Some Great Thing (10 page)

“Please.”

“You speak a very nice French. Are you from Haiti?”

“No, I was born in Winnipeg.”

“Vraiment? Such good French.”

She walked into the kitchen. Mahatma studied the room. Pictures of the boys playing hockey, playing baseball, at communion, at Christmas. Family pictures. A simple living-room. A rocking chair, a blanket-covered couch, a TV. An ashtray, five times bigger than necessary, and a statue of Christ and, in the corner, a photo album. In his notepad he described these objects, as well as the dim lighting, the simple wallpaper and the thin rug. She brought him tea, milk and sugar. And a slice of pie. “You’re young. I bet you love sugar pie. It was Gilles’ favourite.” Mahatma jotted that down. “So this is for the paper?” she asked. The idea pleased her. “When will it be out?”

“Tomorrow, Madame.”

“Please, call me Gisèle.”

“All right, Gisèle. May I see a picture of Gilles?”

“That is him on the wall.”

Mahatma looked at the sixteen-year-old with a peach fuzz moustache. “Do you have any other photographs of him? We would like to put his picture in the newspaper. Perhaps one with the whole family.”

She reached for the photo album. “You can borrow this album. Just bring it back next week.”

Mahatma placed the album in his briefcase. He asked for Gilles’ full name and the other son’s name, and their ages, and her husband’s name, and her husband’s work. She offered surprising details. “I burnt a pecan pie yesterday; Gilles was
furious. He told me if I didn’t watch so much television it wouldn’t have happened. I don’t think he really meant it. Do you? I think he really did love me. I do watch television, that’s true, but I’m not lazy. It’s a lot of work taking care of a husband and two boys. And I drive the school bus in the morning and the afternoon too.”

“Why do you think this happened?” Mahatma asked. “Do you think there’s tension between the English and the French?”

“I don’t know about things like that. Ask my husband.”

“But you, personally? Do you sense the tension?”

“Sometimes. The other day I was shopping in Princeton with a friend, talking to her, you know, in French, and this man passed us and said, ‘In Manitoba we speak English!’ Why would that man tell us that? What would he care what language I was using?”

“Did Gilles have English friends?”

“His best friend was English. And he had an English girlfriend.”

“Had Gilles been in any fights recently?”

“My boy almost never fought. But last week he had some problems with an English boy. It wasn’t about language, though. The English boy was after Gilles’ girl.” Mahatma took that down. The doorbell rang. “You’re a nice man, would you please send them away?” Gisèle asked. “I’m very tired now.”

“Certainly.” Mahatma walked to the door. “Who is it?” he called.

“
The Winnipeg Star
!”

“Mrs. Baril doesn’t want to be disturbed,” Mahatma said. Two eyes stared through the glass at him.

“Mahatma! Lemme in!”

“Sorry,” Mahatma said cheerfully.

“How’d you get in there?”

“Tell you later.”

Turning back to Gisèle Baril, Mahatma suppressed a grin at the shouts from outside. “Let me
in
, Grafton!”

“Who was that?” Gisèle asked.

“A reporter.”

“His language is not very Catholic.” The doorbell rang three times. “Who are you?” Gisèle called through the door.

“I’m with
The Star
,” Edward Slade shouted. “Please let me in, Ma’am. I’m freezing.”

She opened the door. “You’re a reporter too?”

“That’s right, Ma’am,” Slade said.

“Can’t Mr. Grafton tell you about all this later? I feel tired now.”

“I’m afraid that won’t do, Ma’am. If you let him in, you have to let me in too. It’s only fair.”

“Oh dear.”

“I’m awfully chilled, Ma’am. Do you mind if I close the door? You wouldn’t have a sip of something hot, by any chance?”

“Well, if you’re cold, do come in. We have tea and sugar pie.”

She went into the kitchen again. Slade elbowed Mahatma. “Nice try, jerkoff.”

Gisèle returned with tea and pie. Slade got to the point. “If you don’t mind me asking directly, Ma’am, who killed your son, and what do you think should be done about it?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Well, would you say the anglos are a bad lot?”

“Some of them, sure. I mean, as I was telling Mr. Grafton
here, my son Gilles was fighting one of them a few days ago, but it had nothing—”

“So they
are
a bad lot, are they?” Slade scribbled. “And your son was fighting one of ’em, was he? When was that? Last week?”

“Yes, I think it—”

“Fighting an anglo last week,” he said, flipping a page of his notepad. “He get roughed up badly, Ma’am?”

“He came home with a black eye, but he said—”

“They gave him a shiner, did they? I see, I see! Can you spare me a photo, Ma’am?”

Gisèle turned to Mahatma. “Could you give him one from the album?”

“Certainly,” Mahatma said. The door opened. Gisèle’s husband and second son came in.

“Dehors!” the husband shouted.

“What’s he saying?” Slade asked.

“He wants us to leave,” Mahatma said, tugging on his boots. Gisèle began to sob.

Slade approached the father. “Sir, the two of us should have a chat. Man to man. People want to help you through this tragedy, but, to do so, they need to hear from you.
The Star
can help them hear from you.”

“Sacrez-moi ce tabarnac dehors,” the father shouted to his second son, who, although only fifteen, was bigger than Slade. He pushed the journalist toward the door as Slade continued to protest, “Sir, I have a job to do, and the public is very upset about this and is demanding to know why this happened to your son, and how to prevent it in the—”

Slade found himself flung outside, where Mahatma was buttoning his coat. “My boots,” Slade shouted, pounding on
the door. It opened. Two boots sailed out into the snow. Slade ran after them in his socks.

Mahatma had locked his doors and put his key in the ignition when Slade rapped on the window. “The photos,” Slade said, “give me some photos!”

“Can’t hear you!” Mahatma revved his engine.

“You heard me! Turn over those photos. She said we were to split them!”

“Call me later.”

“Bastard!” Puffs of vapour formed and vanished outside Slade’s mouth. “You sneaky bastard!”

Mahatma drove off, leaving Slade gesticulating from behind.

The next day, Mahatma’s story provided pictures of the family, quotes from the mother and a detailed description of the riot. Slade had quotes from the mother, a photo he’d dug out of a school yearbook borrowed from the victim’s school principal, and quotes from English and French hockey players.
Murder at Anglo-Franco Battle
, read
The Winnipeg Star
headline.
One Killed, Six Wounded in Hockey Riot
, read
The Herald
. The news flashed across the country.

Mahatma didn’t get to bed until five that morning, and had to be up early to attend a press conference given by the Manitoba Amateur Hockey Association. He arrived with bags under his eyes. He felt shame when he saw the headlines and his byline. He hadn’t misquoted anybody, and there were no errors of fact in his story, but the incident seemed repugnant now. His intrusion on Gisèle Baril seemed ugly.

St. Albert—One boy died and another six were hospitalized here last night in a hockey brawl which pitted English players against
French opponents and raged for ten minutes until police burst onto the ice.

Gilles Albert Baril, 16, of St. Albert, died immediately when struck by a hockey stick in the back of the head. Manitoba Provincial Police homicide detectives have questioned Baril’s teammates on the St. Albert Lions and players on the opposing Princeton Hawks, but no charges have been laid.

Held in the Manitoba Legislature, the news conference was packed.
The Toronto Times
, CBC-TV, every local TV and radio station, and newspaper reporters from across the country had crammed into the room. Out-of-town reporters kept stopping Mahatma for questions. The press conference did not go well. Jean-Guy Robert, the hockey association president, condemned the riot. He vowed to do everything possible to prevent such a thing from happening again. He said the league had cancelled the hockey season for boys in the sixteen-to seventeen-year-old division. Journalists demanded to know why English and French players were fighting. “I don’t know. We’ll look into it.”

“Who do you blame for the altercation?”

“I don’t have enough information to say.”

“Did a French player begin the fight by punching an English opponent?”

“We haven’t had a chance to look into that yet.”

“Do you think this fight reflects language tensions in the province?”

“No,” said Robert, biting the hairs under his lower lip into his mouth.

“You deny there are tensions?”

“Boys started fighting. It got out of control. Several were hurt. One was killed. I knew his parents. They—” Robert bit his beard again, then, suddenly, his face collapsed into his hands. This made national TV.

Meanwhile, word spread that an opposition member of the Manitoba Legislature was available for comment. The reporters rushed into an adjacent room.

Facing the scrum of journalists, the politician accused the government of ignoring violence in amateur sport and fomenting language tensions by planning in secret to extend French language services. “This may have been avoided if the government had listened to the people instead of plotting to ram French down our throats.”

Slade continued to chase the story. One day, he cited police sources claiming the killer was one of the few anglos on Baril’s team. The next day, he wrote that a source revealed the killer was an anglo from the other team. On a third day, he penned an article under the headline
Mystery Killer Eludes Cops
. Slade was interviewed on national television and quoted by reporters across the country. But his wave of popularity subsided. His predictions about retributive violence didn’t materialize. And the people of St. Albert and Princeton began to dislike him.

They grew tired of his interviewing every hockey player in town. They found it offensive that he attended all subsequent games in the arena, hoping to witness fresh violence. Mostly, they resented his depiction of the townspeople as hockey fanatics steeped in language hatred.

And Slade, for his part, grew bored with the story. Nothing
was happening. Nobody was arrested, nobody charged. After four days, the story had fallen off the front page. Slade felt he was wasting his time hanging around St. Albert-Princeton, living out of a motel room. Moreover, his stay was growing unpleasant. Somebody slashed two of his tires. Someone else jostled him as he entered the hockey arena. Even the waitress in the café where he took his breakfast grew sullen after he asked her a question, wrote down the answer and asked her name. His editor made him stay put a little longer—“just in case, Slade, you understand, just in case.”

Seven days after the brawl, on the night Edward Slade intended to return to Winnipeg, something did happen in St. Albert. It was what Slade had been waiting for. It happened around midnight, on an icy road eight miles out of town. Slade heard about it on his police radio scanner, which he had been monitoring in his hotel room. He heard the name of the victim: Peter Griffiths. Slade raced to the scene, arriving minutes after ambulance workers had carted away the body.

Peter Griffiths, the sixteen-year-old Princeton Hawks player, had lost control of his car on the highway leading out of town. His vehicle shot over a guard rail and down a ravine. The boy’s body was found in the front seat. His head and chest were crushed. Slade had a way with cops. He had learned, long ago, how to talk like them. Edging down the slope toward the officers, he said, “Hey Sarge, what’s it look like?” He sounded casual. Vaguely interested. Slade had met this cop. They had spoken after the hockey riot.

Standing on the hill in the darkness, with his back to Slade, Sergeant James Hetler grunted, “Some prick forced the kid off the road.”

“Oh yeah,” Slade said.

“The rear left bumper and rear left side of his car are smashed. Paint from another vehicle on them.”

Slade asked, “Homicide?”

“Damn right.”

“You giving this to the press?” the other officer asked Sgt. Hetler.

“No way. Not yet. We’ll just report a highway fatality and release no names until we reach the Griffiths family.”

“Who do we go after?” asked the officer.

“The frogs. The kid knocked the shit out of a few of them in that fight last week.”

Slade memorized every word. He climbed back up the hill. “Gotta make a call.”

Sgt. Hetler grunted. He was still looking over the car.

Slade drove into town. There was only one Griffiths listed in the Princeton telephone directory. Slade drove to the house, saw a police cruiser in the driveway and parked down the street. He waited and watched. The door opened. An officer stepped out and drove away. Slade rang the doorbell three minutes later. “Mr. Griffiths? I’m Slade, from Winnipeg. I was just speaking with Sergeant Hetler.” Bill Griffiths invited Slade in without any questions. Slade asked a few general questions, noting the boy’s age, his hockey background and details on the family. Continuing to write and glancing occasionally at Griffiths’ face, Slade noted the man’s appearance from close up: “His eyes, wrinkled and sleepy, light blue, struggling to grasp the fate of his son,” Slade scribbled. Colour was what he needed, more colour: “Six feet, easily 180, Bill Griffiths says his son was already bigger. ‘Just this evening, he took me in an arm wrestle,’ the man said.”

“Where was he going?” Slade asked.

“He had a girlfriend.”

“Who do you suspect?”

“Some French kid.”

“You sure of that?”

“Who else? Peter hammered half a dozen of ’em in that fight last week. But my son did his fighting on the rink. Off the ice, he was a gentleman.”

Slade took that down, word for word. He rose from his chair, mumbled something about how he might be in touch again, wished the father good luck, expressed his condolences, and opened the front door. “Oh, can you lend me a photo of your son?” Slade said. Bill Griffiths gave him one. Slade thanked the man and left.