Stung

by William Deverell

  Spreading out below him, to the north, is Gwendolyn National Park, its thick primal forest, its lake and stream, its ocean inlet. Beyond it, out of view, is Bleak Creek. In clear view, just below the quarry, are Mattie Miller’s alpaca ranch and Hamish McCoy’s waterfront hobbit house. With good binoculars one can see his tall humanoid art forms with beaks, wings, breasts, and a penis erectus.

  The bald eagle’s nest from which Arthur had seen fledglings try their wings last summer is deserted. No sign of cliff swallows, but maybe it’s early. Peregrine falcons usually overwinter, however, and he has seen a couple wing quickly by, a good sign.

  Arthur has kept his body and brain occupied since his flight from Berlin, and this is his first opportunity to relax and empty the mind. But unwanted thoughts of the looming jury trial in Toronto dribble in, and soon the taps are full on. He can no longer blind himself to the crisis created by the loss of an eminent, powerful voice for the bees, of a witness who could stand toe to toe with the savvy communicator, Dr. Jerod Easling.

  It finally dawns on him why he resents this trial — the chances of a win were always marginal, but now it’s a sure loser. Their Nobel winner crossed off. Madam Justice Donahue threatening to slam the door shut on the necessity defence. Arthur hates losing. It’s selfish, an ego thing, but he can’t help it.

  “Surely, you are aware,” said Dieter Hoff before they parted, “of the work of your own Dr. Ariana Van Doorn.” Arthur had seen the name several times in the scientific reports he’d powered through.

  After Hoff dropped him at his hotel, he’d immediately phoned Selwyn Loo, with a lugubrious account of the professor’s sins of arrogance, theft, and infidelity.

  Selwyn simply said, “I sensed there might be an issue of character,” and went on to express his respect for Dr. Ariana Van Doorn and his qualms about how she would handle the rough-and-tumble of court. She had little experience testifying. Brilliant, yes, but a relative rookie in her field. At the precocious age of twenty she’d earned a Ph.D. from the University of Saskatchewan’s Faculty of Agriculture. Now, at thirty-three, she was a tenured professor at Simon Fraser University and a well-published rising star among entomologists.

  But Selwyn had heard she was uncomfortable in public and social events, and shied away from speaking at them. Such a wallflower, he feared, would be outgunned by Dr. Easling. Selwyn has returned to Vancouver to prepare for a pipeline reference and will arrange to meet with her in the next few days, assess her, sound her out.

  Arthur’s phone erupts, shattering the stillness, slamming the brakes on his buzzing mind. “Where the hell are you, Arthur?” It’s his wife, and she’s not on the phone but FaceTime, not in Ottawa but Toronto. He can’t see her yet, though — his view is of shelves of law books and a window through which he can read a familiar business sign: Fu-King Supplies. It’s Nancy Faulk’s office on Spadina Avenue.

  Margaret adjusts her laptop screen, sits on a desk chair. Her face shows strain, confusion.

  “How delightful,” Arthur exclaims. “I was just thinking about you, darling.” Before she can get a word in he blurts out an apology for not having called promptly, as promised, on his return from Germany. “I had no idea you’d be in Toronto.”

  “Yes, you did. I told you on the phone a week ago. Guest speech to the LGBTQ Political Action Forum. I assumed — as did your legal team, by the way — that you’d stop off here. This very day. I have a hotel room. With a king bed.”

  Arthur now remembers her mention of Toronto but not that she’d be staying overnight. A disaster is unfolding. It’s out of Rockin’ Ray’s acid trip: Lower the life rafts, this ship is going fucking down. In contrast, Ulysses is in heaven with his bone, oblivious to unhappy human friend holding inedible tiny screen with moving pictures.

  Arthur stammers out excuses: “I’m devastated, my mind was entirely elsewhere. I’ve truly been missing you, darling, so I must have been massively distracted when you mentioned we might have a night together. Had I remembered, of course I would have, ah, turned heaven and earth . . .” He’s dying. “I confess that I had a powerful need to be here, home, Garibaldi. I had to clear my mind. We had a setback.”

  “I know. Hoff. I talked to Selwyn.” She stands, leans over her computer for something. A tissue — Arthur hears her blow into it. She comes into view again, looking out onto Spadina, another tissue at her eyes. “Okay, let it go, Arthur. There are more important things to worry about. Nancy tells me there’s a hearing soon at which the judge could eviscerate your only defence.” She finally faces her laptop camera. “I hope you’re ready for it. Nancy seems to think you don’t have your heart in this trial.”

  Margaret’s poorly masked show of emotion has Arthur shaken, despairing, helpless — somehow life has failed to equip him with the tools to deal with distress of those he loves. His response is staccato, machine-like: “Please reassure them I am pumped for it. We may have a new star witness. Dr. Ariana Van Doorn. At the top of her field, and she’s been right under our nose all this time. Please tell Nancy I shall be in Toronto in plenty of time for the pretrial issue on the fifteenth. I’m already preparing for it. Not this very minute, but—”

  Margaret interrupts his frantic babbling: “Exactly where are you right now, Arthur?” On the screen, she bends, squints.

  “Up on the mesa at Quarry Park. Bob’s End. With Ulysses. He’s just over here torturing a cow’s knee bone.” He aims the lens at Ulysses, who, shockingly, has dropped that bone and stands at stiff-tailed attention, hackles raised.

  Margaret’s voice comes breathlessly. “Oh, my God. Hold onto Ulysses’s leash with all your might, Arthur, and look up, follow his eyes.”

  Arthur freezes for a moment, overcome by fear of the unknown — maybe Jeremiah has finally been revealed to Margaret. But what she glimpsed, in the far background, on a ledge of the crag that thrusts from the view-blocking limestone mesa, is a large, handsome, well-fed cougar, crouched, staring, still.

  Ulysses, sensing Arthur’s sudden tension as a call to action, surges forward, tugging the leash so hard that Arthur slides on his bum a few feet before he gains control. Tigger watches this scene with indifference, then jumps from the crag and disappears before Arthur can take its picture.

  He and Margaret talk excitedly over each other. The cougar has a hideaway in the quarry, she insists, a den. Arthur is gratified that Tigger appears not to have moved his base to the populated south. “Just think,” he says, “if I hadn’t been here . . .” He pauses to rethink and censor. If I’d been in Toronto is what he was about to say.

  Margaret isn’t listening to him anyway. She is congratulating herself — she’d managed to preserve her FaceTime image as a photo, and has a shot of Tigger sauntering away.

  He says, “The media will love that.”

  “Get a grip, Arthur. I won’t turn informer, nor will you. We have to protect that beautiful wild animal.”

  “Surely we should alert the wildlife people.”

  “I don’t trust them. They have a licence to kill.”

  She’s right. Arthur thinks of Leroy Letkow and his bullet hole in the windshield.

  “I trust Stefan,” Margaret says. “Talk to him.” She shouts: “I’ll be right there!” To Arthur: “I have a cab waiting. I’ll see you when I see you.”

  “I love you.” But Arthur is talking into the void.

  6

  Wednesday, April 10

  Laid low for three days with yet another cold, Arthur has had to stay indoors, so of course the fates decreed that the weather would be constantly, delightfully brisk and sunny. It continues so this morning, and despite his drippy nose he is determined to get out with Ulysses, a trip to the store for mail and missing essentials. Like tissues — he’s carrying around a roll of toilet paper.

  They will visit Jeremiah’s well, where Island Landscraping has allegedly been hard at it for the last week. If so, and if Phase One
has been completed as Stoney maintains, he is owed a draw on his contract. Fat chance.

  Arthur’s plans for an early start are spoiled when Nancy Faulk phones to ask if this is a good time to have a chat about the hearing on the necessity issue on Monday, five days hence. It is not a good time, but Arthur puts down his walking stick, fixes himself another pot of tea, and for nearly an hour they hash over how to dissuade Madam Justice Donahue from gutting the Sarnia Seven’s only hope of a defence.

  Nancy has already drafted her own argument, which she has sent to him as a “pdf,” a form of electronic document — he has no idea what the initials stand for. She pelts him with case citations back to 1754, which she promises to send as links.

  “I’ll give it my best, but as you know—”

  “Yeah, you’re a computer illiterate.”

  “My dear Ms. Faulk, I do not need cases to tell me it’s fundamental to the rule of law that a judge may not usurp a jury’s right to decide on guilt or innocence.”

  “Tell it to the judge. I printed out the leading cases and my brief. You’ll find everything in a Priority envelope at your local post office.”

  Yet another fat chance. She doesn’t know the local post office.

  Nancy feels it necessary to update him on the saga of her divorce — obscenities exchanged in a law firm’s boardroom, her wannabe ex storming out over an issue with a money-losing timeshare unit in a ski lodge.

  The rant consumes several minutes, and she concludes with, “Speaking of divorce, your wife is totally pissed at you for breaking your date on the weekend.”

  “I am aware. One of those domestic mix-ups that occasionally flare up and quickly burn out. I wired her flowers with a contrite note affirming my unyielding, eternal love. Thankfully, Margaret is not without friends in Toronto, and I of course include you, my dear Nancy, so I’m sure she wasn’t lonely.”

  “Not in that convention hotel. Famous for the action in its pickup bar. All those handsome men breaking free of domestic constraints.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “He says, frothing with unrepressed jealous fear.”

  Arthur remembers: Margaret spoke at some gay and lesbian event. His leg is being pulled.

  “Get it together. Read the case law. Hustle your bloody arse out here.”

  * * *

  Ulysses looks on, detached, uninvolved, as Stefan and Solara struggle to fix the north pasture’s tractor gate, which somehow, with unintended brute force, Ulysses has dislodged from its hinges.

  Arthur gives a hand, holding the gate steady while they try to fit it back on. Solara calls: “Must have happened when he was roughhousing with Tabatha Jones’s dog.”

  “Ah, yes, I remember — Taba popped in out of the blue with a petition.” Arthur quickly rolls out some toilet paper and loudly applies it to his nose. “Damn cold. Must’ve got it on the plane.”

  Arthur remains in turmoil over his dawdling failure to put things straight with his life companion. Were he to admit, in a mindless eruption of honesty, that he and Taba had made even the slightest erotic contact (that grasping of fingers, the touch of tongue), or conjured her up for an onanistic workout in the shower, his divorce proceedings would dwarf even Nancy’s in ferocity.

  Margaret won’t be back on Garibaldi for a week and a half, the start of Parliament’s Easter break. She will not mix it up with friends and neighbours; she’ll want peace, a private time, a chance to rejuvenate. Anyway, no one will talk about Taba. The cougar. They’ll still be talking about Tigger the cougar.

  After the pasture gate can finally swing freely on its hinges, Arthur detains Stefan for a consultation: “I’ve been thinking about your idea of going it alone with Ulysses.”

  Stefan had offered his aid, and his uncanny ease with wild animals, to the BC Conservation Service, but the cougar hunt was a closed shop, best left to “our qualified experts.” Feeling slighted but also challenged, Stefan now wants to take Ulysses before dawn, unseen, to where Arthur saw Tigger. Stefan thinks its den is a nearby cave or recess, and if he can locate this hideout, he’ll phone the Conservation Service and seek a guarantee for the cat’s safe conduct off the island.

  “I might let Ulysses go with you,” Arthur says, “if I’m allowed to toddle along.”

  “Excellent.” Expressed without enthusiasm, as if he feels Arthur may not be up to the hard scrabbling. “Let’s set it up after I do a scouting trip up there.”

  When Stefan first approached him with the idea, Arthur had demurred, fearful of exposing Ulysses to danger. But the young wolfhound is needed less for safety than for his traits as a sighthound and his reliable nose for the spoor of fellow beasts. Wildlife Conservation has resisted hiring bloodhounds for this job because of the cost — they are handled by a third-party contractor.

  In any event, there’s no guarantee Tigger is still on the island. No domestic animals have been lost for a week. Mrs. Rollicks’s pot-bellied pig was found yesterday plowing up the flower beds of St. Mary’s graveyard.

  7

  While traversing the north pasture, Arthur heard hammering from the well site, and an occasional curse or shout, but now the only sound is of ravens hoarsely heckling from the cedars, so Stoney and Dog have likely taken their mid-morning beer break.

  Arthur suspects Stoney is financially distressed — a frequent plight — and is putting on a show to extort a quick partial payment before he sits on the job for another year. Arthur stopped visiting the site long ago — the lack of progress was too depressing. The malingerers took down an alder grove to create a clearing, they got Arthur’s tractor stuck in the mud, and the backhoe broke down. That’s about it.

  Ulysses senses that his two favourite local layabouts are down there in the alder bottom, and he sprints that way. Several seconds later, hammers start up again, prompted by the foreseen arrival of the dog’s owner.

  The path opens up between the trees, revealing a circular clearing bathed in sun and surrounded by hills of newly dug soil and clay. Gone is the backhoe, but it has done estimable work, excavating around the well to a depth of seven feet. Arthur could be looking at a New Age meditation circle — at midpoint is the shrine: Jeremiah’s well, a sturdy, round structure of cemented rocks held up by angled timber braces and surrounded by a moat. Stoney and Dog, who have buttressed the braces with crossbeams, greet Arthur, lay down their tools, and pick up their beer cans.

  “I have underestimated you fellows.”

  “Dog and me accept your apology. We’re used to being underestimated, aren’t we, Dog?” A rhetorical flourish that goes unanswered. “As you see, sire, on-time completion of Phase One is done, the heavy machinery phase.”

  Arthur has to bite his tongue not to take issue with the alleged on-time completion. Dog, sensing his partner is in negotiations mode, takes Ulysses aside, to share a sandwich from his lunch bucket.

  Arthur stares over the edge of the pit, at the moat — at least two feet of water cover the lower part of the well.

  “That’s gonna be an issue,” Stoney says.

  A non-issue, however, had the dig been done in dry season. Arthur ought to have reduced the agreement to writing, the way a lawyer would.

  “Seeps right back in after you pump it out,” Stoney says. “So there’ll be a slight delay while the water table lowers.”

  Arthur will want “slight delay” defined. He listens patiently to Stoney’s explication of Stage Two, which will involve extensive hand-digging. Doing so within the clogged well could be dangerous, so the plan is to use a spade until they hit the foundation stones, and break and enter from there.

  “If there’s a human skeleton, like you suspect, that’s where it’ll be.”

  The Historical Society’s plans for a ceremonial unveiling will be a bust, Arthur fears, if Jeremiah’s bones aren’t here. But the many sightings of his ghost, however ephemeral and mystic, have to mean som
ething, a silent cry for a proper burial. Could he have been chased into his well by a cougar? And drowned there? Arthur adds that to his hobby collection of morbid theories about Jeremiah’s demise.

  The stones forming the well’s spherical walls seem snugly fitted. Hardly a dribble of excess cement. Arthur is awed by the mastery of the creator of this rustic oeuvre, by the artistry and effort of a lone bachelor pioneer. The quality of his homemade spirits was also said to be superb, according to scraps of information passed down. Perhaps he was a genius unrecognized in his time.

  “Luckily we got the right man for this labour-intensive job — Dog over there is a digging machine. But we’re talking unaccountable man-hours — there’s a seam of heavy marine clay down there. I’ve run some numbers and my best estimate for Stage Two is an even ten grand. That’s on top of the five you already owe, of course.”

  “We have an agreement, Stoney.”

  “We do? Jeez, sorry, I don’t remember seeing it.”

  “A verbal contract is valid in law. The total agreed price is fifty-five hundred.”

  “Yeah, but I understood that was only for Phase One.”

  “No, Phase One was three thousand. Plus I gave you a thousand for start-up. Plus I paid for your left-hand side gear.” Arthur gets a headache. He’s losing all dignity here, haggling with Stoney while honking into balls of toilet paper.

  “I recollect it was five K for the backhoeing and then we’d work out a deal for the hand-digging phase. Now maybe I was stoned at the time and forgot I was dealing with one of the sharpest legal minds in North America, and if it’s your word against mine I’m obviously doomed, but I honestly never thought this would happen between us after all the years we been—”

  “Stop.” If Arthur doesn’t accept defeat he’ll be seen by the whole island as a shyster ripping off a guileless local tradesperson. He pulls out his chequebook.

  * * *

  Arthur kicks himself all the way to Hopeless Bay, riled at having been outduelled once again by the crafty stoner. Operation Jeremiah has now doubled in cost. The bleeding, he solemnly vows, stops here. The Stage Two contract will be printed and signed this time, and witnessed. The party of the second part will be required to adhere to strict deadlines. The completion date of the thirty-first day of August shall be strictly enforced. Only acts of God, war, or insurrection will annul this formal indenture.