Stanley Park (2 page)

Jeremy watched the three men make their way around the lagoon and disappear into the trails. He glanced at his watch, sighed. Lifted his chin and breathed in the saline breeze. It brought to mind the ocean beyond the park, sockeye salmon schooling in the deep, waiting for the DNA-encoded signal to turn in their millions and rush the mouth of the Fraser, the tributary offshoot, the rivulet of water and the gravel-bed spawning grounds beyond. Mate, complete the cycle, die. And then, punctuating this thought, the rhododendron bushes across the lawn boiled briefly and disgorged Caruzo, the Professor’s manic vanguard.

“Hey, hey,” Caruzo said, approaching the bench. “Chef
Papier.” He exhaled the words in a blast.

He dressed for the mobile outdoor life, Caruzo. Three or four sweaters, a torn corduroy jacket, a heavy coat, then a raincoat over all of that. It made the big man even bigger, the size of a lineman, six foot five, although stooped a little with the years. Those being of an indeterminate number; Jeremy imagined only that it must be between fifty and ninety. Caruzo had a white garbage bag tied on over one shoe, although it was only threatening to rain, and pants wrapped at the knees in electrical tape. His ageless, wind-beaten face was protected by a blunt beard that fell to his chest. Exposed skin had darkened, blackened as a chameleon might against the same forest backdrop.

“The Professor,” Caruzo announced, “is waiting.”

Jeremy followed Caruzo between the cherry trees and around the lagoon. They passed down an alley of oak trees that stirred another memory of his mother. When they were alone—the Professor was often in the field on other projects, never explained—Jeremy and his mother would spend weekends here, feeding the animals. Bread for the swans, nuts for the squirrels. The racoons would take eggs from your hand and climb up into these same bent trees, crack their prize gingerly and suck clean the interior. Once a racoon bobbed its head in silent thanks before eating. His mother laughed for a long time at that. It was as happy as he remembered her being, ever. From his earliest memories right up to the day in October 1987 when Hélène Papier died, not long after his twentieth birthday. His father was again in the field. Jeremy had been seeking his own petulant distance, living on campus, playing in a bad rockabilly band called The Decoders and failing economics. When Jeremy thought of it now—ten years separating him from the events that had so tragically, so quickly, unfolded—it sometimes felt as if she had given up on both of them, all at once. In the middle of a dream turned left, not right. Taken her leave.
The suddenness of it sent Jeremy and his father flying across the world in different directions.

Caruzo marched ahead. He was chanting, as he would from time to time.

When he reached the end of the chorus, Caruzo stopped on the path, held his hands out as if soliciting critical commentary.

“Food, drink or clothing?” Jeremy asked.

“How about a toonie?” Caruzo said.

Jeremy produced the two-dollar coin and they walked another fifty yards, over a small arched bridge and up to a trail mouth that entered the forest proper. A pay phone stood there. And since the Professor was still nowhere to be seen, Jeremy phoned Jules at the restaurant.

“How are you making out?” she asked him. She had the cordless phone tucked under her chin while she walked across the kitchen of The Monkey’s Paw Bistro.

“It’s all extremely strange,” he said by way of an answer.

“Strange itself is not bad,” Jules said. “All my father ever talks about are husbands and mutual funds. Turns out the evaluation criteria are similar.”

She was trying to cheer him up, which he appreciated as always. “What are the numbers tonight?” he asked her.

“Twenty-six covers early. We have a six-top late. A few tentatives.”

“Thursday,” he said, exasperated.

“Walk-in Thursday,” Jules said. Jeremy deduced from the steady scraping sound he heard that she was stirring the roasted carrot-ginger soup he had prepped earlier.

“I was going to use a bit of cinnamon in that soup,” he said. “Is Zeena in?”

“Zeena, of course, is in,” Jules said, and then, knowing he was trying to think about work as an alternative to what lay before him, she prodded, “Talk to me, sugar. How’s he doing?”

Well, he’s living in a park, for one. But Jeremy knew what she was really asking. “I can’t be sure,” he said to Jules. “He’s not here yet.”

“He’ll show,” Jules said. “Take the evening. I’ll manage.”

“Everything else prepped up?”

“Puh-lease.”

“I made a demi from those duck bones. I was going to use that in the sauce for the duck breast with an apricot preserve.…”

Sous-chef Jules Capelli met these instructions with long-suffering silence.

“Sorry.”

“I got the notes,” Jules said. “Now take the night and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Caruzo had become the messenger. He could still cover great distances quickly on his long legs, and so he had been sent to set up this meeting, loping all the way across town to The Monkey’s Paw to secure Jeremy’s commitment in person. He returned with the good news, and a complimentary plate of lamb sausage and new-potato ragout inside him,
retracing his steps through favourite back alleys, forest paths and finally to the Professor’s camp.

“Yo hey,” Caruzo called from the darkness, adhering to the protocol they had developed: Call from a short, respectful distance away. If there is no answer, come back later. “Hi, Professor,” he called.

The Professor cracked the fly with two fingertips. He was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the little tent, sorting through piles of yellow foolscap pages. Each legal-sized sheet covered on both sides with handwritten notes, scrawled in pencil.

“Yo hey,” Caruzo said. “Chef says yes. Jay-Jay is coming.”

The Professor leaned out of the tent a little ways to catch the words. He was pleased.

“Five o’clock tomorrow,” Caruzo said, nodding vigorously. “But hey,” he continued, then stalled. The Professor waited while the big man squinted and relaxed his eyes repeatedly, milking out the thought.

“It’s good,” Caruzo said. “Jay-Jay coming.”

“Jeremy coming is good,” the Professor said, nodding reassurance.

“I’ll meet him at the boathouse,” Caruzo said. “Meet him, bring him in?”

“Fine,” the Professor agreed. “I’ll meet you both at the bulrushes.”

“Right,” Caruzo nodded. “Right.” But he made no move to disappear into the dark, no move to find his way through the blackness to his own camp, so skilfully hidden for all these years. Instead he waited, a little nervously. “Do you want to talk?” the Professor asked, sensing Caruzo’s mood. He quickly confirmed the presence of a pencil behind his ear, then felt around himself for one of his yellow legal pads.

He made a small fire. Then, as he had done so many nights since he discovered this place and the people in it, the Professor leaned back in the grass around the fire and only listened.

Caruzo spoke in the tongues of angels, although the fire of his words licked around the ideas he worked to express and often consumed them. Tonight again, he spoke of the children. “Their death pulled,” Caruzo said, rocking. “The boy, the girl. Killed as they were. It pulled me and it sent me. Pulled others too. We were like the dry leaves, and their death was a puff of black air. For years I searched for them, and when I found them it all began.” He gestured around himself at the park, the darkness. “From a leaf to a lifer,” he went on. “That’s me. A lifer to a leaf.”

He burned himself out eventually and left as he typically did: without offering firm solutions to his riddles and without saying goodnight. He rose from his haunches, turned in the soft grass and vanished into the shadows.

The Professor read over his notes, then put the yellow legal pad back in the tent. He returned to the fire to watch it as the flames died. Since their last series of meetings, Caruzo had not untangled. So their deaths had drawn him here, the Professor thought, trying to work it through. The leaf blown by the evil event, the black wind. The leaf becoming a lifer, permanent. The lifer anticipating how he would one day, again, become a leaf. Was that it?

The Professor put his hands behind his head and stared up through the canopy of trees to find those pieces of the night sky that were visible. The fragments of constellations that, for those who could believe such things, would provide direction. He remembered how Hélène had disdained astrology, indeed most forms of the mystical. There was a certain cliché about the gypsy fortune teller with which she could not bear association. He learned this quickly after they first met. Nineteen fifty-six, Lyon. Hélène was living with her father and uncles, aunts and cousins, trying out city life after generations on the road. The Professor (not yet a professor) was over from Canada with his yellow pads and sharp pencils, observing. The first case study of a professional lifetime
underway. His thesis named with some of the romance by which it had been electrified:
Romani Alighted: Remembering the Vardo
. Work from which all else had grown, the Professor thought now, branches sifting air above him. Their marriage, certainly. Hélène had been drawn to his interest in her. To his own unknowable history too, perhaps. Before his own father, now dead, there was only an expanse of unknown. A book of blank pages.

But the work with Hélène’s family had also given birth to all his other work. Launched him across the anthropological landscape. Squatters in the Delta. Russian stowaways. The earliest Vancouver panhandlers who had peopled his successful book,
Will Work For Food
. Hélène might not always have appreciated her role at the root of things. And neither of them could have known how Stanley Park itself lay sleeping in their future.

The fire was out. The Professor climbed into his tent to sleep. He didn’t dream of Caruzo. Didn’t lie unconscious under images of Hélène’s beauty, the unfolding of their years or even the October morning when he had awoken in the field with a very particular hollow feeling. The morning he had called Hélène, and the phone had rung and rung.

A welcome relief, this dreamless sleep.

In the morning he climbed down from the forest to the men’s room by Second Beach. Familiar steps. He removed the pane of glass at the back of the locked building, as Caruzo had shown him long ago. He climbed in, washed, shaved. Then he spent the day on his favourite cliff, high above the sea in a salty breeze, thinking of how it might all be finally finished. Ten years later than expected, but one could not schedule tragedy or the irregular dawn of understanding.

When it was time to meet his son, the Professor pulled the fly-fishing net from his pack and walked down through the forest to the lagoon. At the trail mouth he stood in the shelter of a
salal bush, eyes on the path. It was just before five. Caruzo appeared when he promised, leading Jeremy over the arched stone bridge and towards him. The Professor watched, but did not step from the bushes immediately, and the boy did as he would. He grew exasperated. His eyes found a pay phone nearby, a distraction. He stabbed the keypad with a finger, his back to Caruzo. Wishing, no doubt, to be anywhere but here. When he hung up, the Professor stepped from his hiding place, and Caruzo disappeared into the trees as agreed. The Professor enjoyed noting how the densely overlapping branches did not move as he entered the green face of the forest. Caruzo was merely absorbed.

“I can’t stay long.” These were the first words his son found.

“I thought maybe dinner.”

“It’s Thursday. I can’t leave Jules alone.”

His restaurant did not come up without mention of this name. “Oh, I’ll bet you can,” the Professor said.

They stood face to face in the falling light, the Professor’s head just a degree to one side. The boy wasn’t sleeping well, he thought. There were dark circles under his eyes. Black hair strawing this way and that. Was I wiry back then, like he is now? A little pale? They were still around the same six-foot height, the Professor observed, looking steadily into his son’s eyes and thinking: I have not yet begun to shrink.

Jeremy thought only that his father looked better than he might under the circumstances. His eyes were bright, his brows pranced upward with good humour. True, his hair was dirty and his fingernails were black, and he was carrying an old wooden fly-fishing net pinched under one elbow for no evident reason.

“Perhaps you’ll stay long enough to see me catch my dinner then,” the Professor said. One needed darkness, he went on to explain. And so they sat on the bench and talked, circling but not meeting the matter at hand. Demand nothing, the
Professor thought. And so they talked about the Stanley Park game-bird population instead. A point of mutual interest, the Professor imagined.

“You eat duck?” Jeremy asked. A passer-by might have assumed he was about to provide cooking tips. Sear off the breast on a medium grill, skin side down. Render the fat. Finish skin side up, just a couple minutes. Sauce it and you’re good to go.

But to which the Professor answered: “I’ve been here quite a few months and I didn’t bring groceries. Have you eaten starlings?” He was aware that it sounded like a challenge. “Delicious, although you’ll need two or three per person.”

“I’ve eaten ortolan” Jeremy said, and then was irritable with himself for being drawn into the conversation on that level.

“Now, the mallard is a fantastically light sleeper,” the Professor informed him.

Jeremy looked away.

“The canvasback even more so, fiendishly difficult to catch. The important thing is to learn a little each day here. Just a little. I spent a week trying to catch my first bird. A week. Do you know what I mean?”