

  The proceeds of gambling were a cash cow, bringing over a billion dollars into the province’s coffers and also helping many charities. Albertans assuaged their guilt over using gambling to raise government money by allowing nonprofit groups to “volunteer” to work at casinos for a few days every two years. In return they would get a portion of the proceeds of the take during those days.

  It was hard for any group to say no to an average of fifty thousand to eighty thousand dollars every two years in return for a few hours of volunteer work. Still, with Klein and his cronies gone, things were changing. Many school boards, churches, and other nonprofits had passed directives disallowing their members or any group connected with them to accept any money from gambling sources.

  Of course, I could have taken a different route home to bypass the casino. There was no need for me to tempt myself every day after work. But the selection of my route home was a test. I was like the alcoholic who pours himself a drink he hopes he won’t drink or the sex addict who flips through the escort ads on the back pages of one of the alternative weeklies. There was that thrill of temptation, the imagining of what we could be doing, of returning to the comfort of our addiction. It is a comfortable place to be, in our addiction, because we know exactly how we’re supposed to act, what we’re supposed to do, and how we’re supposed to feel. And even though we may be destroying ourselves, it’s at least someplace where life is easier. Living in the real world, with real people, is much harder. So much harder.

  Because of the image of the dead body in the field, today was a more difficult day than normal, a day I knew I could easily say “fuck it” to it all and step through those doors into the beautiful oxygenated air. But today was also a day of honest victory, where the simple act of arriving at a place before anyone else brought a type of success I hadn’t experienced in a long time. When one lives in and for a casino and gambling, luck is a major force in your life and this time luck was not in the cards or the numbers or the order of finish of a horse; it was in the real world. And in that, I took strength and walked past the casino toward my home.

  I followed the path I had taken for these past months in the real world and arrived at my place, my little suite in the basement of a dilapidated house in the Kush. My room was in a postwar bungalow sitting in a nicely sized corner lot, the siding bleached pale, with flakes of paint hanging off the window frames. Twenty or thirty years ago, when some family lived and grew in the house, it might have been one of the nicer houses on the street, but now it stood as one of the few houses left. Three- and four-story walk-ups surrounded it, and directly across the street was an industrial park that had also seen better days. There was a small, unattached garage in the backyard but it leaned to the north like a slouching teenager.

  The back door gave direct access to the basement without having to enter the main floor. The original owners of the house were long gone; the upstairs residents were now a bunch of students attending the nearby Grant MacEwan College. I climbed down the stairs, an invisible presence to the preoccupied upstairs residents.

  The basement was a dark, damp place, the concrete walls of the foundation crumbling and dripping with condensation. Cardboard boxes of various sizes were stacked throughout the basement along with old toys, bikes, and the other refuse created by an annual revolving door of students. There was an old gas furnace pumping away somewhere behind all the boxes, a washer and dryer set from the sixties, and a single shower stall next to the washer and dryer.

  My room was a small rectangle, slightly larger than my bank-machine bedroom from the previous night. Outside light streamed in from a tiny window near the ceiling. The room was neat and clean, the air smelling slightly of humidity mixed with a lingering scent of pine cleaner. A twin mattress and box spring were pressed into the corner of the two inside walls, away from the cold, wet concrete. My bed had comforter and sheets tucked in between the mattress and box spring, and a thin crease between the pillow and the comforter.

  A frayed carpet spread out from underneath the bed, covering most of the floor. There was a small end table with a shadeless lamp directly beside the bed. A matching wardrobe/dresser set were shoved together against the outside wall with an eight-inch-screen TV on top of the dresser.

  Right next to the dresser and filling up the rest of the wall was a Formica-top kitchen table with a matching chair. A single-burner hot plate and small microwave sat at the back of the table against the wall, a jar of change on top of the microware. The microwave was also doing double duty as a bookend for a line of about twenty books.

  As I lay on my bed, my only piece of furniture that could be sat or lain upon, I decompressed, congratulating myself for my day and my victories. But when I pulled the wad of bills out of my pocket, I remembered the bank and fell back onto my bed, shivering. I lay there forever, waiting for the heavy footsteps of police-issue boots as they came down the stairs to take me in for bank robbery.

  Two steps forward, and two steps back. It was always that way.

  7

  I robbed my first bank by mistake. It was two weeks after getting a job at a new paper, some months after living NFA (no fixed address). Despite my disheveled appearance, the managing editor and I had worked together at another paper and he was desperate for a night copy editor, another pig on the rim. It was a dull and sometimes depressing job, so to have someone also desperate for work made me the perfect choice.

  After two weeks editing night copy, I was presented with my first real paycheck in a long time. The ME gave me that first check himself, coming out of his office and handing me the white envelope, surprising the hell out of the other pigs on the editing rim. “Considering your circumstances, I’m bringing your check to you,” he said, trying to punch some authority into his voice. He may have scared the others on the rim, but I had seen him as a small-town reporter fresh out of journalism school so I wasn’t impressed by his appearance. “But this is the only time, Leo, because once you take it in your hands, I’m ordering you to head to the closest bank right now and open yourself an account so we can do a direct deposit. Do I make myself clear?”

  I almost smiled at his order, but I knew it would unwise to undermine his authority. Despite our past relationship, a managing editor has got to look like he’s in power. So I just grabbed the envelope. “Yes, boss,” I said, tempted to flash him a salute but knowing that that would have also undermined his
authority.

  Then I headed out of the building, looking for the nearest bank. It was cold so I had my gloves on and my hood pulled over my toque to cut down on the biting wind. Unfortunately, the nearest bank was the same location where I had ended up sleeping in the ATM foyer during a cold snap several months ago, so I went on by. I was trying to put that past behind me, to forget my lost years, and coming to that bank over and over again, as I rebuilt my life, wouldn’t do.

  Instead, I walked a few blocks to the north, where there were plenty of banking options. I chose one named after an eastern Canadian city and stepped in. The shock of the lights confused me for a second. It was like stepping into a casino, but instead of putting money in it to lose, I was putting money in it to save.

  For a few seconds, I had no idea what to do; I had no recollection of how to fill out a deposit form or to open a bank account. I was like a prisoner being left on his own, to make his own decisions after years of being locked up. Instead of filling in the required boxes on the form, I flipped it over and wrote: “Please give me all your money.” The stupidity of the words made me chuckle, and allowed me to get back into myself. For another laugh I wrote “Thank you” and then flipped the form over and filled in the spots, save for my name and account because that would come later when I opened the account. And with my first paycheck in years and the hope for a new life, I stepped up to the next open teller.

  “May I help you?” she asked. I handed over the slip. A second later, her eyes widened with a look of total fear, her expression reminding me of those times when I would walk up to strangers, begging them for spare change. But this time, it was confusing because I was a citizen with a real job and real money. All I needed was a real bank account and I’d be set.

  “Is there a problem?” I said in a soothing voice, but it only exacerbated the situation.

  Her face had turned white and her breath was caught in her throat. “P-p-please don’t hurt me,” she whispered.

  “Why would I do…” I started to say, but stopped when I looked down and saw that I had handed her the deposit slip the wrong way. My joke was facing up and was no longer funny. I tried to explain the situation but she was no longer listening to me. She had opened her cash drawer and, with shaking hands, started to stack bills on the counter in order of denomination, the blue fives, the purple tens, the green twenties—probably the biggest stack of them all—a bunch of red fifties and about four or five of the brown hundreds. When she finished she backed a step away, her eyes filled with terror.

  I looked about but everyone else was busy with their own work. I looked back at the teller and she had started to shake, her gaze moving back and forth from the stack of bills to me.

  She was deathly quiet but her expression screamed, Take it! Take the money! Take the money and go! There was nothing I could do. I had robbed a bank, and considering my history, no amount of explanation or pleading would help me. A tear started to run down one side of the teller’s face and I knew that any second she would fall apart and my life, the one that I had worked so hard to get back together, would follow along with her.

  I swept my hand across the counter, grabbed all the money and my note, and shoved them into my pocket. I turned and quickly walked out of the bank, jaywalked across the street, and pushed through the revolving doors of a downtown shopping center.

  I walked in and out of shops, doing my best to look like an average shopper but I had no idea what the hell I looked like. When a clerk approached me to see if I needed help, I stammered, “I’m looking for a gift for my wife.” That statement made my shaken appearance okay; I was only a harried husband trying at the last minute to find a gift for his long-suffering wife.

  I went through this charade a number of times, using some of the bills from the bank to pay for these goods. I was in the world but away from it, in that time of emptiness that I always fell into when I gambled, that time that has no meaning, no sense, just a debasing comfort that all addicts dream to return to, so they don’t have to face the harshness of their terrible reality.

  Until that time, I had had no idea that another such place existed outside of gambling, and in a strange sort of way, it brought me a piece of freedom. From then on, when the pressure to gamble became too much for me to bear, I would visit a bank.

  8

  There was nothing new in the story the next day. It didn’t normally take too long for police to identify a dead body. Most people, even street people, prostitutes, drug dealers, and formerly homeless journalists, usually carried some type of ID, even if it was a driver’s license that was long since expired. What took time was finding a next of kin, a distant relative or close friend to confirm the identity of the deceased.

  And Canadian law also stipulated that police could not release the identity of a person killed as a result of criminal activity or a car accident or any similar event to the media until the family (or some family surrogate such as a guardian and so forth) was officially told of the death. That was to prevent somebody from reading in the paper that one of their immediate family members was dead. And even if a media outlet discovered or knew the name of the victim, it was also unethical and illegal for them to print or mention the name until they got official ID confirmation from the police.

  So, based on the location of the victim’s body, her race, and the way she was dressed, I assumed that she was a street prostitute and it would take at least a couple of days until I received any ID information so that I could investigate her life. The question was then what to do with my time until such information was made public.

  I could have sat back and taken it easy for a day or so, but there was something about a busy newsroom that discouraged this kind of behavior. I could have asked for another assignment, a one-off quickie for the next issue, and I would have received one. But if the identity of the girl in the field came through much sooner than expected, I would have to drop that story into the hands of another busy reporter to focus on my more important assignment.

  I decided to forgo another assignment, but in order to keep myself somewhat busy I ran a morgue check using the paper’s Infomart archive system. Infomart allowed any reporter to read any story in the paper’s morgue, the archive of past issues. It worked like any search engine. All you had to do was type a name, a phrase, whatever, and it would give you a listing.

  Like with most search engines, you could get a lot of irrelevant responses if you weren’t specific enough or if you typed in a popular name, like Wayne Gretzky. It also went back only as far as 1985, but it was way better than searching through back issues yourself, or asking some overworked and overprotective librarian to do the search for you.

  Of course, most of the librarians had been laid off in a cost-cutting measure a couple of years ago, and though one of the “concessions” the paper made in order to end the strike was to look into the possibility of hiring back a librarian or two, no move had been made in that direction. And probably never would.

  I typed in “dead body in field,” making sure to use the quotation marks because I didn’t want to include all stories with the words dead, body, and field. Enough people had died in this city over the past twenty years, and since two of the major economic engines in and around Edmonton were agriculture and petroleum products, I shuddered to think how many times the word field was used, not just in a single issue, but in the past couple of decades.

  Even so, I got a large number of hits, sixty-seven of them, to be exact. Apparently there were a lot of dead bodies found in the fields around the city in the past. But in reality most of them weren’t as serious as expected. The biggest listing had nothing to do with dead bodies but with a local play from a decade ago called Over My Dead Body produced by a group called Out of Left Field Players.

  The rest were all true dead bodies although most turned out to be suicides—nowadays most newspapers don’t run stories on suicides unless it was someone famous or an extremely public suicide—or stories about farmers or oilfield workers bei
ng killed in industrial accidents.

  In fact, there were only six stories about female bodies being found in a field, and when I delved deeper into them, looking for follow-up articles relating the identity of the person or the circumstances of the death, only three were similar to the story I was working on. So only four such deaths in Edmonton for the past twenty years wasn’t that big a deal. If you looked at any other Canadian city, you’d probably find the same number.

  I was about to get the system to print all the articles relating to these three when Larry came by my desk.

  “Can I talk to you for a sec, Leo?”

  I set aside my work and turned to face him. “Sure, Larry. What’s up?”

  “How’s the story going?”

  I shrugged. “Not much happening. Police haven’t released the ID yet so there’s really nothing to be done. So in the meantime, I decided to check the morgue for any similar stories from the past. Don’t want to repeat ourselves too much.”

  “You did?” he asked, his eyebrows rising in surprise. “That’s some good reporting. Find anything?”

  “Only a few articles on similar deaths. Nothing like the type of story you’re looking for.” I wasn’t sure if I should be insulted by his reaction, because it could have meant he didn’t think much of my work ethic. I decided to let it go because the other day he did stand up for me and gave me a chance when he didn’t have to. He was also the only one at the paper who knew about my background so maybe he was justified in his reaction.