The Cardinal Divide

The
CARDINAL DIVIDE

STEPHEN LEGAULT

Copyright © 2008
STEPHEN LEGAULT

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law. In the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying of the material, a licence must be obtained from Access Copyright before proceeding.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in
Publication
Legault, Stephen, 1971-
The Cardinal Divide/Stephen Legault.
(Nunatak fiction)
ISBN 978-1-897126-32-5
I. Title. II. Series.
PS8623.E46633C37 2008
C813'.6
C2008-902313-7

Editor for the Board: Don Kerr
Cover and interior design: Natalie Olsen
Cover image: Stephen Legault
Author photo: Dan Anthon

NeWest Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Edmonton Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

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We are committed to protecting the environment and to the responsible use of natural resources. This book is printed on 100% recycled, ancient forest-friendly paper.

1 2 3 4 5 11 10 09 08

printed and bound in Canada

This book is for the future:
for Rio Bergen and Silas Morgen Legault for Jenn

The Cardinal Divide
is a work of fiction. While the Cardinal Divide is a real place, the Buffalo Anthracite Mine, the town of Oracle, and the characters who populate it are fictional, and any resemblance to actual localities and people is purely coincidental.

Mike Barnes stood at the window of his fourth-floor office and looked out at the sweep of emerald forest stretching beyond the Buffalo Anthracite Mine's fenced compound. The last fingertips of daylight tipped the dark spruce and fir forests with light the colour of smouldering embers and then were eclipsed by darkness. Barnes watched for another five minutes as the colour was sucked from the scene before him by the encroaching night. He looked at his watch: it was after nine. He was weary. The day had started early and was ending late, and he still had to drive the long, winding dirt road back to Oracle to his rental house on a hill overlooking town. It would be midnight before he crawled into bed. Alone.

He craned his neck and looked south into the darkness, beyond the existing mine, toward the Cardinal Divide's jagged back. In his mind's eye he saw the reef of stone rising abruptly from the rolling foothills that broke against the implacable wall of the Rocky Mountains. Though the Divide was beyond his line of sight, Mike Barnes knew it was there. Could not forget it was there. So much angst over a hill.

He stretched and turned from the window, the woods now completely dark, the mountains beyond pale shapes in the darkening sky. Barnes sat down at his desk and tidied up a few papers he had shown to his last guest. He filed them neatly in the hanging files in his desk drawer and cleared away his pens. Except for a portrait of his family, and his Day-Timer, the surface was pleasingly empty. His secretary, Tracey, urged him to track his appointments in Outlook, so she could have easy access to them from her own computer. But while Barnes was not opposed to technology, in fact embraced it, he preferred the old-fashioned full-sized calendar book that could be spread open each morning for a panoramic view of the day. It appealed to his sense of aesthetics and to his nostalgia. Barnes recalled his father's Day-Timer, how each January he had given Mike the previous year's to play with. Barnes had spent hours with those Day-Timers, colouring in his father's doodling that adorned the margins of the book and carrying it around in a worn satchel that he pretended was a briefcase.

And now, with his computer sitting at Oracle's only
PC
repair shop, Mike Barnes was glad for this outdated method.

Barnes took a deep breath, closed the calendar, and stood to clear away the glasses and water pitcher that sat on the low, round table at the centre of his spacious office. He collected two of the dirty glasses along with the pitcher and placed them on Tracey's desk. She'd take care of them in the morning.

Mike Barnes' final appointment of that long day hadn't been interested in the glass of water he'd put out for him, though it might have cooled the flames of their heated discussion. Barnes had managed to keep his composure. His final guest had descended into red-faced shouting and livid finger pointing by the end of their two-hour meeting.

All this over a mine. All this over a chunk of stone called the Cardinal Divide. Barnes shook his head.

As he passed her desk again, Barnes thought about Tracey. She had taken it hard when he'd called it off between them, but that was necessary. In a week his wife and two children would arrive in Oracle to live with him for the summer. If he wasn't done this job by the fall they would head back to Toronto on their own. If he finished, the family could head back together.

It was fun while it lasted with Tracey, and he didn't relish sleeping alone, but all good things must come to an end.

He felt the water he'd consumed over the course of the last two-hour marathon meeting sluice in his gut. Time to tap a kidney, then retrieve his things and head for home.

He made his way down the corridor to the washroom at the far end of the hall, passing now empty offices as he went. When he had arrived six months before, most of these offices had been occupied, but slowly he was seeing to that. The operation was top heavy and he had a job to do. And while it wasn't unusual for mining operations to lay off administrative staff, after a steady six months of cutbacks, some people inside and outside the operation were obviously getting wise to what Mike Barnes' true purpose was in Oracle.

He opened the door to the bathroom and stepped in, flipping on the light as he did. He glanced at himself in the mirror, pushed a hand through his wavy blonde hair, pinched his nose where his wire-rimmed glasses rested, and then stood at a urinal to relieve himself.

His last two meetings of the night played out in his mind. He was surprised to find that he had actually enjoyed the meeting
with Cole Blackwater. It was entertaining to see through Blackwater's sketchy attempt at covering his environmentalist tracks by pretending to be a reporter. Wonders never cease, he thought. But his last meeting? That left a bad taste in his mouth.

But what did he expect? The cat was out of the bag.

He finished and stepped to the sink to wash his hands. Then he turned the water off and pulled a few paper towels from the dispenser to dry his hands. Mike Barnes heard footsteps in the hall.
JP
, the night watchman, had just made his rounds. Did he forget something? The footsteps stopped outside the door. Mike suddenly felt a chill rush through his body. He stood still, watching the door, and without knowing why, held his breath. When the door to the washroom opened, Barnes let his breath out through his teeth with a hissing sound. He turned back to the mirror and regarded himself as he spoke. “I told you there is nothing more to say on the subject,” he said as he removed a piece of dry skin from the bridge of his nose, stepping back from the mirror. Alberta is dryer than the desert, he thought.

The blow caught him entirely by surprise. The back of his head exploded with bone-crushing force, sending a thick rope of blood splashing against the bathroom's tiled walls. Barnes pitched forward, his forehead connecting with the edge of the wash basin, blood spraying in a fine mist beneath the counter and across the walls. He collapsed in a heap on the floor, his eyes blank and staring into nothing, into a darkness as black as the hole in the earth called the Buffalo Anthracite Mine.

Cole Blackwater heard the phone ring as he locked the door to his eighth-floor office in Vancouver's Dominion Building. He stood with his hand on the chrome doorknob worn smooth and glossy with decades of use. The key was still inserted in the door as he listened to one ring, then a second, and a third. He looked at his watch. It was nearly 6:30
PM
. Friday.

He let his head fall forward heavily in a gesture of weariness and stared blankly at his scuffed and dirty black boots.

The phone rang a fourth time and then stopped. His voicemail would pick up and the caller would hear Mary's voice ask if they wanted to leave a message. Until two hours ago Mary had been his assistant and sole employee. Now Mary no longer worked for him. He'd had to let her go.

He stared at his boots, his hand rested lightly on the door handle. He was dreadfully tired. More tired, he thought, than he'd ever been in his life. Whoever was calling could wait until Monday. If Monday came. Cole failed to see how he would make it through the weekend. He had no intention of throwing himself off Lion's Gate Bridge or hurling himself in front of the
B
-Line bus on Broadway. It was simply that he could not imagine going on as he was, his only client almost a year behind on payments, no prospects for new work in sight, and a litany of personal problems that would give an advice columnist work for a year. Something had to give.

He locked the door and slipped his keys into a crowded pocket. On the etched glass window of the door simple black letters read, “Blackwater Strategies.” He turned and walked to the elevator and pushed the “down” button.

Three years ago he'd signed a lease on this office in the historic Dominion Building and pledged to take the stairs up to his office every morning and down to street level every night. Daily comings and goings, he imagined, would require the use of the elevator – rushing out to a press conference, or dashing to respond to a client's urgent need. But at least once each day he planned to walk up and down the spiral stairs that climbed dizzily through the centre of the building. He peered over the railing – too short by modern standards – down the five, six, seven, eight stories to the bottom floor and imagined himself inside an M.C. Escher print.