The Man Game (7 page)

Molly finished the sip of her tea. She looked at the doctor with a hopeful smile. He clinkily replaced the spoon to the porcelain saucer beside his cup after stirring the cream that he momentarily watched fulminate in the orange pekoe like incense.

The intellectual faculties are entirely intact, he told Mrs. Erwagen.

She said: I'm aware a that.

Y-yes, well.

Toronto stood in the hallway looking at the ray of light passing through the living room.

What are the chances?

The chances? the doctor said. Why, I thought we weren't …

The chances he might recover some …

My dear, he said, awkwardly, intimately condescending to her feminine ignorance, ah, the, well you see, the vicissitudes a the human anatomy … it's a system a veins …

He was briefly taken aback by the arresting image of her sitting there across the kitchen table from him. Her eyes shone. He would remember them as green, flecked by a saffron cascade of falling flames. His breath globbed in his throat like an undigested foam called ardour.

… There is always hope, my dear.

She clasped his hands in hers. The slender reed of her ring finger scratched his knuckle with the gold bands. The diamond was the size of a tear.

Sammy and I came to Vancouver to start a life for ourselves that we couldn't imagine anywhere else. In Toronto, Sammy was a back-row seat, Dr. Langis. Civilized society already saw him as a cripple. In Toronto, I was a Little Miss Muffett. Everybody wanted to scare me away. Toronto never wanted me, never wanted Sammy. Every genteel bourgeois burgher in Toronto thinks he was born with blue blood in his veins. Is it so much the same in Vancouver, are there as many masks, as much pretense?

A little, my dear. We have our share a burghers.

Burghers everywhere. If a man is born poor, helpless, with peasant blood burning his heart, he should not be so ashamed that when he makes his fortune he tries to buy himself a new lineage.

I agree.

I would rather live with a true cripple than a liar hiding stilts under his slacks. Sammy's mind and spirit is strong.

Dear, sweet Mrs. Erwagen, I shall pray for your husband.

Thank you.

He bowed his hat to her as he walked backwards down the steps of their verandah and bid the angelic Mrs. Erwagen a formal adieu, turning to the street with her visage in his mind's eye.

VOWS HASTINGS MILL BOSS RH ALEXANDER: BRICKS REBUILD CITY THIS TIME ROUND; AGREES TO SELL PLOT TO CPR, RECOUP LOSSES

Illiterate bastards, he complimented. There wasn't a thing in the
Daily Advertiser
RH Alexander didn't already know. In fact, there was little news in Vancouver that didn't directly pertain to him. The headline amused him, for he knew that by the time the CPR got to their land, the best of the forest would already be lumber in his mill. Just because his men weren't allowed to log on that land didn't mean he wouldn't get the timber in any case. If this so-called journalist and some Toronto railway magnate both figured Alexander had been made a sucker in the deal, all the better. The ignorance of the news calmed him. He didn't let go of the newspaper because there was a certain quality to the paper in his fingers that he appreciated. He sat in his high-ceilinged library with what Langis had left with him, therefore not alone, but haunted by the opiate. Listening to the music in his head, his thoughts returned to the doctor, then Samuel Erwagen and his stunning wife Molly, turning again to thoughts of the Great Fire and God's mercy on his home, and finally unravelling his memory
to the day a few weeks ago when he met with the woodsmen Litz and Pisk. Based on his bookkeeper Samuel Erwagen's description of the two men he saw fighting the morning of the Fire, RH Alexander paid a secret visit to these men's camp in Mount Pleasant south of False Creek. He staked out in the morning and portaged south from Coal Harbour into bear country, past the beaver dam to the cranberry swamp where he knew their shack was located. The land around there was swampy and sulphuric. It was a messy camp and Litz and Pisk were the only ones left sitting over the heat of the embers of a tiny campfire. The two lumberjacks were all alone among the dregs of forest, waiting for what next.

RH sat down on an empty stool. He brought out a wad of opium and they brought out a wad of hashish and they combined these and smoked a bowl together.

Upon exhale, RH said: Boys, you're young, healthy. I've been here since '69. I've seen things you couldn't imagine. I'll tell you what I told the men at my mill recently. I said to them, When I first moved here the Indians presumed we were white ghosts from across the ether. Can you imagine their fear seeing our great ships rise over the edge a the ocean with the wind in the sails? What a shock to see us riding our islands from the edge a the water to their land and our white faces coming ashore. That's what they thought our ships were, islands. Indeed. The bloodless white faces coming ashore, from their point a view, from over the edge a the earth. When my son HO was born, they'd never seen a white baby before. Indians crowded around outside the house waiting for us to show him. The horror and awe in their eyes was—we didn't show him in public for a while after that. When our son TK was born a year later, it was the same thing. They brought gifts. Our house smelled a that fish grease for days after. Oh, I know, we
all
know they're a filthy breed, these Indians. I've seen them spit in their own food while it cooks. Nevertheless. What I came to realize, and you think aboot this, both a you: We're all Chinamen here in Canada, except for the Indians. We all came from under the ocean to get here. So
long as you're a Chinaman in this country, you'll work for a Chinaman's wage or you'll get out.

Hm, said Litz, picking his fingernails with a shiv.

They smoked another bowl.

Pisk said: We didn't start the fire.

RH laughed and said: I don't want to see the two a you ever again. Go home. Back across the ether whence you came.

I'm not leaving Vancouver, said Pisk. We didn't start no fires. That was not us. I can tell you who it was.

Don't want to hear your conspiracies.

You
know
who started this, Mr. Alexander.

Regardless a who
you
suspect, RH said, the city believes it was you two.

This is my home as much as anyone's. We won't leave.

You will, said RH. Your names aren't worth spoiled milk around here.

Litz remained silent. Pisk did all the talking.

If we're John Chinamen, said Pisk, who are you?

RH smiled. Behind the mask of his face and the holes of his eyes, a little scared rabbit was looking out. He said: Who am I? I'm the father a this town, that's who.

Listen, I got a better idea, said Pisk. How aboot me and Litz stay out a sight and log all that CPR land you sold and sell it you for …

RH Alexander's eyes brightened. Yes, go on, I'm listening, you were aboot to say you'd sell it for half, so go on.

Half-price timbers …, said Pisk.

Litz brought out his own supply of opium. RH's eyes brightened yet further.

Litz lit the next bowl and passed it to RH. Litz was the son of a wild man from Regina, Saskatchewan, who believed in the crucible. That is to say, Litz's education came in whippings. His father told him that for every blow Litz received, he should deliver one back. And when Litz could defend himself properly, then he'd see an end to beatings. Litz grew up, like this father, to be a stout, unapologetic young man. But before he ever had a chance to take his pa down a notch, the old man
died in a dock fire. Like his father, Litz wore mutton-chop sideburns connected to a moustache.

Pisk was bearded. At twenty-seven, his beard was thick as nettle and already salted. The top of his head was bald. He was raised by his mother in the fog of Penticton, a burgeoning mill town in south-central British Columbia, dangling off the bottom of Okanagan Lake. Pisk grew up around livery barns, blacksmiths, big game hunters, and hemp farms. He started working in the mill when he was eight, tossing ends. Every day he was surrounded by the same iron machinery that ground down his father's life. Black from piston grease, the mills screamed and smoked against the wood, fleshing lumber from forest. Penticton's first wood buildings were on skids so that a team of horses could be hitched and drag them to a new location, to suit the needs of the community.

When he thought of that meeting again, RH was as amused as ever by his woodsmen. What foolish tenacity. What did they hope to achieve by staying here? RH prided himself on his successes. Despite his many shortcomings and luckless, dismal childhood, the usual stack of debts from early business ventures, he'd found a place to prosper here in Vancouver. Therefore he loathed to see men with familiar sensitivities become such obvious failures. But, if these woodsmen were stubborn enough to sell him black-market lumber off land he'd sold his claim to, without any way for the CPR to know where the forest all went, then so be it. What RH planned to do with this lumber was sell the logs, bark and all, straight to the Chinese Emperor, who wanted to build a great fortress, and who paid RH monthly with large sums of cash and chartered a specific boat for the distinguished purpose. RH had to say that it was a successful arrangement on both sides. Savouring that fine reverie, daydream, recollection, call it what you will, he returned his misty eyes to the newspaper in his lap:

MRS. RED'S SOOTHING SYRUP ∼ WILL ALLAY ALL PAIN AND SPASMODIC ACTION; SURE TO REGULATE THE BOWELS; DEPEND ON IT,
MOTHERS! IT WILL GIVE REST TO YOURSELVES AND RELIEF AND HEALTH TO YOUR INFANTS. SOLD BY ALL CHEMISTS, AT 1/2D PER BOTTLE
.

RH was old enough to know Canadian men who'd fought alongside the British and Hindoos against China in the Opium War of 1839. He paid gratitude to their sacrifice every day. In fact, in the reverie of his gratitude, he forgot the newspaper in front of his eyes. He was no more paying attention to it than he was to the voice in the back of his head. He lowered the newsprint in a bird's flutter to his lap, where it folded down to rest.

He heard the sound of feet softly treading, the lash of silk, and then, as if a hallucination or spell of déjà vu, there was the lady herself. He saw a puff of white hair. She was in an evening gown that concealed her round figure like the cover over a stagecoach, and the whiteness of her skin and the light amber of her teeth confused her husband's vision for a moment. As he rose to greet her he realized he was still in his chair, the paper still on his lap, the same ray of light still passing through the room.

Darling, she said. I'm talking to you.

To me, he said.

Yes, darling. Where have our
clothes
all gone, eh?

All our clothes. I'm sure they're perfectly safe.

Safe. Safe has nothing to do with it. Where are they?

… I had a boy take them to Chinatown.

Boy. What, when? When did you do this? Darling, I asked you a question. Darling?

Yes, he said.

What's the matter? I said to you, I said, look at me when I—, darling, I said, when did you have our laundry taken to Chinatown?

It must have been this morning.

Outrageous. What inspired this? When have you ever taken an interest in our
lau
ndry?

Didn't seem clean.

Yes, our laundry—

What I saw on the clothes looked as if it should be taken to be laundered.

Yes, well—, but darling. We have a
day
when laundry is taken. There's a day in the week we reserve for this chore. The men down at the laundry have many customers.

It couldn't wait.

What's this? she said. Darling …

Hm?

Please pass me the tin on the sidetable next to you, dear. Thank you.

LONG-LIFE MUD
, said the tin. There was a smudge of black in one corner. She swung her hands before him with the tin in her palms, the lid wide open under his nose. This is my—did you—this is
my
reserve, she said.

Yes, I apologized already.

No, you didn't.

I remember I apologized many times.

She sat down on the piano chair and leaned in to him. You're in no more pain than I am, she said. Have I ever taken from your reserve?

No, he said.

We're not in pain at all, she said and pet his long moustache. I wouldn't blink an eye if I thought you
were
.

No, yes, he said.

Darling, did you
just
take this?

I did … ago, he said.

This morning then—, she said.

Hm, he said. I should a taken it right in the morning, but.

And you're out?

Yes, obviously I am, RH said, lying. He'd hidden his final stash of laudanum that Dr. Langis gave him this morning, his last reserve unless he found new means.

What will we do? Did you speak with Langis?

Hm.

What did he—

Said it was very expensive. Short supply as it is, men come in who need it more than we—