He puts on a happy face. “Yeah, we’ll be sitting fat.” Enjoying the idea of being in love is one thing, with marriage come chores…
“So how’re you feelin’?”
“I’m tops. I’m going to be out of this coop soon. I always look on the sunny side.” She studies him dubiously. He asks if she had the papers notarized yet about putting the lodge in her name.
“I will, honey, what’s the rush? You ain’t going to die in the next couple of days.”
“I want the legalities done, I’ll feel better if you’re secure.”
She carries on about Bamfield, about the search for the loot, how one guy dug his way into an underground vault that had fifty gallons of stilled hooch, all of Bamfield partied. Faloon isn’t sure if he even remembers where the treasure is. Sixty paces northeast of where the path breaks off for Brady Beach-or is it northwest?
Claudette also tells him there’s a story going around about how Holly Hoover came calling on Mr. Beauchamp in the night. She doesn’t believe there was an improper outcome to that, because he seemed really straight and proper.
The mention of Hoover releases a spring latch in Faloon, and his mouth pops open. “I fucked her.” No preparatory text, nothing, just the blunt admission, and when he tries to explain and apologize in a low, scared voice, she puts up a hand to stop him.
“I kind of knew you did.” Her weary sigh means he could’ve saved a lot of misery by being honest from the start.
“Thank God it’s off my chest. I’m sorry, things have been piling up, they…” He brakes. “No, that’s crazy, why am I saying that? You’re here, I’m happy, this is the high point of the week.”
He’s not going to tell her about Pere Rechard, or about how there may be a monster inside him, the sleepwalking killer. He can’t handle it, doing the book, forever looking at bars. It would destroy her too, visiting every week, then once a month, five times a year, growing older, sadder, lonelier…
“You okay, Nick?”
“Absolutely.”
“You sure?” Looking at him penetrating, maybe seeing the evil. “Don’t do nothing stupid, okay?”
17
“Goway bigpack,” Kim Lee says inscrutably, as Arthur spoons up granola in skim milk. She pantomimes a woman walking, followed by a four-legged creature: Lotis has gone off somewhere with Slappy. Arthur stuffs a basket with hot muffins and jam and a Thermos of vegetable soup, and pours a coffee for the drive.
A mile up Potter’s Road, he comes upon Slappy waddling behind Lotis’s big pack-strapped to it are a rolled foamy, sleeping bag, rain jacket, sweaters. She hoists this freightage over the tailgate, helps Slappy in, climbs in beside Arthur, and as he pulls away, she says gaily, “Hauling supplies to the front line.” She has dyed her hair green and painted her lips green. Green fingernails.
“Supplies for whom?”
“Well…me. I’m quitting smoking, it’s my cold-turkey project. I’m going to have a dialogue with your life partner. I’m going to try a prisoner exchange.”
Arthur is torn: however much he longs for Margaret’s return, he can’t afford to lose his articling student to a tree. Or, as could well happen, to the Women’s Correctional Centre. He reminds her that Corporal Al has been ordered to limit occupancy up there to two persons.
“I can handle Corporal Al. If Margaret wants an excuse to come down with head held high, I’m that excuse. I’ll stay just long enough to get over the nic fits. Three, four days at the outset.”
She appears not to understand that a proper barrister doesn’t dye her hair green and run off to join a forest sit-in. “Santorini’s vanity is of the sensitive kind, he’ll see it as a personal slap that a lawyer defies his order so deliberately.”
“Am I missing something? The Appeal Court voided his order.”
“I know this fellow. He will take pleasure in finding my articling student guilty of contempt. You will be made an example. You will be jailed. Denied admittance to the bar. You must not do this.”
“Yeah, well, having a law degree doesn’t exempt you from the picket line. I’ll handle Santorini. He likes me. I say that because he can’t stop undressing me in court. This is my baby, this project. Spartacus didn’t lead from behind. Nor did Joan of Arc. Or Ghandi.”
Arthur picks up a hint of grandiosity, a martyr complex, a disability that has been the downfall of revolutionaries throughout history. He plays to her vanity: a splendid career is at risk because of a flip and ill-considered decision.
A lazy shrug of unconcern. “‘Too rash, too unadvised, too sudden.’” Another of Juliet’s lines. That riles him, her mocking tone of smug superiority, her lack of deference to a wise elder. His initial impression, the hippie schemer in the Rise Up T-shirt, may not be that far amiss.
“Sorry, I’m cranky, I’m on withdrawal. I am going to do this.”
He imagines it was like this with Saint Joan: one is arguing with a wall. He’ll try not to appear self-righteous as they’re handcuffing her; he’ll try to ignore the roars of laughter in the Confederation Club: poor old Beauchamp, he had to go bail out his student.
He lets her off at Stump Town. More tents, more activists, more banners. Scantily dressed young people, some in green face paint, are performing a slow, ritualistic tableau. A modern dance company? A theatre group?
“You won’t find a place to park,” says Baldy Johansson, at his car window. “There’s gonna be a pagan ritual. Or something.”
“Snug yourself in here, Arthur.” It’s Todd Clearihue, pulling out from Garlinc’s reserved space. He’s in an old Ford pickup and wearing a Budweiser cap.
Lotis has been busy with her pack, but now is looking icily at Clearihue. His unsubtle approach, after he picked her up hitchhiking, has quickly become a part of island lore.
“You want to be careful with that one,” Clearihue says as their trucks pause abreast. “We had her checked out. B-movie teen actress, flamed out at twenty-five. Divorced parents, drugs, sex, abortion, total crack-up, can’t deal with her life, runs away to Canada. Professional shit-disturber, way out in left field. Commies in the family tree.”
He isn’t telling Arthur much he hasn’t already heard or guessed.
Clearihue squints at the painted dancers. “This is starting to look like a bazaar in Kathmandu. You should move those kids out, Arthur, they don’t enhance the image for the fundraising.”
Clearihue isn’t aware Lotis is at his open passenger window until she says, “What did you do to your image, Todd? You were always so clear-cut. Sorry, I mean clean-cut. What’s with this old beat-up truck?”
He makes no effort to turn toward her, says wearily, “Good morning, Lotis.”
“The new you just doesn’t work for me. Local yokel with a beer commercial on his head. When you’re trying to fake your way into the community, you don’t wear five-hundred-dollar boots.”
Clearihue strenuously ignores her. “How’s the fundraising coming, Arthur? I’m concerned, I mean it. I must’ve put in nine hundred myself, all told. Sunk at least sixty into the bingo last night.”
He alights from the cab. “A private word,” he says, finally glancing at Lotis in her bold maquillage, the Green Avenger, then moving nose to nose with Arthur. “Between you and me and our tax accountant, I could persuade my associates to go as low as fourteen if we get the right charitable concessions. And here’s the kicker: we may even be willing to carry mortgages for half of it. A monthly payment plan. We’d try to enlist the major landholders. Like yourself, Arthur.”
Arthur shivers, plays with the unspeakable concept of Garlinc foreclosing on the entire island, owning Blunder Bay. He contents himself with, “More foundations will offer more grants if the price is reasonable.”
“Can’t do.” Clearihue steps back from Slappy, who is sniffing at his shiny cowboy boots. The green-face troupe is going single file up the Gap Trail. “Guess there’ll be a lot more when university’s over. I’m hip to it. I marched for peace, I was pretty radical back then.”