My True and Complete Adventures as a Wannabe Voyageur

by Phyllis Rudin

  “So is that why you keep coming out here with me? Hoping it will happen again?”

  “Halfway, yes, although I don’t suppose you can force these things. It’s not like you can make an appointment. Probably if you miss your chance, poof, it’s gone forever.”

  If only there were mulligans in time travel, but Morrie was most likely right. No second tries. Shit! The day of that fateful outing, when I heard that canoe making straight for us, the beat of the rowers’ chorus pounding against my eardrums, I’d felt the buzz of an adoptee who’s about to meet his birth family for the first time. All would be revealed. So that’s where that nose came from. But now my lineage would forever remain a closed book.

  “Why do you think they picked us to reveal themselves to, you and me?” I asked him. I had my own theory as to why those jet-setting voyageurs had set their GPS to zone in on us and I wondered if Morrie’s jibed. In my mind it was because we were devotees pure laine. Zealots you might even say. Probably nowhere else on the face of the earth existed another pair of fur trade fanatics as extreme as we were and that’s what earned us our just reward. To me it was open and shut.

  Morrie wasn’t so puffed up. “What makes you think they were coming to see us? Maybe they were just plying their old routes and dropped in to check out the old neighbourhood. Or maybe they came down to do some fishing. Hook a nice fat walleye or perch for their supper. Grilled over an open fire, nothing can beat it.”

  “Why would they have to eat, if they’re, you know, otherworldly.” I was still looking for flaws to skewer my own argument.

  “Well if they’re otherworldly,” he said, “then by extension so are we. And we eat.” He had a point, but in this whole train of events logic had long ago escaped my grasp. We sat in our stilled kayaks, our ears cocked to what we hoped was the voyageur frequency.

  “Morrie.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Do you believe in the devil?”

  “I try not to think about it.”

  Avoidance. Normally that was a mechanism I could get behind. Just look the other way. But it seemed to me that if we were really buying into this whole visit from the beyond business, and it looked like we were, then we couldn’t sidestep questions of the devil and his upstairs rival. For sure metaphysics wasn’t my thing, but lately I’d started to dip into questions of life, the universe, and everything. I was dying to thrash it all out with Morrie, but in this matter our obsessions didn’t mesh. Or at least he wasn’t owning up to it.

  I tried to tickle him into a round of amateur philosophizing, and maybe I could have gotten him to bite, but Renaud paddled up and interrupted us. Yes again. If there were an Oscar for Best Buttinski in a Supporting Role, Renaud would win it hands down, but at least he planted us firmly back in the present day. We all had our regular workout and lunch, a little fur trade round robin to keep the guys on their toes, and then I drove Morrie back to his place in Mum’s car. In exchange for the lift he invited me in for a visit and a bite with Lena. It had become a regular part of our Sundays.

  It got so I looked forward to these tea parties with Morrie and Lena. It’s not so much that I was craving grandparents. I had a matched set of my own at home. But mine, no disrespect meant, seemed to have been born old. Even as four year olds at the playground they probably worried about breaking a hip, whereas Morrie and Lena would still be barrelling down the slide on their stomachs today, mentally, that is.

  Morrie made the tea party a festive affair, silver tray, china teapot, walnut strudel, the works. He measured out loose tea, a twiggy substance I’d never set eyes on at my house where my mum bought Red Rose tea bags in the value pack. The stuff Morrie spooned into the pot looked like it belonged in a joint, but it brewed up nice and aromatic and I felt like my hosts were giving my taste buds a European education.

  As promised, each week I brought a picture on my phone to show to Lena, something from the collection that I thought she’d go for. Morrie pretended to be jealous. “You never showed so much interest in my fur trade stuff.”

  “Well, maybe if you were to take a picture with Benjamin’s fancy phone of all the beautiful objects in your room to show me, I’d ooh and ah over them too. It’s been so long since I’ve seen them.”

  That request gave us both a major jolt, the sum total of Morrie’s beautiful objects having long since vaporized. It was an idea we hoped she’d lose track of in the druggy haze that sometimes played fast and loose with her concentration. For the time being luck was on our side and it did seem to fall off her radar.

  “So, Benjamin,” she said, staking out a fresh topic of conversation, “tell us who is it you take after? From which of your parents did you pick up your history genes? From both maybe since the affinity is so strong?”

  “Neither that I know of. My mother was math right down the line. Majored in it at university. Wanted me to take calculus, can you believe it? She thought it would discipline my mind. She always planned to teach after she finished school, but she met my dad before she graduated. Then we kids came along, I have a brother and a sister, and somehow she never did get her degree in the end. Never made it back to finish up. She works at the Bay too. In the Purse Department. But anyway, getting back to your question, history was never her thing. For Mum it was always numbers, numbers, numbers.”

  “And your father?” Lena asked.

  “Dead.”

  Okay, so as an answer to a polite inquiry it was kind of bald. I tried to fluff it over a bit. “I guess I picked up my interest in history from the mailman.” But she got the message. For my protection, Lena rerouted all future conversation neatly away from my father, for her protection Morrie kept the chat away from their hollowed-out house, and for his protection I shut up about Morrie’s second career. On Sunday afternoons, everybody had to play nursemaid. This perverse triangle of watchfulness got us to be way more invested in each other than we otherwise might have been, and it didn’t take long before I let Morrie and Lena put down roots in the corner of my heart that my father had left vacant, and they welcomed me into the corresponding spot reserved for a son, if only they’d had one. Now, if this all sounds too warm and fuzzy to be coming from me, what can I say? I just let myself slip into it like you would a warm bath.

  8

  Something was up with Rossi. He wasn’t his old self. He didn’t drop by the museum half as often as he used to and when he did find his way over he barely said a word. I wondered if maybe he had a bug up his ass over all the time I was spending with Morrie. Before we two bonded, Rossi had been my main man on all fur trade matters. And it was true that Morrie had gradually outstripped him on that score. Was he jealous? But after I let that notion percolate for a while, I had to reject it. It was unworthy of Rossi who’d always been there for me, even when I didn’t deserve it. How many times had he picked me up, dusted me off, and wound me up to face another day back when I had the robbery hanging over my head? Pettiness wasn’t his thing. I couldn’t see him playing one of those tweeny schoolyard games of but-I-thought-I-was-your-best-friend. There had to be something else going on.

  I didn’t have much to go on now that he’d swallowed his tongue. Rossi’d made it through probation, so that was off the table, and his supervisor in the kitchen had played kissy-kissy with the notoriously tight-fisted Ange-Aimée in payroll to coax her into signing off on the pay hike Rossi’d been angling for. The chef had even offered to put in a good word for him at some upscale restaurants around town, or at least up the scale from the Bay cafeteria, which effectively left the field open to just about anyplace. Girl trouble? Not likely. Rossi’s life was a constant whirl of girl trouble. He thrived on it. So what was left?

  Only one stubborn idea kept coming back up on me like a wonky curry. I hoped I was as flat-out wrong about it as I had been the previous time I’d confronted him with an accusation, oh so sure of myself. But I had to find out.

  Next time he wandered in, same old same old. Washed out. Jittery. And he could hardly meet my eyes when we spo
ke. Correction. I should say when I spoke. On his end there were only grunting noises which for all I knew might not even have been replies, just the audio from his digestive system. He volunteered absolutely nothing to the conversation unless he couldn’t avoid it.

  “Haven’t seen much of you around here lately. You got something better going?”

  “Been busy.”

  “What with?”

  “Recipes. Stuff.”

  “So they’re letting you show off your own creations? Run the show a bit more over there? About time. Now you can zap them with some quinoa or kale. Some bok choy maybe. Let them know there’s more to life than red jello.”

  “Yeah.”

  That was it? ‘Yeah?’ Things were worse than I thought. Even a reference to jello, that never-fail-to-perform chain jerker, failed to perform.

  “How about school, classes going okay?”

  Rossi’d finally gotten his nerve up to register for some night courses at the Institut d’hôtellerie, the city’s flashy training school for professional chefs. He’d hesitated at first. The uniform they required intimidated him. Too chic, too cool. In their stainless steel teaching kitchens you had to wear the whole schmear, black-checked pants, double-breasted chef’s coat. Even a white toque on your head tall enough to tickle the fluorescents. That outfit was Paris. His Bay uniform Sudbury. The baggy whites the Bay doled out to its kitchen staff hovered in style midway between granddaddy long underwear and psych-patient jammies, all of it topped off with a bakery-lady hairnet. Talk about humiliating. And I sympathized all the way. When it came to uniforms the Bay’s choices ground you down. It was a struggle to rise above the feeling that the clown outfit they had you put on every day wouldn’t define you for life.

  But to Rossi’s credit, he shook off the department store’s uniform curse and moved up in the world to the classy dress code of the Institut. And once he started chopping and puréeing in its kitchens, it slipped his mind that he’d ever suffered from stage fright. Used to be that when he’d stop by the museum on his daily visits, he’d jabber a blue streak about the place; what regular guys his fellow students were, how he’d learned to seed a pomegranate faster than a speeding bullet. No more.

  “School? No problem.”

  “Got anything else new and exciting going?”

  “Nope.”

  I was fed up with these question-and-answer visits. They made me feel like I was his mother, trolling for personal tidbits he wasn’t eager to cough up. This new Rossi, the tight-lipped Rossi, was driving me round the bend.

  “Come on. Out with it. What’s eating at you?”

  “Nothing,” he said in a touchy tone that translated to me as its opposite.

  “You’re back to boosting cars aren’t you?” I’d been planning to wheedle it out of him, let him come clean of his own accord, but I had no patience left for a leisurely lead-in. “You let yourself be sucked back into it, right? You went out drinking with your old crowd again, got the urge, and they didn’t lift a finger to stop you. They egged you on, am I right? Just like before. You swore you’d cut off from those guys.”

  “Again you’re thinking I’m a thief? For a guy’s who’s supposed to be so smart, you sure have a one-track mind.”

  “Don’t get all bent out of shape. It’s the best I could come up with. Look at you. You’re a mess. Don’t try to deny it. Something’s gnawing away at you. You’re jumpy like I’ve never seen you. Can’t look me in the eye. If I’m wrong about the whole car thing, fine, my bad. But all I’m asking is that you tell me what’s up with you. It’s gotta be better than keeping it bottled up, boring a hole straight through your insides.”

  “I’m fine. Same as always. Right as rain.”

  “Yeah, you’re fine and I’m the tooth fairy.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with me. Cross my heart. Give your imagination a rest. You’re working it too hard.”

  “You think I don’t have eyes to see? You’re falling apart right in front of me. A total basket case. Look, you know that anything you say won’t go any further. I’ll take whatever it is to my grave. You can tell me.”

  “Benj, I’ve got to get back to my station. I’m already way late.”

  “Your soup kettles can wait five more minutes. They won’t explode. You’re not going back there until I know what’s up. Who knows, maybe I can help.”

  “You can’t,” he blurted out. I could tell he wished he’d kept his mouth shut, but too late. Now that he’d let that much slip, more stonewalling didn’t make much sense. Rossi did a deep breathe-in before he spoke again. “So you haven’t heard then.”

  “Heard what?”

  “The rumours.”

  “Rumours? What rumours?”

  “I didn’t want to be the one to spread them, see. I’ve been waiting, hoping I’d find out that there wasn’t any truth to them, and that would be it.”

  “What are you talking about?” If I thought Rossi looked lousy before, now he looked like he needed a sick-bag. He took his good old time starting out. Whatever gossip he’d been sitting on all this time, for sure he wasn’t keen to be the one responsible for giving it wings.

  “Remember a few weeks ago when Antoine was off with a stomach flu?” he said. “So Eric sent me in to replace him in the executive dining room. The big bosses from six were there with the new American owners. They were having an all-day powwow. I served them lunch and then when I came by after to clear the table they were slow to clam up and I overheard part of their conversation.”

  “And?”

  “Well, I thought, I mean I might have heard them talking about cutting back.”

  “Layoffs, you mean?”

  “More like shutting down certain non-performing departments.”

  “They’re closing the cafeteria? Just like that? After all these years? I can’t believe it.” No wonder he was thrown off balance after a sucker punch like that. Rossi griped about his job like we all did, claimed he didn’t get enough love, but deep down he was devoted to the place. When he made the job rounds after he’d served his sentence at Cowansville, a hundred other interviews told the car thief (reformed) thanks but no thanks. The Bay took him in. That first job was at the sinks, but he worked his way up to unofficial second banana. Everybody knew that Eric, the chef en chef, wouldn’t switch the celery in the Waldorf salad from a slice to a dice without sounding it out on his underling. The Bay took the raw ingredients that were Rossi, spun them around in the commercial mixer, slapped them in a mould, threw them in the convection oven, and out came a man. The cafeteria was the making of him.

  I felt Rossi’s pain. Didn’t my job help me crawl out of the hole that was my old life too? But it was my role in all this to be upbeat. “You’ll land on your feet,” I told him. “Once you get your fancy-ass new cooking degree you’ll be able to write your own meal ticket at any restaurant in town. They’ll be fighting over you and I’ll be stuck here alone. I’ll miss you when you’re gone, you know. Who else listens to me the way you do?”

  “No, Benjo,” he said, back to giving my eyes a wide berth. “Not the cafeteria. They’re closing the museum.”

  At first it didn’t compute. His words were making their way through my brain all right, but coming out the other end as gibberish. Wasn’t I too young to be having a stroke? Rossi wasn’t taking any chances. He dragged me over to a chair, forced me into it, and pushed my head down between my knees. Maybe not a stroke remedy, but a remedy for something or other. And it helped. All that extra blood up there flushed out the blockages and Rossi’s message untangled itself. I knew exactly what I had to do. I repositioned my head back on top where it belonged and tore out of there, heading straight to the Purse Department. No rumour would dare go round the store without checking in at my mother’s counter. It would be a whopping breach of etiquette after all the years she’d put in at the Bay for a piece of gossip to flit right by without even stopping to say hello. It simply wasn’t done. If anybody’d have the skinny, she would.


  Mum was nowhere to be seen when I got down to her corner of the first floor, but I knew that if Madame Dolce & Gabbana wasn’t on duty shilling handbags, there was only one other place she could be at that hour, under the canopy on Union Street, enjoying a cigarette. It was the hangout of choice for the smoking minions. The metal overhang prevented the smoke from fleeing wasted into the stratosphere. It kept it concentrated and super toxic, just the way they liked it. I’d never come looking for her before. Not once. It was always the reverse. So when I swooped in like a bat out of hell and dragged her away from her friends, her face immediately took on a who-died look.

  “I’ve got to talk to you,” I said, pulling her to an unpopulated corner of the church garden across the street. I let go of her wrist when we got there. I’d cinched it hard enough to leave a mark.

  “Benjie, what is it? Are you all right? Did something happen at home?”

  “Is it true?”

  “Is what true?”

  “That they’re closing the museum on me?”

  She blew smoke slowly out of her nostrils in two plumes so great they looked like power-plant exhaust. Her body seemed to shrivel as it left her. It struck me then that all the experts had it wrong, that cigarettes were all that were keeping her going. Without the smoke to fill in all that empty real estate around her bones and organs, giving her lift, she’d just collapse in a heap.

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “I sure as hell didn’t hear it from you, Mommie Dearest. Is it true?”

  “Benjie, it’s only a rumour, not a sure thing. Don’t get yourself all uptight.”

  “Right. They’re slitting my throat and I shouldn’t get myself all uptight. Maybe I should just sit down and have a cup of tea and a crumpet.”

  “Benjie, my darling boy, don’t do this to yourself, please.”

  “I’m hardly doing it to myself. I’m not the one bringing down the axe.”

  “You know that’s not what I meant.”