The Last of the Lumbermen (10 page)

IT'S FIVE AFTER EIGHT
when I
pull into the driveway and turn off the ignition, still bathed in that strange, resigned calm I felt when the Explorer was about to do me. It's
a relief to see Bozo, looking like a black bear
, sitting on the front steps waiting for me and
for her dinner. Esther must have whispered the
magic words in her ear, because this time
of day she'd normally be on one of her nightly r
omps with her pal Sweetie, the neighbour's Newfoundland.
Until two years ago last fall there was a
third Newfie in the neighbourhood, Camille, but an
American hunter decided she was a black bear, and shot
her in her owner's front yar
d. Since then, Bozo and Sweetie have spent hunting season with
the word “
DOG
” painted across both sides
of them in day-glo pink. So far, so good.

I know, I kno
w. Anything but dealing with the matter at hand,
right? Well, here's what I'm going to do: I'm
going to walk into the house without a plan, just
like I've done all my life whenever the crap gets
close enough to the fan that I can smell it.
That seems right. There are times in a
life when the world moves too fast for even the illusion
of control. I got lucky with the Explorer
, so maybe I'll get lucky again.

I click off the car lights, slip Wendel's
wallet into the inside pocket of my jacket, gather up the
bag of rapidly cooling Chinese food, and slip out of
the car. As I close the door and take
my first step toward the house, Bozo greets me
with a flying tackle, and I find myself lying
in a snow bank with one hundred and twentyfive pounds of black Newfie slobbering in my face.

At least she wasn't going for the Chinese food. And she isn't a Ford Explorer.

ELEVEN

L
YING IN A SNOWBANK
forever with Bozo isn't an
option, tempt- ing as it is. For sure, she'd
be happy about it, provided I gave her the
chow mein. But Esther's dinner is getting cold, and
if I let Bozo sit on my chest like
this much longer I'll drown in dog drool.

I place the food bag as far from me
as I can, push Bozo off the other way
, and climb out of the snow bank. When I'm
almost clear, she grabs the tail of my coat and pulls me back in.

“Cut it out, you stupid slobber-bag.”

These are words she's
heard before, but she knows they don't always
mean the same thing. She cocks her head as I
glare at her, picks up the signal that that
I'm serious, and sinks back in the snow, disappointed.

“It's oka
y,” I say, softening my voice. “Just let me
get the bag here, and we'll go inside and have dinner.”

Dinner
is a word
she understands perfectly, whatever tones come with it. Along
with
romp
, it's her favourite part of human language, and
she leaps out of the snowbank in one graceful bound
to stand, attentive and still salivating, in front of
me, ready to follow me respectfully anywhere
in the universe I — and the chow mein I'm
packing — care to lead her. As she hopes, I lead her into the house where her food dish is.

Inside she sits patiently as I remove my coat and
boots, and she doesn't fuss when I wipe her jowls
with one of the towels Esther keeps by the front
and back doors. I also retrieve Wendel's wallet fr
om my coat before I hang it up. Bozo
follows me into the kitchen with her snout pressed
devoutly against the bag, sucking in the fumes.

Esther has two places set at
the table, but there's no sign of her.
I take the food out of the bag, turn on
the oven, and put the covered aluminum containers inside
to reheat. Bozo lies down to wait beside the table with her snout between her paws.

Esther is sleeping. Her
ability to fall asleep anywhere, anytime, is only
a little less remarkable than how oblivious her slumber is,
and how swiftly she can pull herself out of it
to complete alertness. Being able to sleep deeply in
an unlocked house is partly Bozo's gift, of course. Short
of a grizzly, nothing and no one she doesn't
know can enter this house without Esther's or my consent.

Bozo
isn't exactly a normal guard dog. She doesn't bark
when strangers come around, and she doesn't bare
her fangs if they approach the house. What she does
do is sprawl in the doorway and grab their ankle
or their pant leg in her jaws if and when
they try to get past her, after which she
holds on until one of us tells her to let
go. Last summer, a mail courier spent three hours
on the front porch after he tried to
slip past Bozo to place a package between the scr
een and front doors. By the time I r
eturned home, the courier and Bozo were best pals,
but Bozo hadn't let go of his ankle.

As I lean over to plant a
kiss on Esther's cheek, her eyes open. “Ah,” she says. “You're back. What time is it?”

“Just after eight. Are you hungry?”

She ignores the question, pulls herself upright,
and stretches languidly.

“I've been out for almost three hours,” she says. “I didn't think I was
that
tired.”

“I could run you a bath,” I offer. “That might cheer you up.”

“Who says I need cheering up?” She's
fully awake now, and we're right back to
the impasse we were at when I dropped
her off.

“Well,” I say, “Come into the kitchen, and let's eat.”

WE EAT QUIETLY,
WITH
bursts of small talk that quickly trail off
into silence. I'm about to feed the chow mein to
Bozo when she drops her bomb.

“I think you should know,”
she says, “that Leo Simons wasn't Wendel's father.”

There
it is. She's confirmed the probability that has been
cook- ing in my brain since I saw the dates
on Wendel's two birth certificates. And I'm hearing much
more than she believes she's telling me. I know more than she does now. And that's bad.

First,
there's danger in my knowing more than she
thinks I do. Yeah, most people play the game
of letting on they know less than they do, and the
worst thing I might find out in the next
few minutes is that she doesn't much like Billy Menzies
— some- thing I've lived with for years. That's not
the danger. This is about us, and the
reciprocal trust we've built up. Aside from
the Billy Menzies stuff and what I do
with my money, I've kept very little from Esthe
r. About as much as it now turns out she's
kept from me. But now she's dropped a
major secret. Why tonight, and for what reasons, I'm not clear.

If
you've ever lived in a place like Mantua, you'll understand
why reciprocity makes sense. You rely on the
people around you for things city people either don't
need, or that they get from the big, anonymous systems
that rule their lives. Around here, a
lot of those systems don't exist, and when they do, they
don't work all the time.

So not lying about important stuff
is common sense. It keeps you from giving into all those lowest common denominators that are always inviting you to screw up
or lie to yourself about how low the denominator is. Mo
re than once in the last few years that small
rule has kept me from chasing around. It's
also earned me the one close friend I've ever really had as an adult: Gord.

Gord says that if you
lie to people about important things it damages their ability
to decide what's true or false right across the
board, and makes it impossible for them to ca
re about you accurately. Point is, Esther knows nearly
everything about Andy Bathgate, and
everything
about Weaver Bathgate. But
if my early life comes up, I say I don't r
emember much, and that isn't a lie. The fact is I
remember only four or five of Billy's days with
any detail, and those are the ones I can't tell her about.

But now those four or five days ar
e smack at the centre of what she's revealing,
and unless I can think of something fast, our system of telling the t
ruth to one another is about to come apart.

“As a matter of fact, I was wondering about
that in the last hour,” I say, truthfully.

Esther's eyes narr
ow. “What do you mean by that?”

I pull Wendel's wallet from my pocket
and plunk it on the table in front of he
r. “Wendel has two birth certificates in here.
One says he's twenty, the other says he was
born a year earlier. He left his wallet in the car, and I …”

For a split second
there's anger in her eyes. There's no point accusing
me of going through Wendel's wallet, because I've al
ready confessed to it. She doesn't, and the flash point
fades. “I wanted to protect him from it
while he was young,” she says. “And Leo agreed. W
e weren't exactly expecting his father to show up and claim him.”

That one makes me wince. “How long has Wendel known?”

“He
doesn't. Oh, I had to tell him about the age
business when the Rangers drafted him. He was born
in December, so I just told him I didn't want
him starting school at five. Sooner or later it
would have come out, and I didn't want him to be unprepared. But he doesn't know Leo wasn't his father.”

She turns her back to me and stares out
the kitchen window into the darkness. “Look, I was going to
tell you everything — not that there's very much
to tell. There was a boy from one
of the teams at the last Mantua Cup. You know
how things like that go. I was drunk, and so
was he. It just happened. I was going with Leo
at the time, but we weren't … you know
. When I turned up pregnant, I told him. I
had to. I was supposed to enter nursing that September
, but by late June I was already starting to show.”

Bozo is nuzzling my leg, wanting her chow
mein. I push her away, but she's insistent. She
grabs my sleeve in her mouth and nearly drags me o
ff the chair. Esther turns from the window
to watch, distractedly. I gesture at the nearly
full platter of food. “Do you want any of this?”

“No,” she says absently. “Give it to her.”

I slide the
platter in front of Bozo and she greedily
buries her face in it.

“We left town in July.
Eloped. Leo worked while I had the baby.”

“That was a generous thing for him to do,” I say
.

“Leo was a generous man.” She seems troubled
by that thought for a moment. “Anyway,” she continues,
“the next fall I went to Simon Fraser instead and took
a B.Sc. in psychology. I went there because
I could take classes year round. It only took th
ree years. Then I went to
UBC
and started an
MA
in social work.”

“What was Leo doing all this time?”

“Working for a logging
supply company. And being supportive, whenever he was around.
We lived at the university residences, so there was daycar
e and all that. It wasn't so bad.”

“You didn't come back here at all?”

“Not until Wendel was three-and-a-half. By
then nobody asked questions. Why would they? He was small
for his age. Anyway, when I was a year into
the
MA
Leo's father died, and we moved back her
e so Leo could take over the company. You know most of the rest of it.”

The crisis point has come, and, despite my good intentions,
I embark on a deception, if not quite an outright
lie. “What about …”

She cuts me off. “His
biological father? He disappeared, the poor bastard.” There's
neither malice nor resentment in her voice. While I listen
to her version of who I was and what I
did the night after I helped her conceive Wendel, I
feel a strange kind of elation. She does something
I've never quite been able to do: she forgives
me, all the way to saying that it wasn't my
fault. She knows the basic details of the bus accident,
right down to the drunken bus driver and the
fact that two of the dead were my
closest friends. She's also aware that I flew the coop
before the vehicular homicide charges reached the court. It's another bizarre moment. She actually tries to excuse me:

“Really, what else could he have done? Such a waste.”