Arthur doesn’t like the feel of this. She would be up his nose all day. “Have you ever lived on a farm?”
“No, but it can’t be that complicated.” She perseveres in the face of Arthur’s smile of incredulity. “Okay, I’m a creature of the city, I dwell with the struggling masses. I wanted to do poverty law, but there were no jobs. But hey, the environment’s a critical part of the struggle. Like the marijuanistas say, overgrow the government. I like Garibaldi, it’s the most accidentally hip place I’ve ever been to. Clean air, good smoke. And I’m totally, totally wrapped in the Gwendolyn campaign.”
What might Margaret feel about Lotis moving into Bungle Bay? A tinge of jealousy, perhaps, that might persuade her to climb down from her perch?
“I hope you’ll enjoy your stay.”
She rises. “Put me on pause while I go to the can.”
Now what has he got himself into? He can see the Woofer house becoming headquarters for the Anarchist League. The woman was thrown out of her last place for having raucous meetings.
Lotis is still in the washroom when Pierre pulls up in his Peugeot. “When the cat’s away, eh, Beauchamp?” He kisses his own fingertips. “Belle enchanteresse. I will drive to the ferry and you will add it to the tip.”
Arthur doesn’t respond to his insinuations, though he takes pleasure from them.
Pierre holds open a door for Lotis, bowing like a courtier of the House of Bourbon. “Which sleazy motel would you and M. Beauchamp prefer?”
“I think we can hold out until we get home,” she says, frightening Arthur, giving him a squeeze. He can smell washroom soap. She’s a hippie again, the makeup is gone, the lip ring back. She’s in jeans, a work shirt with burn holes.
On the Queen of Prince George, they climb to the upper deck to watch the sun go down. Grebes and cormorants fish the bays, fir trees glow bright green with new spring skirts, the vivid yellow of flowering broom in clear-cuts and view corridors.
Soon all these islands will be city playgrounds, he doesn’t see how that can be avoided. You can’t stop progress. You can’t stop humankind from its headlong rush to its overcrowded extinction. He doesn’t share Lotis Rudnicki’s belief that the world can put the brakes on.
She asks, “What’s the one last brilliance you wanted from me?”
Arthur has been filling his pipe and is lost for a moment. “Ah, yes, Adeline Angella. Your diagnoses have been faultless to this point, so let me test you with this: what motive, however twisted, would drive her to implicate Nick Faloon in a murder?”
“To discourage the police from looking elsewhere. It’s beyond gorgeous out here. Fade out into a Cecil B. deMille sunset.”
The dying sun burnishes the forested islets to the east, and overhead the clouds are the hues of wild roses, and to the west, scarlet. Arthur is staring at this display but isn’t seeing it. “To discourage the police…Please expand on that.”
“The big question could be: What motive did she have to murder Dr. Winters? Maybe Angella was one of her patients, something bizarre developed between them.”
This comes with the sudden thud of revelation, and Arthur spills tobacco. He works so clumsily at getting his pipe lit that he burns his thumb. He must talk to Winters’s secretary, or subpoena her clinical records. Why had he not considered such a link? His brain has become flabby, he must get it in trim or he may bungle this case. Alzheimer’s, that’s his fear.
On Garibaldi, Arthur finds the Toyota still at the dock, the Fargo still in Stoney’s yard, and the backhoe still in Arthur’s, its scoop in the air like a claw. It hasn’t seen recent duty, the loss-leader pond remains undug. At least the tools are gone from the garage.
While Kim Lee helps Lotis settle into the Woofer house, he heads to his own. The first of the kids must have arrived today: Edna Sproule’s truck is on the upper road, and flashlights are active in the goat corral. Edna is a fourth-generation islander, owner of Boris, billy-goat sperm donor. Arthur will join her after he changes into country clothes.
From the bathroom window, as he finishes showering, he hears a shriek of delight: “Whoa, he’s adorabubble.” Lotis Morningstar Rudnicki has seen her first kid birth.
Arthur feels the threat of heartburn, his stomach gurgling, he ought not to have had the poires au chocolat. He decides to rest a bit. Soon he is asleep in his club chair. He dreams of Margaret in a birdcage. “Day five hundred!” the judge shouts. He’s in court naked and unprepared. He cannot think of a question. He has lost his touch, lost his memory, lost everything.
11
At the Woofer house, over Kim Lee’s breakfast, a hot gluey substance with seeds, Arthur plans his day. There will be extra chores with the kids-four so far. Edna Sproule’s truck is in the yard, and though he knows he should help her, he feels depleted-April has been a cruel month.
He hears Lotis coming down the creaky stairs, late, she slept through the crowing cocks. She is clad in her sleeping garb, an oversized T-shirt that covers only the bare essentials. It urges, “Support the Sicamous Seven,” whoever they may be.
She squints at the wall clock. “Oops, didn’t realize there was a seven-thirty call. Sorry, I had trouble falling asleep. Kept hearing a maniac laughing outside. Crept downstairs to check if the house was safe, and none of the doors was locked.”
Steadfastly averting his eyes from the junction of thigh and T-shirt, Arthur explains that the keys have been long lost, that what she heard was likely a screech owl.
“Drink coffee, yes?” Kim Lee extends a mug.
“Thank you, Sister Kim, is that birdseed porridge? I think I’ll settle for a Tijuana breakfast: coffee and a hump.” She opens a window wide, lights her hump, sits on the sill, has the delicacy to cross her legs. “What’s on the list of chores?”
“Have you ever milked a goat?”
“No, but I can fake it.”
Edna Sproule has midwived twin kids by the time Arthur and Lotis join her. “Udderly fantastic,” Lotis says, looking awed at these sucking, wobbly-kneed progeny of hard-working Boris.
Edna frowns. “Where have I seen you before.”
“Scream Seven. Still available on video.”
“No…that commercial. Where the wife comes home to find her husband did the laundry, and there’s a mountain of suds.”
“And I say, ‘Did you use enough soap, dear?’”
“Yes, that just breaks me up! You’re the one in the ad! Oh, my. Oh, my.” She seems overcome.
“Girl’s got to get through college.” Lotis seems to need to explain.
After the goat-milking demonstration, he shows her how to raid the chicken shed for eggs, introduces her to the greenhouse and vegetable garden, explains the uses of fork and hoe, shows her what a thistle looks like. Before the morning is over, she has managed to douse herself with the hose, wade into a bed of stinging nettles, and tear her jeans on barbed wire. Arthur enjoys every minute.
He will now take her up to the Gap, the highlight of the day. Margaret will learn he has a new playmate at Bungle Bay. The cat’s away, and the mouse will play. Madam has the poet, after all, with whom to stay.
As Lotis is changing, a vehicle purrs up the driveway. Miraculously, it’s the formerly mufflerless Fargo. Stoney has succumbed to a spate of initiative-the new muffler works well, except for a wheezing sound. He turns off the engine, takes a pull from a beer can.
“I straightened out that legal technicality with the backhoe, they’re gonna give me a few more weeks because of this contract. So I’m gonna start on your pool like I promised, I’m a man of my word.”
To deny the existence of any contract would take too much effort. Arthur will let Stoney dig the pool. What damage can he do so far from the house?
“Got a muffler off Myron’s old Chev, kind of had to bang her in place. Should hold until the next crisis. Told you I’d do it for free, but there’s fuel costs, eh, and I’m in a kind of debit situation…”