Jericho

by George Fetherling

  I headed towards the big lake. I had a plan and this was it—to go towards the horse cops when they’d think I was moving away from em. There were a lot of places down there. I suppose you’d have to call em cottages, though to me that sounds like an Ontario word and it ain’t a nice one either. Cabins where people didn’t live year-round cause it’s so bleak in the winter that the country can’t hardly support human life. Some of them had quite a few luxuries. Rich people from the city, dumb-ass Citizens who think they’re getting in touch with the primitive. Ha!

  The nights were wet and cold. I’d put on all the clothes I brought with me, topped off with a green plastic poncho which I’d sort of wrap around me from the inside. No matter what kind of shelter I found I’d always wake up in the middle of the night because my ass was wet. I’d roll over onto my side but then that side’d be wet and I’d have to switch. This would go on all night. I thought I found the perfect spot one day when I came upon this rock overhang so deep it looked like the mouth of a cave. Invisible from the air, invisible from just about every angle, and dry, I thought. It was only the afternoon but I decided to stop there anyway even though I usually waited until dark. It turned out to be worse than being out in the open. Trickles of water, big enough so that you could hear em not just feel em, ran all night like a broken toilet. I got soaked. I didn’t like making a fire if I could help it. You think I was being paranoid but I wasn’t. I didn’t have enough information to be paranoid. I didn’t know if they were after me—yet. I was just being careful.

  Anyway, I ate cold food from the pack. The good news was that the pack got lighter and lighter. So did I, come to think of it. I could tell by the way my clothes were starting to get a little looser, even when I had all the layers on at night. The bad news was that I didn’t know if the food would hold out until I got to the lake. So I cut way back on how much I ate. Every morning I’d move some food from the pack to my pockets. I had a breakfast pocket and a dinner pocket, and I had to fight hard with myself to keep from raiding them early as I trekked up and down, staying in the shade and the shadows, looking both ways (and up) before crossing a place without cover if I couldn’t get around it any other way. I tried to stay filled up with water to take the place of food but this makes for pretty uncomfortable walking all day. It makes you the slave of your bladder, which is something you don’t want to be when you think the horsemen might turn up any minute.

  I honestly don’t know how many days it took me. I lost track and never got the count back. Actually I started thinking in different terms. Instead I just counted the sleep-camps. Let’s see, I’d say, when I waded across that river, that was two sleep-camps ago. I’m too old to be wishing time away like you do when you’re a kid. But I just wanted the thing to be over. And I wanted there to be some destination I could be at when I stopped. I was wet and my feet hurt. Not just sore. Hurt. There was some invisible point I passed when the backpack seemed to be getting heavier even though I knew it was really less heavy all the time as every morning I buried the empty wrappers and cans the food came in.

  The last stream I followed fed into the lake. The first look I had at the water was through the tops of trees but I could tell way before I caught sight of it that there was water there. I could tell from the sky. I’d learned that sky over water looks different from sky over land, like the sky was a mirror that reflected what it saw down below. I hid the pack and moved away from the stream and snuck down to the shore. The lake was quiet except for birds, who were squawking out loud, knowing nobody was around to hear em. The only evidence of humans I could see from there, lying on my belly, was a broken-down little jetty on a point way off to the right. I figured there had to be a cabin just out of sight with a view of the water. These guys build with a view of the lake. That’s a big deal to them. Not like it was to me—to see who might be coming—but to show people that they could afford the scenery.

  There wasn’t any point in waiting till dark to look around. Inside in the dark I’d need some kind of light, which sort of defeats the whole purpose of sneaking around. So I crawled a bit closer, stopping every now and then to make sure there wasn’t anybody behind me—or in front of me or off to the sides. I approached it zigzag fashion. Even when I got pretty close the place looked empty. Not abandoned, just empty, like whoever owned it hadn’t opened it up for the season yet. I was like some animal deciding whether or not to trust the humans enough to take the food they were offering. When I got close enough I saw the door was padlocked. I took out my knife and tried to pry off the hasp. But it was a no-go. Around the side, by the spot where the stovepipe came out in an elbow, there was a window that was open just a crack so that the place wouldn’t freeze. I got the blade in and jimmied the window open and climbed inside.

  I was amazed later when the lawyer gave me all these Zeerox copies from the newspapers. There was this big front-page story about how I sent a tape to some radio station in the Interior after making off with somebody’s cassette recorder. They printed what I was supposed to have said about how I was playing some game with the cops and how I bragged that I could change form by magic and turn myself into a wolf. Crap like that. Complete garbage of course. I never stole any tape recorder. Never saw one, so the idea never crossed my mind, and the voice wasn’t mine, as the cops had to admit later on. Obviously just some weirdo that got a thrill from pretending to be the Sasquatch Bandit as one of the papers started calling me, a name the other ones picked up. They didn’t mean it as a compliment but it did make me legendary in the major media, which meant that there were people in two camps. The newspapers and television blew me up into this “Robin Hood figure,” as they kept saying, the “folk hero” who stole from the rich owners and sport fishermen from places like Portland and Seattle and gave to—well, to myself, I guess. The reporters found a whole lot of people to say things they wanted to hear said out loud. People who wanted to be on TV said what they knew the TV people were looking for, whether they—the TV types, I mean—knew what the audience out there wanted to hear or not. That’s how come things got out of control. I’m lucky they did, cause that was the only way I got the kind of sharp lawyers I needed—they wanted a piece of my high profile too. Then there’s the other side of the coin. I wouldn’t have been in all that much trouble if I wasn’t a celebrity—which I didn’t know I was, being up in the bush at the time. (How did people think I could have mailed that tape anyway?) On the other hand—wait, how many hands is that? Oh hell, I don’t give a damn—what they were calling “public fascination” with me “no doubt had some bearing on the outcome” of the case. Here I’m quoting from one of the columnists. What they’re saying is that I would have been in less trouble without all the hype but I would have been in more trouble too. Go figure.

  I was a long time piecing together what happened. Not in getting the details. (The information was thrown at me from all directions right away. It was like a bunch of kids pelting me with water balloons.) But a long time in sorting everything out and figuring out what it meant. Here’s how it went down. Despite what the tiny perfect dyke said, the cops were right behind us just like I figured they were, just like Clarence knew they were. You can’t fool Clarence. It didn’t take em long to find Jericho and nab the girls, who were scared even after the cops lost interest in em except to use them against me (and maybe Clarence too though they seemed to forget about him pretty quick, maybe because of what they call sensitivities).

  As I see it, the dyke, who never got any jokes—she would call it something like “a humour receptor deficiency”—took everything I said straight and then told them all this stuff about me being an ex-con, maybe an excaped con, and being in organized crime and a dope pusher and one thing and another. Nobody in their right mind would have fallen for all that shit. But at the time there’d been stories about our “pan-province crime spree” (now I’m quoting from one of the papers in Vancouver that I have in my scrapbook). They seemed to be interested first of all in how I’d made off with the truck. After
all, nobody likes Canada Post, and the truck was proof of how feeble they were. That’s the way I figure it. When it came out that I was travelling with my two “female companions” it set up the whole sexual theme song, like we were a three-way menagerie. If only they’d known what the situation really was. Anyway, you’d have to be an idiot not to see all the sex stuff between the lines in everything that was written, especially after Beth and the other one got picked up and the media said that I’d abandoned em. Later on they got pictures of them coming and going to court. Until that day with the bear, which I’ll tell you about in a minute, they didn’t have any picture of me. Maybe that made me seem like an even bigger mystery, I don’t know. I think it was early on when they tried to get an old one of me from Correctional Services they found out absolutely and for sure that I’d never been in custody and the dyke couldn’t be taken seriously. Anyhow that’s what I suspect. So the media used its head and managed to dig up an old snapshot from back in Windsor. I was real young and skinny and had an Adam’s apple the size of a fucken baseball. Even I wouldn’t have recognized myself unless I looked real close for a long time. I sure didn’t resemble any sasquatch.

  I’m a changed woman, no doubt about it, and sometimes when I’m going to work in the morning I think about my first days in Vancouver, when I was naive and thought I should be looking for my father on the Downtown Eastside. That’s the only place I knew to look. But look for what? Now when I walk the streets they feel like home. They’re probably no better than they were before. In some ways they’re worse, I think most people would agree, because the drugs are much worse and the poverty and crime. The midnineties seems like an innocent time. Who would have thought that? When I cross the intersection as I’m walking to work in the morning, the same old corner looks different somehow.

  The day after Bishop left Jericho, I tried to talk to Theresa about what we should do. She thought we should see if the truck would start and make our way back through all the logging roads somehow until we found the highway. I said I thought that wasn’t a good idea. For one thing, it was almost out of gas, and there were other reasons too. “What if he’s right and the police are coming to arrest us all? What’s going to happen when they find us driving a stolen truck?”

  “I had no part in his crime modalities,” she shot back.

  “The walk out of here will do us good,” I said. “I don’t know about you, but I need exercise after sitting here doing nothing.” I was trying to jolly her along but when I said that she went all stiff, the way a cat does when it sees danger and tries to act tough, with the hair on its back sticking straight up. She never took well to me (or anybody) using humour.

  Then, stupid me, I did it again. “Anyway, it might be easier if we don’t use the roads. We don’t have the magic Stick. He took it with him.”

  She almost got violent. “The idiot and his goddamned stick. If he was here now I’d like to insert it up his ass and set fire to it.”

  I’d never heard her talk this way. It sounded like something a really dumb guy would say. But I held my tongue, as Mother always used to say, though things were pretty chilly between us after that.

  Truck or no truck, we had to get ready. Fortunately I had pretty good shoes on that morning in Vancouver in what felt like a long-ago period in my life. Theresa only had runners, which did mean that walking the whole time would be hard on her even assuming that we found our way and didn’t keep wandering around in circles. I was confident, though. It wasn’t as if we didn’t know where the sun sets, it wasn’t as if there weren’t landmarks.

  After getting my clothes together, I started to worry about what food to take and how much we could carry. She and I didn’t speak that night, though we probably should have, as we still had a lot of stuff to discuss. Instead we sort of retired to opposite ends of Main Street, which was kind of silly when you think about it because Main Street was of course the only street there was and it was so short you could throw a rock from one end to the other.

  The sun couldn’t have been up very long at all when I smelled smoke and flew out the door. I yelled for Theresa to wake up as I ran down the row of buildings towards one end of the clearing. The grass between the clearing and the townsite was on fire, and saplings started to crackle and spit as the flames surrounded them and then went tree-climbing. It was like dozens of low fires were suddenly joining together in one big one. I just about died when I got closer and saw this big wall of fire a ways off. The air in front seemed to go all crinkly from the heat. It was getting pretty grey and I was afraid it would soon be black. Theresa was standing beside me under the gravel knoll, half dressed like I was, saying something under her breath, I don’t know what: I wasn’t paying attention.

  A shape, a figure, was coming towards us. It looked like somebody staggering out of an orange-and-yellow mirage. The figure was coughing a bit, a low throaty cough. It stopped within easy shouting range. “You better get your stuff out of there. The wind’s starting to blow this way.” Clarence’s voice was calm-sounding as usual, but it seemed out of place right at that moment. I looked over at Theresa, who ran back for her bag. I called after her, “Get mine too. And the food I picked out.” Then an afterthought: “And the rest of my clothes.” But she was gone by then.

  “The wind is a surprise.”

  That’s what Clarence said as we stood there. I must have looked like I didn’t know what to do. He looked like someone who did but had decided to keep it to himself.

  The fire wasn’t getting any wider but it was still headed in our direction and fast. What I remember now is the snapping sound of green trees going up, whoosh, and I can still see the black smoke up above. We both stayed there just staring at it, not saying anything. I was starting to get scared. Couldn’t tell about Clarence, though. He was always a hard one to read.

  Theresa came back down the ramp, carrying her big bag and kicking mine ahead of her. I guess she didn’t hear what I said about bringing the food, so I went back to get it myself. When I got up the so-called ramp—you sort of had to walk bent forward, that’s how steep it was—I turned around to look at the fire from higher up. The air was all wavy from up there too and I could see that the flames were sure coming towards us, no doubt about it. I had an idea and yelled down for Clarence to join me in town. He didn’t hear me. It was almost as though he was hypnotized by what he was looking at. Theresa heard me, though, and poked him in the ribs. The two of them were talking, and I saw her point to me up top, using her whole arm stretched out straight.

  The first temptation—to simply run away—didn’t make sense once I’d had a second to think what we were doing. Running away from the town wouldn’t be running away from danger, it would be running away from safety. The town was protected. So I ran down to talk to Clarence. “Maybe we should all come up?” I asked him. “The fire’s got to stop when it comes to this big gravel pile, right? There’s nothing to burn.”

  “Worth a try.” Then sort of matter-of-factly, talking to nobody in particular, “Sure.”

  I said I thought we should use the time we had to collect all the water we could and bring it up to the town in case the fire trapped us in there for a while. T agreed as well. So the three of us went tearing through all the buildings looking for as many empty pots and bottles as we could find. Any kind of container would do. Right then I wasn’t too worried about how clean they were, knowing that later we’d have to boil them anyhow, not just the water. Theresa, though, carried hers using her fingertips only, the way you’d carry a dead rat or some other diseased thing. We weren’t all that organized, I guess. We made a big pile of jars etc. down by the stream. Then, as they got filled up, one of us would walk up to Jericho with them. I say walk because Clarence was the one person who could actually run up the steep path and keep running; he never seemed to get tired. Of course, he was a guy who could run without really hurrying, and this wasn’t great because all of us were racing against the clock. “The temperature is ascending,” Theresa said with worry in
her voice. Clarence said something more alarming, especially because he wasn’t the sort of person to overreact (or underreact either).

  “Looks like the wind’s blowing the fire this way fast,” he said.

  I watched the flames reach the little stream and leap right over it. The fire was burning weeds and grass and tiny trees now, whipped up by the wind from the west. I couldn’t help thinking this wouldn’t be happening if Bishop had been able to do his long-term project and make the stream wider and deeper and dig it all the way around the knoll like a moat around a castle in a storybook. Instead, what happened is that quick gusts sent flaming twigs and even small branches flying up onto the townsite. It was only a question of time until one or another of the buildings on Main Street caught fire. When it happened, we ran down to try and put it out. We used a lot of the drinking water but couldn’t get enough of it up high enough to do any good. “What you need is sand,” Clarence said. But except for what was in the mailbags, we didn’t have any, and at that moment I didn’t have a knife to cut the things open with or the wits to go find one. What we had was only gravel, enough of it to be a lifetime supply for everybody I knew. These old buildings had been dried out and falling apart for years. The wood was soft and punky anyway. It burned with a bright orange-and-yellow flame, spitting at us. It was like the fire was laughing or making fun of us.

  The next building on the same side was Theresa’s. She ran in to get her other things, including her diary, and I went with her. It was pretty scary. When we came out again, in a minute or two, the roof of the end building had burned through and collapsed with a big noise. The wind was even stronger than before, and it didn’t shift like I was hoping it would. You can guess what happened then. Theresa’s place went up like old balled-up newspaper. We kept trying to save the next one along and then the one after that and the one after that but we didn’t really have the equipment we needed. Clarence was using the shovel but it wasn’t doing much good. I think I might have been crying, just a bit, when the hotel went up.