The High Road (20 page)

The crowd was settled and silent by the time Angus walked slowly to the podium. I could see his brow furrowed, his wheels turning as he stood for a moment, head bowed, pondering. Then, as if he’d made a decision, he raised his eyes to the audience, abandoned the podium, and walked to the front of the stage.

“I had every intention this evening of sharing my views on the important issues we confront as a nation, including our current economic travails, our crumbling infrastructure, and several other policy challenges that have caught my attention. And I had planned simply to ignore my opponent’s specious attacks on me and, unconscionably, on my wife’s memory and her contributions to equality in this country. But it seems I have changed my mind. My trusted friends and advisers have assured me that I must not take the bait Mr. Fox has been dangling in front of me since this campaign began. I think they are right in their counsel and may well have saved me the embarrassment, and all of you the spectacle, of a bare-knuckle bout that I was brashly inclined to instigate with Mr. Fox. My hot head has since cooled. So I will not stoop to my opponent’s level, but if you’ll indulge me, I will take the time allotted me this evening to clarify and expand upon what little substance there is in Mr. Fox’s fixation on my apparently radical views.”

Uh-oh. This was not the plan for the meeting. Notwithstanding his words, it sounded very much to me like Angus was about to take the bait. I looked at Muriel but her eyes were fixed on Angus. She looked calm and serene.

“To my way of thinking, a feminist is anyone who believes that men and women should be equal. That men and women should have equal rights. That men and women should have equal access to opportunity. That men and women should be
paid equally for work of equal value and should be equally free from the threat of violence. Being a feminist simply means believing in equality. Mr. Fox has said, and repeated with some vehemence, that he is no feminist. I should think by this definition that he is part of a very small and declining minority. Equality is not a radical idea. And equality should not be a distant goal.”

Angus paused and I distinctly heard the sound of a pin dropping.

“Let me address one other point continually raised and brought down like a bludgeon by my opponent Mr. Fox. My wife of nearly forty years, Marin Lee, was a respected feminist theorist and scholar. She was one of the first to write about the economic contribution of women working in the home. It was her view, and it is mine, that in strict economic terms, the almighty free market theoretically considers the work of women in the home to be without value, to be worthless. It is recognized nowhere in the free market economic model. She presented this idea in the thoughtful book Mr. Fox is waving around tonight as if it were
Mein Kampf
. To be crystal clear, neither she nor I have ever believed that there is a simple and workable public policy solution to address this distortion. This historical inequity cannot be resolved by changes in policy alone. I believe that all enlightened social change through our history and in our future starts with the evolving values and beliefs of each one of us. And that is something legislation can never dictate. So what is this extremist agenda I’m purportedly about to spring upon an unsuspecting nation that will irreparably tear our social fabric? Well, Mr. Fox grants me far too much credit. For my diabolical feminist master plan is simply this. I will continue to advocate and agitate for women’s rights, as I have my entire adult life, so that our daughters and granddaughters might one day enjoy the equality our mothers and grandmothers deserved. I hope Mr. Fox and all of you will join me.”

Angus turned and walked back and took his seat next to Emerson Fox, who looked distinctly uncomfortable. The room
erupted. I looked carefully and through a red ribbon riot saw several yellow T-shirts and Tory blue buttons participating in the standing ovation. It took the moderator another five minutes to restore order.

When the floor was finally opened for questions, all four front-row GOUT firefighters’ hands shot skyward. Despite the moderator’s efforts to ignore them, one of them eventually had to be recognized.

“Madam Chair, I have a very simple question for Emerson Fox,” she started in a surprisingly strong voice. “What makes you think that you can win by attacking your opponents in such personal and reprehensible terms? What makes you think that the people of Cumberland-Prescott will reward such behaviour with our votes?”

Emerson Fox stepped over to the podium on the other side of the stage and leaned into the mike looking smug. He’d recovered his swagger after Angus’s soliloquy and still held the Marin Lee tome at his side.

“Thank you for the question. We’ve conducted this campaign with the goal of winning. With over forty years of experience running campaigns, I can tell you that whatever you may think of this approach, it works. You promote your own party’s platform and you tear down your opponents’. It is a time-honoured and amazingly effective strategy. It may not always be pretty, but it works.”

I thought he was done with the question but the audience was finding its own swagger. And the chorus of boos from the red ribbons and yellow T-shirts seemed to get under Fox’s skin.

“Oh come on, you can’t be that naïve,” Fox sniped. “Look, it’s a proven formula. When I tell you that Angus McLintock is a self-proclaimed feminist bent on pursuing his wife’s extremist agenda, even paying housewives to bake and clean, it’s because the evidence is clear and compelling, it’s all written down in black and white in this book! It says right here in the dedication, before the book even starts, ‘To Angus. My partner, my co-conspirator,
my love.
’
I believe it, and the voters deserve to know. I’ve got nothing against Angus personally. I just don’t want some feminazi representing this riding. Not on my watch.”

What an outrage. I was about to take on Fox myself when something whizzed by me on the way to the stage. I didn’t see who threw the first one, but it must have been a signal of sorts, because a moment later a shower of home-baked cookies rained onto the Tory candidate. Emerson Fox cowered, arms over his head, as the cookies fell. Mind you, the attack hadn’t been flawlessly planned. Some of the GOUT agents were sitting too far back in the crowd. Their aging and arthritic arms couldn’t power the chocolate chip projectiles all the way to the stage, so some cookies landed amid the audience, where they were immediately devoured. Then, the climax. A full vacuum bag scored a direct podium hit, a veritable detonation of dust. I lost sight of the Flamethrower for a moment in the cloud, but the dust eventually settled, all over Emerson Fox, as he coughed and waved his arms about as if he were signalling a circling chopper overhead.

André Fontaine and the rest of the reporters, photographers, and camera operators at the back recorded the whole show.

We made a quick stop at the campaign office before heading over to the Riverfront Seniors’ Residence to drop Muriel off. As soon as Muriel turned the key and opened the office door, we knew something was amiss. Two desk lamps were turned on, casting an eerie glow about the room. The filing cabinets were upended, drawers pulled open, with files spilling onto the floor. I dashed into my office where my desk lamp also burned. Yep. My desk file drawer, where I kept the most precious resource of any local campaign headquarters, the marked voters lists, had been pulled out and now sat on the floor. I knelt beside it. We had carefully tracked and identified all Liberal voters so that we could make sure they all made it to the polling stations on E-day. Without our marked lists, the odds were even longer than they already were for a Liberal running in Cumberland-Prescott.

Our marked lists were gone. All of them. Every last one. All that remained strewn on the floor and on my desk were empty file folders, one for each poll, where the lists had resided. I had actually locked them in my desk drawer. But we’d bought the desks cheap, at a second-hand furniture store, and mine was about as secure as a wet Kleenex box.

I slumped into my chair. Muriel and Angus stood just inside my office door.

“They’ve all been stolen,” I moaned. “This is an unmitigated disaster.”

“There is a wee bit of a mess to clean up, but calling it a disaster is a bit much,” said Angus.

“Oh no, it’s not,” Muriel piped up. “We’re nothing without our marked lists. It was our only hope to get out the vote on election day. Those bastards.”

“What, you actually think Fox is behind this?” asked Angus, incredulous.

“I wouldn’t put it past him,” I replied. “But it’s a moot point now. We are well and truly sunk.”

I would have said more but I was too busy wondering why the air-conditioning unit, usually mounted up in a wall vent near the ceiling, was sitting on its side, leaking on the floor next to my desk. In the dim light, I hadn’t seen it at first. Angus had just noticed it, too, and was already looking up. I tilted my desk lamp to shine the light upwards.

“Shit,” said Ramsay Rumplun. “Okay, you caught me. Now get me out of here,” he whined. “I’ve been stuck in the vent here for over an hour and I can’t feel my legs any more.” He sounded more desperate than a claustrophobe in a coffin.

Angus finally hit the overhead fluorescents and the room lit up. Ramsay Rumplun was stuck halfway through the narrow passage that normally housed the air conditioner. We were stunned into silence. I knew now why I hadn’t seen him at the all-candidates meeting. With our entire campaign team attending the meeting, it was a perfect time for a burglary attempt.

Muriel pulled out her cellphone to call the police (or maybe the fire department), while I pulled out mine to call André Fontaine.

“No phone calls yet till we know what we’re dealing with here,” Angus commanded.

Muriel and I stopped in mid-dial. But I went ahead and aimed my BlackBerry at Ramsay Rumplun and snapped a photo in case we needed it. Plugged fast in the wall vent, he was quite a sight, as he twisted and strained to escape. He looked like a big-game trophy, stuffed and mounted on our wall after a successful political safari.

“Ramsay Rumplun, I presume,” said Angus with a smile. “Is this part of Emerson Fox’s Breaking and Mentoring program?”

“I’m so sorry. I’m so ashamed. My father is going to kill me. I was only after your marked voters lists. That’s all, I swear.”

“That’s like the bank robber who claims he was only after the money,” I said. “Our lists are the principal asset of this entire operation. So turn them over or we’ll just let you stay up there.”

“I already pushed the bag with the lists through the vent into the driveway at the back. You’ll find them there.”

Angus went out the back door and returned in an instant with a canvas book bag brimming with our precious lists. I took the bag from him and just held it to my chest, rocking it gently, as if I were burping a baby. Pure, unadulterated relief. Muriel walked over and looked up at our intruder, avoiding the perspiration dropping periodically from his flushed face.

“Maybe we should just leave you up there. You clearly make a better seal in the vent than that old air conditioner. It’s usually quite chilly back here but right now, it’s really quite toasty,” Muriel quipped.

“Just stay where you are,” Angus mocked. “I’ll try to get you down.”

When we took a flashlight out back and climbed up a step ladder we had in our closet, we could see what the problem was. Actually, I could see
that
there was a problem, but only Angus
could see
what
the problem really was. As he had tried to back out through the opening, Rumplun’s belt had become lodged and locked on the steel edge of the air-conditioner mounts on the outside wall of the building.

I returned inside with Muriel. We were emerging from the shock of it all and had started to enjoy ourselves.

“If you’d only called, I would have been happy to tell you how successful our canvass has been. There was no need to re-create the Watergate break-in,” I chided.

“Ouch! That’s my belt!” Ramsay cried. “What are you doing?”

We could hear Angus through the open back door.

“Hold still and stop your wriggling or we’ll have to call the fire department,” Angus threatened. “Okay, there you go.”

“What have you done? I need those!” Ramsay complained.

“You’ll never squeeze through with them on,” Angus replied. “Okay, I’m pushing on three. One, two, threeeeee!”

Ramsay Rumplun shot through the opening like the human cannonball and landed on the floor below, winding himself. The sight of the portly Ramsay Rumplun, writhing on the floor in search of his breath and naked from the waist down, was not the lasting memory I would have chosen for the evening. But our uninvited guest really gave me no say in the matter. Muriel raised her cellphone and took a photo.