by Scott Young
Then there was once when I was jolted again. I was pressed closely against William’s back. Couldn’t help it. That’s all the room there was. And suddenly I had a distinct feeling that he was in the grips of something uncontrollable: his back was heaving the way it might when a man is stifling sobs. It was only for a minute or less, but it shook me, forced my mind back to the main event. Unless I misread the signs completely on our only other meeting, with Gloria at Maxine’s, he was one of those unfortunates who couldn’t run his own life very well, but probably would have wished to have his father proud of him; could do battle with his father over how he lived his life, but would have given anything to have his father say once, just once, “Good job, son.” Or, “Thanks, son.” But also was just enough of a fumbler that he could have unwittingly played some part in his father’s death that would haunt him to his own dying day.
I kept thinking that Bonner should be picked up again if only because, apart from William, he seemed the only one available who might know something about the murder that I didn’t. Yet.
The ride seemed interminable, as well as wild. William had the advantage on me in every respect—the handlebars to hang on to, a sight of what lay immediately ahead. When the terrain was rough he could see a bump coming and be ready while each jolt was a total surprise to me and my spine, which rattled up and down like a pogo stick. I tried craning my neck around him to give myself some warning, but he was too bulky. When I did manage to get a brief look at what was coming up, it was never reassuring. The meager daylight was failing. In the growing dusk the headlight beam jerked back and forth, up and down, now dissolving into the darkening sky and now flashing across a stretch of river bank or scrubby trees.
The only break I got was that William avoided the stretch of fairly rough bush that had hidden him for a while on the way out two days before. This time he stayed on the river where he could make better time. I finally just hung on and let my thoughts wander on what I didn’t know of Christian, Batten and Johns, the three I’d never seen except on that wall of photos and clippings in Gloria’s room.
Christian, oddly enough, looked Mediterranean—Lebanese, Greek, whatever. His hair was very dark and fitted his head like a skullcap, close to his eyebrows on both sides, and going down into a moustache and beard. The whole effect was of a poker face framed in dark hair, wide at the cheekbones but narrowing at both the forehead and the chin. Batten was a different bird altogether. He had thick grey or white hair in sharp contrast to black (or at least dark) eyebrows, a round face, a smallish mouth that in the photo was open, as if he’d been talking, showing stained and crooked lower teeth. His eyes were unrevealing but his whole expression was not an attractive one; not mean, just closed.
The photo of Johns had shown a handsome man, dark brown hair falling over his forehead on the right side, brushed over his ear on the left. Thin face, long nose, wide mouth, deep set eyes, and unseen but at least as important, a background that—despite the single outburst of bad behavior that had lost him his job in the east and brought him out here—was geared to traditional values.
They were either down and alive, down and dead, or down with some alive and some dead. In the North that image of a crumpled plane in the bush, or out on the Barrens, or on some lake ice, was familiar. Yet relatively few crackups were fatal. Experienced bush pilots were usually so good, lakes, rivers and open spaces so plentiful, that one would never get into trouble without planning immediately what he was going to do about it.
If they had landed safely, kept radio silence and all three were in it together, the money would be enough reason for not using their radio. Until they were really desperate, and even then, rescue would be a dirty word if it meant both they and the money wound up in custody. But how could they manage to avoid that, without outside help? And who could be the outside help? Did that come back to William?
But maybe the three of them weren’t partners. If Johns was as dependable as my old friend Thomas Nuniviak said, he would want to be operating his crash finder. The others wouldn’t, meaning Batten and Christian against Johns, maybe in a real battle of wills, strength, even brutality.
I thought all that, bouncing along at high speed with William on the snowmobile. That one show of emotion was not repeated that I could notice. I wondered if he just didn’t give a damn what happened next as long as he didn’t have to face squarely what had happened in the recent past.
When we reached the first lights of the town’s outskirts I yelled, “Stop at the detachment office where we can talk.”
Instead, we zipped past the detachment and on through the nearly empty streets until he braked by a small house. When he turned off the machine, the silence was deafening. For a moment we just sat there. Then a door opened and in the light I could see the tall figure of Paul Pennycook, who’d visited me at Bear Lodge on Thursday night with the advice that William’s fuckin’ business was his own fuckin’ business, which I now was doubting more than ever.
Abruptly, all my other emotions dissolved into anger. I climbed off stiffly, as close to making an unwarranted—at least by the real evidence so far—arrest as I’d ever been. If I’d ever had much sympathy for William it was gone now. I faced him. Pennycook watched us from the door.
“You can walk the rest of the way,” William said flatly.
I didn’t give my next move any thought, just decided that I wasn’t getting anywhere being polite. Maybe leveling with him would produce an effect that nothing else had.
“What I want to know first,” I said, “is if you know you’re a suspect in some drug dealing in Inuvik.”
Of course he knew, if Gloria was right. She was sure his father had challenged him on that point. I believed her.
He looked uncomfortable but he still said, “Like hell I am!” “I also want to know if you and your father came to blows that night before he collapsed, and what the fight was about, and where he got the bruise on his head that he had when he was brought into the hospital and Doc Zimmer made a note of.”
He stared at me with a flash in his eyes of what I took to be deep apprehension. We were standing two feet apart, by the snowmobile. I decided to keep right on.
“I also want to know if you have any idea where Albert Christian and Ben Batten were going along with half a million dollars of drug money when Harold Johns flew them out of there in that Cessna that disappeared.”
He glowered. “That’s all you want to know, eh?”
“For now.”
“Fuck off,” he said.
But I had the plug out. I didn’t mind Pennycook hearing. Might help. Somebody had to convince William that stonewalling was getting him nowhere. The convincer might as well be me.
I yelled, “You’ve been treated like a guy who has just lost his father and should be given some breaks! You wouldn’t know a goddamn break if it farted in your face.”
We were now practically nose to nose, or would have been if my nose had been about six inches higher.
“So I’m telling you that if you don’t at least try to help us work on who the hell killed your father, you are going to have to get a goddamn court order even to go to his funeral, and that’s a promise.”
For a few seconds I thought he was going to swing at me, but he didn’t. It was strange to see in such a powerful-looking man, but his face suddenly crumpled and he fumbled, “Look, I’m upset, I feel terrible about all this, I’ll try to talk to you in the morning.”
He turned and took a couple of steps toward the open door where Pennycook still was listening, but keeping out of it.
I called to his retreating back, thinking that when he seemed to be on the run one more shot was in order, “Okay, that’ll give me a chance to get on the radio and find out whether we’ve managed to trace Billy Bob Hicks.”
He wheeled slowly and carefully, now really looking like a man who was trying to avoid acknowledging a telling blow.
“Who the hell is Billy Bob Hicks?” he asked, without conviction. He was bushed, confused, beset. I almost felt sorry for him.
“You know who he is and what he’s like. You know he’s a friend of Christian and Batten.”
“But what’s he got to do with me?”
“You tell me.”
“So you don’t know nothin’!”
I hesitated. I thought I’d given him enough. He would have some drinks and do some talking, maybe brave talking, maybe sad talking, but I thought maybe that all through his long evening and night, he might have to pause now and again and wonder if he was playing his cards right.
Pennycook had stayed back through this but now he walked a few steps toward us with what almost seemed like a shy smile. “Hey,” he said to me, “you were just on TV.” He turned to William. “The guy might help, William,” he said. “Jesus, he’s supposed to be awful good, according to the piece on the CBC.”
Imagine that, the CBC making me credible to even one guy in Fort Norman.
William just turned away. I let him go. As I walked slowly back to the detachment, I racked my CBC-endorsed brains for the key to unlock what he knew but wasn’t saying.
Maybe the thought of a key abruptly made me wonder again about his dog Smokey. If No Legs hadn’t made such a point about the way William felt about that dog, I might not have thought of him again. Which, as it turned out, would have been a mistake.
By then it was deep dusk. Soon it would be pitch dark. I figured that if and when Edie and No Legs came in, she would head for the detachment. But given the relative speed of dogs versus snowmobile, that couldn’t be for two or three hours. They had powerful flashlights. If they had kept going, William’s trail was fresh enough that even a mediocre lead dog would have a chance. If that big Seismo was as good as he seemed, they’d get here sooner or later.
It turned out to be sooner rather than later. Around 7:30 I could see her coming, driving her team hard. I went to the detachment door just in time to see her go past. No Legs, riding the komatik, waved. She didn’t even look my way, let alone stop to tell me thanks for an excellent day in the open air or any other appreciative things that might have occurred to her. In fact, she didn’t even slow down. In a few minutes she drove past again, going in the other direction, toward her own place. Her outfit no longer included No Legs.
“Well, well,” I deduced shrewdly (the CBC would be proud of me), “somehow I have offended Edie.”
I walked the few hundred yards to where she lived. She was hard at work. She knew I was there but chaining six rambunctious dogs takes concentration. She didn’t look at me until she had all six securely tethered far enough apart that they couldn’t eat one another in the night.
“Have any trouble getting back?” I asked, for openers.
“Obviously not,” she said.
“I want to thank you for your help. It didn’t work out the way I thought it might, but—”
“Never mind,” she snapped. “Better pick up your stuff.” She stomped into her house and firmly closed the door.
I picked up the tent and survival gear. It was what they call a lazy man’s load, no second trips, I thought, as I staggered back to the detachment. No Legs was parked outside, on his sled. The office had no ramp for the disabled and rather steep steps. The bulb over the door didn’t throw much light but at least we could see one another.
“What’s Edie mad at?” I enquired.
He looked at me with his lips pressed together the way a person might do if recalling some action that he was beginning to regret.
“She thought we oughta make camp and come back here in the mornin’. I said I thought we could get back in all right, with that fresh trail for the dogs to follow. She said of course we could get back all right, that wasn’ the point.” He allowed himself a small smile. “So we came in. She didn’ talk on the way.”
I had an idea he wasn’t telling me everything, but then he might not wish to give it in detail. I don’t imagine the detail included any consideration that the news would have swept through the town like wildfire if it were known that he and Edie stayed out all night in a seven-foot tent when they didn’t really have to. Neither of them, it seemed to me, would have done other than what they felt like doing at the time, if they’d happened to agree on it. Obviously, they hadn’t.
“Maybe you missed your big chance,” I said.
“I thought of that, don’ think I didn’, but”—ruefully—“I figured I should come back and get my sister and maybe have William over for dinner, so we can talk. I mean, the poor guy . . .” He stopped.
“Is that what’s going to happen?” I was pretty sure from his expression that it wasn’t.
“Well, Cecilia is at the Pennycook’s with quite a few other people but what is goin’ on there is mainly drinkin’, right now. Which ain’t my favorite pastime anymore.”
“Do you think the main trouble with William is the business about his father, or something else?”
He didn’t answer directly. He was choosing his words carefully. “He didn’ have to go as far out as he did, wherever that was, just to be alone for a while.” His eyes were troubled. “I just can’t figure what happened to Smokey.”
That bothered me, too. Maybe there was an answer. I couldn’t think what it would be, but tried a few on No Legs. “Of course, the dog could have got hurt, or lost, or chased a caribou, say, and never came back, and William figured he’d make his way home somehow in time, a smart dog like that.”
No Legs just looked at me.
When he left, poling off slowly toward his own place, I had an idea of the questions he was beginning to face. The one about missing a camp-out with Edie would be the least of them.
I went back into the detachment office. Nicky Jerome had come out of his room at the back and was sweeping up, tidying desks. He looked up with a grin. “When you were out just now the corp’ral phoned and says he still has some of that rum and that Bertha has thawed some more caribou, steaks this time. They’re expecting you.”
That was the best news I’d heard lately. I stood there, considering things I might do first. Meaning, before the rum.
I thought of calling Buster but decided against it. If I called anybody it should be headquarters in Yellowknife, but if anything big had happened they’d have let this detachment in on it for sure.
I thought of calling Lois, but I decided against that, too. Her unusually friendly attitude the other night had been unsettling. It was so much like the times of long ago, when I’d been studying to be a white man and giving her more breaks as a woman and a wife. If that kind of thing went on, I might find myself rethinking other matters that I didn’t have time in my head for, right now.
I called Maxine. She was just home. She said that Jules Bonner was around town, had been questioned and released, apparently unscathed, but had stayed away from Gloria totally.
“But he’s not a worry to her for a while, anyway,” she said.
“Why not? He become a born-again nice guy?”
She laughed. “What I mean is Gloria left on the afternoon Canadian for Yellowknife. They’re having a service there for Morton, you know.”
“No, I didn’t know. When?”
She said CBC news hadn’t been able to get a straight answer yet. “The people running it hadn’t been able to get in touch with William, last I heard, but when they can find him they want to do it fairly fast. A lot of the big wheels are due in Ottawa for some parliamentary committee or other. They’ve already had the thing postponed a week. Morton was supposed to go, you know. Lead the delegation.”
I wondered about the kind of shape William was in for an emotional memorial service, which this one sure as hell would be.
Maxine suddenly giggled. “There was a piece on TV about you.” She had a really nice giggle. She could laugh at a guy without sounding mean. It’s a gif
t not everybody has. “The mighty Matteesie Kitologitak, scourge of bad guys from Pangnirtung to Herschel Island. Almost made me proud to know you.”
“Almost, but not quite, eh? Because you know how weak I am in the middle of the night.”
She giggled again. “Oh, I’ve never thought that.”
“Yeah, yeah. Well, I’m firing blanks these days.”
I told her, without details, that I’d hooked up with William finally, but to hold the applause. This memorial business in Yellowknife was a complication I had to think about.
“You going?” she asked. “Quite a few people from here are.”
“I haven’t had time to decide.”
It had some angles, but they didn’t include any pluses for me in going to Yellowknife. If William was gone from here for a couple of days he’d at least be within’ surveillance distance of the North’s greatest concentration of Mounties. If the weather held, and the forecast was okay, that would give me a chance to get back out on the trail to find out where William had been for the last two days. Maybe I could even hunt for a lost dog.
“Where’s Gloria staying?” I asked. “She’s at the Yellowknife Inn,” she said.
That’s where Natives usually stay in Yellowknife. The attached Miners’ Mess cafeteria is where all visiting Natives congregate eventually, Inuit at one table, Dene with several tables together, Metis tables here and there. All peoples separate.
Eventually we told each other to take care, and said good-bye. By now the powers that be in Yellowknife must have got to William. Even phone messages to the band council’s office would mean he’d know about it by now at Pennycook’s. Well, he’d said that he’d talk to me in the morning. I didn’t count on learning much but it was always a possibility. Maybe I should have kept on pushing when I had him on the run. I found myself hoping that William wouldn’t be too hung over to catch a morning flight. The odds were that he would go as soon as possible, partly to leave me behind. Also, the sympathetic support he was getting in Fort Norman was about the best he could hope for anywhere right now. If he didn’t go to a memorial service for his father, a lot of people might start wondering if the presence of the paunchy little Mountie from the Barrenlands who was harassing good old William might make more sense than they’d been willing to admit.
