by Scott Young
She was alone and wouldn’t speak. Just sat there. Maxine sat next to her and put her arms around Gloria’s shoulders and said, “Listen, sweetie, look, we both know what you’re going through. Let us help.”
Gloria just looked at her.
I asked if she knew where I could find William Cavendish. Her eyes might have indicated she knew, but she didn’t reply.
“When you left Maxine’s with William Sunday night, did you go with him to the Mackenzie?”
Finally, she spoke. “No, I wanted to, but we went to the Eskimo Inn and he had a couple more drinks and told me to wait for him there.”
“And he went to the Mackenzie?”
“He must have, because he took his father . . .” she paused and took a deep breath . . . “took Morton to the hospital, didn’t he?”
The Caribou Arms used to be a restaurant called the Raven’s Nest. It had served good food, some of the best in the North, Arctic char and musk-ox and caribou steaks, great French fries, strong coffee, but eventually it had closed due to some dispute about the building being sold, a new owner having different plans. Not much more than a year ago he had re-opened. He sold hamburgers and steak-and-kidney pie and the place was decorated like every other ersatz English pub in Canada. Apparently you could buy the whole deal in Edmonton, fake beams and fake velvet wallpaper, fake hunting prints and old maps of London on the walls and an expert in fake English pubs to put it all together until presto, it was the Caribou Arms. A can of English beer, Double Diamond or Bass Ale or Newcastle, cost $7.50.
“How long did you wait for him?”
“It seemed like forever.”
She was wearing pants and a jacket of that stuff called acid-wash, blue with white streaks. Her blue parka with Arctic symbols on the fringe at the bottom and wolverine fur on the hood was thrown over a nearby chair. She had been drinking a vodka on the rocks, which was almost finished. When I was ordering she asked for a Coors Light. I really wanted to ask her in detail about her relationship with Morton Cavendish. Maybe if Maxine hadn’t been sitting there looking so worried, I would have.
Gloria watched me as I took a swallow of Double Diamond.
“I didn’t know you drank beer.”
“I don’t, much. But order a drink here and you have to get a triple or you can’t taste it.”
Gloria said with a faint smile, “You can feel it, though.”
“Okay,” I said. “So you were waiting for William and he didn’t come back. How long did you wait?”
“I don’t know. Long. I was just thinking to hell with it, I’d go home, he could find me there if he wanted, when Jules Bonner came along and told me to come to his place, that William would be over later, so I went with him.”
She paused briefly. “I had the impression that William had called Jules, or even gone to his place, and asked him to get me over there. When we got there Jules told me there’d been a big fight, William and his father, and Morton had collapsed and had to be taken to the hospital.”
“A fight about what?”
“I don’t know, but Jules still thought William would be along any minute.
“I got sleepy and Jules gave me a blanket on the couch and next thing I knew it was morning and the news had just come on the radio that”—again she paused and swallowed hard when she came to Morton Cavendish’s name—“Morton was in real bad shape and might have to be flown out. I felt like trying to see him, but I didn’t. Then I just stayed there. I felt rotten. I kept thinking I’d hear from William but I didn’t.”
I pressed a little.
“About the big fight Jules mentioned. Did he give you any idea at all what it was about?”
“No.”
“Any ideas?”
Deep breath again. “Every time William and his father got together they argued.”
“What about?”
She shrugged, opened her mouth, closed it, didn’t answer for a minute, then said, “Morton always wanted to know where William was getting money to live on, stuff like that. They just plain didn’t get along.”
“Was William violent with you when he was drinking?”
“Never.”
“Do you think he and his father ever came to blows. I mean, physical violence?”
She didn’t answer.
I said, “Either of you happen to know what doctor was on duty when they brought Morton in?”
Maxine nodded. “Bob Zimmer. He was quoted on the news.”
I asked Gloria if she had seen William at all since then.
She was back to shaking her head.
It suddenly occurred to me that I hadn’t seen him at the airport, either, where you might think he’d have gone, despite the fight with his father. He would have known that his father was being flown out.
“No idea where he went after he was at the hospital?”
Then it came in a burst, tears brimming in her eyes. “I tried all over, all day Monday. I couldn’t get Jules, even. A couple of other guys who hung out with the two of them a lot flew out that day on that flight that went down—you know, Harold Johns, well, he wasn’t really with them that much but I couldn’t find Albert Christian or Benny Batten either, because it turned out they’d gone with Harold, but of course nobody knew that until yesterday. Albert’s girlfriend, Julie, was the one who told the police who was with Harold on the flight. She was mad as hell.”
“What about?” I asked.
“Albert had taken her car without telling her and just left it out by the Komatik Air office where Harold took off.”
That was the first I had known that Johns didn’t take off from the airport. But that wasn’t unusual. These bush flying outfits often had riverside locations. That was handy in summer when they were using floats and when they switched to skis they’d do business out of the same locations. Saved money on airport office space, too. The river wasn’t solid ice everywhere right after freeze-up in the fall but now in January it would hold anything, let alone the kind of light planes Komatik Air had. I still figured Gloria knew more than she was telling me but maybe I could get it elsewhere.
I got up and said to Maxine, “See you later.”
She reached up soberly and patted my bum. “Take care.”
It was broad daylight when I left the Caribou. Three weeks ago, the month of dark days when the sun didn’t show at all had ended, and now there was about five hours of daylight. I walked down the street in sunshine and found Dr. Robert Zimmer, MD, in his office not far from the Inuvik General Hospital. In his waiting room were two little old Inuit ladies with wrinkled brown faces and toothless smiles. One was smoking a pipe. Both wore bright gingham shifts over the warm skin clothes beneath. These old ones and some of the younger Inuit, too, made the shifts themselves. They fell to about calf length and had fringed bottoms. I always think they look colorful on the street, neat and individual, dressed-up town Inuit.
The doctor looked surprised. “Matteesie! Come in.” He spoke a few words in the Inuit tongue to the old ones that meant he’d see them in a minute and they grinned and nodded. He’d been here twenty years and had a twenty-three-foot launch with fish-finding gear that amused the locals. He also hunted caribou and polar bear and had a dog team; everything but a wife, who had left him years earlier to go back to Kitchener, Ontario.
He closed the door, went behind his desk, gestured to a chair and looked at me.
“It’s about Morton Cavendish,” I said.
“Somebody said you’d been around but took the plane out yesterday, Matteesie. I thought of you when I heard that terrible business. It was on the radio that you’d been right there beside him. You back in the police?”
“Sort of I guess I never really left.”
We both laughed. It really was pretty ridiculous, but it hadn’t taken long for people here to decide I’d gone civilian, moving to Northern Affairs.
At
that thought I had a momentary flash of what kind of language I could expect from Buster when he found out what I was doing. Every once in a while, too, I thought of my superiors in Northern Affairs and how they’d dither over how the Russians would react if it came out that this certified Northern Affairs man, police work all behind him, was back getting involved the way I was.
But I couldn’t do anything about that now. Maybe it would never make the papers. A cop, without portfolio. The search for the downed plane was stalled today. Bad weather a few hundred miles south, which meant Norman Wells, Fort Norman, and beyond. I’d kept track on the radio. The weather was okay for the bigger aircraft but no good for tree-hopping while looking for something on the ground. Even without being able to fly, I got the impression from the radio reports that the searchers couldn’t figure out why they hadn’t found anything or heard anything. They’d assume that the pilot would have tried to come down on an open space and if anybody was alive they’d put out colored markers and run a homing device. As far as I knew nothing yet had been seen or heard. But as soon as something was, I could get there in a matter of hours. I was keeping Buster’s orders in mind, but meanwhile—a man was entitled to a hobby, right?
“What I wanted to know,” I said, “was what kind of shape Morton was in when you first saw him at the hospital.”
“Well, to start with, he must have had an angina attack before the stroke. He’d had angina before, you know, enough that he carried nitro pills with him. In fact, he still had some nitro clutched in one hand when he was brought in. But then sometimes he ate the damn things like peanuts. He must have either taken some, or been about to take some, when he had the stroke.”
“Was he conscious?”
“Not when I first saw him. Slipped in and out several times later. He tried to speak. Seemed desperate to tell me something. I tried to get him to write it, but he couldn’t hold a pencil.”
“Would he have come out of it?”
“Well, you can never tell, sometimes the first stroke is just the start and is followed by others—but I did tell people that I thought the chances were not too bad, if we got him to a good stroke facility, like Edmonton. Might take weeks of therapy but sometimes it’s quite amazing, a guy seems totally gone, but over weeks or months, he’ll come back.”
“Anything else you can tell me? About him, or William, or whatever?”
“When Morton was brought in the son was a little loaded, I’d guess. Smelled of booze, anyway. Scared, but then who wouldn’t be, seeing his father’s eyes rolling around like a pinball machine when he tried to speak? Morton had a big bruise on his forehead. I asked William about it and he seemed to be trying to think when it had happened, but he didn’t answer.”
“Was it consistent with a fall?”
“Could be.”
“Or being hit? Slugged?”
“Well, hell,” the doctor said slowly, “yeah, I guess so . . .” He looked at me more sharply. “Yeah, I guess so. I guess that’s all pretty academic, now. From what I hear, I guess the bruise wouldn’t show any more.”
When I left there I thought I’d better check in at RCMP headquarters. The RCMP “G” division covers the whole North, with about 240 men in four sub-divisions and thirty-nine local detachments, mostly headed by a corporal or a sergeant. The Inuvik sub has something close to sixty officers, being one of the busiest subs anywhere. The inspector was an old friend, Ted Huff. Damn near a foot taller than me. Very straight-ahead officer. But when I walked in to the ground floor of the two-storey headquarters building and three or four officers had finished making heavy jokes about me and the civil service, I found out that the inspector had taken the police Twin Otter over to Banks Island that morning for the christening of the first child of the corporal in charge of the Sachs Harbour detachment.
“It’s sort of a mercy flight,” one constable said. “Young Lester over there, his wife had a bad time giving birth and her parents down in Kingston were all worried. They tried for weeks to get her to fly back to civilization with the baby, I guess they figure Kingston is pretty civilized. She’s a good type and stood them off. But it is lonely at Sachs, you know, her in the North for the first time, more housebound than ever because of the kid. I think the inspector just figured it was a nice day and he’d go over there and show that the brass cares.”
He’d be back in an hour, they figured. I said I’d be back about the same time. In front of the Mackenzie Hotel a couple of taxis sat with their engines running.
“Know where Komatik Air hangs out?” I asked the first driver.
“Sure do. Hop in.”
I got in the front seat. In the North, a passenger is thought to be from Toronto if he chooses to ride in the back seat when he could be up with the driver.
This one looked at me closely. He was middle-aged, originally German, and had been here since 1962 that I knew of. “Hey, you’re that guy used to be the special, eh? Matteesie, got to be famous since you left, eh?”
I try not to let it go to my head.
He made a skidding turn to head west on Distributor Street toward the river, back past police headquarters and Arctic College. He turned right at Franklin and soon was in streets I’d once known well from taking drunk girls home and picking up guys for beating up wives, and so on. Once or twice a murder. Natives like to be by a river. This area by the riverbank had become their part of town, Slavey and Loucheux and Eskimos. Sometimes in those early days there’d be ten to a one-room shack, and like as not some girl who had taken secretarial training and got a government job would get up in the morning and have to step over the sleeping people to dress and then walk a mile or so to work, where she’d compete with white girls who only had to walk through a heated tunnel from their subsidized apartments to get to the office. Sometimes, too, when these same Native girls faced going back to the crowded shack at night they went to the beer parlor at the Mackenzie instead. It had been a great system for transforming eager teenagers into twenty-seven-year-old hags.
Komatik Air’s office was in an old prefabricated building called a 512 because that was their square footage. A lot were shipped in when the town was created in the early 1950s. Yellow light shone faintly from a window. A pickup truck stood by the door, with the engine plugged in to an electric cord leading to an outlet on the building’s outer wall.
A weather-worn Beaver was out on the ice near the shore, with a tarpaulin draped over its engine like a tent. There’d be a heat-pot in there to keep the engine from freezing up. The pilot like as not would have an old felt hat tucked away inside the cabin for straining gasoline when he had to gas up from some cache of a few dozen barrels on the shores of some frozen lake. I told the driver to wait, and knocked on the door.
A voice called, “It’s open.”
The man behind the desk was an Inuk, about my size, five feet six, and with a face that lit up like a beacon.
“Matteesie!”
“Thomasee!”
He came around the desk a little shyly because I’d been gone a long time and he wouldn’t be as sure as he once had been. He stopped a few feet from me. “I haven’t seen you since the time I picked you up with that old trapper away out on the Barrens south of Paulatuk! Him and his furs and that Loucheux woman he lived with, dead as a white girl’s ass.” Abruptly he looked stricken. “Jeez, I’m sorry, Matteesie. I forgot your wife is . . .”
Then we hugged one another. Thomasee Nuniviak. About my age. Born around Letty Harbour on the Arctic shore and raised like I had been, more muktuk than caribou. We’d been at school here together. He’d gone to Yellowknife for the engine course and worked for others around aircraft and then got his pilot’s license. He ran water into a kettle and plugged it in. We caught up. It was a little while before I asked, “Heard anything about your aircraft?”
He shook his head. “Not a damn thing. That what you’re here about? I heard you’re with Northern Affairs now
. You hear anything?”
“No. But I’m interested.” I told him why, the Harold Johns connection. “I’m told he didn’t say where he was going.”
“Damn right he didn’t. I’d like to ask him why.”
He busied himself with mugs and teabags. The water boiled. He poured mine first and politely shoved over a can of condensed milk that had two holes punched in the top. I added some to the tea.
“Did he, uh, goof off like this often?”
“Never before. Good pilot. No problems with Harold at all.” He paused. “Policee been down, too, asking the same. The only thing I can think is he didn’t know exactly where he was going to end up. Like maybe this Albert Christian comes in and says he wants to go to Arctic Red and somewhere else from there, he’ll let Harold know at Arctic Red, so Harold would figure he could phone when he got there and tell me what was going on.”
“But he never called.”
“No, but hell, you know, where he got to, if it’s south of Fort Norman, there ain’t many goddamn phone booths! Anyway, all I can do is hope.”
“You know the guys he took, Batten and Christian?”
He pursed his lips and let out a long hiss of air. “That’s what bothers me. I don’t know Batten except to see. But Christian had done one or two trips with us before, down to Wrigley once, another time to Old Crow. Don’t know exactly what for. But we don’t generally ask. A guy’s got money and wants a flight, we take him, maybe bring him back. You know how it is.” He grinned. “That girl whose car Christian left here, she was some mad. She would’ve killed him. Didn’t plug in her car, didn’t leave a note, nothing. They must have been in a hurry, is all I can figure.”
“How far could they get without refueling?”
He didn’t have a useful answer. “You know, depends on flying conditions. But he knew where the gas caches are.”
Obviously that was the least of his worries. It seemed he trusted Harold Johns.
“The police think Christian and Batten have been bringing in drugs. Maybe even on one of your flights.”
