The Strangers' Gallery (22 page)

Hubert usually took these investment matters seriously and proffered all kinds of “insider” advice. But he had never taken younger brother Raymond seriously—not to mention me, his youngest brother—and that was a habit he found hard to break. He also loved to show off, to display his wit in front of strangers. But Anton was not paying him much attention, and Raymond was cleverly avoiding the bait.

So Hubert began to take the opposite tack. “Gros Morne House,” as he called it, was a great idea. He and Gert needed somewhere to go without having to “haul that bloody trailer.” He outlined his specifications.

“I want an ocean view, Raymond, southern exposure, easy access to the water, and as close to a bakeapple bog as you can get. But no goddamn A-frames, if you don't mind, and no heritage saltboxes full of carpenter ants. And nothing made of logs, please. None of that Davy Crockett crap. This is Newfoundland, not Kentucky.”

Raymond was still enjoying his ploughman's lunch, spreading chutney on a piece of cheddar in his own very deliberate way, as if he was always relearning how to eat. He was not saying a word, being a very civil engineer. It was, he had learned long ago, the best defence against Hubert's sarcasm and caustic wit. Hubert had never let him get over his having erected a modular, split-level log house right in the middle of St. John's, and a one-room A-frame log house down the Southern Shore with a ceiling so high he'd had to hire a contractor with pipe scaffolding to change the bulbs in the track lighting in the ceiling.

The St. John's house was a pilot project for which he'd received a significant discount from the contractor, a former sawmill operator whose display he'd seen at the Home Show at the curling club. The house, quite naturally, had attracted a lot of attention. It had people stopping and staring day and night, even pulling into the driveway for a hands-on examination of the thing, as if it were some sort of mirage or optical illusion or a painstakingly deliberate deception: an empty shell with Golden Glow convex vinyl siding and painted-on faux chinking.

Raymond had finally sold the A-frame. He'd sold both log houses, in fact, when he moved to Vancouver, and with no trouble whatsoever. Davy Crockett used to be big in this part of the woods. Mother still has my coonskin cap in a trunk.

Hubert was now adding improvements to Gros Morne House.

“Don't forget the deck, Raymond—and screened in 'gainst the nippers so's I can watch in comfort while Gert goes squishin' through the bog after the elusive bakeapple. Now I know why the Swedes call them cloudberries. The last time Gert had me out in Gros Morne hunting for bakeapples she led me up a bloody mountain that was hidden in clouds. She was looking for an alpine bog meadow—a
mish
, as they call it out that way—that her mother had taken her to when she was six. Forty years ago, for Chrissake, and she thought she could still find it. All we found, needless to say, was trouble. No cloudberries, but lots of clouds, and we had to use that goddamn beeper the park patrol give you if you're going off on any of the longer hikes. We had to wait for a search party. Now, as you know, I'm not easily embarrassed, but you can imagine how I felt when it turned out to be a Boy Scout troop.

“And one last thing, Raymond, seeing as you're paying such close attention, make sure to use a small mesh on that screened deck—not a
mish
but a
mesh—
to keep out the sandflies. They're smaller and even worse out there than the blackflies, and I've seen
them
thick enough to cause an eclipse.”

“The sandfly
is
a blackfly,” Raymond said. “They're both midges. Genus
Simulium
.”

“Then it must be a
midg
et!” Hubert snorted.

I walked over to the counter for another glass of water, and when I came back Anton was standing up, with his face right up close to the tinted window. He looked as if he'd just witnessed something alarming, as if he'd seen Icarus's pale legs disappear into the wine-dark sea. I went over and looked past his shoulder at the oblivious sailors on the ships and the indifferent labourers on the docks, none of whom seemed to have witnessed any tragic event. Neither had the accountant nor the archivist nor the engineer in the tower. Then I noticed the Noble Drilling ship at the dock, the one Hubert had pointed out to us when we first came in.

Anton turned toward us and said, half to himself, as if he'd just discovered the words: “Ignoble Drilling.” He was looking hard at the business card Hubert had given him in his office (always after some extra business), and Hubert was looking hard at him—a stranger, a guest, who had just insulted him; but he never openly acknowledged either insults or praise. He frowned and repetitively traced the circle of his close-cut goatee and thin moustache with his fingers. He glanced at the card that Anton had given him, his global warming calling card—a command, a plea, a warning for us all.

I was thinking of all the negative associations that Hubert's goatee, any goatee, had for me—deceit, lies, scams, falseness, pretense, superciliousness, the autodidact's shallow intellectual air, the man who is, as we say, full of himself—and wondering who or what they were all based on. The only thing that came to mind was Reveen the Magician, who sold out the Hibernia Arts Centre for a week or more every year. Hubert had none of these negative traits to any great degree, no more than the rest of us, at any rate—the barefaced, full-bearded, heavily sideburned, or mustachioed. If he was full of anything, it was talk—too much talk, which tired and sometimes intimidated the rest of us.

“Beg pardon,” Anton said, realizing, I think, that he had committed a serious impropriety, “but fossil fuels are a big danger for my country, which is below the sea. The ice caps are melting and the sea is rising. Greenhouse gases are making the earth heat up. And do you think it's worth the risk for you? These oil wells are in your fishing grounds. What if an iceberg hits a rig? Didn't one sink in a storm already?”

“There's no fish left, my son, so we don't have to worry,” Hubert said, with a friendly but dismissive air.

Anton's eyebrows arched, perhaps more at the dialectal
my son
than at Hubert's summary accounting of the fish stocks. It was curious how he slipped into the Newfoundland idiom with strangers.

“Now what kind of accounting is that?” Raymond said. “They're making more money from the fishery now than they were before the cod moratorium began. And you can be sure that what they're making all that money on is going to be gone even faster than the cod.”

“Well, listen to the fisheries expert, will you. Sure, they could use you at dfo. You don't have to stay out west. In the first place, Raymond, that's not fish you're talkin' about. That's big creepy-crawlies, crustaceans—lobster, crab, shrimp—and squid, scallops, mussels, sea urchins, lumpfish. Underutilized species, visible minorities. I'm talkin' about the Great White Cod. When a Newfoundlander says
fish
, b'y, he's not talkin' about sculpins or whore's eggs. You been in BC too long. You left like all the rest of 'em when things were bad and now that things are lookin' up I s'pose you'll be sellin' your leaky condominium and movin' back.”

Anton looked at Raymond, who was used to this kind of abuse from Hubert and obviously had no intention of responding.

“What will happen to all these fish if there is a spill of oil?” Anton persisted. “And the birds!”

“De birtz?” Hubert mimicked. “My son, you'd have to pay me twice what I'm gettin' if you want me to give any thought to that. I just do the sums, morally neutral activity. But you can be sure our philosophy department worries about stuff like that.”

No one laughed, so Hubert did himself, a good-humoured snort that he had perfected over the years.

“Besides, we don't own the oil. We're just hired hands. You'll have to put those big questions to the government, or to the Hibernia Consortium and the Bull Arm crowd. But there's a lot of money tied up in this, I can tell you, and they're not gonna stop for a few birds or fish.”

“And you can be sure they've arranged it so that they get most of it,” Raymond said.

“Now, Raymond, for once I think you got it right.”

Anton looked disconsolate; he'd had a hard week. He was not a fighter, not a debater; he was easily discouraged, easily distracted. And though he could be blunt and critical himself, even sarcastic at times, he was not aggressive and did not persist when resistance was offered. When people didn't take him seriously, he simply withdrew.

Earlier in the week, Anton had had an admonishing word with Bruce Minchin down the street. Bruce drives less than a kilometre to work in a brand new Jeep Grand Cherokee four-wheel-drive SUV, which, Anton advised him, though I'm sure he knew, gets an average of five kilometres to the litre. This is only a mid-size SUV, Anton said, and 90 percent of people who own these so-called off-road vehicles never take them off the pavement, implying, of course, that Bruce was one of them. Even fuel-efficient cars, Anton added, produce twice their own weight in greenhouse gases every year.

Bruce used the opportunity to try to sell him his old, less grand Jeep Cherokee—and almost succeeded. Anton had been reading about the nesting sites of the piping plover, and was already planning our expedition to the south coast. He imagined a rugged hinterland with rudimentary roads and was not comforted by the sight of my old rusting heap, or Elaine's old rusting heap, whose deflating tires made it look as if it were sinking into the ground. I wished she had taken it with her when she left, but she's chosen a new life, and walking everywhere is to be part of it.

I'd walked down the street with Anton and introduced him to Bruce. Anton had been eyeing the Jeeps for weeks. It was a cold, bright day, and Bruce was out washing the old Jeep, which had a For Sale sign taped inside the rear window. He was wearing a red sleeveless winter vest, and his plaid shirt sleeves were rolled up above the elbows. A river of white suds was running along the concrete curb and down through the grating into a storm sewer, which must have emptied into an actual river, for a small blue fish was painted on the curb beside the grating. I was glad that Anton hadn't noticed the fish.

In a restrained and reasoned response to Anton's attack on his lifestyle and his SUV, Bruce, who teaches chemistry at a technical college and should probably know, told him he should start worrying about other greenhouse gases instead of carbon dioxide, the usual global warming suspect. Then, as he bent over the fender of his Jeep to give it what seemed like an exceptionally hard scrub, he let out a loud fart, either to dramatize his point or perhaps to tell Anton what he really thought of him.

“Sew a button on that,” he said, straightening up. “Now there's greenhouse gas for you. Twenty-four times more potent than carbon dioxide. Sew a button on that.” He looked at Anton and belched, seemingly at will. “CO2 is the least of our problems,” he added. “Think
methane
. Isn't Holland the most heavily populated country on earth?”

“Must be China,” I said, coming to Anton's aid.

“No, I mean the concentration, the number of people for the size of the place. I had to go there once as a so-called external opponent, a devil's advocate, for a Ph.D. defence. But anyway…it's cows you need to be worried about, not people. I was told there was a cow for every three of you—or was it three cows for every one of you? Anyway, think of all the cows needed to produce all that Gouda. Think methane. That's what the dissertation was about. Cows produce more gas than milk—hundreds of millions of tonnes a year, and much more intense stuff than we let out.

“Tell that to Queen Wilhelmina,” he said, finishing up with a smirk.

“Beatrix,” Anton corrected.

“Beatrix, then. So, are you interested in the Jeep?”

Perhaps too much methane was trapped inside Hubert's sunlit glass building. Though it was hot inside, it was a blustery, cold late-November day outside. So far this fall, there hadn't been any snow to speak of, but something called “snowgrains” had been forecast for today. I'd heard the Gander weather office was being moved west; perhaps by now they were forecasting from Saskatoon.