by Wayne Grady
“Fascists have been voted into office before,” Alyssa said, though quietly. “Maybe you’ve read Joan Didion’s book on El Salvador?”
“This is a ridiculous conversation,” Paul said. “Is this what they teach you in English class?” he asked, turning to you.
Did he expect you to back him up? How could you have lived with this man and not known about his politics? He said he was an environmental lawyer and you automatically assumed he was on the side of the good guys. You felt stupid and betrayed. You didn’t know him, and suddenly you didn’t like him.
“No,” you said. Thank god you’d kept your apartment. “They don’t teach us what to think, Paul, they teach us how to think. You should have taken some English courses.”
Paul was about to say something no doubt clever, possibly final, when your phone buzzed and you picked it up. A text from Wendell, “Where r u?” Perfect timing. You lowered the phone to below table level and texted him back: “9th ring of hell. You?”
“Daphne,” said Paul, but you put up a hand.
“It’s Chloe.” Chloe was the dear friend you invented when Wendell first started texting you. Daphne and Chloe, yes. Paul didn’t get it, of course, but Prof Courteous looked up sharply. As far as Paul was concerned, Chloe was a pain in the ass who constantly needed to talk to you, like, right now. She usually texted but sometimes, when it was really urgent, she called, and then you had to drop everything because she was in crisis, she didn’t care if you were in surgery, tell them to baste you up and get your ass over here. Paul used to say that Chloe should get professional help, she wasn’t much of a friend, and you told him he didn’t know shit about friendship, which was true. Men don’t. Your dad has friends he’d played basketball with for years and he couldn’t tell you their kids’ names or what they did when they weren’t playing basketball. Elinor used to say So-and-so seems nice, what does he do? And your dad was like, I don’t know, I think he’s in landscaping or something. Married? Don’t know. Kids? Shrug. Some friendship that was. If Elinor was in trouble, say she got cancer, Sandra would be all over her about it. She’d find out if it was breast or cervix or uterus, she’d do a Gofundme to raise money to buy her a wig or send her to that holistic clinic in Massachusetts or whatever. Maybe Chloe could have cancer and need a friend to go to Massachusetts with her, a whole weekend. But soon, given what you now knew about Paul, you wouldn’t be needing Chloe anymore. Which meant you’d be really needing Wendell.
“Barbet,” Wendell texted.
You looked up at Paul. “Where are we?”
He gave you his blank look.
“What street are we on?”
“Broadway. Why?”
“Good.” The Barbet was on Broadway.
“You got?” you texted back. You were aware that the conversation around the table had stalled. No one wanted to talk about pipelines, and there really wasn’t anything else to talk about. You looked up at Prof Curtis and Alyssa, your eyes awash with fierce, innocent loyalty. “Sorry,” you said, “a friend in need. She’s in some kind of crisis. She’s got this boyfriend, I think he’s abusive to her.” Sympathetic murmurs from everyone but Paul. Wine glasses consulted, heads nodded. Paul rested his chin on his hand, looked out the window at the snow.
“Got,” texted Wendell.
“Excuse me,” you said, then texted, “Call me.”
Ten seconds later your phone played “Poker Face,” and you said, “I’ve got to take this.” You got up, said, “Sorry,” and, into the phone, “Hi, Chloe, what’s up?” You turned your back to the table.
“Don’t forget tonight,” Paul said behind you.
“I won’t,” you said. How could you forget something that hadn’t happened yet? You looked at Professor Courteous and Alyssa and raised your eyebrows, as if to say, How were you supposed to know Paul was an asshole? But now you know.
The snow was deeper on the sidewalk than it had been when you went into the restaurant. No one in Vancouver owned a snow shovel, or would even recognize one if they tripped over it in a blizzard. After walking a block, you put the phone to your ear and asked Wendell where he was, and he said, “Look up,” and you did and there he was, leaning against his van with a canary-eating smirk on his face. You got in on the passenger side and he walked around and climbed in on his. You loved that van, a 1980 pus-yellow Westie, the back seat taken out to make room for his tools, but he left the pop-up bed up top. He reached over and opened the glovebox, took out a tin with a tight-fitting lid and the words “Rat Poison” and “Strychnine” stencilled on the side above a black skull and crossbones. It was the best thing ever. You’d found it in Paul’s basement and thought at first it really did have strychnine in it, but when you opened it there was just something that looked like laundry soap inside, so you dumped it out and gave the tin to Wendell to keep his coke in. He took a spoonful from it and spread it along the lid of the open glovebox. You inhaled every last grain, because that was your favourite part, and when there was absolutely nothing left you let your head sink slowly onto Wendell’s lap, not easy with the steering wheel but he’d put the seat back, and you reached for his belt buckle. Blow, blow, thou winter wind. You still had Wendell and your apartment. You still had somewhere to go. The zipper slid down like a little roller-coaster car, Whee, scary but fun. Thou art not so unkind. The crazy boxers you gave him for his birthday, with Sylvester chasing Tweety across the front. As man’s ingratitude.
Harry
DECEMBER 1999–MAY 2000
After graduating with a BA in English literature and a minor in journalism, Harry had taken the first job that came along, as a reporter at the White Falls Daily Observer. Barely a year later, the paper was taken over by Southam News, a Toronto-based conglomerate that was buying up small-town dailies and flipping them to lesser conglomerates. The Daily Observer’s previous publisher, scion of the family that had owned it since the 1920s, thought that having survived television, the paper would survive the Internet, that as long as Canadian Tire and Hemming’s Freshmart took out double-page ads every Wednesday and Friday, the enterprise would stagger on. But the Canadian Tire closed when a Walmart opened across the highway, and because Walmart also sold groceries, Hemming’s Freshmart stopped giving away discount vouchers through the Daily Observer.
Southam didn’t care. They’d bought the paper because it was housed in an historic building at the centre of White Falls that was worth more than the newspaper itself. Southam moved the staff into a renovated Esso station on Ontario Street and sold the old building to a developer for a huge profit. The ground floor became a Milestone’s restaurant, a pet food store, a jeweller’s, and a White Mountain ice cream outlet; the mayor’s office moved to the top floor; Harry’s wife could look down and see the former Esso station where her husband rewrote Southam wire stories and composed captions to photographs of peewee hockey teams. The Daily Observer no longer came out as a daily but was published as a weekly, although the original name was kept on the grounds that its reporters continued to observe daily, even though they reported weekly. The paper became known to its few remaining employees as the Daily Weekly.
By then, Harry was long gone. He’d taken an early buyout and was teaching at Madawaska College. He enjoyed teaching, felt invigorated by the daily contact with his young students, and still thought he had lots of future ahead of him. He didn’t share the low opinion most of his colleagues held of the students at Madawaska College, in fact he reserved his low opinions for most of his colleagues. Rather than moan in the faculty lounge that the students were taking college-level courses because they couldn’t get into a university, Harry’s view was that his fellow faculty members were teaching at the college level because they weren’t qualified to teach at a university. He certainly believed that about himself. He thought he was a man with few illusions. He liked his job because it was one of the few things he felt he was good at. That and maybe playing pickup softball on
Saturdays, and possibly being able to spot the not quite so terrible wines at the White Falls liquor store.
Except for one evening class on Thursdays, he was finished teaching by four o’clock. He spent the quiet hours between classes in his office, seeing students, marking papers, or just reading and thinking, a luxury he had not had at the paper. At five, he collected Daphne from the after-school program the college ran for faculty and staff. She could have walked the three blocks to their house—they never locked the doors—but he liked spending time with her before her mother came home around seven. After the frantic uncertainties of working at a dying newspaper, where he’d found himself actually longing for a major fire or, dare he hope, a homicide, he didn’t mind the regularity. To keep his hand in, he was a stringer for one of the Ottawa weeklies. He didn’t get the house fires or the homicides—the weekly sent its own reporters for those—but he’d developed a knack for making a plant closure or the appointment of a new United Church minister sound like an historic event. The stories he made up about such happenings were often more generous, and always more interesting, than the reality.
He devised a year-long course in which the students planned, wrote, and edited an annual publication they called Go Mad. The articles covered the spectrum of subjects offered on campus. Besides journalism, there was physical education, health sciences, marketing, photography, and the graphic arts. His students wrote feature articles, investigative pieces, profiles, shorter news items, a books column, and reviews of museum events and local restaurants. He got one of the graphic arts classes to design each issue, the photography class to take photos, and the marketing class to sell ads. The magazine was published online at the end of the school year. It was a master stroke, it was genius, if he did say so himself. And it was so far from anything anyone at the college wanted him to do that every year he had to plead, cajole, and threaten his way through the process. He had to fire up enthusiasm for the project in his own students, then in the faculty teaching the other courses, and after that in the administrators, especially the dean, who didn’t like reporters nosing around campus asking embarrassing questions such as why the football team hadn’t made the finals again, or why there was only one woman on student council, or why so few of the students who received scholarships in the nursing program were First Nations. Harry was beloved by his students, belittled by his colleagues, and beleaguered by the dean. He rarely showed his face in the faculty lounge.
Often, when he collected Daphne from the after-school program, he took her to the Dairy Queen, or to the public library, or for a drive in the country. They went for long rambles in the car, not saying much, contentedly immersed in their own thoughts, or they would sit in the municipal park, near the swings and the teeter-totters, eating ice cream cones and watching crows and sparrows make their way across the dusty grass. Daphne had always been close to nature; he was more the indoor type.
Harry kept their conversations general, not because he wasn’t interested in what Daphne was doing and thinking, he was, but because he didn’t want to seem to be prying. Her mother did enough of that, and he wanted his daughter to think of him as a safe harbour. He believed in the secret life of children. His job was to create an atmosphere of trust and companionship between them, as he did in his classes at the college. He felt that Daphne would eventually feel comfortable enough to talk to him about anything at all.
These were precious times for him. He and his daughter shared so many things. Books, ice cream, the warmth of sunlight through the windshield. She improved on his bad jokes. “What has four legs but can’t walk?” he would ask her. “A dead cow,” she would say. He felt that his love for her was so far beyond doubt that actually talking about it, trying to express it, to put it into words, ran the risk of introducing doubt into the equation. He thought that Daphne understood that. He thought that without having the slightest idea of what a ten-year-old could understand. He was aware that it took time to build an atmosphere of trust, but he thought he’d put in time.
* * *
—
In the final year of the twentieth century, which also turned out to be his final year at the college, he assigned an investigative story to two of his students, Blaine Davis and Melissa Stone, who had been in his introductory class the year before. He left them to choose their own subject, expecting they’d write a local take on the Doomsday Scenario. He devoted a class to the discussion of investigative journalism. He talked about such things as journalistic ethics, the protection of sources, how to conduct interviews, and the frank admission, even the exploration, perhaps even the celebration, of a writer’s personal biases that inevitably permeate any story. “Your perspective should be clear,” he said, “not hidden. It should be right there, up front, so that the reader always knows where you’re coming from.” He handed out copies of notable investigative articles from the past. He then turned them loose on their stories.
A week later, Melissa and Blaine came to speak with him in his office.
Melissa was one of the brightest students in his class. She paid attention and asked good questions, and when she spoke it was generally to the point, although not always to the point Harry was trying to make. Blaine was from a well-to-do Ottawa family, a tall, gangly young man whom Harry thought would be happy covering meetings of the campus chess club but whose association with Melissa had given him higher aspirations. He and Melissa were living together in one of the married-students apartments across from the college. They were seldom seen apart.
“We want to do the story about drugs,” Melissa said.
“Drugs,” Harry said. “Are you sure?”
“Why wouldn’t we be sure?” Melissa said. She had an odd way of holding her pen, as if she first made a fist and then stuck the pen into it, like a knitting needle into a ball of yarn.
“It’s a huge topic,” Harry said. “You may want to hone it down a bit.”
“Is it?” said Melissa. “How do you mean?”
“I mean,” he said, spreading his arms to illustrate massive, “drugs. It’s not a single subject, it’s a whole kingdom of subjects. Do you mean recreational drugs? Club drugs? Prescription drugs? Opioids? Sedatives? Downers?”
“Yeah, all that,” she said. “Most of those are the same thing.”
“Aren’t you worried you’ll get some of your friends in trouble?”
“Our friends don’t do drugs.”
“But what if you find out they do?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what if your friends do take drugs. What if some of them are dealers, or addicts? Would you still do the story?”
Melissa looked at Blaine.
“Because once you start digging,” Harry said, “you’ll have to go where the story takes you. You can’t predict—in fact you must not predict—where that will be. You can steer it in a certain direction, to some extent, but not away from someone you don’t want to hurt or offend.”
“Yeah, the ethics thing, we get it,” said Blaine. “We’re cool with that. We’ll do the research first and see what comes up, and then decide which area we want to focus on.”
“And we’ll let the research determine that,” Melissa added, “not personal considerations.”
“That’s good,” said Harry.
That was late September. He didn’t see either of them for a while, except in class and occasionally in the cafeteria, sitting with their heads together, or bowed over their cell phones like Buddhist monks over thought beads. He was glad they didn’t seem to require his help, as did some of the other students in the class. Leona Finnigan, who was writing about the senior women’s volleyball team, had discovered that there was an unspoken rule against taking on transgender players, and she wanted to know how much she could make of it. A lot, Harry told her. Another student, Jason McCoy, writing about the construction-in-process of the residence building, had learned that the college had accepted the lowe
st bid, even though the company tendering that bid had been sued for code and material violations after completing a similar project in another town. In class, Harry told them that human rights violations and political corruption were two areas in which good journalism could bring about positive changes in society. But they had to make absolutely certain they had their facts straight. And they had to find people who would talk to them about the issues. “Stories aren’t about facts,” he told them, hoping he didn’t sound too pompous. “Stories are about the people who are affected by the facts. Leona, you need to find a trans student who was turned down when they tried to join the volleyball team.”
“I’ve got someone,” Leona said.
“Good. And Jason, find out who owns the last building that company built and ask them what problems they’ve encountered.”
He also gave them his mini lecture on keeping notebooks. “Tape recorders are good,” he said, “but notebooks are better. And take your cameras. You can look at the photos later to recall details, like hair colour, or what was on someone’s desk, or who was at a meeting who might deny having been there. Some of your photos may even be usable in the magazine. Remember, details are what provide the colour in a good article, they bring the reader right into the story. Sometimes the most insignificant detail can make a scene come to life.”
* * *
—
The first semester proceeded normally. A late fall turned into an early winter, with snow threatening before the end of November. Speculation about Armageddon-like disaster befalling the world at midnight of January 1 was making everyone jumpy. The college issued wild memos about computer backups and “infrastructural collapse” and advised students to stockpile medicines, cash, and batteries. Shortly before the Christmas break, Harry invited Blaine and Melissa into his office. He was worried that they hadn’t asked to see him about their story. He was relieved to find them unfazed by the prospect of the planet’s imminent destruction, or by their plunge into the White Falls drug culture.
