The Extinction Club (40 page)

“Can I offer you a drink?” I asked the vet, while reaching for a roll of twenties in my back pocket. She declined.

“Snorin’ like a goddamn lawnmower,” the waitress added. Her scowl turned magically into a smile when I handed her my customary tip. She took the bill from my fingers and gave them a squeeze at the same time.

The vet put her hand to her mouth, muffling a cough or laugh. I filled up both glasses in the event she changed her mind, then halved one of them as a long silence unspun that neither of us seemed able to stop. It was her turn to ask a question, I decided, but no question came. Instead, she picked up a pencil lying by her
café allongé
and performed a kind of baton-twirl with it. I was on the verge of mentioning the photo I had seen of her, the one in Céleste’s locked drawer, but wisely stopped myself.

For complete strangers, we were sitting very close to each other, a hair’s breadth from touching. Close enough to know that she wore no perfume or eau de cologne. If a woman wants to attract a man, that’s the way to go about it.

“Is this where we tell each other highly edited versions of our life stories?” she asked.

“I … well, we could.”

“Ask me a question.”

A clicking sound, like that of a shutter release button, came from her direction. Or perhaps just beyond her. I looked over her shoulder at the next table, but there was no one facing
me, no one holding a camera. The bouncer was now standing by the wall, but his back was turned and his hands were in his pockets. I paused, gathered my thoughts.

“Why did you give me the drugs I asked for? At the clinic.”

“The cephalexin?”

“The pethidine.”

“What’s that?”

What’s that?
“It’s an analgesic. Like morphine.”

“Ask me another question.”

Why don’t you know what pethidine is? Does it go by another name up here? “Does it go … did things work out for you up here? For your daughter?”

“Hardly. Her new friends are just as bad as the old ones. Worse.”

“Is she a student or …”

“She’s a stripper.” She pushed back her chair and stood up, displaying a patch of sweat under her arm. “She’s on next.”

Watching the daughter take her clothes off, I had a feeling, would do little to ingratiate me with the mother. Besides, I was dead. All this noise, all these people was a six-month allotment for me in one night. Worries about my ward, my sad-eyed lady of the highlands, were draining me as well. If I hadn’t left the two-way in the van, I’d page her right now … The clock-hands on the sandwich board by the stage said I had five minutes till showtime. I looked around at the faces—grinning, morose, laughing, blank. Then stared, for some reason, at the red serviette beneath the vet’s glass coffee mug. Except it wasn’t a serviette, it was a folded piece of paper. Like the one I had in my pocket …

I was reaching for it when the vet came into my peripheral vision, on her way back from the ladies’ room. There was pride—more, majesty—in her stride and bearing; all heads turned toward her like heliotropes toward the sun. Put another way, they drooled.

As I stood to hold her chair I entertained the idea of putting my hand lightly on her back, or long tress of hair, but entertaining it was as far as I got. She sat down as the music started and the lights dimmed.

“I really should go,” I said. “And care for my patient.”

Another slow smile. “If there’s anything I can do for her, let me know.”

“You wouldn’t … no, never mind.”

“I wouldn’t what?”

You wouldn’t want to live in a church would you, you and your daughter, and becomes Céleste’s stepmother?
“I’m looking for a black truck, a bear truck. Big tires and broken headlight. Does that … ring any bells?”

She shook her head. But with a faint look of surprise?

“A shot in the dark,” I shrugged.

She offered her hand, which I thought of brushing with a kiss, but shook instead. It was unflinching, her handshake, as firm as marble, perhaps reserved for clients whose pets she could not save. “You know how to reach me,” she said. “But take this anyway.”

I took what was offered, a green business card. “You know I’ll try.” The words came streaming out and made my heart somersault, somersault like a teenager’s heart.

“I know.”

I told her my name, which I should’ve done earlier, but she didn’t tell me hers. She turned to look at the brick-built bouncer, now lurking by the bathroom door, and then at the
stage as Diana the Huntress, with pink bow and arrow, made her entrance.

He kissed the veterinarian, whose name he still did not know, on the mouth. Without premeditation or hesitancy or overhaste. They were haunch to haunch, heart to heart! He could not imagine what had taken possession of him …

I was trying to rewrite that last scene while descending the stairs, but was distracted by a figure on the bottom step. The real estate agent. He was leaning against the banister, minus hunting cap, minus girlfriend. He looked rather drowsy. And didn’t return my greeting or appear to know who I was.

Outside the snow was still falling, but the neon sign no longer blinked; it buzzed and fizzed instead, like a beehive. I cleared snow off the Westy with my forearm, then climbed inside. Fired her up first try. Turned on the heater, then the wipers. While watching them, thinking about the vet, I flashed to the green business card and red slip of paper. I plucked each from my back pocket, put on my glasses, turned on the dome light. The card had a poaching hotline but no other number:

SOLANGE LACOURSIÈRE, M.Sc., Ph.D.

Morphologiste légiste

Centre québécois sur la santé des animaux sauvages

St-Hyacinthe (Québec)

SOS BRACONNAGE 1-800-463-2191

I turned it over. Her cell number was written in pencil, double-underlined.

The red sheet was next:

XXXMAS ULTRA-HORROR—BY INVITATION ONLY

1.
Casuistry
(Canada, 2002, 88 min.) In May 2001, three young artists from Toronto torture a cat to death and videotape themselves doing it.
Casuistry
takes its title from a word for specious reasoning that rationalizes dubious behaviour. The leader of the group says he discovered the word in a dictionary directly above “cat.” Two local gallery owners and a government grant officer defend the action on the grounds of artistic freedom.

2.
Bleu blanc et rouge IV
(Canada, no dial., 26 min.). In this continuing series, a Laurentian hunter-artist once again dips an animal—this time a wolf cub—into a vat of blue enamel, slices off its paws, and the animal slips and slides across the canvas until he has breathed his last and another red-white-and-blue masterpiece is born.

3.
Black Macaques
(Indonesia, subtitles, 45 min.). A Taiwanese captain of a tuna trawler orders a dozen crested black macaques delivered to his boat, alive. Trappers are sent to the jungle, to the Tangkoko Nature Reserve in Indonesia, to bag the rare monkeys. To take the babies alive, the mothers are shot. Aboard the trawler, galley hands bind the animals’ hands and feet. Using sharp bamboo sticks, the crew then punctures the babies’ soft skulls. As the convulsions ebb, the brains are served raw.

Good Christ. This may explain why they built a psychiatric institution nearby. And why the vet was here tonight. What
are the laws regarding animal-kill videos? If the outdoorsmen shows on TV are any guide, I would assume there aren’t any.

I blew out onto the highway with tires spinning, thoughts spinning, stomach churning, unaware that I was speeding dangerously, with no pedal left to go. That’s all I need, more disturbing images running around my perma-fried brain, banging at the walls. More things to impair me when I think of them and madden me when I dream of them.

I never tailgate, but I did so on this occasion. My bicameral mind was in a state of entropic frenzy, with billiarding thoughts about cats and cubs and black macaques and mausolean strip clubs. I was driving one-handed, white-knuckled, buzzing Céleste while passing the car in front, recklessly on a blind curve, when it registered. That the car in front was a squad car.

XXVIII

Every time I write in this book I ask myself, “Will this be the last time?” Bazinet will be out soon, any day now, and I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m working on a defensive plan that will save Nile & an offensive plan that will probably get me killed.

So I’m going to assume this will be my last entry & talk not about humans but animals, really interesting ones that no longer exist.

Around 10,000 years ago, 3/4 of the large mammals in the Americas were wiped out. Like the Mastodon, Woolly Mammoth, Sabre-Toothed Cat, Woolly Rhinoceros, Cynodesmus (a giant dog), Cave Lion, Cave Bear, Giant Ground Sloth, Mountain Deer, Four-Pronged Antelope, Dire Wolf, Castoroide (a beaver bigger than a bear), Peccarie (a pig bigger than a tiger) & our own native Horses, Lions & Camels.

What caused the great dying? It wasn’t a meteor or anything like that. It was something scientists call the Pleistocene Overkill. When the first tribes came across the Bering Strait (which was land at the time) & down through the Canadian Rockies, they entered a hunter’s paradise: forests with around 100 million large mammals. The animals hadn’t a clue about humans & their ways, so the hunters’ spears & arrows caught them by surprise. Totally. And killed them by the hundreds of
thousands. The human population exploded. And whenever you satisfy the basic needs of life, anthropologists say, people use their free time for sport. The early tribes killed these great beasts not only for food & clothing but for fun, for trophies. Hunting was seen as an act to test & prove your manhood.

Modern man has done as much damage as the Clovis hunters of the Pleistocene era. From the 18th century on, North American hunters have wiped out many more species, including the Sea Cow, Great Auk, Labrador Duck, Eskimo Curlew & Eastern Cougar. Not to mention the Passenger Pigeon, whose flocks could number up to 50 million birds, who could blot out the sun as they passed. And whose last member was shot in Canada.

I would like to talk briefly about 4 of these animals, ones that don’t get a lot of ink.

Sea Cow

On land the only bigger mammal was the Elephant. So “Sea Elephant” might be a better name than “Sea Cow.” The largest specimens, females, could reach 10 metres (32 feet) & weigh over 6,000 kilos (7 tons). It was a common species in the North Pacific, but ancient hunters practically exterminated them. They survived only around the Commander Islands in the Bering Sea
,
where nobody lived. The first European to see these creatures was a German naturalist named Georg Steller. In 1741 he described the way they were hunted:

Their capture was effected by a large iron hook, with the other end being fastened by means of an iron ring to a very long & stout rope, held by 30 men on shore…. After an animal was harpooned in the back, the men on shore, grasping the other end of the rope, pulled the desperately resisting animal laboriously towards them. Those in the boat made the animal fast by means of another rope & wore it out with continual blows, until tired & completely motionless, it was attacked with bayonets, knives & other weapons & pulled up on land. Immense slices were cut from the still living animal, but all it did was shake its tail furiously & make such resistance with its forelimbs that big strips of its skin was torn off. In addition it breathed heavily, as if sighing. From the wounds in the back the blood spurted upward like a fountain….