The Cannibal Spirit (32 page)

The air was full of grit and dust as we passed by a huge building site. Rising at its centre was a building bigger than I had ever saw in life, ten storeys or more, and the hammering of steam shovels, same like I had seen them in the coal pits at Nanaimo.

Horseshit to dodge, and motor vehicles exploding noise, no more than horse-carts with engines beneath and a wheel by which to steer. Four men was perched high in one, cravats at their necks and arrogance in their chins and the waggle of their moustaches. White men what owned the world.

I've been in Victoria many times before, and seen the docks filled with ships and throngs of people moving through the town. Yet a town is all Victoria is, and that I only realized then, seeing for the first time clearly what a city is and what it does.

A crowd poured out the arching cavern-mouth of a high brown edifice what seemed, with its twin-peak turrets and steep roof taller than the greatest cedar, almost some German castle from pictures what Professor Boas showed me once of his native land.
Canadian Pacific Railways
read the sign. Here was the church of all this limitlessness then, and the whistle screams of the engines within like fiends, their voices beating down on me till we was past.

Woolacott leaned against me a moment, so that the man seemed needing of support as much as might his captive.

“Just down here a ways,” says one of our policemen, me a shuffling half-breed, the taunts of frayed children on the street corners, the sun pulsing hot now on my hatless head. What was there of hope among such multitudes?

Boas told me a tale once of how he took an Indian chief, from off the central plains of America, up atop a high building to look down on New York. Boas said he hoped to show the man what it was he faced in his struggle to keep his own nation intact. The Indian asked him why the people kept walking round and round the bottom of the building. It took Boas some time to persuade the chieftain that they wasn't doing so, that they was all, in fact, different people. When he finally had convinced him, the old man fell silent and would not speak again that day.

So did I finally comprehend that old chieftain's state of mind.

When we arrived at last outside the police station, and Woolacott pushed me forward up the steps, it seemed a dark and quiet respite inside. Shadows. A cool stone floor. And then words, hollow, as if spoken in a cave.

“This him, is it?” “Big bastard.” “Smells like shite.” Woolacott muttering by return, his voice low and his tone uncertain. I had not heard him this way before: not chock full of his usual self-importance. All was turned by
the tides of such a world, tumbled opposite and upside down, until the waves came so convoluted that they made no sense at all.

“Well, clean him up,” said a voice, weary. “And get a doctor to his eye. Cannibal savage as he may be”—and these words were spoken with irony, I noted, even mazed as I was from the city—“still no reason we should act the same.”

I looked up to see the man what had spoken sitting behind a table weighed down with brown files and paperwork. Plump in his face and flame-cheeked above his uniform, he'd have looked cheery were his expression not so grim.

“Mr. George Hunt?” he says, and I respond in the affirmative. He asked me if I'd had the charges laid against me clearly stated, and he cast such a look at Woolacott as to suggest such might well not have been the case.

“I'm charged with being at a banned ritual,” says I, stuttering some.

“And the mutilation of a corpse,” says he, and went on to read from the charge sheet what he had before him. “You're a unique case,” he says after. “We've had nothing like this before that I'm aware of.” And he asks me if I have a lawyer, at which I reply that I ain't. “Have you money?” says he.

“No,” says I, and he asks if I was planning on mounting a defence. Well, I didn't have no answer to that. Eventually, I says, “I don't know.”

He speaks on the seriousness of the charge and how I'd be locked away in the jail if convicted. Then he asks if I've anyone I could send a message to.

“My brother-in-law, maybe,” says I. He says he'd get me pen and paper shortly. Then he sent me off to be scrubbed and locked up.

“What should I be doing?” pipes up Woolacott.

The captain eyed him over the pince-nez perched low on his fat nose. “You're the constable that brought him here?” says he and, when Woolacott nods, “Then you can see to his cleaning, since you are responsible for his current condition.” Seeing Woolacott under the harsh eyes of scrutiny did bring to me some solace of retribution, if but for a moment.

I was led away down a hallway strung with flickering electric lanterns. I was stripped, given soap, and stood under a shower. After, they gave me thin cotton pants and shirt. Only my boots was I allowed to keep of my
own few possessions. Then they led me deeper still into the building and placed me in a cell with two other Indians, drunk unconscious on the only pallets.

Woolacott looked in at me through the bars, mouth curled up, savouring. He spoke of how he'd be away back to Alert Bay. “Might not be seeing you for a time,” says he before he goes off.

I sat upon the floor, my back against the windowless wall. I put my face in my hands, hoping, I reckon, to shut out that world which I knew now I had no chance, ever, of affecting. It was despair, yes, but also it was shame, embarrassment even, at my own naivety.

HARRY CAME AWAKE
, crying out, his fingers splayed in the air before him. He was soaking wet, the wound at his shoulder pounding where he had rolled onto it in his disquiet. The nightmare: the streets of Hong Kong, the plague, walking to the door with the Chinese sign for Joy writ up on it. Waking as his hand reaches out to push that door open. Always the same.

He lay on his back for a while. Then he cursed and swung himself up and out of bed as if the sheets were themselves riddled with pestilence. He pulled the blanket about his body, picked up his tobacco, stole quietly out of the room and down the stairs of the Spencers' house in the darkness. He went through the dining room and out the twin doors to the porch. Outside, he gulped air until his breathing slowed. The night surged above him. Ragged cloud raced across the stars. The moon had already dropped beneath the horizon. The wind blew strong and cold from the north. He rolled a cigarette. He sat on the rocking chair, smoking, his bare legs, with the brash scar running down his left shin, propped up on the porch's railing.

It was five days since George had been taken to Vancouver. Harry had slept away the first two. On the third, the weather had been hot, and the room in the hospital baking, until he had to get out and breathe the freshness of the wind. So he'd made his promises to Trelawney to be careful, and shuffled up and down the beachfront to the cheery insults of the people.

Yesterday, he'd moved his things from the hospital to the Spencers'. Mr. Spencer was terse, but showed concern for his injuries nonetheless. And he did not ask for details on how he had come by them, which was a relief. Annie fed him new bread, butter, fruit, and enough sweet, feminine fussing to make him pine some for his own wife. They said nothing of his father-in-law. It was Charley who'd explained the events of George's arrest. Now Charley was away somewhere. “Go learn story” was all he'd say.

He watched the faint glimmer from the stars on the soft-lapping tide. His breathing had calmed. The images of his nightmare had faded enough so that they no longer plucked at his reason. He knew what lay beyond
the door, knew the origin of the nightmare. The memory was terrible. As terrible as anything would ever be. It was shame. It was guilt so overwhelming it sucked him down like a turbulent sea into darkness. Yet now that he had been to the very boundaries of his own death and been saved, he would not turn away from anything before him again.

He strode through Hong Kong that day, that summer of '85—that summer of plague and human folly—strutted through the chaos of the streets, a white man made immune by liquor, opium, and ignorance, and, that day, by the rage of jade-green jealousy. Of what had been in his mind when he pushed his way through that door, he was so blind stupid drunk he wasn't sure he knew now, or even that he had known then.

Into the whorehouse he went, along the dark hallway, and through the heavy velvet curtain at the far end. The room beyond, that he knew so well—and that he would not turn back from viewing now, in his mind's eye, though the sweat sprang up again on his forehead, despite the coldness of the wind—the room beyond was strewn with red and blue silk cushions on the floor, tapestries of courtesans and their lovers on the walls—all of it cheaply rendered, threadworn, stained, tattered. A red lantern in the middle of the room swung slightly as a result of his entrance. Two Chinese girls, scrawny arms, drawn faces, the whites of their eyes made brown by opium addiction, stared up at him without interest. There was no one else there. Even the amah was not to be seen.

The curtain at the back of the room shivered, and then there she was. Fah Wei. Her face was like a ten-year-old's—smooth, a round pimple for a nose—excepting the thick rouge she applied at each cheek until she seemed some child clown. Her hair fell nearly to her waist, tied tight in a plait, a white cheongsam to her knees, her skinny arms bare.

She feigned not seeing him at first, just spoke a word to one of the girls. But, when he advanced upon her, she looked up finally and smiled, the small crinkles at her eyes that showed her disdain, the black mischief of her unconcern. “What fuck you here for now, Harry, neh?” she said.

Harry cursed her, shouted at her. Called her dog, slut, bitch. Raged at her there in the whorehouse on the hill above Hong Kong. Had she transacted a fuck with a man he knew, perhaps, who later boasted the delights
of her? He couldn't remember. The imagined slights. The drunken arguments that had no real origin. She drank as much as did he, drowning out the sorrows of her life.

When first he was with her, she snuggled, fucked him with passion, as if new to the game herself. He watched her slenderness when she performed those things he knew were possible from his own childhood in the house where his mother worked. After, she would trill and wash and whistle, tell him, “I like you, not like others,” sing to him lewd songs the sailors taught her. He'd laugh right along with her, but each was a reminder of those rough scum, and the rights they also had to her body. He had been years enough at sea by then to know the way of things. He'd rousted enough in port towns. Visited with whores enough. A rope rubs and rubs against a splinter, year on year, until at last it snaps.

Once they had passed their paid time together, he would stay on to drink, sitting in a corner, glowering, the red lantern casting shadows over him, tap-tapping his fingers, eyeing each new visitor with hatred, until the amah would send him away, and Fah Wei would kiss him and whisper, “Not think them, only you.” Each time—as now he heard her again in memory—her tone was a little colder. He'd stamp away to some opium trader in the town, mollify the gut-twisting injury of her in the smoke and flickering candlelight, the hoarse monotones of dirt-eyed Chinamen.

He sat on the porch outside the Spencers' home and remembered the last night, saw it like a play in a music hall, him in the front seats—best in the house.

In the whorehouse, she is taunting him. She pulls that narrow blade from her ankle-boot. She points it toward him, and then at her own breast. “This love?” she says. “You, me? You stupid! You love? Buy me. Make me home. That love.” She dandles the blade in his face. “Or you fuck off.” She pokes his chest with the knife. He feels a button of his shirt pop, sees it fly up between their two faces, hang a moment right at the level of their eyes, like some magic bauble, before it falls away. She laughs, but not with humour— with scorn. He hears the other girls in the room laughing as well.

He pulls the knife from his own belt, that same blade he had levered up into the eye of its previous owner. He can feel again its balance in his hand—feels it still now, though it never left that room.

“Want fight me?” She swings her tiny blade in circles before his face. “Fight me! Little fuck man.” Goes down into a fighter's crouch. She slaps the blade against his forearm. It leaves a small welt of blood.

So he swats it from her hand. Then he takes hold of her by the hair, pulls back her head. He thrusts the knife blade down through the side of her neck to pierce the artery. The blood explodes out.

He feels the heat of her blood on his skin, on his face as it covers him, hears the screams of the two girls in the room. Feels the panic in him swell. The instant horror at what he has done, at what it is not possible ever to take back. He cannot hold on to the light as it is fading from her eyes. Cannot keep her from death. Her head lolls now. She is gone.

The smallpox was everywhere in Hong Kong. Debauch and revelry had overtaken the city. He'd been waiting, like all of them, for the first signs of sickness to rise up on his own body. Ships weren't coming in nor going out. It felt as if he was present for the last days of the world.