Brian and I exchanged looks. “Actually, yes,” I said.
“So you understand,” said Elijah.
Oh yes. “What happened next?” I asked.
“I got in my pickup and headed out for the reserve so I could tell the elders.”
“The who?”
“The elders. The tribal elders. At the reserve down at Old Wives Lake.”
“And what did the elders do?” Brian asked.
“They filed a claim on that part of the land, saying it was the site of an ancient Indian burial,” Elijah replied. “You tell it from here,” he muttered to Brian, his voice thickening. “You know. What I told you.”
Brian nodded and, reaching out, squeezed his arm. Ugh. He turned to me. “Everything came to a halt,” Brian told me. “Development was frozen. A couple of years later, Big Sky negotiated a deal with the tribe; money changed hands and Big Sky ended up building their golf course after all, but around the grave. They planted a bunch of berry bushes around what had been the wallow. What kind of bushes, Elijah?”
“Saskatoon bushes,” muttered Elijah.
“They also put up a marker with a plaque, saying it was an ancient Assiniboine burial site. But Elijah here, he’s had a pretty hard time because of that grave.” He glanced sympathetically at Elijah, who I was pretty sure was fighting back tears.
“Got sacked,” Elijah said roughly. He shook his head. “Haven’t worked since. Word gets out, you know. Nobody hires a whistle-blower. I lost everything. I was making it good in the white man’s world. Then I wasn’t. Then I was a failure.” He shrugged. “Too ashamed to go back home to the rez, so I stayed here, where I got nothing, where I am nothing. And it’s gone downhill from there.” Bending down, he stroked the dog’s bumpy head intently. She lifted her muzzle and gazed up at him in mute canine devotion. For an instant it was like one of those Hallmark moments, all in soft focus and entitled “Man’s Best Friend.” Tears started to my eyes. Don’t be ridiculous, I chided myself. Keep it real. You’re looking at a wino and a stray, a bum and a mutt, that’s all.
Brian glanced over at me. “Got what you need?”
I nodded.
“OK then.” He turned to Elijah. “Hey, Elijah?”
Elijah looked up, blinking. His heavy-lidded, bloodshot eyes shone wetly. Brian reached into one of the pockets of his vest, retrieved his wallet, and handed Elijah what looked like a pretty big wad of cash.
Elijah gazed at it raptly, like it was the keys to the kingdom or something. “Hey, man, thanks.”
“Don’t mention it,” said Brian. “Get something to eat. Get Lois a nice bone.”
“I will, man. I will.” Elijah stood and tugged on the improvised leash. Lois wobbled to her feet.
“Better yet, why don’t you go back to the rez?” Brian suggested. “Go home. Get straight. You’ve got no reason to be ashamed. You kept the grave of one of your ancestors from being desecrated, even though it cost you big time. In my books, that makes you a hero.”
Elijah shook his head. “I don’t know, man. I don’t know if I can. Get straight, I mean. It’s been a long time. Maybe in another lifetime.”
“Just think about it. OK?”
“Sure, man,” Elijah mumbled. “Can’t thank you enough. C’mon, Lois.” Together they shuffled from the room and made their way down the hall. A moment later, the elevator bell dinged.
“How much did you give him, anyway?”
“Three hundred,” replied Brian. He pushed his fingers through his hair, spiking it.
“Brian! He’ll just use it to buy alcohol or drugs.”
“Let him,” said Brian. “The way I look at it, Uncle Qianfu’s grave – if it is Uncle Qianfu’s grave – may have cost the poor guy the best part of what was shaping up to be a decent life. And for what? For what could turn out to be someone else’s ancestor’s bones.”
“Still.” I hated the thought of Elijah Otter blowing that three hundred dollars. I much preferred the thought of me hoarding it.
“Look at it this way, Scrooge McDuck. If Elijah Otter hadn’t blown the whistle on that grave, whoever’s buried there would have ended up in some landfill somewhere. And if that somebody was Qianfu, then good luck finding him EVER. The way I figure it, we owe Elijah big time. In any case, I wish we could do more for him.” He studied the floor for a moment, his brow furrowed. I had never seen him like this – so serious.
“You gave him money,” I pointed out. “What more can you do? You can’t help people who won’t help themselves.”
He shook his head. “It’s not that simple, Randi. Sometimes people need someone to believe in them.” He sat down on the chair Elijah had just vacated and, placing his elbows on his knees, cupped his forehead in his hands.
“Get up! Get up!” I cried.
“What?”
“That chair! You don’t want to sit there. It might be infested.”
“Infested with what?”
“I don’t know. Bedbugs? Fleas? Head lice? Cooties?”
“Because Elijah sat here? Wow.” The look on Brian’s face was … well, it didn’t do much for my self-esteem. “You certainly could never be described as a bleeding heart. Anybody ever tell you that?”
I felt both irritated and really bad – irritated because I was itching to get to work, but Brian was going all sensitivo hobophile on me; bad because, well, it’s pretty clear I’m a jerk. “Look, Brian,” I said, “I’m sorry I’m not a more sympathetic person. I’ll try to be better. But we have a job to do. Let’s do it, OK?”
“Yeah, sure.” He roused himself as a dog will, shaking itself awake. “Let’s do it. What’s first?”
“Well, for starters, there’s no way we can know for certain that it’s Qianfu buried there and not some random person. Right?”
“We could run a DNA test on the bones once we’ve dug them up,” replied Brian. “Apart from that, no. We just have to chance it. The circumstantial evidence is pretty compelling though. I’d say it’s worth a shot.”
“I’d say it’s not only our best shot, it’s our only shot,” I agreed. “So how about starting with the Land Registry? Since all of this happened during the homesteading period – between 1872 and 1930 – I’m going to try the Saskatchewan Homestead Index first.” I entered the name “Rawlins” and up popped a file number: 1212130. “Yes!” I clicked on the file number, then whistled through my teeth. “Double score. Look at this.” Without taking my eyes off the Zypad’s screen, I patted the bed beside me. Brian sat down and peered at the screen. I refrained from pointing out that whatever critters had made the journey with him from chair to bed were now on this bed. Instead, I made a mental note to sleep in the other bed. “See?” I pointed to the screen. “Where Highway 363 makes that ninety-degree turn, that’s the farm, all ninety-four acres of it. See the change in ownership that happened back in 2001 – a single title transfer from Peter W. Rawlins to Big Sky Golf Course Development?”
“So far, so good.”
“All Native land claims and related locks were geo-coded into the Geological Survey years ago, and from there they were incorporated into the Geographic Web layer of Google Earth. Even if the claims are resolved, they stay in the database. All we need are the coordinates of the Rawlins property and we should be able to pinpoint the location of the grave to within a few yards.”
“And how do we do that?”
I smiled. “Observe the master.” Switching apps to Google Earth, I typed in the address, zoomed in to street level, and enabled the Labels layer. I clicked on the Native Land Claims icon – a single red feather. Up it came, right where it should be. I pulled open the drawer in the bedside table, extracted a piece of aged yellow hotel stationery, copied down the numbers, and showed them to Brian. “Ta-da.”
“Ta-da what?”
“Ta-da! Here we have the grave’s latitude, ladies and gentlemen: fifty degrees, twenty-two minutes, and thirty-six seconds north; and the longitude: one hundred and five degrees, forty-one minutes, and four second
s west.”
“That’s cool in theory, but how do we go about finding this location in the real world?”
“Through the magic of GPS,” I replied. “We dial the coordinates into our I-spex and let them lead us straight to where we have to dig.”
Brian snapped his fingers. “I just remembered something.”
“What?”
“Base maps.”
“Excuse me?”
“Base maps,” he repeated. “Every golf course has one. It’s a data file containing information specific to that particular course – data like tree canopies, bodies of water, watercourses, roads, property lines, utilities, toilets, the distance between tees … that sort of thing.”
“What about it?”
“It’s geo-coded data, genius. We download it from the International Golf Course Database, then layer it over our coordinates using Google Earth and, voilà, we know exactly where the grave is in relation to Weeping Birches’ other features.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “We already know where the grave is.”
“We know its latitude and longitude, but we don’t know what hole it’s near, or sand trap, or water feature. For that we need the I-spex, and no golf course lets you use any kind of HMD unit because of all the injuries from registration errors. You remember. People kept hitting other people in the head with balls.”
I stared at him. “How do you know this stuff?”
“I don’t only torture trees. I’m a landscaper too.”
“Well, hey, I guess it’s worth a shot.” I typed the address into Google’s search field and soon located the Weeping Birches base map, imported it into Google Earth, and layered it over the grave’s coordinates. I zoomed in.
“There it is,” said Brian. “Do you see? Right there. Just beyond the fourth hole. So how are we going to handle the logistics?”
I looked at him. “What do you mean by ‘logistics’?”
“Like the fact that the grave is in a working golf course full of people playing golf – hello! As far as the law is concerned, this matter has been well and truly settled.”
“I don’t know. We notify the authorities, I guess.”
He laughed. “You think two sixteen-year-olds from out of town can just waltz in to whoever and explain that Elijah and his tribal elders might have been mistaken and the bones might belong to one of our relations who, incidentally, has been haunting our family for over a century so, if you don’t mind, we’ll just dig him up and try and scrape a little DNA off of him to see whether our hunch is right? Is that what you’re thinking?”
I scowled at him. In fact, that had been my plan – to the extent that I actually had a plan. When he put it that way, however, I realized how lame and undoable it was. “Did anyone ever tell you that you are a total buzzkill?”
“Just being practical,” said Brian. “Sorry, cuz. I know that’s your gig, but we gotta suss out the situation, know what I mean? Get the lay of the land. Reconnoiter.” He smiled broadly, which made him look like the Cheshire cat. “I hate to be the one to break it to you, but we’re going to have to play golf.”
I stared at him. “Golf? No, no. We don’t do golf, Brian. You know that.” Since Dad had been struck by lightning on the golf course all those years ago, the Lius had sworn off golf – to my great relief, I might add. I had never seen the point of golf and, besides, I sucked at it. Nobody had said anything about a ban on golf. It was a tacit agreement, but no less understood for not being official. No Liu had picked up a golf club in years. At least, that was what I had always thought.
“Confession time,” Brian admitted. “Every so often, I’ve been known to hit the greens for a few rounds.”
“Brian!”
“Haven’t been struck by lightning once.”
“It only takes once. You know that. Dad’s like a vegetable on two legs. Do you want that to happen to you?”
He laughed. “Hey, I’ve already got my curse – dyslexia – remember? Why would I get struck by lightning?”
“That’s fine for you. But I haven’t been eaten by the shark yet.”
“Eaten by a shark, struck by lightning. Either way you end up dead … or as good as dead. Besides, how else are we going to get on the course?”
“We show up and start walking.”
“But you can’t do that,” Brian protested. “People don’t walk on golf courses.”
“Of course they do. That’s what the trails are for.”
“Those aren’t trails, they’re cart paths. And what happens when we get to the grave site at the fourth hole? We have to have some excuse for going into that berry patch. You know how golfers feel about civilians off-roading? They yell at them. That’s before they bean them. Do you know how many people are seriously injured by flying golf balls every year? Close to half a million. And that’s just North America.”
I threw my hands up in the air. “OK, you win. I’ll do it. I’ll play golf.”
He beamed. “No, I’ll play golf,” he corrected me. “As I recall, you totally suck at golf. I, on the other hand, have a pretty decent swing.” He was right, of course; he had always had a good swing. In fact, he was a sort of natural athlete all round, quickly mastering physical skills that I had found daunting or impossible – skiing and snowboarding, diving and surfing, skateboarding.… It was very annoying.
“Whatever.”
“So first thing tomorrow morning, I’ll call for a tee time and we’ll head over to the course. Deal?”
“Deal,” I muttered.
Brian stood and stretched. Dropping his chin to his chest, he surveyed his stomach. “Hmmm. You know, it’s starting to feel a whole lot like dinnertime.”
I checked my watch. “Nine-twenty.”
“Care to join me for a bite to eat?”
“Nah.” I changed beds and lay down, closing my eyes. The headache that always seemed to be lurking there, waiting behind my eyes, flared. “Could you just pick something up for me? I’m nursing a headache.”
“Doggy bag for one. Got it.”
“And could you shut off the lights when you leave?” I rolled into a fetal position, knees pulled in close to my body and arms folded, hugging myself. The room seemed suddenly drafty. I felt cold in my bones, and shivered. “It’s frigging freezing.”
“The Prairies,” said Brian. “Not exactly the tropics. Want a blanket?”
“Please. All of a sudden I’m really chilly. Don’t know why.”
He retrieved a shaggy beige blanket from the top shelf of the closet and draped it over me. I huddled beneath it, trying hard not to think of the bedbugs it might be home to. He turned off the lights. I heard the door latch click into place, and then the lock.
Later, I woke with a start, my head pulsating with a firmly established headache, to hear once more the plaintive wail of the bathroom pipes. It was hard to believe that such a mournful, tormented sound came from anything other than a human being … or something that had once been a human being. I grabbed a pillow from the other bed, planted it firmly over my ear to blot out the wail, and fell asleep once more, my dreams tangled up like garter snakes in one of those creepy breeding balls.
“No, you look good,” Brian assured me in a whisper.
“Really. It’s amazing to see you out of uniform for once. Who’d have known you were a girl?”
“Stop!” I insisted. “I look ridiculous.” I scowled at my reflection in the long mirror. Wouldn’t you know it? Weeping Birches Golf Club had a strict dress code, so ixnay on everything Brian and I had packed (make that everything I owned) and away we went to the club’s pro shop to purchase “proper golf attire.” My wardrobe runs to black, navy, gray, and olive drab, so the prospect of so much pastel made me go catatonic. In the end, it was Brian who picked out our clothes – or, as he insisted on calling them, our outfits. To make matters worse, they were identical: plaid Bermuda shorts into which a canary-yellow Lacoste shirt was tightly tucked, knee-high white socks, white-and-gold soft-spike golf shoes, ligh
t-gray gloves with leather palms and mesh uppers, and a straw visor.
“I think we look sporty,” Brian said, smiling at his reflection.
“I think we look like Tweedledum and Tweedledee!”
“Nah,” he said cheerfully. “More like killer bees.” He consulted his watch. “Tee time in ten. Let’s grab some clubs and a couple of PTDs.” By PTDs he meant Segways – those two-wheeled, self-balancing Personal Transportation Devices that were so retro they were cool again.
I shook my head in disbelief. He was looking forward to this! What was wrong with him? Here I was, suffused with dread and so rattled that my teeth ached … and Brian was looking forward to a jolly round of golf! I looked at my hands in their silly gloves. At least I didn’t have to worry whose icky-sticky hands had last sweated on the Segway’s handles.
Ten minutes later, I caught up with Brian at the tee for the first of nine holes. While I had been struggling to fasten the strap of my helmet, he had taken off at warp speed … or what passed for warp speed on a Segway, a raging twelve miles an hour. “What were you trying to do?” I demanded. “Beat some NASCAR record? Vehicular homicide?”
“What can I say? I have a need for speed.” He surveyed the hole with approval. Guarded by ponds to either side, it was wide and open, with a gentle slope downhill and to the left. “Now, this is what I call a pretty sight.”
“I agree with Mark Twain,” I muttered. “ ‘Golf is a good walk spoiled.’ ” As far as I’m concerned, there are two kinds of people in the world: people who like games and people who hate games. I am a person who hates games. What’s the point if it isn’t real? Mind you, events of the last several days had pretty much wrecked my concept of what was real and what wasn’t.
The Geomancer's Compass Page 13