Jericho (23 page)

He seemed surprised when I told him it reminded me of where I lived when I was a kid.

Theresa called the place “hepatitis-specific” and said, “Why don’t you burn this slum and build a real home?”

She didn’t understand, but that didn’t matter because he pretended he didn’t hear her and went shooting off on one of the fantasies he hoped would scare people he was afraid of.

He nodded towards the portable toilet that he and this Clarence person apparently stole from some building site or outdoor concert. He was using it for its original purpose but had made it into an outhouse, with a pit dug out of the gravel. Next to it was the place he meant, another tiny building, a log thing that looked like a dead dollhouse that some giant foot from the sky had stepped on and broken into splinters. “That,” he said, pointing, “will be the Interpretative Centre.” Theresa shot him one of her meanest looks like he was truly crazy. He paused and said, “Someday
a city rises here in the bush.” He looked back at Theresa like he knew what she was thinking. He probably did, too.

“You think this is nuts,” he said. “I can tell. But there are two ways cities begin, right? You’ve got ones that just spring up out of nothing, like during the gold rush, and you’ve got handmade ones, like over in England or in Europe. Why can’t you put together the best of both? Set an example? Plant the seed? Lay the foundation for the other guys to build on when the time’s right? That’s all I’m saying. In the meantime you raise your own garden and wait for events to happen.”

Over the next few weeks whenever I asked Theresa where she was going or where she’d put something I was looking for, she’d say “The Interpretative Centre” and put on an expression just to make sure I got it. I got it.

The downfalling rain is by me unexpected. I thought this locality was designated as dry: that’s what the Object assured us of. At least I can collect water for bathing, for the stream is deficient in depth for this purpose. Also very muddy and unclear anyway, full of bacteria I am certain. Maybe we can heat some rainwater. Object will likely protest the “waste” of fuelwood, such as he does the use of drinking water for washing, but if said water were used for consumption it would have to be boiled. I despise the black plastic container bag I bought in which the sun is supposed to heat water. It must be moved hourly as the sun goes across the sky. I find it too heavy when full and the water never hotter than luke temperature. Also, no privacy, which is lowly regarded in this place apparently. The other day I went for a walk in the sick forest around here looking for a place with hot sun and came to a clearing. Saw Object
stringing keys on a long wire between trees and Beth, in the nude, hoeing his illegal plants. How do I feel? Silenced to think of them ecstacizing together. I have issues with it clearly. It never occurred to me to believe that she and I had a future tense together, but even so, it galls me that she is really such a donna after all! I am reminded of the broadness of her hips. Probably made for fecundness. I am put off further contemplation of this.

The other day the crazy dyke was taking a shower when a hummingbird saw the red nozzle hanging on a hose from the end of the solar water bag and dove right at it. Thought it was a stamen. The funniest thing I ever saw. Sister Theresa kept swatting it away with one hand while hiding her nonexistent tits with the other one. But the bird kept nose diving at the thing and then hovering there just above her head. She tried to swat it again but missed and down came the clothesline and the old blanket she’d rigged up on a piece of cord between two trees. Her priceless privacy. She spied me and went running off screaming into the bush, her two ass cheeks the only part of her that’s not a straight line, including her personality.

She has issues with this and issues with that. Well, she does have issues with the English fucken language. There’s probably nothing to be done about that. She’s not the type of person who could get into the simple language of Walt Whitman for instance. Me, I’ve been obsessed with Walt Whitman since I read him in the Facility. Maybe that’s from growing up right on the border or maybe it had something to do with Lonnie, though of course he’d never heard of Whitman or probably any other writer either (he never read anything except the
Windsor Star
and the
Daily
Racing Form
, though he stayed very well informed). I’m haunted by old Walt because—why? Maybe because I am valuable in the same way cash is valuable because like cash I do not acknowledge my parents. Maybe because I’m studying to be a refugee! Because I remind me of a younger version of myself! Because I am a found-in in my own life! I take the end as my starting point! You see, I am the basic social unit! I am the building block of all living stuff! I am a harbinger! I have no parameters! Or perimeters! I am the leading edge and the bottom line! I am the resurrection and the Life! You’ll find no moss growing on me, boy! That’s for sure! I am Immortal America! I embarrass myself and vomit! You contradict me? Very well, I contradict you back! Don’t try to stop me! I am Self! I contain Multitudes! I am redundant! Ha!

Bishop wanted to plant a garden even though we didn’t know how much longer we’d be staying and the ground was pretty worthless anyway (though fine for marijuana apparently). I don’t do drugs but pot probably does a lot more good than harm, so every day I’d go out to water and cultivate the little rows. I carried the water in a plastic bucket that had a hole in it but fortunately way up near the top. Bishop said one day it might be possible to dig a ditch that would carry the stream right into the clearing where both my future vegetable garden and his were. It was sort of downhill. “But first I’d want to loop it all the way round the townsite, and that’d take an awful lot of work to do by hand, an awful lot.”

I didn’t know what he was getting at until he explained it to me.

“You can’t plant a city without building defences,” he said. “All the great cities—Jerusalem, Deetroit, Tokyo—started as a set of high walls to keep invaders out till civilization took root and flowered. When the cities grew up higher than the top of the walls, the walls were torn down, then the city expanded out over where the lines had been. The part that was always kept empty so they’d have a clear line of fire at anybody who attacked—that became the suburbs.”

All this was new to me, answers to questions that I’d never thought of, let alone asked anyone, but the more he talked about it the more sense it seemed to make. I can admit this now. When he wasn’t kidding around and being obnoxious, he was a good talker.

And as he talked, he kept filling those post office bags with sand and lugging them straining, dragging them by their drawstring ropes, to make low walls joining the buildings together. I could help him drag the things once they were full (they were too heavy for Theresa, almost too heavy for Bishop and me). Mostly, though, I helped by holding their mouths open while he shovelled in the filling or whatever you call it. At least near the top of the hill there was a lot of sand mixed in with the gravel, which he first dumped onto a contraption he’d made out of half an old screen door. The holes in the mesh weren’t the right size, and anyway it kept getting tears in it because the gravel was so heavy. It wasn’t a very efficient system, we both knew that. I thought the job would never end. But I could see how much pleasure he got out of figuring a way to make do with what we had.

“I keep expecting to find flints in here,” he said to me at one point after two or three days of shovel work and sifting
and lugging the knotted sacks into place on what he called the palisades. “I don’t care what Clarence says, people were here before us. We’re building our city on top of somebody else’s. And who else could it be, right? His people were the only ones here.”

Bishop had obviously taken a lot of trips or knew someone who did, because in with all the junk crammed into three or four of the buildings—and it was amazing all the stuff he’d managed to get into that God-forsaken place and also the care he’d obviously put into wrapping everything so well—I found dozens and dozens of teeny bottles of shampoo and shower caps and plastic combs and shoeshine cloths and sewing kits too and also those flimsy little sleeping masks from Air Canada.

It looked like I needed all the sewing kits because, aside from an old tee or two, I couldn’t find any clothes that fit Theresa. She and I got the smallest one of everything and cut them down as best we could, with me doing the sewing because she didn’t know how (I guess her mother never taught her—I never asked). Remaking a pair of jeans was just too much work. I know because I broke several of the cheap needles trying. But we did a skirt that worked out pretty well and found some material (curtains at one time, I think) that I made into a couple of others. This meant that T ended up always looking more formal than the rest of us. She complained that insects bit her bare legs, but Bishop had lots of repellent stocked away. Mosquito coils too, but she said she didn’t care for the way they smelled. I respect other people’s allergies.

One day I found a raspberry bush about two kilometres
from the camp, I mean the town, and was really surprised. “Here’s your proof that people were settled here before,” I told Bishop when I got back. I still don’t think it was growing wild. It just didn’t have that wild look. I’d had to take my shirt off to carry all the berries in. Theresa whispered to me later, “I wish I could be that free.” Her calves were covered in bites and she’d been scratching them. A red trickle ran down one leg.

Bishop ate a few berries. “Damn that’s bitter.” He looked like he was going to spit out what he had in his mouth. “You know why that is, of course. Too dry here for berries. Bad berries, good weed. People back east smoke hydro.” I must have looked puzzled. “Stuff you grow in some fucken basement can’t compete with grass the way nature intended it.”

He carried on and on about his marijuana and then about the berries. He gave Theresa some advice: “When it’s this dry, the bears don’t have enough to eat. They’ll be looking for the berry patch.”

Here I think he was saying back to her things I’d said to him on the way in, putting his name on things by repeating them and passing them off as his own, but I didn’t mind.

“Then they’ll find Jericho, right? You bet. When you get up in the morning or go for a pee at night, the best thing to do is to sing at the top of your lungs for a minute as soon as you leave your cabin. Just throw your head back and let loose. It scares em off.”

“I’m supposed to
sing?
Sing what?”

“A song, any song. It doesn’t matter.”

“I don’t
possess
any songs,” she said.

“Everybody knows songs.”

A few mornings later we heard somebody coming through the bush. I was out in the street and Bishop was still in the place he called the hotel but he heard it too. I saw Theresa come out of her space a couple of doors down. Somebody was coming all right, coming in from the direction of the marijuana. I could see the tops of saplings sway back and forth as whoever it was pushed them out of their way, first to the left, next to the right. Just then, when we were about to get a look at whoever the visitor was, Theresa’s neck twitched like she was shivering in the cold. She had her Air Canada toothbrush and a cup with her. Without warning she suddenly let out this terrible noise.
Michael row your boat ashore hallelujah, Michael row your boat ashore hallelooo-ya.
She was singing it as fast as a person could. (She snapped at me later, saying something about a bishop—I first thought she was talking about Bishop. Then she almost spat at me: “It was either that or ‘Amazing Grace,’ but if you’re expecting ‘Ave Maria’ you’re not far from being out of line.”) Just then a man dressed in an orange T-shirt and army pants came out of the bush and started up the gravel ramp. Bishop was standing behind me now. “Clarence,” he yelled with a laugh in his voice. “Over here.”