Hole in One (5 page)

When we got out to the golf course, Hanna slung her bag of clubs over her shoulder and marched purposefully out to the little pitch-and-putt area back of the clubhouse, where, I told her, the pro hangs out. He was bending over, lining up a putt, when we came around the corner, so all Hanna got was a glimpse of bent back in a buckskin coat. She waited courteously until the ball plunked into the hole, and then advanced with one hand thrust out.

“Hello, there,” she called out. “I've come for a golf lesson. I'm Hanna Klovack.”

Then she dropped her bag and opened her mouth as six-foot-two of hawk-nosed, black-eyed, Ojibwa Indian turned around, gave her the old up and down, and sort of oozed forward to greet her.

“Running Elk,” he said.

“Er . . . urn . . . Hanna Klovack,” said Hanna.

The swarthy rascal took Hanna's proffered hand, gave her an incandescent smile, and murmured in a throaty baritone, “My golf course is your golf course.”

Hanna blushed a rich vermilion.

“Hanna, meet Joe Herkimer, a.k.a. Running Elk.” Like most Canadian Indians, Joe Herkimer is really only about one-sixteenth native, and in his case, the rest is pure WASP. I told Hanna, “He has an M.A. in English literature. He affects the Indian getup because he thinks it makes women go weak in the knees.”

“It does,” said Hanna. “How come I haven't seen you around here before this?” she asked.

“I've been away.”

“Communing with the Great Spirits?”

“In a manner of speaking,” replied Joe.

“He's been in England,” I said, “working on his Ph.D. on ‘Minor Poets of the Nineteenth Century.'”

The first Indian inhabitants hereabouts were Hurons, but they were nearly all chased away, even before the European settlers came onto the scene, and the land pretty well belonged to the Ojibway, or, as they are now spelled, Ojibwa, one of the Algonkian-speaking tribes. This was Joe's tribe. I once did a piece on the Ojibwa, and discovered that the name comes from two native words,
ajib,
“to pucker up,” and
ubway
, “to roast.” Taken together, they signify “people whose moccasins are roasted until they pucker up.” I had once asked Joe if he thought this meant his ancestors had invented the hotfoot, but he said he had no information on the subject. The tribe was once almost as powerful as the nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, and was known as Chippewa in the United States and as Mississauga in southern Ontario. The French called the tribe members Saulteaux. Like nearly all our aboriginal peoples, under the careful stewardship of their European overlords they went from being proud warriors and accomplished agriculturalists to impoverished hangers-on.

Joe had only recently become interested in his native background; during most of the time he was growing up, he was taught to be ashamed of it. His father, a white contractor, had been captivated by a schoolteacher from the Circle Lake Band whom he had met while building a new school on reserve land. Joe was brought up in Silver Falls as a white. His parents didn't try to conceal his background from him, and he knew his grandparents were still reserve Indians, but nothing much was said on the subject.

“It was like having an alcoholic in the family,” he told me once. “You knew about it, but you didn't talk about it.”

A brilliant student and athlete, he won a series of scholarships that took him, eventually, to Oxford, and it was over there that he finally got interested in his own culture. A delegation of Canadian Indians landed in England in 1981 to protest the patriation of Canada's Constitution, with no provision for aboriginal rights, and Joe read about them in the English press. He decided, then and there, that he had been shortchanged, so he began to study Canadian Indian history and culture, and even got a pretty fair command of the Ojibwa tongue. He couldn't join the Circle Lake Band, since he wasn't a status Indian, but he attended their meetings, and did a lot of work for the Assembly of First Nations—mostly, as he said, “writing pamphlets in lucid prose telling the whites to get the hell off our land.” He had also taken an Indian name, for use on ceremonial occasions, but most of us still called him Joe.

Joe doesn't actually have to work as a golf pro, since his father died a few years back and left him quite a lot of money. He just happens to be a wonderful golfer, so he divides his time between academic studies and lecturing at Trent University, thirty miles away, and teaching golf for very low fees at the Bosky Dell course during the summer, and after work in spring and fall. He says he doesn't mind the poor pay, because he gets reward enough out of whipping the ass off businessmen who have to bite their tongues to keep from calling him a dirty Indian. He believes that, if his ancestors had invented golf instead of lacrosse, they'd still own the continent.

He gave Hanna another of his incandescent smiles.

“Shall we?” he said.

“Shall we what?” asked Hanna, then blushed again. “Oh, golf,” she said. “Sure.” She gathered her dropped clubs, and they moved off towards the first tee.

“No straying into the rough, haha,” I said. I got a frozen look from Hanna.

“What's it to you?” she wanted to know.

“I was thinking more of Joe's wife, Darlene,” I replied. “She's a Wood Cree, and they are noted for their ferocity.”

“Ah,” said Hanna.

“I was also thinking of his four children,” I added.

“Ah, ha,” she said.

“To say nothing of his fine and faithful Bassett Hound, Wordsworth.”

Hanna turned to Joe. “You call your Bassett Hound Wordsworth?”

“My family objected to Longfellow,” he explained.

So off they went, chatting and smiling and looking pleased as punch with each other, for a golf lesson, while I mooched back to the cottage, where there was another unpleasant sight waiting for me.

To wit, Thomas Heathcliffe Macklin, my managing editor. He was sitting amidst the debris in my living room, leafing through Billy Haldane's magazines, which I had left out on top of the pile on the coffee table to remind me to take them around to him. Tommy looked up, briefly, then went on leafing. He was breathing rather strangely.

“Ah, Tommy,” I said. “Catching up on your reading?”

“This stuff is disgusting.”

“Then you won't mind putting it down while we chat. Unless you just came along to admire my housekeeping?”

“In a minute, in a minute.”

I wandered back to the bedroom, doffed my clothes, went in and had the cooling shower Tommy needed, and came back out, refreshed, about ten minutes later. Tommy was still busy leafing.

“Really disgusting,” he said, but he didn't look up. “I'm surprised at you, Carlton.”

“We all have our weaknesses, Tommy. Was there something you wanted to talk to me about that you couldn't raise over at the office?”

He looked startled. “Sometimes you show an almost human intelligence, Carlton,” he said. “It's about this golf-course thing. I read the story you filed this afternoon.”

“Yes?”

“Well . . .” He paused and looked down at the magazine again. “Do you suppose they're real?”

“Silicone implants,” I assured him. “You're working yourself into a sweat over recent advances in the plastics industry. What about this golf-course thing?”

Reluctantly, slowly, he closed the magazine and gave me his undivided attention. “I want you to get onto this development angle, Carlton, and keep on it. I want you especially to explore the business of what the old bustard's—Flannery's—will said about selling the golf course and anything that has to do with that.”

“What about the murder?”

He snorted. “We don't do murders, Carlton. You know that.”

“But we do do developments. Fine,” I said. “First thing tomorrow I'll go over to the Land Titles Office and check out the deed. I don't know why I didn't think of that before.”

“You do that,” said Tommy. “Make sure you find out everything you can about that deed.”

“How do you see us handling this, Tommy?” I asked. “The legal-tangle-over-a-will angle, or the village of Bosky Dell pits itself against a big developer? Should we be looking for a series, or will we run one big feature?”

“We won't run it at all.”

“We won't run it at . . . Then why do you want me to work on it?”

“Consider this a private project, Carlton. It's not so much for the paper as for me. Your boss,” he added, in case I had forgotten. “And Mrs. Post.”

“Mrs. Post? What has the publisher got to do with this?”

“That's not your concern. You just do your job.”

“Aw, come off that crap, Tommy. You're onto something, and if you won't tell me what it is, I can't do my job.”

He glowered at me. Tommy was happier in the good old days when the peons knew their place, but he really didn't have much choice. His investigating staff consisted of myself and Billy Haldane, who thought the Land Titles Office was where they give names to properties.

“Hmm,” he said, and it was not a happy hmm. “Well, I guess it can't do much harm to tell you a little bit. The other day, we had a visit from The Red Tide.”

The Red Tide is what the local spokespeople for the Assembly of First Nations are called in Silver Falls, where bigotry is next to godliness. Joe Herkimer must have been in on this.

“And?”

“Well, it seems that there maybe used to be an Indian burial ground under what is now the fifth fairway at the Bosky Dell golf course. Those jokers wanted the area roped off, and preserved, for Pete's sake. They are even applying for a heritage grant, and they want to get an archaeologist in to conduct a dig. Can you beat it?”

“Maybe they object to the desecration of their burial grounds, Tommy.”

“What's to object? Bunch of dead old bones. Anyway, that's not the point. The point is that they wanted us to run a story saying that they are thinking about taking legal action, and trying to get an injunction to prevent anyone disturbing the situation until they can have a proper study done. Of course, I told them we don't run that kind of story. But, if they do get an injunction, it could hold up the development over there, so I want you to find out what effect that thing in Flannery's will has on the sale of the land, and, while you're at it, find out who's behind these troublemakers. No Indian has brains enough to figure out something this complicated.”

“You'd be surprised, Tommy. Some Indians these days are pretty smart. Drive cars and everything.”

Tommy just grunted. “You don't put this stuff in the news files, you understand. Do it up as a memo, with one copy for me and one for Mrs. Post. Leave them both in my mailbox. You got that?”

“I've never submitted my stuff to Mrs. Post, Tommy. What's this all about?”

“Never you mind what it's all about. The publisher has a particular interest in this matter. That's all you need to know. Just get on with it.”

“Ah, um.”

“Now what's the matter?”

“Well, to tell you the truth, Tommy, I'm not sure I can keep any research I do on this under wraps.”

“Yes, you can. I just told you to. My god,” he went on, “I don't know what they teach you in journalism school these days, but where I come from—”

“Yes, I know, journalists do what they're told, and no lip. But there's a complication.”

“Oh, yeah? And what's the complication?”

So I had to tell him that I had agreed to help Hanna with a story for the Toronto papers, thinking, as I was careful to point out to him, that no conflict of interest could arise, because the
Lancer
would not want to soil its hands with such a story, so it would be okay for me to work on it, in my own time of course. But now that he wanted me to work on it for the paper, well, not for the paper so much as for himself and Mrs. Post, that made it rather complicated and I really didn't see . . .

“Withers, you're babbling,” Tommy said. “Stop it.”

I stopped it.

“Let me see if I've got this straight,” he went on. “You've made some kind of deal with this Klovack bimbo to freelance a piece for one of the Toronto papers . . .”

“The
Star
, I understand, or maybe the CBC-TV . . .”

“. . . some scummy Toronto rag, and you think that would interfere with your duty to your employer, who pays you a very substantial salary every week . . .”

“Substantial, hah!”

“. . . and you would jeopardize the long, happy relationship you've had with this employer for one lousy freelance assignment . . .”

I could see he had got the whole wrong angle on this thing.

“No, no, it's not that,” I explained. “Heck, I would drop the story like a flash. I don't imagine we'll ever learn anything, anyway, it's just that . . .”

I paused. He got it.

“It's just that you're too chicken-shit to explain to Hanna that you can't do her dirty work for her because I have told you to find out certain things for me and to keep your big mouth shut about what you find out.”

It could have been more graciously put, but I had to admit he had it, in a nutshell.

“Yes,” I said.

“You mean, you can't work for me, and keep the information from the scummy
Star
if Hanna doesn't want you to.”

“That's it, exactly.”

“Well, that's easily fixed.” He got up. “You're fired.”

A man of volcanic passions, Tommy. He does not like to be thwarted, and when he is thwarted, he takes steps. Usually, the same step: he fires me.

“It won't last,” I told him. My firings don't usually hold for more than a week. In fact, it appears to be company policy to fire me whenever there's a holiday coming up, and then rehire me afterwards, to save holiday pay.

“Yes, it will,” said Tommy.

“Well, if you fire me, who's going to do your digging around?”

“We'll hire somebody else. Or I'll do it myself.” He seemed to like the thought of this. “I haven't lost the old skills, you know, just because I don't work so well with those goddam computers.”

“Going to break another Henry Doyle story, are you, Tommy?”

This was, and was meant to be, a low blow. When Tommy was a stringer for the Windsor
Mercury
, working out of Sarnia, Ontario, he had to file a story every week about the level of the Great Lakes. They're crazy about lake levels down in that part of the country. Of course, it's rather hard to put much zip into a story like that, because it lacks the personal angle. So Tommy made up an old guy who would comment on the lake levels. It happens a lot more often than you might think in journalism; half the “informed sources” in your daily newspaper are mere wraiths, like Henry Doyle, who kept coming up with colourful comments for Tommy every week. In fact, his comments got so colourful that the Windsor
Mercury
's city editor phoned Tommy up one day and said he was sending a photographer down to get a picture of Henry Doyle. They were going to do a feature on him.

This put Tommy into a bit of a pickle, so he did the only thing he felt he could do. He killed Henry Doyle. At first, he was going to drown him, but he thought that might look suspicious, so he ran him over with a bus instead. It made a tiny item at the back of the paper, and nobody would ever have found out about it, but Tommy got plastered one night years later and boasted about how he got away with it. I had heard the story in the Press Club in Toronto one time, but I had never mentioned it, until now.

“That's does it,” snarled Tommy, jumping to his feet. “You're through. Permanently. And if you want to work on this story for the scummy
Star
, you go right ahead, but of course, if I find you using any information I have just given you in confidence, I'll sue you down to your socks.”

With those cheery words, he was off to the door. As he fumbled with the knob—everybody thinks you have to turn it, but the inner works fell apart years ago, so you just shove—I asked, “Well, anyway, what's the connection with Mrs. Post? Why has she got a particular interest in this? You might as well tell me; I'm bound to find out, anyway.”

Tommy got the door shoved open at last, and paused on the threshhold. He was still clutching Billy Haldane's
Penthouse
, which I guess he had confiscated. He waved it at me as he replied, “Yes, even an incompetent like you is probably going to get onto it. It's perfectly simple: she's the one who bought the golf course and means to develop it.”