Jericho (26 page)

The day after Bishop left Jericho, I tried to talk to Theresa about what we should do. She thought we should see if the truck would start and make our way back through all the logging roads somehow until we found the highway. I said I thought that wasn’t a good idea. For one thing, it was almost out of gas, and there were other reasons too. “What if he’s right and the police are coming to arrest us all? What’s going to happen when they find us driving a stolen truck?”

“I had no part in his crime modalities,” she shot back.

“The walk out of here will do us good,” I said. “I don’t know about you, but I need exercise after sitting here doing nothing.” I was trying to jolly her along but when I said that she went all stiff, the way a cat does when it sees danger and tries to act tough, with the hair on its back sticking straight up. She never took well to me (or anybody) using humour.

Then, stupid me, I did it again. “Anyway, it might be easier if we
don’t
use the roads. We don’t have the magic Stick. He took it with him.”

She almost got violent. “The idiot and his goddamned stick. If he was here now I’d like to insert it up his ass and set fire to it.”

I’d never heard her talk this way. It sounded like something a really dumb
guy
would say. But I held my tongue, as Mother always used to say, though things were pretty chilly between us after that.

Truck or no truck, we had to get ready. Fortunately I had pretty good shoes on that morning in Vancouver in what felt like a long-ago period in my life. Theresa only had runners, which did mean that walking the whole time would be hard on her even assuming that we found our way and didn’t keep wandering around in circles. I was confident, though. It wasn’t as if we didn’t know where the sun sets, it wasn’t as if there weren’t landmarks.

After getting my clothes together, I started to worry about what food to take and how much we could carry. She and I didn’t speak that night, though we probably should have, as we still had a lot of stuff to discuss. Instead we sort of retired to opposite ends of Main Street, which was kind of silly when you think about it because Main Street was of course the only street there was and it was so short you could throw a rock from one end to the other.

The sun couldn’t have been up very long at all when I smelled smoke and flew out the door. I yelled for Theresa to wake up as I ran down the row of buildings towards one end of the clearing. The grass between the clearing and the townsite was on fire, and saplings started to crackle and spit as the flames surrounded them and then went tree-climbing. It was like dozens of low fires were suddenly joining together in one big one. I just about died when I got closer and saw this
big wall of fire a ways off. The air in front seemed to go all crinkly from the heat. It was getting pretty grey and I was afraid it would soon be black. Theresa was standing beside me under the gravel knoll, half dressed like I was, saying something under her breath, I don’t know what: I wasn’t paying attention.

A shape, a figure, was coming towards us. It looked like somebody staggering out of an orange-and-yellow mirage. The figure was coughing a bit, a low throaty cough. It stopped within easy shouting range. “You better get your stuff out of there. The wind’s starting to blow this way.” Clarence’s voice was calm-sounding as usual, but it seemed out of place right at that moment. I looked over at Theresa, who ran back for her bag. I called after her, “Get mine too. And the food I picked out.” Then an afterthought: “And the rest of my clothes.” But she was gone by then.

“The wind is a surprise.”

That’s what Clarence said as we stood there. I must have looked like I didn’t know what to do. He looked like someone who
did
but had decided to keep it to himself.

The fire wasn’t getting any wider but it was still headed in our direction and fast. What I remember now is the snapping sound of green trees going up,
whoosh
, and I can still see the black smoke up above. We both stayed there just staring at it, not saying anything. I was starting to get scared. Couldn’t tell about Clarence, though. He was always a hard one to read.

Theresa came back down the ramp, carrying her big bag and kicking mine ahead of her. I guess she didn’t hear what I said about bringing the food, so I went back to get it myself. When I got up the so-called ramp—you sort of had
to walk bent forward, that’s how steep it was—I turned around to look at the fire from higher up. The air was all wavy from up there too and I could see that the flames were sure coming towards us, no doubt about it. I had an idea and yelled down for Clarence to join me in town. He didn’t hear me. It was almost as though he was hypnotized by what he was looking at. Theresa heard me, though, and poked him in the ribs. The two of them were talking, and I saw her point to me up top, using her whole arm stretched out straight.

The first temptation—to simply run away—didn’t make sense once I’d had a second to think what we were doing. Running away from the town wouldn’t be running away from danger, it would be running away from safety. The town was protected. So I ran down to talk to Clarence. “Maybe we should all come up?” I asked him. “The fire’s got to stop when it comes to this big gravel pile, right? There’s nothing to burn.”

“Worth a try.” Then sort of matter-of-factly, talking to nobody in particular, “Sure.”

I said I thought we should use the time we had to collect all the water we could and bring it up to the town in case the fire trapped us in there for a while. T agreed as well. So the three of us went tearing through all the buildings looking for as many empty pots and bottles as we could find. Any kind of container would do. Right then I wasn’t too worried about how clean they were, knowing that later we’d have to boil them anyhow, not just the water. Theresa, though, carried hers using her fingertips only, the way you’d carry a dead rat or some other diseased thing. We weren’t all that organized, I guess. We made a big pile of jars etc. down by the
stream. Then, as they got filled up, one of us would walk up to Jericho with them. I say walk because Clarence was the one person who could actually run up the steep path and keep running; he never seemed to get tired. Of course, he was a guy who could run without really hurrying, and this wasn’t great because all of us were racing against the clock. “The temperature is ascending,” Theresa said with worry in her voice. Clarence said something more alarming, especially because he wasn’t the sort of person to overreact (or underreact either).

“Looks like the wind’s blowing the fire this way fast,” he said.

I watched the flames reach the little stream and leap right over it. The fire was burning weeds and grass and tiny trees now, whipped up by the wind from the west. I couldn’t help thinking this wouldn’t be happening if Bishop had been able to do his long-term project and make the stream wider and deeper and dig it all the way around the knoll like a moat around a castle in a storybook. Instead, what happened is that quick gusts sent flaming twigs and even small branches flying up onto the townsite. It was only a question of time until one or another of the buildings on Main Street caught fire. When it happened, we ran down to try and put it out. We used a lot of the drinking water but couldn’t get enough of it up high enough to do any good. “What you need is sand,” Clarence said. But except for what was in the mailbags, we didn’t have any, and at that moment I didn’t have a knife to cut the things open with or the wits to go find one. What we had was only gravel, enough of it to be a lifetime supply for everybody I knew. These old buildings had been dried out and falling apart for years. The wood was soft and
punky anyway. It burned with a bright orange-and-yellow flame, spitting at us. It was like the fire was laughing or making fun of us.

The next building on the same side was Theresa’s. She ran in to get her other things, including her diary, and I went with her. It was pretty scary. When we came out again, in a minute or two, the roof of the end building had burned through and collapsed with a big noise. The wind was even stronger than before, and it didn’t shift like I was hoping it would. You can guess what happened then. Theresa’s place went up like old balled-up newspaper. We kept trying to save the next one along and then the one after that and the one after that but we didn’t really have the equipment we needed. Clarence was using the shovel but it wasn’t doing much good. I think I might have been crying, just a bit, when the hotel went up.

The three of us kept moving to the right as the fire jumped the street and one place after another, on both sides, got destroyed. Finally the flames forced us to put our stuff in our laps and slide on our bums down the steep bank on the east side. Only about two hours after it all started, Jericho was a bunch of charred bits of lumber sticking up at funny angles. It was enough to break your heart. Once the fire was done destroying the place, the wind died down and then there was nothing left to ruin. Everything was quiet. Clarence asked if we wanted to go home with him. But we said no, and he left. Later we made a little camp for ourselves maybe fifty metres away, out by the track we’d come in on. The next day is when the police came.

I should make this long story short, partly for your sakes but for mine too. It’s very painful for me to talk about, the
scariest and most humiliating time of my life. A pair of RCMP officers, both male, came up the clearing from the canyon. The tower of smoke made us easy to find. They started to ask us a lot of stuff about Bishop and our relationship to him. At least I’m supposing that they asked Theresa the same things they did me, since they made sure we couldn’t talk together or overhear one another. I told them the truth, but about halfway through decided not to give them anything they didn’t ask for. They knew about the truck, of course—they could see it sitting out there in the grass, this big dead green thing waiting for the rust to start. I told them I didn’t have anything to do with it except for being a passenger. They knew about the video store too but I told them, honestly I think, that I didn’t know what I was doing, that I just stood there like I was told and read the movie names to myself. Then the officer who was talking to Theresa came over and had a private conversation with my guy. Then my guy started to ask me about the convenience store. I replied to all his questions but that’s when I decided not to say any more than I had to. They looked through our stuff or what we’d been able to save, and they seemed to pay a lot of attention to Theresa’s diary, though she yelled her head off. They said we were in custody, and they marched us to the police car, holding our right arms just above the elbow, and put us in the back, and drove us all the way to Williams Lake. It was sure a lot faster going down than it was coming up, but of course we stayed on the main highway and these guys knew the way. When we got to Williams Lake, I was looking out the window at the rail line and the Stampede grounds and the rest of it, and I felt freedom disappearing.

At the detachment a woman officer searched us, first me and then Theresa but not together. I never felt more worthless before or since, even though this was only the first of many times I’d have to submit to this. Almost more than I can count, even though I remember every one. I’ve never been more naked in my life, with absolutely no control whatever over what was happening to me. She wasn’t like the ones you read about or see in movies; she didn’t seem to be enjoying herself especially; she acted kind of bored to tell you the truth, but this made it even more degrading. I don’t know how Theresa felt. We never spoke after that, never even exchanged a single word—our lawyers, once we had them, did that for us. But if she felt like me she was sad that women could treat other women like this. If she was like me, she never quite got over it. I don’t want to say any more about it. All I’ll say is that it was a relief that first time when they ordered me to take a shower because I was certainly dirty on the outside but now I felt dirty on the inside too—this even though I wasn’t crazy about having people with all their clothes on watching me shower, but that was the least of my problems.

Eventually they charged me with “breaking-entering and theft” (I thought those were two different things and the first of them even Bishop didn’t do; he walked right in, like he was a customer). They also charged me with “theft over one thousand dollars” because of the truck, though I kept telling them that Bishop was alone when that happened and I was as surprised as anybody when he turned up with it. In the end, Theresa and Bishop, once they captured him, got the same treatment, and all three of us were also charged with “conspiracy to commit theft.” I thought of what my
mother and sister would say if they saw me having my police picture taken. Or being sent to Vancouver in handcuffs and anklecuffs, which I found out to my horror they did see on television. I slowly realized that this whole—what would you call it? joyride? camping trip?—with Bishop was a big deal in the media. Before they finally caught him, people had been making up stories about him being a genius criminal who lived off the land out in the woods, robbing people, outsmarting the policemen. They were stories about how he’d been living a life of crime with his two—I want to use the right word here … lovers, mistresses, prostitutes, “female companions,” something like that.

After eleven horrible days in that place they put me in, the lawyer got me out on bail. When she did, she told me about what people thought and even showed me some of the things the newspapers had already printed. I was just amazed. First I was angry and later I was frightened all over again, but all through it I stayed amazed. Among the amazing things was the fact, if you believed the media, that Bishop was almost fifty. He sure didn’t look that old. For one thing, people fifty usually take better care of themselves. But it did explain a lot when you figure that he was growing up in the sixties.

Then the funniest thing I could ever imagine happened. All the time I was in jail I couldn’t dream. In fact, I’m not even sure that I slept long enough at one stretch to have a dream if I could have done. When I was back in my own clothes and in my own place, though, I seemed to start right away. They were long colourful dreams.