My True and Complete Adventures as a Wannabe Voyageur

by Phyllis Rudin

  We left Lena to her siesta and headed upstairs to the canoe where it was business as usual. Our conversations ebbed and flowed as the banging of our tools allowed. We didn’t restrict our talk to the fur trade. Uh-uh. We branched out in every direction, struggling between us to resolve all the ugliness that flared up in the headlines week after week. But that day world hunger wasn’t on the agenda. The issue Morrie wanted us to discuss was more up close and personal.

  “You haven’t found out yet have you, when the museum is closing?” Morrie asked me. It had been a while since he last prodded me for an update on the closure. I suffered a bit of a pang that it was taking me so long to root out that one simple fact, but now that the subject was up for grabs again I wasn’t about to let it go.

  “I’m working on it,” I told him. “Things seem kind of dormant right now on that front. They aren’t making any moving noises or packing up crates or anything. But I should know for you soon.”

  “So no one’s seen fit to enlighten you.”

  “Are you kidding? They’d confide in Alexandre before they’d ever speak to me. But I have my spies in the field. It shouldn’t be long now till I get a report.”

  “What’s with those bums that run your place? They don’t even have the courtesy to keep you au courant, you of all people? That’s the thanks you get for being a valued employee? Here you slave for them for peanuts. You care for that collection better than any trained professional. You take every visitor on a trip back in a time machine, give them a real feel for the history, and still they’re prepared to toss you out like yesterday’s fish.” His mini-rant corresponded with my own way of thinking but it was gratifying to hear it spewing out of someone else’s mouth for a change.

  “Retail’s the only language those guys speak,” I said. “History to them is a waste of space. If it’s history you want, then go to the library, if it’s a parka, then go to the Bay.”

  “You’re defending them?”

  “All I’m saying is that I get where they’re coming from. They’re dumping us for the square footage. They probably want to squeeze in some more of that igloo drek that the tourists eat up. Those dopes upstairs probably went to the same business school as my brother.”

  Morrie grunted and reapplied himself to the canoe. I followed suit. It would be easier to pump him if we both had our eyes focused on our work rather than each other.

  “So all this insistence of yours about finding out when the museum’s closing, I’m guessing it’s not because you’re planning me a farewell party.”

  He kept right on sanding. “Just curiosity, son, that’s all.” His answer was clearly bogus. Did he really think I’d swallow it and move on?

  “I remember you saying it would be useful to know exactly when. Not interesting or satisfying. Useful. That’s the word you used. You as much as put me on the job to find out. Don’t tell me it was all just to satisfy some idle curiosity. I don’t buy it.”

  “Don’t go probing too close, Ben. I wouldn’t want you to get burned.”

  So he was shielding me. Forget that. When I babysat Lena, okay. I was happy to be kept in the dark. I had no connection with Morrie’s patsies on those nights. But now we were talking about my museum. Keeping me in the dark wasn’t an option.

  “I’m already involved, aren’t I?” My voice was inching up to an unmanly upper range I’d never hit before. “Even if I don’t know exactly how. I’m doing some kind of prep work for you, research, snooping. So out with it. I have a right to know.” I wasn’t sure what right I was referring to but it gave me a leg to stand on even if it was only prosthetic.

  “You can calm down, Ben. I’m just considering a little project, that’s all.”

  “By project you mean job.”

  “Strictly speaking, no.”

  “So tell me what it is then, un-strictly.”

  “Really, Ben. This has nothing to do with you. Take my advice. Keep yourself safely out of it.”

  “What about keeping yourself safely out of it? Seriously, I’m having a bad feeling about all this. Just what exactly are you planning? Tell me. If you can’t trust me who can you trust?”

  “It’s not a question of trust, it’s a question of exposure. The less you know the better. But anyway, what I’m planning, it’s more on the order of borrowing than stealing. So you don’t have to worry. Satisfied?”

  “If it’s simply borrowing, why can’t I know about it then?”

  “Well, I guess, if you want to be completely accurate, you’d have to call it unauthorized borrowing.”

  “Cut the semantics. We’re not talking borrowing with an expired library card. We’re talking stealing here right? And from my museum.”

  “No, not stealing really. Like I said.”

  “You know, I’ve had it up to here with this runaround you’re giving me. Just spit it out. I warn you, I’m not leaving this house till I hear the full story, so you might as well start talking.” I jumped out of my chair, climbed up on the work platform, and plunked myself down in the canoe. It was the first time either of us had actually sat in it. We were saving that photoshoot moment for later when it was completely done. It was kind of nervy on my part. By rights Morrie should have had first stab at it. But I felt like it put me in a position of moral authority, as if my demand for the truth was backed up by all the generations of fur traders who’d come before us.

  “I’m listening.”

  “Okay. Okay. Calm yourself,” he said. “Get down out of there and I’ll tell you everything.” He lent me a hand for support. I sat back down beside him and waited. He was so slow to wind up I was afraid I’d have to make another stand, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what it would be.

  “It’s the canoe,” he finally said. “The one at your museum. I want to take it out on the water. Just once. Know what the real thing feels like. Live in the skin of a voyageur for a couple of hours. And then I’d return it. No harm done to it. I swear. You of all people should understand that craving, no?”

  It was worse than I thought. He was delusional.

  “And how were you expecting to get that thing out of the store, huh? Explain me that. It’s as long as an RV and must weigh as much as what, the Statue of Liberty? Were you just planning to come in, hoist it up onto your head like a giant matador hat and then walk out wearing it? With no one noticing? Or I know, maybe you were going to attach a rope to it and tow it out like a toboggan. Throw a bedsheet over it for cover. That I’d pay good money to see.”

  Funny. Even as the words were leaving my mouth it struck me as strange that my first impulse wasn’t to attack his premise. Just the mechanics.

  “I know. It’s idiotic to even consider it. But it kills me to think of that canoe being dumped who knows where, someplace you can bet it won’t get appreciated. That boat deserves one last shot at the water before it gets locked up behind glass again to waste away for another few hundred years.”

  “The boat deserves? Are we being totally honest with ourselves here?”

  “Hell yes. You think that canoe doesn’t have a soul? If it could speak what do you think it would vote for? To be stuck in a display case next to a pair of styrofoam beavers or to be out cutting through the water where it was born to be? And we both know, you and me, that there’s a good chance it might not even make it as far as some other museum. I wouldn’t put it past the Neanderthals at your place to chop it up into firewood and have a weenie roast over it. The thing is, Ben, I know it sounds nuts, but I can hear that boat calling out my name to save it.”

  Nobody could match the guy for chutzpah. There was no way anyone could do what he was proposing. The number of roadblocks was mind-boggling. Why not spring the Unabomber while he was at it? It was mission impossible, this crusade he’d set up for himself.

  “Okay, we’re on,” I said.

  “We?”

  “Of course we. You think I’d leave you hanging out to dry?” It would be a risky as hell, but I was beyond caring. My employers had
screwed me every which way but up. I didn’t feel I owed them much in the way of loyalty anymore. It was rationalizing, I know, but I’d hit my limit. Besides, that canoe wasn’t just calling out to Morrie. Some days back at the museum, in the late afternoon quiet, I could swear I heard my own name floating around among the dust motes. I just never realized till now where it was coming from.

  13

  Two heads working together should have meant that the planning would take half as long, but I’d always been dim in math. Somehow, even with both of us running off at the brain towards the same goal, our drawing board remained depressingly blank. Something weird was going on. Our imaginations seemed to be telling us that if we were too stupid to scrap this crackpot idea, then they’d step in to do it for us. So they went on strike. Soon ideas weren’t just in short supply, they were in no supply.

  Our negative progress was getting me down. “You do realize don’t you that if they dismantle the museum while it’s still winter, we’re screwed. We can’t take the canoe out on the frozen river and we can hardly snitch it and hide it under the bed till the thaw. That’ll be the end of it all. Kaput.”

  “Keep faith, my friend,” Morrie said. “They’ve dragged their feet this long haven’t they? Chances are we’ll make it till springtime. And remember we have global warming on our side. Whatever puny layer of ice there is capping off the St. Lawrence will melt like nothing once spring gets it in its mind to show up.”

  Who was this Mr. Upbeat? This side of my partner in crime had never surfaced before. No surprise there. The guy carried around so many troubles he needed a roof rack. But ever since we’d become birchbark blood brothers he let his repressed Pollyanna side peek out from time to time. And sure enough his optimism was rewarded. But not in the way we’d anticipated.

  What happened was we caught a break when a city water main burst and flooded the Bay’s metro level so that all of Men’s Clothing and Accessories was going blub-blub. Now this wasn’t just any old water main. It was a whopper. I’m saying huge. As big around as Alaska and dating from the stone age. Okay, so maybe I am fudging its age a bit, but that sucker was old. The graffiti on its outside read Samuel de C Hélène B. It’s amazing the thing had waited that long to pop. Anyway, this particular water main led off the city’s central reservoir that was perched just up the mountain from the McGill campus. When it blew, gazillions of litres of H2O whammed into downtown landslide style. Pedestrians were swept right off their feet and concrete traffic barriers switched streets of their own free will.

  How often do you think that you get an urban flash flood on a completely unrainy day? Nobody was ready to deal with it. It took the city’s emergency work crews forever till they managed to pull their collective thumbs out of their asses and stick them into the dike where they belonged. By then, the lower level of every last building in the downtown core was doing a fair to middling impression of Lake Champlain.

  Once the torrent slowed to a trickle, the Bay’s higher-ups got out their waders and went sloshing through Men’s Wear, trying to get their heads around the damage to their kingdom. For sure they were going to be run ragged for the next little while overseeing the sopping-up strategy; namely dumping the waterlogged stock, draining and dehumidifying, testing for mould and, you’ll pardon the expression, fecal contamination from the sewers. Then there’d be the paperwork nightmare, the heaps of insurance forms to plow through and the lawsuits against the city and its papier-mâché infrastructure. And on the tail of all that would come the retiling, the rewiring, the replastering, the repainting, the recarpeting, the re-everythinging. Good luck snagging a contractor. The Bay would have to battle it out with all the other buildings downtown that got their tootsies soaked. Management was going to be way too preoccupied to fuss with my museum for the time being. Morrie and I figured that the flood gave us a good month in the bag, maybe two. Meanwhile we’d put our thinking caps back on.

  “So how’s my main squeeze?” I asked Lena.

  “Ready to rock ’n’ roll.” Her patented answer.

  Morrie was still making after-dark strikes to fill the family coffers. As much as he wanted to hunker down and hatch a plan undistracted, he couldn’t afford to devote himself full time to our canoe conspiracy. They’d starve. So I kept Lena company as usual while her light-fingered husband did his bit to keep the bailiffs off their back.

  “I hear you had some bad luck down at your place,” Lena said to me on one of Morrie’s pilfering nights.

  Bad luck? Bad luck? It took me a few seconds to pin down what she was talking about. “Oh, the flood you mean.” To Morrie and me the flood qualified as downright excellent luck, a gift from the gods, but a normal person like Lena whose mind was pure, not rotted out like ours, wouldn’t necessarily see the upside of a tsunami.

  “I saw it on the news. What drama. Who’d ever imagine downtown to get hit by a tidal wave? It was practically biblical.”

  “Locusts might be next. I’d keep a can of Raid handy if I were you.”

  “I’ll file that tip away, thank you. Nothing was damaged in your museum I hope.”

  “No. We were lucky. We stayed dry. The water didn’t rise anywhere near that high. The damage was pretty well restricted to the lower level where Men’s Wear is. It was something to see, though. Cash registers and computer monitors were bobbing on the water. The cologne bottles in the display cases were floating around like fish in an aquarium. The water was up to here on me,” I said, indicating my armpit. “If you’d wanted to, you could have gone from men’s pyjamas all the way over to dress shirts at the far end doing the breast stroke.”

  She took me over-literally. “Why in the world would I want to go swimming through a department store?” This was a problem lately. Lena’s beautiful brain, which used to execute flawless loop-the-loops and triple axels, now had a habit of crashing down to earth mid-manoeuvre. She flip-flopped in and out of clarity without any warning, one minute razor sharp, the next all fuzzy. But that day she snapped back into lucidity with a vengeance.

  “You have to get Morrie to stop stealing, Benjamin. One of these days he’s bound to slip up and get arrested. I won’t be around much longer. I don’t want to have to look down from up there and see him in prison stripes because of me.”

  “How did you find out?” By the time I snapped my mouth shut to keep that question barricaded behind my teeth the words had already sneaked out. Only in my twenties and already my reflexes were slipping. I should have laughed away her assumption, I should have flipped us to a safer subject, I should have run for the hills, but the should-have ship had already sailed and I was left behind on the pier to deal with the truth.

  “Is that really important?” she said. “The point is I know. And I want you to convince him to give it up.”

  “Why me?” I sounded like the whiny little kid who gets nailed by the teacher on the playground when all the other hair pullers were savvy enough to scatter.

  “Because I don’t want to squander the short amount of time we have left together hectoring him. That’s not the memory of me I want to leave him with. You’ll have to do it. There is no one else.”

  Now I didn’t much like the idea of mucking around in the guts of a couple. It seemed to me that a couple, especially a long-in-the-tooth one, is an intricate piece of machinery, finely tuned and balanced over years of trial and error. Its instruction manual is all scribbled over with complicated work-arounds, the yellowed pages dog-eared and studded with Post-its. Then along comes some third party, gives one element the slightest tickle, and next thing you know the whole thing’s gone kablooey. And here Lena was telling me to stick my rusty pliers into the couple’s Rolex gears? She was probably figuring I’d done it before when I chauffeured her around her empty house against Morrie’s decree, so what was the big deal? She didn’t know the half of it. When it came to playing shortstop with a husband and wife on base, hell, I wrote the book.

  I didn’t ever play hooky from elementary school, straight arrow me. But H
ebrew School? That was a different story. Four days a week after school in a language that didn’t even have enough sense to use the Roman alphabet? I mean I ask you. Those late afternoon classes were soul-crushingly boring and the way I recall it, our teachers wouldn’t lift a pinkie to pep things up. They were operating under some weird illusion that the subject matter alone would turn us on without any carbonation on their part. Either that or they were stoned. They had to be aware that we’d just come from spending eight hours chained to a desk at the elementary school across the street where the grade-six menu of history, geography, math, science, French, and English had already bulldozed all the oomph right out of us. If we were going to stay awake on their watch, they’d damn well have to do some bumping and grinding. But I guess their hourly rate didn’t leave them so inclined. It used to kill me to watch all my goyische friends, those lucky buggers, go home from school at three-thirty to veg out on the couch while we chosen people had to put in an extra two hours aleph-betting. It was enough to set you down the path to self-loathing.

  So it was free-cone day at Ben & Jerry’s. Now what kind of choice was that? A scoop of Cherry Garcia on a waffle cone (ten-cent supplement) on the first warmish day of the season, or reading aloud in our crippled Hebrew about the wardrobe trials of Rivka and Dovid as they try to put together a knockout costume for their Purim party? Like I said, a no-brainer. I’d worry about forging a note later. Zach was usually obliging at imitating Mum’s signature. It was his main creative outlet. He’d honed his skills on Rena during the term she was stuck with gym first period. Forty minutes of running laps and doing squat-thrusts with only five minutes in the locker room afterwards to reconstruct herself left her looking like a shlump for the rest of the day. Gym, in her mind, was the underlying reason why no guy at school would give her a second look. So every now and again she appealed to Zach to crib her a note in my mother’s crabby, back-slanted script. Please excuse Rena from participating in gym class this week. She has female problems. He’d do me the same favour, but I’d have to vet his work before he sealed the envelope just to make sure he hadn’t written out of habit, please excuse Benjamin for missing Hebrew School on Monday. He had female problems.