Jericho (16 page)

“That’s one of the things I wanted to talk to you about, Doc. It’s not exactly a rest home round there, if you follow me.”

“I’m afraid I don’t.”

“I’ve been married as many years as you are old.”

“Go on.”

“And my wife’s sicker than I am. We used to be able to take care of one another but I’m not sure how much longer that can go on.”

“What is your wife’s medical problem?”

“She’s being treated for cancer, Doc. And she has conniption fits. She’s always had a terrible temper.”

“Has she been under psychiatric care as well as treatment for her cancer?”

“No, never has. Wouldn’t hear of it. But she flies off the handle at the drop of a pin, when she has the strength. Of course, she’s been a terrible drinking woman almost as long as I can remember.”

“Has your wife ever been diagnosed as an alcoholic?”

“No, ma’am, she’s not an alcoholic. I wouldn’t say that. But she does put it away pretty good. That’s not really what the matter is, though.”

“If you feel your wife needs counselling, perhaps she should see a colleague of mine. Referrals to a specialist are the usual custom in cases like this. I know a very good woman in the field.”

“You think she’s a kook or something? No, that’s not it. She’s not crazy. She just acts crazy all the time. Since she’s been sick, I look back on them days as the good times. When she gets real mad, I know she’s having a good day.”

I worried if I should butt in at this point but I didn’t know what words to use.

“Is she subject to hallucinations?” the doctor asked, moving back in her chair.

“I just mean she’s not happy most of the time,” Lonnie said.

“The same can be said for many of us, Mr. Bischoff.” She seemed totally straight when she said this, didn’t know how flat she sounded. She wasn’t one of those people whose intentions you can read. Unlike Lonnie, who was worried and nervous and wouldn’t shut up.

“I mean she goes on the warpath, busting up the place and everything. When she gets in one of her spells, there’s hell to pay.”

“And she behaves this way when she’s been drinking?”

“When she’s drinking I know there’s a bad one coming for sure. But, I dunno, the last couple years that’s not been a guarantee. It used to be, when we were first married, she’d drink gin. Her mother told me once that the old man liked that too. In recent years, though, she’s taken to Seagram’s.”

The doctor looked blank. Professional and all that but she didn’t want to get involved.

“It does sound as though your wife has a problem in addition to her medical condition.”

“I’m sort of getting ahead of myself here. All that, what I just told you, that was a long time ago. She doesn’t drink so much any more. She’ll only keep a little bit in the place at one time. It’s not her drinking that makes a difference. She was always what you could call a moody person. She’d always blow hot and cold whether she was hitting the bottle or not. But there was always some kind of rhyme and reason to it. When the kid here was small and she was cooped up all the time looking after him, then she’d really go at it at night. She’d let go at anybody, come to think of it. But she’s
not that moody any more. Not good and bad. Just sick mostly. That’s the only mood she’s got.”

“I see. Well, I think you’ll find, with most people, that we reach a time of diminishing expectations. We get to an age where we realize that we haven’t accomplished many of the goals we set out to achieve when we were younger.” This doctor wasn’t all that much older than me. “It can be a peaceful time. But for some people it can be a very disturbing one too. But I’m not really the person you should be speaking with about this.”

“You’re the
only
person I’ve got to talk to about it, ma’am.”

“No, you just believe I am. There are specialists trained in dealing with situations of this sort, both from your point of view and your wife’s.”

“A specialist isn’t going to do the trick, ma’am. I know what the matter is. It’s me. This is kind of tough for an old guy to say, but I’ve let her down in life. I’ve been letting her down a long while, each year a bit more.”

“This bears on my point. I’m in family practice but that just refers to treating the medical needs of all the members of the family. It sounds to me as though you and your wife need a specialist trained in relationship difficulties. Of course, her present medical condition may make this difficult …”

“It’s me, I’m the problem. Somebody told me once I was a romantic. You know what that means?”

“Of course.”

“It means I go off half-cocked. It means I think I can go through life pretending things are a lot more interesting than they really are. The fellow explained it to me like this. He said I go round acting like I’m in a story in some
magazine. That I think there’s a
plot
, like on a TV show. You know what I mean? For years I got her believing it too, just because that’s the way I acted. For me it was sort of good practice. I’m getting old, Doc, but most of the time I don’t let it get me down. Like I said a minute ago, I haven’t amounted to much but I knew that anyway. Being a romantic like this was how I got by. Now that I’m really getting to be an old man I’m not so bothered by it. I still got that other side of me.”

The doctor was getting restless listening to all this. I was too but that’s because I’d heard it all before.

“I used to think she was just like me. Let me tell you, when we were younger we had some pretty good times together. I thought we were sort of like twins. Then it all went haywire somewhere. For a long time I thought she was stringing along with me, but the last few years I seen it the way it really was. I went on being old Lonnie, everybody’s pal with his tool box, and she started seeing things the way they really are. She don’t like me being one of the boys with other people. She thought that was just our thing, the two of us. She learned something else too. She saw me putting it on all the time and I guess she figured that I’d been putting it on all these years. She sort of got the idea that I’d tricked her or something. Or that what we had wasn’t real. Hell’s fire, I don’t know
what
she thought was going on. But I see now we probably shouldn’t have stayed together all this time when none of us knew what the other one was thinking.”

The doctor looked kind of thoughtful, I would say. I guess that was all she could do in the circumstances.

“I can sympathize with the difficulties in your home life,
Mr. Bischoff. But my concern is with how they affect your physical health. I must repeat that I’m a family practitioner. For this sort of situation you might wish to see a therapist who’s specifically trained to help you.”

The session didn’t last much longer.

What happened next is that Paulette died and Lonnie gave up the apartment—I helped him move, what a day that was—and took a room at the Dempster. Hard as this was to believe to look at it, the dump had been, like I already said, one of the glories of his youth: the scene of much play. Now Lonnie was alone. I spent as much time with him as I could, learning to be the next historian. Lonnie would talk about her a lot. He told me that in her last years she would phone the Vets taxi dispatcher every day to get him to send a cab to the LCBO to get her a pint of Seagram’s Gold. Never a quart, always a pint. Cost nine dollars. I guess she couldn’t trust herself with any more than that at a time. But when Christmas came up that year, she’d got the taxi to bring her two pints or three—one for each day the liquor store would be closed.

All the drivers knew her. So it eventually dawned on the dispatcher that she’d stopped calling one morning. That’s how small a town Windsor really is. He tried phoning and got no answer. Nobody knew where Lonnie was. He was spending a few hours with the boys because he needed to get away from the pressure of taking care of her. She slept most of the time anyway, he said. Finally the dispatcher called the cops. They had to break in. They didn’t find her in bed though but laying in the middle of the room. There was a little food on the table and the television was on. The idea was that she dropped dead of heart failure, which everyone thought was Lonnie’s territory.

Not long after the funeral is when he moved to the Dempster Fireproof Hotel, and soon he was too sick himself to leave. In fact, he was too sick to go down to the lobby that he told me used to be so elegant back in the old days.

I
N THOSE DAYS
, I still really hadn’t got used to B.C. geography. Everyplace we went on that wild trip I had to imagine where we’d be if we’d gone the same distance in Alberta instead. We were soon enough on Highway
99
, which even I knew was considered a dangerous road. We were headed in the direction of Lillooet where you take 97 to
100
Mile House, which is pretty much on the same line as Calgary, I figured. Theresa and I kept asking Bishop where he was taking us and he mentioned Williams Lake (Lake Louise is on the other side of the mountains, where life is civilized) and finally up above Prince George—“crazy, empty country up there” (more or less Edmonton where my mother lived when she was a young woman before she was drawn elsewhere). That seemed to be the plan. But whenever Bishop spoke he had a guilty look in his eyes—I saw them in the mirror—saying that maybe he wasn’t telling us the whole truth.

There was only the one seat, so Theresa and I bounced along in the back, sitting on piles of empty mailbags that we had to keep rearranging and fluffing up and sometimes pounding like pillows on a sleepless night. We were soon bumping along past Squamish, Whistler and Pemberton on our way to Lillooet. Bishop was very insulting about Whistler. “They built it from scratch but they made it out of Lego.” Every now and then either Theresa or I would kneel on the floor, grip the back of the driver’s seat and get a view out the windshield. Deep valleys and tall spruce with always some mountain in the distance; the top of it looked like green material cut with the pinking shears Mother always kept in her sewing basket. There was snow in the mountains of course but also on the ground down below, little patches of it in the shadows. It was May, the end of May.

Most of the time back then I liked Theresa a lot. I thought she was smart, though I didn’t always understand what she was talking about, and I thought she had a kind heart, though I could see how other people might not always be able to tell. She’s quite tiny—short and thin—though she sounded and acted like a big woman, the way she moved her body, the way she wore her blonde hair short, in the shape of one of those old-fashioned football helmets made of leather. I always wanted to tell her that I could help her with her hair, but I never figured out how to say it without offending her (I think she was quick to be offended, like bossy people sometimes are). She and Bishop couldn’t stand the sight of one another or the way the other one talked. They were like chalk and cheese, as Mother used to say.

“Why are we driving round in this mail truck? Are you as stupid as you look? Can’t you see that this is the only mail truck on the highway? Do you really think no one’s going to notice? Do you really think they aren’t looking for you driving a stolen mail truck? My God I’ve never known anyone like you, and I’m trained in abnormal behaviourality. Can’t you see what’s endresulting?”

“I have a plan,” Bishop told her.

She rolled her eyes to the ceiling of the truck and acted as if she didn’t care if he saw her do it or not.

We hadn’t been gone more than a few hours when we figured out what Bishop’s plan was. After Lillooet he didn’t stick to
99
which, I saw by the tattery old road map, would have taken us to the exit to
97
through Cache Creek and Kamloops (and, eventually, sweet safe Calgary). Instead he kept going north, using Highway
53
, the Cariboo Highway, until somewhere between Clinton and
70
Mile House he could make a left turn and head west on a much smaller road, the kind that isn’t even a solid line on a map like that. It was pretty wet in places but Bishop was right, there wasn’t much traffic. Once a huge RV came rumbling along like a grizzly but otherwise hardly anybody at all.

This was funny country, between the mountains and the High Chilcotin Plateau (as I later learned it’s called). It’s what lies in between logging country and ranching country, but just when you think it’s gone from one to the other, it turns back on you. The logging parts were mostly clear-cut or had been at one time. There were stretches of bushland and a lot of new growth, five, ten, even maybe fifteen years old. It went back and forth from beautiful to creepy and sad.

“People got rich here,” Bishop said to me. “We will too.”

“I suppose you’re an expert in history too,” Theresa said.

Bishop ignored her.

We’d been driving most of the day and it felt even longer because we weren’t making very good time any more. The road was bad, and slippery in places. Theresa’s mouth tightened every time she got bumped around a little bit. But once when we got thrown together she hung on to me for a second or two after things were all right again. She acted like it hadn’t happened and I was happy to let it go at that. Then Bishop suddenly pulled off the road and she and I were sent flying into each another one more time.