The Man Game (49 page)

He was alone again in his one-room house. No time to lose. Stepping outside, he was pleased to see the sky was starting to clear. Blue sky, sun casting actual shadows over the earth. Shadows of clouds. Italicized shadows of a picket fence.

Came across a Chinaman sitting knees up, nothing but bone and rag with ten dirty claws outspread in a plea of mercy, and the tiny teeth of the dispossessed. His eyes lay somewhere far back in his skull, his lips were minuscule, and his hair was clumpy on his blue scalp.

Coolie life, eh? said Clough.

The Chinaman agreed for the sake of small change.

He walked through lumpy muskeg, over skunk cabbage, weather-whitened elk antlers, and ancient middens, and over the dappled paws of ferns circling the trunks of massive oaks and cypresses. Absolutely no sunlight poked through the forest canopy. The air was cold and humid and fresh and hell on his joints, the ghost elbow included. The course he stuck to was a muddy log road carved by ox-handlers who used it to haul great logs from English Bay to Hastings Mill. They called it Granville Street. It wasn't much. No road signs, no stoplights, no sidewalks, no sun for a kind of compass, Granville Street might be the future centre of Vancouver, but Clough thought it was bunk. He liked the forest. He liked the privacy of the forest. He liked the loose morals of the forest. The forest was made for men. The forest was a drunk like him. The forest lost track of itself.

He watched his step around a thicket of rusted bent-out nails. Granville Street saw curiously high foot traffic that afternoon. With a bit of work Clough acquired rolling paper, weed, and as sure as smoke leads to fire, there in front of him were Terry Berry and his friend Vicars, who kindly supplied the light Clough needed to share some of his weed.

Terry Berry mentioned how they saw Furry & Daggett's men that night a month ago, and what Vicars wanted to know was how did they ever learn to play the man game. Clough only shrugged, and Vicars wondered aloud how a shrivelled baby prick like Campbell ever thought he could play. Clough wasn't going to apologize for the loss because he wasn't yet sure if he wanted to reveal he was coaching them. So he gave these two dudes the old rigamarole and tried to say goodbye.

Vicars wouldn't give back the burning weed, and stood beside him and smoked. Said Vicars to Clough: Did you see this poster? Says here the mugger is wanted for a fifty-dollar reward.

So you know who it is?

Me, nah.

Neither did Clough, but he said: What a you want to bet me I catch him?

Bet you, hell, I
should
bet against you, Vicars said, I might get some better luck.

Then Terry Berry changed the subject. What he really wanted to know was why Campbell lost. I had a
fee
ling about those guys, but no.

Clough didn't alter the rigamarole one bit. The guy kept asking questions. You think Meier's got talent? I sure would a loved to see Daggett versus Pisk, eh, when you think that might happen, 'cause, boy, that was some flogging those guys' asses got, eh, ha ha ha, but seriously, you think Daggett or Furry could a won against Litz or Pisk?

After Vicars finally passed, Clough snuffed out the worthless butt and started walking, wondering aloud where everyone was going. Paying closer attention, he heard a faraway thunderous clamour of Indian voices.

Hey, he called out to a group of Westminster ladies in their Sunday finery. Hey you, he said, who's all that jabbering and kykying, eh? With their tartan bows on their straw hats, milk-fed bosoms, petticoats, and skirts upon skirts. What's the shindy? Where's everybody going?

They snooted their noses at him.

He didn't walk more than seventy paces when he spotted the ruckus. It was the execution. Clough pushed through the crowd watching for more people to avoid. Hundreds of Salish Indians from the nearby reserves were here to plead for the man's life. Besides them, most of the audience was a race of liver-spotted bulldog-jowled lady from New Westminster's Christian Temperance Union here to protest the wrongful execution. Vancouver, as they shrieked, was in a spiritual crisis. Clough kept his distance. He watched from the back of the crowd.

An Indian man was on the wood stage with a rope around his neck. His face would be covered soon. His eyes were getting their final sights. Perhaps these would be his final memories, if God allowed for him to replay even the scene of his own death in the final second. Or are there scenes from life that one represses to the end, and is the death scene one of them? The Indian did not appear reconciled with fate. There was hope in his legs. He said goodbye to his family over and over. The audience was in pain. The women from New Westminster berated the po-lice with King James. If the decision to repeal the execution came at the final hour, the Indian's legs were ready. No one wanted to blink, fearing the end of seeing. The Indian's young wife, stricken in the arms of her relatives, was enough love to imagine he might slip through the noose.

His executioner arrived. The Christians shrieked at him to spare the Indian's life and the po-lice told the ladies to calm down. The po-lice were armed with nightsticks to use only if an outburst needed to be quelled. But no one wanted to a quell a mother. They shrieked until their faces were red and spittled.

Polite phrases, like The Indian's trial is hardly fair, were screamed at the top of their lungs.

Calm down, lady.

Why, it was only a month ago he was caught, shrieked one lady with a fur collar.

A judge denied him life and that's that. Easy, ma'am, easy.

They were all from New Westminster. Vancouver had no ladies this genteel.

His wife is r
a
ped, cried an Indian. Now she has no one. Wa, wa.

Stand back, ma'ams.

Give them a few more hours with their son and father and blood. To make amends and say goodbye.

Don't shriek in my ear, ma'am.

Oh, please, please, po-lice, do not kill Indian for crime a passion. Think a wife and children.

Okay, granny squaw, that's enough out a you.

Think a wife pain. After all she endure, take her husband, too, no.

What I say aboot—, ma'ams. He brandished the nightstick.

Wa, wa. The Indians cried in their language.

It was beyond the po-lice or his executioner to show mercy. By law, the Indian was destined to be hanged.

His executioner was as meek as a golem. Miguel Calderón, the whisky seller, who a month ago had been ordered to perform the act in retribution for having sold this very man the drink that had put him over the edge.

Calderón pulled the eyeholes down so that he could see through his hood to watch his step as he crossed the stage. Every board creaked underfoot. He paused to collect the convicted man's hood off its bench. The po-lice looked at him without sympathy—of the two convicts here tonight, thought Calderón, I should not be the one let off the hook. For his mistakes he too deserved a stricter, more lasting punishment than an iron vacation or a pittance fine. In the book of what's right and what's wrong, if the Indian on stage today was supposed to be hanged, then it was Calderón who deserved the grim honour of setting it so. The hinged floor where the Indian waited was an uncompromising pedestal. They heard each other breathing hard. He brought the hood up and over the Indian's head and trembled fiercely when he covered the Indian's face. Feeling the Indian's sweat on his knuckles overwhelmed Calderón with terror.

Now they were truly the same. Calderón was shocked to see the Indian in the hood, breathing, the hood sucking in and out around his mouth. His breath's steam in the cold air went aloft for the heavens. Calderón was about to say a word. But what word? No, it was over. There were no words. It was too late for words. The hood was on and the noose was secure. He had done this, tightened the noose around the Indian's neck, without consciously seeing to it. He realized now: the hood—the executioner's hood—was an alibi before God, and with less effort than opening a door, he took the Indian man's life out his neck.

There it was, tied high above the crowd. A single flayed actor, a dangling corpse, another dead Indian.

It's too late for crocodile tears, ladies, Clough said as he walked away. You failed, the Indian is dead.

You terrible boor. How can you—

There's nothing left to do. That's what a hanging does for your mood, eh. As Clough sat on a log and nursed a bottle of cloudy hair tonic, he realized he was already committed to the man game.

It was late in the morning when the lumberjack Bud Hoss got himself out of the bush and into Vancouver. It had been a month since he'd last been seen or heard of, not since that fateful game back in January when Pisk had lost all sense. With nothing for him to do as bookie, he, along with others like Calabi, had returned, somewhat reluctantly, to the life he'd led before the man game was invented. Hoss did a few odd jobs. He loitered around town. He began to feel a loneliness sit on him, heavy as it was, like a burden. He was once again a free man, tied to no one, no job, no time. Felt good to be him.

Hoss continued on, a big man swaggering on his buckles and fluffy young moustache. He made his way to the East End, a stumpy neighbourhood where pioneering families of all race and creed mixed with dormitories, hostelries, bordellos, and drug and gambling dens. Hoss knew his way around. He skipped over a red picket fence and followed a creek down Union Street. At the corner he took off his hat, then stepped into a Methodist boarding house and dropped his sack on the first cot they had available.

I been living in the cold for weeks, he told the widow of the house, and you touch my skin it might have a bit a warmth to it, but my bones are ice. Alls I need's a bit a time by the stove, maybe a cup a coffee if you got it, and a blanket that covers my neck same time as it covers my toes.

Well, she said, then I can do you. There's no women allowed and that's final. I'm sure you know better than to do that. I catch you in your room with a bottle a anything and you're out. I don't care if you say it's cider. That's the rules. There's no smoking in the rooms neither and I catch you you're out. You smoke on the verandah if you have to. Breakfast's at seven
A.M
. so you missed it, sorry … but regularly we got back bacon, strip bacon, porridge, griddlecakes, syrup, butter, fried potatoes, boiled eggs, and fresh bread, jams and compotes, and that's included in your quarter a night, so you can't complain to the boys at the bar I sent you out in the day with an empty stomach, eh? But you're all oot a here by eight-thirty A.M. so I can change them linens and do up the cleaning. Takes a woman my age quite a
while
just to do the back and forth along the clothesline unpinning and pinning clothes, eh?

I hear you.

We open back up at five and there's a dinner at six. That's a nickel extra. Understood? God bless you, son, I hope you'll avoid the bootleggers and cat houses and keep to yourself. Be strong, young man.

Yes ma'am.

Having unencumbered himself, Bud Hoss was back on the streets, casual strut amidst intermittent rain. The ruffled mud was moistly glinting. There were ponds of ice-cold water. He had to watch his step. Banana slugs sopped along the boardwalk leaving behind a webby trail of ick. Seeing frost on the lowest shakes of the homes gave him a shiver to the backs of his ears. Even the air was icy wet. The clouds around the sky passed in thin perspirate bands.

A leafless cherry tree quivered with sparrows. Walking past he startled them into the sky.

If he thought about it, he probably could've predicted he'd start a fight today. As he walked through town he shook hands with friends, including Moe Dee.

How the fuck are ya, eh?

Doing fine, thank you.

Heard any news aboot the man game?

Nothing, said Hoss.

On Alexander Street he ran into two bohunks he knew from his early days shimmying spars, one named Terry Berry, the other Vicars. They were coming out of Sprigmans & Co., specializing in flour, feed, hay, grain, and poultry food, the relatively new competitor to Red & Rosy's. Vicars had on a new black hat and he'd got his face cleaned since he last saw him. Vicars, who always had to keep busy doing something, sat down on a stack of firewood next to the store and rolled up more weed and the three of them started to smoke it. Taking the cigar from his friend's fingers and puffing on it; coughing, he said: Hully gee, that's weed.

That's church service and hell's delight all rolled into one, said Terry Berry.

Hoss took another long pull, coughed out the words: Just finished a clearing in the forests north of Squamish. Ever since they outlawed it I been bucking and slinging, chuting logs down to the bay where a tug dragged them back south to Hastings Mill, eh. Got back to town and hooked up with this ol' feller living way the fuck south a Cougar Canyon. I'm talking the old logging chutes kind a area. Chutes and flumes. Hell, I worked for Furry & Daggett, but there's no way I'd work for them now that I got a taste for freelance.