by Don Hunter
Valadez returned with a large woman in agent uniform, who said, “Canadians, eh? Eh?” and chuckled at her wit. She grilled them about their past. Charlie waited nervously for the cannabis question, but the woman passed on it.
Twenty minutes.
The woman started chatting about the differences between their two countries, especially the rules for border crossing, and Charlie looked at the clock.
Fifteen minutes.
Finally she stamped a temporary visa and gave them an address in New York where they must appear. “If you make your plane right now, that is,” she said.
They did, with no time left.
Charlie thought there might be time for a quick beer when they landed at LaGuardia. It was after five o’clock and he would welcome that familiar feeling of well-being always fashioned by the first few sips of suds. Connie grabbed her bag and pointed to the taxi rank.
The cabbie, a native of Haiti, as he would tell them, advised them to lock their doors as he did his own. He chatted as they passed through neighbourhoods from Robert De Niro scripts, explaining, while narrowly avoiding challenges to his driving at several intersections, that he was a retired army sergeant, and he engaged them with his philosophy that it was unwise for other drivers to mess with a New York cabbie. And any that did with him, he would kill, he said. Charlie laughed. The driver didn’t.
The driver said that normally, he would not have the cab’s dividing window open, but “You seem like different kinda folks.”
Connie caught Charlie’s glance: we’re different?
They paused at an intersection and three youths wearing camo-patterned do-rags stepped toward the cab and peered inside. The driver lowered his window and growled something; the trio retreated.
How on earth, Charlie thought, was Connie going to survive in this place?
As they left the cab—and a hefty tip that Charlie considered the judicious thing to do—a banjo busker across the street from the hotel where they would spend their first night was singing “The Streets of New York,” a song Charlie knew well as one of the many Celtic laments Finbar O’Toole droned at the Cedars’ open mic nights.
“And remember all is not
What it seems to be,
For there’s fellas would cut ye
For the coat on yer back,
Or the watch that ye got
From yer mother …”
Charlie shuddered.
The address the woman agent had given them was at Federal Plaza in downtown Manhattan, where they headed at noon the next day after Connie had registered at AMDA and where it seemed that hundreds of people moved at a snail’s pace in a line behind rows of control barriers.
Charlie went straight to the building’s front door and explained confidently to the ex-NFL lineman guarding the place with a large revolver on his belt that they simply needed a stamp on a student visa and that “We are Canadians, so …”
The big man pointed them to the back of the line. Connie groaned, and sneezed. She was developing a cold. It was a sunny day and she had worn a thin blouse, but they were in the shadows of inconceivably huge buildings and a chilling wind cut through their canyons. They waited in the outside lineup for ninety minutes before they were admitted through the door—and into the first of three long and winding inside lineups. Half an hour took them to a wicket where a young male clerk listened, unimpressed, as Charlie explained their situation.
“You should be on the tenth floor, Room 104,” he said, and looked up and said, “Next,” as their number light (521) became history.
“You mean we needn’t have waited all this time …”
“Tenth floor, Room 104.”
In Room 104 an immigration officer was advising a man. “I remember arresting you at JFK. If you are lying now, you are in big trouble.”
Charlie believed him.
The officer turned to Charlie. “Where’s your yellow referral slip?”
“No one gave us …”
“You have to have it.”
Back to the main floor where a mood of desperation mounted in the lineups as the business day neared its end.
“Sorry,” the man behind the desk said, “but we’re closin’.”
“But …”
“Come back tomorrow. Seven AM.”
“To this desk?”
He shook his head. No. He nodded to the main door. To start all over.
“Oh, noooo,” Connie groaned.
The man shrugged, sympathetic. “Canadians. I really don’t know why we bother about visas.”
But they do.
Charlie believed in the philosophy “Never say never.” Elevator back to 104.
“No yellow slip,” he told the officer, fervently. “They’re shutting shop and we have to start the whole bloody thing over tomorrow.”
The officer shrugged.
Connie sagged.
The officer shook his head. He sighed. “Wait,” he said.
Charlie thought this was an improvement on the “Stay!” command earlier from one of the man’s colleagues to a fellow on the ground floor. The fellow had stayed.
Ten minutes and the officer relented. He laid his precious stamp on the critical paper.
“And good luck at school,” he smiled.
Charlie figured maybe just a beer somewhere before they moved on. Connie voted for move on, lots to do.
Connie’s “shared accommodation” (shared with whom?) was in an ageing, red-brick, ten-storey apartment building where a notice said, “KEEP YOUR DOORS LOCKED AT ALL TIMES” and urged those students arriving by car to “LEAVE SOMEONE WITH YOUR VEHICLE WHILE PARKING TO REGISTER.”
Good grief!
“Top floor, Dad.”
The room at least was clean. Two cots with bedding stacked on them. Two built-in closets and two sets of table and chair. Common bathroom down the hall. The view from the window was straight out of West Side Story. Flat, black-top roofs. A screaming fire truck parted the traffic.
The door banged open. A girl examined them, said, “Y’all the Canadian, right?”
“Both of us,” Charlie said.
“Ah’m Katie. From Texas. Y’ roommate, Con.”
Con?
Katie hugged Connie.
“Canadians, eh?” A large man at the door, carrying two travel bags. Texas hat, Texas belt buckle, Texas boots. A petite blonde woman entered behind him, chiding, “C’mon, move it, Chester.” And, “Ah’m Callie Boone—really, lahk Daniel. Hello, honey.” Callie hugged Connie. “Let’s get this place put together, you two. Y’all gonna be great together. Ah know it.”
She ushered Chester and Charlie aside, and within a minute the two men might not have been there as cots were agreed on and made up and other major decisions made.
Chester grinned at Charlie. “They’ll be fahn, y’know,” he said. He gestured toward the window and across and down to a flashing sign on what turned out to be Amsterdam Avenue. Red-and-green neon: McLeary’s.
“Ahrish pub, Ah believe.”
Callie turned to them. “One hour,” she said. “Then you take us all to dinner. Shoo,” she added. “We got woman stuff to do.”
Charlie looked at Connie.
“Go, Dad,” she said. She smiled. “And thank you.”
Charlie nodded at his new friend Chester. “My round,” he said.
Pets and Plants
It was decided that next year, the Spinner’s Inlet Owners and Pets Day and the Harvest Festival would revert to being held as separate occasions.
The Reverend Amber Rawlings conceded that her suggestion of holding them in concert had turned out to be much better in theory than in practice. “I really thought that harmony might prevail,” she said.
The Tidal Times had echoed her sentiment, saying that
the day would “bring pets and friends together with cooks and gardeners in an amicable atmosphere and spirit of competition.”
“Shouldn’t that be ‘animal’ atmosphere,” young Alun Clements had said. Jillian snorted. Alun was fairly close, as it happened.
Things began going sideways when Danny Sakiyama pointed Finbar O’Toole to the other side of the five-barred gate that led to the events field. “It’s a bloody horse. We do pets,” Danny said.
Danny was marshal and chief judge for all the annual goings-on. His word was law. As the community letter carrier for just about ever, and thus privy to a particular store of private material, he was known and respected—and a little feared—by all.
“It’s a Shetland pony!” Finbar argued. “Look.” He stood astride the somewhat plump Nelly, his feet touching the ground, nothing touching the animal. Or pet. “Watch,” he said. He took a carrot stick from his pocket, held it about a foot below Nelly’s left shoulder. The pony—brushed shiny and beribboned with Irish Republican green, white, and orange ribbons—folded at the knees, snaffled the carrot, and whinnied an apparent thank you.
“She’s named for my granny in Rathdrum, County Wicklow,” Finbar said. “Obviously a pet, ’cause who would name an actual horse after his granny?”
A dispute in the other half of the field grew louder, between the tables reserved separately for fruit and vegetables, next to the ones for baked goods, jams, and sauces.
“It’s a fruit,” stated Dr. Daisy’s nurse, Patsy McFee. She plopped a plump Better Boy tomato on the judging table and pointed to the definition copied from the Oxford English Dictionary that she carried with her everywhere in case of such a dispute. “The glossy fleshy FRUIT . . .” She shouted the last bit, causing heads to lift and people to drift toward what promised to be something of a barney.
“Fruit my foot. When did you last make a fruit soup?” Anwen Brannigan demanded.
They kept at it, while at the gate Finbar was pointing apparently in disbelief and mouthing, “What the f … what the f …?”
“Correct, a female lion,” Eddie Pape explained. “Sit, Fatima.” He tugged on the retractable leash that attached him to the big cat. Fatima growled, stared speculatively at Nelly, but sat.
Finbar, who owned a copy of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, decided to heed Falstaff’s suggestion that “Caution is preferable to rash bravery.” In other words, he chose discretion over valour, and conceded, “Okay, animal, not pet,” and, “Gee-up” as he pointed Nelly homeward. “And that’s a pet?” as Fatima settled down at Eddie’s feet.
A sudden interjection was offered from the sideline. “Neither of them are pets. There are no such things as pets.” A young woman wearing a large, round badge proclaiming her a member of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).
Then Jillian Clements said, “She means neither of them is a pet.” She had become sensitive to subject-verb agreement since her grandma, Sheila Martin, in retired-teacher mode, got onto her about it.
“They are animal companions,” the PETA member said.
Fatima opened wide her large, orangey-brown eyes.
Eddie said, “Easy, Fatima.” The lioness growled.
Danny Sakiyama said, “Er, Eddie …” but nothing else.
Edward “Eddie” Pape had been given some leeway in the matter of keeping wildlife as pets. He was a native of Senegal and a member of that national soccer team, as well as of Tottenham Hotspurs of the English Premier League. His Spurs status had been somewhat compromised the previous season because of a tricky knee, which had seen the team place him on the available-for-loan list, whence the Vancouver Whitecaps, in their usual panic for an effective striker, had taken him for the season.
Eddie had explained in an interview with Cameron Girard that just before leaving Senegal, he had seen Fatima, one of the few remaining lions in his country, lying in a ditch badly injured from an encounter with a Toyota pickup. He had nursed her back to health and finessed her through officialdom on his way to Tottenham, and then to Vancouver. While it was officially illegal to keep such a beast as a “pet,” with intercessions by the premier, who himself had been a fairly decent fullback, and who never missed a Whitecaps game, certain allowances had been made …
Eddie’s wife, Bernadette, had taken a cruise of the islands while the negotiations were concluding, had stopped at Spinner’s Inlet, and decided that a chunk of Eddie’s transfer fee would be well spent on a cabin for rent for the year at the south end of the Inlet. Eddie scored a hat-trick on his first appearance for the ’Caps, against the Seattle Sounders, making him and Bernadette eligible for instant citizenship in the minds of all ’Caps fans.
With French being Senegal’s official language, Bernadette had been grabbed by the Spinner’s Inlet school board, which had been desperate for a teacher for the summer immersion session.
“I thought I might enter her in the exotic pets section,” Eddie said. “If you have one.”
“Of course we do,” Danny said.
“Now, anyway,” Jillian said.
“Still not a pet,” said PETA, who had stepped back a bit.
“I’ll tell her that,” Eddie said, beaming a smile.
From across the field, at the green-plants table. “That’s a bloody pot plant! Mary-Jane!”
“So what? It’s legal.”
And nearby, where competition was becoming dire, a strangled cry of anguish arose at the sight of a collection of crushed chrysanthemums in disarray, while beneath the vegetable table a perfectly proportioned potato, a magnificent Yukon Gold specimen, lay mashed before its time.
Things were getting out of hand.
Annabelle Bell-Atkinson became involved in a row with the Clements youngsters when Alun asked if she and her two corgis were entered in the owner-pet look-alike contest. Another fractious moment came when Jillian asked the geeks the same question about them and their newly acquired chimpanzee friend, Cheetah, whom they had named from watching old Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan movies.
The PETA woman told Danny, “You do realize that not only is a chimpanzee not a pet, it has been judged to be almost a person by a New York court. I demand that those two release it.”
“Here?” Danny asked. He grinned at the passing speculation of the possibility that such an action could result in one or more local families claiming the creature as a missing member.
Over the way, baked goods were under attack. One of two strawberry-and-rhubarb pies was missing a significant slice, giving it the appearance roughly of a gibbous moon. Danny decided, while pointing no particular finger at the other pie’s maker, the often-pugnacious Barbara Baranski, that suspicious circumstances made a prize ruling untenable.
Back with the animals, two lambs brought over by a contestant from Salt Spring panicked when Fatima turned her gaze on them, bounded away at speed, and flattened an iguana belonging to lawyer Ezekial Watson, who howled that he would sue everyone involved in the celebrations, including Harry Dyson for negligence of gate duty.
Silas Cotswold, in The Tidal Times the next day, said, “Several attempts to diffuse the various conflicts did little to help.”
This set Sheila Martin aflame over a word she saw misused everywhere she looked. The mayor and retired English teacher paraded in front of the newspaper office with a sign that said, “DEFUSE, NOT DIFFUSE! LEARN THE LANGUAGE!”
The vote at the events committee by the presidents of the Spinner’s Inlet Owners and Pets Association, the Spinner’s Inlet Gardening Club, and the Cooking and Baking Alliance to go their separate routes in future was unanimous.
Rachel Spinner
Rachel Spinner’s phone rang. Its ring tone was the first bars of an old ballad about a legendary huntsman from England’s most northwesterly county of Cumberland, which the first Spinners had left to find and name a new home.
D’
ye ken John Peel with his coat so gay,
D’ye ken John Peel at the break of day,
D’ye ken John Peel when he’s far, far away,
With his hounds and his horn in the morning …
In the kennels behind the house an ageing Irish setter bitch named Fleet raised her head and watched the back door, waiting for her woman to appear with the leash. The phone went to voice mail. In a few minutes the phone rang again, and once more went to voice mail. Fleet whimpered, then settled down, her head resting between her outstretched forelegs, and watched the door. She was the only one remaining of Rachel’s long line of setters.
A sudden, sharp breeze off the Strait of Georgia whipped through a stand of willows on the edge of a small pond at the side of the property, found its way under the massive front door, ruffled the drapes, and briefly bothered a framed photograph on the clear-fir-finished wall above the blackened stone fireplace.
A book lay open on the table, a journal of sorts: Rachel’s Book of Memories. An old, lovingly polished coal miner’s miniature lamp sat near the book. The book was open to the date of the photograph on the wall: Good Friday, 1941.
The familiar photograph was the young Rachel in the blue uniform of a second officer in the British Air Transport Auxiliary, with a pilot’s wings. A ferry pilot. Beside Rachel, a slim young man in Royal Air Force blues with flying officer’s rings on his sleeves. Jack Thomas.
Rachel had delivered a Spitfire to RAF Biggin Hill. Jack had laughed at her tiny frame as she climbed out of the cockpit. Had stopped laughing when she offered some suggestions. And had fallen in love and declared he would never leave her side.
They had managed a seventy-two-hour pass. He had taken her in his 1937 MG and driven for eight hours, with two stops in small towns in the Lake District, until they arrived at the coal-mining village where the first Spinners—Samson and his young wife, Maud—had left behind a collier’s life. The village sat on the moorland between the Irish Sea to the west, and the Lakes to the east.
