“Well, what has happened?” the Professor said. He was dirtier, Jeremy noted, and today he seemed slightly agitated.
“The rumours of them still being buried in the park,” Jeremy began, “these are urban legends.”
“I see,” the Professor said, nodding. Not surprised.
“They were killed here, though. October 1947 is the agreed month.”
“I see. I see.”
“And a witness came forward,” Jeremy said, watching to see what effect this information would have. “A Miss Harker. She apparently saw the murderer.”
“Yes?” The Professor said, very focused. “And what else?”
Jeremy scratched his head.
“What else did she see?” the Professor prompted.
“The kids?” Jeremy said. He had the feeling that he was being tested.
“But what else, anything?”
“I’m sorry,” Jeremy said, not understanding.
“In the park,” the Professor said, exasperated. “She saw someone.…”
And then he stopped and looked away, realizing that Jeremy had nothing more.
“There are a few newspaper articles,” Jeremy said.
“I read them. There are also some notes, which I didn’t have time to read.”
“I see,” said the Professor.
It occurred to Jeremy that he had wanted to appease, to make done with what he had promised. “I closed the restaurant for the morning to do this for you,” he said.
“Your sacrifice is appreciated. So, nothing else to tell me?”
“Business is better,” he said. “If I hold Dante and the bank off for another couple months, maybe the decision won’t be needed.”
The Professor glanced at him. “That would be nice, wouldn’t it?”
They drifted in silence for a moment.
“Will you at least read the rest of the file at the library?” the Professor asked quietly.
Jeremy bowed his head. “I’ll try,” he said. “But you understand that it’s really important I focus on The Paw right now.”
The Professor nodded slowly.
“I came looking for you a couple nights ago,” Jeremy said.
The Professor registered surprise.
“I saw some people around a fire.”
“Did you really?” Now the Professor was smiling.
“Two men, a woman and a baby. They spoke a strange language.”
The Professor actually clapped his hands. “Brilliant. Strange how?”
“Popping. Hissing.”
“You have seen and heard a great thing,” said the Professor. “An ancient tongue. An aboriginal language, nearly extinct. I had heard there was a group sleeping in the low area just west of the lagoon.”
“That’s them,” Jeremy said.
“Cultural holdouts,” said the Professor. “These people are taking a last stand. Homing in on a place that cannot be taken from them. You see, their language belongs to this land. The words themselves are linked to specific things: a bend in a creek, a bank of stones, the old Beaver Lake salmon run. They’ve moved back, this small family or group of families, however many there are, to the place from which they cannot be driven.”
“Well, they could be. You’re not allowed to live here.”
“Yes, of course,” the Professor said. “But the land itself cannot be taken. This great locus of civic pride, this Stanley Park. It can’t be expropriated, built up, paved over, strata-titled. These speakers of an ancient tongue, their actions are the sociolinguistic equivalent of taking sanctuary in a church. These woods, this is the church.”
The Professor was animated. His hair tufted out at the sides as he spoke. “And you don’t see the connection at all, do you?” he said, after a few seconds of silence.
Jeremy didn’t, although he found himself reluctantly interested.
“Each of these new arrivals will forge their own connection to this sanctified soil,” the Professor said. “The Babes in the Wood were only the latter-day genesis of matters.”
“What about Siwash?”
“Siwash counts everything that passes,” said the Professor, his face wide open with wonder. Dogs, joggers, bladers, pedestrians, bikes. Everything, the Professor theorized, was being catalogued.
“Why?”
“Oh dear, I am disappointed,” the Professor said.
“How should I know?” Jeremy answered, defensive.
“If somebody were to ask me, What am I trying to accomplish?” the Professor said, in a strangely flat, dogmatic cadence (it took Jeremy a moment to appreciate that he was being mimicked), “I would answer that I was trying to remind people of the soil under their feet. Of a time when they would only have known what that soil could offer.”
“Or words to that effect,” Jeremy said, but he gave a half-smile in acknowledgment of the impersonation. It was pleasing that his father remembered something he said well enough to repeat it under these circumstances, even half-right and miles out of context. “You only forgot the part about food.”
“Ah yes,” the Professor said. “It’s all about food.”
“I’m a chef. It is all about food.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s about roots and place. It’s about how people relate to the land on which they stand. In our rootless day and age, our time of strange cultural homelessness—and worse, our societal amnesia about what used to constitute both the rewards and limitations of those roots—I wonder if we might look to these homeless,” and here the Professor extended his thin arm, pointing into the park to signify all of its occupants, “to find an emblem of the deepest roots of all.”
Jeremy considered this for a moment. For an instant, he had thought the Professor said culinarily homeless, a provocative phrase. He asked about Siwash again.
“Perhaps he’s marking the passage of these various visitors over this ground,” the Professor said. “Their movement across the soil of which you so eloquently spoke.”
“Why would he?”
“There may be a number he is waiting to reach,” said the Professor, looking disappointed with Jeremy for not trying harder.
“What number?”
The Professor rolled his eyes. “Well, we won’t know that, will we? Perhaps it’s a running total with some significance trigger, a value above which something will happen.”
“Something might happen? That’s comforting.”
“Perhaps not,” the Professor said, then changed the subject. “So, do you know how to find your way out of Stanley Park?”
Jeremy thought he knew. They hadn’t come very deep into the forest. He looked around himself, about to answer the question seriously before reading the playfulness in his father’s question.
“No, Professor,” he said. “How do I find my way out of Stanley Park?”
“Why,” the Professor responded, “you just follow the psychopath.”
THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE
“Where is she?” Margaret was fussing, something she didn’t like to catch herself doing particularly. But as soon as Jeremy came in she was taking his coat and offering him a drink. She was shooing Trout off the kitchen table. Apologizing for the mess (although there wasn’t much of one by post-weekend standards) and in advance for the dinner.
To Jeremy’s nose, everything smelled competently Silver Palate tasty.
“I told you to clean up your paints honey,” Margaret said to Trout. Then to Jeremy: “Drink?”
Trout looked up and smiled faintly when he saw Jeremy. He lifted one arm draped in a painting smock. A silent, open-palmed gesture Margaret had seen him use so many times. Maybe it was inspired by Star Trek, she thought, although it seemed less like Unitarian go-forth optimism and more conventionally priestly. A televangelist, maybe.
Jeremy returned the blank hand of friendship. Trout lowered his head again to the work open on the table in front of him. First he gazed at it, then he moved his head slowly to consider the colours on his palette and those in the painting. Margaret frowned as she poured Jeremy’
s drink. She asked him again about Benny.
“Coming in an hour,” Jeremy said. “She works until eight.”
“Canadian Tire, you said?” Margaret answered. She couldn’t keep the little smile off. She wasn’t disdainful; she just found the detail cute. He had produced such a series of odd dates over the years since they broke up. Jeremy’s epic love poem of alternately fragment or run-on sentences.
“She left Canadian Tire,” Jeremy informed her. “It’s a bit complicated, but she had another job in less than a day. Barista at the Inferno Pender. She’s one of those people who can’t be unemployed.”
Margaret allowed her eyebrows to rise with approval. That last part was new, the industrious-sounding part. And Margaret, treasurer of the Western Canadian Women’s Business Association, believed in the power of feminist industry.
“One Bushmills,” she said, and slid a tumbler across the kitchen island. Then she stopped, her slender hands briefly motionless on the thick wooden counter, looking with more genuine exasperation at Trout, still at the table. He had just dipped a brush methodically, having settled an internal debate about colours, and was applying the result to a very precise place on the paper. Silently industrious himself, she thought. “You know,” Margaret said, more to herself than to Jeremy, “maybe I’ll have a drink.”
Fussing definitely wasn’t her. Fussing was household angst jazzed on oolong tea. It was reasonable to Jeremy that seismic engineers didn’t do fuss, especially those doing their work along the Pacific Rim’s Cascadia Subduction Zone, where popular science would have it that everything from Portland to Vancouver was spectacularly overdue for obliteration. In the Cascadia Subduction Zone, the oceanic plate was slipping irrevocably under the North American continental plate. Maybe only ten slips in the past three thousand years, but each one rumbling for minutes at a stretch, releasing energy at some point past what the Richter scale had been designed to measure.
So Margaret didn’t fuss about the future like everybody else but planned dispassionately instead. Margaret made a significant mark on the landscape (her firm was tearing up and reassembling buildings and bridges all over Vancouver), but she did so merely by spontaneously acting out who she was. She premitigated damages by designing such things as seismic gas-flow cut-off triggers, shock absorber systems. Restraining cables for heavy objects and the crafty reinforcement of fifty-year-old bridges. Jeremy’s favourite example was the strong-motion network.
“What does it do?” he asked her once. They had been shutting down The Paw together. One in the morning, something they did when Olli went to Palo Alto or Redmond overnight and Trout was with a neighbour. Her foodie friends would leave, and Margaret would stay behind to drink grappa and talk.
“It measures strong ground motion so we can analyze the quake afterwards. Statistically speaking, there is a significant probability that we’ll have a subduction quake in the next 150 to 200 years. It’ll be massively destructive, we know that, maybe a thousand Loma Prietas combined. And no one’s ever measured something like that. How the ground moves, directions, speeds, distance, which plates.”
“Who’s going to be around to read the meter after all that?”
“Well, someone will survive. We’re not all going to die.”
She actually got upset with pop science’s apocalyptic interest in The Big One. “What a name,” Margaret would say, with visible disdain. Subduction quakes in the Pacific North-west are all pretty big, baby—they just don’t happen that often. “Throwing darts at the millennial calendar is less useful than, say, four gallons of water a person and heavy-soled shoes under the bed.”
“For what?” Jeremy asked.
“To drink, duh.”
“I meant the shoes.”
“Oh,” Margaret said, looking at Jeremy seriously. “Earthquake. Glass. Think about it. Heavy soles.”
She went and got herself the drink. Trout had finally risen quietly to his feet. Jeremy turned to watch the little boy as he stared down unsmiling at his painting. He looked at the tip of his paintbrush, wiped it on a stained towel and packed up his kit. When he was finished he took the painting gently by its two upper corners and, holding it out from himself, swung it slowly back and forth to dry it. There was no point fussing with this kid, it occurred to Jeremy, his movements were so simple, so unswervingly predetermined. So like his mother’s.
Jeremy looked around himself now and registered how even the layout of these two-thousand-square-foot Yaletown lofts resonated with a particular kind of architectural certainty. Steel cable railings along the edge of the overhanging second floor. A concrete and aluminum spiral staircase. Exposed steel beams, the centre ones still with the tracking for some kind of monster crane. The kitchen itself more slick by far than The Paw’s, everything top end. Aga. Calphalon. Cuisinart. Good Grips.
Margaret turned away from him now and held a crystal tumbler under the ice dispenser on the front of the aluminum fridge, came back to the island and poured herself some Stoli. Took a big sip.
“Cheers,” she said. “And hello, by the way.”
“Hi.” He laughed at her. Standing there in her long black skirt, cream sweater. Pearls. Apron with the Microsoft Windows95 logo (an ironic gift for Olli, no doubt). With one hand aiming the tiny matt-black remote at the stereo and sparking up a Tony Bennett CD. In her other hand the glass dipping over dangerously, bracelets falling down her slim arm towards her elbow. She had beauty, thought Jeremy compulsively as he watched her. She owned it. Somebody or something had bequeathed it to her. He imagined there might have been a ceremony involved, at which some quiveringly perfect, angelic being spoke silver words: “You shall have beauty, daughter. You have been chosen.”
“So, what’s she like? She cute?” Margaret said.
“Can we talk about something else?”
“Don’t be shy, it’s me.”
“She’s very attractive, in an odd way.”
“Odd how?” Margaret asked, smiling internally at the description. Weren’t they all? Except Jules, of course, but Margaret sensed that Jules was somehow out of bounds.
“Why don’t you wait and see, Peggy?” Jeremy said. He didn’t use this name with her often, a university name. A rockabilly pretence she adopted during those days. She wore it the same way he wore his pompadour back then, although she grew out of her pretence more quickly.
“Well, you can’t tell me what you really think when she’s here,” Margaret said, pretending not to have noticed.
Jeremy thought for a minute about the question. Odd how? Well, there’s the tongue stud, he thought. Odd because I might have expected to be repulsed by this detail but am not in her case. She’s hard and symmetrical and certain. A bit like you, but more compact and more dangerous and, well, just odder.
“She has short white hair and pale blue eyes,” he said finally. “She’s very smart.”
“Jay, look,” said Trout, standing next to him now.
Jeremy crouched next to the boy, glad for the distraction. Trout had slipped out of his smock and was wearing his uniform: blues jeans rolled up a turn at the bottom and a white pocket tee. Jeremy wasn’t sure he had seen the kid wear anything else in the past three years. Now he took hold of Jeremy’s shirt at the shoulder. “It’s a dollar,” he said.
Margaret came around the Aga to look down on the two of them.
“Very nice, honey,” she said to Trout.
An American dollar, painted to fill the middle of an 8 ½-by-1 1-inch sheet of paper. Another discernible stab at president Washington. He had the hair right this time, those solid-looking waves of powder white.
“Olli gave him a U.S. dollar after coming back from California about a year ago,” she explained to Jeremy. “Trout pinned it to the wall above his bed.”
“She made me take it down,” Trout said. “Peggy said a dollar would make me greedy if I looked at it all the time.”
Jeremy stifled a laugh. Margaret widened her eyes.
“Don’t call me that, sweetie.”
“Why money, Trout?” Jeremy asked.
Trout didn’t offer an answer, and Jeremy didn’t know precisely what else to say. He was looking at the painting, feeling the snuffly breathing of Trout next to him. Feeling, as always, the impenetrable nature of what lay behind Trout’s fixations.
“I didn’t exactly make him take it down,” Margaret said when Jeremy stood up. Did she come off hard sometimes? Like a tough mom? She knew she had no perspective on the matter. Self-evaluation in parenting was about the most imprecise science there was, she imagined.
She moved back into the kitchen, leaned and opened the oven door. “Roasted yams,” she said. “Stuffed with garlic and ginger. Recommended by Martha.”
“Oh, splendid.”
“She’s wonderful—don’t you say a snide word. And quails with grapes. I hope you like quails.”
“I love quails. I love to eat little birds. I love ortolans, remember?”
“Oh right, you animal.” Margaret said. “Is that what we ate that one time?”
“Sure. Remember putting the napkins over our heads while we ate them?” he asked her, reminded of how they’d gone along with this gourmand convention ostensibly meant to capture the delicate aroma.
“Yes,” she said, smiling. It was all coming back. “I think they were pretty good, weren’t they?”
“Oh, they’re delicious. Silly but good.”
“Why silly?”
“Well, to truck in this little bird all the way from France, you know. What’s the point?”
“It was fun,” she said. Now she was holding a hand gently against her sandy hair as she read from a magazine open on the counter. Silver Palate, he noted and congratulated his nose. “I was going to open a Pinot Gris, Jay. Does that work?”
“It works fine. Was Olli in California again this week?” Jeremy asked.
“Redmond, Washington. The next big thing.” She sighed and looked around for a moment, losing her train of thought. She took another sip from her vodka and clumped the tumbler onto the counter.
Jeremy rested the heels of his hands on the edge of the island and watched Margaret corral the quails on the corner of the cutting board and begin to truss them for browning.
Stanley Park Page 14
