The Raids

by Mick Lowe

  Both men began to herd the demonstrators into McAdoo’s car, which led the shuffling, disgruntled procession up Regent to Elm Street, and back down the hill towards downtown.

  Inside the Mine Mill Hall, morning found the occupiers emerging from the warm but uncomfortable cocoons of their sleeping bags, stretching tiredly after a night’s sleep that had brought all the peaceful repose of an all-night bombing raid.

  Foley Gilpin, who had elected to spend the night inside the Hall, was happy just to be alive. He walked stiffly to the door of Sworski’s office, knocked and entered.

  Spike was already awake, listening to Hartley Hubbs’ news bulletins on CKSO.

  “’Morning, Foley … Well, if this is all the work of the CIA as you claim, they didn’t need to start up their own radio station. Voice of Freedom, was it?

  “Liberation,” interjected the newspaperman.

  “Yes, well, whatever. They’ve no need, anyway, because they’ve got CKSO! They haven’t stopped pumping up this nonsense,” Sworski gestured toward the jagged outline of what had been his office window, “since it all started last night.”

  “True enough,” Gilpin reflected. “But remember, Spike, ever since the raids started Steel has been one of the station’s biggest advertisers, what with all the air time they’ve bought to take out ads smearing Local 598, and you personally. As one of my wisest colleagues said recently ‘Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one.’”

  “Yeah?” replied Sworski, rubbing his bloodshot eyes with both hands, “He sure knew what he was talking about. We gave it our best shot, old friend, but it just always seemed like no matter what we did, we always came up a day late and a buck short against ’em.”

  Gilpin did not disagree, but instead he cautiously approached Spike’s busted-out window.

  “Pretty well deserted out there now, Spike. Guess they’ve had their fun and gone home.” Traffic was even beginning to stream slowly past on Regent Street, Gilpin noticed. Very slowly, given that it was the boomtown’s usually manic rush hour; rubberneckers, Gilpin guessed, curious to inspect the Union Hall after the well-publicized events of the night before. The place must have looked like a bombed-out building. The hammer-and-sickle still fluttered, mockingly, in the morning breeze.

  To this day, Foley Gilpin cannot quite explain what it was that first tweaked his attention … just a vague something over on the other side of Queen’s Athletic Field, so far away in the uncertain early morning light he could barely make it out …

  Gilpin glanced back around Sworski’s office, and he spotted Spike’s high-powered field glasses. “Mind if I use these?”

  Sworski merely shrugged. “Knock yourself out.”

  Gilpin quickly grabbed the binoculars and returned to the gaping, jagged window. He removed his eyeglasses and laid them on the corner of Spike’s desk before pointing the binoculars at the indistinct objects that had first drawn his attention, twisting the gnarled focus knob to gain a sharp focal plane. They were a powerful instrument, and Gilpin found it difficult to hold the binoculars steady enough to see clearly. Just breathing seemed to throw him off, as often as not. But then suddenly, as if by magic, the newspaperman succeeded in coordinating the necessary conditions all at once, at least for a split second. And then he saw with sudden, foreshortened crystal clarity: two figures standing side by side, the shorter one in a rumpled, nondescript trench coat, the taller one angular, athletic, in blue jeans and a grey, hooded sweatshirt. It was him! The mystery man—he was almost certain! It took Gilpin’s breath away, and the field glasses jiggled ever so slightly and the frame was lost.

  Exasperated, Gilpin pulled the binoculars away from his eyes, snatched his spectacles from Sworski’s desk, and put them on before squinting at the distant figures in the hope he could get a better aim for another look. He snatched his specs off his face once again, peered through the binocular eyepiece, twisting the focus knob this way and that. But it was no use. Either the view was in focus and the frame was lost, or everything was so blurry that there was no frame, to speak of, at all. Finally, Gilpin gave up at his attempt for a close-up view, and put his eyeglasses back on. Once again, he peered across the athletic field. Yes, they were still there, no doubt about it. This was not a figment of his imagination.

  Across the distance of Queen’s Athletic Field a pair of solitary figures stood watching the front of the Mine Mill Hall. Clearly, the night-long siege was drawing to a close. The shorter observer, the one wearing a trench coat, was scanning the front of the Union Hall with his own binoculars. “There,” he pronounced with satisfaction. “That’ll give ’em something to remember, ’stead of your little, ah, misadventure in that alley downtown last summer. What were you thinking?”

  His companion shrugged. “I didn’t like the little shit-face. Those snot-nosed college kids are gonna be big trouble, and I don’t mean just for the Agency. They’re gonna jeopardize the entire war effort before they’re done, maybe even the President …”

  Trench Coat looked up at him in disbelief. “So we go around kicking the crap outta them? That’s your solution?”

  “Spoiled brats,” averred the athletic figure, who stood with his legs stretched wide and his arms crossed over his chest. “We don’t dare slap ’em around down there.” A note of contempt entered his voice. “All the bleeding hearts would be raising bloody hell if we did. Look, we’re gonna have to deal with punks like that eventually, I just thought this place and that time would be more convenient …”

  Trench coat emitted an audible groan. “You thought? You thought? For Chrissakes, this isn’t Berlin in ’45! Please do me the favour of not thinking when you’re in the field. Simply following orders would suffice. Got that?”

  The tall figure simply shrugged. “Sure. Whatever you say. Now get me outta this shithole. What time’s our flight?”

  “Wheels up fifteen minutes after we’re on board.” They turned away and descended the embankment above Alder Street, heading for Elm Street and, eventually, their next assignment in defence of the free world.

  Big Bill McCool and his son Jake adjourned to Gus’s Restaurant just up the hill and around the corner from the Union Hall on Elm Street for breakfast once it was clear that the siege had lifted and the threat to the Union Hall and its occupants had wound down.

  Both men were bone-tired, the adrenalin of the night’s events now having long since worn off. They settled in to a booth at Gus’s surrounded by the restaurant’s familiar morning smells of freshly brewed coffee and frying home fries.

  Soon, both of them were holding mugs of steaming hot coffee.

  Jake raised his first. “Well, Dad, here’s to the Mine Mill.”

  Bill McCool tapped his mug against his son’s.

  The younger man looked into his father’s eyes. “But I think we’re beat, Dad.”

  Father returned his son’s look with a steady, world-weary gaze.

  “I know it, Son.”

  “But at least we lived to tell the tale, as Uncle Bud would say.”

  “And to drink more of Gus’s bad coffee.”

  Both men laughed out loud. It was good to be alive, and breathing the old familiar aroma of home fries and onions being cooked back in the kitchen here at Gus’s.

  “There were times last night I wasn’t sure we’d make it,” Jake confessed to his father.

  Big Bill nodded sheepishly. “I know. I’m very sorry I got you into that, Son. But when I called the mine yesterday I had no way of knowing …”

  Jake cut his father off with an upraised hand. “I know, Dad. I know.” It seemed an age ago that Jake had received the summons from his dad to join him at the Mine Mill taproom, but in fact it was only yesterday. So much had changed in so little time! Jake surveyed the world outside Gus’s windows with bleary eyes—everything appeared slightly fuzzy and out of focus, somehow.

  Jake’s father shook his head. “And if your mother ever got wind of this I’d never see the inside of the old homestead again.”

/>   The statement was, Jake realized, only a slight exaggeration. His mother had warned him off involvement in the Steel raids from the start. But now that they had both survived last night’s harrowing experience, Jake felt it was a new day, in more ways than one …

  “Listen, Dad, there’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about …”

  Big Bill nodded agreeably. “Go ahead, Son.”

  “Dad, I think it’s time I moved out, got a place of my own.”

  The elder McCool frowned. “But where would you live? Housing’s mighty tight around town right now, Jake.”

  “I know. But Foley Gilpin says he has a spare bedroom, and that I’m welcome to bunk in with him until I find a place.”

  Big Bill considered this with pursed lips before nodding his head slowly. “Very well, Son. You’re a grown man now, been doing a man’s job for what, almost a year now. I certainly won’t stand in your way if that’s what you really want … What say we order some breakfast?”

  They emerged from the restaurant into uncertain Sudbury spring sunshine an hour later.

  “I’m going back to the Hall before I head home,” Bill explained to his son. “To say goodbye to Bud and Walt.”

  Jake accompanied his father for the short walk to the Mine Mill Hall, but he felt reluctant to re-enter the building with his dad. It just seemed to Jake all of a sudden like a place with too much history and too little future.

  “Well Dad, guess I’ll leave you here. I think I’ll walk over to Foley’s—let him know I’ve decided to take him up on his offer. Tell Mom what we talked about. I’ll be out to the Valley later to start moving my stuff.”

  Big Bill turned, surprised. “What? You’re not coming in? All right, Son. I’ll explain things to your mother.”

  The two men faced each other, shook hands, and after an awkward pause, embraced each other as people will do when they are on the cusp of great change and facing an uncertain future.

  Bill McCool patted his son lightly a few times on the back before holding him out at arm’s length to get a good look at his boy. He liked what he saw.

  “Take care of yourself, Son.”

  “I will, Dad. I promise.”

  Jake found Gilpin’s building—an aging, unprepossessing red brick place on a side street just a short walk from downtown—and he climbed a few flights of stairs to reach his friend’s apartment. The hallways of the building had a steamy ambience and were redolent of bacon frying and coffee brewing. Jake tapped softly on Foley’s door, and his friend answered almost at once.

  “Jake!” The newspaperman was not displeased at the interruption—he still had few friends in the city, and visitors were always welcome. “Come in, come in!”

  “I was just making some fresh coffee. Come on in and sit down in the kitchen. Care for a coffee?”

  “No, no thanks. I’ve just come from Gus’s with my dad, so I’m pretty much coffee’ed right out.”

  Within minutes of seating himself at Gilpin’s kitchen table Jake came right to the point. “Listen, Foley, remember how you once told me if I ever wanted to leave my folks and move into town I could crash here until I found my own place?

  “Well, after last night I think that time has come … Mom’s gonna figure out Dad and me were in on that pretty fast, and life won’t be worth living out there for either one of us …” Jake grinned awkwardly.

  Gilpin smiled sympathetically. “So get out while the getting’s good, eh, Jake? Sure, I get it, and my offer still stands … We’ll split the rent fifty-fifty—your end’ll be twenty five bucks a month, plus utilities—and you can have the spare bedroom … I’ll move my office outta there into the living room and it’ll be all yours … Come ’ere and I’ll show you around …”

  The truth was Foley Gilpin was delighted by this news. His freelance income was still minimal and the chance to save on rent and household expenses was a godsend. Besides, he’d like the company—he’d always enjoyed Jake’s easygoing ways and youthful swagger, and his knowledge of a city where Foley himself was still learning the ropes.

  The apartment tour didn’t take long—the place consisted of the kitchen, living room, bathroom and two bedrooms—and what Jake noticed was that the apartment, with dull, hardwood floors and equally dull, beefy old-school baseboards, and porcelain bathroom fixtures that were no longer gleaming, appeared homey, well lived in and not overly tidy—Gilpin seemed to have newspapers, books and notebooks strewn over every flat surface of every room. A quintessential bachelor pad. But the pièce de résistance was a six-foot high stack of dusty newspapers, leaning precariously to one side, beside the fridge. “Just keepin’ them there ’til I get around to clipping ’em for my files,” Gilpin explained.

  None of this mattered a great deal to Jake, for whom the flat held the twin attractions of freedom and hominess. “You got yourself a deal—and a new roommate,” he told Gilpin, offering his hand across the kitchen table.

  They shook on it, and so began a new—and quite eventful—chapter in the life of Jacob Hamish McCool.

  32

  A Night on The Town

  Summer burst brilliantly over the Basin that year, as it sometimes does, like a bomb. The city was transformed almost overnight, it seemed, from a frigid, barely habitable place of seemingly endless winter to a steamy, benign, infinitely forgiving climate. The ice was gone from the lakes and the sap was rising.

  The new roommates settled easily enough into their new routine, alternating shopping and cooking duties on the rare evenings they didn’t elect to eat out downtown somewhere—the China House and the Trevi Tavern were two especially favoured venues—when no one felt like cooking.

  But it was one evening after they’d eaten at home that Foley touched on a subject he’d been wanting to broach with Jake for some time.

  “So whatever happened between you and your girlfriend, Jake?” Gilpin sensed at once he’d struck a tender nerve.

  Jake pulled a long face and shook his head. “I dunno, Foley, it just didn’t work out, is all … You know the reason better than anyone …” His voice trailed off, and Jake looked down, brushing crumbs off the kitchen table.

  “You mean that caper at the President last summer?”

  Jake swallowed, and nodded. The corners of his mouth drooped downwards. It was impossible for him to conceal that he still harboured feelings for Jo Ann Winters. He still missed her terribly.

  Jake’s lack of eye contact did not escape Foley, who looked closely at his young friend.

  “Jeez, Jake, maybe you’re being too hard on her—and yourself. Whatever was going on there—and we never did get to the bottom of that—whatever it was, it sure wasn’t her fault …”

  “Listen, ever since you moved in I’ve been watching you mope around—you go to work, come home, watch some TV and go to bed. That’s it! That’s all you ever do, day after day! You need to get out more, young fella your age, you should be going out at night, have some fun! All work and no play—”

  “Makes Jake a dull boy.” Jake finished, smiling despite himself. He was surprised, and more than a little touched, at his friend’s evident concern for him. “Yeah, yeah, I get it Foley. I get it, I do. But after what happened to my brother I just didn’t feel I could go back to her … There were just so many things between us we couldn’t really talk about after that …”

  “I know, kid, I know, but I hate to see you still beating yourself up over that … Maybe you should at least give her one more chance …”

  Jake nodded uncertainly. He was a little surprised to discover he felt a lump in his throat. He smiled half-heartedly at Foley. “Yeah, maybe so, Foley. I guess you’re right.” And with that he stood up from the table, excused himself and went back to his room.

  Jake unzipped the bottom of the case and pulled Ben’s guitar out. He’d bought a songbook or two that contained, in the simplest possible terms, the music to a few of his favourite Dylan songs. After mastering a few basic chords—G, D and E—Jake had learned to strum o
ut an accompaniment to his own homespun warbling of a few lyrics. On this night he sang “Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance” before switching over to “Girl From the North Country.”

  Last year’s Freewheelin’ album by Bob Dylan always reminded him of Jo Ann. It was still one of his favourites. He put the guitar away and pulled the album from its well-worn slip cover before placing it on the turntable. With a heavy sigh Jake sat back on the bed to absorb Dylan’s scratchy vocals for the umpteenth time …

  After a few more such morose, sorrowing weekday evenings Jake could stand it no more, and he ventured out on the town on Friday night.

  Downtown Sudbury was a lively place on warm summer weekend evenings as young men, flush with their bonus earnings, stalked the Durham Street sidewalks toward their favourite haberdashers in search of new clothes. Often they’d enter the chosen menswear store clad in their old clothes and emerge a few minutes later attired head to toe in brand new duds after instructing the clothier to simply burn the old ones. The scene on Durham Street itself was just as extravagant as youthful miners cruised back and forth from the Elgin Street strip to Christ the King in an endless river of polished chrome and revving V-8s fuelled by surging testosterone and thirty-cent-a-gallon gasoline.

  Jake himself was drawn to gentler and cheaper—if not always much quieter—pursuits, to the live music venues that were beginning to proliferate in a downtown entertainment district geared increasingly toward a youthful population with both time and money on its hands, and on this night he chose to sample a new local rock ’n’ roll band playing in the Bavarian Room of the old Nickel Range Hotel on Elm Street. The music itself was derivative—nothing Jake hadn’t heard on the radio a million times before—Beatles tunes, mainly, interspersed with chanted incantations like “Louie Louie Lou-eye Hey, Hey! Hey, Hey! We Gotta Go!” but it got the packed house roaring along. The joint was jumping, and the air was overheated by the exertions of hundreds of over-amped, sweaty young people bobbing up and down, yelling out the hokey refrain at the top of its collective lungs. Jake himself, beer in hand, was feeling no pain when he sensed a soft tap on his shoulder. He turned around to see who it was, and almost died.