Some Great Thing (9 page)

Chuck Maxwell tried to rescue Mahatma from his slump on the crime beat. “Do more victim stories,” Chuck said. “They make the best-read copy in the paper.” When Mahatma began to protest, Chuck added, “You didn’t commit the crimes. You’re just writing about them.”

Chuck accompanied Mahatma to court one day. “There’s three things you gotta watch for. The first is the big crime. That hardly ever happens, but you gotta be around when it does. The second is famous people. If you’re on the cop beat and the attorney general’s son gets arrested for pimping and you miss it, you’re fucked. The third thing is quirky news. When you hear something offbeat, ask yourself if it’s weird enough to get picked up by the wire services and printed all the way over in Australia. Like that vacuum story. If it’ll cross an ocean and survive, you’re looking at page one for sure.”

Helen Savoie had lived for ten years above a fur store east of the Red River. Initially, she had used one room to sleep and the other as a study. But after joining
The Herald
, she often slept in her study or wrote in her bedroom, noting ideas for stories late into the night. The landlord had always assumed Helen was a secretary. She never bothered to correct him.

In her earliest days at the paper, an editor had asked her to coach one of the weaker reporters—a fellow named Chuck
Maxwell—in the art of writing. Helen took the task to heart. In those days, reporters still used typewriters. Helen would bring home carbon copies of Chuck’s articles. In her spare time, she would unite split infinitives, tighten leads and cross out adjectives. Helen eventually realized Chuck would never improve much. But the editing bug had infected her. From time to time, she couldn’t resist red-pencilling other reporters’ carbon copies and slipping the corrected work into their mailboxes at work. This unsolicited service proved unpopular in the newsroom. Helen let it drop, except for occasional comments to new reporters who appeared receptive to criticism. Although Mahatma Grafton was a capable writer, Helen detected a disturbing tendency in his work. He was too hungry for news. Too willing to write anything. In a recent article, he had happily compared police statistics on the number of rapes this year and last. Helen circled the offensive paragraph and scribbled, “What do you take these for, basketball stats?” before dropping the clipping in his mailbox.

Helen didn’t hear back from him. She believed that Mahatma Grafton was rudderless. Capable of producing great work, but equally likely to waste his talent on junk news. Helen pictured Mahatma lingering on the brink. He could swing one way or the other. Journalists started out honourably, but circumstances—city editors, assignment editors, tabloid competitors—plunged them into trash cans. It took less effort to grab the easy stories—dog bites boy, mayor swears at premier—than to climb out and do something.

Every day, when journalists came to work, they knew how their work had been judged: their stories ran big or small or not at all. Reporters learned how to wring the most gratification
from the least work. Helen worried about Grafton. On the cop beat, he exhibited a growing tendency to grab easy news. It disturbed Helen that so many young reporters tossed aside their values to succeed. Perhaps they didn’t have any values. Didn’t care about anything. “I don’t have an opinion, I’m a journalist,” they would answer if you asked them anything about anything. Should Canada withdraw from NATO? Bar American cruise missile testing over Canadian airspace? Idiots.

Hassane Moustafa “Yoyo” Ali met Helen Savoie on the bicycle path in Lyndale Park on the east side of the Red River. Helen was out for a stroll, and Yoyo had come to see the Red River, which, he’d been informed, had been a meeting place for Cree and Assiniboine Indians before the Europeans came. “Excuse me,” Yoyo said to her. He found her plumpness attractive. Yoyo worried about disturbing her. He knew that Canadians disliked talking to strangers.

“Yes?” she said, eyeing him directly.

He asked, “Is this the historic Red River, travelled once by Louis Riel, father of Manitoba?” He liked her big hips, big bones, big legs. She resembled a good strong African woman.

For her part, Helen noticed his heavy accent. She guessed that he was from Haiti. And so cute: small, like a boy, but in his late twenties, or older. Replying in English, Helen said yes, this was the Red River.

“Should I call you Madame or Mademoiselle?”

“It doesn’t make any difference,” she said. Oh yes, he emphasized, it made a difference. “Mademoiselle,” she said.

Touched by the man’s struggle to carry on in English, Helen made up her mind. She began speaking to him in French. Flawless French.

“Alors, vous êtes canadienne-française,” he said.

“Mais oui.”

“Vraiment?” He studied her with great interest.

“Oui,” she said, shyly. She admitted that she was French-Canadian. That she still carried the language with her.

Yoyo told Helen he was spending ten months in Winnipeg as a foreign correspondent while gaining experience as a contributor to the St. Boniface weekly. They spoke of St. Boniface, Canada and Cameroon as they walked through the park. A bitter autumn wind whistled across the river. She could see he was cold, and she, already wearing a heavy sweater, offered him her jacket.

He declined. “That is very kind of you. In my country, never would a white woman lend a black man her jacket.”

“There are whites in Cameroon?”

“There are tourists, and there are ex-colonials, and missionaries, and those who wish to rescue us from our misery,” he chuckled. “They come over, stinging from vaccinations, suffering diarrhoea from our water, melting under the heat, cursing the roads when it rains, carrying mosquito netting to protect them from malaria, never speaking our native languages, sometimes not even speaking French, yet still, somehow, they remain convinced that they must rescue us from our misery.”

“And do they do it?”

“No, they leave, after a few weeks, or months, to rescue themselves from their own misery.” Helen laughed again. A long, hearty, simple laugh, mirth that she had barely known
in the many years she had worked at
The Herald
. Yoyo was a charming fellow. Handsome, in his way. But thin! His wrists and knuckles seemed particularly frail. Perhaps this was what she found attractive. She allowed herself to dwell for a moment on inconsequential thoughts that could never lead anywhere. Yoyo asked her name. For him, she pronounced it ‘Hélène.’ “Hélène!” Yoyo said it with urgency, as if he were warning her of a rushing bicycle.

“Oui?”

“Hélène, je t’aime.”

They met the next day in the park, on the bicycle path, under a tree with a strange branch that reached straight out and then curved up, like a bent arm. Yoyo told her it resembled the arm of an African woman reaching up to adjust a water pail on her head. Yoyo kissed her cheeks. His lips were thick. Dry. As dry as a twig in the sun. Dry, perhaps, but they exerted pressure. Promising lips! He said, “Hello, my lover!”

“And what makes you think I’m your lover?”

“Come now, Mademoiselle Hélène, if we were not lovers, why would you have met me today?”

He told her she had beautiful eyes. Stunning hair, dark brown, very brown, that hung straight down, grazing her neck. “Tellement foncés, tes cheveux,” he told her. As if she had
ancêtres africains
. She was going to tell him she couldn’t meet him again. She was going to say she didn’t want to get involved. She was going to break it off before it started, but then he told her he was returning to Cameroon in six months. Helen bit her tongue. If he were going soon, why not? He was staying in the home of an old widow; they couldn’t go there. So Helen took him home.

Yoyo was a wonderful lover. Less energetic, less thrusting, than her old boyfriend. Yoyo was no bigger than Helen. In fact, laughing, she put him on the bathroom scales and found out he was two pounds lighter. He didn’t perform gymnastics and he didn’t display Olympian endurance. But he was caring. He made her look into his eyes when they made love; his eyes were so dark that, whenever the lights were dim, she couldn’t find the line between his pupils and his irises. Sometimes he spoke in French and sometimes Bamileke, his mother tongue. He said the English language wasn’t fit for bedroom conversation.

They made love again. The phone rang. It was out in the hall, on the floor. Before he had undressed her and let her strip him, Yoyo had stared at the beige receiver in the bedroom. “Canadians leave telephones in their bedrooms?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, puzzled at his confusion.

“You leave them right next to a bed?” he asked.

“Yes, why?” she asked.

“And if it rings while you sleep, won’t it wake you up if it is so close to the bed?”

“Yes, of course.”

“And that doesn’t bother you? You would let the phone ruin your rest?” This was the first time the practice had struck Helen as absurd. But Yoyo hadn’t finished. “Now, one other thing. If you and I are making love, and this phone rings, what happens then?”

“Well, normally, I would answer it.”

Yoyo shook his head. Canadians really had their priorities mixed up. “I have entered you, and we are gasping together, and you are prepared to roll over and answer the phone?”

Helen grinned and said, “You never know. It could be important. Someone could be selling vacuum cleaners.” They laughed and kissed, but before going further, Yoyo carried the phone into the hall.

“Do you know what I would like?” They had slept for an hour.

“Anything you want, Yoyo.”

“Make me breakfast.”

“What?”

“Make me breakfast.”

It was two in the afternoon. “Why breakfast?”

“In my country, when a man and a woman make love, if the man does a good job, the woman makes him breakfast. A huge, whopping breakfast. She treats him like a king. It is thought that he deserves it, if he has satisfied her.”

“Well, how about eggs and orange juice and toast?”

“I’ll take the toast and the eggs,” he said. “Many eggs and much toast. But no juice! By no means juice! Just give me tea with honey.”

“You don’t like orange juice?”

“I don’t like what Canadians call orange juice! In those frozen cans? How can one freeze the juice of an orange? I nearly choked, the first time I tasted it. We have beautiful oranges in Cameroon and we know how to make orange juice. The richer a nation becomes, the less capable it is of producing respectable orange juice.” Helen laughed hard, hearing that. It sounded particularly funny when pronounced with Yoyo’s West African accent. She made him breakfast.

Nobody threw a party like Georges Goyette. He threw one in November in his second residence, a renovated farmhouse thirty miles south of Winnipeg. He had a fridge stocked with beer, friends who were fiddlers, and a knack, himself, for clacking spoons. He invited a roomful of people who didn’t believe in letting a party die before dawn. He brought Yoyo along, telling him that it would do him good to get out of the city. “Ca va te déconcrisser,” Goyette laughed, slapping his friend on the back.

“Ca va me quoi?” asked Yoyo, who was unfamiliar with Goyette’s personal slang.

“You know, it will loosen your bones, let your blood pump, show you a good time.”

Yoyo nodded, unsure of what to expect. Georges Goyette, a man of many interests, was not one to invite only francophones to his parties. If certain language purists couldn’t cut their parties with anglos, then those purists, as far as Georges was concerned, could go roll hoops. Georges liked a party with two languages, loud music and wild jokes. His fridge never ran out. It seemed to get fuller as the night wore on. Asked about it, he would stroke his beard and refer to the Bible: “You have heard of the story of the multiplication of the bread? Well, this is the multiplication of the beer. Why not? Both have yeast, right?”

Georges invited Mahatma Grafton to the party. Grafton had originally struck him as a bright young journalist, but he was now giving Georges reason to pause. Grafton had been producing silly crime stories lately. Georges would have
liked to talk about it, but Grafton couldn’t come to the party. Other journalists did come, however. Chuck Maxwell, a longtime drinking buddy of Georges’, came. And so did Norman Hailey. And Helen Savoie. So did Sandra Paquette and the mayor, John Novak, who had known Georges for a long time.

Sandra met Yoyo, whom she found fascinating and whom she introduced to the mayor. The two men hit it off. They spoke passionately about world politics. Yoyo spoke at length about Cameroon. He equated the tensions between the English and the French there with those in Canada. The mayor said he would love to see Cameroon. Goyette jumped into the conversation until fiddles sounded from the barn. The farmhouse emptied. Everyone flocked to the music except Helen, who hesitated, knowing that Yoyo would want to dance with her and not wanting to make such a public declaration about their affair. To avoid meeting Yoyo, she slipped out of the farmhouse and walked down a country road. A man appeared beside her suddenly, giving her a start. “Take it easy,” said Chuck Maxwell, “it’s only me.” After a moment he added, “It’s sure getting a little heavy in there.”

“Heavy?”

“Everywhere you turn, people are speaking French. It’s rude, if you ask me.”

“Nobody’s asking you,” Helen said.

“Don’t you think they could speak English when other people are around?”

“It’s a party. The host is French-Canadian. So are half the guests. So what’s your problem? You want rules for party talk?”

“They all
can
speak English, you know.”

Helen sighed. “What do you say we just enjoy the nature?”

“French extremists want the moon,” Chuck complained. “If they keep it up, Manitobans are gonna say, ‘Whoa! Enough’s enough. If you want to speak French everywhere, just move to Quebec!’”

“Chuck!” Helen said softly.

“What?”

“You’re a good guy and you’re my friend. But you still haven’t figured out that this province, and this country, were founded by the French and the English. So spare me your bullshit, okay?”

The temperature in Winnipeg dropped to -40 degrees Celsius, which was the same as -40 degrees Fahrenheit, on November 22, 1983. This was a record for the month of November. It was colder in rural Manitoba. Automobile gas lines froze. Block heaters had to be plugged in, but even then, many cars wouldn’t start. Yoyo was horrified. He feared the sub-zero merging of Celsius and Fahrenheit. Imagine! So cold that it didn’t even matter whether you were referring to one or the other! For a while, Yoyo refused to go outside. Inside, he wore a hat. He wondered what would happen if the heating system broke down in his house. He had stepped out two days before it hit -40. At that point, it was -20 and dropping. The cold had bitten his forehead. Yoyo had never suffered from headaches, but the stinging cold gave him one. He longed for the summer and for his country.

Midway through this cold snap, and shortly after Mahatma Grafton passed his probation at
The Winnipeg Herald
, Manitobans woke up to news of the most bizarre crime story in years.

It happened in the St. Albert-Princeton hockey arena, thirty miles south of Winnipeg, on a Thursday night. St. Albert, a predominantly French-speaking town, was bordered by Princeton, which was mostly English. Each town had its own mayor and city hall and bylaws, but they shared a library and recreation centre. Each town had its own hockey team, but they shared the St. Albert-Princeton arena.

The fight started around 8:30 p.m., peaked five minutes later and faded abruptly when the police arrived. Georges Goyette, who was watching his son’s St. Albert team play Princeton, witnessed the brawl. It started when a sixteen-year-old St. Albert player punched a Princeton player in the face. He hit him again and the Princeton boy fell to the ice. The players on both teams cleared the bench. The results: two broken noses, one concussion, a fractured wrist, a broken ankle, many cuts and much bruising. Nothing serious happened to the original two combatants. But a St. Albert player who had broken one nose and blackened four eyes in the brawl ran into fatal luck as police stormed the arena. When he turned to look at the cops, someone—nobody seemed to know who—clubbed his head. The boy died before he was carried off the ice. His name was Gilles Baril, the son of the town baker.

Some parents joined the fighting, but Goyette hopped over the boards and towed his son off the ice before the brawl had reached that point.

Edward Slade dived into the story. A good one. At last. He called the cops in St. Albert. A constable gave him the basics: one kid killed and six hospitalized. But the constable wouldn’t name the dead boy.

“Can’t you tell me anything about him?”

“He’s dead.”

Slade eased off. He started chatting about violence in hockey. Fighting was getting out of hand these days, wasn’t it?

“Yeah, but you haven’t seen the likes of this before,” the cop said. “You wouldn’t have believed it. Those kids went wild.”

Slade, who was unmarried and childless, said such incidents made him worry about the safety of his own kids.

“You got kids too, eh?” the cop said. “I got three little terrors.”

“I’ve got two,” Slade said. “And we’ve got another on the way. Try living on my salary with kids.”

“Don’t I know it,” the cop said.

“My boys will be hitting the hockey age pretty soon. I worry about what’s going to happen to them in those leagues. I mean, today’s violence, you think we’ll see more of it in the future?”

“Between you and me,” the cop said, “I think we can expect to see more of this. Things could get worse.”

“Even for kids that age?”

“You bet. They’re the worst. They’re animals.”

“How old did you say that boy was? The one who got killed?”

“Well, I’ll tell you, but you didn’t get it from me. Sixteen.”

“Thanks, buddy.”

“Sure. See you.”

“Bye.” Slade scribbled out a possible lead: “‘Bloody brawls
in boys’ hockey will skyrocket after yesterday’s brutal slaying of a 16-year-old player in the St. Albert-Princeton arena,’ police predicted yesterday…”

Slade consulted a rural phone book and made several random calls to St. Albert residents. The third person he reached was able to tell him the name and number of the hockey coach. After dialling it, Slade got the coach’s twelve-year-old son. His father was talking to police at the arena. The boy answered all Slade’s questions: the name of the deceased, his address, his parents’ names. But he wasn’t able to provide directions to the victim’s home. Slade asked for the phone number of someone who could direct him there. “Who is calling anyway?” the boy asked.

“This is
The Winnipeg Star
,” Slade barked. “And it’s urgent. We need someone else’s phone number. Someone who can give us directions.”

“I don’t think I’d better,” the boy said. Slade pushed the boy but it didn’t work. The boy simply hung up. Slade drove to the town. Someone there would direct him.

Ben was flipping through a magazine and chewing a toothpick. Mahatma, who lay on a couch, watched his father. Neither moved when the phone rang at 8:50 p.m. It reminded Mahatma of work. It made him think of hanging around court, taking notes, interviewing crime victims, squeezing information from cops. He wondered, as he let the phone ring, if he would dream of work that night, which he had been doing with increasing frequency. Mahatma hated dreaming of work. The phone finally stopped.

“What kind of foolishness is that, calling at this hour!” Ben said. “Anybody who phones at this time of night has been raised upside down!”

It started ringing again. Mahatma took it.

“It’s Don Betts. I need you to do some overtime. Got a car?”

“No.”

“Then take a cab over here, on the double.”

Mahatma hung up and turned to his father. “Don’t wait up for me.”

Only a few minutes ago, Ben had been planning to go to bed. But now he no longer felt like it. The house didn’t seem right with his son gone. Since Mahatma’s arrival four months ago, Ben hadn’t slept well until the boy got home from work. Ben would stay up and leave the porch light on and be watching by the curtains when Mahatma came home. He would greet his son, lock the doors and then sleep deeply.

Mahatma knew that Slade was onto the story. It was inconceivable that Slade would not be working on this. Slade would expect to clobber him. But Mahatma had no intention of letting himself get scooped. Not this time. This time he was giving it everything. He drove a
Herald
car straight to the town, knowing that his job would be impossible if Slade got there first. Slade had a reputation for erecting roadblocks for his competitors. When he could, he would cart off a family’s entire photo album so no one else could get it.

Mahatma arrived at the arena seventy-five minutes after the riot ended. Pushing into the crowd, he got the name of the boy who was killed. Then he found a boy with a Princeton

Hawks jacket. Peter Griffiths had been in the penalty box when fighting broke out. “Why were you in the penalty box?”

“I was doing two minutes for frog bustin.’”

“I see,” Mahatma said. “A penalty.”

“I speared a frog. Big deal. Everybody does it. You’re not putting that in the paper, are you?”

“I’m just doing research right now,” Mahatma said. “I don’t know what will go into the paper.”

“If you’re just researching, I guess I can talk to you.”

Griffiths said he had been waiting for his penalty to end when a St. Albert player—Emile Moreau—clobbered an English opponent—Jack Hunter—right in the face. Hunter was so stunned that Moreau was able to hit him again. This took place by the boards, after a whistle, and so close to the penalty box that Griffiths could almost touch the blood on Hunter’s face. Griffiths hopped over the boards and crosschecked Moreau, knocking his helmet off. Moreau fell to his knees. Hunter recovered in time to break Moreau’s nose. He cut him over the right eye with a second punch. And a third.

“Why didn’t you pull Hunter back?” Mahatma asked.

“Because Gilles Gendron from St. Albert hit me when I wasn’t looking,” Griffiths replied. “Then Ernie Cohen took Gendron out. Then a frog knocked down Ernie. I took on that frog. Then everybody got into it.”

The more Mahatma heard, the faster he wrote. Griffiths said the tensions were nothing new. “We’ve always hated them and, I guess, they’ve never been exactly crazy about us.”

“Why do you hate them? Why was that kid killed?”

“Hey, I didn’t do it, I didn’t kill him. You’re not going to put in there that I killed him, are you?”

“No.”

Friends led Peter Griffiths away. “Hey man,” one said, “don’t talk to that guy. He’s a fucking reporter.”

Mahatma interviewed another player and three parents. The teams apparently fought a lot, but nobody could say why the French and English hated each other. “Why don’t you get along?” Mahatma asked a player.

“We just don’t.”

“And where are all the French people now?”

“They hang out at the community centre. You’re not going to talk to them, are you?”

“Maybe. Where’s the community centre?”

Slade spent half the time Mahatma had spent in the hockey arena, and interviewed half the people Grafton had seen, but still managed to extract vivid quotes. “People say you guys are getting rowdy and that local hockey should be banned for kids your age,” Slade told a few English hockey players. They replied that the fight was the fault of the French, that Gilles Baril deserved what he got, and that English hockey players were banding together in the streets. “What if they came after you in dark alleys?” Slade asked. “Have you thought about that? How will you protect yourselves then?”

“We’ll break their skulls with hockey sticks!”

From this, Slade wrote the lead for one of his many stories: “Teen-aged anglo goons have vowed to prowl St. Albert-Princeton at night, carrying hockey sticks to fight the French…”

Slade asked boys in the arena where the victim’s family lived.

“You wanna go there?” someone answered. “That’s not where the other reporter was going. He was going to the French community centre.”

“What reporter?” Slade asked.

“Black guy.”

“Mahatma Grafton? Shit! Where’d he go?”

“To the community centre. What kind of name is ‘Mahatma Grafton’?”

“Not sure,” Slade said, “but it could be French.”

“You telling me that black guy’s a frog?”

“Could be,” Slade said.

“Get off it! Black guys aren’t French! They’re English!”

“Well, this one’s a bit of everything. See ya.”

“What explains the violence?” Mahatma asked a woman at the French community centre.

“We’ll have to look into that,” she shot back at him. “What do you want from us?”

“Something to help people understand what happened tonight.”

“You’re not interested in our pain,” the woman told Mahatma. “You can’t know our pain if you’re an outsider.” She was accusing him, excluding him, but it was a good quote. He wrote it down. It wasn’t until he had lived in Quebec six years ago that he had been forced to see himself as an anglo. People there were keen to categorize him. He was a man, Canadian, a student, black, but there, in the eyes of those living around him, Mahatma Grafton was an
anglais
.

“Why can’t anglophones understand your pain?” he asked. “Aren’t English parents suffering today too?”

“When people see an English boy in the streets tomorrow, are they going to say: ‘There’s the one who killed Gilles Baril’? Of course not. But when they see a French boy five minutes later, they will say: ‘There’s the one who started the riot.’” Mahatma wrote that down. “I don’t want that in the paper,” she said. He kept writing. As far as he was concerned, it was too late: she had already spoken. And anyway, what harm could it do her? Now, he simply needed her name. How would he get it? She would refuse, of course, to give it. At that instant, two men swept up to her.

“Louise,” one man said, “I’d like you to meet Pierre Gagnon. Pierre, this is Louise Robitaille, one of our town councillors.”

There. He had her name. Then he had another stroke of luck: he spotted Georges Goyette! “Georges! What are you doing here?”

“My son plays for St. Albert. I came to watch the game.”

“You saw it, then?”

“Yes.”

“Is your son okay?”

“He’s fine. I dragged him off the ice when the fighting began.”

While Mahatma scribbled, Goyette described the fight. “It was tragic. I saw two fathers going at it in the stands. Part of the age-old hatreds around here.”

“By the way, do you know where Gilles Baril’s family lives?”

“You’re not going to bother them?”

“I have to.”

“You have to? Just tell your editors the family was out.”

“This is my job.”

“That’s how you see your job? To invade families in times of shock?” Goyette, for once, wasn’t smiling. The comment didn’t affect Mahatma. He had no time to think about it. He spent half an hour finding the modest bungalow on an icy rural route fifteen miles out of town.

“Qui est là?” The woman didn’t want to open the door.

Mahatma knew that getting her to open it would be the hardest part. He held up a card with his photo. She unhinged the chain and opened the door. “Police, encore?” She urged him in so she could close the door.

“No, Madame, I’m with
The Winnipeg Herald
,” he replied in French. “I’m awfully sorry to trouble you.”

“With
The Winnipeg Herald
and you speak French like that! My Lord, you speak well. You speak better than we do. We’re simple folks out here, but we never hurt anybody, either.” She was a thin woman, about five-two. She had grey hair and clear blue, baggy eyes, and she wore a pink nightgown and knit slippers.

“I’m terribly sorry about your son, Madame.”

She hung her head to the side, then looked at him again. “What can you do? The Good Lord needed him.” Mahatma slipped the pad out of his pocket and noted that down. He could picture the quote on the front page.

“I won’t bother you for long. It’s just that…”

“Sit down. My husband and my other son have gone out to take care of everything. It’s hard, staying alone at home when your son has died.” Mahatma got that down too. She asked, “Would you like some tea?”