Jericho (19 page)

Anybody who stumbled on it (no one did) would have found a weird-looking scene: a woman and a man in just their underwear and another woman buttoned up to her throat, covering the cab and steel box of a truck with oil paint the colour of mushed-up green peas. It was a nauseating colour, though it sort of blended in a bit with some of the early spring vegetation—better than blue would have done, that’s for sure, or red. A good thing the store didn’t have a lot of red. Still, I could see why they were stuck with all this baby-food green. Who’d want that in her house?

The job took the three of us the entire day, using a little sash brush a few centimetres wide to go round the trim and ones about four times as big to do the rest. They weren’t
high-quality brushes and a lot of brush hairs got left behind. At first, I kept trying to pick them out of the wet paint, using my fingernails like tweezers. (Theresa wasn’t as good at this, as she kept her nails so short. Maybe she chewed them that way.) Bishop told me not to worry about the bristles. “Every time you pick up one you leave a fingerprint. You don’t want your prints all over this thing.” I hadn’t thought of that and it frightened me a little bit the way he said it.

Then he said: “Don’t worry about the roof of the cube. We’ll leave it till last and see how much paint we have left. What’s important is what they can see from the road.” This made sense but it sent another shiver down my body because I knew what he was getting at. I hadn’t quite pictured that we were being followed by a posse or whatever they’re called.

Theresa was territorial, the way she guarded her side of the truck. Once she staked out an area, she kept Bishop and me away and worked with a lot of concentration, keeping two brushes going, doing the big open patches with the large one and the smaller spots and touch-ups with the baby one. She didn’t sing to make the time go by, didn’t even talk. Bishop and I worked as a team, me with a big brush and him a little one at the same time. We’d switch when we got tired. I was surprised how well we worked together. I was also surprised that Bishop wasn’t a better painter, what with all the trades he kept telling us he’s learned at the knee of that grandfather in some place whose name I kept trying to remember. Rattlesnake. No, that wasn’t it. Watersnake. Gartersnakeville?

By the end of the day we’d covered everything but the roof and still had nearly one full can of paint left. I thought
we should go back and do major touch-ups. We’d been putting it on pretty thick but the original paint still showed through most places, especially when the clouds would break and we’d get a glimpse of what the job looked like in direct sunlight. It wasn’t a pretty sight. But Bishop said we had enough paint left to do at least part of the roof, for when they sent the helicopters to hunt us down. By now his paranoid remarks didn’t bother me so much; I realized this was just his way of speaking. It was creepy but that was how he talked.

He hadn’t considered how to get up on top of the box without ruining the wet paint on the sides. He sat down on his haunches to puzzle out the answer while Theresa gave him poisonous looks. Eventually he dragged up a deadfall spruce about three metres long and, pointing it straight up with his two hands, lowered it some and finally let it go. He’d figured the distance pretty well, actually. The top end only messed up a small patch on Theresa’s side, easily fixed with paint still on the other brushes. I was surprised how quickly he scampered up this log ladder, like a South Pacific boy scurrying up a palm tree for coconuts. He got about half of the square surface covered—the front half, closest to the driver. The rest stayed government blue-and-red.

The three of us were a mess. Bishop put some gas from one of the jerry cans on the T-shirt Theresa had used that morning for washing and started to rub off all the blotches of vomity green on various parts of his body. We pointed out ones in places he couldn’t see. Then he and I did the same for Theresa, who had a big drop the size of a quarter in her hair, right above one ear, and a smaller one on her chin. Then came my turn to get the once-over from them.
In the end, we all marched down to the little stream to wash off the gas and dirt. Strange considering the season, but the water wasn’t deeper than a half-empty bathtub at most. With Bishop and me still in our underwear, the three of us got in at the same time and managed to mostly submerge ourselves by holding our arms over our heads and keeping our legs out straight. Some of us might have wanted it to be otherwise, but it was a very unsexy experience. The water was freezing cold.

We passed a boring night talking and in the morning saw how really hideous the damn truck looked. You could see every brush stroke. It looked like we’d sloshed on the paint and then gone at it with garden rakes. We now had the most conspicuous-looking truck in Canada. It looked like hyperactive children had painted it. Hyperactive and colour-blind. The paint was enamel and was still wet. Not tacky. Wet. About as wet as when it first went on. Bishop held another council of war and said we’d have to stay camped there until it dried. He didn’t know how long that might be. If we started driving with it this wet we’d pick up splashed mud and wet leaves and stones, and who knew what the thing would look like then. “Okay, so maybe it’s not camouflaged the way we’d like. But it doesn’t look as much like a mail truck way out in the bush.” No, it looked a lot sillier than that. Theresa was steaming with anger. We were stuck there another whole day waiting for the paint to dry enough for us to go on. Talk about watching paint dry.

“There’s a saw up at the Project,” Bishop said.

His point was that he didn’t think to bring one with him now or buy one when we were at the store. We had to go looking for non-rotten wood on the forest floor, stuff that
was big enough for a decent fire but small enough that Bishop could break it into lengths by putting it between two rocks and jumping on it. Theresa said, “The methodology is reductively stable, obviously.” I didn’t know what she meant exactly but I knew from her tone what she was trying to say.

I carved out a little pit, surrounded it with small rocks and started to build a good fire for boiling up a bigger supply of safe water. I wanted it at a raging boil for ten or fifteen minutes before I’d add the Javex; I wasn’t taking any chances. If only we’d had a big pot, it wouldn’t have been such a chore. Also, we didn’t have enough things to store water in. I was looking around for plastic bags, anything that would hold liquid, since I didn’t want this to become a daily routine. Theresa said she’d take care of it and disappeared up the road. Just then Bishop came over with little logs stacked up in his arms like Christmas presents. “The maple’s the best for burning,” he said as he let all the wood fall to the ground at my side. It was all spruce except for some birch. I was coming round to Theresa’s point of view; I said to myself, “Good Lord, I’m out in the woods with a guy who doesn’t know one tree from another and thinks he’s in charge.” I burned the spruce anyway. It sputtered and crackled.

I guess that was another big difference between Theresa and me. She had men all figured out. Of course she had brothers or at least one that she mentioned. Most important of all, she’d had a father. Mine was hiding in Bella Coola or somewhere, I wasn’t sure where, and to tell you the truth my desire to track him down was already starting to disappear. Looking back on it after all this time, I can see that wanting
to find my father was like wanting to get pregnant. Sometimes the desire crept up on me and I’d be completely taken over by it. It would make me blind and deaf to everything else I might want to do instead. Then the feeling would go down and the sun would come out, and I’d soon get a little angry with myself for falling for the trick again. What suckers we are.

[Then with time running out I’d get one really bad bout. Later, long after this whole ugly scene with Bishop, when I was back in Vancouver and leading a respectable life helping people, I made a decision to go to a fertilization clinic. Whatever you do, don’t say sperm bank. The point was to get the job done without having to think too much about where the sperm came from, and the best way to do this is to not use the word at all. Being settled in the funeral industry by then and happy in my life and with enough money for the first time to think that raising a child would be an option, I went so far as to have a no-obligation introductory interview and take home all their literature. I kept it in the bottom of one of my dresser drawers. Every once in a while I’d pull it out and read it over again, but I never got up the nerve to actually do anything more about it. Maybe “nerve” isn’t the right word. Maybe “need” is better. Whenever I’d feel the wish come over me, I’d read through the literature and remind myself what was possible. That would make me feel better and the same night I’d put it back in its drawer. Having it there in a manila envelope under my lingerie was almost the same as having it flat against my skin. My sister Annie always says how much luckier women of our generation are over Mother’s and of course she’s right. No matter how lucky we
are, though, it’s never as lucky as we could be, which keeps us all yearning. I mean here I was living in an age when I could go to a clinic and have my eggs fertilized but still just short of being able to choose the gender. I suppose I am more influenced by all those talks with Theresa than I thought at the time.]

Theresa had walked up the road to the general store and come back with a pretty large aluminum cooking pot with a lid, two more jerry cans and a pair of collapsible plastic water jugs. One of the jugs was see-through and had a plastic spigot, the other was black and had a hook in the handle. The black one used solar power to heat the water you put inside. She also had a few more foodstuffs. That was just about all she could carry. She only weighed
102
pounds, she said. (I always thought Dutch people were bigger.)

“How much was all this?” Bishop’s tone was pretty angry. I guess he was still thinking he didn’t want her to be seen, so the three of us could be identified together. Either that or he was mad that she went off without his permission. She didn’t take well to his tone of voice.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“No, how much? I’m curious. Our money situation is getting a little dangerous.”

“I said don’t worry. I put it on a credit card.”

“Jesus, you’re a fucking idiot.”

She gave him back as good as she got and it was pretty ugly on both sides.

“Haven’t you got the brains to know that the last thing you do when you’re on the lam is use a credit card? Soon they’ll know our movements and exactly where we’re at. Unbelievable.”

“That’s ridiculous. How would they ever know that I’m up here with you, or Beth for that matter?”

I thought it very interesting that being with Bishop for a while made her willing to use “they” instead of a particular name. Who were “they”? I didn’t know much about him, but I got the idea that Bishop meant somebody other than just the police.

“Naive!
” He blew the word out of his mouth, raising his voice another notch. “What do you think happens when you didn’t turn up for work or whatever? Even someone like you has friends, at least acquaintances maybe.
Some
body reported you missing. And somebody has tied you two together, you can count on it, sister.” He called her sister, that’s right. “When you’ve been gone a certain length of time, the first thing they do is run your credit cards.”

“They can’t get that kind of information. The banks don’t give that out.”

“You’re the most ignorant person I’ve ever met.”

“And you’re the kind no one who’s comfortable with her sanity would ever take seriously. Plus you’re a fragmented personality, not reality-driven. You’re a creation of your sickness. You don’t even believe yourself. No one believes a word you say, either.”

At that moment I remember noticing how Bishop’s anger was a constant, an underground stream that came to the surface now and then. Not always when you expected to see it. On the other hand, Theresa only attacked somebody she thought had problems. Normally she was just a little condescending. But at other times, like this—maybe when she thought being rude wasn’t getting through—she was real snarly. The madder Bishop got, the louder he yelled. The
madder she got, the funnier she talked. At one point she screamed out that Bishop was “narrowly compressed” and “a retrograding volatile.” I’m not sure exactly what that meant but I got the general idea and so did Bishop. He said that in a more intelligent country there would be a bounty on people like her, like the bounty on wolves.

Personally, I was worried that there was already a bounty on all of us. Bishop had a way of thinking out loud that after a long enough time made you fear that maybe he was right, maybe everybody
was
coming for us. After all, being the way he was didn’t automatically mean that he was wrong all the time. Even if you believed only half of what he said, he still had more experience at this kind of thing than Theresa and me.

When the truck was drier but not exactly dry, he decided it was time to pack up and get out of there. I could almost hear him thinking that he’d leave T behind but then thinking better of it because he knew she’d go to the police. “The posse’s too close” were his exact words. (So I was right, that is what it’s called.) This caused Theresa to say to me later that “the asshole and I have rhetorical differences that form the basis of our communications brownouts.” But having made the decision for us to go, Bishop changed his mind. The damn truck (even I loathed it more and more, and Theresa—don’t even ask) wasn’t quite dry enough, though I couldn’t believe it would look any better when it was. Bishop put a fingertip to it, as though testing a steam iron to see if it was hot. He left a fingerprint that he then rubbed out with his shirt-tail.

Bishop said we couldn’t leave until we found a few places on the truck that were tacky instead of sticky. We were
packed, and the renewed waiting was painful because everybody was mad at everyone else and had nothing to do. It was a miracle we hadn’t had any rain to really make an even bigger mess of things. When I look back it sounds ridiculous, but that’s how it was. We gave it one more night. It was a night of silence. We didn’t even hear anything outside even though we listened hard for insects and animals or even a little wind.