Jericho (29 page)

I lost track of time. Maybe that’s part of losing your way. It sure didn’t help none. I was a man without time to measure where I was in my life. Once you’ve lost track, it’s hard to pick up the count again. So I don’t know how many days I was out there. I thought I was in trouble when I was on my way
in
to the damn lake. But when I was running away from it is when I knew I was really in for it. All the same I was very calm, not hopped up at all. Guys say they get rushes pulling a job. I was the opposite. I slowed right down. My head got more clear than it ever was. This is the way I am now. Sizing up my past errors like I’m supposed to do, I understand that this shows how much hot water I was in. It was like those stories you read about people suddenly getting warm when they’re actually freezing to death.

Day seven, day eight, I don’t know when it was exactly, a week at least, is when I saw the bear tracks. You couldn’t confuse em for anything else: they were goddam bear. I know I’m no woodsman but they were fresh. I followed em through the mud for a while. Hell, I was lost anyway, a lost soul for sure, maybe a lost body too; it was starting to look that way. But then I thought: What if I come up behind
him? (Or her, though the paws looked pretty big even though I didn’t have anything to compare em to. To be on the safe side I’m going to say it was an it.)

I tried to figure out where I was, but I couldn’t. I wandered around for maybe an hour. Who knows how long? In our brain, I guess, we like to turn to what’s already familiar, and it looked like I was turning to the left all the time, like a supermarket cart when a spot on one wheel wears flat; I was making a half-circle back to my own path. Then I saw more tracks, even fresher ones I could tell, cause the mud they were in was still squishy. Looking at em next to mine and seeing how deep they were told me how big it was: pretty damn big. A few of these indents and then no sign. Then I’d find some more. It was behind me now.
It
was following
me.
I was being stalked for Christ sake. This couldn’t be happening. I shot off to one side but I guess I smelled pretty bad, so it didn’t have trouble figuring out which way I’d gone. I didn’t want to run and make too much noise and go flying again. So I walked quick but steady, at least as fast as a bear would, or so I was hoping, so at least it couldn’t gain on me. Every so often, needing wind, I’d stop for a couple minutes, take the pack off and get down on my haunches to look around in all directions, scouting.

Did I hear it coming for me? Well, I thought I did. Heard something there all right, outta sight but not all that far off. Then shots rang out way down the opposite side of the hillside.

There were three of em. Shots from a shoulder weapon, not from a handgun cause I knew what
those
sound like. The fucken cops are closing in is what went through my mind, for I was shook up but still had my wits. Three shots spread
at least three seconds apart. That seemed funny when I thought about it. Whoever was doing the shooting was either aiming at three different things or doing target practice. I just about jumped outta my skin when I heard another three, same gun, same way. Long echo this time, though—couldn’t quite figure out why the sounds were more run together like. I said: Now I get it. A signal. A distress signal. I got out my flares to send a signal back. Whoever was there could get the bear off my back. Now I know what you’re thinking: sending up a flare in the woods is too stupid for words. But these things shoot straight up. That’s the whole idea. What falls back to earth, and it takes a while cause you’re trying to light up the sky, isn’t much. Besides, the countryside there was pretty wet at the time; everyplace I stepped I made a mess of the earth.

I pointed the thing and hit the back of it hard like you’re supposed to. Nothing happened. Tried it a second time. Nothing happened again. So I took out the other one. It took off all right—I was going to say like a rocket but that’s what it was, a rocket, right? High up over the hill it busted open, sending out big blooms of yellow smoke in all directions. I know they had to see that, whoever they were. I bet the bear saw it too. The bear! I was already unarmed. Now I was unarmed with a fucken bear looking to have me for breakfast. A weird situation for a city kid to be in.

I hustled myself over the hill. I wouldn’t be gone very long before I’d find em or they’d find me. By now I know they wasn’t cops, though I don’t think I would have cared so much if they had been. Three guys, middle-aged, outdoorsy clothes, work clothes, no Day-Glo hunter ponchos or anything like that. Only two of em had rifles. They saw me and
one of them got all excited and started saying something about Sasquatch Guy which naturally I didn’t understand. One of them pointed his rifle at
me!
I guess he thought he might get a reward, that’s how I read it now. At least the cops’d look the other way at hunting bear out of season. It was
way
too early for deer too. Later, when the Mounties had me, the first thing I said to em was “In ceremonies of the Horseman even the pawn must hold a grudge.” They didn’t get it. They’re not music lovers, not educated people in the Civ department of life, not folks who appreciate the olden days, even their own.

I
NITIALLY
I
DID NOT COMPREHEND
the full enormity of my project when I decided to author a book about my life helping others adapt to the challenge of their situational environments. I had been guest-starring on various talk shows both regional and nationwide and was in demand in person also. I found I possess natural abilities for such more public forms of discourse than that to which I had accustomed myself already. Too, I made a determination that I actually responded favourably to it on a personal enjoyment level. I discovered that speaking my writing into a tape recorder—different microphones for different followings, I was beginning to learn—was not contrarian to talking for the cameras, but of course I was wrong (I admit this freely). I located an agent to represent my enterprise and she counselled me on selecting the most advantage-filled offer. A writer was engaged to copy out the contents of the tapes and put the words in grammatical order, but he quit in the
middle, indicating he could not rein in his jealousies despite my free assistance as to how he might attain growth in this area. The next one quit also, but she was not a mature individual, so I was not surprised. Eventually, after numerous months, the work was realized and you see the results. Despite the publisher, who argued with me at every step, I was seven weeks on the best-sellers’ list in
Maclean’s
and the better-quality newspaper formats. The publisher has termed that I am a substantial phenomenon. I cannot disagree though the words are his and not my own.

By this time Mother and my sister Annie had long since been sharing an apartment in Calgary where Annie had a pretty good job in the health care field. She and I never discussed it, but I figure she didn’t tell Mother about the Vancouver boyfriend she’d broken up with. I’d been out of touch with her—this isn’t like me—because I was humiliated and feeling guilty on account of having been so stupid, but when the excitement was over I went home for a visit. (I thought of it as home because that’s where they were.) Annie was at work at the hospital when my bus arrived and I went straight to their building, an old high-rise, so I knew I’d be seeing Mother by herself. I was worried, not knowing how she’d reacted to the publicity and everything. No matter how old you are you never stop feeling like a kid around your mother and probably never stop thinking you’re an orphan after she’s gone. None of this, though, prepared me for what happened.

She didn’t look a day older than she did the last time I saw her, though a few years had passed already. I hope I have those genes, though the results so far say I don’t! When I was
younger I was obsessed with my genes, not knowing anything about my father; I’d let myself get carried away imagining all the defects I’d inherited and wondering when they’d start showing up. Later I remember thinking that I’d turn into a tall slim blonde, the way that those icky things turn into monarch butterflies. This goes to show you that we get more optimistic as we go along, thinking we’re only becoming more realistic. Maybe I thought this is what was happening to Mother. She was obviously glad to see me, but she seemed worried about something, I couldn’t tell what. It was as if she was avoiding what was really on her mind, even while she let me know, though not in so many words, that she was all right with what I’d done and sorry for what I’d been through. She kept asking about this and that in my life. She listened to the answers, but I could tell that the asking and the listening were distracting her from something she wanted to say, or hear me say.

She wanted to know about Steenrod’s, for example, and I told her how lucky I was that Mr. Steenrod had decided to take me back. He didn’t have to, you know. I told her how, when he asked me to come with him down to the basement, I thought we were going to the prep room. Instead he invited me into the place next door where he kept all his model trains set up. I felt honoured because I knew this was where he went to be alone and relax when he had worries, which it turned out he was having right about then. He went in ahead of me so he could turn on the lights. I remember that they took a few seconds to finish flickering, so that I got a view of the big table—it was the size of my whole bedroom—for just a mini-instant, then darkness, then another quick peek, until the room
was fully lit. He had the tracks running all over the whole place, around the outside and kitty-corner too. Right in the middle was a town. When I got closer I saw it had streets with tiny people in them and houses and churches, a city hall or courthouse. He’d even built a mountain, which had a tunnel going through it for the trains—they entered on the one side where there was nothing very much and came out at the place where the factories were. He turned on the power and showed me how the thing worked, including his tape of realistic railway sounds and the way the trains were timed so they wouldn’t collide even though they passed pretty close to one another on a figure eight. The trains just went around and around. (I mean where else could they go? They were just trains.) The town was the part that looked alive, even though it stood still. There were so many things to look at in the tiny city he’d made. Lights on in the houses, people barely visible inside. Shops with displays in the windows.

“You know I don’t have anyone to pass this business on to,” he said.

I felt myself nodding.

He’d put on his little train-driver’s hat with the stiff beak. It looked like a tall muffin with stripes.

“Over the years I’ve often thought about succession,” he said. “You worry about whether what you’ve built can be carried on after you’re gone—whether it will. You’ll understand in a few years. Of course, you’ll have a family, I imagine. I never did.” He sounded sad. He watched his toy trains go hooting around the table. The noise seemed, well, trivial, I guess you’d say, compared to his voice. “There’s never any urgency until it’s almost too late.”

He paused again, pretending to do something to one of the switches. “I always wanted to find a young person I could teach and then turn the business over to, getting some money for my old age.”

He was going to ask me if I wanted to take over the Steenrod Funeral Home! He heard his own voice played back to him and saw what I was thinking. He didn’t change his tone, though. “I always thought I’d find some young fellow who was fresh from graduating in mortuary science and was looking to get practical experience for a few years and learn about the area.”

Well, this let me out at least a couple of ways: I’m not a fellow and I don’t have a degree or a certificate in anything at all except esthetics.

“You have to know the people you’re serving,” he said. “That’s essential.”

I don’t know what I said back. I can’t remember.

“I’ve seen this neighbourhood change,” he said. “When I was a young man this was an honest middle-class part of town. It wasn’t exactly the finest place to live, but it was home. It was very self-contained and independent. I’m talking about the fifties here. You’d feel safe walking anywhere. Now …” He trailed off. The little trains whistled. They looked like electric mice scurrying into their tunnel. “It’s sad what’s happened,” he said softly. “There’s no other word for it. It breaks my heart.”