The Cardinal Divide (2 page)

But that was three years ago. It had been more than a year since he'd last run up those stairs to work in the morning, and probably six months since he'd jogged down them in the evening. It wasn't because he'd grown too busy to spare the few minutes required for the trip. It was the exact opposite.

He stood in front of the elevator as it climbed from street level toward the eighth floor. He tried to see himself through to the other side of the weekend, going on as he was. Now without Mary. He sighed heavily, his shoulders hunched forward, his back slouched.

Of course, there were options available to him. There were always options. He hadn't fallen so far that he couldn't claw and scramble his way back out of the hole. But to take advantage of those options meant defeat to Cole Blackwater. And Blackwater did not take defeat – or even retreat – well at all. He had suffered the humiliation of retreat and defeat in the past, and he had sworn never to suffer their indignity again.

The elevator chimed to signal that its ancient door would soon slide open.

Then he heard the phone in his office ring again. He must remember to call-forward his office phone to his cellphone now that Mary was gone.

The phone rang again. Intuitively he guessed that it must be the same caller that had rung a few minutes ago. He looked at the elevator door open in front of him and his body shifted toward it.

The phone rang again.

The elevator waited.

Blackwater muttered under his breath. He turned away from the elevator and walked quickly toward his office door, his right hand searching in his pocket for his keys.

He reached the door in time to hear the phone ring a fourth time. He rummaged in his pocket, grumbled under his breath, and finally resorted to pulling the pocket's entire contents out in his fist. Loose change, receipts, two shopping lists, a to-do list, SkyTrain receipts, gum wrappers, and an alarming amount of pocket lint came forth, along with a heavy ring of keys. Coins and wads of paper fell to the ground – one coin rolled toward the open banister that surrounded the spiral staircase and rolled over the
precipice – while Blackwater found the right key and forced it into the lock. The door opened. The phone stopped ringing.

“Sweet Jesus,” Blackwater grumbled, looking at the phone on Mary's reception desk, and then chided himself because he'd promised Sarah that he would watch his language.

The red light blinked, indicating at least one message. He closed the door behind him, ignoring the pocket detritus on the floor, and stepped into the office.

Immediately he felt sad. For the last three years Cole Black-water had occupied this space, and for nearly two of those years, Mary Patterson had been there with him. Most often she was there when he arrived in the morning, and most evenings she was there when he left. She had been stalwart in her service, and dignified that very afternoon when he had told her that there simply wasn't any money left to pay for her services, regardless of how underpaid she was, and for how few days of the week she accepted pay.

Mary Patterson, of course, knew this. She had known it before Blackwater himself. After all, Mary kept the books for this two-person shop, and had more financial sense in her little toe than Blackwater had in his whole, ever-increasing-in-size torso. Months ago she had presented him with a financial forecast that predicted dark days ahead unless their fortunes should change. Two months ago Blackwater cut his own salary in half, and Mary trimmed her work week to three days. Last month Blackwater didn't write himself a cheque. Finally, on the last working day of April, he told Mary that he simply could not pay her for May.

Mary smiled her sweet smile and said that it was
OK
. Then she said she would call him next week to check in and see how things were progressing. He saw in her eyes no malice or ill will, just the same kindness and resolute confidence she radiated when he interviewed her for the position of Executive Assistant. Like most of the women in Cole's life, he had done nothing to deserve her kindness or loyalty. And like all the women in his life except one, he'd finally lost her.

He sat down behind her desk in the high-ceilinged room that formed the reception area and lunch room of his two-room office. The telephone's red light flashed and Cole decided to wait a minute or two so that the caller, whoever it was, would have time to leave a
message before he dialled into the voicemail service to retrieve it.

He looked around the space. The clear light of April filtered through the tall windows on the western wall. He had chosen the office not just for the lovely staircase, but for the deep sense of history that the Dominion Building radiated. Once the tallest building in the British Empire, its copper roof and irregular shape, along with its central location on the edge of Vancouver's Gas-town, made it a regional landmark. The social and environmental justice organizations housed in it had dubbed it the Tower of Lost Causes, just as 1 Nicholas Street, his former office in Ottawa, had been known as The Green Building.

The whitewashed walls of this outer office were tastefully decorated with framed prints and posters of west coast landscapes and environmental campaigns. A large potted fern occupied one corner, and a used but well-maintained loveseat and club chair another. It was all in perfect order, clean and tidy.

His own office, however, suffered the same lack of order that afflicted his pants' pockets.

Blackwater leaned back in the office chair behind Mary's empty desk, sighed heavily, leaned an elbow on the desk, and looked at the phone. Maybe he should go and she should stay? It almost made sense to lay off the boss. Mary Patterson had learned a lot in the two years they worked together, and more often than not he sought and valued her advice on his few remaining projects. But he hadn't taken on a new client in months. Blackwater's one remaining client, a small First Nations band council from the north end of Vancouver Island who looked to him for advice on how to stop the spread of salmon farms, hadn't paid him in a year. He'd stopped asking. He knew it was bad business, but they were good friends, and so he continued to help where he could. They had their own troubles.

I wonder if there are any things I do, Blackwater thought cynically, that Mary cannot?

He picked the phone from its cradle and dialled *98 and then, without listening, punched in his four-digit pass code and pressed 1 for new messages. Two messages waited.

He listened. “Hi, this is a message for Cole Blackwater. It's Peggy McSorlie calling. From Oracle, Alberta. I don't know if you remember me, but we worked together on a Jasper Park issue when
you were still in Ottawa. That was a while ago. Anyway, the reason that I'm calling is that the group I'm working with now, we're called the East Slope Conservation Group, could really use some help with a big issue that's popped up with the local mine here in Oracle. It's the Cardinal Divide, Cole. They want to dig a mine right below it and we need help figuring out how to stop them. I understand that you do that sort of work and we'd like to talk with you about it. Could you give me a call tonight? I'm tied up most of the weekend, so please call this evening if you can. Thanks, Cole. Hope to hear from you soon.” Cole jotted down the number that she finished the message with.

He used the speaker phone so he could jot a few notes on a scrap of paper from Mary's recycling bin. He was about to hang up and quickly call Peggy McSorlie back, but decided to hear the second message.

“Hi Cole, it's Peggy again. Listen, I have to run out to pick up the kids at basketball, and then we're going to get some dinner in town. Pick up some groceries. I'll be home around ten Alberta time, I guess that's nine yours. I hope to talk to you then.” She left her number again.

Cole hung up. He sat back in Mary's chair and looked at the scrap of paper with Peggy McSorlie's name on it, and her phone number.

It must have been six or seven years since he'd heard from Peggy McSorlie. At the time he had been working for a national conservation group as its young and enthusiastic National Parks Conservation Director. Jasper National Park's Management Plan was up for its mandated five-year review when Peggy McSorlie contacted his Ottawa office to ask for help thwarting a proposed plan for increased white-water rafting on the fragile Maligne River. Harlequin ducks, endangered in some parts of Canada, nested on that river in the spring, and raised their young there before migrating to the west coast in the fall.

With McSorlie and a coalition of other conservation groups, Blackwater managed to put the kybosh on the rafting proposal. They argued successfully that white-water rafting had no business on the narrow Maligne River whatsoever, given that waterway's value to the secretive harlequin ducks.

Cole Blackwater remembered Peggy McSorlie as a feisty and
competent biologist who studied the Maligne and other National Park rivers to assess their value for harlequin ducks. She was middle-aged, with a Master's degree in something or other and, as he recalled, the mother of two school-aged boys. She lived on a farm on the eastern edge of Alberta's foothills near Oracle, Alberta, with her cabinet-maker husband who ran a small woodlot.

Like many before her, McSorlie had worked diligently on contract to Parks Canada, helping the federal agency understand the complex resources that they were legally mandated to protect, only to watch her years of study and labour collect dust on a shelf while the Park Superintendent and Chief Park Warden ushered in plans from the local business community to expand development, use, access, and ultimately, corporate profits in the National Park.

But McSorlie, Blackwater recalled, wasn't one to sit on her hands. When the Jasper Park Management Plan review called for more rafting on the Maligne, she went to the media, and was “fired” for her action. Nobody had actually written her a pink slip. No, she was simply informed that her contract was complete, and was asked to hand in the keys to the rusty 1980 Dodge Ram that served as her research vehicle. That's when she called Blackwater.

He looked at the number again, and at his watch. It was 6:45. An hour later in the Mountain Time Zone. He stood up, heard his knee pop and felt his back creak, pushed the slip of paper with the number into his pocket, and walked to the door. His keys still hung in the lock. He closed the door behind him, locked it, and stooped to scoop up the litter at his feet, jamming it, along with his keys, in with the note. He had a couple of hours to kill before he could call Peggy back. He walked to the elevator, stopped to peer down the long spiral of stairs, and then punched the “down” button. Blackwater had become good at killing time of late. He knew just what to do.

He stepped from the Dominion Building onto West Hastings Street and walked west to the lights where he waited with a dozen others to cross the road. It was a cool evening, and clear. He turned the collar of his coat up against the chill. The Dominion Building sat on the very edge of Canada's poorest postal code, the area of Vancouver known to the world as the Downtown Eastside. Looking east along West Hastings, Cole Blackwater saw the shops and
storefronts fade and deteriorate. Looking west, toward the downtown business core, he viewed glitter and flash. Cole Blackwater stood at the intersection of two worlds.

Cole's best friend – his only real friend, not just a drinking buddy – Denman Scott spent night and day advocating for the rights of the people on the streets of the Downtown Eastside. But powerful interests opposed him.

Waterfront property along English Bay and False Creek was quickly being bought up by American, Asian, and European investors, and twenty-, thirty-, and forty-storey high-rise luxury condominiums were being built over the rubble of some of Vancouver's poorer neighbourhoods. Handfuls of the million-dollar condominiums were being bought by wealthy Americans as safe havens for themselves and draft-aged sons who could be conscripted for American's new war – the same old war with a new name, thought Cole. More and more dilapidated Eastside hotels, flop houses, and ancient warehouses were being bought and renovated or razed and rebuilt as flats and condominiums for the upper-middle class.

The light turned green and Blackwater stepped into the street. The consequence of this gentrification was evident: more people on the streets. Now that their $30 a week hotel rooms were converted to one room apartments for Vancouver's chic business and arts community, with rent starting at $1,500 a month, more and more people were forced into alleys and doorways. And not just on the streets of the Downtown Eastside, where the problem could be contained and “managed” by police and what social service providers remained after deep provincial cuts to mental health facilities and services for those living in squalid poverty. Now the Downtown Eastside's drug, prostitution, and crime problems had spread throughout the city as the most desperate people sought shelter, food, and a fix elsewhere.

Blackwater stopped on the corner of Cambie and West Hastings to drop a quarter into the hat of a man he recognized.

“God bless,” muttered the man, looking into his greasy ball-cap at his take. Blackwater said nothing, but turned down Cambie toward the water.

Many of Cole's acquaintances, those who had lived in Vancouver longer than six months, learned to look right through
the homeless, the vagrants, dope dealers, and the beggars in the Downtown Eastside. Not Blackwater. Not yet. He was deeply cynical about many – most – aspects of the human condition, but so far he hadn't formed a callous over the part of his heart that encouraged him to drop a quarter (and sometimes in the winter a dollar) into the hand, cap, or cup of someone who desperately needed it.

He understood why people turned away. “There but for the grace of God go I,” he thought many times as he strolled through the neighbourhood between his office and the Stadium SkyTrain station just a few blocks away. When faced with such terrible human suffering, when confronted with such a staggering waste of human life and potential, how could you not eventually turn away?