Jericho (27 page)

In one of them, I was walking down Main in Vancouver. It was exactly the way it was the first time I saw it, when I
was emotionally just a kid, a girl just out of Alberta. People keep calling it a slum, you know, and it is, but it was people’s home, too, at least in those days. There were all different sorts of people, some of them whose lives were getting better, not just ones whose lives were worse. I’d say the music you heard was ska as well as punk. You know, it was diverse.

Anyway, I’m going along and either people keep stopping me to talk or else I’m seeing what I don’t really want to see and I go by fast. I’m headed towards Hastings but it takes an awful long time, especially with all these interruptions. Now it’s true that Main is pretty long all right, but Hastings never seems to get any closer. You know how things can be in dreams. I remember that somebody, a woman, came up to me and started talking about where she could get “cheap” cigarettes. She kept saying the word over and over. Later, when I was awake and my brain was turned on, I figured out that she meant ones that had been stolen. I guess she thought a thief like me would know.

The longer I walk, the worse the street gets. It starts out with little shops run by families, but it turns into a place with second-hand junk stores and a Money Mart. For two whole blocks every building is all boarded up. The pavement out front is still alive, with groups of young guys standing around looking like they’re waiting for trouble, but the buildings they’re leaning in front of are dead. The boards they’re shut up with aren’t new ones, either. They’re old and rotten and brown like the lumber at Jericho.

It starts to get creepy, like the dream is turning into a nightmare. All of a sudden there are maybe a hundred people around me. They’re like the characters in that movie
Night of the Living Dead
that I saw on video once except that they’re very active. They’re the most destroyed people I’ve ever seen. I end up screaming at them, “No, I don’t have any money. No, I don’t have anything for you. If I had money I’d be taking the bus home but I don’t, so I have to walk.” Then it hits me: why
don’t
I take the bus? There’s a bus stop right in front of me. One comes along. When I see it coming, I say to myself: “I don’t care which one it is. I’d get on even if the sign on the front says
BETHANY
,” which as you know is my full name but it’s also a place in the Bible. I looked it up later in some religious books we have at work and found out it’s where Lazarus was from, him and his two sisters. When the bus gets close, I see what it actually says is
ALMA
. Now there
are
buses that say that—it’s a street way over in Kits—but that also happens to be Mother’s name. Weird, huh? I ride along a few blocks and get off at the Steenrod Funeral Home. I go down into the prep room and who should be there waiting to see me but Bishop. He’s wearing a suit that doesn’t fit him very well and he’s nervous, pacing back and forth. He says he’s going to court and he needs my help: he doesn’t know how to do up the necktie. I tell him I’ve never tied one for anybody who was alive. So he stretches out on the table and I do the knot for him.

When I woke up, I said to myself: “What does this dream mean?” Then it hit me. It means he’s going to prison. Of course.

They forced me to become a victim of celebrityism. However, I refused to be dictated to by their behavioural imperatives. It was a difficult time for me on multiple levels.

I don’t know where my two co-defendants got their lawyers. I thought Bishop’s must have been assigned to him by the court, but later I wasn’t so sure. He looked pretty expensive. I asked my lawyer about it but he only gave me an odd look. He was hired by my family. This is what I mean by problems.

Father and my brother visited me in jail. My brother was scared but pretended to be supplying support for Father—who looked old and sad with his fat bald head and sounded that way also. He told me that he had canvassed lawyer acquaintances on the Island, men he knew from church and the K of C and groups of Dutch people, and they suggested various other ones over here, and that the best one of them would be in communication with me soon. (He came the next morning and I was out on bail the day after that.) I asked how Mother was coping. I thought that is what they would expect me to ask, the sort of data I should be soliciting from them. Father seemed relieved that I mentioned it. That’s when he told me she was ill. I could see in his eyes that he wasn’t telling me everything. Later he said that she was
very
ill. For a few seconds I wondered whether he was breaking the news of her death to me a little at a time, which is a standard technique known to every person in my discipline. But he stopped there.

“She’s sorry she can’t come to see you,” he said, “but it’s better this way.”

I thought what he meant was: this place is awful-looking and loud and dirty and depressing at the same time and this poor devout woman who always sees the best in people would be so shocked that she might not experience any recovery. Later, as I have rewound the conversation in my
mind and then replayed it over and over again, I think he must have been telling me that Mother would have been ashamed of me, which I have difficulty believing to be true. Long have I been embarrassed by this because they have no right to be ashamed of me. At other times, though, it did to me seem obvious that what he was saying was literally true and no more than that—that she was just too sick to get on the ferry. I sometimes make the mistake—I admit it openly—of not recollecting how uncomplicated and simple of speech my parents and their friends are. But at the time I was also upset because my idiot brother was staring at me with actual pity, which made me furious with him.

The bail hearing was a blur, over before I knew I was really awake. The outcome was the one of which I had been assured. I was told I was free to go home, and as soon as I could I went over to the Island. Mother was sitting up in bed. She kept coughing—a dry cough—and putting the fingers and palm of her right hand flat above her breastbone like she was going to say “Mercy!” or gently tap out the illness inside her, like Father emptying the ash from the bowl of his pipe. I thought: This is not just healing by the laying on of hands (very Protestant) but the laying on of
her own
hands on herself. Aunt Jo was there for a while, in and out of the room. She looked much the same as when I had seen her the last time. Too, there were neighbours and church people I was supposed to remember but really didn’t. I wondered if the priest had come for a visit but I didn’t want to ask and I caught myself in time. I got there in late morning and stayed all afternoon until the patient got tired. We had the longest talk we had ever had. One of us would remember something about the past and then it would be the other
one’s turn. Her thoughts weren’t always connected in ways obvious to me but I guess they had their own logic system inside her mind. I was expecting the worst when she started talking about the Church, but it wasn’t too bad.

“The worst part was the way Marian devotion changed,” she said. “But me, I never changed in my heart. Mary was the part of the Church that a woman like me found a home in.”

I suppose she was trying to tell me something she considered important. I guess she was trying to reach out across the sexuality gap. If so, it didn’t work. She just seemed sad to me. That pretty much summed her up, I guess.

I spent the night in my old bed in my former bedroom. My brother, who had come down from Nanaimo, had his famous summer porch back (where I think he used to jack himself off a lot; maybe he did again, for old times’ sake). It was freaky living in the past, for the experience is contrary to nature.

The lawyer and I didn’t seem to like one another all that much but I think he was good at what he did. At first I had to keep telling him to explain to me what he was doing. It took a while but finally he started behaving. He didn’t like doing it but he did it all right. I found the process quite interesting. Partly this is because the law turned out to have much in common with my own profession. I mean helping others even when they didn’t deserve it.

He went to the scumbag’s bail hearing and told me what happened. Bishop’s lawyer, the mysterious one, made a case for letting him out of jail, pointing out he didn’t have a criminal record and had a co-operative attitude and that no weapons were used in the “pan-province crime spree,” which is what the Vancouver tabloid kept calling it.

“The Crown’s argument,” the lawyer told me, “is that Mr. Bishop had no known job or profession and that he had been in a rehabilitation program. There was apparently no suitable reply to the first point. The second one, counsel said, simply showed his client’s ability to be reformed, because the treatment was obviously successful, as he has had no further problems with drugs, alcohol or other substances. The judge wasn’t convinced. Often the judge’s mood is a determining factor.”

So they kept Bishop locked up.

Over time the lawyer let me in on our strategy. “It’s tricky,” he said, “because Ms. Hubbard’s intentions aren’t known to us.”

I asked him what exactly he was referencing by this remark. His tone altered. He switched over to the language of the poor, because I suppose he figured that, as we both had to deal with those people in our careers, this was a tongue we had in common, a kind of secular Latin.

“The Crown looks good if they get him to plead guilty. They look better if they convict all of you. Maybe a plea bargain can be worked out. His counsel might be working on a deal to have his client cop to the truck theft in return for the other charges being dropped.”

I asked him where that would leave me exactly.

“Hard to say. Probably the Crown would do a deal like that if the defendant agreed to implicate you and Ms. Hubbard.”

I must have had horror written all over my expression, as he then tried to be reassuring. “And of course it could work the other way round as well. You and Ms. Hubbard could give testimony against him. Obviously they don’t have a case
against you in the vehicle matter. As for the conspiracy charge, that’s only there to frighten you. My own feeling is that the rest is pretty shaky too. We might be able to make everything disappear if you agree to testify. Of course we’d have to get Ms. Hubbard to testify as well. From the point of view of the Crown’s case, it has to be both of you or neither one, so that your testimony doesn’t cancel out hers and vice versa. I’ll start talking to her counsel. Then, if it looks like it could happen, I’ll approach the prosecution.”

That made me feel better, but I either didn’t trust him or I didn’t hold confidence in him, I don’t know which. Maybe first one and later the other. Whichever way I looked at it, it meant that I still found a methodology of working with him. He probably felt identically to me. What matters is that agreement was constructed, although it took a while.

For once I was not bashful about giving expression to my opinion. It didn’t seem fair to me that the bastard Bishop should have a say in any of this, even indirectly, but he did. You always hear television police complaining that they take the evil villains off the streets but the system puts them right back again. I have come around to this viewpoint too after realizing the similarities between that profession and my own. (You work your brains out helping the disadvantaged and then they just go out and get wretched all over again.)

It seemed to me that, despite my own lawyer’s work, the whole thing depended on what Bishop and his person wanted to do. As I understood the situation, he could choose to plead guilty or go to trial. He picked the second one. That pissed me off because anybody who knew anything knew he was guilty. He was guilty of stuff that’s not even against the
law yet. Yet he wasted everybody’s time and other resources by letting other people decide. I thought this was typical of how he rejected the taking of responsibility. Exactly the sort of low-life morality-abandonment you’d expect of a known thief/kidnapper/pervert/drug dealer. My lawyer and I got into an argument about this. He said it was “a fundamental right” of the accused to elect to be tried and to put up the best defence he could. In this case, he said, it was only a question, if he went that way, of whether he’d ask for a trial by the judge-and-jury or a superior court judge (Smithe Street right downtown) or by the Provincial Court (Main and Cordova, a locality with which I was more familiar than anyone should have to be—but that was my job, correct?). If he picked the higher court he’d even get a preliminary hearing in the other one first. Liberal bullshit, of course. Being a creep himself, Bishop took the creepy old building at Main and Cordova. Probably it reminded him of home. Right in the middle of everything, my mother died. But they didn’t have to stop the trial like I thought they would. The trial just carried on without me for a while. Being a trusting individual I didn’t find anything suspicious in this action.

Except when I had to be in Victoria, I was in court every day. Or rather, out in the corridor most of the time, looking at the low-lifes. It was interesting to watch the proceedings inside but often hard to hear: the people do not speak clearly the way they do on TV shows and in movies. Beth was there some of the time but there was only one day when we were there together: I caught her looking over at me once or twice. I thought she mostly stayed away because she was afraid of me. Homophobia.
Her face had that blank expression of someone who’s that way. Later her lawyer said to mine that she was “suffering” from having her name on TV and in the newspapers with one of those ugly drawings they make. Personally I wasn’t bothered by this type of thing, and right after the case was over I had to screen requests for interviews. (I thought I owed it to our society to distribute my ideas through the major media.) In the witness box, though, she didn’t have any reservations about performing. She told them exactly what they wanted to hear and she made herself look innocent and good while doing it. The judge was male, which explains a lot on a number of levels. She flirted with him by not flirting. I came around to realizing that I can’t stand the slut after all.