“The border’s too far and too intelligent,” she said. “Everybody tries to disappear to a crowded place where you can blend in easy. Let’s go to someplace we’ll stand out—to the locals, who we don’t care about—and where we can hang out a lot of tripwires, where we’ll hear early about any other odd strangers in town. We’re both city lads, so we’ll hide in the boonies.”
“The Gulf Islands,” he said. “A ferry.”
“That’d work,” she said. “But I’ve got something better in mind. Cast your mind back about a million years, to when we were free human beings, loose on the earth. What was I working on, when I had to go visit my mother?”
Paul stopped short, and stared in admiration. “Jesus. Of course. Whatsisname! Bonehead Island!”
June’s recent trip south to visit her mother had forced a working con onto the back burner: the mark had been ripe but June was too busy to pluck him, so she had been forced to reschedule. He was a yuppy software baron named O’Leary, presently away with his beloved on a long-planned trip around the world which would take him three months even in the absurd event that everything went as planned. Postponed opportunity had proven to be a blessing in disguise: O’Leary’s luxury A-frame home stood unoccupied until his return.
“Bowen Island,” June said. “Henry O’Leary.”
“Where is that one?”
“It’s one of the Horseshoe Bay jobs.”
“Better and better,” he said. “A little one. This likes me well. Have you noticed that things always start to look better after you eat a sub?”
“First we have to get there,” she said. She was cheering up too, but was not yet ready to admit it. “Let’s go find a doss. Tomorrow we scrounge a little, and then catch a ferry.”
“Scrounge what?”
She thought. “We need a backpack, maybe an overnight bag, some binoculars, sunglasses…an ice chest wouldn’t hurt. And cash, of course, at least enough for two pedestrian ferry tickets. And as much L.L. Bean as we can lay our hands on.” She looked him over critically, and suddenly started to laugh. “And you’ll need to shave.” The laugh built as he stared in incomprehension. He had forgotten. “Nothing looks less respectable than five o’clock shadow all over your fucking head,” she managed, and then lost it.
So did he, of course, and the shared laugh grew until they had to stop walking and hold each other up, and in no time at all they were kissing, still laughing but really kissing.
“Are we having fun yet?” he asked when they broke for air.
“Who stopped?” she said. But there was something indefinable in the placement of her eyebrows, or possibly her lower lip, that cued him it was time to stop kissing and get back to business.
Besides, the rain was starting to really come down, now.
The Lower Mainland of the province of British Columbia is more than generously supplied with islands; if you’re missing one, it’s probably there, somewhere. There ought to be a Lower Mainland salad dressing.
In 1995 one could drive thirty minutes south from Vancouver, almost to the U.S. border, and take a large ferry from the immense ways at Tsawwassen (providing one resisted the urge to attempt to pronounce it) southwest to any of the medium-size, generally well-populated Gulf Islands; these gathered like hungry pilotfish around the anus of the leviathan Vancouver Island, whose immense torso enclosed the Strait of Georgia between it and the mainland. Alternatively, one could drive twenty minutes north and then west to the feverishly picturesque Horseshoe Bay, and take a small or medium-size ferry from more modest docks than Tsawwassen’s to an assortment of smaller and less populous (thus more interesting) islands in Howe Sound. These varied widely in state of development—from rustic Gambier Island, accessible only to foot traffic, to Bowen Island, relatively built up and well built. People were starting to call it Commuter Cay: it perfectly met the needs of the yuppie commuter, being as far from Vancouver (in every sense of the term) as one could get and still be within reasonable travel time. There was more than one Porsche on Bowen Island, and you could rent Buñuel movies or buy fresh Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee beans at the general store—but you could also get Cheese Whiz, frozen waffles and King Red Man chewing tobacco.
The Horseshoe Bay terminal was ideal for a fugitive, big enough for one to hide in the crowd but not big enough or important enough to be watched. Paul and June, carefully dressed and outfitted to suggest fairly rich people who had dressed down for the trip so as not to appear pretentious, would have been effectively invisible even without the drizzle.
Paul could not believe the security.
“There isn’t any!” he exclaimed almost angrily. “Look at this place! No ID check, no cameras—I swear to God I don’t smell a single cop, uniform or plain. There must be some, but they’re all cooping.” They were strolling along the edge of an immense parking lot which had filled in the last half hour and would empty in fifteen minutes, on the opposite side from the long row of washrooms, “restaurant” and other dollar-traps that were currently milking most of the cars’ passengers while they waited for the ferry.
“They’re probably helping a trucker with his engine,” she said. “Usually they try to stay visible. In case someone needs to ask them a question.”
Paul stared at her. “I will never in my life get used to this country. It isn’t fucking natural.”
“Thank God!”
“Christ, we could clout a car right here in broad daylight, if we had any use for one. I’ve seen three with keys in them.”
“Where the hell are they going to go? Every one is boxed in.”
They reached the front of the lineup, found a spot from which they could admire Horseshoe Bay. It was easy work. The stage-prop binoculars proved useful. The ferry was in sight in the distance, looking rather like Roseanne Barr—a white tub and proud of it, with great bumpers—and a cinch to beat the napping Hare in the swimming race, approaching Horseshoe Bay with the speed of the bell at the end of Geometry class.
“June?”
“Mm?”
“About your mother…”
She kept staring out across the gunmetal water. “She’s still here. I can feel it. Still hanging on.”
He nodded uselessly. He began to speak three times, producing nothing at first, and then, “We could,” and “If.”
She nodded, and put the binoculars on a bird. “Pop has enough on his plate just now,” she said, tracking it. “He can’t believe they moved to a country without socialized medicine.”
“Yeah. I just…”
“I know.” She put down the glasses. “And what I’m supposed to do is come into your arms and let you comfort me. You deserve that. You really do. I’m sorry.”
He said nothing.
“I don’t know if this is going to make sense,” June said. “I want to try and say it just right.” There was a long pause, and then the words came out quickly. “You and me. When we’re together I want you inside of me, and me inside of you. You know that. When we’re together and it’s good I want to be naked for you, naked to you. I want you to come inside of my skull and know me, know me better than anybody else, know me better than I’ve ever been able to make myself known to anybody else, know all my secrets and all my sorrows.” She stopped speaking, bent her head. The ferry was 25 percent nearer when she continued. “Well, it happened to me, the real deal, and it sucks. I feel like I’ve been raped by a column of ants, like a burglar left turds on the carpet of my brain on the way out. I don’t know, it—” She broke off again. When she resumed, her voice was thicker, her words clumsier. “So what I mean, us, it’s for a while it’ll be a little hard, okay? I’m trying to say hard the way it was, like before, feeling that way again for a little while, with anybody, I just—I’ve only got the two speeds, flat out and neutral, and I’m scared to touch the pedal…I hope you can deal with that.”
He had trouble enough dealing with the simple urge to reach out to her with his hands, then and there: the lunatic certainty that if he only touched
her he could draw out some of her pain even if she said otherwise. And he did have the fleeting, guilty thought that running for your life is much more fun if you can get laid during the lulls. But he was a strong man, and loved her enough to give her anything she asked that would not kill him outright or spoil his opinion of himself. He took several deep breaths without being caught at it, and when he had himself under control, he said, as if agreeing on a restaurant, “Space. Sure.”
The ferry was near, now. She checked his backpack, then picked up her overnight bag. “Thanks.”
“Yowsah.”
Then neither of them said anything until he said, “Say when,” and she said, “You’ll know.” By then the ferry was beginning its approach, snorting foam, and he picked up the cooler and they joined the rest of the foot passengers lining up at the gate.
They were much more plausible as rich people, walking a couple of feet apart.
Snug Cove, the ferry terminus at Bowen Island, was a lovely, sleepy little place, quaint but not yet aware of it, its “downtown” small enough that there was nowhere you could stand in it and not see forest, but just large enough to offer a choice of “restaurants.” They dined in silence (as was expected of people dressed like that) at the least worst. The deck view of a rustic duck pond guarded by a magnificent old grandfather tree was splendid, but Paul was still moved to swipe tips on the way out. As they stepped back out onto a sidewalk which, between ferries, was empty as a politician’s word, he spoke to his lady for the first time since they had left the mainland. “So how far is this place?”
“About a fifteen-minute drive, I think. I’ve never actually been there.”
He groaned. “Naturally. We can’t go around clouting cars, either; we have to live here. Is there any point in my even asking whether they have cabs on this overgrown speed bump?”
“Nope.” She headed off uphill through the drizzle, toward the beckoning wilderness. He followed with as much good cheer as he could muster. Within what he thought of as a city block, the terrain leveled off—but the buildings and sidewalks went away. He was too much of a city kid to be comfortable walking anywhere that didn’t have sidewalks, but his guru had once drummed into him that he must never complain (because she was sick and tired of listening to it), and so he soldiered on, scheming ways to humiliate an irresistible force. Any place that has fifteen-minute drives should have cabs, he thought from time to time, as the blisters began to form.
Suddenly June stopped, for no reason he could see. Distantly he heard the sound of a motorist, and envied him or her fiercely. “What’s up?”
As though it were an answer, she moved a few steps to the edge of the roadbed, held out her hand, and stuck up her thumb.
He blinked, puzzled. “What are you doing?”
She sighed. “Just wait. And pray.”
The vehicle, a truck that had emphysema too bad to be singing that loud, was almost upon them now. All at once it dropped its pitch, like Tom Waits nodding off in the middle of a song, and slowed to a complete stop beside them.
The driver, a senior citizen, stared at them. At a loss, Paul stared back. Both the old man’s hands were visible on the steering wheel.
“Where you folks headed?” he asked.
Paul was too flustered to remember his cover; June supplied the name of the man whose house they were supposed to be sitting, and described its location. At once, as if some sort of agreement had been negotiated, the old man leaned to his right and opened the passenger door of his pickup, clearly offering them a ride. Up front, with him.
When June began walking around the front of the truck, Paul decided people must just do things like this in the country, in Canada anyway, and followed her.
Sure enough, without so much as displaying a weapon, the old man put the truck very neatly in gear and took them where they wanted to go. He did talk nearly as much as a New York cabbie, in a voice clearly audible above the roar of the truck’s renewed Waits imitation, but was willing to listen to June bullshit back—he even gave her something like fifty percent of the airtime. In the course of his own rambling he disclosed at least three pieces of information of use to anyone who wanted to come clean him out some night. He even waited to offer his name until June gave their current names.
“And it’s all right to laugh when I tell you,” he prefaced it.
“I wouldn’t laugh,” June assured him.
“Aw, go ahead, I wouldn’t want to see you folks hurt yourself. My daddy’s name was spelled L-Y-C-O-T-T, and he always pronounced it ‘like it’—‘like it is,’ he’d say, ‘and you can Lycott or lump it!’ And then my ma decided she just had to name me after her dead little brother Maurice…” He waited until their faces showed they’d got it, thumped the dashboard and cackled. “That’s right: I’m Moe Lycott!”
After a polite pause, they used the dispensation they’d been given and began to giggle. “You don’t seem mad about it,” June said.
“Hell, no,” he said. “All my life, whenever I walk by, people point and say, ‘Now, that’s—’”
June obligingly supplied the punchline, and giggled some more.
Paul did not really think the bald husband of a chirpy yuppie woman who kept silent himself would be out of character, but eventually he felt he should produce at least a token attempt at polite discourse, to make clear that he was not the world’s only wealthy skinhead. He cast through his mind for movies he’d seen involving country life, and at the next gap in the conversation, he said, “So Moe, do you have any cows?”
The truck was allowed to take a solo for the next forty-three and a quarter yards or so.
“I been a widower twenty year,” Moe finally said, and immediately asked June something about her imaginary job back in the city.
Although June’s directions had been general, Moe spotted the right mailbox with his cataracted eyes and let them off exactly where they wanted to be. He drove off before Paul could even begin to embarrass himself by offering to pay for the ride, leaving them the single word, “Goodnight,” as though he no longer had a right to talk their ear off now that they were no longer locked into being with him. June turned at once and started down the weeded driveway, but Paul stood where he was for a moment, frowning.
“What?” she said, turning back.
“Nothing,” he said. “I just feel like a tiger trying to hide in a slaughterhouse. This island is candy. Hell, Hopeless Harry could get healthy, here.” He blinked. “I can’t believe I just said that sentence.” Hopeless Harry was the worst grifter either of them knew, a man with a face so quintessentially dishonest that he had once been stopped and frisked while dressed as a priest in a wheelchair; you had to admire his doggedness, but then you were done admiring him.
“Down, boy.”
“I know, I know,” he said. “I feel like the Invisible Man in the girls’ dormitory, though.”
As he had prayed, that got a faint grin. “Up, boy. Come on, let’s check out our lovely new home.”
The keys, as expected, were where people hide keys.
Much money had been both thoughtfully and tastefully spent on that home. The location itself was a postcard. The A-frame was a sketch drawn on the back of the postcard by a master. It had two decks out back, both cantilevered out over a dizzying slope that dropped what Paul thought of as about fifteen stories in about one block to Howe Sound; lush forest on either side framed the view perfectly, making it endurable. Next stop, Japan. Hi, birds.
“I can’t believe this clown didn’t actually get someone to watch a house this nice for him while he was away.”
“Why? To make sure nobody moves in and trashes the place, or something? What do you think this is, civilization?”
There was a hot tub built into the lower deck, big enough for seven people or four programmers. The barbie on the upper deck enabled a reasonably bright child to cook half a beeve at a time to perfection, and the deck itself had a built-in cable-and-power hookup in its railing so you could take the portable TV/CD
/tapedeck/tuner/VCR out there without stringing unsightly wires from the bedroom. There was an Aptiva in the den, with Pentium 133 chip and 32 megs of RAM, a ten-gig hard drive, a 25-inch monitor and an 800-dpi printer. There was a similarly equipped Power Mac in a corner of the living room; apparently O’Leary had taken all of his Powerbooks with him on his world tour. The brand-new state-of-the-art high-end entertainment console beside the Mac produced sound you could taste and video you could smell in any room of the house including both bathrooms, and could be remotely programmed from most of them. The fridge and freezer could have supported a midsize restaurant; the microwave could have accommodated the other half of the barbecued cow, with the gas stove for the potatoes and vegetables; there was no room in the house without at least one ceiling-high shelf of books (most either old friends or intriguing); the construction and carpentry were ostentatiously breathtaking throughout; the interior decor said you deserve this quietly but very persuasively, and it came as something of a relief to Paul when he managed to find (in the garage) a single, inexplicably uncomfortable chair.
“I don’t want to con this guy,” he said to June, when he found her sorting through excellent drugs in the drawers of the guest bedroom. “I want to be this guy.” He smelled a bag of marijuana, and sighed. “I love this part of the world.”
“You haven’t seen what he’s sleeping with,” she said.
“True. What is Mrs. O’Leary like? You never told me.”
“What’s that got to do with what he’s sleeping with?”
“Ah,” he said. “You were working a Diabolique.”
“A modified Diabolique,” she agreed. “What he’s sleeping with has a Y chromosome. Likes girls just as much as Henry does, thank goodness, or I’d have had to be big sister fag hag.”
Paul nodded. “I wondered how old Henry was dealing with the problem of bringing his mistress along on a world cruise.”
“By the time they all get back from being locked in a hotel together for three months, all the way ’round the planet, the boyfriend will be happier than ever to have me help him set up a burglary-gone-wrong on the happy couple, and run away with me. I just hope he stays greedy and half-smart, doesn’t decide to ad-lib and lever them both over the rail somewhere along the way. I won’t blame him if he does, but I want this place for the whole three months if I can get it.”
Lifehouse Page 9
