Jericho (25 page)

“I think your best bet is to get to one of the towns. Split from the bitch. Dye your hair—you should be good at that. Then slowly make your way somewhere. Seattle’s always good, though Portland’s better. A good-quality town, Portland. A lot goes on between the cracks.”

I guess I must have been looking kind of wild-eyed.

“Or you could stay here and take your chances. And really your chances may not be too bad. But if you take my advice you’ll ditch the social worker.”
He was moving quickly now. He picked up a few more items and stuffed them in one of the zippered compartments and got a coat. He looked like he was going to say goodbye but didn’t, not in words. He put the pack on. It wasn’t the biggest pack in the world but it was well stuffed, and it looked like it might be almost too heavy for his shoulders.

He sort of jumped on his toes in a funny way, to make the contents settle, then he was gone, off into the woods, the opposite direction from Clarence. I watched him disappear with the mountains far off in the background. That’s the last I saw of him till all of us were back in the city, and you know the rest.

This is the Affidavit of Bethany M. Hubbard, sworn before me at Vancouver, B.C., on this seventh day of September 1996.
[Signature]
A Commissioner for taking Affidavits for British Columbia.

I’
M NOT MAKING THIS UP
: its name is Downtown Mountain, I don’t know why. Maybe it was called that by somebody who was homesick for Civ. I just about fell over the first time I saw the words on the map, way out there in the absolute middle of nowhere in particular. I always related to it. Which is why I avoided it now and went the other way. By the time you twig to a pattern of behaviour in yourself you can bet your ass the cops have already done the same thing. I could see these bastards in my mind’s eye, flying low in light aircraft, looking for movement or little dots of unusual colour, reporting every once in a while to some command post, saying things on the radio like “Hotel Whisky Whisky, do you copy?” I thought: If this was the States they’d have thermal sensors, probably ones that can screen out deer and pick up on heat blooms from human-size critters. Later I read that this wasn’t true. The Mounties do have infrared but the bush canopy where I was is too
thick for it to work. Maybe I knew this all along without knowing that I did. Which is why I kept under cover when I could and tried to blend in when I had to cross open country. The damn backpack was bright blue nylon, the blue of sparks from an electrical fire. In a little creek I emptied it out and then covered the outside with mud, rubbing it in like I was washing it with mud because in Bizarro World that would make it clean. Then I stuck a few twigs through the webbing. I tried not to use any shiny objects, especially when it was light out.

I headed towards the big lake. I had a plan and this was it—to go towards the horse cops when they’d think I was moving away from em. There were a lot of places down there. I suppose you’d have to call em cottages, though to me that sounds like an Ontario word and it ain’t a nice one either. Cabins where people didn’t live year-round cause it’s so bleak in the winter that the country can’t hardly support human life. Some of them had quite a few luxuries. Rich people from the city, dumb-ass Citizens who think they’re getting in touch with the primitive. Ha!

The nights were wet and cold. I’d put on all the clothes I brought with me, topped off with a green plastic poncho which I’d sort of wrap around me from the inside. No matter what kind of shelter I found I’d always wake up in the middle of the night because my ass was wet. I’d roll over onto my side but then that side’d be wet and I’d have to switch. This would go on all night. I thought I found the perfect spot one day when I came upon this rock overhang so deep it looked like the mouth of a cave. Invisible from the air, invisible from just about every angle, and dry, I thought. It was only the afternoon but I decided to stop there anyway
even though I usually waited until dark. It turned out to be worse than being out in the open. Trickles of water, big enough so that you could hear em not just feel em, ran all night like a broken toilet. I got soaked. I didn’t like making a fire if I could help it. You think I was being paranoid but I wasn’t. I didn’t have enough information to be paranoid. I didn’t know if they were after me—yet. I was just being careful.

Anyway, I ate cold food from the pack. The good news was that the pack got lighter and lighter. So did I, come to think of it. I could tell by the way my clothes were starting to get a little looser, even when I had all the layers on at night. The bad news was that I didn’t know if the food would hold out until I got to the lake. So I cut way back on how much I ate. Every morning I’d move some food from the pack to my pockets. I had a breakfast pocket and a dinner pocket, and I had to fight hard with myself to keep from raiding them early as I trekked up and down, staying in the shade and the shadows, looking both ways (and up) before crossing a place without cover if I couldn’t get around it any other way. I tried to stay filled up with water to take the place of food but this makes for pretty uncomfortable walking all day. It makes you the slave of your bladder, which is something you don’t want to be when you think the horsemen might turn up any minute.

I honestly don’t know how many days it took me. I lost track and never got the count back. Actually I started thinking in different terms. Instead I just counted the sleep-camps. Let’s see, I’d say, when I waded across that river, that was two sleep-camps ago. I’m too old to be wishing time away like you do when you’re a kid. But I just wanted the
thing to be over. And I wanted there to be some destination I could be at when I stopped. I was wet and my feet hurt. Not just sore. Hurt. There was some invisible point I passed when the backpack seemed to be getting heavier even though I knew it was really less heavy all the time as every morning I buried the empty wrappers and cans the food came in.

The last stream I followed fed into the lake. The first look I had at the water was through the tops of trees but I could tell way before I caught sight of it that there was water there. I could tell from the sky. I’d learned that sky over water looks different from sky over land, like the sky was a mirror that reflected what it saw down below. I hid the pack and moved away from the stream and snuck down to the shore. The lake was quiet except for birds, who were squawking out loud, knowing nobody was around to hear em. The only evidence of humans I could see from there, lying on my belly, was a broken-down little jetty on a point way off to the right. I figured there had to be a cabin just out of sight with a view of the water. These guys build with a view of the lake. That’s a big deal to them. Not like it was to me—to see who might be coming—but to show people that they could afford the scenery.

There wasn’t any point in waiting till dark to look around. Inside in the dark I’d need some kind of light, which sort of defeats the whole purpose of sneaking around. So I crawled a bit closer, stopping every now and then to make sure there wasn’t anybody behind me—or in front of me or off to the sides. I approached it zigzag fashion. Even when I got pretty close the place looked empty. Not abandoned, just empty, like whoever owned it hadn’t opened it up for the
season yet. I was like some animal deciding whether or not to trust the humans enough to take the food they were offering. When I got close enough I saw the door was padlocked. I took out my knife and tried to pry off the hasp. But it was a no-go. Around the side, by the spot where the stovepipe came out in an elbow, there was a window that was open just a crack so that the place wouldn’t freeze. I got the blade in and jimmied the window open and climbed inside.

I was amazed later when the lawyer gave me all these Zeerox copies from the newspapers. There was this big front-page story about how I sent a tape to some radio station in the Interior after making off with somebody’s cassette recorder. They printed what I was supposed to have said about how I was playing some game with the cops and how I bragged that I could change form by magic and turn myself into a wolf. Crap like that. Complete garbage of course. I never stole any tape recorder. Never saw one, so the idea never crossed my mind, and the voice wasn’t mine, as the cops had to admit later on. Obviously just some weirdo that got a thrill from pretending to be the Sasquatch Bandit as one of the papers started calling me, a name the other ones picked up. They didn’t mean it as a compliment but it did make me legendary in the major media, which meant that there were people in two camps. The newspapers and television blew me up into this “Robin Hood figure,” as they kept saying, the “folk hero” who stole from the rich owners and sport fishermen from places like Portland and Seattle and gave to—well, to myself, I guess. The reporters found a whole lot of people to say things they wanted to hear said out loud. People who wanted to be on TV said what they knew the TV people were looking for, whether
they—the TV types, I mean—knew what the audience out there wanted to hear or not. That’s how come things got out of control. I’m lucky they did, cause that was the only way I got the kind of sharp lawyers I needed—they wanted a piece of my high profile too. Then there’s the other side of the coin. I wouldn’t have been in all that much trouble if I wasn’t a celebrity—which I didn’t know I was, being up in the bush at the time. (How did people think I could have
mailed
that tape anyway?) On the other hand—wait, how many hands is that? Oh hell, I don’t give a damn—what they were calling “public fascination” with me “no doubt had some bearing on the outcome” of the case. Here I’m quoting from one of the columnists. What they’re saying is that I would have been in less trouble without all the hype but I would have been in more trouble too. Go figure.

I was a long time piecing together what happened. Not in getting the details. (The information was thrown at me from all directions right away. It was like a bunch of kids pelting me with water balloons.) But a long time in sorting everything out and figuring out what it meant. Here’s how it went down. Despite what the tiny perfect dyke said, the cops were right behind us just like I figured they were, just like Clarence knew they were. You can’t fool Clarence. It didn’t take em long to find Jericho and nab the girls, who were scared even after the cops lost interest in em except to use them against me (and maybe Clarence too though they seemed to forget about him pretty quick, maybe because of what they call sensitivities).

As I see it, the dyke, who never got any jokes—she would call it something like “a humour receptor deficiency”—took
everything I said straight and then told them all this stuff about me being an ex-con, maybe an excaped con, and being in organized crime and a dope pusher and one thing and another. Nobody in their right mind would have fallen for all that shit. But at the time there’d been stories about our “pan-province crime spree” (now I’m quoting from one of the papers in Vancouver that I have in my scrapbook). They seemed to be interested first of all in how I’d made off with the truck. After all, nobody
likes
Canada Post, and the truck was proof of how feeble they were. That’s the way I figure it. When it came out that I was travelling with my two “female companions” it set up the whole sexual theme song, like we were a three-way menagerie. If only they’d known what the situation really was. Anyway, you’d have to be an idiot not to see all the sex stuff between the lines in everything that was written, especially after Beth and the other one got picked up and the media said that I’d abandoned em. Later on they got pictures of them coming and going to court. Until that day with the bear, which I’ll tell you about in a minute, they didn’t have any picture of me. Maybe that made me seem like an even bigger mystery, I don’t know. I think it was early on when they tried to get an old one of me from Correctional Services they found out absolutely and for sure that I’d never been in custody and the dyke couldn’t be taken seriously. Anyhow that’s what I suspect. So the media used its head and managed to dig up an old snapshot from back in Windsor. I was real young and skinny and had an Adam’s apple the size of a fucken baseball. Even I wouldn’t have recognized myself unless I looked real close for a long time. I sure didn’t resemble any sasquatch.

I’m a changed woman, no doubt about it, and sometimes when I’m going to work in the morning I think about my first days in Vancouver, when I was naive and thought I should be looking for my father on the Downtown Eastside. That’s the only place I knew to look. But look for what? Now when I walk the streets they feel like home. They’re probably no better than they were before. In some ways they’re worse, I think most people would agree, because the drugs are much worse and the poverty and crime. The midnineties seems like an innocent time. Who would have thought that? When I cross the intersection as I’m walking to work in the morning, the same old corner looks different somehow.