Jericho (17 page)

“There’s a crossroads up ahead with a store that has everything we need.”

Theresa’s sigh spoke louder than words. Without talking, the two of them seemed to agree that she would wait in the truck. It was probably the only time they agreed on anything. Bishop grabbed my arm and said, “Let’s go shopping.” I wondered how many times he’d been this way before.

We walked a few hundred metres up the road and after two or three big twists and bends came to a pretty fair-sized country store with two gas pumps out front. He was wrong about it being a crossroads; it was just a bulldozed wide spot. A loud dog was tied to its unpainted dog house and wasn’t any too happy about it either. Inside there was a little lunch counter, not more than seven or eight stools covered in red vinyl with patches that didn’t match. The rest of the place was full of merchandise. Fishing tackle. Food in cans and a couple of coolers and freezers. Hardware. Lots of paint. Even a wall of videos for rent
(seeing this gave me a little jolt). Bishop said: Stock up on grub. So I did, but I was shopping without knowing how much we had to spend, where we were going or how long we’d be there. The only thing I knew was that there were three of us.

The stuff I was picking out seemed pretty dreary. Then I looked up and saw some big Styrofoam coolers out of my reach on the tip-top shelf. Fishermen probably bought them for their catch. And their beer. Bishop was getting some coffee and stuff, knocking over fruit cocktail in the process, and I motioned to him. He caught on right away. So I got a lot of fresh vegetables and fruit or what they had of it—potatoes starting to go spongy, apples, a cabbage, a cauliflower, a big bag of oranges. The aisles were so narrow only one person could be there at a time, which wasn’t a problem since there probably weren’t half a dozen souls in the whole place, so I was surprised to see that there were actually carts like in a supermarket. Tiny, tiny ones about the size of a doll’s baby carriage. When I spotted these, I got three big bags of ice as well. Bishop told me to get the smallest bottle of bleach they had. What I found was Javex, which reminded me of Mother: it’s the brand she always bought when Annie and I were growing up. He also told me to get seeds and I did. I could see and hear him barging into things as he now had a small shovel, a spade really, and things like that. He’d also picked up some of those red plastic gas cans with the nozzles hidden inside the screw caps.

“And I want to fill these up at the pump,” he told the woman at the counter.

She did up the calculations.

“Haven’t you got any spray paint?” he wanted to know.

No, she said. “What we’ve got is just what you’ve got here.” She picked up the paint cans and brushes he’d laid on the counter.

I guessed that we were using up almost all our cash.

Even though we’d taken our sweet time, the place still seemed a blur to me. [It seems even blurrier now, which is why I’m taking my time and trying to set down everything just as I remember it. Thank you for letting me do this.] As we hauled the last batch of stuff down the road, Bishop stopped just outside the door and pointed with his pointy chin (his arms were full) at the bright yellow ruler tape stuck up along the door frame so that convenience store operators could tell the police how tall a robber was. “When I was a kid,” he told me, “Lonnie, my grandfather-who-raised-me, used to take me into the store and make me stand up straight against one of these and measure how much I’d grown.” When I repeated this later to Theresa she said they didn’t have them when Bishop was that age, they were a
1980
s thing. “He probably heard that somewhere and has said it so often he thinks it’s true. He’s not just a liar, he steals other people’s lies. He’s not just a thief of things and money, he’s a thief of lies. In terms of ethicality he’s very iffy, to say the least.”

When we got the last load—the foam coolers with all the heavy ice inside—back to the truck, Theresa frowned at Bishop with her lips and jaw but her eyes were snarling. She had been writing in a diary she kept. Much later, when we were hiding out up in the woods, I took a peek at it one day (I feel guilty, I confess). She had written: “Entry. Emotional burden of Object with his vain deceitful personality has probably led him to depression alternating
with hypomania. Observed Object in latter state. The other would be lethargized with deadness of eyes. Now overcommunicativeness and grandiosity. Talks constantly of some plan referred to as Project J, whatever that is. Drinks and drugs to excess, insulting behaviourisms, fits of jealousy.”

We drove through places named Gang Ranch and Dog Creek. And Alkali Lake where there was no lake that I could see. Maybe I wasn’t looking out the front at the right time. Maybe it had dried up over the last summer, though it should have come back by this time of year. You could tell that the countryside was supposed to be hot and empty in July and August but right now it was still a little soggy. This didn’t keep small stones from hitting the windshield like popcorn popping in the pan when we went through a patch of gravel. Vancouver people like to say that you can go skiing and golfing on the same day when you live there. Here you could freeze and die of thirst at the same time. I made everybody sandwiches out of the new stock of food.

“I feel better with all these provisions,” Bishop said.

I think he was talking to me but Theresa answered: “Food. Why don’t you use the correct terminology?
Food.”

The truck was starting to take a beating, especially when every once in a while the road just gave up, like a person who’s all of a sudden stopped breathing. Bishop was holding on to the steering wheel instead of steering. We bumped and jerked along. You could feel the suspension hollering. It was a truck but it was made for city work. We’d hit a hole or drive over a small branch and you’d think that something was coming up through the floor to get you.

We hadn’t seen any other traffic for miles. In fact there was no sign of other people at all except for the odd bit of garbage that the melting snow turned up and some log fences, but they were a good ways back. The only form of animal life we saw was a scrawny deer. I could tell that everything would be quiet if we hadn’t been making such a racket with the truck. With the day rattling to its end, Bishop was looking for a place to camp. There weren’t any. Finally he said he was just going to pull over to the side, which he did, putting the truck on a tilt to the right before saying, “Let’s have more
food.”
He looked at Theresa as he said the last word. She wouldn’t look back.

Bishop had trouble making a cook fire. He used up a book of matches and turned to a butane lighter, first setting fire to the match cover and sticking it under his pile of sticks, where it sputtered out. “Everything’s wet,” he said. I showed him where to look for dry leaves. I showed how to put down twigs on the bottom, building up a square like a tiny log cabin and filling it with the leaves and putting thicker stuff on top going crossways, and how to get down low and blow hard on the leaves when they started to smoulder. Soon we had bread toasting on one part and water boiling on the other. I told him how long to boil the water to make sure it was safe, then how many drops of his Javex you used for extra safety without leaving a strong taste of the stuff. I then showed him how to transfer the drinking water to a small bottle I’d bought at the store. I was surprised to find out he didn’t know these things. But then he was probably surprised at what I didn’t know about other subjects.

There wasn’t much talking during dinner. After we’d eaten we moved a lot of the supplies up to the front, next
to the little seat for the driver, so there would be room in the back for all of us. We had nothing to sleep on except mailbags but plenty of them—enough for mailbag pillows and mailbag blankets. The incline was so steep that we couldn’t sleep with our heads or our feet facing the windshield. We had to sleep sideways, with our feet touching the inside of the wall that rested in the ditch. This was pretty uncomfortable and took some getting used to. Bishop decided he couldn’t stand it and turned the other way round, with his head at the low end and his feet up high above him.

“Are you going to sleep like that?” I asked.

“It’s very good for your circulation. Gets the blood flowing to your brain for a change. Like standing on your head in yoga.”

I had to tell him that I didn’t think it was such a good idea. I told him of a case at Steenrod’s, a teenage boy who died wearing gravity boots after finding that he couldn’t get out of them. (Bishop stayed the way he was for a while but then later moved up to the way Theresa and I were.) This got me to telling stories about my days at Steenie’s. They both seemed very interested in different ways.

Theresa said, “What was your worst experience?”

I told them about the coroner’s call at that old frame house in Strathcona. A crack house, I heard the cops say. And the smell that made you sick it was so human, and that beautiful young girl with the small entry wound a few centimetres above her heart.

“Wait a minute,” Bishop said. “You’re talking about my old place. I had to move in with a friend cause Forensics was there for about ten days tearing up everything. A real drag.
When the tape came down I went back, but we never got rid of the stink, you know. I finally had to find somewhere else to crash.”

For a while after that I couldn’t find anything else to say, not without asking questions we might not like the answers to. Eventually, Bishop started speaking again, quieter than normal but still in the way he usually spoke. He was talking about death, about the grandfather he called Lonnie. He said: “I don’t know if he believed in God or not. But right to the end he thought the Big Bands were coming back.” The light was fading and I couldn’t tell if he was pausing or if he’d finished. All of a sudden he started talking again. “I’ll never forget the last words I heard him say. He was making a sandwich and he said in a soft voice, ‘The heel of the loaf is like the jokers in the deck.’ He sounded sad when he said it.”

We were still talking about the past when Bishop fell asleep and started to snore. Well, he’d been doing all the driving, because it was his truck, he’d stolen it after all. Theresa, though, looked like she was angry with him all over again. But she simmered down and she started to tell me about where we came from and what she wanted to do. We were whispering, lying there side by side on our mail sacks, trying to avoid the big metal buckles, and Bishop’s snoring got louder and louder. I tried rolling him over, using both my hands, like I was making a skinny snowman, and that worked for a while, but soon he flopped on his back again and the noise got even louder than before. Theresa eventually got so fed up she woke him up and threw him out of the truck. She could really take charge when she got worked up. Bishop put up less of an argument
than I expected. He grabbed a double armload of mailbags and left. T and I didn’t get to sleep for a couple of hours. By then we could hear muffled snores off in the darkness somewhere not far away.

You could say I took my leave-taking of my parents’ marriage model very early on. I rejected their template as ill-suited to meaningful sustainability. My family was challenged. You won’t believe the ways they impaired themselves.

My father used to say that he decided to come to Canada after he saw Canadian soldiers liberate the Netherlands from the Germans (he was only a boy then). Many Dutch people came to Canada in the late
1940
s. Mostly they went where the jobs were at the time. Few of them went directly to Vancouver Island like my father and mother. Their decisions were enwrapped with the fact of their being Catholic and from the South, not the North—not wicked urban Amsterdam. In the many parts of Canada where there are plenty of people from the North, the words “Dutch” and “Catholic” don’t interface in the common imagination; the terms simply aren’t correspondenced. Although there were others like us on Vancouver Island, we were isolated there. We were outcasts out to the third or fourth ring. Within the family configuration, I was the most outcast of all. In a family of black sheep, I am the most black.

The most major thing in my family’s life was Vatican II. The most important human person was the Bishop of Victoria, Remi Joseph De Roo. That was a famous if silly-sounding name. He was a Vatican II liberal. A great one for
the folksingers, Bishop De Roo, and completely at odds with Vancouver and the rest of the Lower Mainland, where they kept to very conservative liturgical traditions and preaching and were very indulgent to traditional sacramental, devotional aspects of the faith. Over there in sin-ridden Vancouver, people didn’t jump on the idea that Catholicism was the living synthesis of straight Middle Eastern monotheism and the easy-going Greco-Roman polytheism, which made it simple to gobble up new worship and observances that came along. So in popular terms the Church in conservative Victoria was liberal. It was as though the two groups were twins confused at birth. Logically my parents were better suited to Vancouver but they immigrated to the wrong place. Typical. How they suffered (and made us suffer), how they loved suffering—so was suffering really such a sacrifice? Anyway, they became the outcasts again.