by David Giblin
They found a tarp in the bushes and used it to sling the plants from the landing gear. They were quite cheerful on the ride back to the Landing and invited me to have lunch with them the next day before I started guiding.
I didn’t start until 2:00, so when I showed up at noon I had a couple of hours to enjoy their lunch. It was almost ready as I climbed on board. The skipper was doing his bit as the ship’s cook. They were still quite elated over their little find the previous day and were in very high spirits.
I noticed an odd but familiar odour as I entered the wheelhouse, but I couldn’t quite place it. The young constable took me on a quick tour of his ship. He seemed proud of his assignment; it must have been a choice commission to receive, at least compared to being stuck in the boonies being eaten by mosquitoes, or doing traffic detail in Surrey. He showed me the automatic charting system. It worked with computer-driven imaging that plotted the real-time course of the vessel and displayed it in relation to the preprogrammed chart information. He was like a kid with a new computer game as he showed me all the things it was capable of doing.
“Of course,” he giggled, “I can’t show you how this works when we’re at full speed, ’cause that’s classified.”
He found this highly amusing for some reason and started to giggle even more.
“I’d have to arrest you.” He was turning red in the face.
“Hey,” piped up the pilot, “why don’t you show him the cruise control?”
“This boat’s got cruise control?”
“The boat doesn’t, but the skipper does.”
This struck both the pilot and the constable as hilarious and they both laughed so hard they started to choke.
“Hey, Dave, don’t waste your time with those idiots. They haven’t made sense all morning. The way they’re acting, you’d think we just busted the French Connection or something. Come on down here, I want you to taste this for me.”
I joined the skipper in the galley. The odd smell was even stronger here. It was very familiar to me, but I still couldn’t place it.
“I just pulled these cinnamon buns out of the oven. Here, try one.”
He offered me a roll and took a huge bite of one himself.
“Oh man.” The skipper closed his eyes. “Isn’t that the best thing you’ve ever tasted? They just melt in your mouth when they’re fresh out of the oven like this.”
He rolled his eyes and took another huge bite that nearly finished off the rest of the bun.
“My mother used to make these. The smell always reminds me of her kitchen. I used to come home from school and she’d feed me cinnamon buns.”
He was talking through his mouthful. Icing clung to his lips.
“She’s dead now, bless her soul, but whenever I make cinnamon buns it’s like my old mum is there with me, you know? Do you ever think like that about smells, Dave?”
In all the time I’d known the skipper, he’d never talked about his mother or opened himself up so emotionally. Not that there was anything wrong with a guy talking about his dear departed mother, but there was something about the dreamy look on his face and the way he was putting away a pan full of cinnamon buns. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought he was stoned.
Then I recalled where I had come across the funny odour. It became obvious why I had had such a hard time placing it in the context of being on a police boat.
“Hey, Skipper.” I dropped my voice to a whisper. “Just between you and me, you guys haven’t been sampling that marijuana you busted the other day, have you? I mean, strictly in the spirit of scientific research of course.”
This struck the man as being extremely funny.
“Us! You think we’ve been smoking pot? Hell, don’t you know that’s illegal? Why, we’d have to arrest ourselves! A Mountie always gets himself.”
He started laughing so hard he choked on the cinnamon bun. I gave him a few minutes to catch his breath.
“No, really,” I said, “ever since I came on board, I’ve smelled smoke.”
“Smoke?” he said, the responsibility of command sobering him up a little. “You say you can smell smoke?”
“Yeah, maybe you guys have been on board all morning and you don’t notice it, but take my word for it, it’s there.”
“Smells like marijuana, you say?”
“Well, yeah, I, umm, smelled it once. A roommate in college, you know how it is.”
He started laughing some more.
“Now that’s funny.”
“What? That I want you to believe it was my roommate who was smoking?”
“You expect me to believe you really went to college?”
He was laughing so hard now that tears were coming out of his eyes. I felt like an outsider with no sense of humour as I stood watching the man trying to regain his composure.
“Let’s go down to the engine room,” he said, leaning on the counter for support. “We put the grass down there to store it.”
Since the engines had been constantly running to burn off the excess diesel, the engine room was exceedingly hot. And the bright green heap on the floor was smoking.
Spontaneous combustion was at work on the oil-rich plant material. There was a grey haze throughout the room, the fumes of which had permeated the rest of the ship.
All of a sudden they became very serious and the smouldering pot was quickly unloaded onto the dock. A small group of onlookers gathered to watch from the railings of the standing wharf above us. The skipper and his men went about their business with a crisp professionalism, despite the comments from the people at the railing. In a few minutes it was all on the dock, hosed down.
Once the danger to the boat was removed and the fire put out, the three RCMP members looked around them. They looked up at the faces on the railing. They looked at the pile of pot plants lying on the dock. They looked at one another. Then all three of them started to laugh again.
forty-four DOUBLE-DOUBLE
DOUBLE-DOUBLE ALWAYS STAYED at the Landing when he visited Stuart Island. It had much to do with the scenery. The incredible setting on the south end of the island gave a view all the way down Calm Passage as far as the north end of Cortes Island. Guests stayed in cabins spread out through the trees on a rocky hill overlooking the water. Double-Double always reserved one right on the cliff over the water’s edge.
We had nicknamed him Double-Double after the size of the specially ordered rain gear he needed to wear. On the human scale of things, Double-Double was definitely a tyee. He weighed in at almost four hundred pounds. Whenever we went fishing together my boat took on a decided list. Whatever skinny little fishing partner he brought along, they just didn’t have enough bulk to balance out the boat.
He was a man of immense appetites. Another reason he stayed at the Landing was the talent of the chef. As you can imagine, he liked to eat and eat well. He worked as a sales representative for one of the biggest food wholesalers in the US. He brought along extra supplies for his visits and the chef was always kept busy. No matter how much he had eaten before he got into my boat, he always brought along two coolers: one filled with beer, the other filled with candy, chocolate bars, and potato chips, in case we got hungry.
Of course, Double-Double was always the first one to reach for a cooler. He seemed always to be unwrapping something, so there was a constant flow of foodstuffs into his mouth. When we picked up our lines and travelled to another location, we departed in a cloud of candy wrappers that the wind blew out of the boat.
Double-Double was especially fond of a candy not available in the US that I had introduced to him, Mackintosh’s Toffee. A thick bar of pure toffee, it became soft and difficult to divide in the hot weather. That was the reason for the other cooler. When the bar was kept cold, it was hard and brittle. I had shown him how to crack the bar by slamming it down on the gunnel of the boat. It had become one of our rituals. Double-Double punctuated his sentences with the slap of a toffee bar.
“You just can’t find this st
uff in Southern California,” he told me once. “I guess it’s too hot for it down there.”
Double-Double also liked to tell jokes. Each time he came he had one in particular that would set the tone for the whole trip. This time it turned out to be a joke about stand-up comedians.
“Okay, Dave,” he said to me, “I want you to ask me two questions. The first one is, ‘What is the hardest job in the world?’ The second is, ‘Why is it so hard?’ You got that?”
“What’s the hardest job in the world?” I repeated.
“Being a stand-up comedian.”
“Why is it so—”
“Timing!”
His partner this time was a business associate from Nebraska who had never been salmon fishing before. It was also his first visit to BC, and he was suitably impressed.
“Man, will you look at those eagles. Aren’t they something? It’s so beautiful up here, I don’t care if I catch anything or not.”
The two of them had been part of the group watching as the RCMP removed the smouldering pot from their engine room. The spectacle soon became a subject of conversation. Gord from Nebraska admitted he had never tried the stuff. Double-Double was staggered.
“What do you mean, you’ve never tried it? Didn’t you ever go to college?”
“I went to college in Nebraska.”
“So, what are you saying, they didn’t have pot in Nebraska? I know that’s bull, or were you just too much of a geek to know how to score?”
Double-Double cracked a Mackintosh’s on the gunnel for emphasis.
“I’ll bet Old Dave here could find us some. Hell, I bet Old Dave probably knows whose pot that was that got busted!”
“Old” Dave knew a number of things, chief among them the dangers of supplying illegal substances to guests.
forty-five THE SONG OF JOY
DOUBLE-DOUBLE COULD BE very persuasive. After all, he did make a very good living as a salesman. He was certainly his own best advertising. The next day I showed up with a small quantity of the substance, enough to keep them happy. (Double-Double didn’t believe in delaying personal gratification. He wanted to try it immediately.)
We stopped by his cabin before we went fishing. Double-Double and I sat on the couch. Gord took a chair facing us, his back to the window and the view of the ocean. As the guide and person in charge of all the technical details, such as running the engines and baiting hooks, I was delegated to rolling the joint. Gord from Nebraska had a number of questions.
“So, what’s this stuff going to do to me?”
“Quit worrying, will you? You’re going to enjoy yourself,” said Double-Double.
“How am I supposed to know when I’m stoned?”
“You’ll know.”
“Yeah, but how do you tell? What does it feel like?”
“You’ll know.”
“Does it happen all at once or does it come over you slowly?”
“You’ll find out.”
“It’s not going to make me act weird or anything is it? I don’t want to come to in my underpants lying in front of the lodge.”
“You mean, like last year at the Christmas party when you got so shit-faced you couldn’t walk and woke up in the women’s bathroom? Look, this stuff is different from booze. It’s not going to make you act any stranger than you do already.”
The discussion went back and forth between them while I concentrated on getting the joint rolled. As I worked, cleaning the grass of seeds and stems, I noticed, over Gord’s shoulder, a sailboat rounding the point on its way to the Landing. I recognized it as a boat called Song of Joy. The guy who owned it operated a foundry. They worked with brass, making ornamental objects for homes and office interiors. As a hobby he made brass cannons. They were small but fully operational, definitely not toys. Many a sailboat captain from the eighteenth century would have been proud to have samples of his work on board.
He always saluted the lodge as he made his way to the dock. It added a little pomp and ceremony to his arrival.
I noticed some activity on the bow of the sailboat; I was well aware of the ritual that was taking place there. As I poured a small amount of grass onto the rolling paper, the men on the bow were pouring a small amount of powder into the muzzle of the cannon. I tamped down the grass carefully as they tamped the powder with a special ramrod. They rammed down the wadding, I rolled the paper between thumb and forefinger. I licked the gummed edge of the paper and sealed it as they placed a small fuse in the touchhole.
Gord was still talking.
“So, you’re sure I’m going to know when this stuff’s working and I’m not going to act weird behind it.”
Double-Double was still murmuring his reassurances. He too had no idea that the Song of Joy was approaching or what it meant.
I struck a match to light the finished joint. On the boat out in the bay they prepared a long-handled “match” to light the fuse on the cannon. I took a few puffs to get the joint going properly and then passed it to Gord.
He held it very gingerly and took a small puff without inhaling. He looked as if he thought it might bite him.
“Oh come on, for pity’s sake, just take a big haul and hold it in,” Double-Double coached him.
Nebraska Gord shrugged his shoulders and took a long drag on the joint. He inhaled and held his breath.
At the same moment the Song of Joy let go with its cannon. I saw the smoke erupt out of the muzzle first and then heard an incredibly loud boom!
The windows of the cabin rattled and the whole building shook. Gord rocked forward from the force of the concussion. The blast rolled across the water and the echo reverberated off the mountains and around the resort. Still not looking behind him at the source of the detonation, Gord opened his eyes wide in amazement. They held a look of awe and childlike wonder. He let out his breath and looked instead at the joint in his hand.
forty-six GIBBERISH
THE HELICOPTER MADE a low pass over the landing pad at the Carringtons’ resort. It circled as the pilot lined up his approach. Helicopters were quickly becoming the latest symbol of affluence at Stuart Island. At first only those owned by a big company made the occasional landing. They flew in busy executives to important meetings with clients. Then, last year, a couple of the opulent yachts showed up with a helicopter sitting on a specially modified pad atop their decks. That winter Troutbreath persuaded the Carringtons to install a landing pad on the front lawn. From the windows of the restaurant and lounge, people could be seen landing on it. It appealed to their clientele. It caught the crest of a trend. Soon they had private and personalized helicopters, like limousines, dropping off important-looking people in a windstorm of leaves and grass clippings.
A rumour had been circulated that a famous movie star was expected. People stopped to see who would be getting off. They peered out from the restaurant windows and stood in the lounge with drinks in their hands, watching. One man had brought a video camera. Down at the gas dock, where the rumour had originated, Troutbreath and I watched the landing with some amusement.
The helicopter, a brand new Bell Jet Ranger, hovered above the pad as it slowly descended. Its hull gleamed with new paint that matched the colour scheme on the Brelands’ yacht. The landing gear settled on the pad, and the pilot shut down the engine. The rotors whined to a stop. The door opened. People craned their necks to get a better look; was it a movie star? A well-known athlete? A noted politician?
Wet Lenny stepped out of the helicopter and stood blinking in the bright sunlight. He held on to his baseball cap and ducked under the still spinning blades. The crowd noticed the tattered, blood encrusted sneakers and the Adidas bag, and there was a murmur of disappointment. The helicopter started up again and took off, leaving Lenny standing on the lawn in a swirl of leaves, alone.
Lenny was returning from the Brelands’ estate, in time for the year-end salmon derby. It was an annual event that brought out the lodge’s regular guests and a few select friends. A pool was established that pro
vided for very substantial cash prizes. There was a prize for the biggest coho and one for the biggest fish overall. Some of the proceeds went to the community Salmon Enhancement program. The derby allowed people to drink expensive alcohol, smoke expensive cigars, catch fish, and still feel like they were doing something for the environment. It was a very popular event.
I talked with Wet Lenny while he was getting gas and bait for his boat. Some of his time in Vancouver had been spent with the FBI agent and the man from the SEC. I was curious to hear the outcome of their trip to Stuart Island.
“They had the co-operation of the Canadian authorities and they gave us an office where they could access the FBI’s main computer database. They entered all the information in my notebooks to see if there were any correlations with the information they had.”
“They entered all your notebooks?” I knew that Lenny’s notes were substantial.
“Hey, these guys were experts, and they had scanning devices. You should have seen what they could do. They’re very thorough.”
“So, what did you find out?”
“They weren’t at liberty to share that with me.”
“Privileged information?”
“Yeah, I guess, something like that. But they did get very excited. So excited they let me have a favour.”
“A favour?”
“See, they had all my information entered into their computer. It seemed the perfect time to ask it a question, the one I’ve been working on for years.”
“In keeping with your line of research?”
“Exactly. I wanted to see if the computer could find any underlying patterns, some kind of unifying principle on the way fish are caught. I’d never have a better chance than with such a powerful computer system.”
“I guess the FBI would have the best there is.”
I should have thought about that last question more. Not that it was much of a question, but it was hardly out of my mouth and Lenny was into a long and excruciatingly detailed description of the kind of computer he’d had access to.