by Edward Riche
Fourteen
Wally’s quad: an RZR 900 Polaris Pursuit. In Camo. Loves it.
Shag the tree-huggers of downtown St. John’s, that crowd of comefromaways in designer rubber boots. What did Cy Jardine call them? “The bellyaching Veggie Burghers of the East End.” They complained that the machines destroyed the country! But it wasn’t their country. It was Wally’s. Wally’s dad’s. A giant, his dad, Brendan. Respected. Feared. Up the whole Southern Shore. And this was their land, regardless of what the Crown said. If they wanted to drive a quad up here or over the Perroquet Downs or through the Avalon Wilderness Area that was their business. Masterless. They’d thrown off the Englishman’s shackles and made their own way on these bogs, in these woods. Jesus, one day the O’Neills are resettled out of Dunchy Head and the next persecuted for keeping a spot up in the country to snare a few rabbits.
Not long after WestJet established a service between St. John’s and Dublin, Wally took a pilgrimage to the ancestral home. But he found Dublin grubby and sour, a pricey international anywhere. His Irish brethren were completely uninterested when he mentioned Newfoundland’s connection. The pubs looked exactly like their knock-offs back in St. John’s and the Guinness didn’t taste any better. It tasted the same. Wally was happy to come home out of it. He was a true Newfoundlander.
On his favourite route for the quad there was a minty tunnel made by low-hanging larch branches that Wally loved shooting through. Rocketing out the end of it the four-wheeler came right off the ground and didn’t she bounce like a rubber ball when she came down again. Almost lost control of the machine every time, Wally did.
Clearing the stand of trees he tore across a pelt of barrens, the pond they called Skin Tilt in his sights.
His father, Big Brendan, had expected more of Wally, Wally knew. He could be mayor of St. John’s but for Matt Olford. Hey, the guy won a Stanley Cup with the Oilers, wore the ring. Not that Olford did much with that team; he was, like, third or fourth line. But Olford had played enough hockey to get elected.
Olford had figured out the municipal politics game too, how to remain in office as long as he wanted: do nudding, do dick-all and take no stand. Previous mayors worked themselves into a lather dealing with the mini-mayors of the outlying communities, the tax-avoiding brown-baggers, trying to get them to grow up on issues of infrastructure and sharing the burden. When they told Olford they wouldn’t pay he shrugged and said he understood their position. Six months later they were asking him how to spend the money they’d begged from the province or the feds. Olford let them come to him with solutions it should have been his business to imagine. Wally couldn’t operate like that; he couldn’t sit still. He was a doer.
By now Wally should have gotten the call from Whassiname McAvoy, should have been courted to stand for Parliament as the Member for St. John’s South and, by default, being the only federal Conservative from Newfoundland, be destined for the Cabinet of the Government of Canada. Privy Councillor. That’s how Brendan laid it out for him. But Wally got tangled up in that moose thing, shot a cow with a “bull only” licence and got nailed by Wildlife on the road out. He knew Bill Murphy kept a moose cock in his freezer for such a possibility but that day, that one day, Wally neglected to take the dong along.
The Liberal Party had recently sent a messenger to indicate they could forgive and forget but they weren’t going anywhere. Wally wasn’t going to be a sacrificial lamb.
So now Wally “Bull Only” O’Neill was a city councillor and his brother, Des, ran the Blackmarsh Inn. They were small-time. And with all this prosperity, all the new money — it was galling. This was their time to be in on the action and they were outside the tent. They were outside the gravel pit camp! They were with the bears up to the fucking dump!
Everybody else was getting rich from the oil play. Everybody else was getting a piece. You needed money to make money. He and Des had an idea, a solid idea for a new evacuation system for the offshore rigs. Wally was going to take it to Gerald Hayden, was waiting on a meeting. He was going to get the O’Neills back in the game.
He stopped the quad next to the water and turned her off. It was quiet but for the whinging of a faraway chainsaw. When his father brought Des and he here as boys it took a few hours to walk in. The pond was blocked with fair-sized mud trout then. It was fished out now.
Wally lit a Player’s Light. That was his reward, a smoke. These days a man had to skulk off to the woods to enjoy a dart without being harassed.
The fisheries had come and gone and fortunes were made. Wally’s people were the ones in the longliners and the trawlers, the ones swept overboard, lost at sea, the ones bent and broken by toil, and when it was said and done and the cod were gone the O’Neills were back where they started. Wally wasn’t going to let it happen again.
He flicked the butt into the pond and started up the machine. Its guts and his were one.
The existing ATV tracks leading up from the beach were so deeply cut into the peat that tea-coloured water was pooling in them. They were too greasy for purchase so he broke new trail. The machine’s front wheels clawed up over the bank with a roar that raised a fox hiding in the tuckamore. The animal was sooty and silver, with what looked to be black leggings like a baseball player might wear. The fleet creature made for the trees. Wally went for it with the quad, gunning the engine.
Fifteen
Patty didn’t proselytize and never once asked Matt to accompany her to a service. She’d joined the church of her own accord; she was never recruited. She reported to Matt that she accepted an invitation to attend a service as a courtesy and had a much more pleasant experience than she expected. The things she heard there made sense, she said. She went back again unbidden. She was insistent that no one tried to “convert” her. She sent their children religious material, but never showed any of it to Matt.
Patty did send Matt annoying motivational e-cards: a picture of a mountaineer on a summit with the word “AMBITION” and some drippy message imploring the reader to get on with it. Today she had posted, on her Facebook page, one of those takes on the “Keep Calm and Carry On” posters from the Blitz; the crown at the top of the card was replaced with a crucifix and the message below said “Keep Calm and Rely Upon.”
How was Matt supposed to respond?
Stranger than these new messages was that Patty used to, not so long ago, post the mock versions. An image of hands stacked at the centre of a huddle with the caption “Meetings: Because none of us is as dumb as all of us.” An image of charging bulls closing on a Pamplona runner with the caption “Tradition: Doesn’t mean it’s not stupid.”
Could someone block irony, make themselves deaf to something they’d always heard? Maybe the sense could be lost through exposure to excessive sarcasm or in a single blast of ridicule too cruel.
Patty was the office manager at Atlantech Petroleum Services. She worked alongside engineers, perhaps not scientists, but empiricists, men and women of fact, of measure, more than of faith. What exactly had his wife — whom he loved, who was always so much more intelligent and skeptical than he — chosen?
He’d opened his laptop to google “Lloyd Purcell” and had seen the “Keep Calm and Rely Upon” Facebook posting, as had, he realized, his neck reddening, many, many others. What were her colleagues at work saying? Their friends? What were their friends saying about Pats and Matt? “She left him for Jesus!” “Hush, Alan, that’s a terrible thing to say.”
He typed “Lloyd Purcell” into the search box. There was a Wikipedia page and an IMDB page, which Matt saw was something to do with the film and television business. He remembered hearing about the guy now. He was a writer in Hollywood and got into trouble down there, something sordid to with drugs or boys or girls. Yes, Lloyd Purcell’s brother — Matt could not remember his name — ran a restaurant on the outskirts of town, in what was now Dewey Mercer’s ward, where Matt and Patty and Steve and Belinda once at
e a wonderful meal. What was that place called? It was back in the day when going out to eat was about the people with whom you dined, not the chef’s IMDB page. Food seemed such a fuss these days, thought Matt.
Matt clicked on the Wikipedia page. It was short and incomplete, as if someone had started it and then abandoned the project. He scrolled down, looking for details about Purcell’s run-in with the law in Los Angeles. The guy had worked on a television show, All Heart, that Matt had seen, and some movies he thought he might have heard of. Where was Personal Life, he wondered as he scrolled.
Audrey’s voice came over the intercom.
“You have a call from the Prime Minister’s Office.”
Matt depressed the talkback button.
“Who at the Prime Minister’s Office?”
“It’s a woman, Carole. She’s calling for a ‘Fred McAvoy.’”
“I think I know that name. Does he have a title?”
“Communications something.”
“The Prime Minister’s Office?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Sure it’s not a prank, Audrey?”
“I don’t think so.”
Matt wondered what it could be, worried he’d forgotten something. He sat on a couple of national bodies to do with municipal governance and they were forever appealing for more federal money.
“Okay, I’ll take it.”
He picked up the phone handset.
“Hello?”
“Mayor Olford?” It was a woman’s voice.
“Yes.”
“Please hold for Mr. McAvoy.”
Matt supposed he was being asked to join some new committee to do with cities. He wasn’t a member of a political party so it wasn’t a plum.
“Mayor Olford?”
“Yes.”
“Fred McAvoy. I’m with the Prime Minister’s Office.”
“What can I do for you, Mr. McAvoy?”
“I remember seeing you play with the Oilers.”
“Yes?”
“I’m a Leafs fan, even when I lived in Calgary.”
“Lotsa Leafs fans out there” — Matt closed his laptop — “despite it all.”
“It really must have been something to play for that Oilers squad. The best team ever?”
“The best players on that team were some of the best to ever play the game. But I’m very biased. Case to be made for the 1970 Bruins too, and those Montreal teams a few years later.” Matt heard himself talking too much. “The team wasn’t better because I was on it, that’s for sure.”
“Don’t be modest. I think you won most of the big faceoffs.”
Matt won them all.
“Yes. I’m proud of that.” Why was this guy calling? Did Matt remember the name McAvoy from the news?
“Yanic Perreault was a top man on the faceoff, don’t you think?”
“Exceptional. If he’d been bigger. In the league, then. He doesn’t get the recognition he deserves. Wasn’t a terrific skater.” Matt thought again he should be listening more closely; there seemed some subtext he was missing. Surely this McAvoy character hadn’t called to talk about the finer points of the faceoff. “And Perreault played for some teams . . . teams in transition.”
“‘Teams in transition,’ yeah. Who was the best — besides yourself, of course — the best on the faceoff?”
“Stan Mikita,” answered Matt. Was it a prank? Who was this really?
“Curved blade though. I’d put an asterisk next to everyone on that Chicago team. I never liked them. Bobby Hull — overrated. And a drunk. The prime minister is writing a book about the Leafs. Dave Keon as well, on the faceoff?”
“Yes. But like Mikita, different league than me.” Matt disagreed with McAvoy’s assessment of a Black Hawks unit he considered one of the greatest.
McAvoy switched to French.
“Vous avez joué pour une équipe Junior au Québec?”
“Oui, à Trois-Rivières, les Draveurs. Some called them the Dukes.”
“Vous avez . . . appris le français là-bas?”
“C’était ma mineure à l’université, mais oui, le français que j’ai, si c’est bien ça qu’ils parlaient, c’est là que je l’ai appris.”
“What was your major?” McAvoy returned to English.
“Economics.”
Matt thought he heard McAvoy laugh, or make a sound that was meant to be understood as laughter. It was considered and unnatural.
“Now why didn’t I know that?” McAvoy said. The comment was directed to someone else too, his mouth was away from the handset. There were others in that room in Ottawa with him. “The prime minister is forever reminding us that he’s an economist.”
“I’m not an economist. I was an undergraduate. Not really any . . . I don’t profess a deep understanding.”
“What is it that Keynes said? ‘In the end we’re all dead.’”
“On his deathbed he said, ‘My only regret is that I have not drunk more champagne.’”
“Really?”
“The quote you’re thinking of is ‘In the long run we are all dead,’” said Matt. “Mostly misunderstood, I think.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. It was to do with economists ignoring the immediate consequences of policy and, you know, thinking about an abstract . . . long term, about the future and not the present. I haven’t thought about it in many years.”
“Obviously the prime minister’s inclinations are to the Freshwater school, common sense really.”
“Like I say, I’ve not put it to much practical use.”
“That cannot be true.”
“There’s scant economic theory running a city — we have few levers to pull. We are at the mercy of larger forces.” Matt regretted saying this; it was like he was making excuses.
“You were in business.”
“I was in sales. Hayden Heavy Equipment, and truth be told it was the Stanley Cup ring that sold the excavators.”
“Gerald Hayden is a significant contributor to the Conservative Party. He’s mentioned you.”
“Oh.”
“Do you know why I’m calling?”
“No, I do not, Mr. McAvoy.”
“Never got wind of any polling?”
“I don’t have a big political organization. We’re not active between campaigns.”
“Our party’s research is exceptional. We did some polling in St. John’s South.”
“Okay?”
“You would win the seat for the Conservative Party.”
“I . . . I’m not . . . Traditionally in St. John’s municipal politics we don’t run on a ticket or with a party affiliation, so I . . .”
“None of the other names even stood a chance. Good names. You’re popular. I’m speaking for the prime minister.”
“I’m not a member of —”
“Getting a representative in Cabinet from Newfoundland has been a problem for us. It’s a priority. Where there is so much growth out there in the resource sector.”
“I understand.”
“It’s not like the price of oil is going anywhere but up.”
“No.”
“China.”
“Yeah, for sure, China.”
“Of course, I can’t promise . . .”
“Of course not.”
“Our polling indicates you would easily unseat the incumbent and a number of other competitive candidates from the other parties.”
“Heartened to know that. I’m not . . . a Conservative.”
“You’ve been a responsible fiscal manager. You are not affiliated with the Liberal Party or the NDP?”
“I am not. Over the years I’ve been approached by people from all three parties, provincially, hoping I’d run. Gerald Hayden was always trying to sign me up, but I�
��ve never seriously considered —”
“It seemed incredible to me.”
“What did?”
“That you’d . . . I mean, this far along in a political career and . . . it’s so . . . ” McAvoy searched for the word. “So chaste.”
“Politics aren’t ideological down here. Its clans and tribes.”
“It’s the time in the prime minister’s mandate to make changes, to bring in new blood. You would be a great addition to our team. I’m speaking for the prime minister.”
“I would have thought there’d be someone else already considering a run . . .”
“There is someone — ong connections to the Progressive Conservative Party, family connections — but for a number of reasons we can’t get into the prime minister doesn’t consider him suitable.”
“. . . I can’t give you an answer . . .”
“No, no. I didn’t expect one. Think it over.”
“I will.”
“Not for too long. Please keep our discussion in confidence.”
“Absolutely.”
“Strict confidence.”
“Understood.”
“Wayne Gretzky was going to run for us in Toronto but he would have had to move back to Canada.”
“Right.”
“Your wife, Patricia, she’s a member of the same church as the prime minister — the Christian and Missionary Alliance?”
“Yes, she is. I’m not a member of the church.”
“We know.”
“And I’m not a member of any church. I’m not . . . ,” Matt now said, for the first time in his life, he supposed, “I am not a believer.”
A stage laugh. “Perhaps winning St. John’s East will make one of you.”
“St. John’s South.”
“Yes. Right you are. More important that you believe in Canada, allegiance to Her Majesty and all that.”
“Of course.”
“You’re not one of those who took down the Canadian flag? No Newfie separatist stuff in the closet?”
