The Republic of Nothing

by Lesley Choyce

  Our section of the protest, cut off from the rest, was being surrounded by twenty or so horseback policemen and we were being pushed up against the giant glass wall of a bank tower. If Gwen was scared, she didn’t show it. I saw only defiance in her face. Any minute she might do something really stupid. We slipped to the back of the crowd, but there was nowhere left to go. We were right up against the green glass wall and people were crushing in on us as the horses paced slowly forward. A whiff of the gas made my eyes water, my mouth sting. Gwen began to cough. Out on the street, I saw bodies of protesters writhing in pain from injuries or from the gas. Hundreds of other protesters simply lay down right in the street, surrounded by dozens of uniforms. We were being crushed now, surrounded on three sides by men on horses slowly but steadily inching in, purposefully jamming us against glass and concrete. I held on tight to Gwen. She shouted out, “It doesn’t matter what you do to us. We’ll stop the war.” Others shouted too as we found it getting harder and harder to breathe. Someone began to cry hysterically. “Back off!” somebody screamed.

  We were trapped. Now we were going to be crushed. Certainly they were doing more than just their duty. It was impossible to see their faces; they were faceless, emotionless machines doing the will of the government.

  More people began to scream and hysteria was sweeping the crowd. I felt the glass behind me actually beg;in to flex like a weak skin of ice on the surface of a newly frozen pond. We were about to be crushed to death or killed in an explosion of broken glass. A woman fell under the hooves of the horse and she shrieked. Except for the cry of the injured, a curious quiet had come over the crowd and as I looked around I saw pure, undiluted terror in the faces around me.

  Why I did what I did next cannot be fully explained. Desperate options come from deep within. Maybe it was my mother, although it was so absurd that it seems unlikely it would have been in her psychic bag of tricks. Maybe it was one of those vague, distant spirits I had met in a dream. I knew I had to do something. It was just like someone had thrown a switch. And what I did was begin to sing, “Oh Canada.” I sang it like I was a kid in grade two who would belt it out on a good morning as he just arrived at school. I’m sure it must have sounded off-key and warbly as I belted out, “Oh Canada, glorious and free!”

  My guess is that most people in the crowd, including the cops whose horses were in breathing distance of my face, had never heard the national anthem of their northern neighbour. Gwen joined in, sounding shaky but celestial. And at that moment the horses stopped, backed off ever so slightly. This mob, taut as a living, single wild creature, suddenly relaxed its communal muscle. One single policemen lifted his face shield and looked straight at me. Horses shuffled backwards and protesters began to leak out of the crushed crowd from the sides. Gwen sang a few more lines, stumbled on the words and then stopped, out of breath. The only cop with a face was looking straight at me and, in his eyes, I recognized pure hate. He had wanted to see us cave the glass wall in. He wanted to see blood and jagged glass driven into the bodies of anyone who would speak out against the American war. He had that ugly passion of a true patriot in his eyes.

  I could not look away from his face. I should have sidled out of there like the others, safe now on the side street and making a run for freedom. But there was something in the locked horns of our stare. It was what I felt then and what he told me in his silence that suddenly made me understand war, understand how someone becomes an enemy. I blinked back my hate and tried to move away with Gwen, but he was headed toward us. I could see the eyes even better, see the puffy, half-shaven face. Whatever level of calm had overtaken me to save us all with a national anthem was now gone. I felt animosity, not for anything this man had done but for the fiendish look in his face. Gwen was tugging at my sleeve now. We had a clear exit, we could have got away but I stood my ground. He towered above me now, his foaming horse breathing heavily. I saw the billy club raised. Why would he use it on me if I was posing no physical threat? I believed that this was the line he would not cross over. He would not actually hit me because, I wanted to believe, there was still some common bond of humanity that would prevent him from hitting an un-armed good intentioned kid from Nova Scotia.

  I was looking at his face, his eyes. I saw the stick raised in the air, saw it shudder and hesitate, and then without seeing it, I could feel the air slice, feel it descending towards my head. I dodged out of its way and as I did, I saw Gwen dive forward at him. I screamed. She was about to take the goddamn thing on her own skull to save me. I knew I had made a big mistake. We should have run. But another hand, the anonymous hand of a fellow protester, had reached up and grabbed the end of the stick and was trying to pull the cop off his horse. Gwen grabbed the cop’s wrist and was biting it hard enough to draw blood. The horse reared up and I nearly fell over backwards but kept my footing enough to pull Gwen off the policeman and away as the horse came back down on all fours and a can of tear gas went off.

  We got far enough away from the gas so that we were not blinded with tears or choking, but we were disoriented and shaky enough that two other patrolmen on foot came up and pushed our arms up against our backs. “We saw that,” one of them said. “You’re both under arrest.” They handcuffed us and led us quickly to a nearby van. We were thrown into the back of the paddy wagon onto the floor. The truck was nearly full of other protesters. We lay panting and coughing, and it took some time before I could speak. I pulled Gwen up off the floor as the truck began to speed off. “You all right?” I saw blood on her mouth. “Are you hurt?”

  Still unable to speak, she shook her head, smiled at me and wiped the blood on her sleeve. Finally, holding her throat and gasping, she pointed to the blood on her clothes and said, “It’s not mine. It was his. I have very sharp teeth.”

  Once Gwen got her bearings, she shook off the fear that we had both felt and treated our arrest as an adventure. I took a bit of glory from my comrades as the “Crazy Canuck who sang some wacko Canadian song.”

  In the cell, along with at least twenty others, we waited for two hours, singing together and swapping stories about what had happened on the street. For the most part, the outrage we had felt was gone and I couldn’t help but think that this was the jovial comraderie of soldiers who had just done battle. A strange irony. We were called out in pairs or one by one, and word came back that we would all be released after the posting of bail.

  Much to my shock, it was the horse patrolmen who had tried to bash my brains out who came to ask Gwen and me to join him in an office. My first surprise was that his voice sounded strangely familiar. He had a New York accent like Ben and he was about the same age. Inside a small, windowless office with a silent uniformed policewoman present he asked me, “You both Canadian?”

  “Nova Scotian,” I answered. It was a typical Bluenose reflex.

  “Nova Scotian, huh? What are you doing down here?”

  “We came to protest the war,” Gwen answered defiantly. She looked very weak now and tired. I needed to get her out of here, to get her home, and my mind was filled with a wasp’s nest of impossible entanglements.

  “It was an illegal protest. You need permits for this sort of thing. You were breaking the law.” He was rubbing his band-aged wrist now and it looked like the blood was leaking through the bandage.

  “I didn’t know that,” I lied. “We didn’t come down to try to break laws. We only wanted to try to stop the war.”

  He breathed heavily. “I got a kid over there. He’s about your age. Fighting for his country. Doesn’t want communists to fucking take over. You kids know nothing.” The cop was looking down at the floor. The hate was all sucked out of him and a profound sadness filled the room. Gwen looked over at the policewoman but she looked away at a small framed picture of a Vermont hillside on the wall.

  “Maybe we don’t want to see your kid get messed up over there,” I said. “Maybe we care, too.”

  But he wanted no more of war debate. He had let his other self out of his unifor
m for a brief instant and now he had crawled back into his job. “You want to know what I can have you charged with?”

  We said nothing.

  “Unlawful assembly, assault and battery of a police officer and crossing international borders for the purpose of creating a disturbance. That’s a federal offence, by the way.”

  “We don’t care,” Gwen sassed back, but I didn’t let her get anything else out.

  I decided to forgo any sort of logical argument now. I acted like I was scared. It didn’t take too much acting. “We’d like very much to go home if we could — to our families.”

  The cop shook his head. “Jesus H. Christ,” he said. “You come down here and disrupt a city and you want to go crawling back home to mommy and daddy like nothing happened?”

  We said nothing. I was looking for a way out. I was thinking about Gwen’s father, realizing that if they actually did some sort of check on us they’d figure out who she was. I didn’t want it any more complicated than it already was.

  “Can I make a phone call or something?” I asked.

  “Gonna call the Canadian Communist party to come bail you out?”

  I shrugged. The policewoman got up and brought a desk phone with a long extension over to us. “Here,” she said. “Call.”

  I guess I had already sorted it out. It was very simple. There was only one person who was going to get us out of this and, oh boy, did I want to get us out of here and on that 6:30 plane home for Halifax. I pulled out a phone number from my wallet and told the operator I was calling collect. My father answered the phone. It was the middle of the afternoon, but he sounded like he had been taking a nap. “Where are you?” he asked.

  “I’m in jail. In Boston. Gwen is with me.”

  “In jail? What the hell for? I knew about the trip, but what on earth did you do?”

  “We protested the war.”

  “Oh.” There was a bit of silence. It was hard to know what my father was thinking. “What do you need?”

  I asked the cop. “What do we need to get out of here?”

  “You need a goddamn lawyer and probably about a thou-sand dollars in bail.”

  “Dad?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I heard.”

  “I want to get Gwen home,” I said, my voice cracking. “Today. She’s not feeling too well.” It was true. She looked pale and for good reason.

  The cop was shaking his head. “No way are you going to get out of here by supper time, kid.”

  My father heard that too. “Tell me where you are, what you’re being charged with and who I can talk to there. We’re going to hang up and I’m going to have you out of there within an hour.”

  I gave him the whole scoop. All the while the cop was nudging me like my time was up.

  “Sit tight. I’ll have you out. Put the officer on the phone.”

  “Thanks Dad.” I hadn’t called him that for a long time. I handed the phone to the cop. “He wants to talk to you.”

  Reluctantly the man whose son was at war took the phone. Whatever it was my father said, it had some sort of impact on the cop, because by the time he hung up, he had already begun to treat us nicer. Less than an hour later, the cell door opened. We were told to leave. No charges, no nothing. “Need a ride to airport?” the lady cop asked. Gwen was very sleepy now, very tired, and I had to help her to walk.

  I gulped. “Yes please,” I said as politely as I could.

  Two hours later we were on the Air Canada flight headed for home. My head was swimming with love, swimming with war and swimming with history. When my father met us at the airport as we cleared customs, he gave me a big hug and hugged Gwen as well. I thought he was going to gush all over us but he said very little. “Get in, kids. We’re going home.”

  Gwen lay down in the back of the Buick and fell asleep immediately. I sat up front and it was so good just to be with my father again that I felt a warm glow of pride. He had come through for me. “How’d you do it?’

  “Politics, son. It’s a powerful tool. I talked to Colin as soon as we hung up. He agreed it would look very bad on my career if my kid spent much time in a Boston jail. It might make the party look bad, make the province look bad. He got on the phone to the governor of Massachusetts who got on the phone to the mayor of Boston who immediately told the police chief to have you released. It was all in the politics. Colin didn’t want this little blot on any of us.”

  I was suddenly puzzled. I had guessed he had pulled a few strings, but I was annoyed by the motive. “Is that why you got the premier to make the phone call, because you didn’t want it to look bad?” For a minute I felt like I didn’t know who this man was. Did he save our asses to protect the god-damn Tory party?

  My father shook his head. “No way, Ian. I went that route because I knew it was the quickest way to get you out. If I had to, I would have gone down there with Kirk’s harpoon cannon and blasted you two out of jail. Can’t allow some foreign government to hold hostage two citizens of the republic.”

  I sank back in the seat. I knew he was telling me the truth and knew it had been a long while since he had mentioned the republic. It was still alive, somewhere inside him. And right now we were headed back to the island. Tomorrow I would wake up and I’d go to school. If Gwen was feeling up to it, we’d catch the bus together there in front of Burnet’s house, and by mid-morning we’d be taking a vocabulary test in English as if nothing at all in our world had changed.

  33

  The lights were on at Gwen’s house but the car wasn’t there. I walked her inside and there was no one at home, no sound except for the static of the interstellar receiver back in her father’s shop. It was picking up intermittent static bursts from a quasar perhaps or a failing star somewhere in a distant galaxy, and it gave me an eerie feeling of my own insignificance. Gwen sank one last time into my arms and she said, “It’s okay, really, Ian. They probably all went out for a drive.” It was, after all, a warm pre-summer evening.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes,” she said, kissing me on the lips. Planets tilted slightly out of kilter on their axes, stars slowed down on their breakneck race away from the centre of the universe. A burst of hot static shot through the room. My father was waiting in the car. After I left Gwen and sat down in the dark Buick, he said, “Someday you’ll tell me about Boston, okay?”

  “Right,” I knew exactly what he meant. He knew that it was more than the war protest, more than the arrest. He had watched me kissing Gwen through the window and he knew that while he had been gone, his son had grown up; he knew I had changed and it would take more than a few minutes of father/son heart-to-heart to get to know me again.

  As we drove back to our old house, the sound of pebbles and shells crunching beneath our tires on the gravel road, I felt the bond again with my old man. Maybe he had not changed so much after all. Maybe he still was my old man. Soon he would find his way back to his island home and to us. It’s one thing for a man to storm out of his home in a rage after years of pent-up frustration and chase across the continent, perhaps to Alberta, for a new job, more money and a new life. But Everett McQuade would never have done that. His had been a silent, almost unadmitted parting, a melting from the old ways. His intentions had been good. Maybe one day he would become a great politician, an international statesman, someone who would bring world unity and global peace. But even that, to me, would not be quite enough. I wanted my father back with us. I wanted him living and working on the island. A weekend replica of my old man was not enough.

  “Potholes are in the exact same places they were forty years ago,” he said, his face lit up by the red and green lights on the dash.

  “Oughta have it paved. Somebody should get the ML A to look into it,” I said.

  He shook his head. He knew that none of us on the island wanted paved roads. We’d live with potholes. Pavement meant more traffic, more tourists, more change. We wanted the island to stay roughly the same. No one was more adamant about that than the refuge
es — Ackerman and the Phillips family. My mother, Casey and I agreed. Let the rest of the world be paved black and blue with asphalt, but let us have our island without tarmac.

  We pulled to a stop in front of the house. The light was on in the kitchen. My father turned the car off and killed the headlights. I went to open the door, then noticed that his face was frozen, his eyes fixed on the light of the kitchen window. My mother sat at the table, her hands outstretched on the table top in front of her. Directly across from her was Ben Ackerman. His hands lay on top of my mother’s. Their eyes were wide open, locked intently on each other. They weren’t speaking.

  If it wasn’t for the cold glacier that set up camp in the back of my skull just then, if it wasn’t for the fact that I had marshalled all of my forces of disbelief into action, and if it wasn’t for the fact that my father took a short choking gulp of air into his lungs, I might have believed I was looking at two people in love. But I could not believe that. “Ben calls it psychic transfer,” I said. “It’s his scientific name for it. Mom has been teaching him how to read her thoughts. He says he’s always been interested in telepathy. He and Mom have become close friends.” I tried hard to contain the rattle in my voice.

  “What are they doing?” he asked me. I don’t think he had heard a word I said.

  “They’re communicating,” I said.

  “Why is he looking at her like that?”

  “Eye contact is important. It puts them on the same wave-length, I think.”

  My father jerked open the door. I saw the look of anger; I could feel the brooding, smouldering fire. I half-expected to see his clothes in flames. I grabbed his sleeve as he started to get out of the car. “You’ve been gone a long time,” I told him. “The weekends, the vacations, the visits. They’re not enough. She needed a friend.” I saw, for maybe the first time, a heavy weight on my old man’s shoulders, a blanket of defeat trying to smother the wrath. “Let’s go in,” I said.