by Bill Gaston
“You know that R. Crumb? The old hippie cartoon guy?”
“I love R. Crumb.” He hadn’t seen R. Crumb in a while, except that film about him. He and Drew had seen it together.
“It depressed him.”
“It did?”
“I think because R. Crumb was in The New Yorker at all.”
“Huh.” He could see being disappointed by it, but not depressed. And why not spread the dark joys of R. Crumb to the conservative masses? Still, you could understand the nostalgic underground strand Drew was clinging to.
They walked a few more strides before Pauline asked him what he thought Drew was depressed about.
“I don’t know. He does seem sort of down.” “Down” had always been Drew’s way, though. Andy pictured, maybe they were twelve, Drew pulling his face back from a new microscope, having had a gaze at hairy scooting things, and on his face was knowledge that all life was hungry in a dangerous way, malevolent, and fundamentally wrong. “Down” was something Drew generally brought to the table. Though maybe he’d been farther down of late, come to think of it. He’d been meaning to lend Drew that book on S.A.D. It said excess melatonin might be the culprit, which was surprising, as was the fact that northern latitudes didn’t appear to cause it, despite the twelve percent of Inuit who —
“And if he’s suicidal,” said Pauline, “me being there won’t make a bit of difference.”
“What?”
“Okay.” Pauline stopped and threw her hands up as if warding off a crowd. “Forget that. I didn’t say it. Mistake.”
“Jesus.”
“You can’t help thinking about everything, you know?”
“Has he said something?”
“Forget it. I’m more likely to kill myself.”
“Are you thinking about his mother? Because —”
“She fell asleep at the wheel.”
“True.” Who knew what Drew thought. He wouldn’t talk about his mother, and what could be more telling than that?
“It’s funny but—” Pauline was suddenly quite cheerful now. “It’s not funny, but he thinks you’re depressed too.”
“Me?”
“Maybe it’s, when you’re depressed, you think everyone’s depressed.”
“He thinks I’m depressed?”
From Pauline’s look it seemed she was going to ask, Well, aren’t you? Instead she said, “He calls it ‘your rut.’ I think it’s the solitary life you lead that worries him. Actually”— Pauline squeezed his hand, though it was more timid spasm than squeeze—“I guess we both worry about you sometimes. But hey—” She turned to him and laughed. “This isn’t about you!”
He spotted his car a block away looking too wedged in between a white pickup and a yellow hybrid taxi. They were done talking, but Pauline quickly asked him not to mention the breaking up to anyone because they hadn’t told Chris yet. Andy said he’d thought Chris was still in Calgary, and Pauline said he was but that she didn’t want him hearing it from friends over the phone. Barely sixteen, a month before grade eleven exams, Chris had driven to Calgary with an older friend who’d taken his father’s truck without permission. When the father threatened to press charges the friend came back with the truck, but Chris stayed. He was flipping burgers, or that was how Drew described it to Andy. “Doing anything he has to do to stay away.” According to Drew, Chris might have got a U.S. scholarship in either hockey or tennis, and Chris’s response to this kind of encouragement had been to drop competitive sports. To hear Drew tell it, his son dropped sports because of Drew’s encouragement. Now even high school was a question mark. Andy liked Chris. He’d met him when Chris was a day old, and Andy was probably the closest Chris had to an uncle. He’d been Chris’s fellow student when Drew taught them both to fly-fish. And Drew was right — Chris had been the normal little kid, eager for Dad’s attentions. Andy had watched him hit puberty and grow into a wise little cynic, not unlike Dad, but even Dad fell under his freshly baleful gaze. Andy didn’t know if Chris had drug issues, but he looked the type, with his knowing eyes and careless hair and acid-wit T-shirts. In any case, Chris was probably the main reason for Drew’s depression and no need to state the obvious to Pauline. If Andy had seen Drew tear up on the subject of Chris, imagine what she’d seen.
Before they climbed into the car, Pauline smiled at Andy over the black mirror of the car’s roof. “Anyway I don’t know. It just might be better to be away from each other. We’re both wondering what that might feel like.”
Pauline didn’t care to drive the Mustang back to Andy’s.
IT BEING WEDNESDAY, on the way to the Wheat Women party Andy dropped by his mother’s for an abbreviated visit. He was ready for her to see him in his black clothes, disapprove, and pronounce something in singsong like, “But clothes don’t make the man,” absolving him.
He was hardly noticed. Laura’s mother had gone for her walk but failed to return. She’d been gone two hours, it was dark, and now raining. They’d all been out looking, and Doris’s daughter’s husband still was, and they’d just called the police. The dining table was set for four and centred by a bucket of chicken, its famous smell of spiced fat thick in the room. Coleslaw and French fries had been put into bowls and serving spoons laid out, but nothing had been touched. Andy’s mom seemed particularly stricken. She looked grey and her eyes betrayed that she’d been crying. Andy didn’t think he’d seen her like this since his father died, and this bothered him, the similar weight given his father and Mrs. Schultz.
He wanted to ask if Laura had been called yet.
“Is this the longest she’s wandered off?” he asked instead.
“I think so. But it just feels wrong. Something’s wrong this time.”
“Well let’s hope she rolls up in a taxi at any moment.”
“It feels different. We all agree.” His mom looked over to Rita, who said “Mmhmm” without looking up from leafing through the phone book. Doris agreed from her living-room chair.
“We drilled her,” said Andy’s mom. “We made her promise and promise to call us. Her coat pocket has our phone number, her purse has our phone number, her wallet has our phone number. We told her to phone, phone, phone. If she forgot that, I swear she’ll forget to breathe.”
Andy didn’t know what to say so he said nothing.
“But you look very nice, dear.” His mother was looking at him down her nose. “Very ‘of a sort.’ For your party. Your shoes especially.”
“Thanks.”
“Doesn’t he look good?” His mother didn’t raise her voice but aimed the inflection at Rita and Doris. Doris responded that he looked very nice, and Rita said so too, but without looking up from flipping her Yellow Pages, which stung Andy a little.
“Maybe I could go back for my car and do some looking too.”
“No, dear, you have a party to go to. We’ve checked all the places we can think of, and now the police are checking . . . some of the ‘other’ places.”
Places a body might be found, Andy understood.
“Well, this is really a drag.”
“It is, dear.”
He watched his mother shake her head, for herself only, not performing. She said, barely audible, “Either way, it’s the end.”
Doris scampered up to Andy apropos of nothing and, smiling, asked if he wanted some chicken. Andy thanked her and explained that he’d be eating at the party. Rita, funny and his friend again, did a voice to ask Doris “why would he want trailer-trash chicken when his party’s hoidy-toidy catered?”
But the room sobered quickly. Not even tea was being offered so Andy decided it was time. He wished them luck in finding Mrs. Schultz. He said he felt guilty going off to have fun. He added that he had spoken with a contractor about building a seawall. His mother nodded and said that was good to hear, but she was plainly bound up in her worry. Andy hadn’t seen her like this. He went to hug her but she didn’t get up. She raised her cheek for a kiss, distracted, hardly aware of his lips. To his back she
said, “Even the best of friends must part.”
THE TWO CHINESE women did look twenty. Andy sipped a glass of ice-cold Aussie shiraz and watched them, surrounded by a circle of smiling older men in suits. It was funny to think that commerce fuelled this swarm and not the expected other. One was very cute, though her face was big and almost perfectly round. Like a poem that rhymed, she was pretty but seemed limited. The other had a horse face but she looked kind, and you could see her sense of humour. They both wore a skirt and matching blazer — the pretty one’s navy, the other’s tan. Both up on high heels. Neither tapped a foot to the Eagles song “Hotel California,” a bizarre selection Andy thought at first, but then not, given the makeup of the crowd. Counting back, he realized the song was as old as he was, and offensive to none.
Though all the other men kept their shoes on Andy had taken his off by the door because after his walk in the rain he pictured the odd spongy soles of his new shoes retaining a dirt stew and depositing it into Mr. Madden’s cream carpets. And shoeless he would loom a little less over the Chinese women. He sipped and watched them from the edge of the foyer. He heard “beautiful city” in a tortured accent from the cute one, while the other — who wore a wooden Haida comb in her hair — kept saying “shipping.”
Andy would approach the women soon. If they asked him, he could tell them about Prince Rupert. It wasn’t like he’d boned up but, sure, he’d gathered his thoughts. First he’d ask them, Did you know that Prince Rupert exists because of Asia?
He’d say that even as a boy he found it funny that on maps of the west coast of North America, the only dots were L.A., San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, and Prince Rupert. Sometimes Portland would be there, sometimes Anchorage. Why Prince Rupert? Because — and the funny one might like this — Prince Rupert was supposed to be big. Mapmakers were anticipating PR to earn its dot. Prince Rupert was supposed to be Canada’s grain spigot. There was supposed to be a giant lineup of ships out there.
He’d enjoy telling them that Prince Rupert was an invention, born in 1908, when Mrs. Eleanor M. MacDonald of Winnipeg, Manitoba, won the $250 prize for her suggestion of “Prince Rupert” as the name for the town being built at the end of the new national rail line on Canada’s northern west coast. She chose the name because Prince Rupert was the first governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, a cousin of King Charles ii, and also she liked his looks.
Andy would add that Charles Melville Hays built the rail line after noticing, on a map of the world, how British Columbia toppled westward the farther north one went, meaning northern B.C. was hundreds of miles closer to Asia, miles that would lure any shipping company wanting to save fuel. In 1904 his engineers declared the base of Kaien Island, ninety miles south of Ketchikan, Alaska, to be one of the world’s finest deep-sea harbours — ice-free year round and a minimum channel depth of one hundred feet. In 1908 the rail line was finished, two hundred white people lived on-site, and Mrs. MacDonald won her contest. In 1910 Prince Rupert was incorporated as a city. In 1912 Charles Hays died on the Titanic.
Andy would ask the Chinese Wheat Women if they’d seen the ten-foot-tall sign perched five miles out of town on a scenic bluff overlooking the Skeena. Perhaps the distances were a little pathetic for being hand-painted.
Tokyo, 3830
Vladivostok, 3928
Panama Canal, 4303
Shanghai, 4642
Hong Kong, 5286
Halifax, 6641
Sydney, 6671
Calcutta, 8332
London (England), 9104
Andy could explain, if they were still nodding, that these destinations remained dreams. In 1990 Prince Rupert had a population of twenty thousand. Today there were seven thousand fewer. And if they were at all intuitive, the Chinese Wheat Women might already have noticed how, despite the smiling and laughing, every guest here looked hungry. The Wheat Women, especially the non-cute one, might link it to all this rain, and she’d be partly right. She might also notice another shared feature, an impatient lean to the body, something like a pugilistic barfly’s chin sticking out. The Wheat Women would do well to prepare themselves.
Andy’s glass was empty, a perfect excuse not to approach them just yet. He pivoted on new socks in the direction of the bar. He wondered if they knew about the Highway of Tears. Probably they did, probably they read the local newspaper and knew the death count had just risen from twelve to thirteen, all Native girls — who didn’t look that unlike the Wheat Women — who had disappeared on the highway to Prince George after sticking out their thumbs not more than a mile from this house. But they might not know about the Iron Chink, not unless they’d toured the Cannery Museum. A hundred years ago, when the salmon were limitless and Chinese cannery workers stood shoulder to shoulder moving fish down the line for one to gut, one to scale, one to fin, one to cut in chunks, and one to stuff in a can, along came a machine that could do the work of all of them. And, as the cannery owners congratulated themselves, they didn’t have to feed it. But they did give it a name.
ANDY WAS STANDING in a small line for a refill of shiraz from the bartender, a sad-eyed and shirt-and-tie-garbed Tsimshian girl nearer fourteen than nineteen, when Drew, Pauline, and Leonard arrived. Seeing Leonard, Andy recognized the girl to be one of his innumerable nieces, and now he understood Leonard’s presence here too. Leonard sometimes used events like this to get loud about the white man’s corporate intentions, and Andy hoped he would keep his mouth shut. With the Highway of Tears again in the news, things could escalate. In any case, as the Leonard-niece awkwardly topped up his glass, Andy supposed this girl got her job in the first place because of Leonard. Further evidence that this girl got her job as someone’s favour was an ice-tub full of not only white wine but also the red. Andy tipped forward to whisper that she should get those reds up on the table because they should be room temperature, and the girl complied, dead-faced, as she likely would have had he been a strange man in a bathrobe in off the street, asking her to hand over ten bottles of wine. He saw that her earlobes were freshly pierced and the holes, one of which was off-centre, were inflamed and swollen closed.
Drew didn’t hang up his coat before striding into the living room to kneel at his father’s stereo. The Eagles disc was near its end but Drew took it out to put in — Andy could see when he reached his friend’s side — a Miles Davis. Drew knew that the legs beside his head were Andy’s.
“He won’t even know the diff,” Drew said quietly, but with the weight of judgement. “Nice duds,” he said to the new black pants beside his face, this judgement a little harder to gauge. From the speakers a trumpet opened with strangled poop, poop, poops, that Davis sound.
Funny how, kneeling there, Drew looked the teenager again, easily playing the role of intolerant son in Dad’s house. Andy couldn’t help but think of Drew and his own son, Chris, and what goes around comes around. Though it wasn’t the same — Chris wouldn’t even talk to Drew, and here Drew had willingly come to his father’s party.
Andy deliberately kept his eyes from the mantel and its central picture not three feet away, a depressing photo if you knew what to look for: a blowup of Drew, Pauline, and twelve-year-old Chris posed outside Arthur Ashe Stadium in New York, Chris holding up the tennis ball Pete Sampras had smacked into the stands. Apparently Chris, who it turned out liked playing tennis but not watching it, had never not been a jet-lagged and whiney mess the whole trip. In this picture, much celebrated by Mr. Madden because the trip to the U.S. Open had been his gift to them, Chris glowered. Drew looked only wary (he’d told Andy the guy taking their picture was weird and Drew was wondering if he’d get his camera back). And there, with her arm around his waist, was Pauline — her smile way too happy, inaccurate.
Andy hadn’t seen his friend for a week, what with Drew’s absence from work and then a shift change. He cupped Drew’s shoulder, said hi, and offered him his untouched glass of merlot.
“Ah, man, I’m on the wagon.” Drew shrugged, smiling, and here his judgement was d
irected at himself.
“Holy cow. This is a first.”
“It wasn’t helping the situation.” Drew met Andy’s eyes and it passed between them that he knew Andy and Pauline had talked.
“Well, maybe it will,” Andy offered, nodding. Surprising himself with an expression at least ten years gone, he added, “Gotta listen to the head-Betty, I guess.” Somehow the Betty Ford Clinic had joined your inner voice of guilt to become your head-Betty, who kept tabs on your drinking.
“Yeah, well, who knows.”
Andy snatched his wine back to his chest. “Can’t have it anyway because it’s mine.” He took a sloppy sip. In the middle of this little gesture he knew he’d wanted to have a beer with Drew, and a chat, a heart-to-heart. A beer would’ve been the only way it would happen.
“Andrew! Good to see you!”
Drew’s father was at his elbow and they shook hands. Mr. Madden was the only person who called Andy Andrew, save for his mother, who might use it on occasions like his birthday, as if to remind him of his actual name. Drew and Andy were both Andrews as kids, and everyone agreed that because of their obvious close friendship, to avoid confusion one must became Drew and the other Andy. Apparently he and Drew chose. Neither had recollection of any of this, and neither got excited when any parent hauled out the anecdote. And when Mr. Madden called him “Andrew,” Andy always got the slight sense he was being reminded that his own son had been made to change his name furthest and that Andy had been done a favour.
“Nice spread,” Andy said, smiling at the cloth-draped table holding platters of hot and cold hors d’oeuvres. (He saw one was chicken à la king in puff pastry, which he hated.) A longer table was just now being set up with warming trays and Sterno pots. A Native man of about twenty-five, with one of those bodies that is wide face-on but almost skinny in profile, wearing white apron and tall chef’s hat, lugged a stainless-steel bin and placed it in its cradle over the lit flame. Andy recognized the man as another of Leonard’s relatives.