Fall from Grace (6 page)

“But he was respectful, Larry. He listened to the advice I gave him and he wrote good copy. There was a time when I took him to his first town council meeting. I was introducing him around, informally, mind you, because being on the town council in a small town, even being mayor, isn’t a full-time job like it is in the city. It’s almost a volunteer thing and they all have their real jobs in the daytime. So I introduce him to the mayor, and while I’m doing so, another councilor comes into the room. And the mayor sees him and makes some sort of crack about this guy’s attitude at the last meeting, you know, innocent banter about how he hopes that so-and-so doesn’t get all annoyed about something like at the last meeting because he made it last too long.

“And even though we sit through the meeting and get the typical small-town council stories, little Larry is all excited about what the mayor said. He thinks he’s got a great story, a bit of political intrigue that he can use and then reuse once all the reaction comes in from the previous crack. Larry thinks he has a scoop, and if he was covering council here in Edmonton, he would. But in Olds, he doesn’t.”

“Why the hell not? That makes sense if someone makes a comment like that. He’s the mayor talking to a reporter so he’s got to watch himself.”

“Obviously, you’ve never worked at a weekly, either,” I said with a shake of my head. “In a small town, when the mayor makes a joke about someone else, even another councilor, it’s not a news story, it’s only the mayor making a joke. If you turn it into a story, and then another story when you get a rebuttal comment, and keep the controversy going, you might as well close up shop right then because no one is going to trust you or your paper, so people will not only stop talking to you, they’ll stop advertising with you, stop taking their printing to you, and so on.

“And I told Larry that and he didn’t believe me, he really thought he had a story. He just thought I was a complacent editor who wasn’t really interested in real news. But in a small town this wasn’t real news, wasn’t even close. But Larry kept at it, he wrote a story, and instead of giving it to me, he handed it over to Neil, the publisher, thinking that he could convince this small-town rube that he knew how to bring real news to the paper.”

“So what did the old guy do?”

“Despite his look, Neil was not someone to mess with. He may have looked like an old farmer, but this guy flew a fighter plane in the Battle of Britain, got shot down but managed to crash-land his plane with only a broken leg. And when they sent him back to Canada, he ended up in Alberta training new air force recruits to fly planes. He was also a strong supporter of the Liberal Party, which in small-town Alberta is about like supporting the Antichrist. But Neil wasn’t afraid to make his views known, and although people disagreed with him, they respected him for standing up for himself and what he believed.

“So when Larry finishes his spiel about the newsworthiness of the story, Neil nods and asks him for the copy. Larry hands it over and smiles at me while Neil reads it. But after giving it a good read, Neil rips it to pieces and tosses the pieces into Larry’s face. And he stands up, his full six-three height towering over Larry, and growls, ‘If you ever write or do anything like that again, I’ll not only fire you, I’ll drag your ass to the press, and stick your right hand in so you’ll never write again.’”

“Yeah, so what did Larry say to that?”

“For a while, Larry says nothing. In fact, nobody says anything because, of course, we’re all watching. The smart move for Larry would be to mumble, Sorry, and walk away. But Larry doesn’t walk away. All he does is look like a hurt puppy because his scoop is now in pieces at his feet. And then, I don’t what he was thinking but he blinks a couple of times, stands up straight, and says, ‘I can always write one-handed with my left.’ And he turns and walks past the press and out the back door.

“Neil shakes his head and walks over to me. I ask him if Larry is fired but Neil shakes his head. ‘Nah. He’s a got a lot to learn but he’s an obnoxious prick so I’m guessing he has a bright future in this business.’”

Anderson laughed, thanked me for the line, and took the hard copy of my sidebar. He made a few marks with his pen and then handed it back, calling it a masterpiece.

I typed in his changes and then sent the story directly to Larry’s computer, also cc’ing the piece to Whittaker. A few minutes later, Larry came out of his office. Whittaker saw him and followed behind. Larry’s face was blank but I knew I had written a good story so had no reason to worry.

“Go home, Leo,” he said as he arrived at my desk. “There are a few minor things but I think Whittaker can handle it from here on, right, Whitaker?”

“No problem,” she said. “One of our shooters even got a nice shot of the tent in the field so we can package that up with the story.”

“Excellent,” Larry said. “Excellent work, everyone. Paper’s going to look nice tomorrow. But Leo, you go home and get some rest. You, too, Anderson. No reason for you to hang around here, either.”

Everyone grunted in acknowledgment. I entertained the idea of inviting Brent out for a beer but realized he had family at home and probably wanted to go see them. I pulled on my jacket, muttered thanks and good night, and left the building.

6

It was six o’clock by the time I was outside, but it was already dark. Typical for late fall. The days were getting shorter and shorter, the arc of the sun getting lower in the south sky and the shadows longer. In a few more weeks it would be dark by four and by the time Christmas rolled around, we’d be only getting seven hours of daylight, not a lot for the most part, but at least the sun would be shining. People new to the city always commented on that. Even though winter was cold and the days were short, the sun shone most of the time. And the sharper angle changed the wavelength of its light to the warmer reds and oranges, so even the color of the air would change.

Since I didn’t have a car, but still lived relatively near downtown, I was a walker. My trip home took me north along 101st Street up to 104th Avenue where I cut through a large open lot where the old railway used to run toward my neighborhood. From there, I headed west along 105th, behind Grant MacEwan College and its concrete towers, until I got to my house, which was located in a neighborhood officially called Central McDougall.

However, over a number of years, it had been given a series of informal names based on the immigrants who lived there at the time. It had been called Little Saigon in the seventies and eighties because of the Southeast Asian boat people fleeing the Vietnam War and its aftermath. Those folks had moved, and in the past ten years or so they had been replaced by refugees fleeing African wars in Ethiopia, the Sudan, Somalia, and the like. The new name was now Little Mogadishu or, more informally, Kush.

It was a decent neighborhood, full of old houses, three- and four-story walk-ups, and mom-and-pop restaurants and stores. Newer developments such as the college, condos, and a plethora of franchises were starting to gentrify the place, but that pace was still slow north of the old railway line. Despite these changes and the emergence of a vibrant African spirit to Kush with restaurants and stores offering food and goods from East Africa, it was still considered a rough part of town with johns trolling for streetwalkers along 107
^th
Avenue, homeless folks pushing shopping carts filled with empties, and the odd gang-related shooting.

For someone like me, it was perfect: close enough to walk downtown and to other amenities, but still dangerous enough to keep the rents low. Unfortunately, there was one area of my walk home that always gave me pause. On the corner of 101st Street and 104th Avenue, just at the edge of downtown, there was a casino, an industrial warehouse of a building dressed up with neon and three-tone paint to give it a garish look.

Casinos were nothing new for Edmonton. Outside of Nevada, this city had more gambling space per capita than any other city in North America, a fact that some people in the chamber of commerce liked to celebrate, while others didn’t. The proliferation of casinos and video lottery terminals, those electronic gambling machines throughout the province, was another legacy of the Klein era, those fourteen years when a beer-drinking, cigarette-smoking, gambling politician ran the province. It was nice getting private liquor stores but having more casinos than anyone else and VLTs in almost every single bar in the province made things a little difficult for someone like me.

The proceeds of gambling were a cash cow, bringing over a billion dollars into the province’s coffers and also helping many charities. Albertans assuaged their guilt over using gambling to raise government money by allowing nonprofit groups to “volunteer” to work at casinos for a few days every two years. In return they would get a portion of the proceeds of the take during those days.

It was hard for any group to say no to an average of fifty thousand to eighty thousand dollars every two years in return for a few hours of volunteer work. Still, with Klein and his cronies gone, things were changing. Many school boards, churches, and other nonprofits had passed directives disallowing their members or any group connected with them to accept any money from gambling sources.

Of course, I could have taken a different route home to bypass the casino. There was no need for me to tempt myself every day after work. But the selection of my route home was a test. I was like the alcoholic who pours himself a drink he hopes he won’t drink or the sex addict who flips through the escort ads on the back pages of one of the alternative weeklies. There was that thrill of temptation, the imagining of what we could be doing, of returning to the comfort of our addiction. It is a comfortable place to be, in our addiction, because we know exactly how we’re supposed to act, what we’re supposed to do, and how we’re supposed to feel. And even though we may be destroying ourselves, it’s at least someplace where life is easier. Living in the real world, with real people, is much harder. So much harder.

Because of the image of the dead body in the field, today was a more difficult day than normal, a day I knew I could easily say “fuck it” to it all and step through those doors into the beautiful oxygenated air. But today was also a day of honest victory, where the simple act of arriving at a place before anyone else brought a type of success I hadn’t experienced in a long time. When one lives in and for a casino and gambling, luck is a major force in your life and this time luck was not in the cards or the numbers or the order of finish of a horse; it was in the real world. And in that, I took strength and walked past the casino toward my home.

I followed the path I had taken for these past months in the real world and arrived at my place, my little suite in the basement of a dilapidated house in the Kush. My room was in a postwar bungalow sitting in a nicely sized corner lot, the siding bleached pale, with flakes of paint hanging off the window frames. Twenty or thirty years ago, when some family lived and grew in the house, it might have been one of the nicer houses on the street, but now it stood as one of the few houses left. Three- and four-story walk-ups surrounded it, and directly across the street was an industrial park that had also seen better days. There was a small, unattached garage in the backyard but it leaned to the north like a slouching teenager.

The back door gave direct access to the basement without having to enter the main floor. The original owners of the house were long gone; the upstairs residents were now a bunch of students attending the nearby Grant MacEwan College. I climbed down the stairs, an invisible presence to the preoccupied upstairs residents.

The basement was a dark, damp place, the concrete walls of the foundation crumbling and dripping with condensation. Cardboard boxes of various sizes were stacked throughout the basement along with old toys, bikes, and the other refuse created by an annual revolving door of students. There was an old gas furnace pumping away somewhere behind all the boxes, a washer and dryer set from the sixties, and a single shower stall next to the washer and dryer.

My room was a small rectangle, slightly larger than my bank-machine bedroom from the previous night. Outside light streamed in from a tiny window near the ceiling. The room was neat and clean, the air smelling slightly of humidity mixed with a lingering scent of pine cleaner. A twin mattress and box spring were pressed into the corner of the two inside walls, away from the cold, wet concrete. My bed had comforter and sheets tucked in between the mattress and box spring, and a thin crease between the pillow and the comforter.

A frayed carpet spread out from underneath the bed, covering most of the floor. There was a small end table with a shadeless lamp directly beside the bed. A matching wardrobe/dresser set were shoved together against the outside wall with an eight-inch-screen TV on top of the dresser.

Right next to the dresser and filling up the rest of the wall was a Formica-top kitchen table with a matching chair. A single-burner hot plate and small microwave sat at the back of the table against the wall, a jar of change on top of the microware. The microwave was also doing double duty as a bookend for a line of about twenty books.

As I lay on my bed, my only piece of furniture that could be sat or lain upon, I decompressed, congratulating myself for my day and my victories. But when I pulled the wad of bills out of my pocket, I remembered the bank and fell back onto my bed, shivering. I lay there forever, waiting for the heavy footsteps of police-issue boots as they came down the stairs to take me in for bank robbery.

Two steps forward, and two steps back. It was always that way.