A City Called July (16 page)

I didn’t hear the door being broken down, but it couldn’t have taken the boys very long. The night was still noisy with my own breathing, and a feeling that somewhere out there great ships were moving heavily through dark waters. I tried to think. Well, to be honest it wasn’t thinking. At times like this I get more intuitive than thoughtful. Sometimes I can’t tell the difference. I knew that I couldn’t cross the steel bridge. They would be waiting for me there. At least they would if they knew the territory half as well as I did. I stopped and listened. Nothing. Through the dark, looming up at me was the grey form of a discarded lock on the old canal. It looked like a dry bone, with all the wooden and metal works removed from it. I headed south, towards the escarpment and the railway line. There wasn’t much cover, but at least there wasn’t a moon to give me away. On the top of the first lock I came to I sat on an ancient bollard and could make out the rope burns along the limestone facing at the edge of the lock. The lock gates had disappeared years ago, so there was no way across the canal here. I pushed on, keeping the canal to my right.

Faintly, I could hear a car motor. That would be them, heading to cut me off. Once they got to the tracks they could cover a fair stretch. I’d have to cross where the bridge crossed the canal or head east until I was out of sight. I could see the criss-crossing girders closer now, and for a moment they were swept by headlights. Then to my right the deep whistle of a lake boat nearly lifted me by my belt into a stunted sumach that had grown between blocks of limestone. I could see the slow progress of the ship’s riding lights as it moved into position at the bottom step of the twin-lift locks. The old canal took twenty-five locks to lift boats in the 1870s up the escarpment. The present canal did the same job for ships three times as big, in eight huge cement steps.

I could now see the railway embankment. There was no way I could slip by under the bridge without being seen. And the embankment was high enough so that I’d be seen clambering up the slope. I kept to a fringe of sumachs that began in a depression that ran east, parallel to the railway. It suited me, so I went along with it. From the edge I could still see the bridge, and now I could make out a flashlight beam running up and down the rails. My comfortable, well-shaded depression turned towards the tracks, and just as I thought that we might have come to the parting of the ways, I could see that it was running straight for a culvert that ran under the tracks. It was made to order. It was even dry until I was within fifty feet of the entrance, then I felt both feet go wet at the same moment.

It was a narrow squeak through the culvert. Ahead of me something scampered close to the ground. Things brushed across my face, and my head banged into the overhead arch every time I tried to give my aching back a break. As I eased through, it sounded like a pipe-band rehearsal; the sloshing of my feet through the muck between the stretches of water nearly deafened me. I was glad when I came out the other side. By now I was very close to the base of the escarpment. If I had to escape to the south, that meant I’d have to go straight up.

I looked back towards the bridge. That was when the beam of light caught me. The glare blinded me and I heard the sound of the bullets cutting through the branches of the trees before I heard the echo of the shots bombarding off the face of the escarpment. I turned the shot-gun on them and let them have one blast. When I stopped running I was at an intersection of depressions. The one I was in turned east, the larger one, like a track for oxen, moved south-west. That was roughly towards the new canal, and gave me the feeling of doubling back on my pursuers, so I took it. It went low, lower than the other stream-bed, and the longer I followed it the more it seemed like an abandoned road or trail.

By now the track had continued in a gentle curve moving in the direction of the old canal. At the same time it was cutting deeper into the ground, giving me complete protection on both sides. My feet slipped in and out of muck and tripped over stones as I went. By starlight I could only see a few feet ahead at a time. For some reason, I trusted this trail. I kept moving. There was a dark round spot ahead. I was almost on top of it before I could see that it was the handsome entrance of a tunnel. I could make out a curve of well-matched stone blocks over the arch. From where I was standing, it looked enormous, although it couldn’t have been much more than about twenty feet high and fifteen or sixteen across.

It hit me at last. I’d been walking along the old right-of-way. Now the old canal was crossed by the black iron bridge I’d seen, but at some earlier date, the tracks went
under
the canal.

I moved in, holding to the middle and trying not to think of the creatures of the night that used to haunt my bedroom when I left my clothes in an untidy tangle on the chair when I was a kid. The tunnel curved gently, continuing the arc of the graded trail. The middle was mush. There was no sign of ballast or railway ties anywhere, and the place smelled as dank as a sewer. It seemed to go on forever, but it couldn’t have been more than an eighth of a mile until I saw an arched section of magenta light ahead of me. It got bigger as I slushed on. It must be the glow above the foundry that had located off the St. David’s road. In fact, I could hear the distant thump of drop-hammers through the night.

Once out the other side, I turned north for just long enough to let the embankment over the tunnel reach a reasonable grade. As soon as it looked no steeper than about forty-five degrees, I scrambled to the top. To the north I could see the present line of track with the steel bridge almost shining in the dark. That’s where I’d last seen the boys. There wasn’t any way that I knew of for getting to where I was faster than the way I came. I had the old canal between us now. I was kneeling on one of the oddest pieces of man-made engineering ever made: the spot where an abandoned railway tunnel passes under an abandoned canal. I’ll have to think of that spot again sometime when I think that Grantham is moving into the twenty-first century too quickly.

Half-way down the embankment again, where I’d half slid, half fallen, I heard a distinct rattle among the sounds of slipping feet and stones. I moved my feet quickly before the rattlesnake of my nightmare struck at my unguarded ankle. I must have been hallucinating. I didn’t see anything, and whatever it was it was gone without another sound. Over my shoulder I could see lights from the flight locks and I could hear the faint hum of motors. Beyond the other-worldly twin locks with their regular light standards lifting the buff planes out of the darkness, I could make out the pale glow of Papertown on the other side.

I kept hiking along the ghostly railway track, knowing that it would eventually lead me back to the main line from which it had separated years before I was born. I kept pushing the pace. “Before I was born,” as though that’s a measure of anything. It was like my asking when I was six if the ocean was over my head. The universe was divided into what was over my head and what wasn’t. Not a fair division at all unless you happened to be six. Ahead I could see the present canal’s surge tank. It looked like a gigantic car muffler on end. It must have stood two hundred feet in the air. Right beside it ran the railway right across the new canal. The bridge was down so it was easy over and home free for Papertown.

FOURTEEN

“What do you mean, ‘Can I put you up for a few days?’”

“Just that, Martha. I’m on the run. If I show up at my office or at the hotel, somebody’s going to lean on me pretty hard. It’s just for a few days. I know you’ve got a spare room.”

“Yeah. You fixed it so that it’s been spare ever since …”

“I’ll pay rent, Martha. I don’t mean to take advantage.”

“That’s the story of my life: nobody ever takes advantage.”

“I’ll keep out of the way. I never cook in my room.”

“M’yeah. I know the type. Taco chips in your briefcase, milk cartons on the window sill.”

“No. Honest. I’ll fill up your refrigerator for you. Nothing in the room but me. You’ve got my word on it.”

“Benny, you don’t seem to realize that I’m a maiden lady and maiden ladies don’t invite strangers into their homes without at least three weeks rent up front. And even so, on this street, I’ll never hear the end of it.”

“Thanks, Martha. You’ll never regret it.”

“M’yeah. I regret it already. How soon will you be moving in?”

“I’ll hail a taxi and be right over. Bye.”

“Tonight? Cooperman—” I pretended I didn’t hear her and hung up.

Martha Tracy has more things to do with her life than keep a rooming-house. She’d lost a paying guest once when I started digging up the past. But in the main she’d been helpful to me in my work six or seven times. Nobody knew this town the way Martha did. She worked for Scarp Enterprises, a big real-estate firm. She knew where all the bodies were buried in Grantham and who buried them. I’ve had more free advice from Martha than I like to remember. She lived in the western part of the city in a house that backed on the tracks that came from Hamilton and were on their way over the Eleven Mile Creek bound for Niagara Falls. I noted the neglected privet hedge as I went up her walk to the green porch.

“Well, you didn’t waste any time, did you?” Martha gave me a heavily leaded smile and pushed open the door farther to let me pass. “I’ve got the kettle on,” she said. Martha doted on instant coffee. Sometimes she got her hot water from the chrome kettle, but often from the hot-water tap. She was blonde, stocky and met the world with a Churchillian jaw.

“Martha, I’m not going to tell you about the trouble I’m in. The less you know about it the better.”

“Library chasing you for fines again?” She dropped into a kitchen chair as she passed a mug to me, and then straightened the hang of her housecoat. She regretted her gag about the library and moved the conversation to the practical matters of towels, the availability of hot water, the broken bottom step and the quirky radio that suddenly increases in volume when you least expect it. I gave her some money which she put into a drawer bursting with coupons.

“Martha,” I asked, after I’d emptied my mug and cleaned the ring on the white enamel table with a dishcloth to show my clean living habits, “what is the biggest engineering project now going on around town?”

“You mean us or the other wheelers and dealers?”

“Not Scarp. I mean a big government contract going to Bolduc or to Bagot Cement.”

She lifted a red-marked palm from the table and leaned her cheek against it, while staring out the back window to the maple tree by the railway fence. “Bolduc is building the new fire hall on the Queenston Road end of St. Andrew Street. As usual they are building condominiums in about six different locations around town. But nothing big, nothing special.” I returned the dishcloth to the sink. “Cooperman, have another cup of coffee and don’t jump up and down like that. You make me nervous. Let me think. You want bigger than that, don’t you?”

“Yeah. Something with government money in it. Something with rights-of-way that need buying.”

“Now you’re making it easy. The Feds have called off the work on the canal, so that leaves the province. What they are up to is this: a new major superhighway is going to be built to help the Shaw Festival at Niagara-on-the-Lake. As it is there are so many switchbacks and traffic circles on the last part of the trip from Toronto that half the potential audience for the plays ends up in Lewiston or Niagara Falls, New York, wondering what went wrong.”

“I know that road. You have to double back to the Skyway bridge to make connections with the road to Niagara-on-the Lake.”

“Well, the province,” Martha said, lowering her voice just perceptibly, “in its wisdom, is going to build a four-lane divided highway from the Niagara end of the bridge all the way to the Festival theatre without getting hung up in the traffic of hamlets like Virgil and Homer on the way. It’s big money and Bagot and Bolduc are the only local developers big enough to handle it.”

“That sounds like the one I’m looking for. When it’s finished the festival will be able to run all year round and the sale of fudge along the main drag in Niagara-on-the-Lake will double our sugar imports.”

“Don’t knock it, Cooperman. My brother-in-law works in the bar at the Prince of Wales Hotel. Think of what he’ll make in tips alone. What’s going on, Benny? Dirty work at the projected crossroads?” I didn’t want to do my guessing in public, so I dodged the question and showered some thanks in Martha’s direction. “What am I here for?” she said. “Don’t leave a ring in the tub if you love me and don’t tell any of your friends that phone after ten at night that you’re shacking up here. Now, let’s have a little drink to make it legal, Cooperman. I’ve been thinking about you lately.” Martha unscrewed the top of a bottle of Crown Royal, the last of the Christmas bonus, she said, and filled two tumblers well beyond my limit. I knew there’d be a price to pay for dropping in on Martha like this, but it seemed steep only when she’d pulled the cork of a second bottle. This time it wasn’t a brand I was familiar with. When I stopped coughing, I told her I wanted to go to bed. She looked at me to be sure of my meaning, then she got up and reappeared with a pair of pyjamas, which she poked at me. I had the tact not to ask where they came from. After all, I was a guest under her roof. Who was I to judge? She gave me some clean towels, a wash-cloth and told me to leave my shoes and pants outside the door and she’d see what she could do for them.

“Your shoes look like you’ve been running through a sewer.”

“In a way, I was. I’ve been playing games over by the old canal. You know where the Showers is?”

“Teach your grandmother to suck eggs. Patrick Oliver Tracy, my grandfather, ran lock eleven and the Homer bridge for nearly thirty years. Where’d you get your feet wet?”

“I found a tunnel running under the old canal.”

“That’d be the old Great Western tunnel by lock eighteen. There’s a road tunnel between sixteen and seventeen. I’m not sure whether it’s still there. I haven’t been out that way since I was a kid. But, hell, I’d wear my Wellingtons if I went anywhere near there. You’ve got to be careful. My cousin got a bad bite looking for the road that Laura Secord took trying to warn the British of some coming battle or other.”