The Geomancer's Compass (14 page)

F
or some reason – we weren't thinking straight and, besides, Moose Jaw's downtown seemed to exist in some strange parallel universe, a Bizarro World with no Starbucks – we made our way back to Nicky's Restaurant and took the same booth we had vacated a couple of hours earlier. I tried ordering a variety of things ending in “cino” and involving “latte” somewhere in the title; in the end I had to settle for something Svetlana swore was coffee, although I had my doubts. As for Brian, he ordered a piece of saskatoon berry pie
à la mode
and a gigantic glass of milk. “When in Rome,” he said, by way of explanation. Then he pointed his fork at me in a menacing way. “Spill the beans, Randi.”

“Spill what beans?” I stared at my coffee. It didn't look safe. I opened one of those little creamer thingies they give
you at restaurants and poured its contents into the abyss. Then another. Now it looked oily.

“
All
the beans,” he insisted. “See it from my perspective. Aunt Daisy collars me when I get home from work yesterday and, out of the blue, informs me that I have to drop everything I'm doing and come to Moose Jaw today to do something very mysterious and oh-so-important with you. ‘What?' I ask. ‘Your cousin will tell you,' she says.”

“I told you!” I defended myself. “We're looking for Qianfu's grave.”

“Which is impossible to find. Oh, and then just to mix it up a little, we run into our deceased great-great-grandfather on a virtual reality tour and you say, well yes, this isn't the first time that's happened. What? Did it slip your mind?”

“Of course it didn't. It's just that … I told you, Brian. I didn't know whether it counted, whether you could say that an encounter in a VR environment was something that actually took place.”

He shut me down fast and hard. “Uh-uh. No. I'm not buying it. You're withholding information. You're telling me what you think I need to know and nothing more. You think I'm stupid, but I'm not.”

“I don't think you're stupid.”

“Yes you do. All of you. Don't think I don't know it.” The look on his face … I'd never seen him so serious. Or was that hurt I was reading in his expression? I felt a stab of guilt in
my gut. He was right, of course. I had always thought of him as kind of dumb; we all did. “Crazy Brian!” we'd say. What we meant was “Crazy
dumb
Brian.”

“You're dyslexic, not stupid,” I muttered, looking at the greasy pools of creamer sliding across the surface of my coffee.

“So they say.” His tone became brisk. “I'm going to draw a line in the sand, Randi. You're going to tell me why we're looking for Uncle Fu Man…
Qianfu's
bones because, in case you hadn't noticed, ‘why' is very important. You're going to tell me now. And you're going to keep nothing back. And if you don't tell me everything, I'm finishing this pie – which is excellent, by the way – and then I'm packing it in and going back to Vancouver.”

I threw up my hands. “All right. You win. It's because we're cursed. There, I've said it. Are you happy? We're looking for Qianfu's bones because we're
cursed
.”

He stared at me. “Who's cursed?”

I leaned over the table and hissed, “Us. The Lius. The whole family.”

He looked baffled.

“What?” I demanded. “You haven't noticed that there's something wrong with all of us?”

“Not you.”

“Not yet. Apparently I'm to be eaten by a shark off Bermuda.”

“How do you know that?”

“The Grandfather told me.”

“When?”

“Yesterday.”

“No, I mean when are you going to be eaten by a shark?”

“In three months.”

“I wouldn't go to Bermuda if I were you.”

I sighed. Shutting my eyes, I rubbed my forehead where a small headache was beginning to percolate. Silently I named this headache “Brian.” “Do you see now why I didn't want to tell you? Not because I thought you were stupid. Because this whole curse thing is just … nuts, is what it is.”

He considered this for a moment. He dug around in his pie like he was looking for something – rocks, jewels, stray bits of beetle. “It doesn't sound that crazy to me. In fact, it would explain a lot of things.”

I rolled my eyes.

“It would!” he argued. “And why not? ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.' That's from
Hamlet
.”

“I know,” I said tartly. “We studied it in English last year.”

“And I saw the movie. So let's say we are cursed. For argument's sake.
Why
are we cursed?”

“That's where Qianfu comes in. According to The Grandfather and A-Ma, the
feng shui
where Qianfu is buried,
wherever that is, sucks, so he's punishing us. Ergo the curse. What's a ghost to do?”

Brian looked thoughtful. “
Bad feng shui
. That makes sense.”

I snorted. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“You know about
feng shui
?”

Brian gave me what was probably intended to be a withering look. “I'm a
bonsai
warrior, Randi.
Bonsai
and
feng shui
are complementary disciplines. Of course I know about
feng shui
.”

“Well, you know more than me, then,” I admitted. “I only know that toilet lid thing.”

“So let me get this straight. You're saying that, if we manage to find Fu Man…
Qianfu's
bones and rebury them in a place with good
feng shui
, the curse will be lifted.”

“That's the idea.”

“And then we'll be OK?”

I shrugged. “I guess. I don't know. How should I know?”

“Will I be able to read?” The longing in his voice … I'm not going to lie; it made my heart hurt.

“Are you asking me if curse-lifting is retroactive? How should I know? Nobody's spelled it out for me. Maybe it will just be better in the future. Maybe we'll have to make do with our various problems, but there won't be any new ones. Maybe the symptoms won't be so extreme.”

“Too bad we couldn't have done it earlier,” he said soberly. “You know. Before.” His eyes had a stricken, faraway look. I
knew that he was remembering the last year of his mom's life, when she could barely lift her head from the pillow, when she kept asking to be allowed to die. It had been hard on us all, but it had been hardest on Brian. His father dead, Oliver holed up in his own little world, and Aubrey so starved that her brain wasn't working right. I tried to imagine how I would feel if my mother kept pleading with me to let her go; even the thought was unbearable.

“Hey!” In an effort to distract him, and in the interests of full disclosure, I retrieved the wooden box containing the geomancer's compass from my knapsack. “I've got something to show you. A-Ma gave me this the night she died.”

He looked at me and his eyes lit up. “What is it?” he asked. “Can I see it?”

“Wipe your hands first,” I said. “You've got pie juice all over them.”

He wiped his hands on his napkin, then took the box and opened it. “Wow. This is amazing. What workmanship!”

“It's a
lo p'an
,” I explained, “a geomancer's compass. It belonged to The Grandfather. It came down through the family. I don't have a clue how it works, some gobbledygook about harnessing
chi
, but I was supposed to bring it with me on this trip. Apparently The Grandfather is going to use it when the time comes to deal with Qianfu.
If
we can find a bundle of bones that disappeared over a century ago, which I'm not convinced we can.” I took the box from him and,
reaching into my knapsack again, retrieved the key that A-Ma had given me. “She gave me this as well.” I handed it to him.

“What's it to?”

“The first locked door we encounter. That's what she said.”

“Hmmmm.”

“What?”

He slipped the key into a pocket. “I wonder … are you through with that coffee?”

I pushed my cup away untouched. “This isn't coffee. This is hot water a flea drowned in. Then there was an oil spill. I don't want to think about what would happen to me if I actually drank it.”

“Alrighty, then.” He rubbed his hands together with relish and yelled, “Svetty! Oh, Svetty!”

“But you haven't finished your pie.”

“Precisely why doggy bags were invented.”

Svetlana emerged from the kitchen, looking grumpy and hard done by. She lumbered over to the table and stood there scowling and kind of twitchy, like she was spoiling for a fight. I could sympathize. I had often wanted to throttle Brian myself. It was bad enough having your name shortened to “Randi”; being called “Svetty” would be the worst. I decided to give her a ridiculously large tip to make up for it.

“Check, please,
Svetlana
,” I said, sliding the
lo p'an
box back into my knapsack. “Oh, and could you point us in the
direction of the Azure Dragon Tea and Herb Sanatorium?”

She gave me this look – what it meant was hard to tell, given the no-eyebrow thing, but it didn't strike me as friendly. “Head east on River Street. That way.” She pointed. “You can't miss it,” she said, with a sideways slide of her eyes at Brian. “It's … Chinese-looking.” The way she said “Chinese” – not nice.

Maybe not such a big tip, after all.

W
e were not half a block from the restaurant when I spotted this homeless man camped out on the sidewalk at the junction of an alley and River Street. A scrawny black dog with a makeshift collar of twine and a leash improvised from a piece of rope lay coiled at the man's feet. I stiffened and, taking Brian by his elbow, drew him closer. “Don't you dare talk to that guy!”

“Why not?” he asked in a perfectly audible voice. Which he did on purpose to embarrass me.

“
Shhhhh!
I mean it, Brian!”

My entreaty fell on deaf ears, of course. No sooner were the words out of my mouth than Brian was making a beeline for the dog. He really likes dogs. I mean, he is over the top about them. I like dogs too – if they're clean and don't drool. I couldn't tell whether this dog was a drooler, but it was definitely not clean.

“Nice dog,” Brian was saying to the homeless man. “Can I pet him?”

The man stared at Brian with heavy-lidded, bloodshot eyes, then blinked. He looked startled. “Uh … sure,” he croaked.

Probably people didn't talk to him much, I thought. Probably they just walked on by, pretending he wasn't there. Either that or they yelled at him to go away. That's what I would have done – not yelled at him, but walked on by, looking everywhere but at him and his dog in the alley. Now, because of Brian, I couldn't very well do that. I had to stand there looking at a homeless guy, which is hard because homeless people tend to look pretty rough, like their lives are rotten, and it makes you sad to look at them – and kind of frightened. This particular guy was First Nations, with copper-colored, deeply lined skin and high cheekbones. He looked to be in his forties or fifties; the hair that poked out from his Winnipeg Warriors toque was almost blue-gray.

Brian hunkered down and held his hand out, palm open, to the dog, which lifted its head and sniffed it warily. “What's his name?”

“
Her
…
her
name,” said the man. He had a big gap between his two front teeth. “It's Lois.”

“Lois. As in ‘Lois Lane.' That's a good name for a dog. Hi, Lois. How you doing, Lois?” Brian scratched the dog under her muzzle. She evidently liked this, lifting her muzzle higher to accommodate his fingers. “I'm Brian.”

“Name's Elijah,” said the homeless man. “Elijah Otter.”

“Glad to meet you, Elijah.” Brian extended a hand. Elijah hesitated a moment, then extended his own grimy one; it was encased in an old black glove with the fingers cut out. They shook hands. I made a mental note to give Brian one of my antibacterial wipes as soon as we were out of Elijah's sight.

“Do you and Lois like pie?” Brian asked.

The man looked uncertain, as if this might be a trick question. “Well, yeah.”

Brian hoisted the paper bag containing his leftover saskatoon berry pie from the restaurant. “Because I couldn't finish this, and I don't think I want to carry it around all day.”

“We can take it off your hands,” said Elijah.

“Could you? That would be a help.”

“Sure,” replied Elijah. “No problem.”

Brian handed him the bag. “Great. Well, nice to meet you, Elijah. Keep it real.”

“Thanks, Brian.” Elijah sounded almost happy. He peered expectantly into the paper bag. “Have a good day now.”