The Master of Happy Endings (6 page)

3

On the second day of herring season he learned at the Free Exchange that Bo Hammond's overturned boat had been discovered floating just beneath the water's surface. Hammond himself had not been found—probably carried with the currents into the colder, deeper waters of Georgia Strait. To Thorstad this was shocking news, but it was discussed rather matter-of-factly amongst islanders who'd lived through too many herring seasons to be surprised. “Some of them guys, they can't stop filling their nets even long enough to deliver to the cannery boat. A little skiff like his, gets so low in the water the first decent wave just swamps 'er.”

He knew that bigger boats than Hammond's had gone down before now from the weight of too many fish, their owners made reckless by the vision of countless herring enriching their bank accounts. This was greed, he supposed, doing its ugly work. Yet the news about Hammond caused him the same sense of loss now as he'd experienced whenever he'd heard unhappy news about former students.

Well, it was more than just a sense of loss. He was surprised by a heated rush of anger—the stupidity of it. Unlike Lisa Svetic with her sarcasm and von Schiller-Holst with his criticisms, Bo Hammond was one person here whose company, however fleeting, he'd enjoyed. He'd had a new tale to tell after each excursion away—close calls with pirates at sea, dangerous journeys up South American rivers, beautiful women left weeping in forgotten villages—all a little preposterous but, you suspected, probably true. They'd been welcome reports from a dangerous left-behind world.

When he stepped inside Lisa Svetic's store still reeling from this news, the postmistress roused herself reluctantly from her red-leather chair to stand large and stern and important behind her counter wearing a pair of faded bib overalls. “Do you think anyone ever found Blondie and Dagwood funny?”

She showed too little distress at Hammond's drowning. Her uncle, she said, had drowned in a similar manner. “Why they gave that fool a fishing licence I'll never know. Uncle Geoff I mean.” She used a ribbed undershirt to dust her ancient cash register and the full length of the counter. “Hammond wasn't exactly a fool but he must've got carried away, thinking of all the revolutions he could finance with the money he'd make if he didn't stop pulling in fish.”

“This is a terrible thing,” Thorstad said, indignant that Hammond could be so casually dismissed. “A good man has been lost!”

She tossed the undershirt under the counter and bent to scribble something in the little notebook she kept beside the till. “The problem with a two-day season is it turns the whole damn business into a cutthroat competition.” The thistle tattoo bristled with her disapproval. “They'll risk their stupid lives rather than leave a few fish for someone else's net.”

Thorstad felt an unfamiliar brand of sadness to think of all the secret messages that had entered Bo Hammond's brain from those books—now lost, or dissolved in the cold grey sea along with his self-image as a saviour of the downtrodden, while all the fish he'd hauled in were free to swim away or spawn as they'd originally planned.

“Somebody over in Nairobi was probably counting on him,” Lisa said, “or them poor suffering souls in Haiti.
Those
poor souls in Haiti.”

He wished he'd never let her know he'd been a teacher.

“Of course it could be suicide,” she added, standing back to fold her arms. “Or murder. I thought that Cuban fellow looked suspicious but Hammond always claimed they were friends. That's the sort of person they would send, isn't it?”

Was this what came of reading the coloured comics? “Why would anyone want to kill Hammond?”

“The usual reason.” She looked off into the distance and tapped two fingers on her counter. “It's the risk you take when you get involved with drugs.” Sharing this information seemed to cheer her up.

Thorstad made no effort to disguise his shock. This was enough to make him believe he'd been asleep for years. He'd liked Hammond, though of course he hadn't known him well. How had he got himself involved in a business like that? Of course Thorstad had no experience with illegal drugs himself, beyond catching the occasional student with a joint in his pocket.

“I figure he was collecting their money—large bills tucked behind the flaps of them books.
Those
books.” She pulled a sour face and came out from behind the counter to roll a twenty-litre container of water over beside the others near the door. “Paying the local growers—you know—and sending the rest off to who-knows-where. Laundering it, I guess you could say. They must've caught him cheating someone big.”

He crossed his arms, to hide his agitated hands. “And you knew this all along?”

Behind her counter again and panting a little, Lisa Svetic shrugged. “I thought you educated people could see right through the rest of us, ha-ha.” She slid two envelopes out from his pigeonhole and slapped them down on the counter. “Hammond knew the risks. He would've gone nuts if he'd stayed too long where it's safe, with nothing to do but building chairs.”

Pushing the letters inside a pocket of his corduroys, Thorstad left the Store and started across the muddy road—confused, uncertain what he'd intended to do next. Though Alvin White stood up from under the hood of the blue Henry J he'd rescued from across the water, Axel Thorstad did not stop.

Lisa had followed him to the door. “If all them letters are offers of marriage you must be pretty damn fussy. You holding out for Penelope Cruz? Scared some old witch will get you in her clutches?”

“You knew Elena,” he said without turning back. He meant: Do you think there's anyone could replace a woman like her?

“It was lovely of you to say that, my darling,” Elena said, once he had started down the forest path, “but don't you think you ought to explain to poor Lisa what you really want, because I'm sure some part of her thinks that even having a man like you around is preferable to living alone in that house behind the Store and hoping every day that someone new will come in through her door and offer to make her life more interesting, since whatever you think of her she is a good-hearted woman who has treated you well and probably looks out for your well-being more than you realize—which reminds me that there is bound to be some sort of memorial service for your friend Hammond and it would be just like you to refuse to attend even though you know perfectly well that you ought to be there even if you don't speak to a soul, just so you will be seen supporting the only neighbours you have in your shrunken world, so please make sure Lisa drives you to the service in that old Ford pickup she parks behind the Store.”

Elena was the only woman he'd ever known who was convinced the Ford Motor Company had manufactured every pickup on earth. Lisa's truck was an ancient Chev without doors, decorated with rusted-out holes, running on three cylinders and four bald tires, just barely capable of taking her down the narrow muddy roads into the hidden parts of the island when she needed to deliver a shut-in's groceries or mail. Like the few other vehicles seen on these roads, her Chev had been brought across the strait on a barge, since the little ferry was capable of carrying only pets, mailbags, vegetables, caged chickens, foot passengers, replacement parts for water pumps, and hardware purchased from Canadian Tire.

“Get you in her clutches,”
Lisa had said. To be in someone's clutches suggested strong fingers around your neck. His mother had used the phrase when she'd warned him against the excessive interest displayed by one of his students, a young woman determined to be a poet and embarrassingly grateful for every drop of encouragement. It had got so that it was impossible not to see what was between her lines, requiring him to respond as though he were too stupid to understand. “Watch out, my dear,” his mother had warned. “You're so naive, that girl will have you in her clutches before you know what hit you.”

Would a father have taught him how to handle the situation? Thorstad didn't know. He'd never had a father, except in a few frames of a Hollywood film and the photo he'd lifted from the celluloid to hang on his wall. His father had died after a leap from the roof of a four-storey building at Centurion Pictures, though only the first few seconds of his jump would appear in the film. His face could not be seen as he hurtled himself from the edge, and of course he'd been dressed to look like the actor Derek Morris, who was playing the role of a policeman attempting to apprehend the man who'd killed the woman he loved. The rest of the cop's dangerous feats were performed by a second double, who brought the original jump to a happier conclusion by landing safely on a lower roof to continue the chase. Why they hadn't re-shot the beginning of the jump with the replacement was a mystery, but Axel Thorstad was grateful the possibility had been overlooked.

The accident had occurred two weeks before Thorstad was born, which was the sort of thing he might expect in a Dickens novel but not in his own real life. He had never seen his father's face, he had never heard his father's voice, but he had watched his copy of that black-and-white film starring Derek Morris and the beautiful Marisa Gale, and so had witnessed those final seconds of his father's life, anguished at his inability to alter the outcome. Anyone who looked closely enough could see that the policeman who lands on the lower roof is not the policeman who leapt from the top of the four-storey building. His mother had pointed this out when he was a boy.

His mother had explained that as a stunt double his father had known his face would never be captured by the camera. Having failed as an actor himself, he'd chosen to devote his life to the same dangerous career as the famous Cliff Lyons so that artists with real talent could be free to do their work without fear of harm. But he had lost the opportunity to live out this noble purpose when he fell from that roof on his first day before an actual rolling camera.

Derek Morris may have been grateful for the sacrifice. For thirty years Thorstad's mother had received an annual Christmas card from the actor, though of course he might have been sending cards to any number of widows whose husbands had made it possible for him to live on, unscarred, to old age and international fame. If it had been guilt that inspired those cards, Thorstad would never know.

Rather than remain in Los Angeles after his father's death, his mother had moved north to the place of her childhood, a midsize harbour town, a coal-mining centre in those years before it was rescued from decline by the construction of a pulp mill whose smokestacks pumped foul billows into the sky. Here the new mother lived with her parents in the family home and did not remarry.

No doubt his mother's account of his father's accident explained his early fascination with movies. He'd been the only boy at Saturday matinees who sat silent and unmoving, hypnotized by the activity on the screen—the movies somehow implying a link between his world and his father's, a direct connection between his town and the mysterious place of his father's death, a city as magical as it was dangerous.

As a young man, Axel Thorstad had aspired to something like his father's dedication to the lives of others, though not in any aspect of the movie business. It was in the classroom that he'd eventually pursued his goals, exploring with adolescents the power of Mark Twain's humour, the glories of Shakespeare's dramas, and the heartbreaking beauty of Synge's
Riders to the Sea
. Of course the great works of literature needed little assistance from him, but they could sometimes supply the key that would open the doors to those mysterious teenage lives.

And what had he ever been but a servant of love? For more than thirty years he'd explored with teens not only the wise compassionate powers of the masters but also the more recent wonders and insights of contemporary writers. He had supervised dances, and organized weekend conferences with living poets. He could think of former students whose love of poetry had led them to take up the teaching of Literature themselves; he knew of computer programmers who were writing plays in their evenings. And of course there were young people in the world today who would not be in the world at all if he hadn't encouraged their shy-and-awkward fathers to invite their pretty-but-overlooked mothers to the graduation dance.

In later years he had needed to do far less of this gentle sort of matchmaking, since somewhere along the way young women seemed to have taken matters into their own hands. Such gestures—even where needed—were far less welcome than they had been. Perhaps this was due to the widening gap between his age and their own. Year after year students continued to be seventeen, while he'd advanced steadily through birthdays towards his inevitable exit into the dark obscurity of retirement. Amongst the latest students were the youngest children of those shy boys and girls—middle-aged couples who'd turned out on parents' night to make sure he knew their gratitude had not worn thin. Grey hairs had begun to show up on their heads, while they could not help but notice the deepening lines in his face, the spots on his hands.

By the time he'd emerged from the woods behind his shack, a dark cloud had moved in above the strait, obscuring most of the sky and all of the facing island's mountains. Insects flew past. An owl hooted somewhere in the woods, perhaps thinking night had fallen. The waves slapped weakly onto the beach and then hissed and gurgled while sliding back through the gravel.

Normie Fenton's little wooden rowboat had been pulled up onto the rocks, and Normie himself was at work doing what Thorstad had once done for himself every year—rebuilding the retaining wall damaged by the winter tides, its logs and buttresses washed away or left in disarray along the beach. Normie raised a hand in greeting but continued hauling solid lengths of driftwood up the beach, seldom looking up long enough to notice anything outside the world immediately around his boots. If he needed help he would holler for it, but otherwise he worked alone to shore up the crib so the sea would not steal more than it already had of Axel Thorstad's soil.