The Last of the Lumbermen (18 page)

Basically, we need just two
rights. One of them is the right to be tr
eated decently, by everyone and everything. People will fight like
hell over what decency involves, but so long as we don't divide ourselves up into gangs and tribes
those kinds of arguments are what life is about.

The other right we
need to have is the right to make smartass remarks.
If we have that right guaranteed — and if we
practise it — all the other personal freedoms we'r
e whining about are guaranteed, and so is democracy.
You know that because that's the right that all those
authoritarians want to take away, whether they're in
a corporation's boardroom, or down on the str
eet corner trying to prevent you from getting on
a bicycle without putting on a combat helmet and body
armour. Check it out if you don't believe me.

I guess
the other thing is that we ought to wake up
and realize that nothing is black and white. Life's like
a rainbow, for Christ's sake. It's always over there
— until you get over there and dis
cover it's over here, and you just walked thr
ough it and missed everything.

ESTHER ARRIVES AT EIGHT
on the
dot, carrying a fresh change of clothes. Before
Gord left he gave me a fat bottle of
muscle relaxants to control the esophageal spasms, which,
he says, aren't likely to return unless I decide
to take up gymnastics or weightlifting — or hockey. He also told me to be checked out by nine.

It's an
awkward moment. We have a thousand things to
talk about, a hundred decisions to make, but no obvious
place to start. So we start simple. She smiles at
me, I grin back. I feel shy, almost. I thought
I was hiding a stranger from her, and
now I have to deal with the idea that the
only stranger she had to put up with was the one
she lived with every day — the one who didn't
open himself and his past up to her. The
metaphysics of that one make my head spin.

“Get dressed,” she says, “and we'll go home.”

This tells
me one thing I badly need to know. I still have a home to go to.

PART TWO

NINETEEN

A
S WE CLIMB CRANBERRY
Hill in the crisp winter dawn,
it comes to me that it was less than twenty-four
hours ago that I had that hair-raiser with
the Explorer, and that, despite the two near
deaths, the mayhem and the revelations, the world is
better now. My nervous system, no doubt helped by
the muscle relaxants Gord gave me, lets loose
a flood of endorphins, and an insight.

It's this: it'll
be the familiarities, and maybe the practicali- ties that have
built up over the last six years that will carry
things — if it doesn't send them wheeling into the
cosmic ditch. It's not just the sunlight and the
drugs, either. Subtly, Esther is letting me see that she's prepa
red to go on with our life together.

How do I detect this? First off,
she's talking about the day we're about to launch into
as if it will actually happen: she has appoint
ments with several clients, Gord has asked her to
go over to Jack's apartment to pack a bag for him
and get rid of the perishables. She's already picked
up Fang, his Jack Russell terrier. The other news is
that Wendel has gotten word that the Cabinet
report on the northern harvest cuts is going to be
released at one o'clock, and he's organizing a pr
ess conference with the Coalition — at one-forty-five.

But the
truest signal is that, as we cross the first intersection outside the hospital, she slips her right
hand across the seat and onto my thigh. So the
re it is. Not just that she does it, but
the
way
she does it. Esther touches in two distinct
ways. When she's pissed with me, she touches me with her
fingers, like she's handling a dead fish. When things ar
e good, she touches me with the palm of her hand,
a firm, comfortable touch that is both possessive and
intimate. The touch of her hand on my thigh this
morning is the palm-touch, so warm and electric that I can
feel the emotional glue it exudes. I'm so grateful for
it that I have to turn my head to the window to hide the tears.

To distract myself, and her, I offer to
take on the job of packing Jack's bag.

“That'll help a lot,”
she admits. “I've got my first appointment at nine-thirty,
and I'd have had to scoot over between then and eleven-thirt
y. The plane leaves at one, so you'll have to
deliver the bag to the hospital. You up to that?”

“Sure. Who's taking him to the airport?”

“Gord will be taking
him out there, but his knee will have to
be immobilized, so they'll probably take him out in
an ambulance. Not sure how they'll handle that on the plane.”

“Don't they normally wait a couple of
weeks before they do this kind of operation? To let the swelling go down?”

“Gord wants
Jack out of town before Milgenberger gets a
chance to convince him that the injury isn't serious, and
that he can do the job here. You know
Gord. He doesn't pull strings gently. When he
wants something done his way, he wraps the strings a
round everyone's throat so they have to do what
he wants. He had the specialist in Vancouver lined up
by the time I got to the hospital this morning.”

“Nice guy to have around when there's t
rouble.”

“Yes indeed,” she agrees. “If it wer
en't for him, you'd likely be in intensive care
with electrodes stuck in both ears, with some idiot planning to open you up for an exploratory surgery.”

WE HAVE JUST FIFTEEN
minutes at the house befo
re we have to leave — time to put Bozo
outside for the day, and Fang out for a quick
pee. Being what he is, Fang wants to spend the
day pretending he's a Newfoundland. He tries to
follow Bozo through the snow, but since the
recent snowfall is still powder he simply goes submarine and
I have to dig him out of the tunnel he
digs, grousing and nipping. If Bozo had Fang's personality and
ambition, we'd have to put her in a
steel cage to keep her from eating the neighbourhood.

As
I try to settle Fang down, who has by now
decided that my pantleg is a raccoon, I replay last
night's telephone messages. The one that interests me is f
rom Wendel, left while Esther was at the hospital picking
me up, saying that the Coalition is meeting at one
at the Alexander Mackenzie coffee bar to discuss the
government's announcement.

I've never been to a Coalition meeting. People who
think they're right have a way of being righteous
about it, which in my mind isn't quite the same thing
as being right. It's usually the opposite of knowing the
right thing to do. Righteousness is what a few too many
Coalition members run on, and like Wendel they can
be a real pain in the ass when that's all they've got.

But since Wendel is my pain
in the ass, I'm going to drop in on
the meeting to see if there's anything I can
do to nudge him and his friends toward the r
eal world. Gotta start somewhere with being his father,
and if I'm going to start laying a parental
hand on him it best have some practical application.

Esther is standing in the hallway. “Ready to hit the road?”

“One sec. Do you know where my briefcase is?”

I see her eyeb
rows rise slightly. “It's probably in the spa
re room with your other junk.”

“Right.” She's surprised because I almost never
use the damned thing, preferring to carry whatever I need
either in my pockets or in my head. But
in the briefcase is one of the few organized things
I've been working on recently. It's a handmade analysis of forestry employment records and
job multipliers I've been fiddling with over the last
few months. What my research shows is that for
estry employment has been dropping steadily since 1979
, and that under current industry values there
a
ren't
any employment multipliers. This might prove useful to Wendel.

I busy myself
scattering papers and books across the spare room
without finding the briefcase, and then remember that it's
in the trunk of the Lincoln. I spin ar
ound, and there's Esther leaning against the doorjamb. She's laughing
at me. She's seen this routine before, and the
re's no contempt in her laughter. She told Gor
d one time that I don't clean up or do
housework, I fight chaos. Or spread it.

I DROP HER OFF
at her office and drive over to Jack's apartment, which is
over a second-hand store in the nearly derelict
downtown. Jack's business would do better if he moved
out to one of the shopping centres, but he's
like Gord that way: he has his loyalties.
He lives and works where he does because he
believes his job is to do services for the community
, not just “do better” for himself. So he stays in
the old downtown because that's where Mantua is —
for better or worse. The malls could be anywhere in
North America, and what goes on in them is p
retty much the opposite of what he means by community
. His office is at one end of the building overlooking
the street, and his living quarters at the back. He owns the building.

He's
lived in the apartment since he broke up with
his wife, who got the house as her part of the
settlement. That was about twelve years ago, before I
knew him. In my time I've seen women come and go
from his life, much as they've come and gone
from Gord's. Jack will tell you he's still
looking for the right woman, and then laugh and say she
doesn't seem to be looking very hard for him.

I r
etrieve my briefcase from the trunk, and use the keys Esther gave me to let myself into Jack's place. It doesn't
take long to find his flight bag in one of the
closets, spread out the bag on the bed, and
begin to put together what he'll need. I find his
shaving kit in the bathroom, toss in his toothpaste and
a new toothbrush still in its plastic case,
and a bottle of shampoo. There are five
vials of pills in the medicine cabinet, and, not su
re which he needs, I take them all and return to the bedroom.

Let's see.
Pyjamas, bathrobe, check. Three pairs of undershorts — no,
five — a half-dozen pairs of black socks, some T
-shirts, three shirts, a couple of pairs of cotton t
rousers, a pair of casual shoes, and a suit, which
I hang over the door with a clean shirt and
tie. I'm packing the last of it in when I lose
my grip on the pyjamas and bathrobe. They fall to the floor.

I pick them
up and stretch the sleeves apart for refolding.
The pyjamas are enormous — big enough, probabl
y, to fit Gord. The bathrobe is
the same. I refold them both and place them beside
the flight bag. I check a set of drawers acr
oss the room, find proper-sized pyjamas, and,
on a hook behind the bathroom door, the right-sized
bathrobe. I put those next to the bigger ones,
and sit down on the bed.

I reopen the pocket on the bag that has
the shaving kit and the pills, and check the label
on the pills. Only three of the five vials
have Jack's name on them. The other two have Gor
d's. I begin to check around the room. On
the night table shelf on the left side of the headboa
rd are two books on forensic medicine and
a biography of Michel Foucault, a French writer Gor
d has been talking about recently.

I do the two-plus-two, and
it comes to four. Then I do the subtractions,
the multiplications, and the long division on a few dozen
loose ends that have been there all along, flapping
around inside my head. It's still two plus two equals
four. I wander out into the living room, laughing
out loud. Jesus H. Christ, you guys. What am I
going to find out next? That Junior is an extraterrestrial?