The Man Game (45 page)

The following morning Dunbar escaped from Vancouver. The moist savage cage that had imprisoned him for three days in January, 1887, finally set him free. It was not without mixed feelings. Tears, his own; and The Whore Without A Face, she too, if he heard correctly, had wept. A kissless farewell and he was gone. The Whore Without A Face remained in her cloister at Wood's and he boarded a train in New Westminster heading east. He didn't bid his brother any kind of farewell. He didn't even call on Toronto. He rode in the back of an applecart, shivering, while the farmer complained the whole way there about the Chinamen.

On the train, his sleeping car was compact but royally accessorized. Yet still he felt like a real peasant: letting his emotions overtake him. He already missed her. There was a girl, and he had met her, who knew love when she felt it rubbing against her heart. She was a glorious hydra with no true face, and their time together was so short-lived, so punishingly short-lived. He didn't know how he would survive not having her. Was he in despair or just incredulous? Life to Dunbar was a series of worsening associations. It was so private between them. No one would ever know that he was ever in love with her because his love lived in a sacred room, a dark room. He realized he might find some satisfaction in cherishing a deep regret and harbouring it to the grave, his secret love, all the while living in Wyoming among cows, a wife like a chicken coop on fire, and who knows how many children he'd eventually have to feed. The image of his brother Sammy, the man who was only a head, floating around in his wheeled chair with an Indian at his side—it all came
back to Dunbar in a rush of queasy vertigo. He decided right then and there that from this day on, he would grind like a mortar and pestle, and his labours would provide for his life, and he would ask for no more than what he reaped with his own hands.

Please, Ma, Father, I mean no harm, for it is I, your loving son. I have returned with foul news aboot Sammy …

As Dunbar prepared his words, he became aware that many of the passengers and crew aboard the train were watching him. Until he found out why, he wouldn't let on. This was how he always lifted his hand to his chin. Why was that woman leaning back in her chair every minute or so to search for something in her handbag? And why did her eyes always dart up to look at him with the most unflatteringly serious face? Her face was quite similar to the train conductor's, who came again to check for tickets. Another suspicious goon. His brother is living with a woman who controls his every move, quite literally, while she seduces what appears to be every drifter in town, right under his nose. To make it worse, they live with an unstable, or perhaps he should say fiendish Indian, since his parents will never visit. And two Chinamen act as houseboys, creeping soundlessly over wood floors that scream when any other foot touches them—the floors that is. The real culprit of Sammy's predicament was still definitely Molly, a conniving woman after the Erwagen fortune sure enough. Sammy was virtually incapable of rational thought with her around; her every gesture left him senseless with ardour. Sammy was so thoroughly seduced by Molly's hypnotically green eyes, soulful and yet so proud, that he himself defended her innocence while she plundered the good name of the Erwagen family in plain public view.

The fur traders on board carried weapons under their skins. Dunbar saw a big man straight off the trapline flash the black double barrel at him and laugh. If he changed from one car to the next, the fur traders always followed him. When the train conductor asked him for his ticket again, he was afraid to show it. How you feeling, sir? he asked, a shockingly
inappropriate question coming from an utter stranger, a mere ticket-taker. All these questions were getting under his skin. He didn't answer any of them. Instead he shut himself in his private, seven-by-three sleeping cabin, and washed his face with the new bar of Ivory soap, shaved with the complimentary Kampfe Brothers safety razor, quite an invention, and rolled up under the Hudson's Bay blankets for what he hoped was long enough.

He slept for two days. Three more days into the voyage, and Dunbar was howling and thrashing and not unlocking the door, though he could reach it from any place in his room. When they liberated him, he was clammy beyond belief. According to a doctor he'd succumbed to a kind of fevered paranoia brought upon by infection, and if kept under watch, his health should improve within the week. For safe measure, he was opiated heavily and quarantined. Influenza was no laughing matter. They fed him milk to relax him and he did indeed say some queer things about lumberjacks while under the fevered spell. With good-hearted intentions or pity, the doctor prescribed for him chicken soup and lots of rest.

An intense bladder infection quickly turned into gushing venereal sores overnight, all over his genitals and mouth. The slightest movement Dunbar made cracked open a sore. In the hours before the train reached Fort William, the crew recommended they stop for real medical attention, Dunbar insisted that the only doctor he trusted was Klinx in Toronto. Klinx, he's the only man in the world I trust, he said. But as his temperature dropped, he kept saying the same thing. Klinx. Take me to Klinx. These were his final lucid hours. The Erwagen family doctor's name was Billings.

His parents, Mr. and Mrs. Erwagen, took him straight from the train station to the hospital. The first thing he said upon seeing their faces was that they were milky devils.

Dunbar had developed a full-blown case of catatonic mania brought on by a breed of super-syphilis, according to Dr. Billings. He sees nothing but devils, the doctor surmised.
Herpes sores ravaged his genitals with craggy and volcanic scabs. The gonorrhea doubled him over with bee-sting pain that throbbed across his entire pelvis. He was unable to stretch out his legs to full height. Rank mucus streamed in green rivers from his eyes. The colour of his urine alternated between dark red, oxidated copper, and muddy grey, and dribbled all day. The last stage of his journey through life came when the syphilis gained complete control of his nervous system and started to mutilate his features. In an hour, he went bald. Once the hair was gone, his entire head deformed until, in about a week, it resembled cauliflower. His nose and mouth sank between the gutters of ruddy white vegetable flesh. His veins poked themselves to the surface, almost on top of his skin.

Before anything could be done, the Toronto medical establishment stepped in and requested that Dunbar be allowed to live under a prolonged spell of morphine for the opportunity to study him as a rare and valuable scientific specimen of rampant venereal mutation. The mind was lost, but his body was a boon, said the men of medicine.

A monthly stipend was offered to the Erwagens as compensation for their loss. His mother was bedridden again. The idea of her son living out his years as a morphined freak, cut up and inspected by avid surgeons, attacked her overnight like scarlet fever. Father Erwagen looked at the cheque and started to guiltily daydream. The cheque's amount was good, it bespoke the gravity of the matter at hand and was, after a time of calculating deliberation, accepted. An Erwagen is taught never to argue with numbers, he told the doctors, who seemed to find the credo disagreeable. They wrote a letter to Dunbar's wife in Wyoming but she was already dead, frozen to death in the latest storm. What happened to Dunbar next is a story for medicine. Photographs were taken and discreetly reproduced for private collections, including at least one in Vancouver.

Instead of telling their son Sammy the whole horrid story of Dunbar's illness, and whose own health his parents
knew nothing about, they wrote him a telegram to let him know that his brother Dunbar was dead.

On the same day Dunbar left town, two days after the man game, Vancouver's general practitioner Dr. Langis received a panicked-sounding note:

Please, doctor, we must meet. Be at the post office 5
P.M.
Man needs help urgently
… etc. etc. …, he read through it quickly, searching for any sign …
bring your instruments ~ Mrs. Samuel Erwagen.

He read the note again. It was written as though by the hand of someone new to English.

Man needs help urgently
—as if dictated.

He said aloud: A man?

What man? he thought to himself. She must mean her husband, not me, he thought, putting aside his own feelings and studying the note further.

He checked to make sure his pince-nez were in the breast pocket of his vest—they were—and was on his way.

In Vancouver there was steady work for the Whitemen's doctor. Why, just the other day, a young man up in the branches of a red cedar had axed his hand in two, fainted and dropped a hundred feet to the ground, landed on a bed of chanterelle mushrooms, dislocated a shoulder, woke up, used his mouth to prepare a tourniquet for the cleaved hand, walked ten miles into town and dingled the office of Dr. Langis, let himself in, sat down at the doctor's side and showed him the bleeding wound and the wonked arm. All a problem like that required was gauze and a drop of laudanum. Now and then stitches were needed. Dr. Langis was an even-tempered man, that temper being serious and impatient. Never looked you in the eye. Wouldn't remember your name. He heard only what ailed you. Among these salmonbellies he was an eel, quick-witted, never sympathetic.

The note from Molly left him curious … hopeful, if he allowed himself such luxury. Which he did not. As he walked
down Cordova, he walked into the pall. There was snow in patches and the fog bleakened everything. He could see into it as much as a block ahead. According to Dr. Langis's pocket fob, it was twelve past the hour. Late as usual. Fine then, he thought. He knocked steadily three times.

Molly hurriedly let him in, studied the street with her green eyes (moted with brown), slammed shut the door. The post office's clapboard facade trembled as if struck by the back of a hand. Inside, he allowed her to remove his topcoat and scarf and find them a place on the rack. Her lips were the colour of a sweet plum, her tongue hiding between them, strange fruit, peeled.

And how have you been, Dr. Langis? she said politely, leading him past the counter to the back room. She wore a modest frock with a seasonal lily appended to an open buttonhole, but this didn't smell like romance. Dr. Langis felt the blood to his fingertips ease back. She walked too quickly for this to be a secret rendezvous.

I-I'm w-well, said the doctor, pressing around his face for his pince-nez.

He followed her through the door to the back room. There before him sat a bearded gentleman, charmless and hulking across a sofa that leaked sawdust. His bare, ravaged feet were up on a table. Doubtless, the feet were the matter.

Why had Molly sent this urgent message for him to meet her here when it was only to amputate the feet off this unrepentant bohunk? Surely her husband must be in the room and he was just too blind to see him. Well, the other person in the room turned out to be a second young man who stood dumbfounded next to a tube of brown newsprint. With a moustache for a face and ball bearings for eyes, his expression was of calculated sheepishness, the manners of a pugilist or lummox.

The doctor fished pockets in search of his pince-nez, wondering if he'd left them in his topcoat, but no, here they were, where they always were, in the right breast pocket of his vest, wrapped in a handful of blue silk.

Molly gestured.

The doctor focused.

Pisk's feet were laid out in the light coming through the south-facing window. There was a candle-powered frosted lamp as well. These feet, they sat on the table like two gruesomely overdue loaves of raisin bread waiting to be thrown out with the rest of him.

Worst frostbite I've seen in I don't know how long, said the doctor to Pisk's feet, which were black, flaked, and glassy. He gingerly lifted one and turned it to the side. Pisk didn't acknowledge, no sign of pain or awareness. When the light touched it, the black showed through to a layer of green, scaly, and metallic skin like exposed mica. The heels, ankles, and patches on top were hot pink. The knuckles were a molten shade of red surrounded by the blackened silicated crust. They'll both have to go, he said.