The Republic of Nothing (31 page)

Still unable to speak, she shook her head, smiled at me and
wiped the blood on her sleeve. Finally, holding her throat and gasping, she pointed to the blood on her clothes and said, “It's not mine. It was his. I have very sharp teeth.”

Once Gwen got her bearings, she shook off the fear that we had both felt and treated our arrest as an adventure. I took a bit of glory from my comrades as the “Crazy Canuck who sang some wacko Canadian song.”

In the cell, along with at least twenty others, we waited for two hours, singing together and swapping stories about what had happened on the street. For the most part, the outrage we had felt was gone and I couldn't help but think that this was the jovial comraderie of soldiers who had just done battle. A strange irony. We were called out in pairs or one by one, and word came back that we would all be released after the posting of bail.

Much to my shock, it was the horse patrolmen who had tried to bash my brains out who came to ask Gwen and me to join him in an office. My first surprise was that his voice sounded strangely familiar. He had a New York accent like Ben and he was about the same age. Inside a small, windowless office with a silent uniformed policewoman present he asked me, “You both Canadian?”

“Nova Scotian,” I answered. It was a typical Bluenose reflex.

“Nova Scotian, huh? What are you doing down here?”

“We came to protest the war,” Gwen answered defiantly. She looked very weak now and tired. I needed to get her out of here, to get her home, and my mind was filled with a wasp's nest of impossible entanglements.

“It was an illegal protest. You need permits for this sort of thing. You were breaking the law.” He was rubbing his band-aged wrist now and it looked like the blood was leaking through the bandage.

“I didn't know that,” I lied. “We didn't come down to try to break laws. We only wanted to try to stop the war.”

He breathed heavily. “I got a kid over there. He's about
your age. Fighting for his country. Doesn't want communists to fucking take over. You kids know nothing.” The cop was looking down at the floor. The hate was all sucked out of him and a profound sadness filled the room. Gwen looked over at the policewoman but she looked away at a small framed picture of a Vermont hillside on the wall.

“Maybe we don't want to see your kid get messed up over there,” I said. “Maybe we care, too.”

But he wanted no more of war debate. He had let his other self out of his uniform for a brief instant and now he had crawled back into his job. “You want to know what I can have you charged with?”

We said nothing.

“Unlawful assembly, assault and battery of a police officer and crossing international borders for the purpose of creating a disturbance. That's a federal offence, by the way.”

“We don't care,” Gwen sassed back, but I didn't let her get anything else out.

I decided to forgo any sort of logical argument now. I acted like I was scared. It didn't take too much acting. “We'd like very much to go home if we could — to our families.”

The cop shook his head. “Jesus H. Christ,” he said. “You come down here and disrupt a city and you want to go crawling back home to mommy and daddy like nothing happened?”

We said nothing. I was looking for a way out. I was thinking about Gwen's father, realizing that if they actually did some sort of check on us they'd figure out who she was. I didn't want it any more complicated than it already was.

“Can I make a phone call or something?” I asked.

“Gonna call the Canadian Communist party to come bail you out?”

I shrugged. The policewoman got up and brought a desk phone with a long extension over to us. “Here,” she said. “Call.”

I guess I had already sorted it out. It was very simple.
There was only one person who was going to get us out of this and, oh boy, did I want to get us out of here and on that 6:30 plane home for Halifax. I pulled out a phone number from my wallet and told the operator I was calling collect. My father answered the phone. It was the middle of the afternoon, but he sounded like he had been taking a nap. “Where are you?” he asked.

“I'm in jail. In Boston. Gwen is with me.”

“In jail? What the hell for? I knew about the trip, but what on earth did you do?”

“We protested the war.”

“Oh.” There was a bit of silence. It was hard to know what my father was thinking. “What do you need?”

I asked the cop. “What do we need to get out of here?”

“You need a goddamn lawyer and probably about a thou-sand dollars in bail.”

“Dad?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I heard.”

“I want to get Gwen home,” I said, my voice cracking. “Today. She's not feeling too well.” It was true. She looked pale and for good reason.

The cop was shaking his head. “No way are you going to get out of here by supper time, kid.”

My father heard that too. “Tell me where you are, what you're being charged with and who I can talk to there. We're going to hang up and I'm going to have you out of there within an hour.”

I gave him the whole scoop. All the while the cop was nudging me like my time was up.

“Sit tight. I'll have you out. Put the officer on the phone.”

“Thanks Dad.” I hadn't called him that for a long time. I handed the phone to the cop. “He wants to talk to you.”

Reluctantly the man whose son was at war took the phone. Whatever it was my father said, it had some sort of impact on the cop, because by the time he hung up, he had already begun
to treat us nicer. Less than an hour later, the cell door opened. We were told to leave. No charges, no nothing. “Need a ride to airport?” the lady cop asked. Gwen was very sleepy now, very tired, and I had to help her to walk.

I gulped. “Yes please,” I said as politely as I could.

Two hours later we were on the Air Canada flight headed for home. My head was swimming with love, swimming with war and swimming with history. When my father met us at the airport as we cleared customs, he gave me a big hug and hugged Gwen as well. I thought he was going to gush all over us but he said very little. “Get in, kids. We're going home.”

Gwen lay down in the back of the Buick and fell asleep immediately. I sat up front and it was so good just to be with my father again that I felt a warm glow of pride. He had come through for me. “How'd you do it?'

“Politics, son. It's a powerful tool. I talked to Colin as soon as we hung up. He agreed it would look very bad on my career if my kid spent much time in a Boston jail. It might make the party look bad, make the province look bad. He got on the phone to the governor of Massachusetts who got on the phone to the mayor of Boston who immediately told the police chief to have you released. It was all in the politics. Colin didn't want this little blot on any of us.”

I was suddenly puzzled. I had guessed he had pulled a few strings, but I was annoyed by the motive. “Is that why you got the premier to make the phone call, because you didn't want it to look bad?” For a minute I felt like I didn't know who this man was. Did he save our asses to protect the god-damn Tory party?

My father shook his head. “No way, Ian. I went that route because I knew it was the quickest way to get you out. If I had to, I would have gone down there with Kirk's harpoon cannon and blasted you two out of jail. Can't allow some foreign government to hold hostage two citizens of the republic.”

I sank back in the seat. I knew he was telling me the truth and knew it had been a long while since he had mentioned the republic. It was still alive, somewhere inside him. And right now we were headed back to the island. Tomorrow I would wake up and I'd go to school. If Gwen was feeling up to it, we'd catch the bus together there in front of Burnet's house, and by mid-morning we'd be taking a vocabulary test in English as if nothing at all in our world had changed.

The lights were on at Gwen's house but the car wasn't there. I walked her inside and there was no one at home, no sound except for the static of the interstellar receiver back in her father's shop. It was picking up intermittent static bursts from a quasar perhaps or a failing star somewhere in a distant galaxy, and it gave me an eerie feeling of my own insignificance. Gwen sank one last time into my arms and she said, “It's okay, really, Ian. They probably all went out for a drive.” It was, after all, a warm pre-summer evening.

“You're sure?”

“Yes,” she said, kissing me on the lips. Planets tilted slightly out of kilter on their axes, stars slowed down on their breakneck race away from the centre of the universe. A burst of hot static shot through the room. My father was waiting in the car. After I left Gwen and sat down in the dark Buick, he said, “Someday you'll tell me about Boston, okay?”

“Right,” I knew exactly what he meant. He knew that it was more than the war protest, more than the arrest. He had watched me kissing Gwen through the window and he knew that while he had been gone, his son had grown up; he knew I had changed and it would take more than a few minutes of father/son heart-to-heart to get to know me again.

As we drove back to our old house, the sound of pebbles
and shells crunching beneath our tires on the gravel road, I felt the bond again with my old man. Maybe he had not changed so much after all. Maybe he still was my old man. Soon he would find his way back to his island home and to us. It's one thing for a man to storm out of his home in a rage after years of pent-up frustration and chase across the continent, perhaps to Alberta, for a new job, more money and a new life. But Everett McQuade would never have done that. His had been a silent, almost unadmitted parting, a melting from the old ways. His intentions had been good. Maybe one day he would become a great politician, an international statesman, someone who would bring world unity and global peace. But even that, to me, would not be quite enough. I wanted my father back with us. I wanted him living and working on the island. A weekend replica of my old man was not enough.

“Potholes are in the exact same places they were forty years ago,” he said, his face lit up by the red and green lights on the dash.

“Oughta have it paved. Somebody should get the ML A to look into it,” I said.

He shook his head. He knew that none of us on the island wanted paved roads. We'd live with potholes. Pavement meant more traffic, more tourists, more change. We wanted the island to stay roughly the same. No one was more adamant about that than the refugees — Ackerman and the Phillips family. My mother, Casey and I agreed. Let the rest of the world be paved black and blue with asphalt, but let us have our island without tarmac.

We pulled to a stop in front of the house. The light was on in the kitchen. My father turned the car off and killed the headlights. I went to open the door, then noticed that his face was frozen, his eyes fixed on the light of the kitchen window. My mother sat at the table, her hands outstretched on the table top in front of her. Directly across from her was Ben Ackerman. His hands lay on top of my mother's. Their eyes were
wide open, locked intently on each other. They weren't speaking.

If it wasn't for the cold glacier that set up camp in the back of my skull just then, if it wasn't for the fact that I had marshalled all of my forces of disbelief into action, and if it wasn't for the fact that my father took a short choking gulp of air into his lungs, I might have believed I was looking at two people in love. But I could not believe that. “Ben calls it psychic transfer,” I said. “It's his scientific name for it. Mom has been teaching him how to read her thoughts. He says he's always been interested in telepathy. He and Mom have become close friends.” I tried hard to contain the rattle in my voice.

“What are they doing?” he asked me. I don't think he had heard a word I said.

“They're communicating,” I said.

“Why is he looking at her like that?”

“Eye contact is important. It puts them on the same wave-length, I think.”

My father jerked open the door. I saw the look of anger; I could feel the brooding, smouldering fire. I half-expected to see his clothes in flames. I grabbed his sleeve as he started to get out of the car. “You've been gone a long time,” I told him. “The weekends, the vacations, the visits. They're not enough. She needed a friend.” I saw, for maybe the first time, a heavy weight on my old man's shoulders, a blanket of defeat trying to smother the wrath. “Let's go in,” I said.

The door opened and I stepped through first. Dorothy and Ben had let go of each other's hands and had unlinked their minds. Or so I supposed. I, too, as my mother's son, had become a disciple of these psychic games. But I had always been an observer. Not like Ben who dived into the metaphysical pool headfirst and had barely come up to gulp the air of the real world again.

My mother was on her feet rushing towards us. “What a treat,” she said. “Both of you here at once.” And I didn't know
just then if she meant Dad and me or Ben and her husband. Both of the men she loved. Oh, I doubted very much that the two of them had been physically intimate, beyond the language of hands and “eyebearns,” but I knew deep down that they had developed a love for each other and from what we had seen through the window, theirs was a more passionate intermingling of minds than any I had ever seen.