The Codfish Dream

by David Giblin

  To Kim

  CONTENTS

  one The Codfish Dream

  two Homing

  three V0P 1V0

  four Lost Civilizations

  five The Orange Orifice

  six The Herby Derby

  seven The Familiar

  eight Morris Goldfarb

  nine The Expert

  ten The Fellowship of the Sea

  eleven The Fool

  twelve The Fruit Doesn’t Fall Far from the Tree

  thirteen Yule Tide

  fourteen Workers on Government Service

  fifteen Troutbreath

  sixteen Neatness Is Nobility

  seventeen Wet Lenny

  eighteen The Bullet Train to Tokyo

  nineteen The Trouble with Free Enterprise

  twenty The Trouble with Wet Lenny

  twenty-one Lucky Petersen

  twenty-two Mr. Carrington

  twenty-three The Reserve Box

  twenty-four Cut-Plugs

  twenty-five The Gucci Loafers

  twenty-six The Enforcer

  twenty-seven The Need for Experts

  twenty-eight Carol

  twenty-nine The Blue Heron

  thirty Strange Karma for the French Petty Nobility

  thirty-one The Bird-Feathered Man

  thirty-two If a Tree Falls

  thirty-three Room Service

  thirty-four The Suits

  thirty-five Big Jake

  thirty-six The Dog Salmon

  thirty-seven Pity the Messenger

  thirty-eight Chain of Command

  thirty-nine The Rest Stop

  forty If It’s Not on TV, It Didn’t Happen

  forty-one Have You Seen This Fish?

  forty-two The Record

  forty-three Where There’s Smoke

  forty-four Double-Double

  forty-five The Song of Joy

  forty-six Gibberish

  forty-seven The Blood Knot

  forty-eight Maintenance

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  one THE CODFISH DREAM

  HOME-STYLE COOKING, the neon sign said. I was very hungry, but something about the diner made me hesitate and stop just inside the doorway. Red vinyl-topped chrome stools, the kind you can spin around on, were tucked under a long Formica counter. Black menus in chrome holders matched the napkin dispensers and the shiny salt and vinegar containers. Each booth along one wall displayed a chrome and glass control for the Wurlitzer jukebox that squatted in the corner: three plays for a quarter. The place smelled of onions and the hot fat in the deep fryer. I could watch the cook put my order together. I got over my hesitation and took a seat at the counter. The restaurant was empty, except for the cook, and she didn’t say anything to me, just kept polishing glasses with a white cloth. I picked up a menu. The specials were handwritten on a piece of paper taped inside: Salisbury steak or liver and onions, a choice of blueberry or cherry pie for desert. The soup of the day was navy bean. I was too hungry to think, so I ordered a deluxe burger with fries, and for ten cents extra I got mushrooms.

  With one quick motion of the cook’s hand, the patty hit the grill with a satisfying sizzle. The cook carefully opened the bun and placed it beside the patty. She hadn’t said one word the whole time, and her silence was beginning to make me uncomfortable. But before I could think about it too long, the burger was ready. She slid it to me across the counter. It was fresh and juicy, with lettuce and tomatoes spilling onto a big side of fries. I picked it up with both hands and took a huge bite.

  My mouth closed onto something sharp and metallic. A tremendous jerk from the burger lifted me right off the stool and up toward the ceiling. The diner disappeared and I found myself underwater being pulled toward the surface.

  I tried to move my hands but couldn’t make them work. I kicked my legs but they felt strange; looking down I saw they had changed to fins. I started to thrash about wildly. A dark shape loomed above me. As I was dragged closer I saw two people smiling down at me. One of them was holding something. The other looked like the cook from the diner. I didn’t think they had my best interests in mind. I knew if they brought me to the surface it would mean my death.

  I gave one last desperate shake of my head and woke up, sweating, in my bed.

  two HOMING

  IT WAS 1983 and I was approaching the summer of my thirty-second year. For some time, five years to be precise, it had been my habit to spend the summer months fishing the waters around Stuart Island, north of Vancouver, BC. It had become a popular place, especially among well-to-do American sportsmen. Luxury yachts belonging to members of the Seattle Yacht Club crowd the docks, and a steady stream of float planes come in and out daily.

  Now, I don’t mean to imply that I was one of these amateur anglers, or a dilettante chasing after various and elusive species of fish merely for sport. Nor do I want to give the impression that I was only (and here I must lower my voice to a whisper) a tourist. My reason for travelling to Stuart Island each summer originated from a more primitive need: that grim spectre money forced me to take employment there as a salmon fishing guide.

  The alarming state of my bank balance announced the coming season. As the summer grew nearer, the sum of money left in my bank account grew smaller. Finally, I had to leave my home on the southern end of Vancouver Island and travel north to the small town of Campbell River. There I could purchase any groceries and supplies I needed and charter a float plane to take me the last few miles to my destination.

  Campbell River is world famous for the salmon that return there each year. Its shops offer an abundance of items a fisherman might need: the latest advances in rods and reels, as well as hooks, lines, sinkers, nets, and other such goods. Fishing equipment is everywhere, even in the gas stations and drugstores. The whole town revolves around sport fishing. All its streets lead down to the water. A jetty reaches out over the waves along the shore. Scores of people line the railings. They drop a lure into the water below and try to catch one of the salmon as they swim past on their way to spawn in the river.

  The streets fill with people, their eyes slightly vacant, their minds lost in fishing reveries. They spend hours inspecting the rods, reels, and lures. They talk endlessly about the fish they have caught, the fish they did not catch, the fish they want to catch. I was too busy for such distractions. These lost fisher-folk, wandering the sidewalks and cluttering the aisles of the stores while staring off into the distance, acted only as obstacles to my errands.

  After spending a couple of days in town, it finally came time to appear at the float plane dock, early, for the flight to Stuart Island. After a strange and restless sleep, I left the motel room and made my way to the mouth of Campbell River and the float plane docks. There I would meet up with another guide, my roommate for the summer.

  three VOP 1VO

  WE HAD SHARED a small cottage for the last couple of seasons and so had developed a routine. Like me, my roommate began the season by spending a few days in town, running errands such as retrieving our outboard motors from the shop where they were stored for the winter. Usually we would have met on Stuart Island, but this year a few unavoidable changes had us flying in together.

  A de Havilland Beaver on floats waited at the dock where our supplies, including the two motors, lay in a pile ready for loading. My roommate paced up and down beside them. His name was Ivor Vopnstrom. Vop was twenty-five years old or, as he preferred to say, on his twenty-fifth revolution around the sun. The postal code for Stuart Island is V0P 1V0. All the guides immediately nicknamed him Vop. I’d known him for two years before I ever discovered his real name.

  Vop usually went out of his way to appear calm and collected, but that was not the case
this morning. He hovered about, barely acknowledging my arrival, as the dock boys began loading the plane. His jaw muscles clenched and unclenched. His hands moved about his body, roaming in and out of pockets, straying behind his back, wandering from ear to buttonhole, never finding rest. At first I took this unease to betray concern over the equipment. A broken rod tip is a minor nuisance in town, but it becomes a major complication in a remote area like the one we were going to. Spare parts are not so easy to come by; a fifty-cent fuse that blows at the wrong time can cost hundreds of dollars in lost wages thanks to the trip to town for a replacement.

  The engines were the last things loaded, and at two hundred pounds apiece the dock boys needed our help wrestling them up the steps and into the aircraft. Vop worked himself into a froth, grunting and straining, and even though it was a cold spring morning he was sweating profusely. Vop wasn’t much for small talk, though he liked to get in the last word, and always offered his opinion about a more efficient way to do the task at hand. Yet this morning he remained strangely silent.

  It occurred to me that I had never known him to go up in an airplane. In the past we had always arrived at the island by boat. Boat was the main means of transportation among all these islands, as common as a pickup truck in other parts of the world. Vop lived on an island to the south of Stuart Island, and he usually stored his boat and motors there. But this year he had been at university on the mainland all winter, and his motor had been in the shop with mine. His boat was at Stuart Island, so the only way for him to get there was to fly in. I was coming to the conclusion that Vop—Vop the unfazed—hated to fly.

  When Vop finally did say something it was to offer to sit in the rear of the plane. The boat motors were balanced precariously back there between the seats, and he offered to steady them.

  “We don’t want them to fall over,” he said, and smiled.

  It was a smile of abject terror.

  I enjoy flying. I’ll sit up front any chance I get. I was only too happy to let him sit with the engines. He wedged himself into a seat beside the doorway. When I looked back from the co-pilot’s seat, his arms were wrapped around the engines and his knuckles were already turning white. The flight to the island would be mercifully short, at least, a matter of some fifteen minutes. I settled in my seat. It was a clear, cloudless day, and I intended to enjoy the flight.

  The float plane taxied out to the channel for takeoff. It first had to work its way past the sandbars at the river mouth. The pilot turned to me. He was a tragically dashing figure who might have been more at home in a Spitfire over the English Channel than in a dingy little float plane, flying from one dingy logging camp to another. He had to yell over the intense noise of the rotary engine. His accent sounded foreign.

  “So, you want to go to Stuart Island?”

  “I guess so,” I yelled back, “although on a day like today it really doesn’t matter where I end up.”

  “That’s a mad place.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Well, all those people there just mad to go fishing.”

  “Yeah, I guess they are.” I was just trying to be agreeable.

  “You must be mad, too.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “You’re going there, aren’t you?”

  The plane turned into the ocean currents that swirled at the river mouth, and the sun shone through the window behind him. His head disappeared in the glare. Dark glasses hid his eyes. All I could see of him were his teeth as he smiled; I caught a glint of gold.

  We reached the part of the waterway reserved for takeoff and landing, and the pilot turned his attention to the controls. He gave the engine full throttle and the nose of the aircraft rose steeply. There was a slight chop on the water, and we bounced a little as we picked up speed. I sat forward to see out the windshield. We had just become airborne when I felt something warm run down my leg.

  I looked down at my feet. The bottom halves of my new white deck shoes disappeared into an inky blackness. My heart stopped. It was like peering into another dimension. If the floor of the plane had suddenly dropped away, leaving my feet dangling in space, I wouldn’t have been any more shaken. Then I caught a whiff of hot oil and realized what must have happened.

  On the console between the pilot and me was a filler cap for adding oil to the engine. The cap must have been loose, so as the nose of the plane rose on takeoff, oil had spilled out onto the floor.

  Conversation inside an airborne Beaver is impossible. You can’t yell hard enough to talk. I nudged the pilot with my elbow and pointed to the oil at my feet. He didn’t seem all that concerned. Perhaps it was something that happened on a regular basis. He casually shrugged his shoulders, as if to suggest disdain for the maintenance people, and simply tightened the cap. He flashed me another gold-toothed smile and turned his attention back to flying.

  The smell of hot oil filled the plane. It settled into the back and enveloped Vop like warm syrup. He began sniffing the air suspiciously. To his already strained mind the smell could only mean something was very wrong. A low moan made itself heard over the noise of the engine. I turned round to offer some sort of encouragement. Vop was staring about wildly, the fatted calf being led to the altar. His eyes rolled in their sockets. To be in the air was one thing; to be up in the air in a burning plane was clearly too much for him. He was beginning to crumble.

  By this time we were over Quadra Island and starting our descent to Stuart Island. It would be time to land in a matter of minutes. The ordeal Vop was suffering would soon be over. However, as the pilot began the approach to the dock at our cottage, a large motor yacht was leaving the marina next door, trailing a huge wake behind it. It created a series of waves right in front of us. The pilot had no choice but to set the plane down regardless.

  It hit the first wave and bounced back high in the air. The motor Vop was clinging to shifted and pushed him against the rear door. The plane bounced again as it hit the next wave. The door flew open and Vop, still clinging to the engine, was now dangling out the door feet first. He opened his eyes long enough to catch a view of water rushing past. The plane hit the next wave, and the spray from the impact soaked him from the knees down.

  He couldn’t get off the plane fast enough.

  It dropped us at our dock and I tied the plane up. I stood in a small pool of slightly used, high-grade engine oil and watched as Vop heaved our things off the plane like a man possessed. He made a squishing sound with every step. As he worked he mumbled to himself. “I can get out of a car and walk. I can even get out of a boat and swim. But I’ll be damned if I’ll get out of a plane and bloody well fly.” It would have been dangerous to get in his way.

  He barely needed help getting the outboard engines down the steps and onto the dock. The plane emptied, we watched as it taxied back into the bay and took off. Vop was calmer after that. We carried the groceries up to the cottage.

  Food always has a calming effect, so we opened up the boxes and found something for dinner. We celebrated our first night back on Stuart Island with a bottle of wine. Then we opened another one to celebrate getting back without being killed.

  four LOST CIVILIZATIONS

  YEARS AGO, BEFORE the Depression and the Second World War came along and changed things forever, the coast of British Columbia was more richly populated than it is now. Wherever there was shelter from the gales of winter, wherever the sun shone even in the darkest days, wherever natural clearings made the best site for an orchard, and wherever freshwater creeks ran clear and clean to the ocean, invariably someone has at one time erected a small but comfortable cottage. These cottages tend to share a similar floor plan and style of architecture. They have pantries and sheds attached to store wood and boats. They have deep front porches and they share the same curiously rounded windows. The tops of the windows arch, giving the rooms’ interiors the feel of a church hall.

  When these cottages were built, steamships served the coast from Vancouver to Prince Rup
ert. Many of the place names refer to the ships’ presence. Stuart Island Resort, on the south end of the island, below the first set of rapids, is still called the Landing. A regular stop on the steamship’s route, the ship would be forced to wait for the tide to turn in order to navigate the rapids during slack tide. Mail and supplies reached the islands on these ships, and people wishing to travel simply stepped onto the boat and stepped off again in Vancouver or anywhere else along the way.

  Life must have been serene and satisfying. The coast was still abundant with fish, shellfish, grouse, and deer. Wild, edible plants and mushrooms grew everywhere, and the gardens of the homesteaders were prolific.

  The Indigenous people here were unique among the world’s civilizations. There was so much food that it allowed them the leisure time to develop a sophisticated art and culture. Remnants of their traps and weirs for harvesting salmon, placed in the mouths of the creeks, remained around Stuart Island.

  After the war, life was so disrupted that it never returned to its former ways. The old steamships were retired, and the homes and cottages entered into a period of neglect.

  The place Vop and I shared was one of these cottages. It must have been beautiful once, but years of long, wet winters had had their effect. The incessant damp had wrinkled the whole building, like skin kept too long in a bathtub. The siding was cracked and warped; the paint was peeling. In spots the wood showed through and was bleached to a silver colour by the weather. The roof was disappearing beneath a layer of moss that insulated the interior and was the only thing that kept out the rain. Now the cottage didn’t seem to have been built so much as grown in the clearing like a toadstool, a strange, elaborate, and rather large one, complete with round-topped windows and plumbing.

  Inside mildew bloomed gloriously across the ceiling, watermarks stained the curling wallpaper, and the kitchen linoleum was as rippled as the ocean outside. In the absence of human beings, obscure species of bugs had taken over. Spiders had lived here so long they had developed an advanced spider civilization that had then gone into decline. The remains of their webs spread out from the corners of the ceiling like the ruins of ancient temples. The corners of the house were full of creepings and scurryings; the mice in the back rooms could be heard playing cards.