Into this picaresque scene comes Stan Caliginis, this time with Tildy Seares, star chucker of the Pieces. The crowd chants, “Tildy, Tildy.” She hefts the lumpy ball, tosses it in the air, getting its weight. Her arm whirls like a propeller and she fires a strike down the middle of the plate. A squeak of terror from Forbish as he begins his fall. As he hits the water a tsunami rises, swamping me and several unlucky others.
From the stage a squawk of microphone: Scotty Phillips demanding attention. “This is a big one, folks, the Mabel Orfmeister. And the winner is … pass me the envelope, please … for the sixth straight year, Doc Dooley – ninety years young and still the champ! Jump on up here, young fella.”
Sunk deep in my club chair by the western window, I am practising my thousand-mile stare, seeing but refusing to enjoy the taunting beauty of Apollo’s chariot in fiery descent toward the sea.
“We should do that, Arthur.” Margaret, in an apron, at the kitchen doorway. “Check out Stan Caliginis’s pad. Heated pool.”
“I did not come to Garibaldi Island to hang around some finance mogul’s pool listening to him go on about his bloody silky-textured Pinot Gris.”
“Oh, dear. That sounds sardonic.”
“Sorry, what means ‘sardonic’?” Niko, the WOOFer.
“Sour. Like a lemon.” Margaret wins laughter from Niko and Yoki.
“Rich guy, not too old, look good,” says Niko. “Maybe I visit too.” Loud giggles.
I am left alone to mope for a few minutes, then Margaret reappears with a basket of peas for me to shell. My peas, from my second-place garden. They’re making a special dinner in honour of my narrow loss. Three points. Three points!
“He’s someone we may want to get to know.” Stan, she means, Stan Caliginis of the silky texture. “I got the impression he’s coming out of the closet politically. He intends to rehabilitate that mess of a vineyard organically, and we ought to encourage that.”
“I can’t imagine it’s escaped your notice the vineyard was returning to forest. Alders twenty feet tall. Baby cedars. All being ploughed up – even the producing old vines.”
“Darling, they’re mostly Cabernets and Merlots, and they don’t produce in this climate, as the Bulbaconis learned too late. The whole area’s overgrown with broom, ragwort, and thistles – if it’s on the invasive list, it’s there. I’d prefer to see healthy vines and a natural groundcover. I know you try, Arthur, but you are hardly a frontline fighter for the environment.”
“Unlike a certain handsome male divorcé, I don’t pretend to be.”
“I’m not interested in his looks.” Said sharply, but she smiles. “Kind of interested in his money, though.”
Which the Green Party is constantly, profoundly short of. Margaret spends half her waking hours fundraising. She hates it, and I can’t blame her.
I apologize for my crotchety behaviour. She says she understands. She kisses me on the forehead and sets the basket on my lap.
I stare sadly at the fat green jewels filling my bowl. I massacred Dooley with my twelve pods – got the blue – but he’d rebounded with his dills and pickling onions.
The phone rings. Seconds later, Margaret walks out of the kitchen with it, talking softly, and enters her study. Something political, private, not to be shared.
I must rise above disappointment, closet myself in my den awhile, read through the factum, the depositions, the written exhibits, the cases. Prepare myself to put up a sporting fight for the brilliant renegade I wrongly sent to jail.
Postscript from “Where the Squamish River Flows,” A Thirst for Justice, © W. Chance
READERS CURIOUS TO DELVE INTO Gabriel Swift’s history post-Beauchamp have various sources available to them.* A brief summary must suffice here.
It was his leadership of a three-day prison revolt in 1965 (riot was the word used by officialdom and the press) that condemned him to lose any hope for early release on parole. It has been calculated that, over his first few years, at least a quarter of his time was spent in the hole. Acts of defiance for which he was punished included the smuggling out of calls to action that found their way into the radical press – proposals, for instance, to occupy lands he deemed stolen from Native nations. A superb linguist, he regained full fluency in the tongue the residential schools had tried to erase. He took on an ancestral name meaning Thunderbird – he who throws bolts of lightning.
The festering contention between Swift and the White Clansmen came to a boil three years into Swift’s sentence, when he was grabbed from behind by two men while another laid his left cheek open with a knife, from eyelid to chin, causing impaired vision in the left eye. On hearing about that attack, Beauchamp kept it together for one day – during which he tried to visit Swift in a guarded emergency ward and was rebuffed – then went on a bender that found him, a week later, phoning his office for funds to fly back from New Orleans.
Through his recovery, Swift continued to decline visits from Beauchamp as he had declined many times before, refusing to answer his letters, refusing even to speak his name. There has been no known contact between the two men since.
Swift’s obduracy in this regard seemed excessive to Beauchamp until he reluctantly concluded that Swift believed he’d been persuaded to plead guilty by a green lawyer who had been inveigled by a cunning one. That is a scenario about which Beauchamp remained in denial for many years – maybe until this day, because he still waffles – and there can be little doubt it was one of the factors that catapulted him into his skid road phase.
As to Swift, at such times as he was not embroiled in prisoners’ rights crusades, he pursued a UBC correspondence degree. As a reward for earning it, he was escorted under guard to attend commencement at the Point Grey campus. On that day, June 16, 1967, eleven years and six months before the expiration of his sentence, he vanished into a mob of mortarboard-throwing grads. Picture this: a gowned young man, scarred like a pirate, a black patch over his eye, a scroll under his arm certifying him with a degree in history with honours, magically disappears not just from a university campus but from the country of his birth. It’s assumed he had confederates.
It may not be particularly useful but it is interesting nonetheless to compare the life paths of Beauchamp and Swift through the next two decades. Beauchamp may deny it now, but for the first half of the seventies he was busily buying into the North American dream – wife, family, attractive home in a posh neighbourhood – while earning prestige doing interesting, well-paid work. Deborah came along in 1973, and he was lovingly occupied with her. Annabelle was not yet having affairs openly. Those were years in which he found contentment, even happiness, to a degree that later eluded him, at least until he found peace on Garibaldi Island and the love of Margaret Blake.
Swift, however, while on the run found himself in the heady whirl of gun-toting guerrilla politics – the Weather Underground, the American Indian Movement in its early, militant years – then making his way to Mexico, to Cuba, and thence to East Berlin. There he attended Humboldt University and (if certain romantic modern European histories are correct) kept a safe house for the most radical of the seventies underground groups, the Rote Armee Fraktion, while sleeping with the anarchist cult figure Ulrike Meinhof.
A stay in Moscow followed, during which his bad eye was surgically repaired to eighty per cent of normal vision. Then a return to Berlin, to Prague, then Krakow. He was a hero of the Soviet bloc, of course, and much feted. At each stop he accumulated classes and credits and honours toward a doctorate in linguistics, finally conferred in 1979 by the Free University of Berlin. That’s when he took up with the anarchist punk poet Bettje Kristoff and began writing. The Canadian government tried to extradite him from West Berlin, but that attempt bogged down and was abandoned.
It was while Dr. Swift was composing Linguicide: The Death of Living Tongues – which went on to win the 1984 Feversham Medal – that his estrangement from Soviet-style socialism became apparent, as confirmed in several articles he produced
for the New Statesman. But he remained a proud radical, and in one of his rarely granted interviews (none came my way!), he claimed not to have deserted his cause but to have been deserted by it.
For Beauchamp, in comparison, the late seventies and early eighties were a blur of hard work and hard drink, getting criminals off by day, being the life of the party at night, suppressing the guilt associated with the Swift trial, suppressing the pain of cuckoldry – a man trapped by love. Finally, in 1985, after drunkenly falling though a skylight above his bedroom, he joined AA. Three weeks of forced sobriety in hospital, and some intense ruminations about his future, seem to have finally wrung him dry.
* See the appendix.
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2011
A carb job won’t solve nothing,” says Stoney from under the Fargo’s hood as its engine coughs and wheezes. “Maybe you want to retire the old girl from active duty, eh? I got dibs on a eighty-seven F-250 I think I can wangle for three large, plus dealer’s commission.”
I have spent ten times as much on repairs to my bionic pickup: valves, front end, clutch, wiring, brakes, omnia et omnia. The alleged master mechanic sold her to me originally, and somehow I have never found the heart to service her elsewhere. And so the Fargo is here again outside Stoney’s cluttered garage, sputtering, farting, finally expiring.
“I am not ready to give up on her. She’s family.” And Blunder Bay’s sole vehicle, other than a light tractor. Margaret keeps her Prius in Ottawa.
Stoney emerges from under the hood, gazes across his two acres of skeletonized relics. “My inventory of used carburetors is currently depleted, so I’m gonna have to move heaven and earth to locate a transplant.”
There follows the traditional ceremony: the haggling over fees and disbursements, the greasing of an already greasy palm. But I manage to secure a courtesy car.
“The Fargo is job one, and this here spiffy loaner is my guarantee of that.” Stoney points to an aging muscle car in the garage: a Mustang convertible, circa early 1980s. It seems to have benefited, if that’s the word, from a recent paint job: eggplant purple, with graffiti-esque designs of crackling lightning on the hood and on each door, a galloping horse with mane aflame. Hairy, testicular dingle balls. Black leather around the steering wheel.
“Picked up this here rag-roof cheap at a customs auction for my fleet of luxury rentals. It’s not for around here, though. It’s a city car – rides an inch off the ground; I already got a dent in the tran pan. Normally I would charge at least a token fee for such a hightest car, but not for the legendary Arthur Beauchamp.”
It’s dark in the garage but I make out rust spots at the back end, some hidden by decals. Stoney promises it will be serviced and brought around tonight. “By the way, I never had no chance to give my sincere commiserations over how you crapped out at the Fall Fair. I heard it was a crushing blow.”
“Thank you,” I say, inanely.
“Can I give you a ride somewhere, sire? On the house.”
“I’ll walk.” I have mail to pick up. I am prepared: hiking boots, packsack, a walking stick. It’s a sunny, laid-back Saturday afternoon on the Labour Day weekend, which I intend to enjoy at all costs. I wish Stoney well and limp off, my walking stick taking the burden of my left foot, still tender though newly fitted with orthotics. The discomfort is compounded by the wound reopened by the reminder of the lost Orfmeister.
I take the East Point cut-off, a steep trail but with a grand Pacific view. Below the escarpment, in Hopeless Bay, a pair of harbour seals is corralling a school of herring. Gulls spiral and dive for leftovers. A bald eagle awaits its turn on a tall low-bank fir. In backdrop to this wildlife display are the steep cliffs of neighbouring Ponsonby Island, where craggy arbutus and oak struggle from the cracks. Now, as I continue down to the store, the Salish Sea opens up to a view of the Olympic Massif in Washington, its white peaks.
The appeal is twenty days hence. In a few days I must cross the Salish Sea and isolate myself in the Tragger, Inglis library with old Riley, the research gnome, and somehow pull it all together – all the strands, the grounds. There are several.
First, Gene Borachuk. Now in his early seventies, healthier than most in their forties, he still hikes the mountains, skis the diamond runs at Whistler. Many years ago, after he retired from the RCMP – as an inspector – we had a chance meeting at which he expressed doubts about Gabriel’s guilt. When I got the nod for an appeal, he waived that boneheaded undertaking I’d given him and signed an affidavit avowing Gabriel was unmarked when he booked him but battered after Knepp and Jettles left his cell.
In itself, not much to vacate the guilty plea. But it establishes that two central police witnesses could reasonably be suspected of other perjuries. At appeal, Her Majesty’s emissaries will complain they’re at a disadvantage. Knepp and Jettles are ill-equipped to defend themselves; the former, at ninety, is in a Tucson retirement home, and the latter in a care facility and can no longer recognize family or friends.
My second ground involves the foot that washed up on Gambier Island in its men’s size-eight Puma. I got an order to exhume it – which of course attracted great public chatter – and to everyone’s shock, including mine, two X chromosomes showed up in the skeletal tissue. The defence had been misled by the Crown, I will argue, encouraged to believe it was a male foot – Dermot’s foot – a factor that led to the plea bargain.
That exhumation was also prompted by a dig through Dr. Mulligan’s archives that turned up a kind of suicide note – more a meditation on suicide than a cry for understanding. It had been buried in his papers for almost five decades. But how could that be? Would not scores of thesis researchers have pored through them?
The discovery of that note inspired an appeal that, old Riley informs me, holds the Commonwealth post-trial lateness record. I’d got leave to appeal from Justice Bill Webb, a crony, a fellow AA. That was in May, after advance proofs of Thirst for Justice showed up in Blunder Bay’s P.O. box. Though I read with dismay the personal calumnies in “Where the Squamish River Flows,” I will not deny that Wentworth’s dissection of my efforts helped propel me to action.
I finally clump my way to Hopeless Bay, the island’s commercial hub. Overlooking the public wharf is Abraham Makepeace’s General Store and Post Office, a venerable institution, and next to it his new licenced lounge. An architectural novelty thrown up by local tradespersons paying off their tabs in goods and labour, this sturdy post-and-beamer is several degrees out of plumb. It still smells of fresh-cut cedar – Makepeace couldn’t afford kiln-dried – and walls are already warping. Its most notable feature: a deck dangerously cantilevered over rocks and tidal pools at the toe of Hopeless Bay. Ernst Pound’s RCMP van is sitting among the beaters and rusting pickups parked out front, and he and his auxiliary, Kurt Zoller, are up there on that deck, lecturing several of the regulars.
Before tackling my shopping list, I head up the ramp to the deck, hoping to be a soothing presence. Pound has been testy of late, and Zoller, who runs the island’s water taxi, is an odd fellow with his twitches, flinches, and hints of paranoia. Slightly built, buried in a uniform a couple of sizes too big. Right now he is acting the nuisance, getting into peoples’ faces, smelling their breath.
“This one has definitely been smoking.” Zoller jingles his handcuffs.
“Cool it, Kurt,” Pound says. He is trying to ignore me, but my presence may be adding to his irritation. “None of you individuals are the required three point two metres from this building, so I’m gonna have to pull Abraham in for not enforcing the smoking bylaw.”
A chorus of insincere apology – unnecessary, as the case fails for lack of evidence. No cigarettes are visible, nor an ashtray. Presumably all exhibits disappeared when the boys saw the cops driving up.
“None of us want Abraham doing hard time, so I’ll let this infraction go if you gentlemen help us out about some of the local plantations.” Pound is referring to Garibaldi’s main agricultural export. It’s harvest time. Hi
s pathetic ruse to extort information is greeted by grins and silence.
“Come on, guys, or they’re going to transfer me off this rock.” He’s reduced to begging. “Don’t want nobody’s names, just locations. A couple of small grows. A hundred plants is all, just to show I’m doing my job.”
Ernie Priposki, already in his cups, issues a challenge. “Hey, Ernst, instead of putting the squeeze on us lawful abiding citizens, why ain’t you out lookin’ for that runaway girl from … from …” He tries to get his tongue around it. “Skachewan.”
Pound turns to me. “See what I’m up against? A wall of silence. Kurt, I’m gonna have a word with the counsellor here while you explain to these losers they can either do their duty as citizens or we’ll be waiting around the next bend with a radar gun and a breath test kit.”
He leads me inside, takes a stool. I pause by the bulletin board, study a missing persons notice. The girl from Saskatchewan, Kestrel Dubois: fourteen, pretty, dark, slight, staring sullenly at the camera. She went missing five days ago, was spotted on a B.C.-bound bus.
Emily LeMay, the voluptuous barkeep, sets down coffees, then chucks me under the chin. “You old sweetie. When I think what coulda been.” A sigh. It disheartens me that Emily seems to have given up pursuing me, further proof I’m over the hill.
“Cut Priposki off,” Pound tells her. “I see you serving intoxicated individuals, I’m filing charges.”
“No wonder she gave you the heave-ho.” She flounces off.
The island is abuzz over the open affair between the constable’s wife and the telephone man. Unable to sustain the mellowing effect of two stints on Garibaldi, Pound has become a surly, snarling cuckold.
“I’m way down on my catches for this year. Unless I pull something off they’re going to put me behind a desk.” He looks at me in a needy way. “You’re in the know around here, Arthur. Just a little tip – nobody’ll guess it came from you.”
I'll See You in My Dreams: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel Page 28
