Stanley Park (4 page)

There was silence for some time. The bird began to glisten, then hiss gently. Finally the aroma was released: smoky, fatty, rich with oil. He twisted the stick a quarter turn.

“This is all quite illegal, of course,” Jeremy said finally, aware that the comment was softened by his own complicity. But the Professor only looked at him as if he were a little slow for just getting this point. “All right,” Jeremy went on, failing to resist a small smile. The duck smelled good. “How do you catch a starling?”

“Caruzo showed me,” the Professor said, re-energized. “Peanut butter spread on top of a good strong epoxy from any hardware store. On a stick or a low branch in a relatively clear area, not too far into the forest. You can watch from quite close by; they are not a shy bird. Or scarce, for that matter. It works nicely, although you’ll want to remove the feet before you cook them.”

Jeremy rocked gently back and forth. Shook his head as if to clear it. “You clean them up like that?” he asked, nodding towards the juice container full of water.

“I take the starlings down to the men’s room by the beach,” the Professor said, “where I can spread out and do a good job.” Now he was rummaging through his leather case, which he had slung up in the low branches of the nearby
cedar. He re-emerged from the branches carrying a bottle of wine. “I bought this wine for you. A Rioja. You like Spain, don’t you?”

“Never been.”

“Right. France, was it?”

“France,” Jeremy said.

The Professor uncorked the wine. Then he unsnapped a collapsible field cup from inside its pouch, telescoped it out, poured some of the red wine and handed it across the fire to Jeremy. He had a plastic cup for himself.

When they both had wine, Jeremy still did not sip. The Professor felt the pause and looked at his son.

“Participatory anthropology …,” Jeremy began.

“Quite beyond immersion,” the Professor said. “The next step, really.”

Jeremy chose his words carefully. “I thought you had given this up.”

“I had,” the Professor said. “But I left something unfinished. Something I thought should be put to rest.”

Jeremy wasn’t sure he understood.

“My own celebration of ‘local bounty,’ ” the Professor said, nodding towards the duck and smiling.

“Not funny,” Jeremy answered.

“You don’t like that we might be working on parallel projects.”

Jeremy sighed and lifted the silver cup in the orange light that flickered around them. “Santé,” he said. “To your health.”

“A la vôtre,”
said the Professor, before drinking. “To yours too.”

They charred the bird a bit on the back and the legs. It was tough to cook directly over such a low flame. Still, it wasn’t badly done. The breast was crispy, the meat the texture of medium steak. The Professor cut them off pieces in turn, which they ate with their hands, sitting cross-legged next to one another in the dry ferns near the fire.

“It’s not really cooking, I realize,” said the Professor. “Perhaps with a salal-berry cream sauce we could tart it up to your customer’s level of sophistication.”

“Sure.” Although: salal-berry cream sauce. Not bad.

“Salt?” The Professor dangled the packet at eye level.

Jeremy took the paper envelope of precious salt and sprinkled some across the piece of canvasback breast in his fingers. He chewed and swallowed. He took a breath.

“I’m just a cook.”

The Professor glanced up. “Oh yes?”

“That’s all,” Jeremy said. “So I like local produce. So I like local rabbits. Whatever.”

“Whatever? Meaning: no reason for this preference? No larger significance?”

“Of course it has significance. There just isn’t any big—”

“Any big reason for it?” the Professor said.

Maybe not, Jeremy thought. He swallowed another mouthful of duck and held a greasy finger up in front of himself. “If somebody asked me, ‘What are you trying to accomplish?’ ” he started, “I would answer that I was trying to remind people of something. Of what the soil under their feet has to offer. Of a time when they would have known only the food that their own soil could offer.”

“Sort of a nostalgia thing,” the Professor said.

“Make fun,” Jeremy said, “but how would you answer the same question?”

“I would say,” the Professor answered, “that I am here allowing the words of this wilderness to penetrate me, to understand what is being said by these people. Because I believe it is something that concerns us all, some more than most. You and I, for example. Or perhaps we are just ready to hear these words. You and I.”

Jeremy looked away. Part of this answer was pleasing, the inclusion. The remainder was exasperating. “And what are those words exactly?”

“In aggregate, something along these lines:

Jeremy shook his head and sat back. “And to think Sopwith Hill won’t commit to that.”

“The stories don’t come all at once, shrink-wrapped with a complimentary bookmark.”

“Give me one. Just one to get a sense.…”

“Well, there is this Siwash character,” the Professor said. “He sits in the forest—a few hundred yards that way, near Siwash Rock—counting.” Counting people, the Professor went on to explain. Nobody knew why, and the Professor had only spoken with him twice since arriving. Siwash made him tea both times, their dialogue polite, cagey. He had arrived, he explained, like so many others had arrived. “I am blown here,” Siwash had said, running a hand over a waxy scalp, then pulling on an ear that appeared to have two lobes. “I was washed up on the beach like all the others. Crawled free from the wreckage of an imperfect landscape onto these perfect shores. I will never leave.”

He liked maps. The Professor described how dozens had been Scotch-taped to the walls of the concrete bunker that the man called home. National Geographic maps of the earth’s polar regions. A black starlight globe. Various cylindrical and conical projections. All these hung in the relative darkness of the concrete room, glowering obscurely from the shadows in a bunker that had once been a pillbox, an armed outpost on a rock outcropping above Siwash Rock. A vantage point from which the authorities once thought they
could repel Japanese invaders during the dark and paranoid days of Vancouver’s World War II.

But what about this counting? “Is there a number?” At their second meeting, the Professor tried to press down on this issue. He had decided the tea was China Black. “Is it a number you’re waiting to reach? Like a thousand, or ten thousand?”

“No number,” Siwash told him, and became elusive.

“Maybe a head count of some kind,” Jeremy offered, intrigued by the idea. The map-lined pillbox in a public park was richly eccentric, certainly, but it sounded cosier than his father’s set-up.

“Caruzo thinks it is a tally, yes. But even he doesn’t know,” the Professor said, nodding. In fact, Caruzo did not speak of Siwash often, and the Professor had never seen them together. He imagined it would be like having two evangelists in the same room. They could talk, but they already had views on everything, and their words were better directed at others.

“Caruzo,” Jeremy said. “I suppose he is another story.”

“I would think so, perhaps even the first chapter of a longer story. I understand you see him from time to time at the restaurant around breakfast.”

“Yes, thank you. He’s been a Friday regular for the past month. If you have any more people living around here who want free coffee and cigarettes and maybe a snack in the morning, you send them along.”

“Those volumes you couldn’t handle,” the Professor pointed out.

“I suppose you sent him to see how I was doing?” Jeremy said.

“And you also sent him back with word that you wanted to see me,” the Professor responded. “So we have both used him as a messenger, haven’t we?”

They drifted into silence for a moment, the fire dropped to coals.

“I remember a photograph. The three of us at the lagoon,” the Professor said eventually.

Jeremy looked up sharply at the mention of it. “Under the cherry trees.”

“That’s the one,” the Professor said, smiling. He cut off some more duck. “You see how there is also a great deal of us held in this wilderness.”

Jeremy didn’t know what to think of that comment. They were silent for a few minutes.

“You wanted to see me. To ask me something, I suspect,” the Professor said finally. “But I sense you are suddenly shy. Perhaps I can balance the scale by asking my favour of you first.”

Jeremy nodded in agreement.

“I need someone in the city. Someone to do some research.”

It surprised him. “Why not Caruzo?” he heard himself say.

“Well, Caruzo can’t read, for one.”

“Why not you?”

“Fine then.”

“Sorry. Tell me.”

The Professor took a moment before continuing. “Babes in the Wood,” he said finally.

Jeremy waited for more, and when nothing came said: “Who are …”

“Who
were
murdered in Stanley Park, not far from here. Two children, conventionally understood to be brothers, although there have been different views on this over the years. In any case, two children, unsolved murder. Still, this story is not a murder mystery, understand. I am interested in the myths surrounding their death, about their bodies still being buried here in the park. About related matters.”

“And when exactly?” Jeremy said, growing faintly nervous.

“Oh,” the Professor said. “A long time ago. Fifty years. It was in all the papers at the time. Two little kids, murdered with a small hatchet in the park. Not half a mile from where we’re sitting, in fact. The killer, never found. The reason, inexplicable. The repercussions.” And here the Professor leaned forward and looked at his son very closely. “The repercussions still spilling down through the years.”

There was a second of silence.

“All right,” Jeremy said. “What can I do?”

“I need details,” the Professor said. “You could try the library.”

Jeremy thought for a second.

“Yes?” the Professor pressed, canting a bit forward.

“Sure,” Jeremy said. “I promise.”

“There are stories, you understand?” The Professor was again looking directly at his son. “There is Siwash and there are others. There are individual stories written in code. Say mental illness, say what you like. But I have come to understand recently, very recently, that in these stories there are threads that weave together into a single chord. A single story lives at the centre of it all, and by this story the others might be interpreted.”

“These kids,” Jeremy said, voice flat.

“Their death. Perhaps.”

Jeremy nodded, feeling helpless. A promise to do some research didn’t sound like a lot coming out. Released into the dark air between them, it gained volume and weight, instantly.

“Well then?” the Professor said, thinking they should move on before the boy reconsidered. “Do tell.” And with this comment, he laid back in the ferns, his head outside of the pool of firelight, supported in his two interlocked hands, elbows flaring out and framing his darkened face. A coal sparked and threw an instant of reflection into his black pupils.

“The Monkey’s Paw is everything I want to do,” said Jeremy, by way of introduction. “Jules and I work exceptionally well together. We understand each other precisely.”

“Jules Capelli, yes. Plus, the alliterative Anya Dickie likes you,” the Professor said.

Jeremy nodded. “That review helped us, I can tell you. We were in deep trouble there for a while,” he said. Even thinking about it made him nervous.

The Professor waited.

“Money trouble,” Jeremy explained.

“Ah, yes,” his father said. He was not overly familiar with this kind of trouble.

“No matter how good people say we are, the downtown east side makes some people uncomfortable. That is, some of the foodies we would otherwise be attracting won’t go there. Plus, what we do is not always cheap to begin with. A prawn raised in a vat in the basement of a factory in Singapore is about half the price of a fresh prawn from the Queen Charlotte Islands. Not as good, clearly, but cheaper.”

“Fascinating,” said the Professor, who was enjoying the ideological drama captured in the story. “It is inefficient, perhaps, to have your passion for local ingredients.”

“Maybe that’s it,” Jeremy said. “In any case, I almost crashed the whole thing. It was close. Debts, credit cards, cheques. I’m bad with that stuff. And even now, it would be misleading to say we’re hugely profitable.”

“I see,” the Professor said. “Now you feel pressure from the moneylenders, and it is distracting you from what you love to do, is that it?”

“Sure. Partly.”

“And despite these pressures, you have little control over increasing your own business. So you simply cook well, remain devoted to your culinary principles, and hope that a lot of people will eventually come to appreciate your efforts and come to your restaurant and spend money, etc., etc.”

Jeremy nodded wearily. “Basically. The strain of which brings me to the question.”

The Professor sat up and poked the coals. “I’m listening.”

“Dante Beale.”

His father stopped poking the coals and looked at him. “What about Dante?”

“He’s offered to invest. He likes the restaurant. He knows I’m struggling. He believes in what I’m doing.”

“That barista boy,” the Professor said.

“He
employs
baristas,” Jeremy said. “Thousands of them too. Inferno International Coffee is huge—you have to give him credit for that.”

“Credit,” said the Professor, thinking back. “Isn’t that what he gave you?”

“He guaranteed my bank loan. This arrangement would be quite different.”

“I’m sure.”

“This would be an opportunity to let someone else worry about the money for a change.” The Professor was skeptical.

“I know this is unusual,” Jeremy said, “but I’m asking for advice here. You know him.”

“I don’t trust him.”

“And you’ve been neighbours, friends, for what … twenty years?”