Vancouver: A novella (Wisdom Tree Book 3)

by Nick Earls

  At the express pay machine I reach for my wallet and Knut says, ‘No, no,’ and waves me away. He stands with both hands on the cane, feet apart, while Janet pays with her credit card. ‘Wheels are good, aren’t they?’ He lifts the tip of his cane and points at my suitcase. ‘They’ve made travel a lot easier. How’d we go five thousand years before coming up with that idea?’

  As we pick our way through the parked cars, Knut’s hand occasionally touches a roof, checking his balance as he finds places for his legs to go. The Knut I remember was a biped—legs as long as trees, maybe, but they worked like legs.

  Their car is a huge station wagon, long enough to jut beyond the vehicles next to it. It has a vinyl timber-look strip along the side, but could be customised into a hearse without much effort. It has instead been customised for Knut, the front passenger seat tipped back and pushed all the way to the seat behind it.

  ‘Beats having to fold up every part of me to fit across the back seat of the Benz,’ he says as he opens his door. ‘Remember that?’

  ‘They’ve stopped making this one,’ Janet says as she unlocks the back of the car, swinging the window up and the door to one side. ‘We’ll get an SUV next. There’s a few models that’ll work for us.’

  In our emails over the past few months, Knut had no size at all, and now I’m with the bystanders, marvelling again at his height and its poor fit with a world that’s built around the rest of us. Unlike his father, who stood among miniature houses just long enough for a photo, Knut will forever be the giant in the village.

  I sit behind Janet, which places Knut almost next to me, semi-reclined, his shoulders, neck and head on an extension fixed to the back of his seat where the headrest once was. He looks as if he’s set up to be launched through the sunroof. His knees are still bent, but normally, and he’s angled them away from Janet and the gear stick. I’m sure that’s a habit. Mine are the other way, facing her door, since they’d be in her back if I pointed them straight ahead. In most company, my height gets me the front seat.

  ‘It’s only for the first few minutes that this feels like I’m on the couch and you’re my therapist,’ he says. ‘You’ll be used it to before you know it.’

  As we drive south, a broad rectangle of light falls through the sunroof across my lap and the top of Knut’s head. He draws himself forward, to the extent he can, to keep it out of his eyes. The highway is grey concrete with neat conifers in rows beside it, white cloud puffs lifting like signals from the dark mountains to the east.

  ‘I saw the Calgary program,’ he says. ‘You were on with Richard Ford.’

  He lets it hang there. So the next move is mine. Is he a fan of Richard Ford’s? A friend? The reviewer whose book Ford famously took into his backyard and shot?

  ‘I was. He filled the room and I got to be his support act.’ There were five hundred people in that theatre. I threw everything at my reading, and caught the attention of enough of them to sell every copy of my novel in the bookstore. ‘Fortunately festival audiences are kinder to support acts than band audiences.’

  ‘Did you read from Rattlesnakes?’ Janet says over her shoulder.

  The arrival of the name of my novel in the conversation is so unexpected it takes me a moment to realise she’s asked a question. Knut is watching me, waiting.

  ‘Yeah.’ When it comes, it’s out of me too quickly, as if I’ve invented the story and I’m some impostor who wasn’t in Calgary at all. ‘I did. It seemed to go down okay.’

  It’ll be an anecdote one day, in the right circumstances, once I’ve processed it. I picked my best live piece from the book, gave it a big intro and threw everything at the reading. Then Richard Ford made his way to the lectern to cacophonous applause, his eyes lowered like a man looking for loose change on the pavement, having once found a quarter at that exact spot. The lights were bright on that stage. He reached the microphone, opened his book and leafed through the pages.

  ‘This is just a simple story,’ he said, his entire intro. I felt like I’d been up there tap-dancing and juggling flaming bowler hats.

  ‘Well, good,’ Knut says. ‘I see it was recorded for CBC, for one of their radio arts shows, so we’ll be looking out for it. We’re close enough to Canada that we can pick up their signal. I understand he has something new coming out next year. Richard Ford. Did he read from that or Women with Men?’

  ‘Women with Men.’

  It was a story he read from, not a novel, and it was in a published book. I was too caught up in the deconstruction of my own effort and the horror of his intro to take in the details. It was my first North American reading, the first from the St Martin’s Press hardback of Rattlesnakes.

  ‘Did he call them novellas? I bet he didn’t. You’re doing the right thing, writing novels.’

  ‘Here we go,’ Janet says, leaning across to try to catch my eye in the mirror. I lean too, to make it possible. ‘I hope you’re ready for this.’

  ‘It’s only the truth,’ Knut tells me. He lifts his hand and gives her shoulder a squeeze. ‘It happens to be a truth Janet’s heard more than once. The novel is the only sensible choice and the short story the least foolish of the others. Micro-fiction? Novellas? Two different kinds of sophistry. Ask any publisher. They’re the kind of thing that’ll see you committed to the furthest liberal arts college from the Flatiron Building.’

  ‘Here endeth the lesson,’ Janet says, interrupting rather than ending anything. ‘With any luck.’

  ‘You’ll have to forgive Janet.’ Knut puts on a serious face. ‘She’s from Texas. They bred out subtlety there in the nineteenth century. Hey, how about Richard Ford’s reading style? He looms, doesn’t he? I saw him underlit once. It was positively ghoulish.’

  Janet pokes him in the thigh. ‘So’s anyone over fifty who’s underlit. I’d watch it, buddy. Underlit’s all you ever get to be.’

  ‘And every line seems to decrescendo.’ It’s my turn to chip in. I can’t help it. Almost everyone in Calgary was wide-eyed about Richard Ford, so I could say nothing there. ‘Every sentence is like a breaking wave. In his signing queue there was a girl—a college student—who had his whole backlist with her and, as she handed them over to get them signed, she said...’ I make my best attempt at a Canadian accent, which isn’t bad after five days in Calgary, ‘When I read your books, they’re so sad but, when I hear you read them, they’re much sadder.’

  It feels mean to say it—Richard Ford is a master of the craft and people swooned at his reading—but Knut’s head and shoulders lift from his seat as he guffaws with laughter.

  ‘Much sadder,’ he moans, in a Canadian voice that’s as small and girlish as he can manage. He slaps his thigh. ‘Wish I’d been there.’ He clears his throat. ‘Terrific writer, yeah?’ He says it as though there’s an obligation to restore balance. ‘Not at all comfortable with reverence though.’

  ‘Well, he should be in this car then,’ Janet says, and Knut laughs again.

  We pass a Mitsubishi dealership and a mock-Tudor house, and a sign indicates a turn for Victoria and Seattle. A ramp takes us off to the right, to a merge with the BC-99. We drive by at fields, their crops recently harvested, then dip into a tunnel at the Fraser River. We surface into more farmland, tall hedges beside the freeway with the huge humps of greenhouses visible beyond them, a winery with rows of vines extending away from the freeway’s edge, pruned back to sticks.

  Knut asks about my parents’ health, though I told him they’re well in an email as recently as ten days ago.

  ‘I want to get your history straight,’ Janet says. ‘The history of the two of you. There was a football league in Australia, and your father put it together? Or tried to? I’ve heard Knut’s version of it.’

  My version turns out to corroborate Knut’s more than she expected. I keep it to the high- lights. The plague-story imperative feels less strong in this car.

  The sea appears in the distance to the right and draws closer as the border approaches. To the left are green-ro
ofed white houses among trees with rust-coloured leaves or branches that are already bare. Between the south- and north-bound lanes of the highway is a park with a white arch that’s surrounded by bunches of flowers, their dropped petals sprayed across the grass by the wind.

  The two south-bound lanes are narrowed to one by orange and white plastic barriers. Signs direct us to slow down, and we pass a parked patrol car with two armed Mounties who study us closely. One of them lifts a walkie-talkie to his mouth to report something—the reclining giant perhaps.

  ‘All this new security’s been hell for the BC Bud trade apparently,’ Janet says, dropping down a gear. ‘BC Bud’s a high-grade strain of marijuana people try to ship through from British Columbia to Washington State.’

  ‘But don’t think the illegal trade’s all one-sided.’ Knut adjusts himself so that he’s closer to facing me. ‘The US has plenty to offer, too. Cocaine and handguns go the other way.’

  The border is marked by a two-storey building set against the left edge of the road. It’s cream with sky-blue trim, and tinted windows with all their blinds closed. As we pull up at a set of temporary traf c lights, they change from red to green. We’re the only car. Somewhere, in a booth or behind one of those windows, eyes are watching the road.

  The plastic barriers give way to rows of yellow steel posts. Multiple cameras are mounted on the final pair, like a Pixar version of alien eyestalks, ready to scrutinise cars and everything in them. A broad awning extends from the building, allowing for several lanes of traffic and the faster processing of a different time. The only sign on the awning reads, ‘12’0’’ clearance’. This is the US, and the bilingual metric of Canada is behind us.

  Concrete barriers stream us towards a boom gate and the single operating booth. It’s mostly glass and would look underprotected compared with the rest of the border post if it weren’t for the two soldiers with machine guns, watching us blankly.

  ‘This will be particularly humourless,’ Knut warns me, his voice dropped, hand cupped over his mouth in a final attempt at comic effect before the humourlessness sets in.

  The border guard waves us to his window. He’s thirtyish with steel-framed glasses and hair buzzed short.

  I hand my passport through to Janet, who already has hers and Knut’s wedged under her thigh, along with copies of the Vancouver and Calgary writers’ festival programs. She stops at the window and pulls the handbrake on but keeps the engine running. She makes a pile of all the documents and, holding it between both hands, passes it up to the guard.

  ‘Two of us heading home to Bellingham, honey,’ she says, as though it’s any other day at a border between good neighbours. ‘Along with a friend from Australia who we just picked up at YVR. He’s a novelist, here for festivals in Canada.’

  I lean forward into the space between Janet’s headrest and the side pillar of the car. In other circumstances I would have wound my window down, but it doesn’t feel like the action to take with machine guns around.

  ‘And then on to New York,’ I tell him. ‘There’s a multiple entry visa in there, issued by the US consulate in Sydney.’

  He has my passport in his hand and he’s flicking through the pages. He comes to the photo page and glances at my face. He shifts in his seat to look past Janet. Knut isn’t making sense to him, with his rumpled clothes that suggest he’s hiding under bags, and a head further back in the dim interior than a front passenger’s head would normally be.

  The guard places my passport down on the festival programs and opens one of the others.

  ‘Mr Knutsen, are you injured?’ he asks.

  ‘Not recently,’ Knut says, working to extract any hint of glibness from his tone.

  The guard cups one hand around a micro- phone and says something inaudible. He straightens up, arm along the window ledge, the passport that must be Knut’s still in his hand.

  ‘Could you please step out of the vehicle, Mr Knutsen.’

  ‘That’s Professor Knutsen,’ Janet says, feeling the tide of civil rights rushing out.

  ‘He’s just doing his job,’ Knut says steadily, still tone-free, as he cautiously opens the door. ‘Isn’t that right, officer?’

  ‘Yes, sir. This is all routine right now. Could you and Mr Coates both please step out of the vehicle, have no contact with each other, and both place your hands on the roof of the vehicle.’

  Knut leaves his cane behind as he pulls himself forward on his now suspicious-looking modified seat. He swings one leg out of the car and, once its foot is steady on the ground, the other follows. As I open my door, another guard comes out of the building, a triangle of untucked shirt over his pants, scanner paddle in one hand. He’s older than the guy at the window, and looks like an ex-cop who knows his way around a doughnut.

  ‘Routine, sir,’ he says as he comes towards me, pulling at his belt with his free hand. He’s not to know we’ve just heard that. His head is shaved to blond stubble, not quite masking how much it’s receding.

  I have been through enough airports recently to know exactly how far apart to place my feet as he runs his paddle up and down my legs. This should get easier with repetition but it doesn’t.

  The car rocks towards me as Knut pushes himself out the other side, one hand on the door to keep his balance. The guard pauses, scanner near my shoulder as Knut’s full height reveals itself. Knut is focused on the manoeuvre, rising and turning, settling his feet and legs, bracing with his hands on the roof, one at the front of the car and one at the back.

  A gust of wind blows under the awning, flicking his collar and an undone cuff and tossing his hair into his face. One of his legs seems to buckle momentarily, but he corrects it as if it never happened and grabs the car roof a little harder, staring down through the sunroof into the interior.

  The guard’s paddle whoops at my wallet, which he asks me to take out and open.

  ‘So, you got baggage in the trunk?’ he says, his eyes still on my folded Canadian banknotes and wad of loyalty cards.

  It’s clear through the window that I do. Janet, who is monitoring every word, pops the trunk without being asked. The guard stands back as I swing the door open, then moves in to unzip my suitcase. He flips the lid up and works his way methodically through my clothes, books and notes, setting each pile back where he found it. It’s a process, done the same way, suitcase after suitcase, his hands—smaller hands than his bulky body suggests—sifting through shirts, socks, underwear, until they tap the frame and bottom of the case.

  At the airports, guards have taken photos with my camera to prove its inner workings are as they should be, but that doesn’t seem to be on his list. I’m entering the US, not boarding a plane. The stakes are different.

  ‘All good, sir,’ he says as he steps back, leaving me to close the lid.

  He walks around to Knut, paddle swinging in his right hand as his left hitches his belt again. There are two cars at the red light now, waiting their turn. He stops a metre or so away from where Knut is standing, puts his hands on his hips and looks Knut over from head to foot. It is not a necessary part of the process.

  ‘Am I okay to get back in the car now?’ I ask him, still standing where he’s left me.

  He twists to face me without moving his feet. ‘Yes, sir.’ He points the paddle towards my door.

  As I open it, he crouches and drops out of view.

  ‘It’s a leg,’ Knut says, looking down at him. ‘That thing you’re tapping. So’s the other one.’

  The guard says something I don’t hear properly, another stock response from the sound of it, a mild deflection straight out of the manual. As Knut hangs on to the roof like a huge stick insect, the guard works his way over him inch by inch, in case the new terrorism includes regular-sized people arriving as giants and smuggling who knows what in the pipes of their false limbs.

  There’s a family in the front car waiting at the lights, two kids pushing between the seats to see what’s going on. In the front passenger seat, the mother pulls a
camera from her bag, zooms in squarely on Knut and takes a few shots. The kids are watching him specifically. Their parents have called them through to look.

  The guard asks Knut to get a little lower, and I hear Knut say, ‘This is as low as I get. These legs don’t bend like they once did.’ It’s just between the two of them, no suggestion in the tone that he’s aware of an audience.

  Through the window, I can see the guard’s midsection. His hands go on his hips again. He changes his grip on his paddle, puts his other hand on the roof and pushes himself onto his toes to wave the scanner in the direction of Knut’s shoulders. In the car at the lights, the woman’s camera is lined up and shooting. If I could leave the vehicle, I would.

  ‘Okay, sir,’ the guard says, as he steps away from Knut. ‘You’re good to go.’

  I hear a sound that must be Knut thanking him, in the minimal way that’s programmed into all of us for situations like this, in which gratitude doesn’t apply. Knut stands up straight, stretches his back, then bends down to open his door. His jaw muscles are clenched and cheeks flushed as he folds himself up and eases his way inside. He lies back on his seat, closes his eyes for a moment and massages his thigh muscles.

  ‘Go, honey,’ he says quietly to Janet. He opens his eyes to look at her. ‘We’re good to go.’

  Janet puts the car into gear and we drive slowly into the US.

  ‘Was all that really necessary?’ she says.

  Knut treats the question as rhetorical. Or maybe he just wants to put it behind him, enough reminders already in his life of his gargantuan height, the creaks and aches it’s given him, the attention it draws.

  White lines, a concrete barrier and a guardrail channel us south. We are on the I-5 now, in Blaine, Washington State. The scrub by the roadside is knee-high, dry and purpling with the closing winter. For some distance, there is no way off the road, even as the suburbs of Blaine—shops, traffic lights, a Howard Johnson’s motel—appear beside and below us.