Sing a Worried Song Read online

  Annabelle has been living in Lucerne, in a chalet, part of the spoils of her latest divorce, but flew down to Australia several weeks ago, got very tipsy, and confessed all to her daughter. The bad abstract painter, the flat-nosed Swedish tenor Per Gustavson, who was merely a little treat, a quickie in the back seat of the Rolls. Meyerson was the main course. Right through 1987. Sneaking Annabelle down to his yacht or up to his Grouse Mountain chalet.

  It’s history, Arthur tells himself. Bury it. He has been renewed, he is at last and forever happily married. Life companions.

  Why didn’t she mention she was at Hubbell’s swearing-in?

  MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 17

  The filmy light of early dawn is spreading over Ferryboat Cove as the Queen of Prince George approaches. She’s a battered old tub popularly known as the Queen George or, commonly, the Trannie. She has a vending machine that spits out a dung-coloured liquid advertised as coffee, and another with chips, Cheezies, and chocolate bars, so one has to board her already fortified. Which is why Arthur and Margaret are at the ferry slip’s burger stand, a converted Winnebago, and are sharing the house specialty, Winnebagels.

  “Thank you for seeing me off. You didn’t have to.”

  “I’m not one to sleep with a woman then slough her off in the morning. Also it gets me halfway to the service station.”

  “Poor Stoney, he’ll be hurt that you’re not using him.”

  “It’s a simple oil and lube that would take him half a week.” Stoney, a jack-of-all-trades (mechanics, carpentry, landscaping) and a leading island entrepreneur (taxi, vehicle rentals, pot) has been a fixture in Arthur’s life since he first set foot on these otherwise benign shores. His own personal gremlin.

  Margaret orders a coffee to go. “Do try to come out for a few days.”

  Arthur wonders if she means that. She’s had an apartment to herself in Ottawa ever since her roommate moved away. But Arthur abhors the national capital as much as he loves Blunder Bay. There is always stiffness between them there. It’s the political intensity. The clubbiness of the town. But also the shallowness.

  The Trannie clangs into the dock. Arthur shoulders his pack and escorts her to her car, midway up the boarding lane. He holds the door for her. “I’ll miss you deeply.” He pulls down his slouch hat, embarrassed that others might see this display of feelings. “L’absence est à l’amour ce qu’est au feu le vent.”

  “Absence is to love what wind is to fire.”

  He smiles approvingly. “Your French has vastly improved.”

  They kiss and say adieu.

  §

  The parting was bittersweet but mostly sweet, and Arthur feels buoyed as he begins his hike, lifted by her loving smile and gentle kiss. His worries over her seem silly now. He has got to stop creating these bizarre scenarios. Margaret loves him. Randy Skyler doesn’t. So what? Who cares? Ancient enmities fade with time.

  Such silliness. He laughs at himself, then sings off-key: “It takes a worried man to sing a worried song,” a tune he can’t get out of his head. “I’m worried now, but I won’t be worried long.” It’s a sunny day for a healthy, heart-pounding climb from Ferryboat Cove to the gas station: up Centre Road to a high, rocky plateau that offers fine distant views. Arthur rests at the brow of the hill, taking in the grand tableau of the islands of the Salish Sea, the Coast Range, the Olympic Mountains.

  Sadly, the view is marred by its foreground: the greasy, gravelled frontage of the two-pump garage at the entrance to Evergreen Estates, the island’s sole subdivision, a mélange of box-like homes on small lots with septic and potable water issues. It should be called Nevergreen Estates, Margaret often jokes, for, although all its roads and byways are named after trees, too many lots are bare of them.

  In closer view is what Garibaldians call “Downtown.” The garage and a thrift store are across from the lumberyard and the recycling depot and beside two storefronts occupied by Doc Dooley’s clinic and Wholeness and Wellness Health Foods and Vitamins, with a pair of realtors and an insurance agent upstairs.

  The garage used to be called the No-Service Station until a couple from rural Alberta bought it, retired farmers whose welfare once depended on keeping their trucks, tractors, and harvesters running. Brad and Barb, salt of the earth.

  Barb is at a gas pump and waves as Arthur strolls into the garage. A pickup is on the hoist and Brad is underneath it. But it’s not Arthur’s pickup. His Fargo is nowhere to be seen.

  Brad crawls out, wiping grease from his hands. “Didn’t he tell you, Mr. Beauchamp?”

  Arthur’s worry meter gives a reading somewhat above its base level of Moderate Fusspot.

  “He said you changed your mind, wanted him to do the tune-up. Close friend of yours. Stonewall, or …”

  “Stonewell.”

  “Yup, Rob Stonewell. He’s a great talker, ain’t he? I hope there aren’t no problems. He said he was your best friend, and he’d do it for nothing. He actually knew that old truck pretty good, the way he talked about it. He even had his own keys to it.”

  §

  Arthur waves down yet another offer of a ride — he isn’t capable of being pleasant to anyone right now — and continues his trudge back down Centre Road, contemplating the filing of a criminal complaint. His dark suspicion is that Stoney, who recently wrecked his Ford F-150, needs a vehicle to haul his cannabis crop to the annual growers’ fair this week.

  For the last fifteen years, ever since Stoney sold him the Fargo, the trickster has enjoyed a guaranteed annual income from it. Mysteriously, the old high-riding truck tends to break down whenever Stoney has cash flow problems. But the time of playing patsy to this pirate is over; Arthur will listen with wry amusement to Stoney’s honeyed pleas and will fearlessly spurn them.

  When he reaches the Centre Road ridge, Arthur pauses to take in the narrow valley’s vastly contrasting visions of rural landscaping. In the lee of the hill is the Shewfelts’ cozy ranch house with its meticulously tended lawns and flowerbeds, and plaster elves and Disney dwarfs cavorting among neat rows of apple trees.

  Beyond that is Stoney’s cluttered three acres. The Shewfelts have filed innumerable bylaw complaints against him for keeping unsightly premises, but have had to settle for a ten-foot cedar fence that doesn’t quite hide the charnel yard of abandoned cars and trucks, their parts skeletonized, their bodies left to rust. In plain view, atop a rise, are Stoney’s tumbledown house and garage, his beat-up dump truck and flatbed trailer, a couple of rental vehicles, and Arthur’s Fargo. Arthur assumes those are Stoney’s legs sticking out from under the chassis.

  He makes his way up there by stealth, finding him still under the truck, either working noiselessly or sleeping or passed out. Or maybe he thinks he’s hiding.

  “I just saved your life, man.”

  Arthur’s chocolate-brown walkers have given him away.

  “The brake fluid tubes are shot, eh. That clod at the gas station woulda let you drive off with barely half a inch of leaking hydraulic fluid, and you’d’ve gone flying down Breadloaf Hill, and I’d be at your funeral instead of fixing your truck, making a eulogy about how you were this icon, man, a prince, my mentor, and how much I trusted and respected you, and all the time I’d be hiding the pain, the betrayal.”

  By the end of this, Stoney has wiggled out, slippery from what indeed could be brake fluid. Arthur will let him say his piece. He will not be bamboozled this time.

  “For the first time in my life, I’m going to be truly honest and let my emotions show. I was hurt, man, hurt that my long-time confidant, my mouthpiece, my hero, would go sneaking around behind my back to some Alberta wheat farmer who probably ain’t even certified.”

  Arthur sees no point in reminding Stoney that neither is he.

  “Me and you and this here old girl are a tradition, we’re an important part of island history. We been through too much together to end it o
ver a simple tune-up. This here vehicle was my gift to you.”

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  “It would’ve been except I was a little hard up at the time. The point is you love this here Fargo, and it loves you, and I feel I’ve almost got like a God-given duty to keep her running for you for as long as you both shall live. I was hauling on the emergency all the way down the last hill, man, so that’s another thing I’ve got to look at.”

  Arthur can’t find words, doesn’t even know where to start looking. All he can do is stand and stare at Stoney, who shows no signs of offering the expected cringing apology, and instead has raised his scrawny form to full height, chin up but trembling with emotion, like a cheated lover fighting his pain.

  “Yeah, and I’m also hurt because I got pride. I’m like family, man, to you and Margaret, I’m like the son you never had. I’ve always been there when needed. All of Garibaldi has got to know you took the Fargo elsewhere for a tune-up. What does that do to my stature in the community, man? I spent years building up my reputation, and then the island’s foremost, respected dignitary brings it crashing down like the temples of Rome.”

  Arthur sighs. Yes, maybe he was too rash in going to the service station. But let it be a lesson to Stoney. “How long will this take you?”

  “Not to worry, it’s job one. I have to get some hydraulic lines. Couple of days?”

  A week at least. “Sure.” Arthur is staggered by the scale of his defeat. He has to sit down, chooses a tattered car seat over by the dump truck.

  Speedily recovered from his outpouring of emotion, Stoney perches on the Fargo’s running board and rolls a cigarette. “In honour of restoring our friendship, sire, may I extend a personal invite, as executive director of the Growers Association, to our annual Potlatch this Thursday.” Though they’re alone, he drops his voice: “This year it’s at the old quarry. Starts at noon and continues until everyone’s flat on their ass.”

  By Potlatch he means the Marijuana Growers Fall Fair, where produce from Garibaldi’s major export competes for the McCoy Cup, named after a local sculptor caught green-handed with a heroic half-ton of cannabis. The event is usually attended by a dozen or more island growers, plus several mainland wholesalers. A Thursday was presumably chosen because the local constable regularly takes that day off.

  “You could come as our official mouthpiece.”

  Arthur wishes people would accept once and for all that he doesn’t act for dopers anymore, that he’s well and truly retired. “A Potlatch is an honoured aboriginal ceremony of giving, not a pothead bacchanal. I will not attend.” Arthur is still smarting over his unconditional surrender.

  “We invited Doc Dooley to be on our distinguished panel of judges.”

  Arthur scoffs. “That’s ridiculous. Why would he be so unguarded as to take part?”

  “It’s widely unknown, but he grows a few plants for medicinal purposes.”

  That is true — to Arthur’s shock, Dooley has confided as much to him. They are fierce rivals, the lawyer and the doctor, regularly the top two contenders for Most Points in Fruits and Vegetables at the Fall Fair. This year again, Dooley bested Arthur, winning his seventh straight Mabel Orfmeister Trophy. Arthur was crushed.

  Dooley, almost ninety, has shown no symptoms of senility, so it’s ridiculous to think he’s agreed to take part in this lawless event. Major movers of marijuana will be there, from Vancouver, maybe even Seattle.

  Arthur gets impatient with the careless flaunting of criminal statutes on this island. His view, however stuffy and old-fashioned, is that a well-ordered society obeys the rule of law. Some, including the local Member of Parliament, want the cannabis law changed, but Arthur can’t get around his distaste at the thought of the government being in the business of getting its citizens stoned.

  The Growers Association has been dangerously open about its annual affair. It has escaped detection over the years, but Constable Ernst Pound has been increasingly relentless since his marriage fell apart. Meanly, Arthur flirts with the thought of joining the war on drugs, dropping the dime on these fellows.

  “Can I give you a ride somewhere, chief? On the house.”

  “I shall walk.” Arthur doesn’t want to admit his feet are aching. He rises, shoulders his pack.

  “Hey, I got an old Pinto I can give you. Courtesy car.” He points at it, a rust-red death machine that has obviously done a roll in the ditch.

  “Don’t bother.”

  “I’ll do better, the Pinto’s an insult to the great man.” There’s alarm in Stoney’s voice as he watches his best customer stalk off. “I just scored a beaut for my fleet, man, the Kozonskys’ old family Caddie, I just gotta do the papers with them and I’ll run it up to you.”

  “I’d prefer that you focus on my Fargo.”

  “Cross my heart.”

  §

  Arthur is still licking his wounds from that encounter, and is much put out with himself, as he detours from his way home, limping into Hopeless Bay. Why is he stopping here? There was some urgent mission …

  The fax! Age is causing his mind to slip. Yesterday the fax was Worry One. He’s preoccupied — it’s about Margaret, it’s Sudden Departure Syndrome. He’s battled it all the way from ferry to gas station to Stoney’s to here. It will take a few days, maybe weeks, for the ache to lose its grip. “I’m worried now,” he sings, “but I won’t be worried long.”

  He hobbles on to the hundred-year-old General Store and Post Office. A designated heritage site, it’s awkwardly joined at the hip with a recent addition, an out-of-plumb licensed lounge that overlooks the public wharf. Its risky, sloping deck hovers over rocks and tidal pools. It has been named the Brig, in honour of a local pub that burned down many years ago.

  Parked on a bench outside it is Nelson Forbish, editor of the local newsweekly, the Bleat, who is feeding from a super-economy bag of corn chips. He is super-sized himself, at nearly a hundred and fifty kilos, and Arthur winces as he tests the bench to ensure it will hold them. He removes his shoes and massages his feet. It is ten-thirty: he has walked for three hours since seeing Margaret off.

  “How’s the weight program, Nelson?”

  “I’m giving it a break. It’s too taxing on the body.” He looks around, as if to confirm they’re alone. “Marijuana Growers Potlatch, Thursday at noon, the abandoned quarry. Not for publication. Mum’s the word.” He gestures at Ernst Pound’s RCMP van, sitting among the beaters and rusting pickups parked out front. Auxiliary cop Kurt Zoller’s vivid orange Hummer is there too.

  “Do me a favour, Arthur, I’m not good at stairs, can you go up there and see if it’s something newsworthy?”

  Forbish indicates the second-floor deck of the bar, where Pound and Zoller are questioning the island idlers, probably having caught them flouting the no-smoking law. Pound has been known to turn a blind eye to this infraction, bartering leniency for information. Since his wife ran off, he has been increasingly sulky and snappish — he hates his Garibaldi posting. He doesn’t much like Zoller either, a nitpicker who loves parading about in a clean, ironed uniform. The Hummer H1, recently bought second-hand, is presumably intended to enhance the jackboot image he relishes. In real life, Zoller runs a water taxi business.

  Pressed into service as a news gatherer, but curious just the same, Arthur wiggles his swollen feet back into his shoes, heads up the stairs to the deck, and takes up a position quietly behind the two officers. They are questioning four of Garibaldi’s more prankish rogues, all of whom have pints on their shared table but are hiding their cigarettes. Ernie Priposki gives Arthur a conspiratorial wink.

  “I’m thinking of giving you a pass on these smoking violations, boys.” Pound glares at Zoller, who is trying to draw his attention to a full ashtray on a railing post. “Stow it, Kurt. In fact, gentlemen, I don’t think we need to hand out any traffic tickets either today. And maybe not until the weekend. N
o hassling, no breath tests unless you run someone down. And you can smoke your frigging faces off out here.”

  “What’s the catch?” says Gomer Goulet.

  “Just help us out about the Potlatch.”

  “Potlatch?” says Ernie Priposki. “What Potlatch?”

  There’s a chorus of similar queries, an exchange of puzzled looks.

  “I can do it the easy way and nip it in the bud, or I can bring in the whole Vancouver Island drug squad.” Pound’s voice is rising. “And bust everyone! And bust you for withholding state’s evidence!”

  Arthur has never heard of such a charge, except perhaps in movies. He’s embarrassed for the officers.

  “Kurt, I want you to go down to where their vehicles are illegally parked, and I want you to ticket every frigging bald tire, loose muffler, and expired plate. Everything!”

  Zoller seems unsure whether Pound truly means it, and stalls.

  “Just do it!”

  Zoller gets out his ticket pad and moves smartly down the stairs.

  Honk Gilmore, a sly, thick-waisted, sixty-year-old, has been silent, but can’t resist. “Withholding state’s evidence — what’s the law on that, Mr. Beauchamp?”

  Pound whirls and, on seeing Arthur, visibly deflates. The boys erupt in knee-slapping mirth.

  “You seen it, counsellor,” Gomer says. “Police brutality.”

  “No story here,” Arthur hollers down to Nelson Forbish. He puts a hand on Pound’s shoulder and leads him inside.

  Pound makes a soft sound, a moan or a groan, as he seats himself at a table in a windowless corner. Even in the dim light, he looks haggard. “I’m doomed here. I don’t have any credibility on this frigging … It’s the island of the damned.”

  Arthur nods in apparent agreement. He’s anxious to see that fax, but Ernst must be allowed to let off steam.