April Fool (3 page)

Tired, consumed by worry, he forgets he's Gertrude Heeredam, and instead of squatting, he pulls out his oscar while standing, letting go a hot arcing stream. He is not quite finished when he glances up and sees Grizzly staring at him from behind a salmonberry bush across the road, his mouth agape, an expression that turns to rage as Faloon hurriedly tucks in.

Fearing an episode of curbside justice, Faloon sprints to the idling crew cab, clambers behind the wheel, locks the driver's door, shifts, spits rocks. But now Grizzly is right on him, at the side of the truck, and he feels a lurch as he vaults into the back.

The Owl is convinced now that fate has it in for him this April Fool's Day. What a chump, with his mental meltdown. He's afraid his rider will try to kick in the rear window and strangle the cross-dressing psycho sex fiend, or maybe grab the chainsaw and decapitate him. But Grizzly doesn't seem ready to do these things, just glaring at him from the rear-view, sitting on a sheet of plywood, nursing an elbow he banged.

The road is winding and ribbed with ridges, so Faloon can't pour the juice on, but he doesn't dare slow. He can keep going until he runs out of gas, and then the yard super will castrate him. As the road dips by the river, he dares a risky play, slowing almost to a stop so Grizzly can maybe drop the tailgate and clamber out, deciding not to be brave, content to be left alone on the road and not take chances with a psycho killer. But Grizzly doesn't move, and there's even an evil smile on his face, as if he knows what Faloon is up to.

Getting up speed again, he sees shimmering blue waters in the distance, log rafts assembled on it, and the road descends until it comes to a fork by the western lip of Cowichan Lake. When he rounds a curve, he is suddenly aware of flashing lights, officers lounging beside a blinking cruiser–another roadblock.

This he greets with mixed emotions, almost welcoming the sight of an officer furiously waving him to stop–horsemen do not as a rule remove your body parts. As the Owl brakes, he turns
fatalistic, this has not been his day, not at all. He switches off the engine and listens to Grizzly, outside, loudly ratting on him.

When a constable approaches him to seek clarification of these accusations, he rolls down his window and produces Gertrude Heeredam's driver's licence.

“You make an ugly woman, Faloon,” he says.

 

3

W
ith envy, Arthur Beauchamp watches juncos mating in the raspberry patch. A bumblebee tests a daffodil. There is lust in his garden, spring's vitality. Maybe his sap will start flowing again too, and the lazy lout below will rise from flaccid hibernation. The desire is there, but the equipment faulty. When was his last erection–a month ago? A halfhearted attempt at takeoff. But he knows he must accept and move on. We age, faculties rust. Some men lose their hair. In compensation, Arthur has kept his, a thick grey thatch.

No one is around–Margaret is at one of her interminable Save Gwendolyn meetings–so he's unembarrassed to rasp, to no recognizable tune, the song of Autolycus: “April, the sweet o' the year, when the merry daffodils appear.” He mangles the verse. His memory has begun to wear at the edges, like his coveralls. There was a time when he could trumpet, even when in his cups, in that former wasted life, the entire madrigal.

He lays down his trowel, straightens, his back creaking like a rusting gate. Is it the somnolent country life that brings on this decay? Yet he is only sixty-eight. Doc Dooley, who holds the secret of Arthur's high cholesterol and balky heart, is eighty-five and runs in the Garibaldi Island marathon. Run, jog, walk, he orders, and if you can do little else, wobble.

He closes the garden gate, washes his hands by the tap behind his country house–two storeys, 1920s gingerbread–and contemplates playing hooky with rod and reel. Below the
house, where mown grass gives way to white-scrubbed drift logs and the rippled wash of Blunder Bay, his outboard beckons from his sagging dock.

But no, he must hike, must stay faithful to Doc Dooley's regimen, a mile and a quarter up Potter's Road and down Centre Road to Hopeless Bay, to load his rucksack with mail, skim milk, olive oil, and…what else was on Margaret's list? Three tomatoes and two lemons. No need to write everything down.

She is keeping him on a strict diet. She blames herself for the minor stroke he suffered two years ago, attributing it to her over-bounteous table. “Eat light, Beauchamp, and avoid fats,” said Doc Dooley.

He skirts the upper pasture to look for holes in the cedar fence. Occasionally, and by no evident means, the goats escape under, over, or through it–wise locals drive carefully along Potter's Road. Some thirty kids are expected at Blunder Bay Farm–Margaret has a way of knowing these things–so it will be a busy month. Other residents include chickens, geese, a horse called Barney, Slappy the dog, and a pair of cats named Shiftless and Underfoot.

The path descends to an alder bottom, then rises to a dry fir forest before joining the road. He is puffing a little, his nostrils filled with the soft scents of a pleasant spring day.

Avoid stress. Another of Doc Dooley's prescriptions. Isn't that why he fled to Garibaldi Island? To escape the city's ferment, the law's wounding duels? He was fat and foundering, lonely and ill, about to be divorced by a faithless wife. Arthur is a farmer now, he hasn't seen the inside of a courtroom for half a dozen years. Life has taken on a rosier hue since he fell in love with Garibaldi Island, then, just as quickly, with his neighbour, Margaret Blake, organic farmer, environmental activist.

She gave him eyes to see nature's artistry after six decades of city blindness, when gazing at concrete, not conifers, at shop windows, not still ponds, seemed the natural way of humankind. Arthur's milieu was more conservative than conservationist.
“Let's save
this
environment,” a fellow member of the Confederation Club once chortled.

But rural life comes with its cracks and stains. For one, he didn't anticipate living with Margaret would be so hectic. For three of their five years together, she served as Garibaldi's elected trustee, volatile, disputatious, scaring people with her gingery tongue. Now her ire is focused on the proposed development at Gwendolyn Bay, its threatened deforestation. On that issue, this is an island divided. Friendships have been broken in heated debate at permit hearings. Locals driving by still wave, but many no longer smile.

Arthur's annual pursuit of tomatoes, carrots, and cabbage has kindled in him a love of green and growing things, refreshed each spring with the new life about him. He supposes he's an environmentalist, but sees it as a lost cause, the earth warming, overpopulating, racing toward one of those messy epochal crossroads, maybe another mass extinction. Arthur would rather not think about this. He imagines there's not much one can do about it. There's no one to take to court. The whole thing lacks the sweet simplicity of a murder trial, a clean verdict at the end, freedom or punishment.

He sees two more houses being framed on Centre Road, view sites snapped up by weekenders from the city, the island changing too quickly, its population doubling in six years. The loudest supporters of the Gwendolyn development are these new people, who want “progress” and “conveniences,” who lug to the country as much of the city as they can, SUVs and gas barbecues and lawn mowers. Arthur has to forgive them. He too was a newcomer, he didn't understand rural things–though he had a sense there was more to life than starting off the day in a crowded elevator at parking level five.

He suspects it's unfair to deny others the right to live here, to pull up the drawbridge. He doesn't know how anyway, it's beyond him, it's politics. Arthur is not a political person, not
a joiner. Alcoholics Anonymous on Tuesdays, Tai Chi irregularly on Thursdays, bit roles with the Garibaldi Players, that's his limited social docket. He leaves high matters of state to Margaret, who is a member of some twenty groups, Farmers' Institute, Garibaldi Protection Society, Library Board, Parks Commission, Field Naturalists…When does she stop?

Across the road, just past the ferry turnoff, a pixie is hitchhiking–it's the third time he's seen her in the last several days–olive-skinned, big mischievous eyes, wide mouth, a classic beauty. A different kind of newcomer, a hippie, the kind you see at demonstrations. Spiked hair. Denim jacket with peace symbols and a Cuban flag. A smile and a wave, which he tentatively answers, a tip of his hand to his John Deere cap.

As he chuffs up the rise below Breadloaf Hill, he sees about thirty vehicles parked by the community hall. The Save Gwendolyn Society. He thinks he hears Margaret's voice exhorting action. Yes, there is her aging spaniel, Slappy, listening at the door, ears perked. Arthur hopes no one will see him slip past, he doesn't want to be dragged in there. He doesn't even want to think about Gwendolyn Valley. There's nothing these people can do about saving it.

Todd Clearihue, the boyish ever-smiling developer, speeds by in his Audi convertible, honks, waves. Beside him is the pixie. She waves too. Clearihue is the president of Garibaldi Lands Inc., which has title to Gwendolyn Valley. Margaret calls him a sociopath.

Coming into view, where the road descends to the docks of Hopeless Bay, is the General Store,
circa
1904, paint peeling from the boards of its high-windowed false front. A flatbed pulls away, three men in the cab with takeout coffees, and as they pass by, Arthur reads the logo: Gulf Sustainable Logging. They are strangers and do not wave. Maybe they were offended by the notice posted by the door: “Chainsaws must be left in your truck. We are not responsible.”

The store (Abraham Makepeace, proprietor) connects to a warehouse on piles, and groans within of groceries, tools, and the various odds and sods that support civilization on this cranky island. It also serves as post office (Abraham Makepeace, postmaster), coffee lounge, and, ever since the Brig Tavern burned down, illegal source of spirits (Abraham Makepeace, bootlegger).

Staring out the windows of the enclosed porch are several local idlers in their tractor caps, work shirts, and patched jeans. The porch serves as a lounge, chairs in haphazard array around a wood-fired Jøtul, coffee in the pot, an honour jar heavy with dollar coins. Arthur exchanges greetings, obligatory remarks on the weather, and steps up to the mail counter.

Makepeace, tall, skeletal, the face of a depressive bloodhound, is slow to hand him the mail, a final possessive inspection of letters and magazines. “Your subscription to this here
London Review of Books
is due. Bill from the vet. An offer from a phone company, they want to give us the Internet on local calls. They say we can't live without it.”

“Who says?”

“Well, practically everyone.”

“I have lived sixty-eight years without it.”

Makepeace too has been slow to catch up to the electronic revolution, last year buying his first fax machine, a dollar a page to send or receive. But he's debt-ridden from tabs unpaid. He is fatalistic about the Gwendolyn development, which will include an efficient store, with chrome and fluorescent lighting and grocery buggies. A beer-and-wine outlet, a restaurant and bar, a real-estate office.

Makepeace pulls the island weekly,
The Bleat
, from Arthur's mail slot and folds it open to the letters page. “Guess you want to read Margaret's latest.” Arthur pats his pockets for his reading glasses, he remembered to bring them.

“‘Pirates,' she calls them.” This is Baldy Johansson, the terminally unemployed electrician, who has got up for a refill.
“That ain't so bad, but ‘ecological Nazis'–ain't that carrying it too far? Can't they charge her for slander, Arthur?”

Arthur must regularly parry such elusive questions of law, has found ways to divert them. “There's no law against hyperbole.” Arthur can tell no one quite understands that word.

The Bleat
, renamed from
The Echo
as a salute to the island's many sheep farmers, causes Arthur anxiety when it appears, usually about midweek. Its editor seems not to have heard of the laws of libel, and makes no effort to restrain his most regular correspondent. This latest letter of Margaret's seems inflammatory to excess, “environmental wrecking crew” being the epithet most softly put. She has already been warned by Garibaldi Lands Inc. (locally known as Garlinc) that “remedial” action might be taken. The horrors of a defamation trial.

“That there wife of yours is pissing in the wind,” says Ernie Priposki, the alcoholic farmhand. “They own the land, they can do what they want with it, ain't that the law, Arthur?”

“People have rights in this fair and democratic land. Trees do not.”

“Can't stop progress.”

Arthur pours himself a coffee, turns to the front page, the main story, under the byline of Nelson Forbish, publisher, editor, and entire workforce. “It is rumoured that logging of Gwendolyn Bay is to begin this week, which has caused foment on our beautiful island.”

A smiling photograph of Todd Clearihue (lately seen zooming by with the hitching pixie) in close embrace with Island Trustee Kurt Zoller, who is brandishing a cheque. “Garlinc boss donates $300,000 for new fire truck.”

“You got to look on the good side,” Priposki says. “It means jobs, there's a lot of guys out of work on this rock. Garlinc ain't doing a clear-cut, they're going to leave some trees, people want their lots to be nice. I'll have another little hit.”

Makepeace brings out a bagged bottle, pours a dollop of rum into Priposki's coffee. “Not you, Arthur, I suppose.”

“Thank you, no.” He catches a whiff of alcohol and tenses.

“Blame the government,” says Jeff “Gomer” Goulet, the crab fisher. “They could've made it a park.”

Garlinc paid $8 million for Gwendolyn Valley, an estate sale, the land sold too quickly, before anyone could object. Margaret organized petitions, besieged Ottawa to add Gwendolyn Valley to the scatter of lands composing the Gulf Islands National Park. All to nought.

“No government's got no business seizing nobody's private land.” A heroic triple negative from Baldy Johansson. “We got rights, don't we, Arthur?”

“I didn't know you owned land, Baldy.”

“Well, if I did.”

Arthur buys a two-day-old
Vancouver Sun
, sits down with his coffee, spreads the front page open. Immediately a story catches his eye: “
CROWN SEEKS PSYCH HEARING FOR RAPE-MURDER SUSPECT
.” Below that, a related article: “
FRIENDS MOURN DEATH OF DR. WINTERS.
” Her photograph, blond, smiling, attractive. But it's another photo that holds him, a forlorn face in a police cruiser.

Nick the Owl Faloon. How could this be? Arthur dares not count the times he defended this mannerly rascal, and a deep sadness comes. He doesn't want to read further, not now, so he quickly finishes his coffee and makes his purchases.

He decides to return home by the Gwendolyn Bluffs, though that means a long detour, at least another hour. But it might be the last time he will see this valley clothed in green. They plan a hundred and fifty lots with, according to the glossy handout, “driveways, power, cable, sewer, and water in.” There will be a resort, shoreline condos. To attract city commuters, a hovercraft service.