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Authors: Wayne Arthurson

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BOOK: Fall from Grace
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7

 

I robbed my first bank by mistake. It was two weeks after getting a job at a new paper, some months after living NFA (no fixed address). Despite my disheveled appearance, the managing editor and I had worked together at another paper and he was desperate for a night copy editor, another pig on the rim. It was a dull and sometimes depressing job, so to have someone also desperate for work made me the perfect choice.

After two weeks editing night copy, I was presented with my first real paycheck in a long time. The ME gave me that first check himself, coming out of his office and handing me the white envelope, surprising the hell out of the other pigs on the editing rim. “Considering your circumstances, I’m bringing your check to you,” he said, trying to punch some authority into his voice. He may have scared the others on the rim, but I had seen him as a small-town reporter fresh out of journalism school so I wasn’t impressed by his appearance. “But this is the only time, Leo, because once you take it in your hands, I’m ordering you to head to the closest bank right now and open yourself an account so we can do a direct deposit. Do I make myself clear?”

I almost smiled at his order, but I knew it would unwise to undermine his authority. Despite our past relationship, a managing editor has got to look like he’s in power. So I just grabbed the envelope. “Yes, boss,” I said, tempted to flash him a salute but knowing that that would have also undermined his authority.

Then I headed out of the building, looking for the nearest bank. It was cold so I had my gloves on and my hood pulled over my toque to cut down on the biting wind. Unfortunately, the nearest bank was the same location where I had ended up sleeping in the ATM foyer during a cold snap several months ago, so I went on by. I was trying to put that past behind me, to forget my lost years, and coming to that bank over and over again, as I rebuilt my life, wouldn’t do.

Instead, I walked a few blocks to the north, where there were plenty of banking options. I chose one named after an eastern Canadian city and stepped in. The shock of the lights confused me for a second. It was like stepping into a casino, but instead of putting money in it to lose, I was putting money in it to save.

For a few seconds, I had no idea what to do; I had no recollection of how to fill out a deposit form or to open a bank account. I was like a prisoner being left on his own, to make his own decisions after years of being locked up. Instead of filling in the required boxes on the form, I flipped it over and wrote: “Please give me all your money.” The stupidity of the words made me chuckle, and allowed me to get back into myself. For another laugh I wrote “Thank you” and then flipped the form over and filled in the spots, save for my name and account because that would come later when I opened the account. And with my first paycheck in years and the hope for a new life, I stepped up to the next open teller.

“May I help you?” she asked. I handed over the slip. A second later, her eyes widened with a look of total fear, her expression reminding me of those times when I would walk up to strangers, begging them for spare change. But this time, it was confusing because I was a citizen with a real job and real money. All I needed was a real bank account and I’d be set.

“Is there a problem?” I said in a soothing voice, but it only exacerbated the situation.

Her face had turned white and her breath was caught in her throat. “P-p-please don’t hurt me,” she whispered.

“Why would I do…” I started to say, but stopped when I looked down and saw that I had handed her the deposit slip the wrong way. My joke was facing up and was no longer funny. I tried to explain the situation but she was no longer listening to me. She had opened her cash drawer and, with shaking hands, started to stack bills on the counter in order of denomination, the blue fives, the purple tens, the green twenties—probably the biggest stack of them all—a bunch of red fifties and about four or five of the brown hundreds. When she finished she backed a step away, her eyes filled with terror.

I looked about but everyone else was busy with their own work. I looked back at the teller and she had started to shake, her gaze moving back and forth from the stack of bills to me.

She was deathly quiet but her expression screamed, Take it! Take the money! Take the money and go! There was nothing I could do. I had robbed a bank, and considering my history, no amount of explanation or pleading would help me. A tear started to run down one side of the teller’s face and I knew that any second she would fall apart and my life, the one that I had worked so hard to get back together, would follow along with her.

I swept my hand across the counter, grabbed all the money and my note, and shoved them into my pocket. I turned and quickly walked out of the bank, jaywalked across the street, and pushed through the revolving doors of a downtown shopping center.

I walked in and out of shops, doing my best to look like an average shopper but I had no idea what the hell I looked like. When a clerk approached me to see if I needed help, I stammered, “I’m looking for a gift for my wife.” That statement made my shaken appearance okay; I was only a harried husband trying at the last minute to find a gift for his long-suffering wife.

I went through this charade a number of times, using some of the bills from the bank to pay for these goods. I was in the world but away from it, in that time of emptiness that I always fell into when I gambled, that time that has no meaning, no sense, just a debasing comfort that all addicts dream to return to, so they don’t have to face the harshness of their terrible reality.

Until that time, I had had no idea that another such place existed outside of gambling, and in a strange sort of way, it brought me a piece of freedom. From then on, when the pressure to gamble became too much for me to bear, I would visit a bank.

8

 

There was nothing new in the story the next day. It didn’t normally take too long for police to identify a dead body. Most people, even street people, prostitutes, drug dealers, and formerly homeless journalists, usually carried some type of ID, even if it was a driver’s license that was long since expired. What took time was finding a next of kin, a distant relative or close friend to confirm the identity of the deceased.

And Canadian law also stipulated that police could not release the identity of a person killed as a result of criminal activity or a car accident or any similar event to the media until the family (or some family surrogate such as a guardian and so forth) was officially told of the death. That was to prevent somebody from reading in the paper that one of their immediate family members was dead. And even if a media outlet discovered or knew the name of the victim, it was also unethical and illegal for them to print or mention the name until they got official ID confirmation from the police.

So, based on the location of the victim’s body, her race, and the way she was dressed, I assumed that she was a street prostitute and it would take at least a couple of days until I received any ID information so that I could investigate her life. The question was then what to do with my time until such information was made public.

I could have sat back and taken it easy for a day or so, but there was something about a busy newsroom that discouraged this kind of behavior. I could have asked for another assignment, a one-off quickie for the next issue, and I would have received one. But if the identity of the girl in the field came through much sooner than expected, I would have to drop that story into the hands of another busy reporter to focus on my more important assignment.

I decided to forgo another assignment, but in order to keep myself somewhat busy I ran a morgue check using the paper’s Infomart archive system. Infomart allowed any reporter to read any story in the paper’s morgue, the archive of past issues. It worked like any search engine. All you had to do was type a name, a phrase, whatever, and it would give you a listing.

Like with most search engines, you could get a lot of irrelevant responses if you weren’t specific enough or if you typed in a popular name, like Wayne Gretzky. It also went back only as far as 1985, but it was way better than searching through back issues yourself, or asking some overworked and overprotective librarian to do the search for you.

Of course, most of the librarians had been laid off in a cost-cutting measure a couple of years ago, and though one of the “concessions” the paper made in order to end the strike was to look into the possibility of hiring back a librarian or two, no move had been made in that direction. And probably never would.

I typed in
“dead body in field,”
making sure to use the quotation marks because I didn’t want to include all stories with the words
dead, body,
and
field
. Enough people had died in this city over the past twenty years, and since two of the major economic engines in and around Edmonton were agriculture and petroleum products, I shuddered to think how many times the word
field
was used, not just in a single issue, but in the past couple of decades.

Even so, I got a large number of hits, sixty-seven of them, to be exact. Apparently there were a lot of dead bodies found in the fields around the city in the past. But in reality most of them weren’t as serious as expected. The biggest listing had nothing to do with dead bodies but with a local play from a decade ago called
Over My Dead Body
produced by a group called Out of Left Field Players.

The rest were all true dead bodies although most turned out to be suicides—nowadays most newspapers don’t run stories on suicides unless it was someone famous or an extremely public suicide—or stories about farmers or oilfield workers being killed in industrial accidents.

In fact, there were only six stories about female bodies being found in a field, and when I delved deeper into them, looking for follow-up articles relating the identity of the person or the circumstances of the death, only three were similar to the story I was working on. So only four such deaths in Edmonton for the past twenty years wasn’t that big a deal. If you looked at any other Canadian city, you’d probably find the same number.

I was about to get the system to print all the articles relating to these three when Larry came by my desk.

“Can I talk to you for a sec, Leo?”

I set aside my work and turned to face him. “Sure, Larry. What’s up?”

“How’s the story going?”

I shrugged. “Not much happening. Police haven’t released the ID yet so there’s really nothing to be done. So in the meantime, I decided to check the morgue for any similar stories from the past. Don’t want to repeat ourselves too much.”

“You did?” he asked, his eyebrows rising in surprise. “That’s some good reporting. Find anything?”

“Only a few articles on similar deaths. Nothing like the type of story you’re looking for.” I wasn’t sure if I should be insulted by his reaction, because it could have meant he didn’t think much of my work ethic. I decided to let it go because the other day he did stand up for me and gave me a chance when he didn’t have to. He was also the only one at the paper who knew about my background so maybe he was justified in his reaction.

“Is that why you came over to talk?” I asked him.

“Actually, I had another thing in mind,” he said, perching at the edge of the desk behind him. There was another reporter working there—another crime reporter named Edgar Franke, decent writer but more interested in joining the sports section—and for a second, he looked like he was going to say something about Larry sitting on his desk. But he changed his mind and went back to writing his story.

“I seem to recall that sometime during our past conversations, you told me one of your parents was Cree. Your dad, right?” Larry continued.

“Actually, it’s my mom.”

“And what does that make you?”

“I don’t know, her son, I guess?”

“Don’t be obtuse. I’m asking if that makes you an Indian.”

“They’re no longer Indians, but natives, First Nations, Aboriginal.” I guess I should have said
we
but getting used to the fact that I’m an Indian was a constant process. Sure, growing up, I knew where my parents came from and it was kind of cool letting friends know that I was half Cree or one quarter Cree or one sixteenth Cree, depending on what story about her bloodline Mom was talking about.

Back then, it was neat to pretend I could smell things in the air other people couldn’t or hear the sound of something approaching from a distance, or track the trail of another kid when playing hide-and-seek. It was all bullshit, no doubt about that, but it was no different than Mike Hamilton saying he was a better basketball player because he was black or Randy Brignell saying he knew kung fu because his mom was Korean. Those kinds of differences were okay growing up on the army base. They were fun differences, differences that made playing war or hide-and-seek or James Bond or whatever more fun.

They were safe differences while behind them we were pretty much all the same, just a bunch of army brats trying to make friends as fast as possible and have as much fun as you could until you or someone else was posted to another base, best friends lost forever in the administration of the Department of National Defense.

Of course, Mike Hamilton may have been black, but his family didn’t celebrate Black History Month or Martin Luther King’s birthday. And Randy Brignell’s mother may have been Korean, but the only time they ate Korean food was never, because there wasn’t a Korean restaurant near the PMQs. And though my mom was Indian, or native, First Nations, or Aboriginal, nobody spoke a word of Cree in the house. Nobody spoke a lick of French, either, but that was Dad’s side of the family.

BOOK: Fall from Grace
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