Stung

by William Deverell

  So it’s now the rear end of Wednesday, and I’m just back from a five-K run in the park, and have turned on the Jays at Minnesota. We’re up 1–0 in the third, bases loaded with one out. Wild pitch, two-zip. (I’ve become mildly addicted to the sport, and am hoping that will pass.)

  During commercials I make a gesture at tidying up the indescribable mess in this funked-up joint. I love Lucy Wales, we’ve been pals and co-conspirators forever, but she’s the roommate from the gutters of hell, and between her and Sinbad and Sleepy, the pampered cats, it’s a chaotic situation, dirty dishes, flung underwear, smelly crap in the litter.

  Lucy works half days at a Rexall in North York, behind the counter, so I’m well tutored for my cover. She’s also a part-time chemical science student as well as full-time anarchist, portraits of her heroes on the wall, Sacco, Vanzetti, Kropotkin, L. Susan Brown. Property is theft, so just leave it lying all over.

  Just as the Twins put three across in the fifth, she saunters in, back from work. She tosses her bag on the cat-chewed sofa, and grabs the remote.

  “Hey, I’m watching that.”

  She studies me with her spooky, shadowed eyes. “Seriously? Get a life.” She mutes the TV. “I got the goodies.” Six hardshell capsules spill from a Ziploc. “Two of these little guys will knock him out for seven hours. But plan for five.”

  They make me nervous, these little yellow caps. “What’s this stuff called?”

  “Lucy’s Mix.”

  Meaning she packed these caps herself. That doesn’t give me comfort.

  “Two are placebos, just flour and food colouring. Those are for you. I pinched one end of each just in case you mix them up, but you want to keep the dummies in a separate pocket or something.”

  The Mix, she explains with excessive confidence, combines Restoril, a high-end sleeping pill, and Rohypnol, which she scored on the black market, a drug favoured, ironically, by date rapists. “No hangover effect, he’ll wake up as refreshed as Sleeping Beauty. More effective as a suppository, you want to stick it up his ass. Oh, yeah, I threw in something for the libido. Maximizes sexual heat.”

  “Whoa.” She has to be joking, she’s twisted.

  “PT-141, it’s a kind of testosterone. You’re getting it on with this creep. You have to bring him off before he flakes out.”

  “I’m not fucking him.”

  “Well, you have to give him something. Head, at least. You don’t make him come, he wakes up still horny, no sign of pecker tracks, he’s going to wonder.”

  There’s a dismaying logic in that. “What if he doesn’t wake up?”

  “Trust me.”

  “Have you tried it? Has anyone?”

  “Hey, Ray is on his way with a pizza. He’s up for anything short of junk.”

  Her boyfriend of three years, Ray Wozniak, Rockin’ Ray, lead guitarist for Panic Disorder, four post-punk indie rockers who actually make enough loot playing bars and clubs to feed their drug habits. He’s a Californian, a fellow traveller of the Action Network, but not a go-to-meetings kind of guy.

  And as promised, here he is, at the door, his signal five-note rap, and Lucy lets him in, relieves him of the pizza. Guitar case slung over his shoulder. Blond, wild-haired, stringy, six-four, almost criminally handsome. Not exactly a candidate for Mensa.

  Kisses Lucy, busses me, pot on his breath. Looks at the silent TV set, confused: Who around here gives a shit about baseball? Jays have closed the gap, a two-run homer.

  Ray leans in for a close-up of the six capsules. “What’s with the appetizers?”

  Lucy gives him the full lowdown, then asks if she could interest him in doing a test run.

  “Definotly,” he says.

  “For the cause. Yolo.”

  “Absonotly.”

  “Why?”

  Ray ejects Sinbad from our one easy chair, sits, noodles on his guitar. “For one thing, I just woke up.”

  Lucy is pissed. “Then please delete yourself.” Severe enough to perk up the ears of the cats.

  I don’t want a scene. “Hold on, I’ll do the tester.”

  * * *

  I emerge from the loo after a pee and a shower, in clean panties and a knee-length top, laying out my jeans by the pullout in case they have to take me to Emergency. Lucy announces she has set her bedroom alarm for four a.m., seven hours from now.

  “I’ll be up till then anyway,” Ray assures me. He fingers a soft, sleepy melody. I take a deep breath, pop two caps with the tail end of a can of beer that I’ve been working on, for my nerves, and nibble at a slice, picking off the bacon, feeding the bits to Sinbad and his sister Sleepy.

  We wait. Jays tie it up in the seventh. I go, “Yay.” Lucy’s Mix isn’t taking.

  I go back for another piss. Still not feeling sleepy after half an hour. There’s an edginess, though, urgent little messages from my cunt. Maybe that aphrodisiac, the PT-141, cancels out the soporifics.

  Lucy has made up my bed, and is sitting on it, thumbing her cell, waiting to tuck me in. Ray has laid his guitar aside and is lighting up a thin one. He looks delicious, sinewy, blond hair spilling over his shoulders.

  A wild impulse propels me onto his lap, taking a hit from his joint. “Dress rehearsal,” I say. “You be Howie.”

  I wrap my arms around him, give him a smooch. He doesn’t seem to know what to do with his hands, so I place one on my left boob.

  “Hey,” Lucy yells. “That’s not in the script.”

  “Script calls for an orgasm.” She’s an anarchist, right? All property is common.

  Ray uses his tit-hold to kind of lever me away — gently, but I suddenly feel very foolish. And woozy. “Oh, God, I’m sorry. Wow, I’m going under.”

  I barely remember Lucy settling the covers over me.

  9

  Thursday morning, August 23

  I awake to the sounds of voices. A woman: “She’s been gone three weeks, Officer.” His response: “I’m afraid I have bad news.”

  Sinbad jumps on me. I pry an eye open. Darkness. The TV on. Ray is watching something Netflixy, sprawled on the armchair, legs propped on a stool. The door to Lucy’s bedroom closed. My phone tells me it’s half past three. Six and a half hours.

  There were vivid, uncomfortable dreams: fleeing from the cops on my bicycle down narrow lanes, into the protective cover of a cloud of bees, who lose their way as I arrive at a protest, fat men in red MAGA hats, their leader yelling, “Get her outta here!”

  I nudge the cat off my feet and pull the covers off and sit up. Feeling okay except for that incessant carnal craving.

  “Welcome back,” Ray says, not rising, just turning his head. “You okay?”

  “Almost.”

  I give him a hungry, lingering look.

  “Absonotly,” he says.

  I go to the bathroom to engage in some lonesome love. Takes me two seconds to get off.

  Chapter 2: Arthur

  1

  Thursday afternoon, August 23

  Arthur Beauchamp is in his underpants, seated, his right foot elevated, an inflated pink balloon, and it hurts like the wrath of God. Thirteen stab wounds for which a cold pack, calamine, and baking soda offer not a tittle of relief.

  “They build nests in the ground,” says Margaret Blake, his wife, who does not seem overcome with sympathy. “You should know that.”

  “I’m abundantly aware.”

  He had stepped on a wasps’ nest in the north pasture and gone howling down the hill with them in hot pursuit. They got him in the shoulder and torso too, but the foot suffered the worst of it. He’d been sockless in scruffy tennis shoes. He should have known better, as Margaret insists on reminding him. He can’t deny that. Senescence has finally begun to take its toll on the old fart.

  Arthur is deep into his seventies, and though physically spry, unstooped, a tall, craggy man, he’s bec
ome forgetful, error-prone, finds himself constantly making notes: little slips of paper haphazardly strewn on counters. Certainly, his days in court are over, though he still remains prominent on the letterhead as senior counsel for Tragger, Inglis, Bullingham in Vancouver: Arthur Ramsgate Beauchamp, QC, OC, LLD (hon.).

  It’s not pronounced Bo-Shaum, in the manner of the Norman conquerors of fair England, but Bee-ch’m, in the manner of the defeated Anglo-Saxons. But he answers to either, and has given up trying to correct those untutored in the nuances of Franglish phonics.

  Arthur used to don his gown for occasional courtroom forays, always scuttling back to his sanctum sanctorum with great heaves of relief. That’s history. Let his record of thirty-six straight wins be his legacy.

  That legacy is enshrined in a book that sits on his shelf of biographies of notables far more famous than he. This warts-and-all history, wedged between Francis Bacon and Francis Beaumont, is titled A Thirst for Justice — the Trials of Arthur Beauchamp. The lawyer who authored it took great, chortling pleasure in laying bare Arthur’s youthful alcoholic excesses and romantic failures.

  Arthur tries meditation, to will away the pain in his foot, but again, as always, fails to find the peace it allegedly brings. The wasp attack was the second this month — yellow jackets have infested their waterfront island farm in these baking hot days of August. They infiltrate the house, though Margaret, insisting that all living things have their place in the biosphere, would shoo them out rather than put them to deserved death.

  His wife — or life companion, as this over-liberated politician prefers — has a fortnight left of summer leave before her return to Ottawa, where she serves as the Member of Parliament for Cowichan and the Islands and as Canada’s fiercely uncompromising Green Party leader.

  She’s a political animal, his wife, and is overburdened by her duties, but her many vows to retire have come to naught. So there’ll be another few months of living apart, as the fall session of Parliament gets underway.

  Arthur will at least have the company of his aging border collie, Homer, as well as one fat, farting horse, two lazy cats, four arrogant geese, ten frisky goats, thirty free-range chickens, and two clever young farmhands: Stefan Petterson from rural Oregon and Solara Lang from Houston, American refugees. Farm-bred Stefan is an animal behaviourist, with a degree in that esoteric art, and Solara is an African-American inner-city social worker learning the mysteries of rural life.

  Solara has been here two months and Stefan only two weeks — socialists, escapees from Trumplandia — and they’re out there now, as observed through the screen windows, engaged in the ticklish art of goat milking. Blunder Bay is a barely break-even farm since Arthur and Margaret stopped raising lambs — their annual slaughtering proved too painful. But the organic goat cheese and the roadside sale of eggs, apples, and veggies make enough to earn farm status, a tax break, and food on the table.

  Margaret applies more calamine lotion to Arthur’s tender foot, then leaves him to bear his pain like a man while she returns to the CBC news channel, a report on the protests in Brazil. Honeybee populations there have been decimated, the prime suspect a neonic, a crop-enhancing, insect-destroying, songbird-decimating, nicotine-based compound much touted by the chemical industry.

  Vigor-Gro is the trademark, and now that the U.S. Department of Agriculture — under the Trump government — has rubber-stamped it, Vigor-Gro is being exported worldwide by Chemican-International. It’s a U.S. corporation but one of its main production centres is a plant in Sarnia, Ontario, a border city serving the ravenous American market. Canadian regulators have blindly mimicked the Americans’ endorsement of this pesticide.

  In Sao Paolo, thirty protesters have been hauled into court for blocking traffic in and out of a Chemican distribution plant. Most are out on bail, all being sued — along with owners of several apiaries — in a form of litigation all too common in this age of corporate bullying, a SLAPP suit.

  “Bastards,” Margaret says. “We’ve got to do something, Arthur. A fundraiser at least.”

  Arthur agrees, of course, but his swollen foot has discouraged him from championing stinging insects in a country six thousand kilometres away. There are more immediate battles to be fought, right here on their island of Garibaldi, their little chunk of threatened paradise in British Columbia’s Salish Sea.

  A familiar face appears on the screen: Selwyn Loo, the brilliant, sightless environmental lawyer. He is running a class-action lawsuit against Chemican, on behalf of North American beekeepers. Now he is in Brazil, being interviewed about Chemican’s motion to gag the defendants.

  “Their SLAPP suit is intended not just to intimidate by suppressing the fundamental right of free speech, but to exhaust the defendants’ legal resources with a host of frivolous and abusive court actions. The coalition will not bend.”

  Margaret is already on the phone, to her staff in Ottawa, instructing them to set up a website for donations and design a fundraising event.

  Evening is nigh, time to put the chickens to bed. Arthur painfully pulls on his pants and hobbles to the door, grasping his walking stick to use as a crutch. The chickens are scattered around the yard, but here comes old Homer to help, arthritic but game, sucking it up, accepting pain as his lot, an inspiring example.

  The fowl dutifully scurry toward the henhouse gate, Homer limping off to corral a straggler, which heads for home, flapping and squawking. Poor old Homer, he’d recently had a stroke, his rear legs barely working. Arthur can’t bear the thought of putting his old pal down after fifteen years of loyal service.

  He gives him a hug, limps back to the house to receive a call.

  Margaret hands him the receiver. “Al says he feels your pain, but he couldn’t help laughing.”

  Reverend Al, the acerbic Anglican minister, Arthur’s best friend, cruelly finding humour in a wasp blitzkrieg.

  “Quarry Park bylaw hearing tomorrow afternoon. You going to make it, old boy?”

  “Even if I have to crawl.” Garibaldi’s two nutty Trustees are proposing to rezone twelve acres of parkland to industrial. Parkland!

  2

  Friday morning, August 24

  Arthur spends much of the morning hobbling around with Stefan and Solara, repairing fences, bringing in hay, and reaping the rewards of garden and orchard. Twenty-year-old Solara has become a deft hand at tilling, weeding, and harvesting, and Stefan, who is twenty-five, not only has a deep understanding and love of animals, but is an innovative master of tools. Petite, mop-topped Solara is a chatterbox with a gentle Texas twang, and rangy, long-haired Stefan speaks rarely, though succinctly. Arthur will miss them when they go.

  They are waiting for residency papers, hoping to find more lucrative employment than that offered by Blunder Bay — they are burdened with massive student loans, credit card debt, and, in Stefan’s case, default of payment on his late-model mid-sized van. They found their way to Canada through the American Refugee Centre, seeking a bolthole from the depredations of their self-obsessed president and his supporting cast of wealthy misanthropes, crooks, and global warmers.

  They reside in the house next door. Smaller and older than the main house, it was built in the 1890s by pioneer homesteader Jeremiah Blunder, who is famed equally for the potency of his homemade alcohol and for the ignominy of his death: a drunken slip down his stone well. Island old-timers claim they’ve seen his ghost occasionally roaming the island’s byways with a jug of moonshine.

  Arthur’s feisty neighbour, the widow Margaret Blake, used to live in that old house with her late husband, a skilled tradesperson. Together, they painstakingly restored it, scoffing at island lore that it was haunted by Jeremiah’s revenant, pouring new footings, adding a second bedroom, new shakes on walls and roof. Soon after, her husband died tragically in his prime.

  After Margaret accepted a stumbling marriage proposal from the shy, besotted newcomer who’d bought nex
t door — also a refugee, from the law — she moved to the more commodious main house. Their two farms were also married, into one forty-acre parcel of pasture and rolling hills on the banks of the Salish Sea.

  Chores done, Arthur considers taking out his skiff to check the crab traps, but hesitates. Something is nagging at him. Yes, the bylaw hearing this afternoon about Quarry Park. He limps off to his ancient pickup, Homer dragging himself after him, like two wounded soldiers. The wasp swelling has abated, though it still feels like Arthur is walking on a dead, prickly stump.

  He hoists Homer into the passenger seat, its window open so he can enjoy the rush of passing air. The engine coughs and sputters before igniting, then stalls. Another old, crippled friend, this 1969 Fargo is on its third engine, fourth transmission, the equivalent of replacement hips, knees, and internal organs, but costlier, not covered by Medicare. This may be the old girl’s last year.

  He turns the ignition key again, and the Fargo seems to take a deep breath, summoning all its dwindling strength, and it fires up and holds. “Good on you.” That’s intended for the truck but Homer hears it as a compliment, gives him a lick.

  Arthur is on his way to Quarry Park, feeling a need to pay his last respects, admire its rough-hewn majesty before it is jackhammered into desecration. Bizarrely, inexplicably, Garibaldi elected two numbskulls last winter as Island Trustees: the self-aggrandizing Kurt Zoller, a tour-boat operator and self-proclaimed libertarian, and Ida Shewfelt, the holiest of rollers, who believes God created the world 5,700 years ago in six twenty-four-hour shifts. Together they control the three-member Local Trust Committee.

  British Columbia’s Islands Trust Act was intended to shield the Southern Gulf Islands from over-development, but the statute is fuzzily worded, poorly enforced, and subject to the whims of local Trustees. Zoller and Shewfelt are determined to upend Garibaldi’s pro-conservation Community Plan as they trumpet their vision to “grow Garibaldi.” How Arthur despises that use of the verb. One grows vegetables, not islands.