Some Great Thing (21 page)

The nurse stepped into the room and held up a finger: they had one more minute.

“Come here, Don,” Chuck’s voice was weak. Betts stood close to the bed. “Do me a favour.”

“You name it, Chuck. Whatever you want.”

“Have a heart, next time a reporter fucks up. Anyway, I forgive you. I forgive you for everything. Now get out of here. I want to talk to Hat.”

Betts shrugged and stepped back. “He must be delirious,” he muttered to Mahatma.

The nurse escorted Betts from the room. Then she came back for Mahatma. “It’s time to go.”

“Wait a minute,” Chuck said. “C’mere, Hat.”

“Yes, buddy?” Mahatma said.

“I want you to fuck off.”

“Sure, Chuck.”

“You’re my friend, right? So I’m telling you, as a friend, to fuck off out of
The Herald
. Go do something better. Fuck off to the Greek islands. Crete. Go to Crete to…” Chuck gasped. Then he started up again. “Write. Write your ass off. Do some great book. Do it for me, Hat. Do it for you. Go write a novel. A great novel.”

“I don’t write fiction, Chuck,” Mahatma said, stupidly.

“Go write one anyway. You’ve got one in you, Hat. You’ve got better things in you. You’ve…” Chuck lost his breath, again.

“You must leave now,” the nurse said.

“Bye, Chuck,” Mahatma said. Chuck said nothing more.

The next day, hospital staff told Mahatma that Chuck’s condition had deteriorated. The doctor advised against visiting. Mahatma called back later but couldn’t reach the doctor. The next morning he learned that Chuck had developed an infection. The day after that, the hospital didn’t return his phone calls.

Mahatma busied himself with a story on the anti-French backlash—enraged by a
Herald
editorial in favour of the language accord, LAFTOM supporters had flooded
The Herald
’s switchboard with phone calls one day, making it impossible for regular business to get through. As soon as Mahatma finished the article, he took a taxi to the hospital.

Mahatma was desperate to see his friend. But he didn’t want to jeopardize Chuck’s health, barging into the room without sanitized hospital garments. He stood around feeling awkward
but when a nurse told him to wait downstairs, he said, “I’ll wait right here.” This meant more to him than getting any story. This was Chuck’s life. “He’s my friend. We work together. We are like family! I have a right to know how he is doing!”

An hour later Mahatma raised his head from his palm and looked up to see a nurse conferring with a doctor. Both of them were looking at him. Mahatma got to his feet. “I’ve been trying for two days to find out about Chuck.”

The doctor led Mahatma down the corridor. “I don’t think your friend is going to make it.”

“He’s not?”

“He has developed a pseudomonas bacterial infection, an overwhelming bodily infection. It is extremely hard to stop. The signs look bad. Blood pressure, heart rate, temperature, urination—”

“Can I see him?”

“All right. Ask for garments at the nursing station.”

Mahatma changed into the hospital clothes and approached Chuck’s bed. “Chuck? It’s me.”

“Mahatma!” Chuck croaked. “Mahatma!”

“Hang in there, Chuck.” That sounded so stupid. It sounded like encouragement to a runner, or a boxer. “Everybody is asking about you.”

“Mahatma!” Chuck cried.

“Yes, Chuck.”

“C’mere.”

“I’m right here, Chuck. Can I do anything? Is there anything you want?”

“Stay here. You’re my buddy, right? You never screwed me around, and I never screwed you around. Buddies, right?”

“Sure.” Mahatma swallowed hard. “Sure we are.” He wondered if he should tell Chuck about the card again. The card and the flowers and his picture on the front page. Chuck grunted. He gasped. He sighed and shivered and then he slept.

The telephone rang in the night. Mahatma jumped up, yanked it from the cradle and mumbled into it.

“Mr. Grafton?” a voice asked. “I’m very sorry. Chuck died this morning.”

Edward Slade hadn’t written a decent victim story in a month—no old ladies shooting purse-snatchers, nobody killed by falling icicles, no one crippled saving someone else’s life. There wasn’t even any police corruption to be found. News was so dead that Slade imagined that cops were behaving well solely to starve the tabloid business. He persuaded his editor to let him take a run at the French rights controversy. Why leave all the good stuff to Mahatma Grafton?

Slade’s first story ran under the headline
What’s All the Fuss About?

The Manitoba government wants to make French an official language of the province. It wants the rights of Franco-Manitobans spelled out in the Constitution. Here’s what the government says about the language deal:

•French will become an official language in Manitoba

•the province will need 500 bilingual employees within three years to boost services in French

•Manitoba will translate 450 statutes, or about 10,000 pages, into French

But here’s what critics say:

•it’s unfair to other ethnic groups to give the French language number one status (right up there with English) when Franco-Manitobans number only 50,000 and rank as the province’s fourth largest linguistic group

•it takes jobs from those who don’t speak French

•it paves the way for the French to dominate Manitoba

Do
YOU
want French to be official here? Take part in
The Star
survey by filling out the questionnaire below.

Next, Slade published a report card on the players in the French language crisis. He had used this device on the cop beat once, ranking police inspectors by performance. His readers loved it. And nothing infuriated a police inspector more than seeing the mark “C minus” next to his photo in
The Star
.

Jake Corbett’s leg hurt. His foot was swelling. Sometimes, it felt like somebody was hitting his leg with a hammer. The skin was rotting on his lower right calf. The blood wasn’t circulating well. His skin there had turned into a charcoal black broken only by the pinkish, coin-sized ulcers of cracked and open flesh. On top of that, his room was too hot. Downstairs in the Accidental Dog and Grill, Frank cranked up the heat too high. His clients liked coming in off Main Street to sit in
the warm and steamy café. But all the heat went upstairs, pouring out the air vent in the wall near his bed.

Jake began spending a lot of time in the Flapjack Café, on Main Street just north of the railway underpass. The cook didn’t mind Jake spreading his welfare documents all over the table. One day, the cook, whose name was Harry Carson, said, “Hey Jake, how do you feel about eating with black folks all the time?”

Jake looked him in the eye and said, “I don’t mind black people, so long as they keep their pamphlets to themselves and don’t go putting them on my table.” Harry doubled over at that one.

Jake told Harry that his lawyer, a lady named Brenda, was helping him fight the welfare people. She was working on getting Jake a vacation. Everybody else got to take holidays. Why not people on welfare? Jake wanted welfare to pay for a three-week vacation in Toronto and Montreal.

Harry Carson thought, this fellow doesn’t have it all together. There was nothing sadder than the sight of a poor white man. Harry couldn’t understand it. If
he
were white, he would have made train conductor. Hell, he would have made engineer.

Jake Corbett got lucky. Two days after he read in
The Herald
that some group called the League Against French something was to demonstrate outside the Legislature, the police returned his confiscated loud hailer. Jake took it to the demonstration and wandered through the crowd, looking for a good place to speak.

Edward Slade tapped his shoulder. “Hey Jake, what you doing here?”

“I got something to tell the people.”

Slade started scribbling in a notepad that seemed to drop out of his sleeve. “You agree with the league?”

“Sure.”

“You think it’s wrong to make French official?”

“Sure.”

“You oppose constitutional changes, translation costs, et cetera?”

“Right on.”

“Why?”

“It’s a waste of taxpayers’ money,” Jake said. He meant to tell Slade that what the government ought to do is scrap welfare and bring in a new idea: Guarantee Annual Income. This was the last hope for poor people in Canada. Jake was going to explain all this but Edward Slade ran off to interview a politician.

Jake pushed through the crowd and reached a platform. There, between columns by the entrance to the building, men and women were arranging microphones and electric cables and chairs and documents. Six men and two women stood on the platform looking down at a thousand people who had surrounded a statue of Queen Victoria and filled a circular driveway abutting the steps of the Legislature. A man with a beard and a deep voice said a few words into a microphone. Everybody cheered and clapped. A second man spoke for a minute. A woman took her turn. When she finished, the speakers took a break. They were caught by surprise when Jake limped up the steps and onto the platform.

Mahatma Grafton arrived shortly after the speeches began. He hadn’t had time to talk to Lawson. He hadn’t even had time to estimate the crowd size. He only had time to ask himself what Corbett was doing on stage.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Corbett said into the microphone, “I’m gonna tell you straight and true: WE’RE GETTING SCREWED!” The crowd cheered. “The government isn’t minding our Charter of Rights. What about poor people? We aren’t getting any security like it says in Section Seven! We got to mind our Charter from the roots to the top! We…”

Mahatma smiled broadly. Give it to ’em, Jake! People in the crowd began to mutter. Complaining to their neighbours, they drifted off. A man on stage approached Corbett. “Just a minute, I’m still talking,” Corbett said. The man persisted. “I SAID JUST A MINUTE!” The microphone belched a chalkboard screech. Hundreds of people were leaving the demonstration. “THE PROBLEM WITH THE WELFARE PEOPLE IS…”

Mahatma could see Corbett’s mouth working but heard no more sound. Corbett had been disconnected. He stopped, turned and stretched a wide mouth at the man beside him. Two men pulled Corbett away from the podium. Lawson told the crowd the demonstration would continue. But he was interrupted by megaphone-boosted soprano anger: “Down with unfairness. Down with this meeting. Down with poverty! Up with the Charter of Rights and Libidies!”

Shoving broke out behind Lawson. Corbett lost his place on the platform and found himself back in the crowd. He pushed his Blow-Joe megaphone volume button to max and
let loose with another speech. Half the crowd wandered away, while others stayed to watch Corbett’s tussle. Finally, Lawson took the microphone on stage. Corbett matched him word for word. At that point, the rest of the crowd disbanded.

Ben Grafton had attended the rally out of curiosity “Who is that man?” he asked his son.

“That’s the welfare kook I’ve written about.”

“That man is no kook. I don’t care if he’s on welfare, I don’t care if he sleeps under abridge, I’m telling you he has power. Took him three minutes to send a thousand people packing. Could the premier of Manitoba do that? Answer me that!”

Mahatma borrowed his father’s idea for his lead:

A Winnipeg welfare recipient accomplished yesterday what Premier Bruce Gilford couldn’t have hoped to do: he disheartened and disbanded 1,000 anti-government protestors at the Manitoba Legislature.

Slade, in
The Star
, wrote:

He came, he saw and he messed up the whole works.

That was what organizers of yesterday’s rally against the Manitoba government’s French language plans were saying after a $178-a-month welfare man poleaxed the proceedings with an outburst of his own.

Jake Corbett, who lives in a greasy spoon and lugs around a megaphone to air his beefs about so-called “welfare injustice”…

In his column for
Le Miroir
Georges Goyette wrote:

Introducing an unwitting champion of the Franco-Manitoban cause…

None of these articles generated any media interest outside Winnipeg. However, by a circuitous route, a fourth article sparked the interest of the international press. For
La Voix de Yaoundé
, Yoyo wrote:

Winnipeg—A brilliant social strategist has managed to defuse a wave of anti-French bigotry and at the same time attract attention to the plight of the poor in Canada.

Jake Corbett, a middle-aged man of poverty, no education and ill health, again showed his talents as one of the fastest rising social critics in North America…

Christine Bennie, who had been reporting for
The New York Times
since quitting
The Herald
eight months ago, was covering an assignment in Cameroon when Yoyo’s article appeared.

Christine Bennie had a passion for local newspapers. Everywhere she went, she read them. In Tucson, in Tijuana, in Toledo. Bennie could read Spanish, French and German, and she made good use of it with the local press. In Yaoundé, lounging in a bar in the Forum Golf Hotel, scanning
La Voix de Yaoundé
, Christine locked onto a fascinating line in bold face that said, “De notre correspondant à Winnipeg, Has-sane Moustafa “Yoyo” Ali.” Christine took a long sip of her tonic and asked herself: What’s this paper doing with a correspondent in Winnipeg? She devoured the story. Some guy
on welfare was turning everybody on their heads in good old Winnipeg. Christine vaguely remembered Jake Corbett. She had intended to do an article on him, but had ended up resigning from
The Herald
before she got around to it. The truth was that for months, Christine had been pestering her new editors to let her return to Winnipeg for a few days. “I could write you some local colour that you wouldn’t believe,” she told them. Nobody doubted that. Everybody in
The New York Times
newsroom remembered the wire story that had come out of Winnipeg a year or so earlier:
Wild Moose Bolts into Downtown Winnipeg, Causing Panic
. An even wilder wire story had come out of Winnipeg since Christine had left
The Herald: Welfare Recipient Pardoned for Sucking Letters from Mailbox
. After that,
Times
reporters began teasing her about the city. “Winnipeg? Where’s that?” someone would say. “It’s where they suck moose out of mailboxes.” First the moose, then the vacuum incident, and now the welfare recipient with more personality than Martin Luther King. Or so
La Voix de Yaoundé
suggested. Christine would see for herself. She’d be going to Winnipeg soon. She felt like scooping the ass off
The Herald
. And she had to meet this Hassane Moustafa Ali! What on earth was he doing in Winnipeg?

Ten days after Yoyo’s article appeared in
La Voix de Yaoundé
, Christine Bennie arrived in Winnipeg. She had contacted
La Voix
before leaving Cameroon to obtain Hassane Moustafa Ali’s address and telephone number. She flew from Dakar to New York, spent five days at home and then flew to Winnipeg. Mr. Ali was extraordinarily hospitable. A true Cameroonian! She
had phoned from her office in New York and he had offered to meet her at the airport. She accepted with pleasure. She would write two stories from Winnipeg: an offbeat piece on a Cameroonian correspondent in Canada, and a piece about Jake Corbett, the welfare hero.

Yoyo met her at the revolving baggage counter. “It is my honour and privilege to welcome you to Winny-peg, even if it is not my city,” Yoyo said. The smiling woman had a firm handshake and big, firm hips, like a good Cameroonian woman. She was gregarious. She loved to talk. He liked her immediately.

They chatted all the way into the city, in the back seat of a cab. “You came out here on a
bus
to meet me? I don’t believe it. I simply don’t believe it!”

“You went all the way to visit my country and read our humble newspaper in Yaoundé?” Yoyo countered. “I don’t believe that! I simply don’t believe that!”

Yoyo directed her to Frank’s Accidental Dog and Grill. She wouldn’t go in at first. “Just a minute. Just give me a minute. I just have to get this down.” She appeared to be noting the name of the café, the address, the name of Joe’s Barber next door, the look of the men in the street.

They stepped inside. She shook the hand of the man behind the counter. “Hello,” she said warmly, “I’m Christine Bennie from
The New York Times
.”

“Hello,” he replied evenly, “I’m Frank, from an accidental pregnancy.”

“Good one. I’ll remember that. Is Jake around?”

“Hey. Would you do me a favour? If you’re doing a write-up, would you kindly not call this here establishment a greasy spoon?”

She smiled. “Sure. I think I can do that.”

“Good. Jake’s upstairs. Your friend knows the way,” Frank said, indicating Yoyo. “He’s been here before.”

Christine found Jake Corbett in fine form. He was arranging his files and clippings about welfare when she came in. There was no place for her to sit. The bed and chairs were covered with documents. She noted the documents in his hand, the clothes he wore, the sagging bed, the paint-peeling window held open by a brick.

“Don’t tell Frank about the brick,” Corbett warned her, “he says I’m burning up his energy. Says he’s gonna boot me out he hears that brick’s in the window.” Christine steered Corbett through his welfare woes, keeping him on track for the story she was framing. Then she went with Yoyo to see Mahatma Grafton. He provided photocopies of his earlier stories on Corbett and explained who Christine should talk to for more details. She phoned a welfare officer who hung up when Christine identified herself. She phoned the deputy minister of Community Services. She phoned Corbett’s lawyer. She phoned a professor of social work at the University of Manitoba. She found out about how a judge had ordered Corbett’s arrest, how Corbett had gotten beaten up in Polonia Park, how he had turned an anti-government protest into a dud, how he had gotten on the front page of
The Herald
four times in as many months.