Up in Smoke

by Ross Pennie

  Never mind Hamish’s fifteen cases of a more-or-less harmless skin disease. It was the second half of the story, told with Hamish’s trademark flare, that had turned Zol’s hands into blocks of ice. Five teens from four different villages in Norfolk County, Zol’s new patch of the province, had been hit with galloping liver failure in the past few days. Two had died. Three others might be headed that way. Preliminary tests had ruled out the usual causes of infectious hepatitis, so it probably wasn’t a virus or a parasite. It sounded like poisoning. But of what? Recreational drugs? The water supply? Had the teens been horsing around with agricultural chemicals? Pesticides?

  “Has he gone?” Colleen asked.

  “The Maxi-Wash called. Saab’s fine. They picked him up, all super apologetic.”

  “Hope they’re giving him a raft of free washes.”

  “Can’t see him going back there. You know what he’s like.” Hamish had an impressive memory, and not only for the Latin names of a multitude of micro-organisms. The man never forgot a slight or injustice.

  Colleen touched Zol’s arm. “You okay? You look—”

  “Hamish just handed me a couple of his diagnostic conundrums.” That was the Hamish term for them. In public, Zol would have to call them “public-health challenges of a significant nature.” Here in his kitchen, they felt like ordeals by fire. “And they both seem centred on Simcoe.”

  “Your first biggies down there.”

  He told her the little he knew from Hamish about the kids with devastated livers, their eyes and skin glowing with jaundice.

  “Now what?” she said.

  He wiped the sweat from the back of his neck. “It’s hard to know where to begin. Natasha’s out of town for the weekend.”

  Natasha Sharma, still under thirty, was the brightest light in the Hamilton-Lakeshore Health Unit. Zol had agreed to the secondment in Simcoe on the condition that Natasha would be assigned to help him whenever he needed her. With a Master’s in epidemiology and a detective’s nose for case-cracking details, she was a brilliant epidemic-buster. She had charm, dedication, and absolutely no ego. Furthermore, she was independent and very low maintenance. “Poor thing is somewhere in Toronto. At one of those big Hindu weddings her mother is dying to throw for her.”

  “Isn’t she hot and heavy with a Greek guy? A surgical resident?”

  At first, Natasha had passed off the handsome and dark-enough Dr. Kostos Stefanopoulos as a westernized Punjabi, an orphan with no Hindu family in Canada. It had worked for a while, but her mother had a meltdown when Kostos let it slip that he’d been an altar boy at a Greek Orthodox Church in East Toronto. “Yeah, but that doesn’t stop her mother from praying that one day Natasha will come to her senses and settle down with a nice Punjabi engineer.”

  “I have a feeling,” Colleen said, “her mother is going to be disappointed.”

  “I’ve got Hamish sniffing and digging on the liver thing until Natasha gets back on Monday.” Hamish was as keen as Natasha at epidemic-busting, and because that wasn’t part of his job at Caledonian University’s medical centre, he was thrilled whenever Zol asked him to be a special consultant on a health-unit case. “He’s going to update me in a couple of hours. Maybe by then he’ll have something we can brainstorm with.”

  She poured them each a glass of orange juice and motioned for him to sit down. “Here,” she said, “have a shot of this.” She nodded toward the Globe and Mail still scattered across the counter. “You were about to tell me about your loon and the legend of a second one to match it.”

  “Was I?” If the ancient story had any truth in it, the repercussions would be too much to contemplate. It was better to leave it be. “It’s nothing. Just silly hype.”

  “Come on.”

  He frowned and shook his head. Even though the legend had been told to him by the enthusiastic curator at the ROM to whom he’d relinquished his loon pipe fifteen years ago, it felt demeaning to attach superstition to such an exquisite artifact. Besides, it was ancient history compared to the urgency of the outbreak of liver failure among the Norfolk teenagers.

  “Goodness, Zol. Anything that’s two thousand years old is bound to carry folklore to spare. That’s part of its allure.” She crinkled her eyes over the rim of her juice glass. “Come on, it’s not like you to hide things from me.”

  When she put it that way, perhaps the story did lend a harmless, mystical quality to the work of an ancient artisan. He downed his orange juice in three swallows, then told her about the two loon pipes that were said to have been carved as a pair.

  “From the same block of pipestone?”

  “That’s the idea. A male and a female. One with garnet eyes, the other with black onyx. In life, male and female loons have identical plumage. Their eye colour changes with the seasons. According to the legend, the two carvings are indistinguishable, except for their eyes.”

  “Loons mate for life, do they not?”

  He shook his head. “A popular misconception. More like serial monogamy.” He’d done a project on loons in grade seven, his interest sparked by the pair that nested year after year on the small lake bordering his family’s tobacco farm. As a kid, he’d seen two loons fighting to the death there on Smiths Mill Pond. One was defending his nesting site from an interloper who had designs on the site and the female who came with it. The winner had taken all. Zol never discovered whether the victor was the incumbent or the interloper. All the same, Mother Nature had taken on a new harshness in his thirteen-year-old eyes.

  “And the legend?”

  “The story goes that together the pipes bestow some sort of power that vanishes when they’re separated.”

  Colleen smiled. A dreamy look flashed in her eyes and was quickly replaced by a frown of concentration. “Who had them last? And when?”

  “Who knows?”

  “And the power?”

  Zol didn’t answer.

  “Come on, was it spiritual? Political? Sexual?”

  He shrugged and said nothing, wishing he’d never mentioned the legend. He hated superstition. For centuries, the practice of medicine had been based not on logical deductions, but on myths and old wives’ tales. His mentor and medical muse had been the most famous physician on the planet in the nineteenth century, Sir William Osler. Everywhere Dr. Osler went, he taught medical students to observe sick people systematically, to draw conclusions about their patients’ illnesses using rational thought, not superstition. Sir William, known for his empathy and wit, grew up in Dundas, the crunchy-granola town Zol could see huddled in the valley below his sunroom. When preoccupied by a public-health ordeal, Zol often looked down from his affluent but lonely perch on the Escarpment’s brow and pictured Dr. Osler at his desk, writing truisms for the ages by candlelight. With the cash from his first paycheque, Zol had purchased Dr. Osler’s 1895 Parker fountain pen in a Montreal antique shop. Whenever he ran his fingers along the black ebonite shaft and sterling silver clip, the great man almost came to life. The instrument was stolen from Zol more than a year ago during a confrontation with a crazed butcher. The police had recovered it, but they’d been holding it in their evidence box for ages, always promising to return it to him soon. God, he missed that pen. And he could sure use some of Dr. Osler’s wisdom now.

  “For heaven’s sake, Zol. By the look on your face, there’s more to this than a couple of stone loons wielding some sort of nameless power.”

  He dug into his pocket for a loonie, the one-dollar coin he kept in his pocket for fingering when he felt anxious. The coin’s reverse bore the image of its namesake swimming on a lake. He wove the coin through his icy fingers, passing it from one hand to the other and back again. The rhythm always soothed him.

  He took a deep breath. “The legend says that whoever has possession of both loons will be empowered to take over all the lands he can reach by canoe in the months between the equinoxes.”

>   Colleen thought for a moment. “You mean between March and September?”

  “Two hundred years ago, the voyageurs could cover a lot of territory between spring breakup and winter freeze-up.”

  “The French fellows?”

  “Europeans and Natives. The explorers and fur traders who opened up the country.” He checked himself. Europeans opening up the country made it sound as though the continent were closed before they arrived. If closed meant unspoiled, he figured it was okay to think of it that way. As a public-health officer whose new territory included the largest First Nations reserve in the country, he was teaching himself to deviate from the old, Eurocentric path.

  “But this is now,” Colleen said. “No government is going to recognize the power of two ancient pipes.”

  “Of course not. But if a Native leader ever got hold of both pipes, he could use them in a propaganda campaign.”

  “How so?”

  “Without believing in the legend himself, someone could appropriate the supposed power of the loons — incite a pseudo-legitimate call to arms. He could travel across the country from reserve to reserve, wave the loons, inspire cells of Native people to rise against five hundred years of oppression.”

  “Cells? Seriously?”

  “Why not? Guerrilla warfare, Canadian-style. Might not take much to get them started.” He could feel himself heating up, his voice rising. “They could demolish bridges. Block highways. Disable power plants. Blow up factories and government offices.”

  “Surely not.”

  “Our position on this land is a lot more tenuous than any politician or non-aboriginal citizen wants to admit.”

  Colleen clutched the elephant pendant in her fist. He could tell she was remembering why she and her late husband Liam, European descendants, had left post-apartheid South Africa. Was she picturing the nightmare of a similar scenario playing out here, in her adopted country?

  “If Native gangs close the railways and highways, commuters won’t get to work, goods won’t get delivered. Large manufacturers like Toyota and General Motors will pull out. The U.S. will shut its borders. Banks, schools, offices will close. No car parts. No Corn Flakes. No artichokes or avocados.”

  “Okay, okay. I understand.” She thought for a moment. “So where’s the other pipe?”

  “No one knows. Did it get smashed over the centuries, or is it out there somewhere, waiting to meet its partner?”

  She pointed to the newspaper. “Is that what this bombing is about? Someone retrieving the loon pipe from the ROM because he’s got the other one?”

  “Or you’re a Native guy who thinks he knows where it is.”

  “But why the destruction of the museum’s Crystal entrance? It’s not as hellish an example of contemporary architecture as the critics say. A fair bit of majesty in all that glass and aluminum.”

  Zol studied the photos of the damage. “The bombing doesn’t make sense as a robbery. The First Peoples Gallery, from where they must have stolen the artifacts, is on the opposite side of the ROM from the Crystal.” He knew that gallery well, had taken Max there to see the loon.

  “You mean,” Colleen said, “they stole the loon and a few other artifacts, then blew up the Crystal for spite?”

  He mulled that for a moment. “Not quite,” he told her. “As a manifesto: We’ve taken back the pipe, we have explosives, and we’re going to use them.”

  He could feel his dread deepening. “They could be getting ready for the next stage. Trains and bridges.” He gripped his coffee mug against the chill in his bones. “The railroad has always been a powerful symbol of European repression. It threw the continent wide open to epidemics of smallpox and measles. Millions of Natives died of infection without a shot being fired.” He told her about the nineteenth-century prairie paintings in his grade-school history text, the images vivid with spilt blood. “The trains brought floods of settlers who slaughtered the plains bison to the brink of extinction. The prairie Natives starved by the thousands because their entire way of life depended on thriving herds of those buffalo.”

  Colleen shuddered and fastened the upper buttons of her vest. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” she said, her tone cautious. “There’s nothing you can do to retrieve the stolen loon. It’s not as though you’re responsible for it at this stage.” She picked up her juice glass, seemed to consider its contents, then put it down. “What’s happening with Max today? Shall I pick him up from Travis’s? What time did they —”

  The phone rang. Zol grabbed it on the third ring. “Hi, Dad, I was about to call you.” Ever since his mother’s diagnosis two months ago, he did his best to sound upbeat on the phone with his parents, but the sight of their number on the call display hit like a smack in the gut. One day, the call would come announcing the chemo had stopped working and the lung cancer had spread out of control. “Have you seen today’s paper?”

  “Your mother say it is time.”

  Zol squeezed the handset. His knees gave out, and he slumped into his chair.

  “Oh, Dad. No. Really?”

  She’d looked pretty good yesterday. Her oncologist had virtually promised that chemo and radiation would provide a good eighteen to twenty-four months of remission. She still had sixteen months of good health left. Maybe more. She’d been making elaborate plans for Christmas with Max. Was she not going to make it to Halloween, her second-favourite holiday?

  “She’s wanting talk to you.”

  “About what?”

  “She not tell me.”

  That was a bad sign. His parents had shared everything: their midnight escape from Hungary as young children in 1956, their years of low-paid agricultural labour, their pennies scrimped for the down payment on a farm, their worries over crop damage and tobacco market dips.

  “She just say it is time, Zollie.”

  He wanted to ask “time for what?” but he couldn’t force out the words. And he didn’t want to hear the answer. He knew it would come to this. Mum had almost refused her last chemo treatment, insisting that her back pain, and the overwhelming nausea, exhaustion, and mouth sores of chemotherapy were going to steal her dignity. She hadn’t fussed over the loss of her hair, but she had vowed never to relinquish her self-respect. She’d carved out her place in the New World and she was going to leave it on her own terms, proud of her family and her accomplishments. He pictured the stash of morphine behind the Bible in her bedside table. They both pretended he didn’t know it was there. Her security blanket.

  “Can she take the phone?”

  “She say you must come. Must see you in person.”

  “But can’t we talk for a sec?”

  “No, Zollie. You come now.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Zol glanced at his mother sitting beside him in the minivan. Katalin Szabo — Kitti to her family, to her friends at the Catholic Women’s League and the hospital’s volunteer association — fidgeted with the tissue wadded in her bony fist. Her eyes widened at the sight of the next set of potholes, and she braced against the armrest. He pumped the brake as gently as he could and eased onto Robinson Street. Simcoe General Hospital loomed at the end of the block like bits of mismatched Lego snapped together through the decades.

  Mum clutched her handbag to her chest and leaned forward. Damn, here it came, another coughing fit. He swallowed hard, slowed to a crawl, and planted his hand on his mother’s shoulder. As he rubbed her upper back, he felt the shuddering through her heavy cloth coat. When the fit stopped, the vehicle was eerily still. With heartbreaking grace, she pressed the Kleenex to her lips and deposited something undoubtedly nasty.

  He’d never get used to her turban. It was supposed to hide her chemo baldness, but instead it drew attention to her cancer like a neon sign. It would not let him forget that though his mother looked encouragingly robust, she had a serious illness. He couldn’t stop thinking of the impending we
ight loss that would steal the flesh from her soft round face and make a mockery of her high, Slavic cheek bones.

  No matter how gently he tried to negotiate the county’s neglected roads, she winced with back pain every time the vehicle rocked like a tractor on a stony field. “I’ll drop you at the front door,” he said, “and get you settled. I can park in the visitors’. Won’t take me half a minute.”

  “No. We walk from car. I still have my good legs.”

  They used to be gorgeous legs. Everybody said so. A closet full of shoes was her only vice. That and a pack-a-day smoking habit she’d kicked about a year before her lung cancer diagnosis.

  “No, Mum. Let me fetch a wheelchair.”

  “Certainly not.”

  “But, Mother, it’s freezing.”

  “We walk. Together.”

  He parked in the visitors’ lot, as close to the front door as possible. She took his arm against the heavy gusts blowing all the way from Chicago. He had no idea why they were going to this effort. Though she wasn’t as strong as she liked to pretend, she didn’t seem sick enough to need immediate admission to hospital. She hadn’t packed a bag and she’d warned him to steer clear of the emergency department.

  Why were they here?

  Twenty minutes earlier, greeting him from the wingback chair in her living room, she’d looked surprisingly confident. Her breathing seemed comfortable, she was a good colour, and she’d thrown him a warm smile. Then she’d told him enigmatically that Now is time, Zollie and insisted he take her to the hospital. He’d asked what was wrong, but she wouldn’t say. She had a handbag in her lap, but no suitcase.

  “Is your doctor expecting you?” he’d asked.

  “No questions. Take me to hospital.”

  “But don’t you need a few things? What about your meds?”