Jericho

by George Fetherling

  Praise for jericho

  “There is something brave about careening towards the darkness, whether it’s done via sexuality, outlaw behaviour or writing, and Fetherling’s ability to dispense with his critical mindset in favour of an exploratory one will be surprising to anyone who has perceived him as primarily a brainy person, abstracted on high. Jericho is risky and alive, and memorable in the long run for its presentation of a remarkable archetype.”

  —BC Book World

  “Fetherling is a master of the perceptive comment and the dry remark, combining the keen observation of a social historian with a poet’s precision and joy in the play of words. In Jericho, he reveals his talent as a storyteller and maker of fables as well…. It’s fast, it’s funny, and by the time you finish it, much of what you thought you knew about the characters will have been inverted.”

  —The New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal

  “Voice is Fetherling’s great achievement here: the book is divided into sections narrated by each of the three, and the passages are so distinctive, so sure.”

  —The Georgia Straight

  “At times funny… and at others puzzling, Jericho is driven by prose that bumps and bounces along as the characters search for Bishop’s mythical Jericho.”

  —The Sun Times (Owen Sound)

  “Jericho is a funny, quirky and acutely observed road trip along the rough edge of our culture. It’s a novel that retells some of the myths—urban and otherwise—that define us.”

  —Nancy Richler, author of Your Mouth Is Lovely

  ALSO BY GEORGE FETHERLING

  Fiction

  The File on Arthur Moss

  Memoir

  Travels by Night

  Travel

  Running Away to Sea

  Three Pagodas Pass

  One Russia Two Chinas

  Poetry

  The Dreams of Ancient Peoples

  Selected Poems

  Madagascar: Poems & Translations

  Singer, An Elegy

  For Merrill Fearon

  one

  NOW THAT THE WHOLE STORY IS OVER, the question everybody keeps asking me is the same one I’m still asking myself: How did I get involved with a man like that? Or didn’t I have more sense in the first place than to run away with someone I didn’t know? I can’t explain, I can only tell you what happened, the same way I told the police and the lawyers. That’s the easy part.

  I didn’t really like him that much, not at first and not afterwards, but only for a while in-between. Now that I’ve had time to think about it, I guess I could make a pretty long list of things about him that would turn anybody off. For instance, he didn’t have very good skin. As someone who was a trained esthetician in those days, I always wanted to help him with this, but I couldn’t quite figure out how to do it without hurting his feelings—back when I didn’t understand this wasn’t the kind of thing he would have cared about one way or the other. Now I know exactly what he would have said: “Ha!” Which would have hurt my feelings. Another thing: his bottom front teeth were stained like those of an elderly Chinese-Canadian man who’d been drinking too much tea his whole life. And most of the time he didn’t make very good eye contact when he spoke to you. In my new career I know how important good eye contact is in dealing with the public. Not that he was a member of the public, of course. He was private. Being with him in those good weeks was like having my own private wild man. He smelled wild. His scent always made me think of a wolf’s den. I don’t mean that I really know what a wolf’s den smells like, but I could guess. When he did decide to make eye contact, though, it was spectacular. His eyes were the same colour as green grapes.

  I’d sure never met anyone like him. There may be some others around, but I never met them in Alberta. He’s not the sort of person anyone would meet in Alberta. He was from back east somewhere. He used to talk about it sometimes, and I thought he was making it up or at least letting his own talk run away with him; other times I wasn’t so sure. I’d never thought much about the East. If you blindfold me and spin me around like a bottle, I’ll always wind up facing west. Of course, there are degrees of west, and I suppose there are degrees of east too. He was from someplace that must be pretty old—beaten down and worn down—though my instinct tells me it’s a place that’s not completely explored, maybe a place there aren’t even up-to-date maps of, I don’t know. I was so naive back then, I didn’t even know how naive I was. Bishop was a lot of things, but you couldn’t call him naive exactly.

  If when I tell you this story I seem a little distracted, it’s only because I’m thinking of my mother. She’s practically the only one who never asked me why I acted so crazy and got into trouble and embarrassed everybody. But there’s another question, just as big, that hangs over us when we’re in the same room together now. It’s: How could I have made the same kind of mistake she made? I’m pretty much sure that’s why she doesn’t ask me the Question. Mother and I used to think we had the best mother—daughter communication it was possible to have. Now we’re not so sure. Or maybe it’s only that our best communication doesn’t find its way down from our brains to our mouths.

  The wolves have issues with the moon. Sometimes when I’m down really deep I think I hear em. I know I do in my head at least. You don’t need to be able to touch something or even see it before it’s real; a thing can be real in your brain. This usually happens when I’m all stretched out and everything’s ready to go but the mind won’t leave the body in the death-rehearsal that’s supposed to happen every night: it’s like a fire drill only it’s a death drill. Who else except me could wander off in the head when it’s so damn noisy? Then during the day, when I’m so tired I feel like I’ve got a layer of crinkled cellophane behind my eyeballs, I’ll all of a sudden think that I hear the wolves again, only way far off and weak this time. Or maybe they’re just secretive, speaking to each other in wolf whispers, barely working their mouths and with their ears straight up so’s to eavesdrop on us. But I figure out it’s only the heating system or a generator clicking in maybe, something deep inside the walls, and I come to my senses. I say to myself: Honestly, what’s somebody like you know about wolves?

  The first time I ever laid eyes on Bishop he was making trouble outside the Art Gallery on Robson Street. What he was doing was tormenting a mime artist. This strikes me as funny now, because Bishop was a man of words, big spring downpours of talk, sometimes beautiful and sometimes, well, disturbing. The street performer, who I now know was about half Bishop’s age, was doing the standard old-fashioned things that mimes do: man walking against a stiff wind, man in a foot race up steep stairs, man discovering that he’s trapped inside an invisible glass cube. (Why aren’t there more women mimes?) Bishop had obviously picked him out as somebody he could make life miserable for. He was parroting his movements, sometimes running a bit ahead of the poor guy just to confuse him, then putting his own face right up against the mime’s; their noses almost touched. I couldn’t tell from where I was sitting, at my jewellery stand, but looking back now I think Bishop was probably giving him the death’s-eye stare to scare him off. The mime was trying to keep as still as one of those Buckingham Palace guards in the tall fur hats, but Bishop got to him. The guy actually seemed close to sobbing as he picked up his jacket and his collection basket and hurried off to some other good tourist corner. Bishop was triumphant. As the fellow went away, Bishop screamed after him, “First we kill all the mimes! Shakespeare!” That was the first time I ever heard that little snorty laugh of his: “Ha!” People passing by stared at him.

  Soon I was seeing him all over Downtown and the West End. One day I was coming back from selling my handcrafted jewellery near English Bay when I saw him with two girls, a black one and a white one, walking up the other side
of Robson, with him in the middle like he owned them. Later I thought: He probably does. When they got to one of the little hotels there as you go east up the hill, I saw the three of them stop and Bishop started to jump up and down, as high as he could, with his left arm stretched out over his head. I began to jog with my big folding display table so I could see what was going on. He was hopping and hopping, straight up, as if he was on an invisible trampoline, one arm stiff above him like he was reaching for something he couldn’t quite touch. One of the girls seemed to be urging him on, the other one was nervous, like she was looking out for the cops. Three huge flags—an American flag, a Canadian flag and a B.C. flag—hung down from poles fixed into the hotel’s electric sign. When I got close enough I could see that Bishop was trying to set the U.S. one on fire with a butane cigarette lighter. Whenever he got high enough off the ground, the wind made by the motion of his body blew out the flame. The one girl was giggling uncontrollably, the other looked as though she was about to go into serious panic.

  Just then a man who worked at the hotel charged out with another man—his boss, it looked like—and began shooing them away. “The police are on their way,” I heard the original man say. The panicky girl looked even more nervous; the other one, I saw now, was too stoned to have any fear. Bishop and the two hotel guys got into quite an argument. It ended when the airport shuttle pulled up and Bishop and his two friends got on. Words were still being exchanged. I was only a couple of metres away by this time and I heard Bishop scream back from the safety of the bus as it pulled away, “Fucketh not with me, saith the Lord, for I shall have thine ass on a kaiser roll!” I remember thinking that he had a scrawny excuse for a butt but nice long skinny legs.

  Even in Vancouver a person like that stood out. I kept looking for him wherever I went, maybe to take my mind off the mission I told my sister Annie I was on. Eventually, when I saw him again, it was as if I was watching a play and he came stumbling onstage and became part of it.

  I was coming back from one of my long fruitless searches on skid row far out East Hastings and stopped to rest awhile on the grass in Victory Square. The day was just lovely. I had been enjoying it for a while when a homeless woman came by. She was old, I couldn’t tell how old exactly, and she eased herself down on the curb in a deliberate kind of way, like she was suspicious of the place where she was about to sit. She was travelling with a supermarket cart full of paper bags. From a distance she would have looked like a simple customer who’d got lost on the way from Safeway while looking at all the coupons she hadn’t managed to use that week. At close range, though, I could see that she carried her reality with her everyplace she went, just like she did her possessions. I noticed a plastic bracelet around one wrist with computer writing on it.

  “My name is Dennis and I’ll be your server this evening.” She spat out the words. “Sonsabitches!” Then a little later: “This is your final warning. Please pick up the white courtesy phone.”

  That’s when Bishop appeared out of nowhere and sat down beside her without a word. He was smoking a cigarette but soon tore it from his lip and flicked it on the ground by her feet. She suddenly became alert and picked it up.

  “Would you like a whole one?” Bishop shook the pack and one popped up, like a trick card in a deck.

  After looking at his eyes and then at the cigarette, she decided to take it, though she seemed as if she still expected to get an electric shock when she touched it. Then she pulled her cart close to her and began rummaging in the bags. “Cheapskates,” she muttered.

  “You’re welcome,” Bishop said back.

  She was pulling things out of the bags: a change of old clothes, a swim fin without its mate, a coffee can, a broken barometer, a length of that flimsy brass chain they used in the seventies for hanging cheap lamps from. The cigarette went into the coffee can and she replaced the lid. “I keep all my cheapskates in here,” she said, and patted it.

  “I’m a broker on Howe Street,” Bishop said to her. I wanted to laugh out loud. “This morning a guy comes into Reception and asks if I’m in, and Deborah says, ‘Who shall I say is calling?’ and the guy says, ‘Death.’ She says, ‘Do you have an appointment?’ and he says yes. And she says, ‘What is it regarding?’ and he says it concerns contributions. So she buzzes me and says, ‘There’s a Mr. Death to see you, sir.’ I ask what he looks like. Deborah says he’s tall, wearing a black suit with a bright red silk tie and, you know, cloven hooves. The last thing I hear as I’m running out of there is Deborah saying, ‘I’m afraid he’s in conference. Would you like to leave a message?’”

  “There’s no president for that,” the old woman says after chewing the question over for a while. “There’s no legal president for that decision. It says so in the papers.”

  She started pulling pages of old newspapers from one of the bags and then removed other pieces from inside her clothes.

  “Now some people wear them first and don’t read them, but I read them first. Or sometimes I’ll read them, if it gets too warm.” She made a sound like gurgling.

  I didn’t know if all of this was funny or sad. Looking back of course I’d have to say sad.

  Not every day but several times a week I’d run into this strange guy I’m telling you about. When I finally got up close I saw that his shoulder-length hair was done with implants. One morning he got on the bus I was riding. He had barely come up the steps before he was having some kind of brief but interesting argument with the driver. I didn’t overhear all of it but it seemed to be a kind of verbal scuffle, the sort (I’d find out over time) that seemed to be what happened after he’d made his first impression on people. At the front of the bus, in one of the seats facing across the aisle, was a woman who was about eight months pregnant.

  “Don’t worry, madam,” he said to her in a clear voice, a little too loud. “In an emergency situation, I can deliver your baby.” She looked alarmed and everyone else seemed startled but I have to say he made me laugh. “My first job in show business,” he told her, “was as a whorehouse puppeteer.” Now she was really frightened. On certain words he had some sort of an American accent like you hear on television. Show business came out show bidnet. He liked to put it on, I’m not sure why.

  Without meaning to or even noticing for a while that I had, I’d turned into a kind of accidental spectator in this person’s life. Maybe that’s what prompted me to get off when I was sure that’s where he was getting off too. It was only a few stops from where I was planning to get off anyway.

  I was following him, I have to admit it, because I was curious what he would do next or say. When he stopped at a newsstand, he made a big honking noise like he was talking back to the headlines on the newspapers. Maybe this was his way of sneering at the media. I looked at them too, but they didn’t seem unusual to me. I hesitated a minute, then trailed after him when he went into a coffee place a few doors away. He saw me looking at him and locked on eye contact (and like I’ve told you, when he did this it was like a magnetic force was involved). He could do the look all right, and it drew me over to where he was. He motioned for me to sit down.

  “Are you the one from the other day?”

  I said, “I guess so.”

  He looked at me suspiciously. “I don’t usually do this.”

  “Me neither.”

  “But you sounded like you might be okay.”

  At that point I realized that either we were having two different conversations or he thought I was someone else. I guess either way was a possibility. I got the feeling he was waiting for someone that was obviously not me, or at least waiting for me to say the magic password that let me into his reality, if that’s what you want to call it.

  “I saw you in the park a few days ago with that homeless woman.”

  Which park? Which homeless woman? He had to think for a moment. “Pigeon Park?”

  No, I told him, Victory Square.

  Then he remembered. “She’s an oracle,” he said.

  “Oh.”
I probably sounded dumb, but I didn’t know what else to say.

  “She’s a wise woman, a wisdom-teacher. She foretells the future. She may be a healer too, though I never seen her heal. But she’s definitely an oracle.” He pronounced the word something like awrickel, rhymes with popsicle.

  Until I learned how to listen to him, Bishop’s statements like this would often leave me not knowing how to answer. Over time, though, I started to understand that this was one of the reasons he spoke the way he did. He was a hermit who couldn’t stand living alone. He was a social animal with no small talk, not even much medium talk as far as I could tell. Just talk. All the same kind. His own. He liked acting outrageous, I think, because it kept conversations from happening, yet he kept talking all the time, regardless. Something had happened, some bad biology, that had left him this way. That sounds lame, but I didn’t have any other explanation for it. He’d say things out loud to see how they sounded and it frightened a lot of people. “I am a death provider,” he said once, and the people around him jumped out of their chairs.

  Even during that first encounter in the coffee bar, he kept telling me multiple versions of himself. “I was born in the Year of the Rat,” I remember him saying grandly, “and was raised by circus folk—good people, much misunderstood.” The whole time I sat with him he glared at the front door, waiting for the other person to enter. He kept yakking but I couldn’t tell if he was interested in talking to me or giving the mystery person some more time to show up. He didn’t look at his watch, I noticed. Then I noticed he didn’t have a watch. Every so often he’d grip the end of his ponytail and unconsciously place it on his shoulder like a parrot. He caught me looking at him doing it and thought I was staring at the bad scar on the back of his left hand.

  “The result of a freak accident,” he said. “I got in a fight with a freak. That was years ago, back in Snaketown.”