Mind Games Page 27

  This was the moment of truth, the moment to which my yearning-scrambled life had been dedicated. I took off the mask. My voice quavered. “Hello, Peter. I’m your son.”

  “I’ll be buggered, Dubbin, is that you?”

  “Your other son.”

  “I don’t have another son, thank God for that.”

  “The one you conceived in 1967. In a sleeping bag in the outfield of a ballpark in Nelson. During a rock concert.” I can’t remember everything I said, words were pouring from me, a disjointed history that provoked only a frown. “Am I bringing it back, Peter? Her name is Victoria. She gave birth to your other son on June 7, 1968.”

  I waited for the shocked face of revelation. But he said, “Peter? I’m not a Peter, though I’ve been called worse. It’s Alexander. In 1967, I was in bloody England. Looks like you could use a drink, old fellow.”

  I don’t know why I hadn’t picked up the English accent right from the start. As he led me in, I took in a rear view of the dummy on his back, a long dress, nylons, beat-up runners. The house was cluttered, a cedar table bearing the tools of recent efforts – cloth, scissors, swatches of fur, foam padding. A bottle, half-full, of vodka.

  “Came over in seventy-five with my wife and son. She left me, and I raised my son to be a bit of an asshole.” He examined me under a naked light bulb. “Well, if you aren’t a carbon copy of Dubbin. But no, the ears are wrong, no scar. Good thing too, or I’d have run you out.”

  I was in a stew of incredulity, embarrassment, and relief. As I piece together this jigsaw night, I realize that I ended up in the slammer because I began foolishly celebrating my unDoobieness.

  Walker seemed eager to prove we weren’t kin. His full name was Alexander Myerscough Walker – old passports were produced in proof of that, along with a marriage notice in an Uxbridge weekly, a diploma from an agricultural college, June, 1968, the month of my birth. For my part, I could only offer a confusing explanation of who I was, my bastard state, the clues that led me here.

  Our chat was oiled by vodka tonics, and soon we were deep into his bottle, laughing at my gaffe. There was much to like about the man, he was hale and forthright, even confiding he kept a grow op in the basement, the remnants of a thriving business. His worthless son had been stealing the buds, selling them, attracting heat. But Clint Huff had caused even greater damage to his trade.

  The aim of Walker’s costume was to get the mayor’s goat. There had been similar taunts over the years – it was Walker who’d stencilled Wanted on Huff’s campaign posters. They are the Hatfield and McCoy of Jackson Cove.

  I think it was earlier – I haven’t got this account in order – that I explained Huff is suing my mother for libel. He snorted. “What a bloody fool.” (Our shared nemesis brought about a bonding, and now I’m unable to ask the Mounties to drop by to verify my identity: Walker’s house reeks of pot.)

  He led me up a narrow wooden staircase to the turret, where a telescope was set on a tripod. “This here is my watch-tower, so I can see the horsemen coming. That’s where the little nuisance lives.” I could see the back of Huff’s tidy frame house, the second floor still lit.

  “I used to have an outdoor grow, a wholesale business, respectable customers. Then he got ducks.” They’d torn up his plants. Walker had to move his grow indoors, hasn’t had a decent year since.

  I looked through his scope: a second-floor window partly curtained, the headboard of a bed, and above it a smiling portrait of Princess Diana.

  “He’s got her plastered all over his walls. I swear he’s got a life-sized blow-up rubber Diana. Likes to pretend he’s Dodi al Fayed.”

  I was transported back to the mezzanine of the New Westminster Courthouse. They betrayed the one great shining light of this world. She died for our sins.

  Huff sauntered into view, dressed for Halloween in what appeared to be ancient Egyptian dress. I watched a while longer, but Huff vanished, and the lights went out.

  Walker led me back downstairs, poured more drinks, produced snapshots taken with a telephoto lens. They showed the Diana doll, though no intimate moments were captured.

  “Should I report the twit to the Board of Education?”

  “Not unless you want to spend the rest of your life in a courtroom.”

  I was given several prints, though I was unsure what use to put to them. (The photos – plus my watch and wallet – are in the custody of my jailers, in an envelope that I pray they haven’t opened. Why haven’t they received confirmation that the Dooberman is behind bars? Maybe he has escaped jail.)

  The vodka bottle emptied, Walker urged me to join him at the dance. He had a few chores first, so I donned my Snoopy mask, zipped up my bear suit, mounted Vesuvio II, and rode back to the Community Hall. Through the open doorway, I could see the musicians (remnants of the Brain Damage of 1967?), bearded, greying, with middle-aged paunches.

  Suddenly I halted. The man and woman leaving the hall were dressed in the boots, jackets, and stripes of the Royal Mounted. The Dooberman heard a quiet voice of warning, pedalled his way back across the uneven lawn to the road.

  I lost control momentarily and nearly slid into the RCMP van, had to grab the side mirror to steady myself. I looked back – the two officers were on alert. I bolted, swept downhill to the village. Stupidly, I’d aroused suspicions with my clownish flight.

  But they didn’t follow me, and I was soon on the main street of Jackson Cove with its charmingly hokey Bavarian façade, the town hall a high-steepled image from my dreams. By the lake was the Warm Springs Hotel, steam curling from its pools. I intended to check in, but first made my way to the general store. The pot and alcohol made its choices bewildering and the transactions complex. When I doffed my Snoopy mask, the saleswomen examined my credit card suspiciously, picking up the phone as I walked out with clothes and swim trunks.

  She alerted the local RCMP, of course: the Dooberman was back in town with a credit card stolen from a doctor. That, at least, is what Corporal Netty Krepusch theorized as her underling handcuffed me at the check-in counter of the hotel. My explanations were seen as preposterous, and I worsened matters with my lurid flow of loud complaint.

  But now comes Netty herself, jangling keys, looking frazzled and contrite. “I’m so sorry, Dr. Dare.”

  The next day, nursing a hangover, I phoned Jack Churko from the Warm Springs Hotel. The search for Grundy and Lyall continues to frustrate him, but he had a great gloating laugh over my arrest – it is all through the VPD – and he claimed to have had thoughts, when Corporal Krepusch phoned him, of telling her I was wanted on a nationwide warrant. Dubbin Dooberman, by the way, was in the pokey all the time.

  Netty Krepusch bought me dinner Sunday, an effort at amends, and was relieved I wasn’t contemplating a suit for false arrest. When I sounded her out about local characters, I learned, to my lack of surprise, the mayor is a “fucking headache” with his constant advice and interference. His sworn enemy is thus widely tolerated: it’s known Alexander Walker keeps a small grow, but the law is selectively enforced.

  On Monday, I took a spin to Nelson, an old and pretty town snuggled into the valley by Kootenay Lake. I strolled about the ballpark, seeking an impossibly distant memory of being. Here was third base, where Peter told Victoria she was the most beautiful creature he’d met since escaping prison. Here in the outfield, they made psychedelic love, and the supposed miracle of me began.

  The skies had been darkening all day, and as I was standing lost in left field, the weather turned brusque, a cold front from the north, flurries. The grounds quickly went white, a clean sheet covering the sins of 1967 – so virginal that I didn’t want to disturb the cold peace of it all. By the next morning, as I began my bus journey home, several inches of snow had fallen. I was experiencing ennui, an old familiar sense, fatherless again, the weary search continues.

  1 At one point, he rather jarringly used her name in addressing me.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Notes for Wednesday,
November 5.

  I telephoned Tim this morning, to welcome him home but also to let him know I might not be fit to see him at his regular time because I’ve come down with the flu. He insisted on coming to my home to make mushroom soup.

  Though stricken with an unseemly nasal drip, I found some comfort in his droll exposition of Halloween night in Jackson Cove and his “close encounter with consanguinity.”1

  As for his showing in the bicycle rally, he dismissed it as being of relatively trivial concern – though I doubt those are his true feelings – and shrugged off my compliments at his trophy for the men’s section. He is setting his sights now on the United Appeal’s race in Vancouver, in the spring.

  He has rejoined the search for Grundison and DeWitt, who are believed to have fled into the North Shore mountains and are equipped for a long seige.

  Celestine Post has been scheming again, and her efforts have, conversely and perhaps unfortunately, rekindled his hope of regaining Sally’s affections. I continue to wonder at his stubbornness in that regard.

  Otherwise, Tim has achieved a level of emotional stability that further intervention may not significantly enhance. Yet another side of him showed during this visit. He is a thoughtful caregiver with an easygoing manner, generous with his advice on non-traditional medicine.

  Before he left, I raised the issue of discontinuing my services to him, given that he has gained as much emotional balance as one could expect. He was unsure whether he was ready “to leave the nest and fly.”

  I’m glad we were able to air out that hotel-room happening without being hobbled by a tape recorder – no need to tuck it away in the file with the rest of my psychobiography. Freud put it well: in therapeutic relationships, one owes discretion even to oneself.

  “Do you think it’s best if I refer you elsewhere, under the circumstances?” A ridiculous question. I won’t have you throwing me to the wolves because of an unguarded moment. Relax, Allis, there were no consequences other than some awkwardness. All regrets will pass with time. Soon we will be laughing at ourselves.

  Disease fattens on stress, so it was good that you were able to unload your marital concerns (my prescription: take his offer of the house, mortgage free, forget the squabbles over money). Your temperature actually went down after the unburdening; the virus seems to be retreating to the nose for a last-ditch stand.

  And don’t worry about me – I never catch colds or flus. To summarize: You should be getting out more, exercising. Vitamin C, Vitamin E, echinacea, don’t be afraid of garlic on your breath: it’s the smell of health.

  But I’m afraid much of my advice was lost on you – it came with a false note of bravado from one who seems incapable of freeing himself from the web of love and need and hurt. Sally is back from Japan. I found her message on my machine when I returned from Jackson Cove, congratulating me for being the second-fastest doctor in the West. Did I hear a tremor of misgiving, a hint of disappointment about the Japan trip? About Cousineau?

  Victoria was not amused by my adventures in Jackson Cove, my false encounter with consanguinity, my arrest. She scolded me for my foolishness. I described Huff’s paraphiliac obsession in the hope it might cheer her up as she waits, pessimistically, for Judge Lafferty to render her decision, but she found the whole matter disgusting.

  John Brovak, however, was keenly interested in Huffs pretend love life, and whisked over to Granville Island, persuading James to slip him in between a Dependant Personality Disorder and a Social Phobic. He goggled at the pictures that Walker gave me, insisted on pocketing them for “safekeeping.”

  I reminded him he hadn’t billed me for the Vivian Lalonde case. He clapped me on the shoulder, demanded instead that I make a donation to my favourite charity. “Professional courtesy,” he said. “Maybe I’ll get back a little noblesse oblige. I got a real bitch coming up, a junkie so hooked on smack he didn’t realize he was firing a gun.”

  As for Grundy and Lyall, it now seems clear they made their way across one of the bridges to the mountains. A couple of nights ago, a break-in occurred at a small store in Lynn Valley. Only food was taken, frozen steaks, eggs, bread, about thirty kilos of canned goods. Police are going door to door on Grouse and Seymour mountains, checking ski cabins and chalets, quizzing hikers and skiers enjoying the year’s first snow.

  I’ve not heard from Vivian. No calls. No visits. No skulking shadows in the night. Doubtless, she’s getting over me, though I still can’t understand why I deserved her mindless infatuation. On the other hand, Celestine Post and I have become, if not thick as thieves, conspiratorial buddies. I can’t deny I’m getting a kick out of her latest amatory scam. She’s been insinuating herself into Sally and Cousineau’s social scene, turning twosomes into threesomes in restaurants and on country drives.

  Last night, knowing Sally was a presenter at an arts ceremony, she inveigled Cousineau to come to the gallery opening of “Virgins No More,” erotic works by Celestine and a few of her friends. I couldn’t be there last night, but wandered in today – a cramped feminist gallery. A large canvas by Celestine featured wild swipes of exploding colour that drew the eye into a black tunnel thickly edged with red pigment; in case the point was lost, it was tided Orgasm Number Six. A price tag for eight hundred dollars, a red dot, proof of sale.

  Ellery Cousineau is now the proud owner of this piece of Celestine Post-Modernism. “I made him a deal: half-price plus he goes down on me.” She showed me her tongue, a mock, catlike lick. “He’s coming by the loft tonight.”

  I was shocked, though I knew that Celestine, with her bent for hyperbole, had given me a coloured version of the bargain reached. Which is this: Cousineau has promised to bring a cheque tonight and perhaps enjoy a glass of wine, and there’s no reason Sally has to know, because he intends the painting as a gift to her. I suggested Celestine wear a dress from Toddlers for the occasion.

  I suspect Cousineau will be less resolute than I in resisting Celestine’s charms. I picture her in the throes of artistic creation: Orgasm Number Seven. I feel no guilt: I didn’t counsel or encourage her scheme, and I will proclaim my innocence if Sally learns she took on a false lover. When Sally learns …

  It is Thursday. Hope has risen from the ashes of marital loneliness, I must grab it, hug it to my breast, and pray. Ellery Cousineau has met his undoing!

  For this, I must give thanks to Celestine, for her schizotypal impudence and her inability to stop rummaging in others’ lives. I met with her today over a martini lunch at the Granville Island Hotel, where she jauntily described how Sally had popped into her loft this morning for their regular exchange of gossipy tidbits. Sally found Celestine and Cousineau sitting over coffee, hungover, she in baby-doll pyjamas and he in more modest but incongruous attire: shirt and socks and sweater, but pantless, a green wraparound skirt stretched around his middle.

  Ellery tried to explain he’d come by this morning to claim his painting – see his tight smile, hear his cracked, laugh-it-off voice: I intended it as a secret gift for you, my darling! You see, there it is, leaning by the door! And, damn it, he’d ever-so-carelessly jostled his cup, spilled hot coffee on his jeans, soaking them through to his undershorts. As proof: these garments were in Celestine’s washer. The skirt was all he could find to wear.

  But Celestine couldn’t lie to her long-time best friend, and chided Cousineau for assuming Sally was gullible enough to believe him. (The truth, Celestine explained to me, was that a semen spill occurred early in the evening’s festivities. “Real impetuous guy, didn’t have his pants off, and he went off like a rocket on his first try”)

  Cousineau did, in fact, get coffee on him, including grounds, when pot and filter were dumped on him. As well, Sally hit him on the head with Orgasm Number Six, then threw it against the wall, and stomped out.

  “I did it for you,” Celestine said to me. “No great sacrifice. He was a tiger in bed when he got his motor restarted. And he looked divine in a green skirt. Spent a few minutes in the closet before he c
hose it.”

  I played with that image: Cousineau in the closet. Maybe I’d misconceived his proneness to stare at women – was he merely admiring their attire? In my dream, he was searching through a trunk of dresses, stockings, and unmentionables – seeking something that would fit him?

  Misled by jealousy, I’d defamed Cousineau. Sally had thrown me over not for a pedophile but a prematurely ejaculating cross-dresser.

  Ah, but these were merely caprices of the vengeful mind. It is wrong to gloat, I must rise above spite.

  I waited for Sally’s call, which came mid-afternoon. She was still furious, insisted on blaming Celestine and me jointly, we were in cahoots. I defended myself and offered sympathy but couldn’t hide my glee very well, and she hung up on me.

  It’s late on Friday, when I would usually be in your consulting room, so I hope James reached you in time to cancel me. Briefly, the situation is this: the search for Grundy and Lyall has just turned frantic. A Los Angeles family seems to be missing in the North Shore mountains, a mother and two teen daughters. They’d come up here a few days ago on a post-divorce holiday.

  Yesterday, Gladys Moore called L.A. and left a message on her father’s answering machine, saying she and the girls had the use of a ski chalet. No location given, presumably the North Shore. Gladys Moore’s father tried several times to reach her on her cellphone. No response. Last night, he called the North Vancouver RCMP.

  We’ve since learned, through her friends in California, that Gladys Moore received the keys to the chalet from a friend retired in North Vancouver, a ski enthusiast. It’s an architect-designed log building on Grouse Mountain, he told police, and is off any beaten track.

  Our fear is that Grundy and Lyall scouted the chalet, found it deserted, and that Gladys Moore and her daughters walked into it blindly and found the two fugitives hiding there.