Image Decay

by Mark Lisac

  “Hello, John,” he said, turning but not getting up. “Ken is just educating me about jazz. He knows a lot about it. I understand he has the best collection of Glenn Miller records in cabinet.”

  That sort of remark often had people feeling off balance with Ellerman. Becker decided not to ask if he was joking. Instead, he said, “I understand you’ve had a rough week. Getting Fincher’s car towed out of the parking lot must have taken some effort.”

  “Just a phone call. When you’re minister of infrastructure help is just a phone call away. Fincher wasn’t happy but he had no business parking up on the surface. He has an underground spot with all the free car washes he wants. If he wants a surface spot right outside the door too he can ask me. But he won’t. He knows I know he lent his car to his kid for a trip up to Yellowknife. He got the government to pay for the damage when the kid hit a deer and skidded into a ditch. He owes the public about eight thousand dollars.”

  Becker smiled. “I hadn’t heard about that.”

  “It happened. Early this summer. Just because he’s provincial treasurer doesn’t give him the right to decide his ministerial vehicle is covered for whatever damage he inflicts on it.”

  “Has he done anything else?”

  “You mean aside from being a general run-off-at-the-mouth smart boy? I wouldn’t be surprised. But he had no business parking in that surface lot. Those who transgress must accept having to do penance.”

  Becker remembered the fuss during the previous election when Ellerman had decided to put up his own signs rather than the ones printed by the party. The Ellerman signs read: “Waste not, want not.” The other side of Santa Claus.

  The music stopped and Shaw introduced the next tune. Becker asked himself how long it had been since he’d seen a live jazz performance, how long it had been since he had moved from the electrically charged atmosphere of the States to this oil and cattle country where even the cities felt rural, how long it had been since he had experienced a moment of peace or pleasure without feeling a wash of ache and anger in the background. He glanced out the front window to see if Arlene was still in sight.

  She was not. She had walked away from the club past the old McPherson church and along the line of poplars leading to the small widening of the sidewalk that served as a viewing point over the river. She pressed against the black iron railing and gazed across the valley. The lights of the taller new apartment buildings and condominiums hung silently in the air on the other side. They reminded her of people going about their business, oblivious to anyone who might be watching them. A cluster of old houses and brick buildings that once held small businesses lay scattered on the flat bank on the near side of the river. The old iron bridge crossed the valley nearly a kilometre off toward the right. She recalled reading a description of how it had been built. She could not remember when she read it but knew it was the first time she had come across the words “boxed girder.” The river itself wound through the deep valley, a dark path hidden from the surrounding prairie land. The lights from the new buildings high on the upper banks cast faint reflected lines on the water’s surface. They weren’t strong enough to illuminate the flowing water. Whenever she looked at the river, Arlene sometimes thought about its source up in the mountains. Some of the water came from rain but some originated in a glacier. It was the melted legacy of unimaginable cold and pressure from ten or eleven thousand years in the past. She could not see the current and eddies in the night darkness but she could picture the relentless flow in her mind’s eye.

  Footsteps tapped softly on the sidewalk toward her right. She did not turn to look. They kept sounding closer and stopped. She still did not look, wondering now but not worried because whoever it was had stopped off to one side and not directly behind her. Then she heard a familiar voice.

  “Arlene. Taking the night air? Or taking in the view?”

  Now she turned halfway. “Hello, Frank. A little of both. You?”

  “I suppose you could say a little of both for me as well. I look at the university over there and think about how much it has changed over the years. All those new buildings. All the old houses taken down to make room for them. So many new students, more all the time. Yet the spirit remains the same, or should as long as the people responsible take care to preserve it.”

  Arlene looked toward the lights of the university buildings, dim fluorescent glows behind the silhouette of the old railway bridge.

  “The past always has something worth saving,” she said. “The question is always what part of it is worth saving. I remember some of your colleagues saying there was no real Canadian literature worth studying. They even fought against the establishment of a Canadian literature course. No one would try to make that case now. We’re all better for the change. I wonder still which side you were on.”

  “The sides in a quarrel can be ephemeral. The continuity of the institution is what’s important.”

  “And when you give advice to ministers, is that how you put it? Do you say any decision is right as long as it supports survival of the government?”

  “The cabinet ministers usually have that thought uppermost in their minds before a discussion even starts. But it’s true I’d be foolish to urge them to take many risks. Or to turn a blind eye if I saw any of them pursuing a risky path.”

  She turned away from the river to look at him squarely again. “You didn’t stop here for idle reminiscing, did you? Are you even here by accident? Or did you see me coming here? Were you watching from someplace in the club?”

  “I was there. Not conspicuously. Keeping up with the latest cultural advances in the city. I did see you and John at the window and thought about how long it’s been since you and I had a talk, just the two of us.”

  “Have you missed that?”

  “You were always stimulating, a breath of fresh air.”

  “Congratulations. Another question dodged. How many thousand are you at now?”

  They stared at each other. Clicks of stiletto heels broke the silence. Two women with dark eyeshadow, hair piled high and skirts hemmed higher walked by. They headed toward the hooker stroll four blocks west. Jeffries looked around and sighed. The corners of his mouth slid down.

  “So much for culture,” Arlene said. “Building it up must be a struggle here.”

  “Ah well,” he said, “Boswell was consorting with prostitutes when he wasn’t recording nearly every word that Samuel Johnson uttered. That hasn’t dimmed his reputation much. Being careless about reputation is never a good idea, though. Some things are winked at, others cause damage.”

  “Not if they never come to light,” she said.

  He hesitated and went on, “John seems to take a perfunctory attitude toward the province’s reputation. He does his job but no more. Something may be developing that could be significant. I have to attend to it. I don’t think he would actively frustrate my taking care of the situation. But he seems to have his own priorities. They may inadvertently get in the way of higher priorities.”

  “Not your own personal ones. You mean, of course, the priorities that should be followed for the good of the province.”

  “Exactly.”

  “You didn’t follow me here for old times’ sake.” She half-smiled as she said it, more to herself than to him.

  “A small project is going on,” he said. “It’s in the nature of a review of artistic material. I think something potentially dangerous may be in the material. But I also have reason to believe it’s now in the hands of a man who is not to be trusted. John has the man under observation but I think John is looking for something else, something I don’t know about. It would be best if John were kept apart from the review until it is finished. Ideally, it would be best if I knew what has attracted his interest. But I should at least have a clear field to concentrate on finding what is really important in the material.”

  “You want me to spy on my husband, and to steer him in a direction that suits your interests.”

  “The be
st interests of the province.”

  “And just how am I to go about getting him to volunteer information about this secret project? And then to divulge whatever private interest he has in it?”

  Jeffries smiled with a regretful small tilt of his head to the right. “It’s only a matter of possibilities, of course. But if he should express annoyance at anything in the next few days, perhaps you might lend him a sympathetic ear, be a willing support to him. He may even begin to tell you more if he thinks you are the one person he can count on to be on his side. He may be lonely.”

  She let that pass. With Frank Jeffries it was best to let every little provocation, every probing needle pass. “And then?” she said.

  “It would be a natural event for the deputy minister of Culture to have lunch or tea sometime with one of the city’s leading supporters of cultural organizations.”

  The corners of her mouth drew up, making her look amused again. “And if I politely declined?”

  “That would not necessarily be disastrous but neither would it be a help to the province.”

  “And if I told you to go jump in the river?”

  “That would not help either. Nor would it be a way to remember old friendship.”

  Her face remained unchanged but her voice hardened: “Friendship? Is that your story now? I remember what you did to me. You didn’t call it friendship then. You exploited a young co-ed and you called it more than friendship then.”

  “You were hardly innocent and defenceless. And it was hardly the only relationship ever struck between a professor and a student.”

  “No, it wasn’t. I got over it. Maybe I knew all along it was a passing thing and your attention would wander when the next year’s class walked into your lecture room. No, what made it different was what I figured out several years later. There was no shortage of pretty, eager sophomores willing to accept a lot of attention and more from a professor who’d published two books and had spent a year at Oxford. Why me? Out of five or possibly even ten other possibilities? I admit I was flattered and it took years to realize it wasn’t any personal quality that attracted you. It was my name. My father’s standing in the province. Oil and cattle meant prestige. And prestige was what attracted you. Your own family was never grand enough to suit your image of yourself. If you couldn’t have your own oil wells and own cattle ranch you could have them vicariously. Was the idea of being associated with them enough? Or did you actually think of creating a formal link like one of those diplomatic marriages that old royalty used to arrange? Did you actually dream of marrying into a family with a name as well as money? And probably getting out with a divorce a few years later?”

  He had gone from the hint of a wry smile, to letting his mouth sag open with a look of pain from an unfair attack, to a neutral expression, head tilted back ever so slightly in a pose of gravitas and self-possession in the face of gathering hysteria.

  “Arlene.” He paused. “I won’t try to convince you of anything. The essential point is this. I need to have something done to protect the reputation of the province. God knows there are few enough people now in the government with a firm grasp of we mean to the life of this country. Of how important it is to preserve our example and leadership. You of all people, with your background, should understand that. Your husband may or may not get in the way but it’s best to keep him as far removed as possible. If he does get in the way and a disaster results, the consequences for him would be unpleasant.”

  “You’re forgetting something,” she said. “I haven’t spent all these years helping build his political career only to watch it go up in smoke. And I’ve been building ties to the community. They aren’t as numerous as yours. They could well be more relevant. You’ve been wielding authority in your little corner of the world long enough to lose track of who’s where on the scale of importance. Don’t threaten John. That will threaten me too and you’ll be surprised at what will happen. I’m not a young undergrad now.”

  Jeffries listened without changing expression. “I’ve told you how things stand,” he said.

  She was not finished. “Just how good is your memory of old times, Frank?”

  “Good enough,” he smiled.

  “Do you remember Walter Melnychuk?”

  Now he hesitated before answering. “That poor boy who hanged himself partway through his final year?”

  “That poor boy who told one of his friends he was confused about his sexual identity. He used to have tea with you. I would have thought you would remember him better. Was it just the co-eds you used to flatter with your attention, and then offer them more?”

  He pursed his lips while keeping his gaze steadily on her for two seconds, five seconds, ten seconds as she stared back. Finally he said, “You’re in deep water, Arlene. Sharks swim there.”

  He looked her up and down as if considering her for the first time. Then he turned and walked back toward the parking lot beside the club. She watched him for a few seconds, listening to the steady tap of his leather shoes, and turned back to the river. After a few minutes, long enough that she thought he would have reached his car, she walked back to the club. She felt a flatness inside her as if she could not get her lungs properly inflated with each breath.

  Along the way she passed the old United Church again. It had been named after one of the early missionaries in the territory. She thought about the audacity of early arrivals—deliberately seeking a place in a far and winter-hardened land for the purpose of trading for furs, or starting a small farm, or converting strangers to a foreign religion. The red bricks of the church wall were developing a smooth, glazed surface after seven decades of exposure to weather and vehicle exhaust. Yet they had stood up well. She thought she had shown more audacity with Jeffries than she had ever tried with anyone. And that she could learn to use it, cautiously, just as well as her great-grandparents had done when they also had come out to this place of glorious summers and killing winter cold.

  She opened the door of the club and found John and his two colleagues. They were talking casually while looking at the quartet on stage, so she assumed that whatever business had taken place had been completed. She joined them and talked long enough to be polite. John knew she would be wanting to leave and had no reason to stay longer himself. They said their goodbyes and walked to the car.

  About forty minutes later they were approaching the acreage. Through openings in the stands of poplar and birch and spruce, sloughs reflected the moonlight and the lights of acreage homes. Most of them were ranch-style bungalows but occasionally there were two-storey statements of new wealth. John had said little during the drive and she had not tried to talk with him. Near their driveway, he spoke.

  “It looks like I’m going to Broken Pines the day after tomorrow. I’ll have to meet the premier first but apparently they think I’m just the smooth talker to be out there for the government. I’m supposed to monitor the well capping and talk to the media every day. The drilling company is bringing in a bunch of Texans to put out the fire and stop the gas. I suppose I ought to be flattered but I don’t see why it’s a job for the culture minister. Industry or Energy would have been more logical, I would have thought.”

  Arlene said, “Are you going to ask why they’re giving the job to you?”

  “I will, but I already have a good idea from Santa. The priorities committee met this evening and decided I was the best fit because I get along with the media and I used to be in Industry. Not a job for rookies, it seems. Santa did say it sounded as if someone had already put the notion into Billy’s head before the meeting.”

  She watched the trees, the sloughs, and the fields surrounded by horse fences slide by. She asked whether he would be gone more than three or four days. He said it could be closer to a week because the capping job was going to be complicated. That was why an experienced crew was being brought in from outside. But he would make sure it was no longer than a week and would start trying to spring himself after three days.

  “You�
�ll be all right on your own?” he asked.

  “Yes, I’m used to it. I’ll take good care of the dogs.”

  “I guess you may have some meetings in town, and there’s June to come over for coffee.”

  “I’ll get by.”

  “And there’s that young Nicaraguan to keep you company. It seems like there’s no shortage of work for him to do around the place.”

  “Yes,” she said, looking out the window. He worked his lower lip under his front teeth, wondering why he had not been able to bite it before blurting out something he knew he should not say.

  “I suppose you’ll have enough to do and enough other people around to keep you company,” she said.

  “I suppose,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. I’m used to being on my own, too.”

  16.

  IN THE BRIGHT EARLY SUN THE SPRUCE TREES LINING THE highway reminded Becker of green marble. Their needles had a hard sheen. He listened to the hum of the tires as he looked out the window, bored because one of the security staff was driving.

  He would rather have been in a small plane anyway. He regretted that the well site was not far enough away to justify a flight. Night flying was best. He liked the glow from the dials on the cockpit panel. In a twin-engine, there was usually a radar screen too. All the onboard lights were reassuring. However dark the sky, however much cloud was obscuring yard lights from the farms below and the islands of light from scattered towns, the lights on the panel, the numbers and lines on the gauges, said everything was fine. He knew others did not trust small aircraft. He did. The steady buzz of the engine was like a recurring promise. The thin sheets of metal and acrylic windows making up the plane’s body enclosed a safe platform from which to view the unpredictable world.