by Sam Wiebe
Four nos in quick succession, a could-you-get-back-to-me, and a disconnected number. I waited half an hour and dialed the fifth number again. A Wayne Loam answered on the second ring.
“Y’ullo?” he said.
“My name’s Dave Wakeland, I’m a private investigator. Are you by any chance related to an Anne Loam, or a Chelsea Anne Loam?”
“Sorry, you’re a what?”
“Private investigator, sir.”
“This about inheritance, some dead relative?”
“Sort of,” I said. “Do you know Anne Loam?”
“I know she was my sister. How much are we talking?”
“Mind if we do this in person?”
“No complaints on my end.”
“Should I drive to you?”
“You’ll have to, my van’s got starter troubles. But I’ll make it easy on you. Know the Tomahawk? That’s five minutes from me on foot. What say I meet you there at two.”
“Suits me,” I said. “If you have any documentation about Anne Loam…”
“I’m not a documentation type guy,” Wayne Loam said. “But I’ll see what I got.”
“Photos, anything.”
“See you at two.”
—
I gassed up the Cadillac at a Husky on Broadway. As I waited for the automatic payment machine to spew out my three feet of receipt, a text came through. It read: THIS IS KEN. SORRY TO DO YOU LIKE THAT.
I climbed behind the wheel, texted: SORRY NOT GOOD ENOUGH.
WHATD BE GOOD ENOUGH was his reply.
I still needed two hands to text. I pulled into the air pump space and wrote YOU KNOW WHAT I WANT.
NOT GOING TO HAPPEN.
I pulled over at the corner of Clark and Terminal. I punched in I NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE PARTY.
Everett’s answer took a while. I watched some teens dribble a basketball across an industrial park. I looked up at Ken Lum’s white neon cross that presided over my part of the city. It was unlit at this time of day and turned west so I could barely see the writing. But I knew what it said. An old biker tattoo design, now reclaimed as neighbourhood art:
E
V A N
S
T
My phone jumped in my hand. Everett had texted me back: NOT FROM ME.
THEN FROM SOMEONE ELSE. I was quick.
PUTS ME IN A BAD PLACE.
It took me a while to write but I was happy with my response: HAND IN GARBURATOR BAD OR JUST AWKWARD?
Broadcast silence for seven whole minutes.
ILL LOOK INTO IT came the response.
13
DRIVING TO THE NORTH SHORE entailed retracing the day’s steps and passing through Coal Harbour, then onto the Stanley Park Causeway that cut through the park and led to the Lions Gate Bridge. The other side of Burrard Inlet was a different city. Compared with Vancouver proper, North Van seemed wealthy and green and removed from the grit and hustle—“pleasant” was an apt descriptor—but it had its own atmosphere, its own legends. Its own ghosts.
I outdid the speed limit by twenty klicks, making up for the time I’d spent texting Everett. I had music going through the Caddy’s stereo, Ingrid Jensen’s Vernal Fields, her muted trumpet on “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye” a mellow burn.
Coming off the bridge it took me a minute to find the road that would take me to the Tomahawk grill. I remembered my father taking me there, remembered splotching crayon colours on the placemats.
The Tomahawk served up lumberjack food, barbecue, burgers and eggs, and did it as well as could be done. As for the decor—log cabin exterior, totem poles—it was hard to pin down. An almost century-old restaurant that serves organic beef burgers named after famous coastal chiefs ought to be hard to pin down.
It was six past two. Aside from an elderly couple and the wait staff I was alone in the place. I sat and ordered a Chief August Jack burger with a Boylan’s cola.
A quarter of an hour passed. The next customer that came in was tall and broad-shouldered and wore a red trucker hat and a Gore-Tex jacket despite the heat. He nodded at me and sat down.
“I googled you,” Wayne Loam said. We shook hands. “I was here a few minutes early and you weren’t around so I went and got my mail. Ordered without me, huh?”
The waiter set my burger down, took Wayne Loam’s order. “Help yourself,” I said, indicating the fries.
“Don’t mind if I do.” The waiter brought him a cup of black coffee. “Thanks kindly.”
“You probably guessed there isn’t a fortune waiting for you,” I said.
Wayne Loam nodded. “These type visits are always extra hassle.”
“Other people have asked about Chelsea?”
“Sure,” he said. “I always tell them what they can do with themselves, so many words.”
“But not me?”
“You asked about Anne. You asked about my sister.”
“Anne Loam went missing too?”
“No,” he said. “But yes. She was taken.”
“By who?”
“Government. Who else?” He slurped his coffee. “Yeah, she was taken to one of those residential schools. One day two guys show up in a government van, out of the blue, and take her. I was off hunting with my cousins when they came, else I’d’a been nabbed, too.”
“Fuck.”
“That’s the word for it. When Anne came back she wasn’t near the same. Took her a long while to get comfortable being around people, get back to dancing—Anne couldn’t dance to save her soul, but try and tell her that. Then, just when things looked up, along comes Chelsea. Not that we all didn’t love her.”
“Who was Chelsea’s father?” I asked. I’d lost my appetite. “Did you know him?”
“Anne was real good keeping that secret,” Loam said. “But I found out. He was slipping her money.”
“Who was he?”
“Thomas Mulcahy. Father Tom. Real nice guy. He used to talk to me after the service. Took an interest in me, which was probably just him taking an interest in Anne.”
His food arrived, a Yukon breakfast, bacon and scrambled eggs. He chewed slowly. “Yeah, we used to talk about me going into the seminary. Wasn’t too keen on the celibacy part. Guess neither was he. He said he’d write me a letter of recommendation for the college in Canterbury. The story of how I found out he was the daddy’s pretty good.”
It was. Father Mulcahy had trusted Wayne with the church bookkeeping. Wayne had excelled in mathematics—“not calculus, but stick a dollar sign in front of it and I can do most anything with numbers.” He’d worked out a rough formula for church donations. “I forget it exactly but it was something like, number of attendees times a buck minimum donation, minus the number of kids, minus the number of really stingy people like the Clays, minus the people who couldn’t afford to spare anything.”
During the summer attendance dropped, until late August. “People who’d done an entire season’s worth of sinning were now suddenly taking their kids, getting ready for the school routine.”
Attendance doubled but donations plunged. Wayne couldn’t figure it. His system had been accurate to within five dollars for the last eight months. And then suddenly it wasn’t just off, it was exponentially less.
When the next week’s yield was even shorter, he grew suspicious. And he noticed his sister Anne with new baby gear.
“Not stuff people had kicking around their homes and might’ve donated, but high-end Hudson’s Bay type stuff. And not only baby stuff but dresses. Anne had this blue dress. Sheer. Like right out of a Chatelaine.”
Wayne confronted Anne on her thefts. Anne denied it. Said the money was a gift from an admirer. Wayne connected the dots.
“I talked to Father Tom. I was pretty naive. I asked him why he didn’t marry Anne and get some other job. He cried. First white man I ever saw cry.”
“What happened to him, Mulcahy?”
“The darndest thing,” Wayne Loam said. “Soon as I let him know I knew, he got an urgent call back
to Canterbury. I go to his office to chat, Father Tom’s stuff has been cleaned out and Father Radomsky’s moving in. No goodbye. At the time that hurt more than what he’d done to Anne.”
“How did Anne come to put Chelsea up for adoption?”
“That would be, what, eighty-something? Eighty-three?” The waitress refilled Wayne Loam’s coffee cup, asked if I wanted anything. I told her just the cheque.
“Anne met a fellow named Billy Micheaux and wanted to go off with him. Billy was Anishinaabe, a bit younger, real good-looking. No shortage of women, white black red, you name it. I think she thought without a kid they’d be free to go off together.”
“And did they?”
“Yes and no. For a time. But then she came back. By then she was in her forties, been kicked around a bit, so to speak, and she started getting real forgetful.”
“Alzheimer’s? Dementia?”
“Forgetful,” Loam repeated. “Plus she regretted giving up Chelsea Anne. Talked about getting a lawyer and trying to get custody back, but with her forgetfulness and other bad habits she never got around to it. Couple years in Riverview and then back here once they shut that place down. She passed about eight years back. Buried next to my mother and other sister.”
“She and Chelsea ever connect?” I asked.
“Well,” Wayne Loam said, “here’s what happened. Maybe fourteen years ago I got a call same as you, asking the same questions you did. She said her name was Chelsea Loam and did I know anything about her mom or her mom’s family. I told her pretty much what I told you with a few family things that you wouldn’t find interesting, and I wouldn’t tell a stranger, no offence.”
“You told her who her father was.”
“Sure. By then he’d passed too—plane crash. I asked her did she want to come by the property, meet her mom. She said only if her mom wanted her to. I asked Anne and she said, ‘She wouldn’t want to meet me, after what I done to her.’ Both of them kinda hurt, but shy. Plus Anne’s bad habits. So they never got together even though they lived on opposite sides of a bridge. That’s the Loams for you.”
“Anyone else ever ask about her? Chelsea, I mean?”
“Policemen,” he said.
“And?”
“I have a rule,” Wayne Loam said. “I don’t talk to police. You’re First Nations and you talk to police, sooner or later you wind up in police custody. Then your odds of surviving drop a significant amount. So I don’t talk to cops, or splash ’em with urine if they’re on fire.”
“Fair discretion,” I said. “I used to be a cop.”
“Your father, too. A fellow can learn anything off that Google.”
“What else did it say?” I asked.
“That you’re pretty fair with your clients, but as a cop you were kinda quick with the old riot baton.”
Without prompt the waiter had brought Wayne Loam a slice of apple pie with whipped cream in a dish on the side. He offered me his fork but I shook my head. I’d pushed my plate away, elbows on the table.
“I’m twenty-nine,” I said. “I’ve been seven years in this other line of work. I don’t know I’d do things differently.”
Wayne Loam patted his chest. He flipped open his wallet but I’d already given my credit card to the waiter.
“I’m twice your age,” he said. “My kids’re older than you. And their kids are half your age. Them and my scoundrel of an ex-wife is what I got for family. Anne was my sister and Chelsea would’ve been my niece. There was a lot I could’ve done for them—a lot more. But I decided early on that family wasn’t the same thing as blood. I got cousins and such, but I don’t consider them family ’cause they don’t come around anymore. Family are the ones who want to be there. And Anne when she got back couldn’t stand being with us for very long. Plus her bad habits, and me trying to raise two kids. She didn’t seem to need me. Of course now I think she really needed me and maybe couldn’t bring herself to say. I wasn’t there for Anne, is the bottom line.”
“Family’s tough,” I said emptily.
“And what gets my goat is, I’ve been burned by the church, and the government—well. But I still go every Sunday and I still pay my income tax. And if you hadn’t’ve phoned I wouldn’t’ve thought of my sister.”
We walked out and had cigarettes standing in the gravel parking lot. It was still hot, the sky still cloudless, but late afternoon had become early evening almost imperceptibly.
“I guess I’m hoping that you helping Chelsea is like me helping my sister,” Wayne said. He coughed the first drag of smoke out of his lungs. “That sounds sappy, huh?”
“It does sound a bit Hollywood Zen.”
“All the same, I hope you find her. I hope she just got tired of everything and lit out. Living wild somewhere, no priests and no cops. No one trying to do things for her.”
I said, “If I find her like that, I won’t disturb her.”
We finished our smokes. I drove him to his place, a sprawling half-acre with an old colonial. The wooden skeleton of a half-finished porch had been grafted to the side of the house. A woman stood on the porch tending a barbecue. Two teenage boys sat lounging on plastic chairs. I could hear Ry Cooder off a tinny boom box.
I dropped Wayne Loam off and watched him rejoin his family.
14
HOME. I MADE A STIFF BOURBON and Schweppes and fired up my stereo. I looked around the bare-walled apartment with its overstuffed bookshelf, couch and end tables culled from thrift stores and auctions. The TV with its collection of films I never watched. The Xbox that had sat unplugged since my half-sister’s last visit to the city. Leaning against the couch was a framed Alex Colville print of no small value, which I hadn’t bothered hanging up. Marie had given me a birthday present of a Sidney Paget poster, Holmes and Moriarty teetering over Reichenbach Falls. It sat in its tube mailer atop the fridge, never unfurled.
The apartment revolved around the Rega turntable, the Meridian power amp and Klipsch speakers. I chose Esperanza Spalding’s first record, gave it a quick clean with a microfibre brush. People retreat into their record collections because sound is the least voluntary sense, the one most often overwhelmed. To control sound is to control mood.
I had Blue Note reissues, European imports, 180-gram audiophile editions. Stacked in a pair of wooden Forcite crates I’d purchased from an army surplus and lined with moleskin. Not a massive collection, but a well-curated tour through soul jazz and outlaw country, with a foray into nineties Seattle that was longer than healthy. Frog Eyes, Mad Season, Sleater-Kinney, Jackie McLean.
I set the needle down into the grooves. Spalding’s cover of “Ponta de Areia” with its syncopated bass line came over the Klipsches, heavy and warm. I sank into the couch and watched the ice cubes in the drink melt.
The pattern of living out your parents’ lives without learning anything, without avoiding the pitfalls that had brought them down. Wasn’t that an almost universal fear? And yet who ever avoided that completely? Anne Loam separated from her family, Chelsea from hers, Kevin from his. In a way Chelsea had been the most fortunate. She’d ended up with people who loved her. But was that enough? Maybe her fate had been written into her blood and tissue, in a place that a foster family’s love couldn’t reach.
My father had been a street policeman, Constable for Life. Someone who’d found in violence a comfortable, casual friend. He’d died unglamorously in a freak turn of events. I’d tried to resurrect him by becoming like him. It was a bad fit. When it came to violence I didn’t have his tact or discretion.
Side A ended. With my patio door open I could hear from up the block the sound of a tenor saxophone. Someone at Commercial Station, playing for change. I listened to that while I chose a follow-up, something darker, angrier. I pulled out Soundgarden’s Screaming Life EP. Not their best, but I’d lent Jeff my Badmotorfinger and hadn’t seen it since. I dropped the needle on “Nothing to Say,” Kim Thayil’s lumbering guitar tone perfect for steering oncoming depression into profitable rage.
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Blood—violence and family. It was too much to fathom. But I’d made one decision.
I texted Ken Everett. AT THE INN?
NOT NOW came the reply.
NOW. RIGHT NOW.
No answer.
LEAVING RIGHT NOW, I texted.
DONT BE STUPID. NOT THE TIME. NOT THE PLACE.
CANT BE HELPED.
I waited for an answer. When it didn’t come I turned off the stereo, locked up and threw on a coat. I left the drink untouched on the floor. I was in the hall when the phone rang.
Everett said, “You know how much shit you got me in?”
“One straight answer’s worth.”
“Your head bolted on right, Dave?”
“Asks the Exiles hangaround.”
“I am a cunt’s hair away from my patch,” he said. “Throw my old sparring partner a bone. Didn’t consider this. This is a world of trouble. You don’t even know.”
“So tell me.”
“Believe me, I fucking asked about what’s-her-face. I didn’t even ask, I broached the fucking subject. All a sudden Rhodes got quiet. Next day his bodyguard visits me, asking all about you.”
“You’d told me a tenth as much about Chelsea Loam as you said to the bodyguard, this’d be over.”
“Dave, I don’t know anything. You don’t talk about his business. Only way you’d find out is by asking Rhodes yourself.”
“I plan on it,” I said.
“Dave—”
“Don’t bother trying to talk me out of it,” I said. “I know it’s stupid. You just play dumb like you don’t know anything about it.”
“He told me, Rhodes did, I hear from you, I should tell him. He knows I’m outside taking a call. You show up—”
“So tell him,” I said. “Tell him I can’t let it drop. Tell him the media and police don’t need to be involved. Tell him I’m not threatening him and I’m not looking for revenge. Answers only.”
“Dave—”
“Tell him that.”
I hung up.
