Jericho (31 page)

“Right at that time there was work out here in the oil fields. Leduc today is a suburb out by the Edmonton airport but it was a separate place back then. The boom had spread all over but I went there first because it was a place I’d heard about: it was famous. I was strong in them days and getting a good-paying job wasn’t hard. I made a little on the side gambling with the other guys, but you had to be careful; that’s a rough bunch of men. At least that’s what I thought until it was time to move on and I went up the coast for the first time, up to Kitimat, where they’d built the big smelter.”

His eyes seemed to be turned inside, not out. Then he looked over at me.

“It was what they took to calling a megaproject. There were lots of these big projects after the war that brought thousands of men here from all over the world really. But that’s history. You probably know all that.”

Like many older people, he couldn’t quite figure out, at least couldn’t remember, how old the younger person was, even though in this case it was his own daughter. Maybe his mind didn’t want to hang on to the information, because it would have kept reminding him of how old he is. So he
sometimes said things like this that made me think he thought I was still in school.

I said, “I don’t actually.” But what I wanted to know he wasn’t telling me. So when he came to a natural pause in his story, I up and asked him, “When did you and Mother become a couple?” That’s coming to the point.

“Ah, well …” He didn’t have a smile on his face before, but now he got real serious. “We met at a dance in Edmonton. She hasn’t told you this stuff, eh? That’s interesting. We met at a dance in Edmonton at a place they called a ballroom in those days but was only a drinking spot mostly. I used to have a picture that some street photographer took of us going along Jasper Avenue arm in arm, big smiles on our faces, both of us wearing big hats. People don’t wear hats much any more. I thought they were coming back.”

“Why did you have to leave?” I had to keep him from wandering off or escaping, and I thought this was better than why-did-you-run-out-on-her-and-her-baby.

There was a long silence. He sipped his coffee like it was still hot, which it couldn’t have been. He looked straight at me but then at the tabletop and then out into the distance. When his eyes came back to me, they didn’t have the same look as before.

“Let me say right at the start that it’s all my fault.”

What he said didn’t exactly come as a surprise. It was hard for me to tell how much he meant it. I guess I should give him the benefit of the doubt or at least let him explain. I guess my expression said please continue.

“The plain truth is that I had what people called a nervous breakdown. They call it something else today, anxiety
or depression or something, I don’t know. I’ve spent years trying to dope this thing out, believe me. I think about it nights when the picture’s on the TV but the sound’s off and during work when I should have had other stuff on my mind.”

I listened hard. I wanted to hear what he had to say and at the same time I didn’t.

“Here’s how I figure. I was really really wounded by what Cappy did to his own flesh and blood, it was evil almost—that’s a big word, I know. Where we come from, family wasn’t like that, brothers for sure didn’t do that; nobody had ever heard of such a thing. I should have gone back down to what they called Snaketown and had it out with him, but I was weak. I like to think I was weak because I was bleeding so much. Truth is, when I’m really honest with myself, I don’t really know: maybe I’m weak period. I also like to think that I would at least have gone back across the river and talked to him. That’s not too much to ask of myself. I was moving in that direction right enough, then—you know what happened. So I came out west and tried to lead a good life—not a bad one anyway—and eventually I met Alma. Your mother.”

I thought: That’s an odd way to put it; I know my mother’s name for God’s sake. When he paused there like he was going to stop the story, I said to myself: Well, he’s just thrown away my sympathy. But then he picked it up again, and started to talk much more easily, more slowly too.

“It wasn’t like nowadays,” he said, looking at me more straight ahead finally. “Getting pregnant out of wedlock was a terrible thing. The woman would usually go somewhere far away from home to have the baby, that is if she had the
baby.” Then almost as an afterthought he said: “The Church had a lot of power.” I didn’t want to interrupt as he was telling me the stuff I wanted to know, or some of it; he might not flow like this again. He wasn’t a bad man, I decided. I figured that out by the way he told me that he thought he wasn’t tough enough, which at first I thought was an excuse but then came around to accepting for what it was. But I was almost struck dumb by the weirdness of the whole thing. That my father was this old Italian-Canadian guy with hairy wrists and forearms (the hair was like underwater ferns, I thought) and as you know I’m not usually a woman who sits back quietly without taking part in the conversation.

We talked so long I thought the coffee shop was going to ask us to leave, but no, they only gave us dirty looks every now and then. Or, like I say, I mostly listened and he talked. His stories sounded fragile sometimes, as though he was reaching down under the floorboards with one arm in the dark, up to his shoulder, not knowing what he’d find. The drift was that he left Mother for the Coast not long before I was born (“once I knew she’d be all right”—I know, but that’s what he said) but got into trouble gambling on something in one of the camps or some big project. My guess is that he didn’t have much gambling talent, if that’s what you call it. Then he went on a sort of downward spiral.

I thought he was going to tell me about being a skid row person in Vancouver. When he didn’t quite, I nudged him in that direction. It’s not true, he said. He did have a drinking problem once but he was never homeless, he only lived in one of those transient hotels, using up his savings, he said, and being independent though not exactly what he called
“flush.” Then he broke out of the mould, out of the mood I guess you could also say. For a minute I thought he was going to tell me he’d had a religious experience of some kind, but I guess this was probably me reacting to the fact that I not only had a father all of a sudden but he was a Catholic, I guess—he has to be. I didn’t ask him anything about that, because when he was talking about growing up in Ontario he’d said there was a lot of prejudice against Mediterranean people with names that ended in
i
or
o
, and I assume that he meant that it was Protestant people who were the prejudiced ones. No sooner did I say this to myself than I realized I was being prejudiced myself. For a second I hated myself for this—and him for making me have such thoughts.

My sense is that he bottomed out in Vancouver and then bounced back. What he went through precisely I’m not sure. Odd how he suddenly sprang up in our lives to say he was sorry about the past and tell us his life stories but then, once he was into talking, decided to hold back some of it. When I got home and was putting together the pieces of everything that was said, I realized there were two big gaps: the one between his fight with his brother and his brother’s (my uncle’s!) death; the second one between that and when he came out to Alberta. Who knew? Who knows? The living carry around so much secret stuff with them. It’s as though they’re practising to be dead.

Eventually he went down into the States. He mentioned Portland and other places, I forget them all. He told me that he ended up with his own business in Arizona, a small company that sold oxygen in bottles, to hospitals and the sick, I suppose. I asked if he was married. “I was,” he said. “That’s what kept me in Arizona so long that now I can’t really leave.
No energy to get to know someplace else from scratch. We have a son. He’s twenty-seven.” (So I guessed to myself that his wife was a whole lot younger than he was.) “We’re divorced.” I wanted to ask him about my half-brother and many other things, but I could tell he was getting talked out, and the non-communicativeness was coming back in a big way. I was so full of mixed-up emotions I could hardly think. At least I got his address.

There aren’t any Citizens in this place but there’s definitely a sort of Civ. It’s Civ based on respect and fear, the way it should be, and worship of what is or isn’t going to happen next. It’s like living in a hotel except that nobody does anything for you, only to you: a very bad hotel. But it’s also like being in one of your better hotels: sex and drugs on room service. What I mean is it’s like living downtown, D/T. Men march everywhere and get told to stop certain places and wait for something or somebody. We all stand there with our hands at our sides, some looking straight ahead, some gazing down at their shoes with no expressions at all. It reminds me of going to Deetroit with Lonnie when I was a kid and having a crowd of people pile up on the sidewalk behind you when you were waiting for the light to change. A lot of energy gets pent up in that half a minute between W
AIT
and W
ALK
. Then the crowd would spread out and drift across to the other side and sort of evaporate as they went wherever they had to go, to do whatever business they had going for them. Waiting for the subway to pull up to the platform must be like that too. They don’t have a subway in Windsor. Don’t have one in Vancouver, only the Skytrain to the suburbs. They don’t have one in here either of course.

This place is mostly artificial light. Not much sunlight at all. So even though everybody’s keeping schoolteacher hours—safe in bed at nine o’clock; well, in bed anyway, maybe not all that safe—it’s like you’re doing all your business at night, like some gambler. And the noise. There’s a lot of metal banging against metal, and not just any metal, steel. It’s like being in a really crummy gym, with muscle guys banging the free weights together all the time. This is the doors to the ranges and cells being opened and shut by remote control while guys do their waiting-for-the-sign-to-change routine. You hear the clanging sound as you’re sliding off to sleep on your slab and you hear it again in the morning when it wakes you up like a bird. In between times, you hear it in your dreams. When you dream, it’s a little bit of the present that comes barging into the past. When you’re awake, it’s a piece of the old days making music in the here and now. If you listen hard, it’s like traffic noise, honking horns, little blasts from cop whistles, maybe sirens in the background. City noise.

I’m lucky, really. I can’t begin to tell you how lucky. They could have sent me to one of those newer places in the suburbs. No ranges there, no steel sounds, no Jimmy Cagney left at all. Same people but no past which means no present either. Everybody knows the reason almost nobody excaped from Alcatraz and Devil’s Island was because of the currents and sharks. The reason you never hear about somebody excaping from one of these places—they got names like the Regional Remand Processing Unit—is because the joints’re surrounded by suburbs on all sides. Human life can’t exist in suburbs. Corrections Branch sends out search parties when somebody breaks out and they find him pretty quick, lying
right where he’s dropped, beside some mall, city-starved to death. It’s the cruellest kind of punishment there is to lock somebody up in an indoor suburb in the middle of outdoors ones; you go crazy if you stay and die if you try to leave. They would have sent me there if they knew how I felt about it, but fortunately they didn’t. I outwitted em. Wasn’t a fair fight at all.

Civ dies when you cut down all the cities to make suburbs. I’ve never seen em but the guards probably have uniforms with creases in em, like the ones service station attendants had in the fifties—or at least in ads for the fifties that you used to see in the seventies. Here the guards are like cops, smelly messed-up cops, and we’re like criminals, which is really what we are. We’re playing cops and robbers with real cops and real robbers. The cops look scared when they’re ganging up on a person. We look wary, on our toes all the time, keeping watch, waiting for the next shift of cops to take charge. We’re leery of change. I say again, it’s exactly like nature. The rats eat each other but make each other sick.

Here’s what I mean. Instead of being a suburb inside rings of other suburbs, this place is a city shut off by a moat of suburbs from all the other suburbs that lie beyond. Same difference, you say; I say no, it isn’t, it’s important. Walls and fences don’t keep us in. Parking lots and maybe a mall or two, some fast-food places for sure, an omniplex cinema now and then—this is what’s keeping the Citizens from getting in here, and I couldn’t be happier about it. Out there is Burnaby or Surrey or someplace (I can’t tell one from the other); that’s the buffer zone protecting us from places even worse. Bet you thought there weren’t any places worse. Don’t be naive.

What we got here is like a beacon. You can see it from anyplace in the chain-store prairie that surrounds us. It’s like D/T Mountain that way. It inspires people, gives em faith. Hope, anyway. The point is: I’m lucky.

I’m not a superstitious person. Until I’d been back to work at Steenrod’s for quite a long time, I’d never even given a thought to good luck and bad luck and whether they really exist or not. Then I started to have some good luck in my life. That’s what it was; it certainly wasn’t anything I had any control over. And this made me see that what went on before that could, in one way or another, be called bad luck. This put everything that had happened into perspective.