Order of Good Cheer

by Bill Gaston

  “It’s the Chamber of Commerce,” Drew’s father explained. “I was only happy to provide the space.” He smiled and, houseproud, with a hand indicated first one end of the long living room, then the other. He leaned into Andy with a stage whisper. “Maybe I’ll get to keep the leftover hooch,” then he gave both Drew and Andy a stage glare. “Not that there’ll be any, with you two here.”

  Mr. Madden had bright eyes, and charm. Andy figured he was PR’s most successful realtor largely because, like some politicians, he’d got so good at trying to act like a nice guy that, over the years, he’d actually become one. Drew’s mother had died twenty years ago when her car went into the Skeena as she drove back from Terrace. It was a straight stretch, no ice, suicide an unstated possibility. Drew had inherited his brooding nature from her.

  Mr. Madden cheerfully asked Drew if he’d be “stereo master” for the evening, and his son said okay and walked off, up to the bar, and got himself a bottle of beer. Andy watched him tilt it back for a long first sip.

  THE CUTE ONE’S name was Li and the other’s May. May was the more interesting to talk to, and not just because her English was better. Andy had been right in guessing that she had a sense of humour.

  Still standing in front of the couch, the Chinese Wheat Women hadn’t left each other’s side, and now Andy and Pauline chatted with them, just the four. The various town dignitaries and businessmen appeared satisfied for the time being that they had done their duty.

  May drank beer out of the bottle and Andy another glass of wine. To break the ice he asked her if she could stand the weather here. She told him she came from “a raining city” north of Shanghai and she found the weather here “okay.” He asked her if she’d ever heard of Dancing Monkey.

  “It’s a dish, a meal, that royalty would eat,” he explained. “I think in the south. Canton.”

  “It is monkey that they ate?”

  “Yes. It’s the most decadent thing I’ve ever heard of. I was wondering if it still might exist in, you know, certain circles. They’d have to be very corrupt, I think.”

  “Corrupt to eat monkeys, yes.”

  “Yes.”

  “But, no, I have not heard of this, ah, dish?”

  Andy asked her about her last name, which had sounded like, simply, E. He asked how she spelled it, and May told him that in her language she drew it with a character, and in English it was for her to choose.

  “I could spell it one E. But then I have a curious name. I think it would be a very ‘hip’ name, like the name of a rock star.”

  “I guess it would.”

  May’s eyes shone above her constant smile. Prone to the wordplay that non-native speakers sometimes are, she enjoyed her own humour. “I could spell it a single Y, which would be phonetically more correct, I think. You have ‘sill-y,’ and ‘Bill-y,’ and ‘y-clept.’”

  “Holy cow!”

  “Yes. ‘Hol-y.’”

  “No — you said ‘yclept.’”

  “This word is not so common I don’t think.”

  “People actually only say it to be funny.” She could be a friend, a PR girl, except for the way she kept nodding, almost a bow from the shoulders, every third or fourth word, a gesture of subservience maybe, even if it wasn’t felt.

  “But if I spell it Y, then people I think will pronounce it ‘why,’ which will be curious, to have a question for a name.”

  “May Why.”

  “Yes. I am being asked a question every time I am spoken to. It is like a joke. You have a very famous joke about the word ‘who.’ It is a baseball joke.”

  “You know that one?”

  “Yes. It is very, very funny. I think so. My English teacher used it in his class. He was from Canada, from Halifax. Grant. He told us his name and home were all we needed to know, to speak English. Glant flom Harifax. It took a very long time to teach my ear to teach my tongue.” Saying all of this, May had gently turned away from Li and dropped her voice, and Andy understood that she didn’t want to embarrass her friend, whose tongue was not as well taught.

  Li would likely not have heard in any case because she was talking with Art Tanner, an ex-businessman who now worked in government, keeping alive the province’s tradition of selling all its best trees to other countries.

  Tanner was talking loudly to her, as one does with foreigners.

  “So let me get this straight. Li? Yes, Li. Now, Roger over there — Mr. Sorenson over there says — You say you’re ‘a student’?”

  “Yes, we here studying nature of sistah city.” Li’s foreignness had her bring a hand to her mouth and shield it when she grew unsure. “And shipping, to China. Ah, relationship of —”

  “You’re a student. A university student.”

  “Ah, yes. University in Shanghai. Study of relationship, for instance, hypothetical, of drought in Alberta, plus market price grain, equal amount of tons shipping to China. Many factor. Very very many factor.”

  “You don’t work for a corporation then?”

  “Ah, no no.”

  “You don’t work for your government either?”

  “Yes. Our government, Chinese government, give us grant, to study these, ah, relationship.” She pronounced “Chinese government” as one fast word. “You know, Prince Rupert is seven hundred eighty kilometres close, more close, to ports in China than —”

  “We’re aware of that. So you’re here to — While you’re here, is there any way you can, let’s say, influence —”

  Art Tanner had turned two shades darker during this exchange. Andy could see that all he really wanted to ask was, Is there any point in any of us talking to you?

  “Let me try this. Will your ‘study,’ possibly bring, an increase, of business, of ‘shipping,’ to Prince Rupert?”

  “Ah-yes. If our work is, you say, ‘publish,’ and Chinese government see, then, yes, more shipping very possible. Very good.”

  Meanwhile, May E was trying puns on Pauline, and Andy decided she was mostly frivolous. Li was mostly shallow, and Art Tanner mostly selfish. Andy wondered what he mostly was. He knew he was gazing at the wall of beige drapes and that he couldn’t pull his gaze away, staring so thoroughly into the wavy scalloping that he could feel his brain move with it. He was wet with perspiration. Maybe it was these new clothes.

  Art Tanner regarded Li as if gauging whether she might still be in any way worth his while. Apparently she was. His face collapsed then rebuilt itself to smile in an altogether different way, a less businesslike way, and he asked if he could fill her half-full glass.

  SOMEWHERE IN THE thick of the evening the banquet developed a ragged and angry feel. It had lost dignity, if it ever had any, so as to be almost fitting when someone threw up in the hall bathroom. There was little laughter now and people started trickling out. Andy couldn’t say if it was the fault of Leonard’s yelling at Worthington, or if the Wheat Women’s impotence had blunted the horny commercial spirit. Or it might just have been the food. Andy had already decided it was the food. It wasn’t horrible but it was supposed to have been good. Food could make you groan and laugh. Staring at the half-full trays of chicken à la king and dry meatballs, Andy thought of yesterday’s reading, of Champlain, of changing a colony’s mood with brilliantly strange food, with celebration for its own sake. And he might have cured scurvy! The livers of seal and porpoise had vitamin C in them, but only if freshly killed, and they also ate the green stomach contents of moose. In a fantastic accident, Champlain had unwittingly also cured their plague.

  Leonard had started yelling when Andy was in the kitchen phoning his mother. She’d called the party with a message for Andy, simply that “they found her.” Andy wanted to make sure that they found her healthy, and to see about his mother too. He was calling just as Leonard came into the kitchen, seething, followed by Ken Worthington, the manager from the Hickory Pit. Andy had noticed Worthington flitting in and out of the party, checking on the food table and beer supply, and not only whispering admonishments to th
e guy carving the baron of beef but straightening his chef’s hat. Apparently Worthington was the caterer. In fact Andy thought he recognized the rib sauce smothering tonight’s “Barbecue Winglettes.”

  His mother answered and, yes, Marie Schultz was alive and well. Behind him, Andy heard Leonard saying something about the toughest roast beef he’d ever had. Then something about his niece and nephew. Andy suspected that Leonard mostly used “niece” and “nephew” and “brother” in their idealized sense.

  “But no,” Andy’s mom said softly, “she’s not well and she’s not the same.” Laura’s mother had walked all the way out to Oliver Lake Park, where the police found her sitting at a picnic table, under that new shelter the Rotary Club had built. They didn’t know how long she’d been sitting there by herself in the dark, frightened, and she didn’t know either.

  “You sound really tired, Mom. You should try to get a good sleep.” Behind him, Ken Worthington and Leonard were debating the ethics of minimum wage.

  “We’re in a dither here. Poor Marie was just happy to be home, and we’ve upset her.”

  Andy asked her what she meant.

  “We’re angry, dear. And we’ve told her that we don’t know what to do with her.” She allowed herself a long pause and then spoke slowly but with the weight of a milestone in her voice. “We’ve told her, that we don’t know, what we’re going to do.”

  Andy said nothing could be decided tonight and at least they’d found her and they all needed sleep. His mother pointed out that tomorrow was another day. They said goodnight.

  “Andy.” Leonard was not looking his way but he was being hailed. “We need your opinion on salmon. Come settle something.”

  “I’m no foodie.” But Andy went to stand by the two men, both of whom were portly, and black-mustachioed, but while one was unidentifiable in an off-the-rack grey suit, the other wore jeans, a Tibetan felt vest, and what he called his “headdress,” a single eagle feather attached to his ponytail, that bounced against his back when he got this animated.

  “Tell me,” Leonard said to Andy while he looked Worthington in the eye. “Would you say the Chinese are famous for fresh fish?”

  “Um. I guess.” They were a people largely lacking refrigeration, but sure. They kept carp in pools. Actually they dried most of their fish. And there’d been a nasty taint to some squid he’d had at the Jade last month. Likely Leonard was thinking of Japan. “Sure,” he added.

  “So if you want to impress Chinese dignitaries with fish, would you say that freshness is something you shoot for?”

  Worthington snorted at the “dignitaries,” but chose anyway to address Leonard’s logic, namely his failure to mention the closure and ban on fresh seafood until the mystery of the fishkill had been solved.

  “Whoa.” Leonard pointed both hands, like six-shooters, at Worthington. “Closure was lifted two days ago. You had time to —”

  “One day. The boats haven’t even gone —”

  “The salmon are in the rivers. You want fresh salmon, you talk to someone like me. You going to make this thing work, you need fresh. It’s your job to get it.”

  “Don’t tell me my job.”

  “That frozen sockeye was cooked dry, and putting a sauce on it, that slippery fuckin’ hollandaise —”

  “Béchamel sauce. Gimme a break.”

  “— only makes dry fish feel dryer and doesn’t fool anybody, and those fuckin’ frozen prawns were farmed ones from China.”

  “And was a nice touch. You know, ‘China.’ Trade. As in, we’re already doing it. ‘Trade.’ As in, yes, we catch prawns here too, but look what we eat: yours.”

  “Frozen, farmed, Chinese. You know why they’re the cheapest ones in the store? You know there’s health warnings on that shit? They use shit water, and to keep the shit alive they pump in crap galore, unbelievable, they inject the fuckin’ hormones with antibiotics to keep the fuckin’ crap out of the — You know what night soil is?”

  “All imports are —”

  “They use human shit to fertilize everything. The fish farmers and all their fat drunken uncles stumble out at night and reef down their fuckin’ black pyjamas to take a dump in the family prawn tank.”

  Ken Worthington lifted a single hand by way of goodbye, or maybe “I’ve had it,” and turned to leave. Andy felt bad for him. He was in the wrong business, because he had less a feel for food than for money, and here he was moonlighting to make ends meet, cutting a few corners. Palming his way out the saloon-style door, Worthington looked mostly tired.

  Leonard seemed tired too as he grabbed a beer for both of them from the fridge. Side by side they leaned back against the kitchen counter.

  “What’s with Drew?” Leonard asked, mostly to the floor. “He looks messed tonight.”

  Andy said he didn’t know. He could say he was ignoring his head-Betty, but didn’t want to explain a word game. He asked Leonard why the tilt with Ken Worthington, and Leonard said he’d arranged the jobs for Grace and Neil — his niece and nephew — and this catering business could really work out, it could get bigger and make jobs for more kids. Leonard tried to get Andy to agree that the food was abysmal.

  “It’s not memorable, no.”

  “It’s fuckin’ sad. There’s no excuse. You try that barbeque sauce?”

  “It’s sad.”

  “And Grace needs something good in her life right now.”

  Andy pictured the dead-eyed girl out there, clumsily tilting wine into businessmen’s glasses. “She from the north?”

  Leonard nodded. He had relatives in the villages to the north and south, both accessible only by boat. The village to the north was worse in terms of what Leonard generally called “family values.”

  “Know what they’re doing there now? They get cranked on meth and — You know extreme fighting? Those shows on cable?”

  Andy asked if he meant that caged fighting with no gloves, where you could knee and elbow and they got all bloody, squeezed up against the chicken wire. It was sometimes on at the Legion if there was no hockey.

  “They get high and they extreme fight. With their friends, man. They do a fuckin’ fight club.” He implored Andy with the saddest small eyes, and Andy could see the niece in that face. “They try and beat up their brother. Their best friend. They do meth and try to kill each other. Brothers.”

  “Jesus.”

  “It’s gotten fuckin’ primitive, man. It’s that satellite tv. Bad news.”

  “Where’s Grace stay?”

  “With her aunt.” Leonard began violently shaking his head at the next thought. “You know, her brother, sixteen, seventeen, he’s cooking meth in his bedroom, almost killed them all, and his father doesn’t give a shit? Does nothing?”

  “Did it catch fire?”

  “I don’t know, it was fumes or something. The thing is they don’t care. Father’s a selfish asshole. Mother doesn’t metabolize.”

  This was Leonard’s term for a drunk. He liked seeing alcoholism as purely physiological, to remove all judgement.

  “Speaking of which”— he brought his empty beer to his face and peered in —“to beer or not to beer, that be the question.”

  “Charter tomorrow?”

  “Bears.”

  Taking tourists on the long run up-inlet he didn’t have to leave as early as with a fishing charter, but still early. He didn’t care much for grizzly watching. It demanded noiselessness once within two hundred yards. The Khutzeymateen sanctuary had the world’s densest grizzly population and you could generally count on some to be feeding on the shore grass, but you had to be delicate. Leonard had to cut the engine and drift in with not even a clink from binoculars set down. Andy had come along a few times to help, basically to make coffee and hand out sandwiches. He didn’t love grizzlies himself. They hated humans and were kind of insane, as animals go. Through a complex lineage tree they were related to a large, evil pig. He suspected Leonard needed his help less than his company, so he’d feel less lonely when the
tourists complained among themselves that this “close encounter” with the bears just didn’t seem that close, nothing like what you could see at home on high-def. Leonard once told Andy that most people with the money to afford his charter were automatically a bit afraid of him not only because he was Indian, but because by rights he owned everything they could see and deep down they knew it. He’d also told Andy, somewhat dramatically, that when passing Metlakatla he wouldn’t announce that the abandoned village was once the site of the largest church north of San Francisco and west of Chicago, because he didn’t want to reveal where his people had first been enslaved.

  “Texans,” Leonard added, about tomorrow. For some reason Leonard liked Texans.

  Andy remembered Leonard’s words to Worthington, “You talk to someone like me,” and had an idea.

  “Len, could you get some wild food, no matter what time of year?”

  “Sure. Maybe. Like what?”

  “I’d pay for it and everything. I’m thinking mussels, the big —”

  “West coast of Haida Gwaii. Where it’s crazy stormy they grow the size of dance slippers. Read that in a book, ‘mussels the size of dance slippers.’ ”

  “Great.”

  “But they’d have to be flown in. Which shouldn’t be a problem. I’ve got a buddy supplies a resort out that way. How many pounds you want?”

  “I’m just thinking. How soon would you have to know in advance?”

  “I dunno, a week?”

  “How about a moose?”

  “You want a moose?”

  “‘Some’ moose.”

  “Well, it’s out of season, you know.”

  “That’s why”—Andy smiled —“I’m talking to someone like you.”

  Leonard nodded sombrely at this. “Okay.”

  “But it would have to be fresh. Not frozen.”