Jericho (7 page)

I enjoyed watching her shower. She was just a bit thicker everywhere than I thought she would be but very firm, like a piece of fruit at the absolute optimal moment. I loved to
see the rivulets of soapy water run over her shoulders and then down her back or drip between her breasts and belly. Of course, to get a good long casual look, I needed my back to the wall and the rest of me exposed, which I hated. I’m not really sure but I believe this is the heritage of my separate-school education. Gym class with the nuns. The sisters also told us that we must never go to the washroom at Woodward’s department store, as white slavers lurked there and we could be kidnapped and forced into lives of shame.

Beth told me how she was getting nowhere selling jewellery and was bored all the time and so had gone to see about going back to her other employment. She had an unwarranted obsession with finding her father, and when she had made her day’s quota of sales, if she did, she would resume her wanderings in the world of lost souls, looking for male derelicts of the right age to whom she could show the photograph she had. This didn’t strike me as a very practical approach. The area is just too big and too populous and her whole methodology too random, too dependent on sheer good luck, which she never seemed to have. I did not want to tell her that I thought she was wasting her time. I wish there had been something positive I could have done. I made an honest attempt at some research, because she was expecting me to. But there were no social service records in the City of Vancouver archives for any male with that name or nobody with even approximately that name who’s remotely the right age. Frankly, I wasn’t expecting to find any. It’s not as though there’s an
Alkies’ Who’s Who.
I was naturally surprised, then, when one day she came into the office to tell me her good news.

“I’ve just got a lead on his whereabouts,” she said.

I’d never seen her so excited, and I tried to imitate her tone with necessary conviction. “Tell me!”

“He was seen in Bella Coola.”

“Who saw him?”

“A woman had a vision.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I just sighed appreciatively. I fear I knew whom she was referring to, but I held my tongue and let her unwrap the story. That cretinous psychotic Bishop had befriended the woman who calls everybody riff-raffs. She’s a well-known local character, one of the harmless homeless I call them, sometimes delusional but not actually unstable and certainly not dangerous or potentially violent like Bishop, the phony. I could hear what had happened between the lines as Beth told me her version of the events Bishop had related. The oracle, as he called her, can slip into another dimension if you believe in her. I once heard her say in this very office that she could predict earthquakes. (She thought a big one was coming, which is how the subject came up.) Bishop got to talking to her about Beth’s quest and “the oracle,” as Beth was now calling her, apparently said, “I know of such a man,” or words to that effect, and then recounted the missing man’s life in intricate detail such as she could not know except by extra-empirical means: at least one and maybe two daughters (one of them certainly named after a place in the Bible), his alcoholism, his desertion of the family and his drift over the mountains into the flophouses and beer parlours of the Downtown Eastside. According to Bishop, she said things about Beth’s father that she couldn’t have known if she was not telling the truth about what she saw in her head—for example, how when he was a kid his father used to tie him to a chair and
read the Bible to him, both Testaments and the Apocrypha. Beth said that was one of the few details that her mother ever offered in trying to explain why her husband had acted the way he had.

“Are you taking all this at face value, or has the woman herself repeated it all to you?”

“I wanted to find her right away, of course, and show her the photograph and see if she recognized his features. But I went to Victory Square and some of the other places where I usually see her—in the doorway of the Dominion Building and outside the old cinema, and so on—but I couldn’t find her. But I will. Anyway, I think I’m going to head up to Bella Coola and make first-hand enquiries.”

“Oh, Beth,” I said. “Beth Beth Beth.”

I gave her a big hug but did not know what to do after that.

The first dead person I ever saw wasn’t in a funeral parlour. It was on the street over in Deetroit and there wasn’t much to see. The cops had covered up the body and made a chalk outline on the sidewalk, right next to where some girls had chalked out a hopscotch thing. I only got a glimpse for a second or two. I can’t say how old I was except that I was walking between the grown-ups, with one of them holding my left hand and the other my right. They hurried me right along, almost lifting me off my little feet; the red lights on the cop cars were going round like they had something to brag about. I haven’t thought about this for years and years, but it comes back to me now because of what happened in Yaletown that night. Everybody’s still talking about it. What a mess.

Sometimes your first reaction to news like that is really your instinct warning you to move on to the second or even go straight to the third. At other times, though, the first thought’s the truest because it’s won the race to the surface. Learning to tell the right one from the rest—that’s the trick. I’m talking experience here. Judgment.

I never knew his real name till I read about him on the front page of that copy of the
Province
left behind by the last guy having breakfast. Everybody just called him Boots. I think he probably told me to call him that the first time we met.

“How can I find you?”

“People know where to find me.”

“What’s your name?”

“People call me Boots.”

His left eye had a nervous tic, it was always twitching. Talking to him was like trying to carry on polite conversation with the Point Atkinson lighthouse.

At the time, I hadn’t really found what you could call my niche and I’d already had a lot of different jobs, usually in the kind of places where everybody else is in the country illegally, including the owner. There was this little weasel that ran a landscaping outfit. A lot of property management companies in charge of West End condos used him. You got paid at the end of each day. Another time I worked with a really bad-tempered Chinese guy moving reconditioned stoves and fridges. He couldn’t decide if he wanted to steer from the front or the back. Either way put him in a mood. Once he almost dropped a Maytag on my goddam foot. When I pointed this out to him, he spit on the front lawn. It was a spit of indifference but it was also a spit of contempt.

Anyway, one afternoon I’m down in the part of town where all the no-fixed-address people live, and I’m just standing there, looking at the action that’s going on across the street, kitty-corner. As it happens, I was in the market for some quality home furnishings at that time as I had to get out of my Strathcona place cause the cops turned it into a circus after one of my neighbours suddenly died and I just left everything there when I went, to confuse whoever might come around. So I was watching this guy set out an assortment of junk on the sidewalk like he was having a garage sale. He had a turntable and a lamp and then a broken-down chair—but no, he then started using the chair to sit on, so you didn’t know if it was for sale or not. He had really a lot of stuff, little pieces of this and that, spread out along a six-or eight-foot stretch of concrete, and I went over to take a look. Up close, the turntable looked like someone had lost their temper at it and the lamp didn’t have a cord. It was all like that. Something strange was going on. This was in the middle of summer. I went back to the shade where I’d been before and waited, figuring I’d scope out things. I didn’t have any appointments to keep.

I know now that at one time Hastings Street was the centre of bustle in Vancouver, what you might call the hometown of play, locally. Gambling, you see, is what people did before there were a lot of drugs to take: it’s the same story everywhere. Every cigar store made book and in olden times there were really a lot of cigar stores, as I understand the situation. There was a lot of action at the tables too because there was an endless supply, year-round, of guys with their pockets full of cash coming from logging camps and fish boats up the coast, looking to get their hair cut, get drunk,
get laid and get lucky at cards. The first two were easy and the third pretty simple too but the last one was more or less impossible. After all, this was the part of town that originally took off when shopkeepers started selling tennis rackets and necessities such as that to suckers on their way to the Klondike gold rush. Pretty expensive tennis rackets, too. On the West Coast, this was the place to be, I think, right through the forties and fifties, when the world was still lit by neon. There was also another little island of Civ down Granville by the bridge. (Now it’s all pawnshops, sex shops and other legitimate businesses.) Lonnie would have felt at home here as long as he didn’t look up and see the mountains. This was his kind of place and that was his time to be alive. As always, the main problem was the cops, but not in the way you think, cause here they were competition. That’s how it had been for a long time. In the twenties, I guess it was, the chief of po-lice was shot dead by somebody who was a little too fond of the Chinese molasses so common in them days. True story, though a lot of details were hushed up.

Fifty, sixty, seventy years on and Hastings was still full of people on a hot summer day, but they weren’t going shopping at Woodward’s or the Army & Navy (though the Army & Navy was still going strong—still is). They were shopping for all different kinds of brain jewellery, starting with Vitamin H and going down the periodic table from there. The cops had pretty much abandoned the neighbourhood. Now and then a prowl car, as Lonnie used to call em, would swim by, watching the quick deals completed with a minimum of words and a handshake lasting a second and a half. But they didn’t do much of anything about it. The scene was
like a busy farmers’ market except it didn’t have anything to do with agriculture.

Everything being so out in the open, I was naturally curious about the guy with the big square second-hand face with the hash marks on one side of it. What was he doing over there exactly? He wasn’t no student at the end of term, selling off all the temporary possessions he didn’t want to drag back home to Kelowna. He was a good bit older than even me and he didn’t get those scars on his face from acne. I had to smile. Guys would come up to him and inspect his loose garbage with great interest. Then, after looking up and down the street, they’d take, say, a fondue pot with a big hole in the bottom over to Boots and give him what I could see even from where I was standing was a wad of dough for it. He put the fondue pot (none of the little forks were left) in a plastic Safeway bag and handed it back to the customer. That’s what the cops saw if they played back some surveillance tape, assuming there was one, which I doubt.

Later, when I got to know him a bit, I said I admired his technique. He didn’t take well to compliments but he did explain his thinking.

“This place is pretty famous. People even come up from the States. A lot of em aren’t really low-lifes, they’re people out for a kick. They want the thrill. They like the blood pounding in their thighs when they think there’s danger. But they get scared easy. I was making it simple for em.”

This was part of his thinking: to make it easy for Citizens who ordinarily wouldn’t come any closer to the Life than reading editorials that denounced it. Boots wanted to bring back the seventies, when straight people with cash would go slumming in their bloodstreams. He was some sort of
business genius, and that’s why I wanted to go to work for him, but I never really got that close. Pretty soon he wasn’t working on the street any more and he probably had a zillion guys like me who were his Avon Ladies and Fuller Brush Men. Any two of us might pass each other in the street and never be the wiser except by the look in the eyes. I knew what he was up to, though.

He had many ideas. But the one about selling drugs to people who actually had money for drugs—that was his best one. Like the roulette wheel, the fulcrum, the vibrating plane and all the other great ideas of the ancient Mesopotamian types, it was brilliant because it was so damn simple. In the early stages, before their dopamines got blown out like breakfast, a lot of these people doing dreams and speedballs were naturally enough really concerned about the strong possibility of an overdose—a problem in amateur circles especially. The answer was to sell em Narcan too so that they or their needle buddy can get the heart and lungs started again real quick. Boots got the idea when he stole some of this shit, or somebody else did and he wound up with it. Then he had his people working on how to make it themselves, in some lab he had somewhere.

What he had all of us selling was Adam and Eve (that’s two different things—there’s Adam and then there’s another one called Eve). This was the dagga weed of what that guy, what’s his name, called the X Generation. Everybody wanted it, girls and guys, cause it takes the scariness out of having sex (which is scarier when you’re young, I guess—I guess I remember that if I try hard enough). They get the energy to go all night for only twenty bucks a pop, but it probably cost less than a penny to make once you’ve got the set-up,
especially when it’s cut with speed or strychnine or what have you. Boots had a squad of people like me selling it to the kids in the clubs where they go to dance. No two batches look the same, which tells me that it was made in a lot of different places so that, if one gets pushed over, the business doesn’t have a recession.