Some Great Thing (3 page)

Winnipeg Mayor John Novak visited the United States before his recent trip to Nicaragua despite claims that American immigration authorities had listed him as an unwelcome alien.

“Betts is pissed off at me for not telling him that the mayor had been in the States before going to Nicaragua,” Chuck said.

“You didn’t write the story,” Helen said. “He did. So it’s his problem.”

“Would you pull him out of a burning car?”

Helen said, “That’s a hypothetical question.”

“Would you or wouldn’t you?”

“It depends,” she said.

“The car is burning. You happen to come along. Yes or no?”

“He’s watching,” Helen said. “And he’s got ears like a hound dog.”

Chuck glanced over a column of desks and heads. He saw Don Betts at the front of the room. “Big deal. Just answer me.”

“Of course I’d pull him out. Wouldn’t you?”

“No way,” Chuck said. “I’d let him roast.”

“And his family?”

“Better off without him.”

Helen grinned. “His car’s on fire. He’s screaming. He has a fractured leg. And you won’t pull him out?”

“Not a chance,” Chuck said.

“But you oppose capital punishment.”

“We’re not talking punishment,” Chuck said. “We’re talking fate.”

“Say he’s bleeding to death,” Helen said, “but the car isn’t burning. Then would you help?”

At that moment, Mahatma Grafton passed by. He heard Chuck say no, EN-OH NO! “What’s going on?” Chuck explained. “If the car’s on fire, then I’m not going near it,” Mahatma said. “But if there’s no fire, I’d have to yank him out.”

They laughed together. Several heads turned.

Betts shouted, “Hey Chuck, I need you here!”

“He’s got it in for me,” Chuck said.

“Maybe he’s got a good story for you,” Helen said.

“Yeah, like rotten meat found in dog meat tins.”

“But with a new twist today,” Mahatma said. “Dog meat is tainted, but proves safer than canned tuna.”

Ten minutes later, Chuck returned to his desk. He ran a hand through his curled hair, which was brown but streaked with silver. He asked if Mahatma were good for a walk. They rode the elevator downstairs. Mahatma saw skin twitching under Chuck’s right eye. “I can’t handle it,” Chuck said. “I can’t take it any more.”

“Having a bad day?”

“You know how long I’ve been at
The Herald
?” Chuck said. Mahatma shrugged. “Twenty-one years. I dropped out of school to start as a copy boy.” They headed north on Smith Street. “I’m a man, aren’t I? An adult, right? I get up in the morning, wash my schlong, drive to work, pay my Visa, right? Then why this? Why this?” Chuck gave Mahatma a piece of paper. It was the size of a birthday card and entitled, in bold
typed letters, Performance Appraisal—Chuck Maxwell. The appraisal had five categories: Accuracy, Speed, Story Initiative, Enthusiasm, and Dress and Demeanour. Chuck got a B for Dress and Demeanour, and Ds for the rest.

“They’re trying to rattle you,” Mahatma said.

“They’ll suspend me if I screw up again. They blame me for Betts’ errors in that story on the mayor. They say the story never would have run if I had found some library clipping about the mayor stopping off in the States before he flew to Nicaragua. Okay, I missed it. I missed one clip. So what am I, an axe-murderer?”

“Don’t let it get to you,” Mahatma said.

They walked back to
The Herald
. Chuck blew his nose, threw his head back and took three deep breaths. “It’s okay. I’m all right now.”

His name was Hassane Moustafa Ali, but friends called him Yoyo. To sharpen his journalism skills, he was working temporarily for a French weekly in Winnipeg. All his life he had dreamt about travelling outside Cameroon. Recently, he had won a scholarship to work for ten months in Manitoba. Since his school days in Cameroon, he had known it to be the fourth most westerly province in a huge nation of ten million square kilometres. Yoyo had longed for years to visit North America. Now, after several days in Canada, he was already counting the months remaining before he could return to his people.

Of the many things that confused him about Canada, one was most irksome. It had to do with a massive tree on
Provencher Boulevard in St. Boniface. A tree with white letters painted sloppily on its bark. Yoyo considered the lettering poorly done. Unaesthetic. Unprofessional. If
he
were to name a tree, he wouldn’t do so in such a slapdash manner. A great country like Canada and a great province like Manitoba could surely produce a sign on which the tree’s name in English, French and Latin could appear in neat letters, as one saw in the botanical gardens of Yaoundé, his home town.

Who had made the decision to identify the tree in such a fashion? In his first days, Yoyo paused to look at the tree as he travelled to and from work. He planned to contact civic authorities to suggest another naming procedure. The name itself, sprayed on the tree, also troubled him. Yoyo, who had read a book on Canadian nature before leaving Cameroon, was sure it was an elm. An American elm. He recognized the leaves: oval-shaped with serrated edges and bold parallel veination. But he had never heard of this tree name.
Clitoris
. He checked the letters carefully. Canadian handwriting differed from that of his countrymen, but Yoyo felt confident after several examinations: the name painted around the bark was
Clitoris
.

Yoyo noticed something else. Whenever he stopped to stare at the tree, people stopped to stare at him. The problem became dramatic on the third day, when he attempted to question a woman passing by on the far edge of the sidewalk. “Excuse me, Madame,” he said, pointing to the letters, “this is the name of the tree?” She coughed and began trotting down the sidewalk. Without even having the decency to reply. Yoyo was troubled
by the manners of Canadians. Even if his French accent were strong, he saw no reason for the woman not to answer him. It was highly impolite. In his country, if a foreigner had stopped him to ask the name of the tree, Yoyo would have been honoured to provide the answer in English, French, Latin and in Bamileke, his maternal tongue. Then he would have befriended the foreigner and invited him to dinner.

When he returned home, he would tell his family and friends that Manitoba was a great land. But he might have to concede that its inhabitants perplexed him.

Today, however, he planned to straighten out at least one difficulty. He would ask a friend at his newspaper about the name of that tree.

It wasn’t a great story. It wasn’t even a particularly good story. But it wasn’t a total sleeper. So Edward Slade, crime reporter for
The Winnipeg Star
, went after it. As a matter of principle, Slade pursued all tips about cemeteries. Readers devoured anything to do with corpses. This one was about some kid who quit halfway through his first day as a backhoe operator at the St. Vital Cemetery. He quit because he dug up a bone. That’s what he was telling Slade on the telephone.

“How do you know it wasn’t a stick?”

“It was a leg bone! A big one! Here I am digging my third grave and I come up with a bone in the teeth of the backhoe. I freaked out, man!”

“Did you take the bone home?”

“No! It belongs to God!”

Slade wrote, “Boy says bone belongs to God.”

“Where’d you put it?”

“I hid it in the cemetery.”

“What’s your name?”

“Denis Fortin.”

The kid met Slade at the cemetery entrance, but he didn’t want to go inside. “I don’t work here any more. They might charge me with trespassing.”

“Nobody’s gonna charge you,” Slade said. “You and I are just visiting. What good’s a boneyard without visitors?” Slade led the kid toward fresh plots of earth. “Is that where you dug?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s filled up now.”

“Like I said, they were burying someone there.”

“So there’s no bones left.”

“I guess not,” Fortin said, shivering. It was cool, for a July afternoon.

“Where’d you hide the bone?”

“By the fence over there.”

“Go get it.” Slade unslung his camera. When the kid didn’t move, Slade growled that he had discussed this case with the police and he hadn’t driven all the way out here to piss around.

Fortin trudged over to some shrubs. “It’s here.”

“Lift it!”

Using a paper bag stuck against the fence, the kid picked up the bone, careful to keep his fingers from touching it. It
was about one and a half feet long, covered in slime. It looked like a human femur. It had a head like a tennis ball, and a socket—like the inside of a giant tooth—to fit a knee joint.

“Kneel by that gravestone,” Slade ordered. “That’s it. No, you’re too close to the flowers. Get back. Hold up the bone. Look serious. Don’t smile. Don’t move.” The kid still held the bone with the paper bag. Slade lowered his camera. “Get rid of the paper.” Fortin grimaced. He let the paper drop. “Okay now, both hands on the bone!” The kid inhaled deeply. He held the mud-coated bone in his bare hands. The camera shutter clicked repeatedly for ten seconds. “Okay,” Slade said.

The kid ran back to the fence. He hid the bone again and wiped his hands on the grass. “Can we kinda get out of here?”

“Believe in ghosts?” Slade asked.

“Sorta.”

Slade’s story and photo ran the next day under the headline
Mystery Bone Spooks Gravedigger
.

Don Betts told Mahatma to match the story. Mahatma tried, but the cemetery manager claimed Fortin had dug up a stick. And Fortin wouldn’t cooperate. Edward Slade had warned him he could face a lawsuit if he spoke to
The Herald
. Maybe even a jail term. It was against the law to speak to two newspapers about the same story, Slade had said. It was breach of trust and fraud. Mahatma wrote a brief story and hoped it didn’t run. But it did run, on page three, and it carried his first byline.

During his first week on the job, Mahatma felt guilty about not doing anything substantial. He killed time by reading the paper. The horoscopes amused him. After his cemetery story appeared, Mahatma checked Aquarius. It said:

When someone asks you to perform a foolish task, assume your responsibilities as a thinking adult. Refuse!

“Right,” Mahatma mumbled to himself. “Refuse, and I’m out of a job.”

Three times in as many days, Mahatma heard reporters arguing on the telephone, saying, “But the public has a right to know!” Once, Mahatma guessed that the information the reporter was demanding was somebody’s age. To Mahatma, the most striking thing about journalists was not what they did, but that they seemed to believe in it.

Jake Corbett didn’t like the letter from the welfare people.

“The Manitoba Social Assistance Allowance program has ruled against your request for an increase in benefits. Therefore, $8.90 will continue to be deducted from your monthly cheque of $178.10. The deductions will continue until they offset the $602.38 overpayment you received in 1976 as a result of an administrative error…”

Jake threw the letter down. He sank onto his bed in his tiny room above Frank’s Accidental Dog and Grill. His leg ached. On $169.20 a month, he wouldn’t even have enough to buy a new bath towel. His only towel was seven years old.

The words “Fort Garry Hotel,” his last place of employment, were barely visible on the cloth. Jake propped his leg on a pillow. At least he had a place to stay. Some people didn’t even have that. Jake had a feeling he would win this battle. He had no job, no family, no hobbies, no friends—and that made him lucky. He had nothing to do but fight the welfare people.

Jake wrote to his Member of Parliament. He complained about his overpayment deductions. He described his honourable discharge, For Reasons of Serious Bad Health, from his job as a doorman at the Fort Garry Hotel. Jake folded his letter into a stamped envelope. He even included his one-page Testament to the Good Character of Jake Corbett, which had been signed by the hotel manager. Jake hobbled downstairs, marched across Main Street and deposited the letter in a mailbox outside the entrance to Winnipeg City Hall. But the instant the letter slipped from his fingers, Jake recoiled in horror. He had included his only copy of the reference letter from the hotel manager. He needed that letter to fight for justice. He put his arm in the mailbox mouth but couldn’t reach anything, so he hurried back into Frank’s Accidental Dog and Grill, ignoring the pain in his leg.

“Frank,” he called out, breathless.

“Whaddya want?” Frank emerged from the kitchen with hamburger meat on his hands.

“Lend me your vacuum, okay?”

“It’s in the corner. Put it back when you’re done.” Frank disappeared back into the kitchen.

Jake lugged the vacuum across Main Street to the mailbox. Stepping into the foyer of City Hall, he ignored a crowd of people listening to a speaker at a podium, and found an
electrical outlet by the door. He plugged in the cord and rolled the vacuum outside. Turning it on, he plunged the naked, sucking nozzle deep into the mailbox. It made an awful racket. Something flattened against the nozzle, making it rattle and buzz. He fished out four letters. None of them was his. He held them in his left hand and shoved the nozzle back down the mailbox. He got two more letters, but neither was his. Jake dived down again with the nozzle. At that moment, a large hand gripped his shoulder.

“Drop that vacuum! You’re under arrest!”

A crowd formed while two police officers led Jake Corbett toward a cruiser. A black man identified himself as a reporter for
The Winnipeg Herald
and asked a lot of questions. Jake tried to explain about his overpayment deductions. The officers pushed him into the cruiser. They also seized the vacuum and put it in the trunk.

Mahatma was having an awful time writing the story. He had the name and address of the accused. He had checked with police to verify the charge. He had even learned that letter boxes were considered post offices according to the Criminal Code of Canada, which said: “Every one who steals anything sent by post, after it is deposited at a post office and before it is delivered…is guilty of an indictable offence and is liable to imprisonment for ten years.”