Jericho (28 page)

The prosecutor was interested in my diary. I had to read parts of it out loud and then they made me explain what I’d just read. Once they made me say what I’d just read but in everyday language, then came back and told me to repeat it in an even simpler version that anybody could understand. I was insulted. When I was cross-examined, Bishop’s lawyer in the shiny suit (shiny tie too) started to try to show that I wasn’t qualified to make the kinds of observations I had noted down in the field. But I told the court about my degree in social work and my job experience and the decision I’d just made to go back for my psychology degree and open a practice as a therapist and get out of the rathole of the Downtown Eastside. After I got through, the issue seemed to evaporate. It seemed to me that this was happening all the time. At one point there (I know this from my reading of the media) they were trying to show that Bishop was a major marijuana supplier, which of course he was.
They were getting around to saying that he caused the fire by trying to destroy the pot crop, destroy the evidence, but his lawyer pointed out that the chronology was all wrong and questioned Beth about Clarence, the First Nations guy. But Clarence didn’t testify. As far as I know he never came out of the Interior. They left him alone. I don’t know why. Lack of evidence, I suppose.

It was funny how the lawyers made Beth and me into allies. At the time I still half believed that this was a case of destiny-fulfillment. Now I’m sure it wasn’t. Just a corrupt system that victimizes people who think it should be changed.

Of course, I am out of all that now. I have a practice in Kitsilano four days a week. I have to delimit it to four in order to get a break from hearing people’s problems. I’ve had no trouble attracting patients, not since becoming familiar to all through exposure via the media. My late mother was forever looking for the moral in the story and the silver lining of the moral. I remember her sometimes. Often. The silver-lined moral here, I would inform her if I could, is that all the adversity I have been through has permitted me to make my life repurposed.

Welcome to the B.C. Corrections Branch, a gated community. Ha!

The first thing you notice about prison is that there’s no advertising anywhere, only signs with rules about one damn thing and another. The language always makes me think of Theresa the social-working lesbian. But no ads at all and no bright colours. Looking back I see that this was a mistake I made at Jericho. I should have been bartering with Clarence
for old metal signs. Sweet Caporal cigarettes, the original Coca-Cola jobs shaped like big buttons with the old-fashioned lettering on em. A beverage-room sign would have been great: L
ADIES AND ESCORTS.
I didn’t even think about a beverage room. Should have had one laid out for the hotel as a project down the line. Hell, I didn’t even have street signs, simple black-and-white street signs, easily heistable by anybody. College boys steal em all the time. I only needed two after all, one at each end.

Of course looking back over your career is what you’re supposed to do in jail. It’s what they want you to do but it’s also what you start doing just naturally because you have a lot of time on your hands to catch up on your backlog of thoughts and besides it helps short out the noise sometimes.

So I think about old Windsor and Deetroit. I think about Lonnie and I retell myself all the stories he told me. I’ll probably be retelling em for the hundredth time before two years is up. I think about Beth too. Her background isn’t any better than mine but it’s a whole lot different, that’s for sure. Anybody can see what a good person she is. Smart too. I thought for a while up at Jericho that her and I might have ended up stepping out together long-term. There were a couple of days there when I thought she wanted to. That’s the way it is with women. You have to know how to read the tracks and move fast once you’re sure, if you ever
are
sure. I was too wrapped up in my own enterprise. Idiot. I hope I showed her how I felt when I told em I wouldn’t testify against her in exchange for a deal on certain charges. I hope her briefcase explained that to her. I knew what I was doing all right, knew what she’d say when they called her to the
box. She’s probably never told a lie in her life and she wouldn’t start then. She’s the straightest person I’ve ever met, in the good sense of the term—and until I met her I didn’t know there
was
a good sense. Don’t get me wrong. She’s no Citizen. She doesn’t see the world as a straight or bent proposition, but she has her own set of codes you might say. My biggest mistake wasn’t Jericho, it was maybe not having good communications with her when I could have. Course, in my own defence, I have to point out that her travelling companion made me jumpy. Ha! They almost blew their case, calling her to give evidence. She’s so allergic to the English fucken language that nobody can make out what comes out of her mouth, so they have to listen to her personality and it’s like a jackal’s.

And I think about skulking around the lake. I always knew I was going to be on the lam, but I never thought it’d be out in the woods, with mountains everywhere you looked, hemming me in on all sides.

They say I used all those cabins like they were a big supermarket. It wasn’t like that at all, it was more like somebody’s damn poor back garden. I’d get inside one place and see what they had to eat. If I didn’t find anything much, I’d try the next one. Some days a few carrots, you might say, and the day after two turnips down on their luck: I never knew exactly what I’d come across. I wasn’t living like a potentate. And I never broke-and-entered a place. I’d just let myself in if it wasn’t locked. It’s like the law of the frontier that you leave your cabin door open for strangers who might be in trouble. When the door wasn’t open, I’d go around to a window that was. There always was one. What I’m saying is there was no smash-and-grab going on and no cat burglar
situation. I only took what I needed to keep going and tried to take a little bit from everybody so it was fair, so fair that maybe nobody would notice anything was gone. Of course, with the publicity and the cops looking for me even out of province (they thought I might have gone over the mountains towards Banff) and even people across the American border talking to the cops as part of their insurance claims, I was playing into the hands of this crime-spree stuff, though of course I didn’t know it at the time. Sheeeet. If I was “eluding capture” like they said, it was because they weren’t very hot on capturing anybody. I remember reading once in a magazine about the missiles in Russia or somewhere. They’re on rail cars that keep going on a sort of loop from one cave or covered-up place to another, making a circle that’s miles and miles across. That way the satellites can’t be sure which cave has the goods. It’s like playing three-card monte with the end of the world, but using the full deck. I was only operating on the same principle. Never went from one cabin to the one next door, never hit the same one twice in a row. Some I never hit at all. One place I didn’t find anything, nothing at all worth taking, so it must have looked like I skipped over it altogether. All the same, I did at least inspect all the ones around the lake and then up the hillside on the south side and even in a few small places way back in the bush, though they were pretty poor and not worth an all-day or overnight hike. I wondered whose places those were, being so far from the lake and the boat ramp. Nothing in em, which told me that people didn’t stay long cause they lived on whatever supplies they could bring in on their backs, which I knew better than anybody wasn’t very much. One was just barely big enough for four homemade bunks
and an axe. Nothing else. Not a match, not a plate. Not the evidence of staples I’d find in some of the richer ones, big wide-mouth plastic containers that still had a little spaghetti in them, or dried beans, or cereal with dried fruit slivers in it, or milk powder, that kind of stuff. My guess is that the little shacks were hunters’ cabins. In fact I know it, cause one of them had a kind of cross-tie, very strong, seven or eight feet off the ground, between two trees. It was for hanging up the kill to bleed it and skin it. Fishermen’s cabins are different. Judging from the insides of their places, you could tell fishermen were almost settlers who went back home when the good weather started to peter out. The hunters, though, they were there to reconquer. Just visiting.

I scraped my arm on a piece of glass and went under the tarp of one of the boats. Just as I was hoping, there was a first aid kit and I got myself cleaned and fixed up. Hurt though. And I’d left blood on the window which I didn’t think about till later: DNA. Nobody had DNA in Lonnie’s day of course. In the boat I also found two flares. Unfortunately they weren’t the kind you shot with a pistol, they were the kind you held away from your body and hit on the rear end. Those I took. They were safety equipment and that’s what safety equipment is for.

I was starting to think about how I was going to have to get outta there. I’d almost used up the food and to tell you the truth didn’t really know what to do except maybe get into a town, but that seemed pretty dangerous. Course, once in some town I could hop a bus to go somewhere else and get out of the whole region, out of B.C. maybe, go to Alberta, ship down to the States: all the places I now know they were thinking I’d go. The States wasn’t a bad idea if you
could get across the border. I’ve heard of places there where asking people questions is considered rude, dangerous even. But I stalled, I admit it. I just couldn’t make up my mind to go, even though I knew I couldn’t stay. Recollecting it now, the way a person is supposed to do in here, I wonder if I wasn’t just too weak to move much. By this time the Sasquatch Bandit was still losing weight, was barely able to scrape together enough to keep a rabbit going, not living high off the hog like the people Outside thought. Maybe it wasn’t only my blood that was low. Maybe my head was run down too. I was like a bear caught in the headlights. I know, that’s supposed to be a deer caught in the headlights but I couldn’t get out of the way fast like a deer and I must have smelled more like a bear.

To get to the point, I was pretty much worn out. One morning I was down at the lake, standing ankle deep, splashing really cold water on myself to wash. I heard some noise far off, a light thumping sound like somebody’s heartbeat, but it didn’t register and I guess I didn’t look up right away cause I knew I was still surrounded by the same goddam mountains, like every other day. Then it got louder and that’s when I got sight of the helicopter slapping the sky around. I was spooked! I was out in the open and it was just sitting up there in the sky like a cat waiting for the rat to come out of its hole. It wasn’t a big one but it didn’t look civilian to me, though it didn’t have any markings one way or another, not that I could see. The machine just stared at me for a minute or so, then turned its belly to me in contempt and flew off sideways and backwards at the exact same time as I shook off my shock and made a break for cover.

I had absolutely no fucken way of knowing that it was a TV chopper. I couldn’t see any people inside. Maybe the sun was in my eyes. I sure didn’t see anybody with a camera. I didn’t know anything about the public having a hard-on for the Sasquatch Bandit. Even those two words together didn’t mean anything. I didn’t know I was playing right into their arms when they got this video of me standing in the water looking up at them, this dumb bearded dirty-looking longhaired guy who stumbled out of the bush like a drunk coming back from a beer parlour. I freaked out. I ran after my pack, then freaked out some more and disappeared into the undergrowth.

I had a flashback to fucken Moses, going around in circles for forty years. That’s what it felt like. At first my pulse was making a racket just like the whirlybird did. The further away I got, the more it settled down, but I was disoriented. I mean I knew which direction I was headed in—nobody changed the place where the sun comes up in or where it goes down—but I’d lost hold of the sense of where I was going cause to be honest I didn’t
have
a place to go any more. I didn’t have time to finish thinking my escape plan through. I went up some hills and down other ones. One of the few high points in my flight into Egypt was a big ridge that looked like a single piece of grey rock running in an absolutely straight line for miles, with trees and other green stuff fighting for centuries to grow up out of the cracks and overcome their upbringing by lighting out for the sky. I huffed and puffed a lot to get up there, let me tell you, and I didn’t know what I’d see from the top. But standing there looking down into the valley I thought to myself, “What a place for a city!” Why wasn’t there one there already? It was
a mystery to me. As I was climbing back down, my feet went out from under me. I fell and rolled down in a kind of mudslide, part of the way on my ass, another part on my back, a few feet near the bottom on my face. It’s a wonder I didn’t end up hurt bad. I’m not that young any more; I’ve lost that chicken-bone flexibility young guys have. Probably what saved me was having the backpack on as a kind of cushion. It would have made an even better one a few days later when I was almost out of food again. This time I didn’t know where I was going to find any more.