When Is a Man (20 page)

G: No, Mom.

E: Well, that and chronic unemployment. He went looking for work and never came back.

P:
So, despite the loss of your home, an entire valley bottom, it's safe to say you're still attached to this area. I mean, your roots are still here, even though
here
is under water.

E: Absolutely. Protecting watersheds became my way of staying attached to the valley—my new roots, you could say.

P:
You were among those who tried to take Monashee Power to court.

E: It was a sham. The courts wouldn't even discuss land value.

P:
Was Hardy Wallace involved in the lawsuit?

E: Oh, Hardy. No, he did things his own way. A bit unstable, you know. It's a shame, he might have been a good voice. Well, in the end, nothing worked. And maybe there was no point to it. What you've put into the land, you can never be compensated for.

P:
Gina mentioned you burned down your house . . .

G: That's about the only thing she's told me.

E: Everything was getting torched. It was just a matter of who lit the match. Monashee had a scorched earth policy. They said it was to prevent squatters from moving into the abandoned houses.

P:
What about the negotiators? I've heard different things.

E: There were one or two good men, at first. I think one suffered a nervous breakdown and moved God knows where. I had to deal with another fellow, a thick-set sort of ape. Him and his thugs.

P:
The short man? No one seems to know his name.

E: It's because his family wasn't local. But I made a point of remembering. Caleb Ready. He was Monashee's thumb pressing on the valley.

P:
That name—you're sure about that?

E: Of course.

P:
You know Caleb Ready drowned recently . . .

E: Is that right? I hadn't heard. Isn't that something. I set fire to our house just to deny him the satisfaction. I wasn't the only one. When the people of Lambert burned the whole village down, you couldn't see across the lake for the smoke.

Paul waited for Constable Cliff Lazeroff to finish talking to the old couple seated in the opposite booth. He seemed to know everybody in the A&W, even the girl behind the counter who'd botched his order. Paul fidgeted with his paper cup, breathed in the deep fryer smells and took in the yellow walls, the orange and brown trim. Bleary-eyed teenagers served sour-faced men covered in engine oil or sawdust. Outside, trucks in the queue for the takeout window carried snowmobiles, sleek machines sheathed in bright plastic and metal.

“Thing is,” Lazeroff was saying, “you have to drive all the way to Grand Forks to get a decent bowl of borscht, let alone real
lapshevnik
.” Then he turned to Paul and followed his glance outside. “Boys and their toys. That kind of guy, he's worked his ass off since high school—he'll buy an
ATV
and sled for himself, his wife,
and
each kid. Then the mill shuts down and he's screwed.” He took a bite of his breakfast sandwich. “You ever dream about those bull trout?” he asked.

“Sure,” Paul said. “Not what I'd call good dreams.” Blinding rain, the traps filling with infinite numbers of fish, a sort of horrifying, biblical miracle.

“Me, I have this recurring dream—well, a fantasy—that I actually have time to go fishing.” He was counting the months until retirement, he explained. Trying to wrap up a few last things.

“Like Caleb Ready's death?” Paul asked.

“Him? No. Odds and ends. You know what I spent October doing? Busting grow ops. We incinerated a million bucks' worth of pot in the beehive at the mill.”

Paul had read about it in the paper but hadn't paid much attention. “Gangs?”

Lazeroff nodded. “All sorts. Gangs, teenagers. Parents. Grandparents.”

“Kind of ironic, all that money going up the burner when everyone at the mill is laid off.”

“Probably the most action that place will see all winter,” Lazeroff agreed. “Anyways, it was Ready you wanted to talk about.”

“Yes. Any progress?”

“None. It's pretty much been written off as a suicide or accident.”

“Any signs to say otherwise?”

“Such as?”

“Maybe he was pushed.”

“Did someone tell you that?” Lazeroff leaned closer, his blue eyes peering sharply through unruly grey eyebrows. “On the phone, you told me his name keeps coming up in your interviews.”

“Not his name, mostly, just who he was.” Paul recounted the stories. The threats and intimidation, the houses and barns that were torched by the short man and Wallace's crew. No one Paul had talked to had actually seen him set fire to their buildings. Most of the people Ready had allegedly victimized were elderly at the time, long dead by now. But participants knew relatives and neighbours who had suffered from his fires. They made it sound like a long reign of terror, a dark smoke that hung over the valley for years. But according to Monashee's archives, Ready had been employed as a land agent for less than eighteen months.

“Listen to this—one of my interviews.” Paul fumbled with his backpack, and the constable frowned at the notebooks and folders. Paul flipped through a transcript. “Here it is. ‘They did this funny thing with some landowners. You know, the man who came by with the expropriation papers would pretend to feel bad for you. He'd negotiate a private sale, buy you out with his own money for a better price than Monashee Power's. Pretend he was doing you a favour and then he'd turn around and sell the land to some developer for three times the price.'” He looked up. “What do you think?”

“Pretty thin.” Lazeroff ran a napkin across his lips.

“Maybe that's how Ready bought his summer cottage. Dirty money.”

“Come on,” the constable scoffed. “He had a good job, you know. Lived in Abbotsford most of his life, supervised different hydroelectric projects around the province after the McCulloch Dam was completed. Brief stint in local politics, sat on city council in the eighties. Father. Grandfather. No mention of burning houses anywhere.”

“He made a lot of enemies.”

“I see where you're going.” Lazeroff shook his head. “Ready was seventy-five when he died—that's a little late for revenge, don't you think?”

“But it's possible.”

“It's a hell of a stretch,” he said. “Forty years later, all these people still hate him?”

“
Hated
might be more accurate,” Paul admitted. “No one knew he'd drowned just recently. For them, he stopped existing once the valley was flooded.”

“Or they're lying to you.” The constable sighed.

“People must have known he owned a cottage in Bishop.” A thought struck him. “Donald Wallace's crew had worked for him. It's bizarre that Hardy didn't know who it was that drowned. Don't you think?”

Lazeroff shrugged, then brushed the crumbs from his lap. “Well, this is all good information. Much appreciated.”

“Okay. Right.” Paul raised his hands in surrender. “Just a theory.”

“Didn't say it was a terrible one.” Lazeroff handed back the papers. “About Hardy. You need to make peace with that man.”

Paul stuffed the pages into his bag, flustered. “I am at peace. I mean—why?”

“You're telling me you're researching—what do you call it, the displacement, relocation, of Lambert—and you haven't talked to the son of Donald Wallace?”

“What, lecture him about gun safety?”

“Yeah, he's not easy to talk to.” Lazeroff picked his teeth and then stood, more crumbs falling from his barrel chest. “But without him, I'd say you're just pissing around the margins.”

The film began with a slow pan across a landscape of fireweed and black earth to settle on three broad, burnt stumps, a woman dancing on each. They bent and rose in wavering, arching stretches, in apparent mimicry of the missing trees. Someone in the audience coughed a single time in exasperation. Paul was very aware of Gina beside him. He'd forgotten how intimate it was to watch a film with another person—especially a bad film. The earlier documentary on Icelandic geological heat vents had been visually stunning, at least, and the story of a rubber raincoat filmed in stop-time animation was made bearable, at least, by its brevity and lack of dancers.

The choreographer's entry had been preceded by a film short—more of a political ad—about a proposed small dam project on Spry Creek. Most of the shots were of pristine wilderness, the eponymous creek flowing through a corridor of cedars and spruces, interspersed with quick flashes of slogans:
RUN OF RIVER = RUIN OF THE RIVER
;
TRANSMISSION LINES ARE NOT WILDERNESS CORRIDORS
. A few boos, countered and silenced by pockets of applause. Paul remembered Tanner mentioning Spry Creek and bull trout habitat but nothing about a potential dam.

The audience around him—mostly middle-aged artsy types and a handful of wool-scented twentysomethings fiddling distractedly with their dreadlocks—frowned or smiled, nodded in appreciation or squinted in bewilderment, according to their tastes. The dancers had leaped off the stumps and were now cavorting through the clear-cut.

Paul squirmed in his chair, too hot in his bulky sweater, and feeling somehow responsible for the film's cheesy earnestness. If this was a date—but this was not a date, just a way of thanking Gina for her help. She leaned toward him and whispered in a faux-British accent, “It lacks in subtlety but compensates with its obviousness.” Hopefully that meant she was enjoying herself.

She hadn't been easy to track down. She tended to disappear from his life for two or three days at a time, and then would show up out of the blue with Shane. The boy was an enigma to Paul, both affectionate and elusive, hugging his leg one moment, indifferent the next. As for Gina, she often looked rundown, with sallow cheeks and chapped, peeling lips. Before he could ask how she was, really was, she'd be whipping up a chocolate bundt cake or soup, and there'd be blenders and food processors buzzing and whirring, drowning out his questions.

Outside, he looked skyward and let the snow melt on his face. He sighed in relief, too loud. Gina was grinning, studying his face. “Not exactly the Vancouver Film Fest?”

“I wouldn't know—never went,” he said.

“Kind of a missed opportunity.”

“That's my life in a nutshell.” Thinking about Vancouver was strange. The Immitoin Valley was a black hole—nothing got in or out, especially in winter. On grey days, the light was so flat that the mountains blended into the sky, no depth, no dimension. Time had frozen to death on some dark slope. His past life existed somewhere beyond the status updates of friends and colleagues on social networking sites: they had achieved something remarkable, gone somewhere exotic, or eaten, cooked, or bought something ethically laudable. Or their child had done something adorable and video-worthy. Where did his project, scarcely begun, fit in with all that?

“There's an after-party at the pub,” he said. “Did you want to come?”

She shook her head. “I'll have to leave you here.”

“Oh, come on,” he said lightly. They'd fallen behind the rest of the crowd.

“The bar's a bit too well-lit for me. I liked sitting there in the dark with you.” Translation: one of Billy's friends—or Billy—might see us. She glanced at the windows, and for a moment it was as if the orange light coming from inside caught and held her.

“I guess everyone knows everyone in there,” he said.

“It's just a bad idea.”

“Okay,” he said.

“See you tomorrow, maybe.” She gave his arm a quick squeeze, glancing around her. Paul watched her until she disappeared around the corner.

Inside, dozens of conversations melded into a river-like babble. A broad set of dark wooden stairs divided the pub into two levels, the upper with its bigger tables, better lighting, and plusher chairs, and the lower with dart boards and pull-tab machines. He spotted Tanner among a group of men and women—festival organizers, the board of directors and their spouses, he guessed—whose tuxes and black dresses stood out from the sweaters, denim, and ski jackets. Tanner broke away from the group and met Paul at the counter, handing a twenty to the barkeep with a grand flourish and passing Paul a beer. “Where's your ladyfriend?” he asked, tipsy, grinning like an idiot. “Saw you sitting together in the theatre.”

“Had to spell the babysitter,” Paul said.

Tanner winked grotesquely. “I knew there was something weird going on at camp.”

“We're just friends.”

“Sure,” said Tanner. Then his grin slipped. “I guess friends are about all you can be, unless—are you back in the saddle?” He raised his forearm until his clenched fist was erect, the obscenity of the gesture in bizarre contrast with his concerned expression.