Some Great Thing (28 page)

“No, try Paris to Moscow,” Ben said. “Do that and I may come too.”

A crowd of journalists jostled the three men. Mahatma’s flight was due to arrive.

“I’ll call you sometime, Harry,” Melvyn said. “And Ben, I want you to tell your son something for me.”

“What’s that?”

“Tell him he has a good mind. Tell him he ought to leave
The Herald
and do something with his life!”

Harry Carson also had a message for Mahatma. He wanted to tell the reporter how highly Jake Corbett had spoken of him. Three days earlier, Jake had come into Harry’s café and ordered flapjacks, and suddenly keeled over. He had a fork in his hand when he hit the floor. Jake had tried to speak. It sounded as if he had food in his mouth. Harry pried open the mouth and used two fingers to scoop out the food. He didn’t
want Jake choking. Harry withdrew a large, unchewed piece of flapjack. It was covered in bright red blood. Jake was trying to tell him something. But he was short of breath.

Harry put a coat under Jake’s feet. He dried his friend’s sweating face. He touched Jake’s hand. Curling his fingers around Harry’s thumb, Jake whispered his last words and gasped. A thick line of blood dribbled down his chin. Harry called an ambulance. But Jake Corbett was gone before Harry heard the siren.

The mayor asked her to go to the airport. He wanted to know what Mahatma had to say about his troubles in New York. Sandra was to take careful notes if Mahatma made a public statement.

“I’d go myself, but it would be unseemly for the mayor to appear so curious. Besides,” he said, grinning, “you might want to see him alone.”

When she lowered her eyes, he continued, “I want you to know that I don’t mind you seeing him. I know you’ll guard the privacy of my office.”

Waiting for Mahatma at the airport, Sandra avoided the crowd of journalists and camera technicians. When reporters were hungry for a story, they would scrum anybody. Sandra didn’t want to be scrummed. She didn’t want to be followed and badgered. She wanted thirty seconds alone with Mahatma. She had done something crazy in New York. She had picked up Mahatma’s suitcase and brought it home. “It’s at my place,” she planned to tell him. “Want to get it?”

They were standing in a bar at the airport. Everybody was drinking. Bob Stone, however, stuck to orange juice. He hadn’t been planning to be back on the job the day after his trans-Atlantic return from Cameroon. But this was his story. He had broken it. He wanted to follow it through before taking any time off. A CBC-TV reporter had a word with Bob. “All right,” Bob said, striving to sound nonchalant. He was told to face the camera. Lights shone down on him.

“Bob Stone,” the TV reporter asked, “tell us what happened when Mahatma Grafton was stopped by immigration officers at the John F. Kennedy Airport.”

Bob assumed his radio voice. This was his third interview that day.

Don Betts and Lyndon Van Wuyss stood at a coffee counter opposite the door through which Mahatma would appear. A pack of reporters pressed in on them. “Come on, Don, tell us about it,” one journalist said.

“Not on your life,” Betts said. “You’re wasting your time. Mahatma Grafton isn’t going to talk to you, either. We’re taking him straight to the office for a debriefing.”

Camera lights shone on Van Wuyss. Someone called out, “Can you tell us about the detention of your reporter in New York?” Reporters stuck microphones close to the M.E.’s face.

“
The Herald
is outraged by the blatant harassment of one of its best reporters. We did everything in our power to make Mr. Grafton’s detention as brief as possible.”

“Sir,” an other reporter said, “we have sources saying that Mahatma Grafton was denied entry to the United States because his father was a socialist and labour activist in the 1950s. How do you respond to that?”

“I’ll have to discuss that with Mr. Grafton.”

Another reporter spoke up. “A spokesman for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service admitted this morning that Mr. Grafton was detained under Section 212(a)28. That is the section barring communist aliens from the U.S.A. Mr. Van Wuyss, is your reporter a communist?”

Van Wuyss ignored the question.

“Here he comes,” someone shouted.

Twenty-five journalists, seven camera technicians and thirty onlookers pressed toward the arrivals door. Betts fought to the front of the pack. Sandra was hit on the head by a television camera. She dropped her tape recorder. She knelt to retrieve it, but the crowd surged forward, knocking her over and leaving her at the outer edge of the scrum. A hand touched her shoulder. Softly. An old, lined, brown hand with long, slender fingers. From behind her came a melodious voice. “Let me help you.”

Ben Grafton gently took her elbow. Sandra felt dizzy. Her forehead was sticky.

“You’ve got a cut on your face. Come sit down.” The smiling man led her to a bench and sat beside her. He pressed a tissue against Sandra’s temple. She moaned. “You’ll be just fine. I looked after cuts and bruises for forty years on the railway.”

Flying west over the Atlantic for the second time in two days, Mahatma no longer felt impatient about getting home, or irritated about missing Corbett’s funeral. He felt calmer. He ate a little but skipped the wine. After the meal, he prepared a statement. He practised reading it until he had it memorized.

Then he slept until the plane landed in Toronto. He made a connecting flight and slept most of the way to Winnipeg. As the plane began its descent toward the prairies, Mahatma shaved in the john, washed his face and picked out his hair. He wished he had a clean shirt.

The first person he saw was Don Betts, pressed against the side of the glass door which had been swung open for arriving travellers. Mahatma shoved past him and through the humming pack of journalists. He stood up on a bench to be seen and heard better. He thought he saw his father sitting with Sandra. But a cameraman on a stepladder blocked his view.

Mahatma said he wanted to make a statement. The scrum grew silent. He described his experience in New York.

“The measures were intended as harassment. The authorities knew I wasn’t stopping in the United States, but only attempting to fly to Canada. Why they harassed me, I don’t know. I’m not a communist. I belong to no political party. I sat on the student council of my high school ten years ago, and that’s as political as I’ve ever been.

“But there is something else I wish to say. I am resigning from
The Herald
, as of this moment. I am resigning because reports I filed from Yaoundé were distorted and falsified by
The Herald
.” Mahatma added that Don Betts had twisted two of his stories and killed others outright.

A reporter asked, “What are you going to do now?”

When Mahatma stepped off the bench to answer, Betts shoved him. Three reporters jumped into the fray. Betts punched one of them. Airport security officers ordered Betts from the terminal. Lyndon Van Wuyss, bombarded by questions, left of his own accord.

It took Mahatma an hour to conduct all the interviews. He didn’t care how the journalists presented his border trouble. He just hoped they let people know that he hadn’t written the stories from Africa that had run under his byline.

A thin, pale man approached Mahatma after the last interview. “I’m Frank, ’member me? Jake lived in my place.”

“Yes, I remember.”

“How’d you like to come clean out Jake’s room?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“He’s got all sorts of diaries and papers and documents and suchlike and if you don’t want ’em I’m junking ’em on trash day.”

“Don’t throw them out. I’ll come see you in a day or two.”

“I’ll give you a hot dog. Deluxe. On the house.”

Mahatma walked up to his father, who stood beside Sandra. He would have hugged them both, but the cameramen would have filmed it. He winked at her and shook his father’s hand. “Did I get the message out to enough media stations?” Ben asked. Mahatma smiled. Ben introduced his son to Harry Carson. Mahatma put his hand in Harry’s big palm.

“Jake Corbett loved you a whole lot,” Harry said. “He wanted me to give you a message. It was the last thing he said. I wrote it down so I wouldn’t forget. But my spelling’s awful bad, and I’m sorry about that.”

Mahatma read the note. “Jake says you’re supposed to write a story on him. A big story or a book. On the life and time of Jake Corbett.” “I’ll come see you soon,” he told Harry.

“Do that. I make good flapjacks. Jake liked ’em, anyway.”

Lyndon Van Wuyss tacked two announcements to the message board at
The Herald
. The first read: “Mahatma Grafton resigned from
The Herald
, effective July 25, 1984.” The second read: “Don Betts has been suspended for one week, effective July 25, 1984, for unbecoming conduct at the Winnipeg International Airport.”

Mahatma could go to Crete. He could live in Spain. But he didn’t want to. Cameroon was more appealing, but he didn’t want to go back there. Not right now. For the present, he wanted to be involved with his own country. He wanted to
do
something.

Jake Corbett must have been some kind of saint or something. Frank could tell. He had never seen Jake do one bad thing. But beyond that, Jake had done something unique. Twice, without even being there, he had drawn couples to the Accidental Dog and Grill. Frank had seen these couples come looking for Jake, in body or in spirit. Couples
never
came to the Dog and Grill. Bums, yes. Bums and winos. And guys out of work. But couples? First, that African journalist had come to Frank’s with that woman reporter from New York. And now, upstairs, there was Mahatma Grafton with a woman called Sandra. There was something special about these two couples. In both cases, the man and the woman were hot on each other. They weren’t clinging or kissing or carrying on like horny kids; they just gave off a certain feeling. There was something going on. They were
discovering
each other. They
were discovering Jake Corbett. It could only mean one thing if such distinguished people were running after Jake, even when he was dead. It meant he was a saint.

Jake Corbett had kept a diary. It spanned several years. On the first page, he had written: “This journal is dedicated to Section Seven of the Charter of Rights. And to telling things straight and true.”

Mahatma flipped through the pages. Certain lines caught his eye. Mahatma lingered over the entry for July 11, 1983—that was the day he had joined
The Herald
. “I been going to Burger Delight on Osborne Street but today they wouldn’t let me in. The man at the door said try Robins Donuts across the street. I never seen anyone else stopped in a restaurant. Except some Indians, one time. Robins let me in. I had two crullers.”

Corbett had documented everything he had ever done. The day he flew to New Zealand. The day he learned his welfare would be cut off to compensate for his trip to Christchurch. The day he was arrested for vacuuming mail from a letter box.

He had boxes and boxes of welfare-related documents. Court decisions, news clippings, booklets setting out welfare rates, letters from welfare officers, notices that his benefits were being curtailed, doctors’ certificates…

Sitting on Corbett’s concave mattress, Mahatma said, “It’s going to take weeks to go through all this stuff. But there’s a hell of a story in it.”

Sandra, who was sitting behind him on the bed, rested her chin on his shoulder. “Write it, Hat. I’ll kill you if you don’t.”

Mahatma and Sandra visited Harry Carson at his café. They sat at the counter and ordered coffee. Harry served up stacks of banana flapjacks with hot maple syrup. He served juice and pie and coffee. And he wouldn’t take a cent.

After the meal, when Mahatma went to the john, Harry leaned over the counter and whispered to Sandra, “You’re his girl, aren’t you?”

“I wouldn’t put it quite that way,” Sandra said.

“I’m too old to put things the right way,” Harry said, pouring her another cup of coffee. Mahatma and Sandra sat with Harry for two hours, past the closing time of the Flapjack Café. Mahatma took notes and said he also wanted to write about the Rabbi one day. Harry said, “Yes, come back. I’ll tell you all about the Rabbi, ’cause he’s worth a book just like Jake.”

It was a Saturday morning, three days after his return. They were in a simple room, with a big window and a big bed and one big pillow. Sandra was still sleeping. Columns of sunlight poured through her window and burst against the mirror. Mahatma heard the breeze. He heard the leaves conversing. He rose, slipped on his clothes and stepped outside. He bought
The Herald
,
The Star
and
The Toronto Times
, held them under his arm and crossed the street to a deli. There, he bought two large cafés au lait and, in memory of Jake Corbett, two crullers. He brought them back to Sandra’s room, and then ate and drank and read in bed until she rolled over and opened her eyes and laughed.

Mahatma devoured the news, pausing over weak articles to calculate what he would have added, deleted or improved.

Reading
The Herald
and
The Star
, four story ideas came to him. He wondered who he could sell them to. But then his thoughts skipped to something else. He sifted again through
The Star
.

“Hey,” he asked Sandra, “where’s Slade’s byline?”

“He was fired for his Bloodbath in the Tropics screwup.”

Ben was out. But he had scribbled a message and a telephone number on a piece of paper.

“Son, call Christine Bennie at
The Toronto Times
. Urgent.”

Christine Bennie asked about Yoyo, of course. Mahatma told her Yoyo had given him a gift to pass on to her. Christine was glad to hear that. And she wanted to know more about Mahatma’s border troubles. Mahatma said he planned to sell an article about the incident to a newspaper. She asked if he knew that she had left
The New York Times
to take a new job as city editor of
The Toronto Times
. Christine said she had given her boss several of Mahatma’s clippings about Jake Corbett. The managing editor liked them. Could Mahatma come for an interview in two days?