Seaweed on the Rocks

by Stanley Evans

  Then a woman appeared carrying a carved wooden whale about four feet long, which she set upon the black box before departing. Arms still raised, the shaman faced the whale. His body trembled as the whale slowly rose into the air, the shaman apparently defying gravity by the power of his will. The whale levitated until it was four feet above the ground, then the shaman grabbed it and began to sing. The whale seemed to be very heavy as its weight slowly bent the shaman double until his face was half-concealed by his long hair, and he moved crabwise around the fire, seeking something and shaking with rage because he couldn’t find it. The drums resumed their beat, quietly at first, and every once in a while the shaman’s song would be interrupted by strangled wails from behind the screen. Gradually one of the phrases he sang came to predominate. I could make no sense of it until the shaman and the whale suddenly vanished behind the black box, whereupon someone shouted the word, “Filligan!”

  Two female assistants dragged the boy to his feet. The drums, rattles and whistles were making a tremendous racket when a ghostly shape materialized from the frightened boy’s mouth. This ghost was floating away when the shaman reappeared, captured it inside a bag and disappeared again into the earth.

  That seemed to be the end of the show. Everybody trooped outside, and one of the masked dancers directed us to line up alongside the firepit. Then, with a sudden theatrical howl, the shaman emerged from the longhouse with the boy, who was barefoot, and began forcing him to walk along the firepit.

  There is nothing remotely West Coast Native about firewalking, so it seemed like a good time to leave. But walking towards the parking lot, the hairs on the back of my neck started prickling, and I looked back over my shoulder. Two of the masked cannibal dancers were right behind me.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” one of them asked.

  I didn’t hear the third man come up behind me, and the blow he struck on the back of my neck numbed me to my toes. As I fell to the ground, they put the boots to me. It was three against one, and I didn’t stand a chance.

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  I woke lying face down on a wet beach, pulses hammering deep inside my head. My clothing was soaked and my hands were freezing. I tried to move and couldn’t. But gradually I became aware that the tide was coming in, and when ripples of salt water began creeping slowly along my arms, I drew my elbows up and rocked myself until I was kneeling. The camp had apparently been abandoned, and I had the night to myself. I started crawling. After a while my body warmed and my brain started to work.

  I smashed the window in the cottage door, slipped the latch and went inside. I fumbled around in the darkness till I found a bed, took my wet clothes off and crawled naked beneath the covers.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  It was one of those quiet, clear, Sunday afternoons. Rooks cawed up in the trees, squirrels feasted on acorns cached since last fall. Kids were building sandcastles on the beach. Joe Paul was using a double-bitted axe to chop driftwood and pile it into a wheelbarrow. Everyone was enjoying life except me. My head ached, I had a bruise on my stomach that looked like a gaudy example of modern art, and every time I moved, my bones ached. I washed two aspirins down with two ounces of Scotch and went out.

  A friendly Airedale, curled up in long grass beside the pathway, woke up and trailed at my heels as I took an evening hobble. To my surprise, clerks were busy in the Warrior band’s office, and looking through a window, I saw Maureen working at a computer. The dog flinched when I stooped to pat its head. “There’s a good boy,” I said. It stayed on the doorstep as I went inside the office.

  “I’m glad you came in, Silas,” Maureen said, looking up from her computer. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you about something.”

  “Sure, go ahead.”

  “Need coffee?”

  “No thanks,” I said, sitting across from her desk.

  “I’ve just had an email from Provincial,” she said. “There’s a fraudster targeting bored New Agers with trust funds—retired stockbrokers, property developers, dot.com millionaires, rich people generally that are sick of travel and shopping. What they want now is personal transformation and inner growth, and they think it’ll be groovy to find their inner Indian. You know, commune with nature in the deep woods. Co-exist with noble savages. Enjoy shaman sweats in a nicely scented sauna. Run around waving mass-produced sacred objects. Smoke peace pipes stuffed with sacred marijuana, get a little buzz on, enjoy some sacred sex.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “you’ve got it down pat.”

  “I went on the Internet, boned up.”

  “Native American spirituality workshops started popping up in California thirty years ago,” I told her. “It was just a matter of time before they reached us.”

  “These workshops don’t come cheap,” Maureen said. “The going rate for a weekend introductory course on core shamanism is between $250 and $1,000, and that doesn’t include travel and accommodation. These guys don’t even advertise. They have a core group of devoted followers that vet potential recruits. Newcomers are sworn to secrecy and made to feel special, part of the chosen few.”

  It was getting on towards sunset when we finished talking. I was leaving when Maureen stopped me by saying, “What’s the matter, Silas? You don’t seem your normal self.”

  “Let me ask you something . . . do you ever get up in the morning, look around, and say to yourself . . . ”

  Maureen interrupted with, “You need a holiday.”

  I went outside. I was looking around for the Airedale when I saw a boat round the breakwater and head in toward the jetty. The setting sun was shining directly into my eyes, so I didn’t recognize the boat until it was two hundred yards offshore. It was the Ednorina, Johnny Mack’s 36-foot troller. Screeching gulls were flapping around it, hoping there’d be offal to fight over. I went down to the jetty in time to catch Johnny’s heaving line, and as we tied the boat up, the seagulls tried to settle on railings and pilings. The Airedale chased up and down, apparently unaware that an Airedale has never in the entire history of dogdom outwitted a gull.

  The Ednorina had five thousand dollars worth of spring salmon, cod and halibut in its hold, and Johnny brought a couple of fifteen-pound springs ashore and gave one to me. I hooked three fingers into its gills, took it home, scrubbed its silvery scales off with a wire brush, filleted, cleaned and decapitated it and cut off its tail, then threw what I wouldn’t eat onto the beach. Seagulls had borne every scrap aloft within seconds.

  Feeling a bit livelier, I called Bernie Tapp. He arrived promptly with a case of Labatts. He popped a couple of caps and we drank while I scrubbed new potatoes, put them on to cook, washed broccoli, sprinkled ground pepper onto four salmon steaks and fried them in butter till the flesh was slightly brown.

  Dinner went down well. Bernie cleaned his plate, congratulated the chef, slackened his belt and offered me another beer. I hesitated.

  Bernie said, “What the hell, Silas. You’ve probably got AIDS as well as clap by now. Yellow jaundice and death may be just around the corner. Do you think another beer’s going to make things any worse?”

  He was right.

  Bernie interrupted my reverie. “Now tell me what’s happening.”

  “Yesterday I followed Charlotte Fox out to Songwet.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “In the back of beyond, way west of Duncan.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  I gave him a dubious look.

  “Charlotte Fox wasn’t in the bush west of Duncan yesterday. She was in town,” Bernie declared flatly. “My wife has been bugging me to take her to see The Illusionist. It was on at the Cinecenta. I’ve been busy lately and kept putting it off, but we finally went to see it last night. And Charlotte Fox was in the audience. She was sitting three rows in front of me, her and another woman. I had them both in sight the whole time. Not only that, but their car was parked near mine.”

  “It sure as hell wasn’t Charlotte’s Lexus.”

  “I never said
it was a Lexus. It was a Mercedes 280. Belonged to Charlotte’s friend, I suppose.”

  “Then what? Where did they go?”

  “I don’t know where they went. They drove out of the parking lot before I did. In any case, I have no interest in Charlotte Fox.” Grinning, Bernie went on, “She’s dragging you around by your dick, pal. You’re a dopey sod sometimes, especially where women are concerned, but I’ll say this for you—you’ve got one very endearing quality, which is why, I guess, a lot of women go for your particular line.”

  “Which of my many endearing qualities is that?”

  “Your charming capacity for making an ass of yourself.”

  I shook my head. “Yesterday I trailed Charlotte’s Lexus—without actually having it in sight—to a fake longhouse west of Duncan. That Lexus was definitely there.”

  “How do you know it was her Lexus?”

  “I checked with Motor Vehicles. It’s registered to her. While I was at it, I checked to see if there were any liens against it. There aren’t. She owns that Lexus free and clear.”

  “In that case, Charlotte either lent the Lexus to somebody else or it was stolen.”

  “It wasn’t stolen. The last time I checked my GPS gizmo—which is about two hours ago—that Lexus was parked outside her house on Moss Street.”

  “I thought I warned you about that! You know damned well that bugging peoples’ cars is a big no-no!”

  “I must have forgotten. It’s a good thing I did, though, because I found out something interesting. There’s this cult thing happening out Songwet way, and last night they staged a hokey healing ceremony. The audience was White and probably thought they were watching something genuine. They weren’t. But everybody was wearing Indian masks so I borrowed one and watched the show.”

  “Where are we going with this?” Bernie inquired cynically. “If a bunch of consenting adults want to dress up in weird clothes and have fun out in the bush, so what? Paintball warriors do queer things out there every weekend. And what the bears and rabbits do in the bush is also nobody’s business.”

  “It may not be your business, Bernie, but I’ve made it mine.”

  “Don’t tell me you take this shaman crap seriously?”

  “Coast Salish shamans believe that sickness is caused by magic and soul loss.” I grinned. “This may come as a surprise to you, Bernie, but people have two souls. One’s in your head, the other is in your heart. When you’re asleep, these souls can be frightened away from your body by ghosts or stolen by people who want to harm you. Shamans find missing souls and bring them back to the sufferer.”

  “Where do missing souls go?”

  “Mostly to the Unknown World.”

  “Sounds like a long way off, so I guess a good popular shaman can build up frequent flyer points pretty fast,” Bernie said, popping another can. “This Unknown World can’t be much joy, though. So maybe shamans use their points on fun trips, take their wives to Acapulco or Fiji, right?”

  “In fact, a shaman’s wife can build up her own frequent flyer points.”

  “In fact?”

  “At a healing a shaman often sings along with his wife, and they sometimes use a wooden bowl full of water to reflect the universe.”

  “That’s it? No drums, none of those goofy, feather dream catcher gizmos?”

  “Sometimes, if a patient has a suppurating wound, say, the shaman uses a hollow bone and sucks the pus out. But you don’t see much pus-sucking these days.”

  “That’s the truest thing you’ve said today,” Bernie murmured, taking a long swig of his beer.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  About a week after my Songwet experience the sun came out in Victoria again. Extravagantly brief miniskirts blossomed like summer flowers all over town. Ice cream shops along Government Street ran out of stock. Old folks hugged the shade. And for no discernible reason the inside of my office began to smell like wet paint. I wanted to tackle Charlotte Fox, but wasn’t quite sure how to handle the matter. I decided that grasping the nettle might work. When I phoned, she answered immediately. I said, “It’s Tuscan night at the Med Grill tomorrow. Four courses, only $16.95 plus taxes. How about it?”

  “Does that include wine?”

  “No, but Med Grill wine isn’t all expensive, and you don’t have to buy any if you don’t want to. What I do is buy a bottle of Italian red at the liquor store, hide it in an inside pocket and have a little rubber tube running up the sleeve of my jacket so I can siphon a drink when the server isn’t looking.”

  “When you invited me to dinner, I was imagining the Empress, maybe even the Latch.”

  “Sorry, you must think I’m Warren Buffett. This is Silas Seaweed.”

  “Is it? Good lord, let me check my calendar.” There was a pause. “Heavens! I’m booked till Christmas! Sorry, bye.”

  I shrugged. It was time to deal with ordinary reality. Headquarters had updated my missing-kid list, and I noted that the two Harris Green boys were still missing. The mother of one was a high-class call girl, and her son had been more or less fending for himself. It had been days before she even noticed his absence.

  I began an aimless drift around the streets and ended up outside Capital Iron. Folks were clustered around a hot-dog stand, where a girl with a yellow ferret draped across her shoulders like a scarf was feeding it bits of pink meat. When they’d finished eating, she crunched the hot-dog wrapper into a ball and heaved it into the gutter. The ferret leapt to the sidewalk, pounced upon the wrapper and tried to carry it away, until it was hauled up short by the string tied to the girl’s belt.

  The Good Samaritan Mission was only two blocks from there, and I knew I ought to go over there and get the results of my blood tests, but something was hauling me up short, too. Instead, I walked over to Moran’s Gymnasium, a single, long, narrow room situated on the upper floor of a red brick, two-storey building so decrepit that the next time Victoria has an earthquake, Moran’s gym will probably be reduced to rubble. I climbed the outside staircase and opened the door at the top. Going into Moran’s is like stepping into a time warp—nothing ever changes. The place has been short of a good mopping since 1980. It lacks proper ventilation and always smells of embrocation, sweaty feet and dust. Fortunately, after a while nasal paralysis sets in and you don’t notice.

  Young hopefuls who might otherwise have been robbing banks or riding unmufflered motorcycles were exchanging blows in a boxing ring. Retired scrappers were reading newspapers and arguing about the Mariners’ latest disaster. Moran himself, chewing an unlit cigar and wearing a shiny blue suit, yellow shirt, red tie and brown fedora, was wandering among the punching bags and weight-training machines and occasionally stepping into the ring to explain a point of basic ringmanship. The rest of the time he lurked behind his lunch counter, hoping somebody would be dumb enough to buy one of his month-old wieners or a cup of yesterday’s coffee. As usual, the octagonal poker table was littered with newspapers and outdated copies of Ring magazine.

  Tony, the masseur, wearing a white T-shirt, white pants and white tennis shoes, was sitting on his massage table chewing a plastic swizzle stick. He was swarthy, heavily muscled and almost as tall as Danny DeVito. He looked at me with sad brown eyes.

  “I need a rubdown, Tony.”

  “You need more than that,” he said in a voice like Tony Soprano’s.

  I took my clothes off in the shower room, hung them in my personal locker and went back to Tony in my jockey shorts. He placed a fresh towel over his massage table. I stretched out on it face down and said, “Treat me gently. My head aches and my bones are fragile.”

  “It’s not only your bones. Face it, Champ, you’ve gone to pieces. You are a mere shadow of your former self,” Tony said, pouring oil onto my back. “I guess AIDS kicks the stuffing out of a guy.”

  “I don’t have AIDS.”

  “That’s not what I heard.”

  “I’m being tested for HIV. It’s not the same thing.”

  “That’s like the girl
three months late saying she’s only a little bit pregnant. And what happened to your head?”

  “I slipped on a banana peel. By the way, what are people saying about Titus Silverman?”

  “They’re saying the nasty prick got what was coming to him,” Tony said, gently kneading the loose skin at the base of my neck with his strong, smooth hands. “They’re saying it was a mob hit.”

  “Mob hit? Give your head a shake, Tony. I come in here for a massage and some polite conversation. All I get is Hollywood Noir and hackneyed expressions.”

  “What do you expect with a thirty-buck massage, David Letterman?”

  “I could go a bit higher if you’ve got something hot.”

  “Okay, try Crazy Legs. She’s fifteen to one in the two-thirty at Saanich.”

  “The last time you gave me a horse, she came in last.”

  “Certainly she did, but that tip didn’t cost you anything. You want solid information, you’ve got to pay for it.”

  Moran came over and stood watching us. He was holding his head to one side and seemed to be listening to something—voices inaudible to the rest of us, maybe, or tinnitus from sixty years of timekeepers’ bells. He jiggled his cigar from the middle of his mouth to side and said, “There’s a poker game here Friday night. Are you guys in?”

  “Sure, I’ll be here.”

  “Me too,” Tony said.

  Moran went away then came straight back. “By the way,” he said to me, “Joe McNaught dropped by earlier. He said to say there’s a message for you at the clinic.” He ambled off to sit behind his lunch counter.

  Tony was working on my pectorals. “Forget Crazy Legs,” I told him. “Tell me who croaked Titus Silverman.”

  “I ain’t heard nothing,” Tony said, “but my nephew might know. He’s in William Head.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Eight years. When I visit him on the weekend, I’ll whisper between the bars. Maybe he’ll know something.”

  I had a shower, ate lunch at Lou’s Cafe and meandered in a daze to the Good Samaritan Mission, wondering about the news awaiting me there. Joe McNaught was absent, and nobody knew where he was, so I stopped by the clinic and asked about my blood tests. The results had come in, but Dr. Auckland had pinned a note to my file stating that he wished to break the news to me personally. I fretted in the clinic’s waiting room for several minutes before my name was announced and I was ushered into Dr. Auckland’s office. He was sitting behind his desk, writing in a folder. “Hi, Silas, take a pew,” he said jovially, but he kept on writing and didn’t look at me properly. There’s an old saw that when juries arrive at a guilty verdict they avoid looking at defendants, so I expected the worst. Finally he closed the folder, leaned back in his chair and gave it to me straight. The news was still sinking in when he came around the desk, tapped my head lightly with a forefinger and said, “Does that hurt?”