Fall from Grace (31 page)

“What? You can’t do this!” the male passenger said.

“Of course I can. The Taxi Commission allows me to refuse or eject passengers if their behavior is threatening to the driver or anybody else, so you can just get out right now! Get out!”

The driver leaned over the front seat into the back and I thought he was going to physically attack his passenger. I opened my mouth to stop the violence, but nothing came out. The driver’s fury was frightening and I had no strength to speak. The passenger probably thought the same thing, because I saw him scramble to the other side of the seat to escape. But we were both wrong. The driver wasn’t attacking; he just reached over the seat back to grab the back door handle and fling open the door. A gust of cold air blew into the warm taxi and I shrank down into the seat to hide from it.

“There you are!” shouted the driver. “Now get out of my taxicab!”

The passenger stayed where he was. I could feel him shivering, from fear or cold, I couldn’t tell. “You can’t leave me out here, I’ll freeze to death.”

“So what? You’ll freeze to death. That’s what you wanted me to do to this poor man, to leave him in the cold so he could freeze to death, so we can do the same to you.”

“Okay, I’m sorry. I get your point.”

“No you don’t. Get out of my cab!”

“No. You can’t. I won’t go.”

“If you won’t go, I’ll throw you out myself!”

“No, please. Please don’t,” the passenger said, his voice breaking. “You can’t leave me out there.” I wasn’t sure what to do. I really didn’t like the anger in the driver, but then again, the passenger had been so obsessed with his own life that he was quite content to leave me to freeze to death so he could keep his schedule. Maybe he did deserve to be left behind but I couldn’t let that happen.

“Let him stay,” I said quietly.

The driver looked at me for a couple of seconds and then nodded. He reached back and shut the door. “You’ll make it to your bloody flight,” he finally said, turning toward the wheel, backing the taxi up, “but only because this man saved your life. Remember that when you climb into your comfortable business class seat, that this man that you wanted to leave behind decided not to leave you behind. You remember that the next time you have to decide between you own damn convenience and someone else’s life.” In a few seconds we were headed down the road.

“I don’t believe you, I don’t understand,” the driver muttered. “This man would have died if we hadn’t stopped, he would have died, but now he is alive. A man’s life was at stake, and you were worried about something as silly as missing a flight. How sad is that? How sad? We have saved a man’s life. Can you not understand that? A man’s life has been saved.”

The driver went on berating and shaming his passenger, and the words faded into a wonderful sound, the murmur of wind through summer leaves, the distant breaking of waves against the shore. I held on to my cup of life, sipping from its elixir, watching the streetlights take me back into the world of the living.

*   *   *

The driver dropped me off at the Grey Nuns hospital, at the far south side of the city. He offered to escort me in, but I assured him I was fine. He accepted my refusal with a thankful nod.

“I don’t want our friend to be late for his important flight,” he said sarcastically, throwing an angry glance at the person in the backseat. “But take care of yourself. Make sure those doctors take good care of you. I know they are busy, but make sure they see you. I don’t know how long you were out there, so you might have caught something or created some sort of condition.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a card. “Call me when you can,” he said as he handed it over. “Let me know how you are feeling or if there is anything I can do for you.”

I took the card and shoved it in my jeans. Even though this man had saved my life, I wanted to leave as fast as possible and forget everything about that night. I just wanted to be someplace safe. I thanked him for saving my life, but when he finally drove away, I didn’t go all the way in. I sat in the lobby until I knew the buses were running and caught one back to my neighborhood.

37

I phoned in sick and stayed in my room, sleeping and weeping. My phone kept ringing, no doubt someone from the paper, either Whittaker or Maurizo demanding to know where the fuck I was, whether I would be continuing with the stories, or Anderson wondering if I was okay. Probably all three, with Maurizo angry that I was somewhere gambling my life away and that the chance he had taken on me had blown up in his face. And he was close to being correct.

The urge to say fuck it to it all was so strong, and one time I got out of bed, put on my clothes to head out and do just that. But there was a banging on the door upstairs, someone shouting my name and jerking on the doorknob. I thought it was the police back for me so I fell back into bed, waiting for the heavy thud of police-issue boots to come down the stairs in order to finish the job that had been interrupted by that wonderful cabdriver. I slipped into a long depressive sleep.

When I woke up, I went through the motions of heading for the casino again, until finally I remembered that little kid who had just moved from Germany and how he dealt with those bullies at the French immersion school. But these were a different kind of bully; they were, in fact, the persons of authority to whom you were supposed to report bullies.

It now was too dangerous to live in Charlie’s old basement room. If the cops who picked me up the other day knew my route home, they knew where I lived. I couldn’t make things easier for them to find me. The time had come for me to find my own place, an apartment that was more suitable to a white-collar worker than to a semihomeless street person on government assistance for mental health reasons.

As soon as I had time, I would search the classifieds and find a decent place to live, preferably near downtown because that’s where the city’s transit system worked best. If you went too far out of the core, transit service was provided but it was sketchy at best, with buses running, even during rush hour, only every twenty to thirty minutes.

I figured on the area west of 109th Street just north of the river as my best bet. It was filled with apartment blocks of various size and all the services needed for such an area. I might have been a bit older than the demographic of the area but it also included Edmonton’s tiny gay community so a single, almost middle-aged man wouldn’t stick out. It was a big step to take, to admit that I had finally turned the corner, but it was mostly for practical, life-preservation reasons.

When I finally stepped out of the house, the cold snap had ended. It was even warm enough for me to walk to the office, but I would no longer make that walk. It was too dangerous. I headed a block north to 107th Avenue and grabbed the first bus downtown.

When I arrived at the paper, I experienced something I had never known at a big city newsroom: a moment of silence. It was short and abrupt, like a shot from a gun, and almost as surprising. I froze, at first not sure why it had happened and wondered if it was directed at me or if it was just a coincidence.

And when I discovered the truth, by how every face in the newsroom was looking at me, or in the process of looking at me, my gut reaction was exactly what one should feel at the sound of a gunshot, to run and escape from the incident as quickly as possible. But I checked that emotion and moved forward, knowing that the silence wouldn’t last long.

It didn’t, because it was replaced by whispers that no doubt had to be about me. But even those whispers wouldn’t last long because while journalists are notorious gossipmongers, there is also the compulsion to move past the immediate event, my appearance at the paper, and move on to a more important compulsion, the deadline.

Of course, a good number of the staffers continued to watch me, many of them surreptitiously, while they typed out their stories for the day, but many others filed my appearance away for future reference, something to look into once their main story, the one on their computer screen, was completed and filed.

The reaction of the newsroom to my arrival and the sight of Whittaker dashing into Larry’s office a second later also confirmed another suspicion of mine: I was fired. Sure, I had broken a couple of big stories in the past few weeks, but no doubt the reaction from the higher-ups and the political fallout because of these stories, and the evidence that my gambling problems were back, had been weighed over and over again by Larry until he had decided that it just wasn’t worth it to keep me on.

I was good because of the work I had done and the stories I had broken, but the reality of it—something I had no trouble accepting—was that I was lucky. Not only was I lucky enough to have been the first person on the scene where Grace was found and that Whitford had decided then to let someone from the media into the tent, but I was lucky to have been given the assignment in the first place. I wasn’t chosen to cover that story because of my ability, I was just the only crime-beat reporter in the newsroom who didn’t have an assignment or wasn’t in the washroom at the time or getting a coffee from the cafeteria.

The truth of the matter was that while big stories were broken by decent hard work, it was just like finding a serial killer, a lot of it comes as a result of luck. You get the right assignment at the right time, someone gives you a tip or, in your efforts to find information about another story you stumble onto something else out of the blue.

Woodward and Bernstein only broke Watergate because they were crime reporters who fell into a minor story about a break-in at the famed hotel. Neal Sheehan broke the Pentagon Papers story for the
New York Times
because Daniel Ellsberg gave him the Pentagon Papers. Sure, these reporters worked hard and long to develop these stories, but without a lucky start, someone else would have broken them instead.

Any one of the staffers here could have found and written the stories I wrote so I was really nothing special. And because I had been hired as a scab during the strike, the union wouldn’t make much of a noise. My only hope was that Larry would instead banish me to the copy desk, but if that happened, I wasn’t sure it would be less hellish to be fired.

I was content to sit at my desk to plan what items I wanted to take home, but Larry stormed out of his office, quickly followed by Whittaker like some royal retainer, and shouted across the newsroom as if he was Lou Grant on a caffeine high. “Desroches! Get your ass over here!”

The entire newsroom turned at the sound and I could only shrug like a silent-movie comic and trudge over. Larry’s entire head was red with rage and Whittaker was smug beyond description. I refrained from any smart comments because that would have been stupid and uncalled for. I had plenty of respect for Larry, plenty of gratitude for how he had given me a chance and taken me in when no one else would have, so making a flippant remark like, Hey, Larry, what’s up?, would have been insulting to both of us. I simply entered his office, stood at the edge of his desk until he was ready to speak. Whittaker followed us, quietly shut the door behind her and leaned against it, as if standing guard.

When Larry settled in his chair, he motioned for me to sit. I did, but again said nothing. I would give Larry the chance to speak first. And when he did speak, his tone surprised. It sounded gentle and caring, like one old friend inquiring about another’s health. “You okay, Leo?”

I nodded. “Yeah, I’m fine. Had a bit of the flu but—”

He waved my comment away, telling me that he knew I was lying. “Fuck that. I’m being serious. Are you really okay? Is everything all right?”

“I said I’m fine, Larry. It was only the flu.” I kept the lie going because with it I could see some way out. I wouldn’t have to tell anyone what had really happened to me, because in the end everybody always assumed something else, like my gambling, was the reason I had missed work.

“Come on, Leo, I’m a friend here,” Larry said, his voice rising in annoyance. “Just tell me if I’m going to lose you to gambling, because if I am, it’s better for all of us if we cut our losses right now.”

I sighed, falling into the act that he expected me to play. “Sorry, Larry, I had a slip but I managed to get it together before I completely lost it.”

“Yeah, I figured something like that must have happened,” he said. “And when you didn’t answer your phone, I headed over to your place the other day, but you weren’t home. I figured you were at the casino or something.”

Even though his reasoning was completely off, I was shocked and touched by this display of friendship. He actually cared enough to come look for me to stop me from going to the casino. He was the one who had been banging at my door, not the police. I felt a pressure behind my eyes and they began to mist over.

“No need to feel ashamed over what happened,” Larry said, taking my tears as shame rather than an emotional response to his efforts. “But next time something like this happens, I want you to realize that you do have friends in this newsroom, and instead of wallowing in pity at one of those bloodsucking video lottery terminals, come into my office and talk to me. And if I’m not here, talk to Whittaker ’cause she’s a member of AA and knows something of what you experience.

“I hate to use a cliché but, as a group, we’ve seen it all. Take your pick, gambling, drugs, booze, whatever, probably a third of the people out there have had some difficulty with something, and for the most part, we’re actually tired of watching good reporters fuck themselves over. So next time, don’t go off half cocked all alone, just hang out here and find someone to talk to.”