

Admiral's Island

By Rick McConnell

Published by Rick McConnell at Smashwords

Copyright 2016 Rick McConnell

Cover Design by Rita Toews

r.toews@shaw.ca

Cover Photography by Bronwyn McConnell

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

How I wish that somewhere there existed an

island for those who are wise and of good will.

-Albert Einstein

1

September, 2005

Oscar's funeral was not grand. It was low-key and quiet, like the man himself. Friends and relatives gathered in the All Saints Multi-Faith House of Prayer and Worship to say goodbye to a man whose life had spanned three centuries. Oscar had lived more than 109 years and had touched many more lives than those hundred and fifty present. He had simply outlived most of them.

I've been to a lot of funerals. Funerals for young people, old people, good people and bad people. Funerals for people I've loved and funerals for people no one could love. Some people deserve to die young and some deserve to live long, but most never get exactly what they deserve. Good or bad, young or old, the accounts rarely balance out the way they should.

Oscar William Wood deserved more. More time. More friends. More peace. He had an abundance of them all, but he earned more. Men like Oscar are rare. If a mean thought had ever crossed his mind, no one knew of him expressing it, let alone acting on it. His goodness was pure and total, and everyone he met knew it quickly. And he knew a good person from a bad one in an instant.

Oscar played a major role in my formative years. I was a teenager. He was in his mid-seventies. Though his passing has nothing to do with the timing of this story, a promise I made to another old friend and mentor has kept me from telling it until now. This second old friend was equally as important in my life as Oscar had been, yet in a completely opposite way. Like me, his journey had led him to the balancing of the accounts of certain peoples' lives-- people who, unlike Oscar, had lived longer than they deserved.

The events meaningful to my story started around Thanksgiving over 30 years previous to Oscar's funeral and changed more lives than just mine. Some of this story is my own recollection of the facts. Other parts come from piecing together bits from thousands of pages of police files which I have had access to throughout my career. Still more came from the memoirs of that other mentor. Though I didn't witness them and have had to improvise dialogue, I have confirmed these other events beyond any reasonable doubt.

****

Sunday, October 10,1971

The weather on the Gulf of Georgia was unusually calm for an October day. The water was flat and mirror-like save for wakes of boats both large and small. The weather had been gorgeous ever since school had started six weeks before, with some days still getting up into the seventies. Storms could blow in from the North Pacific in October and shut down marine traffic for hundreds of miles along the coasts of Oregon, Washington, British Columbia and Alaska. But not that year. And in the sheltered waters of the Gulf of Georgia, the norm was a light gale and easily navigable seas.

The Gulf Islands, along with most of the west coast, were formed ten million years ago, give or take a few millennia, when a chunk of rock drifting up from Australia slammed into the North American continent. When the masses collided at the geologically breakneck speed of several inches per year, the moving plate created the mountainous coastline like a wave of rock crashing up on shore. Those two pieces of the Earth's crust are still pushing each other and that is why it is still an actively quake-prone area.

That would be a geologist's slang definition of the islands. To the layman who lives or vacations in the Gulf Islands, the word paradise is often used. Many residents of Vancouver, Victoria and Seattle spend their summers and weekends there to escape the 'rat race', as my dad called it. That's exactly what he did, retiring early at the age of 55. "You never know when your time's up. Might as well enjoy it while you're healthy", became his mantra when age started his mellowing process. Dad had not been mellow in his younger years. He had a business to run and four kids to feed and clothe. Stress was high and money always seemed short. Then he discovered Admiral's and rediscovered relaxation.

The island allure is hard to explain; it's best to experience it. The moment you get off the ferry, you notice that nobody is in a hurry. People stop and talk to each other; they wave at passing cars. Though all the locals know everyone's business, privacy and anonymity come easily. Elvis sightings were commonplace here even before he died. Carly Simon and James Taylor lived here for a while when they were an item. I'm sure Taylor found the island's speed a muse in synch with his laid-back style of music. Hollywood actors could be seen on the quaint nine-hole golf course enjoying the game at the slow pace it was meant to be played. But residents know why the famous and infamous come here. Privacy is respected rather than invaded.

Huge firs and cedars dominate the landscape, no matter where you are. Beautiful arbutus trees puncture the greens of the forest with their ever-changing reds and yellows. The deep-blue ocean is never far away. The climate is Canada's mildest, which doesn't sound like much, but Admiral's can see several years without snow. The winter rains are an annual complaint, but there wouldn't be the lush greenery without them. Even when the skies are gray, there is still much colour to the backdrop. Summers are usually hot and dry, making any outdoor recreation possible. Skiing, hiking, fishing, sailing, swimming, biking and tennis are all popular activities with the summer crowd but so is just lazing about, letting the days roll by, recharging the batteries. These attractions mean the summer population of Admiral's swells to about double its full-time numbers. But it also wasn't hard to be a non-participant on Admiral's, for society's drop-outs and their wannabes find a non-judging home there.

I stood on the foredeck of the Queen of the Islands and watched as she approached Sturdies Bay on Galiano Island, the first stop of the ferry's route after crossing the open strait from Vancouver. It was here that about a year previous, the ship had battered the dock and put both out of commission for a month. Landings on Galiano had to be made at the smaller and less modern dock in Montague Harbour for the duration. And the replacement ship, The Queen of Sidney, was a much larger boat. The skipper was the father of a school mate of mine. It was his second incident in calm seas in the last five years. It earned him a six week unpaid vacation and a new nickname: Captain Crunch.

There was to be no such excitement that day, though. I looked down over the car deck and watched as a deckhand climbed a ladder on the pier up to the controls which lowered the steel ramp to the ferry's deck. Directing traffic, the First Mate gave a smile and a wave to the half-dozen foot passengers as they set off up the ramp to the pier. When he directed the first of the ten or so vehicles to leave the boat, a male foot passenger turned and extended his thumb towards the traffic. He had shoulder-length, dirty blonde hair tied in a red headband and was dressed in blue jeans, a flower print shirt under a jean jacket, and hiking boots. The second vehicle off the boat, a brand new 1972 Toyota pick-up, stopped just before the end of the pier, holding up the rest of the ferry traffic. The hippie's pregnant mate slung her backpack into the box of the truck and climbed in behind it, using the bumper as a step. She had on an ankle-length pleated and wrinkled peasant dress, a large white and pink tie-dyed t-shirt, J.C. Waterwalkers and a yellow paisley kerchief on her head, Aunt Jemima-style. She sat down with the cab as a backrest as her mate talked to the driver through the open passenger door. He closed it and casually climbed into the box beside her. The truck started up the hill and traffic coming off the ferry resumed. No horns, shaking fists, or even shaking heads. It was just an accepted part of the island lifestyle.

I looked back down to the ramp at the lone car boarding. There wasn't a lot of inter-island traffic. Mostly it was from each island to the mainland or back, but I knew this passenger. It was Jim Morrison, my phys ed teacher. He was also my home-room teacher three years ago in grade eight when I first moved to the island. He had helped me settle in to my new surroundings in a way that made me feel welcome and accepted in this strange new island environment. I liked him as a teacher and a person. He was afflicted with polio as a child and struggled with walking ever since. He used crutches to get around quickly, but could walk slowly and awkwardly without them. Though he had a very slight build and a major physical impediment, he still made athletics his life. He was not the type to use excuses, though with polio, no one would have blamed him for taking an easier road than he had. He often told us as a coach or a guidance teacher that using an excuse or blaming someone or something else for your problems was the same as giving up control of your life. Once you accepted responsibility for everything in your life, everything, he would stress, only then do you have control over it. Over the years I have learned that he was right.

His mother lived on Galiano so I supposed he had been visiting her for the long weekend. Why he needed to take his car, though, puzzled me. Most people, if there were family or friends at their destination, would spare the expense of taking their vehicle on the ferry and just walk on. Also, the next day would be Thanksgiving Monday. I wondered why he wasn't staying until then.

Seeing him reminded me of the math homework I had to finish before Monday night. I had planned to do as much as I could on the boat so I could go out with friends that night and finish it up Monday afternoon. There was nothing big planned for the night, but anything was better than more homework.

I went back inside to the table where Mom and Dad sat, both reading novels. I opened my math book to the algebra problems. I found math fairly easy and usually breezed through it. This year was different, though. The algebra was much more abstract than before and the new teacher and I didn't get along well at all. He knew his math well and was quite arrogant about it. He just couldn't teach it. It wasn't a good mix when the students didn't want to learn it in the first place.

I could feel my body being forced to the right as the ship made a long, hard turn to port then straightened out again. As the engines were cut to idle speed, the purser announced over the PA that we were arriving at Village Bay on Mayne Island. Nothing much ever happens here. I kept at my homework. Working hard was not my forte, but I had to if I wanted to get the 70% mark necessary to get recommended in each class. Right now I was in the mid-60's in math. Maintaining a 70% mark meant you didn't have to write the final, something I only had to do once so far in high school.

I had never been to Galiano, Mayne nor the next stop, Pender Island. From the upper deck of the ferry, they looked every bit as idyllic as Admiral's, maybe even more so given their smaller populations. Combined, that number was about 2000, whereas Admiral's alone was almost twice that. As Admiral's had the only high school in the district, I knew all the kids that lived on the outer islands, who boarded on Admiral's during the school week. For some reason, if there were ever a 'bad' kid or someone in trouble at school, chances were it was one of the outer island kids. Until two years previous, they had stayed at a dormitory, but after an epidemic of pregnancies, most of the girls' parents arranged for private boarding. Only eight boys were left at the dorm, and in rapid succession, one was busted for having twenty-five hits of LSD and another for two one-kilo bricks of pot. Then the dorm burned down one fall weekend under 'mysterious circumstances' as the RCMP called it. Everybody knew, though that Donny Henrik did it. The cops couldn't prove it and if he had any accomplices, they weren't talking.

The Queen of the Islands suddenly cut engine speed. I hadn't looked out the window since we left Pender Island, but I knew this meant we had just entered Long Harbour on Admiral's Island. The boat always slowed down before passing Scott Point Marina so as not to rock the big yachts moored there. The harbour is long and narrow and the ferry leaves a large wake. At this time of year, however, there were only about a dozen boats and none could compare to the opulent craft flying American flags that were commonplace all around the islands in summertime. Lots of big-wigs in their corporate yachts spent a couple of weeks up here each summer touring the islands. They'd usually find a nice marina with a swimming pool for the kids and spend a few days getting drunk with their own kind. Then they'd move on to the next marina and do it again until the holiday was over. Scott Point was one of these marinas.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, we are now arriving at Long Harbour Terminal on Admiral's Island, our final destination. Would all passengers please proceed to the car deck in preparation for unloading. We hope your sailing today was a pleasant one and that you have a nice remainder of the day."

2

Our house was only about a mile and a half from the terminal, and it took longer waiting for our turn to get off the boat than it did to drive home. The reason we were on the Mainland for the weekend was my brother. He had left that Saturday to start a new job in a mine in the Yukon, leaving behind Cheryl and their two little girls. They would go up there after Barry finished his one month probation, and decide if a mining town three hundred miles from the Arctic Circle was the life for them. I told Barry I would save enough money to visit them up North the next summer, maybe even finding a decent summer job up there. Somehow I knew they wouldn't be coming home anytime soon.

The first thing I noticed as we were coming up the driveway was how many leaves had fallen in just two days. There were three huge maple trees surrounding the house, each about 60 feet high. Thanksgiving weekend is traditionally a large gathering for the Green family on Admiral's and the main activity of the males and any able-bodied kids was disposing of these leaves. We'd rake them in a pile on a tarp which we'd drag into the garden with the tractor to be spread out and tilled into the soil. It was almost a two-stage procedure, though as the leaves would not be done dropping for a month, when another long weekend would come along and another raking-bee would happen. That year, though, because of Barry's departure, there was no family get-together on Admiral's, and the leaves were all ours. I started to conjure up a good reason for not raking.

I didn't need it. It was a beautiful day, and Dad didn't feel like raking, either. Being too nice out to do homework, I decided to take Fitz for a walk on the beach. It was low tide and he could scratch and bite at the small crabs under the rocks I turned over for him. Fitz was a yellow-blonde Cocker Spaniel and was the same age as I. He was Barry's dog and we had brought him over to Admiral's on this trip to live out his final days. Cheryl would already have a handful with two small girls, and Barry couldn't take him up north. He was no stranger to Admiral's, though, having spent whole summers and many long weekends with us before we moved there.

Fifteen is pretty old for a dog, and Fitz lived every day to the utmost. Almost every dog back in Steveston could trace his lineage to Fitz. The ones that couldn't could boast of a fight or two with him. Most Steveston dogs could claim both. A Fitz-participated dog fight consisted of a solid ninety seconds of growling, biting, clawing, a clean break and finally some more staring and growling. Then Fitz and his opponent would call it a draw, walking in opposite directions, looking over their shoulders, still growling. Fitz would take on all comers, no matter the size. No dog ever won a fight with Fitz, but then Fitz never really won, either. Like dad, he had mellowed slightly when he was on Admiral's, mostly due to a lack of dogs. There was only the dreaded Rex next door to fight with, and they had had enough ties that neither was interested in trying to settle on a winner. The last battle was two summers previous when Fitz had a real red-letter day.

Our family and Rex's masters, the Torries, were having a picnic at the beach just down the road from home. At least Fitz had a picnic. He had gotten into the lunches when nobody was looking, devouring sandwiches made of salmon, ham and cheese, peanut butter, and chicken salad. There was no trace of a dozen donuts. He left us a few bananas and some apples. He also left Mr. Torrie two shoes near-full of puke. When Dad started to scold him, Fitz took exception to the public ridicule and created a diversion. Rex was watching from a big rock near the water, but in a flash of thirteen-year-old dog, Fitz was across the beach, up on the rock and the fight was on. Maybe Fitz was trying to blame the whole picnic/puke thing on Rex, but nobody bought it. Rex was a large Border-Collie, much bigger than Fitz and a few years younger, but as usual, it didn't matter to Fitz. They soon ran out of room on the rock and went tumbling three feet into the water. Rex wasn't much of a swimmer, so Fitz beat him to shore, shook himself dry all over a friend of Mrs. Torrie's, and stood proud on the beach as only a posturing victor could. Dad finally got hold of him and carried him by the collar about fifty feet to the truck and threw him in. When Dad climbed in the driver's side, Fitz shook himself dry again. I bet Dad's scream could be heard on Galiano.

Later in the day, I was watching TV in the back front room as we called it, Fitz asleep beside the couch. Suddenly, Fitz was bolt upright, growling as I looked up to see Rex walking by the French door at the side of the house. Before I could stop him, Fitz took off after Rex. The pane frame of the French door stopped Fitz at the shoulders, but his head had already gone through the glass. Amazingly, he wasn't cut at all, but he wanted another shot at Rex. He was about to take another run at the door, but I got hold of his collar before he could. Dad came in to see what the hell was going on, but a quick perusal of the crime scene answered his own question. I think he would have given Fitz away right then and there if anyone was sucker enough to take him.

We spent about an hour on the beach. Fitz was moving slowly on the rocky shore. He chased a stick into the water only twice for me, and even then he looked reluctant. He never would fetch properly for anyone but Barry, so the game wasn't much fun for the thrower, having to chase Fitz down in order to throw it again. As we walked back up the hill to home, Fitz really showed his age. It wasn't just the rocks on the beach slowing him down. I thought back to when we were both younger, how unfair it was that he had aged so rapidly. We were the same age, and yet he was in his final years and I was just approaching my prime.

One of my prized possessions today, in 2005, is a picture of Barry, Fitz and myself. Barry, a skinny thirteen year old with curly blonde hair and black horn-rimmed glasses is standing on the pedals of his bike, pumping for all he's worth, while Fitz and I ride in a side-car designed for delivering papers. Fitz is just a pup, feet up on the edge of the box and ears blowing in the wind. If dogs have a way of smiling, this is it. I am a chubby baby, probably about eight months old, and am laughing the way babies do when the thrill of their young life is happening.

After supper, I made a few phone calls to friends and found out that absolutely nothing was happening that night. Nothing had happened on Friday or Saturday nights, either, so at least I didn't miss anything while in Steveston. Tony had his mom's car for the night, though, full of gas and he wanted to just cruise around.

"Why not?" I said trying not to sound too thrilled. Tony was probably my best friend even though he was two years older. We ended up in the same class because he flunked once and I accelerated.

"Okay! I'll be there in about fifteen," he said, hanging up almost before finishing his sentence. Tony could be excitable sometimes for no reason at all. He lived about five miles away and the way he drove on the narrow curvy roads of Admiral's he could easily be at my place in five minutes, though sticking to the speed limits, it should take ten.

He picked me up at the french side door that Fitz had put his head through, and we coasted down the Torrie's driveway. Our driveway and the Torrie's made a big U around our house and where it went behind Torrie's house, became a sort of chopped off W. Tony always came up our driveway and down theirs.

"So whadja do in Steveston? When's you sister coming back? She still hot?"

"Shut up!! You're sick, man! My sister is not hot! Woof!" Tony had always liked Mary. As her brother it was my duty to think she was ugly and stupid.

"Whatever. Your brother left? That's what I'm gonna do. Heavy duty mechanics. I like cars more, but the money's in big machinery, in mines and shit. He made a good move."

"I guess. I'm gonna go up there next summer to visit them. Wanna go?"

"Damn right! That'd be a hoot!" We were just about at the end of Welbury Road where I lived. It was barely wide enough for two cars to pass without each going onto the narrow, grassy shoulder. The trees formed an arcing canopy over the road so that it seemed more like a tunnel than a waterfront road. Just as we approached the stop sign at the end of a blind hill, a deer ran out in front of the headlights, causing Tony to hit the brakes harder than normal.

"Shit! Good thing that little bugger wasn't on the road before I was slowing down for the stop! He'd've been lying in our laps!" Sometimes Tony made me laugh at his own luck and his subtle humour. He was going no slower because of the stop sign he knew was there than he was before the deer appeared. He rarely actually stopped at the corner, but slowed down enough to see if any cars were coming.

We were now on Long Harbour Road, the newest main road on the island. It had a quarter mile of straight road at one point and there was a lot of rubber laid down at one end of it where many Friday night races were started.

"Barry said I should be able to get a job up there somewhere, making good money, not minimum wage gardening for these widows for two hours a week. There's supposed to be lots of work up there. It'd be cool!"

"Is your sister gonna be there?"

"Shut up!!"

At the end of Long Harbour Road we turned left, heading into town. Ganges was small, and on Sunday night before Thanksgiving, deafeningly quiet. We passed Churchill Road and headed down the long, steep hill that curved around The Crow's Nest Inn at the bottom, almost at sea level.

"Too bad it wasn't Saturday and we could get a six-pack to cruise around with." Tony was big and could easily pass for nineteen and buy beer. I wasn't big, but I had a lot of facial hair and looked more than fifteen. But instead of turning right into the Crow, we headed left into the main part of the village. On our left was the harbour, a few boat's lights twinkling of the surface of the still water. Further up the road, we passed Parker Hall and our school on the right.

"Bloody tennis courts should have some lights, then we'd have something to do!" Tony and I played a lot of tennis. It was the only sport I could beat him at once in a while.

"We should bug Harding about that. He said he'd like to see kids use what stuff we have more." Mr. Harding was our principal. He talked a lot more than he acted.

"Yeah, as long as it doesn't cost money. Lights cost money."

We were now passing the Ship's Inn Restaurant on the right. Across the street and down a block was the Crest Restaurant on the left and Bank of Commerce and the Trading Company Grocery store on the right, sharing the same new brick building. In a sort of star-shaped meeting of five roads were the Trading Company, the Shell station, the drug store, the fire hall and Centennial Park, at an intersection that would confuse most city people, but was second nature to people on Admiral's.

We took a right at the Trading Company onto McPhillips Avenue and headed for the pool hall, even though it was closed. The library was right across the street from the pool hall, and kitty corner to the library on Jackson Avenue was the liquor store. Education, entertainment, and refreshments all on one corner, though where you got which was often interchangeable. You could usually find at least two out of three at any of those places. Next to the liquor store was The Reef, a fish and chip cafe, and looking straight down Jackson and across Rainbow Road was the elementary school. Tony turned right again, this time on Hereford, and we were back in front of the Bank of Commerce. As we passed the Trading Company we veered to the left this time, took a quick right around the wooden planters and stopped in Centennial Park, facing back the way we came in. From here we could see most of the rest of the village. To the left, the Gulf station, and across the street a real estate office, a gift store, the butcher and Robber Bob's. Robber Bob's was a little confectionery store with prices inflated for those who forgot to buy enough milk on Saturday when the bigger stores were open. Robber Bob's pretty much marked the village's southern limits except for the bakery, which was obscured from normal vision because of a long, twisty driveway into it. To our right was the Esso station and bulk plant. Across from them were the Bank of Montreal, the Post Office, and Parker's Department Store. Parker's had everything from ladies underwear to lumber. In the basement was Len's Lucky Dollar, another grocery store. Behind us was Centennial Park- a few swing sets, a Maypole and a two see-saw horses. It overlooked the government wharf where about eighty boats of various sizes and styles docked.

"One of these Hallowe'ens I'm gonna plaster that sign with some real rotten tomatoes. That'd sure stand out." Tony was referring to the bright blue Bank of Montreal sign that stood high above the single story building and made everything but the bright yellow Shell sign pale by comparison. After all, this was Admiral's where garish is gauche. In the daytime, the sign was barely noticeable because it couldn't compete with the natural colours of the town in any season. But at night it stood out as a reminder that even an idyllic island must be connected to the rest of the big, bad, industrialized, financed world out there.

"Sure you will," I mocked, knowing full well that he'd never carry through with his threat. Tony was excitable and sometimes a loudmouth, but he wasn't a vandal. In fact Admiral's didn't have vandals. They were called poets. Graffiti was almost non-existent on the island. There was none in the village and what there was on the rest of the island was usually, if not poetic, at least something for most to enjoy. When Long Harbour Road was built, there were a few sections where rock had to be blasted through and the resulting stone facets on the edge of the road became the tablets for many a spray paint philosopher. One of the strangest, and I saw it every day of my life on the island, was 'Long Live Crutch Crickets.' It must have had meaning to someone, but to most it only put a question mark on their face. Many people, at first glance, think the word is 'crotch' and that the graffiti is offensive, but when they read it carefully and realize their mistake, the puzzlement sets in.

"So should we go to your brother's the first day school gets out? Not much to hang around here for." Tony was born on the island and will probably die on the island. This might be the adventure of his life as far as traveling any distance from home.

"Damn rights. It'd be fun to pretend we're a lot older and get jobs we're not qualified for! Ha! Barry said by next summer he should be able to get us jobs in the mine. We could make a shitload of money. There's a camp for the single workers and its dirt cheap to live there."

Though Admiral's was a great place, there was not a lot of opportunity for young people. Jobs were scarce and it was a sad part of the island life that it lost its best young people to places that could offer jobs to them. A kid could wait a long time for a job to open up on the ferries or in the highway department, two of the plum government jobs available on Admiral's.

"Let's go down to the wharf. Dan said he might be coming in tonight. He might have some sole for me to take to Mom." Tony's brother Dan worked on a fishing boat that would sometimes dock in Ganges Harbour for a night. Bottom-dwelling sole were not the most marketable fish, but were still tasty pan-fried with lemon and garlic.

Going through the park, we walked past the Cenotaph which bore the names of island men who died in Europe in the World Wars. There were three Cooks on the stone list, two great-uncles of Tony's from the first war and an uncle from the second. Tony always touched the cenotaph as he walked by it. Though he never knew any of his uncles named on it, he was proud of their contribution and the rock-solid evidence of his family's long history on Admiral's. We stopped at the top of the gangway that led down to the wharf and looked for the boat Dan crewed on. It was hard to find a spot on the railing big enough to lean on that wasn't covered in gull shit.

"Nah...he's not here. Maybe tomorrow night." It was dark out but the wharf was about the best-lit area in Ganges. We walked back to the car just as the ferry traffic from Victoria reached the village. There would always be at least one slow driver backing up all the other cars right from Fulford Harbour where the ferry docked. Anyone going to the north half of the island would have a long, slow ride, as there were very few straight stretches of road which would allow passing.

The long string of cars and trucks would start slowing as it came down steep Ganges Hill, past Robber Bob's and make a left turn right in front of where we were parked. We sat in the car and named everybody we knew as they went by. Fifteen vehicles in all, and probably that many again didn't come as far as Ganges. The second last one was a short, black Chevy van.

"There's Donny Henrik and those guys," said Tony. "Gee, I wonder what they're up to?" he added in a sarcastic tone. Anyone under the age of twenty-five knew that Donny and his buddies brought LSD to the island and, when in season, took out a load of the pot that made Admiral's famous in dope-smoking circles.

"Those assholes are gonna get caught sooner or later," I said. "I don't know why the cops haven't caught on to them yet." Drug use on Admiral's was no bigger a problem than anywhere else, but in such a small place, stories could get blown out of proportion.

"Maybe the cops are on the take," Tony said. For a guy who rarely watched TV, he came up with some wild ideas sometimes.

"Laurel and Hardy? I doubt it. They're straighter than my dad!"

"I suppose. Still hard to figure why those retards haven't been caught, though."

"Dumb luck, I guess."

"Dumb is right. Hey, let's follow 'em!" Without waiting for my input, Tony started the car, raced around the planters and got onto the road. He was going like a madman to catch up to the van. We were just in time to see it turn into the Crowsnest Inn about two hundred yards away as we came around the curve by Parker Hall. We pulled into the parking lot in time to see three of them carrying backpacks into the main entrance of the Crow.

"Yeah, it's that goofball Gorman and Renner the retard with him. What a bunch of losers! I don't know how they could carry on a life of crime for so long and not get caught. Except for the one time. But that was hardly anything." Tony turned around to back up and leave the Crow. "Jesus! the pool still has water in it. Wanna go for a dip?"

"It's a little cool for that! Maybe on the night before we leave for the Yukon." Tony and I and several others made a game of climbing the fence and skinny dipping in the Crow's pool late at night about three times each summer for the last two years. The owner, an old German, would run out in his underwear screaming that he would "kill all you little English bastards!" We always had an escape route planned out and he never caught us.

Tony pulled the car out of the Crow's parking lot and took a right up the hill past Pioneer Village. He drove past the government office, the hospital and Value Village Hardware and Lumber, all of which were not really in town, but in more of a low-rent area. We drove another mile of almost straight road before hitting the sharp S-curves just before the golf course. A steep but straight hill parallel to number one fairway brought us to Central Hall where four roads meet. A left would take us to Vesuvius and the west side of the island where the 'old money' of the island lived. Going straight would take us past all the resorts on St. Mary's lake. We took a right which was Upper Ganges Road, bordering number nine fairway. After passing the golf course on this side, the road took two sharp S-turns which required slowing down to about twenty miles per hour. Tony tried to go faster every time he used the road. His record was about thirty now.

"Shit, man, I don't wanna die tonight," I said as we approached the first and worst of the turns.

"Bhuuck! Bhuck-bhuck-bhuck-bhuck-bhuuuck!" Tony did the chicken noise really well. He had a lot of practice. Still, he slowed down to about twenty-five. "Nah...me either. Mom needs to get some new tires on this thing. It's not hugging the corners like it should."

"I noticed. Almost heard a squeal back there." The second part of the turn straightened out past an apple orchard and an old creamery, now a hippie commune. The second set of turns was not as dangerous, but Tony could make them feel that way. We were soon through them and back on Long Harbour Road.

"I gotta get goin' home," Tony said. "I should do that math homework. You finish it?" He gave me funny look.

"Yeah, I did it on the ferry yest- No! You need to figure that out for yourself. But thanks for the ride. It's not that tough. Just bloody triangles." Tony gunned the car now to head up the driveway.

"Whatever. I'll figure out as much as I need to." We had come around the back of the house and were parked beside the French door. "See ya tomorrow. Say hi to your sister for me!"

"Shut up!" I said as he quietly coasted away from the houses. It was 10:30 on a Sunday night and Monday was Thanksgiving. Fitz was asleep in the old part of the house but didn't hear me go by on my way to the front of the house. Mom and Dad were asleep. I made two pieces of toast, smeared on peanut butter, squiggled on some ketchup and ate them while looking for something on TV.

3

The next day was another beautiful one. I wasn't so lucky with the leaves that day, though. Dad, Mr. Torrie and another neighbour, Bob Walker were planning a raking bee and I was included. What was on the ground took almost all day to rake up, but at least they let me have a beer with them at lunch. Mom had made a pile of salmon sandwiches and we had all worked up a great appetite by then.

That night I did a little homework, watched some TV and was pretty bored by ten o'clock, but not tired. I decided to go for a jog to the ferry terminal and back, perhaps stop and talk to Oscar. Oscar was a security guard at the terminal who I had gotten to know. About a month previous, I jogged past the ferry terminal and up the hill to Scott Point and headed back. Coming back down the hill to the terminal, I slipped on gravel and traveled about five feet on my knees and elbows before doing a near-perfect lip stand. Oscar saw it all from his look-out room on the second floor of the terminal building and came to me as fast as his seventy-five-year-old feet would allow him.

"You alright, son? Was a pretty mean tumble you took there."

I think I just groaned at first. I knew who Oscar was but I had never talked to him. "Yeah, I'm OK. Knee stings a little."

"Come over to the office. I got a first aid kit there. Let's see what's in it. Never had to open it b'fore. You can walk, can't ya?"

I took a few steps. "Yeah, it's not too bad, really." I was scratched up quite a bit and hurt like hell but I hate to admit to pain. Oscar took me inside and put some green stuff on the scratches, making them hurt even more. There wasn't much bleeding, but he bandaged me up quite liberally. If he was in the army like most Commissionaires, I'd hoped he hadn't been a medic.

"You better just rest here a bit. I doubt if you'll feel like runnin' and I can't leave my post to give you a ride home, either. You live just down the Old road, don't you? I've seen you runnin' past here a few times."

"Yeah, it's about a mile and a half from here. I'll be able to walk. Thanks alot for your help." I tried to stand and got a shot of pain from my right knee. It must have showed on my face.

"Just sit and rest some more, there, son. You wanna call your parents to pick you up? You can use the office phone. No charge."

"No, thanks. I'll be okay. They're probably asleep by now, anyway. Maybe I'll just sit here a little while longer."

"That'd be just fine, son. Always glad to have a little company. You like a glass of water?" He went to the sink and filled a glass and handed it to me, then reached for his coffee cup and took a sip. "Engineer on the boat tonight is an ornery young cuss and don't come to have a sit with me. New to the island. Maybe he just sleeps all night and lets the oiler do all the work. I don't know, but I never see them 'til their relief gets here at five. Other shifts are friendlier, though. You're a friend of Tony's aren't you?"

"Yeah, he works for you, right?" We both knew the answers to our questions, but asked them anyway, to be polite. Tony lived next door to Oscar. He did yard work and odd-jobs that Oscar couldn't handle himself.

"Yep. Tony's a good kid. I guess if you're his friend, you're probably alright, too. What's your name?"

"Mark Green."

"Well, Mark, I'm pleased to make your acquaintance." He held out his big black hand and as he turned it over, I was surprised to see how white his palm was. I think it was whiter than mine. I'd never really noticed this on any other black people that I knew, which weren't many, but this still struck me as odd. I read somewhere later that there is almost no pigment in palms of hands or bottoms of feet.

As we shook hands, he let out a big smile and loosened his grip only after I smiled back for about five seconds. That was pretty easy to do, as his big, toothy smile was infectious. Then he started talking. He went from bandages to his family so smoothly, you'd swear his words were greased. He talked about his grandparents and how they had bought their own freedom from their master somewhere in the southern states and made their way to California during the Gold Rush; how that didn't pan out and made their way north, stopping first in Oregon, then sailing to Victoria in the mid 1850's before finally ending up on Admiral's, being some of the first settlers to the Island.

I just sat and listened. He could tell a great story, but he had some great material to work with. As he talked, he touched. He would lay his big white palm on my shoulder or knee, sometimes looking at my wounds as he did. It wasn't offensive nor even uncomfortable. His deep voice and slow speech were pacifying. The sparkle in his eyes made him look as excited as a little kid on Christmas Eve. That mellow excitement was as contagious as his smile.

After they were free, his grandparents weren't exactly on easy street. There was still a lot of racism, imported from all over the states, even in the liberal west. Pro-slavery talk in California was why they finally left there. They traveled with four small kids, all under 10 years old. People would rip them off, often charging double the going rate that a white person would have to pay for things. But when they got to the British Colony of Vancouver Island, they found very little racism. They were allowed a settlement on Admiral's equal to any white man's. They could claim any land yet unused and buy it for $1.25 an acre when the government put it on the market. They carved out a living, first selling wood for fuel, then slowly building up a sheep farm, while planting an apple and pear orchard for the future. As they built, they purchased his grandfather's brother's freedom and he, too came to Admiral's to homestead.

Oscar's mother had been born on Admiral's in 1866, the year Vancouver Island joined with the mainland to become British Columbia. She was named Victoria in honour of the Queen who had instituted changes and reforms to British society. Her friends had called her Wick instead of Vic because, they said, she always had a flame burning in her. If not the head of her class at the North Vesuvius School, she was certainly the most outspoken. Like her namesake, she sought reform where it was needed and was not afraid to speak up in order to set things straight, be it bringing the schoolyard bully to justice or organizing inventive social events, bridging school and community. She often helped younger students in their studies and it was expected that she would someday become a teacher. She did, graduating from the Saanich Normal School in 1886. She immediately returned to Admiral's and began teaching at Central School, becoming one of the first black female schoolteachers in North America. The milestone went unnoticed on Admiral's, however, as she was just Wick Whims, the new schoolmistress. Her colour and gender were not even a footnote to islanders. More than twenty years previous, at the height of the U.S. Civil War, Central School had already had a black schoolmaster.

In 1895, she finally gave in to the charms of Willie Wood, a fisherman from Nanaimo who had cousins on Admiral's. They were married in June, and in March of 1896, Oscar William Wood arrived in the world.

That night after Oscar had revealed most of his story to me, I was able to jog back home, hardly even noticing my scrapes. Tony had told me that Oscar was a pretty special person, but that night I found out for myself. It seemed crazy, but it felt like the more Oscar touched as he talked, the less I hurt.

Since then I had visited Oscar about seven or eight times and learned more about his family, Admiral's history, and life in general. This Thanksgiving Sunday when I got to the terminal, Oscar was ready for me. His usual big smile greeted me at the south door of the foot-passenger's lobby.

"Evenin', Mark. Thought you might be here tonight." He had a pitcher of water and a clean glass for me and a coffee he had already started for himself. Oscar stood just over six feet tall and was well built for a man in his seventies. The shoulders were still broad and long arms ending in those big hands gave him a reach that looked slightly out of proportion, like a boxer with his gloves on. His thinning, curly hair was mostly white, as were his eyebrows, but his eyes shone like glass marbles. The combination was a conflict if one needed to guess his age. The infectious smile was dominated by his big, white teeth, but the shiny eyes had a smile of their own. The infection was irresistible. No one could keep a straight face when Oscar smiled.

"Thirsty?" He knew I was still out of breath and wouldn't be able to drink for a few minutes, but he liked to tease a little and be a gracious host at the same time. He craved company and went out of his way to make people feel at home. My feeling was that I was honoured to be in the presence of such an intelligent and entertaining person. I didn't know he was about to turn the tables on me.

"Tell me about your family for a change," he said. He caught me off-guard. I thought I visited him so that he could talk to me, not the other way around.

"Start with your grandparents. What's their roots?" I guess the stunned look on my face told him I didn't know what to say.

I had to admit I didn't know a whole lot about my grandparents except that they were my parents' parents. The only one I knew was my maternal Grandmother and she had died when I was 10. I knew that Mom's side were farmers in Saskatchewan because of all of Mom's dirty thirties stories and because I had cousins there. Gramma had spent summers there and winters with us in Steveston where it was a lot warmer. I had been to Saskatchewan a couple of times with Mom when I was little, but didn't remember a lot about it except there were no trees and it was hot and flat.

Gramma would come to the coast in late October or so, just when it started to turn cold back on the prairie. She would usually be there right after Thanksgiving. She timed it because we would go to the island for the long weekend and she wanted no part of that. She wasn't going out to the 'bush'. Steveston was flat and barren like the prairies. Gramma could feel right at home there.

She had long, long gray hair that hung right to her ass when she let it down at night, but always wore it up in a bun in the day. She had to spend about fifteen minutes every night combing it and in the morning she had to do it all over again. I often thought it would look nicer to wear it down during the day, and easier to take care of if it was in a bun overnight.

She quilted all winter, rarely venturing out of the house. We had a big bedroom with two double beds and room for a quilting frame and a sewing machine between them. Mary and Gramma slept in one bed and I in the other. Sometimes I had to sleep with Gramma, but I can't remember what would precipitate the change.

Mary and I would tease her sometimes, hiding stuff or making noises when she didn't know we were around. One thing Mary and I agreed upon was Gramma's psychic abilities. We would ask her about things and she would tell us what would happen to this or that and she would always be right.

"Your Gramma sounds like she was an interesting woman," Oscar said. "And you thought you didn't know anything about her. You see, once you started talkin', you recalled a lot of things. Now, when you talk to your parents tomorrow, you ask them about their parents. First they won't say much, but eventually a good story will come out. Next time you come to see me, you'll have something else to tell me." He took a sip of his coffee then pointed his head in the air with his eyes closed and let out a small sigh. "Gettin' too old for these night shifts, I'm afraid. I sure like the peace and tranquility I get with them, though."

I wondered: As opposed to what? He was a widower and lived alone. His family rarely came to see him. He lived in the sticks on Admiral's. What more peace and tranquility could there be? Maybe he meant that I had overstayed my welcome. I'd been there about forty-five minutes. I downed my water and said I had to go.

"Okay, you come back again soon, now," he said as he closed and locked the door I had come in.

As I jogged home, I tried to imagine asking my parents about their parents, especially Dad. He never talked about them. He had some good stories about his youth, but his parents never were in them. Barry had once told me that they had both committed suicide. I didn't know if I could ask or not, but for Oscar's stories in return, I would do what I could.

***

December, 1944

Stalag Luft I

Barth, Germany

Sergeant Willie Herzog stood on the flatdeck of the Mercedes truck. He was surveying the actions of his prisoners in the West Compound as they went about their daily routine of warding off the boredom. It was a cold day, but several dozen men were engaged in a light game of soccer on the frozen field. Others watched the game as they walked around the field keeping warm and getting a final taste of fresh air for the day before their return to the stuffy, overcrowded barracks for the night.

Stalag Luft I was manned by the German Air Force and it imprisoned Allied airmen. The air force brotherhood made for if not relaxed relations between captive and keeper, at least an environment of mutual respect, where the laws of the Geneva Convention covering Prisoners of War were more closely practiced than in the regular Army Stalags. Since the famous escape at Stalag Luft III in March, however, the barracks in Luft I were subject to random searches by the guards. Officially, they were looking for any signs of tunneling or even suspicious behaviour on the parts of the Allied airmen. Tonight the barracks in West Compound would have a surprise inspection and Willie Herzog was excited at the prospect.

Willie Herzog had been denied his wishes to serve his country in the air. His right leg was two inches shorter than his left and the good military doctors decided his disability would make him more suitable for ground service than flying. Of course, this ridiculous decision made Willie even more bitter than he was and once again blamed his misfortune on his father's weak genes. The short leg was a genetic defect that showed up in the Herzog line every two or three generations. Even with an elevating shoe, Willie experienced a constant pain in his back since he was a child. He didn't learn to walk until he was almost three years old. He blamed every misfortune in his life on the leg and blamed the leg on his father. The bitterness in his heart and the constant pain in his back made Willie Herzog an extremely brutal man. He loved to share his pain and had found that it was something for which he had a great talent. Other men of weaker character could not stomach some of the things Herzog knew were necessary for an effective interrogation or the breaking of a man's will.

Herzog knew that escape from Stalag Luffte I was impossible. He had been stationed here since it opened in October of 1942 and no prisoner had ever left alive. He had seen to that himself five times. On each of those five occasions, he had been in charge of the night watch in West Compound when a new guest of the Reich was captured. Before the new prisoner was even officially in the camp, he would be brought to a small shed used as a shop by the camp carpenter. The new prisoner would be sat down in a big heavy wooden chair, strapped down at the waist, wrists and ankles. While one guard behind him held his chin up so his mouth stayed closed to stifle the screams, another held the fingers of his right hand tight to the arm of the chair. This made it easy for Willie Herzog to drive a spike through the airman's hand and into the wooden chair in one precise blow. Herzog would question the prisoner until an hour before dawn, trying to extract any useful information. When he was unsatisfied with the answers he was getting he would use the hammer to smash the prisoner's fingers. He would have liked to be smashing the prisoner's perfect, symmetrical legs, but he needed the prisoner to be able to at least walk if not run at the end of the agony. At some point the other hand would be nailed down, mostly for the pleasure it gave Willie. It was savage, spiteful torture, for most of the prisoners had no useful information, but Willie Herzog enjoyed seeing suffering on the faces of the airmen who bombed the cities and factories of Germany. Before dawn arrived, the prisoner would be 'caught' trying to escape custody and shot in the back as he ran away. On each occasion, the prisoner 'ran' before paperwork was done on him, so Major Todd P. Wilson, the Senior British Officer, never even saw the man alive to be able to dispute Herzog's story. The markings on the bodies were suspicious to Wilson who didn't believe the story the first time it happened and by the fifth time had memorized every detail of the incidents including the names of the guards involved. When the war was over, he vowed, Willie Herzog and his henchmen would be brought to justice.

Herzog's motives were not always service to his country, for he did only what was best for Willie Herzog. But during time of war, the two were often the same. He simply enjoyed torturing the men who were his enemies. If he got any information from them, he used it to curry favour with his superiors. He only killed them to cover up his crime.

***

4

Donny Henrik was from Galiano and was the nephew of Jim Morrison, my gym and guidance teacher. What a contrast in one family. Where Morrison had to fight his whole life to achieve the lofty goals he set for himself, Donny, physically able and bright as well, didn't set goals. Where Morrison tried to mentor into his students his scrappy, positive, do-your-best attitude, Donny's leadership qualities were limited to bullying or cajoling his few buddies into helping him in his dirty work.

Donny's mother, Morrison's younger sister, had an alcohol problem that was probably a big influence when Donny was in the womb. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome didn't have a name then, but any sensible person knew that it wasn't a wise thing to get a fetus pissed up. A drunk also, his father abandoned her when he found out about Donny's conception. His mother had to move in with her parents and between the three of them, Donny was raised in a patchwork, haphazard kind of way. His grandfather tried to instill some values into him, while the two women were always protecting him. Morrison tried to help out more after his father died, but it was one challenge he hadn't overcome as yet. I know all this because Morrison often used them in examples when he taught guidance classes. He never said they were family, but knowing a little about Donny, it was easy to put the pieces together.

Morrison would often use his guidance classes like his church, preaching to us young boys against vandalism, having respect for all people and nature, doing unto others and working up to our potential. He would often say that if he made the rules, school marks wouldn't count for anything except to compare to what a student should be getting for a mark and what they actually were getting. I always thought he was talking straight at me because I really only worked hard enough to get that 70% so that I didn't have to write finals. Who he really was talking about, though were guys like his nephew whose potential/achievement gap was negative and huge.

Donny Henrik was 21 years old that year and had managed to stay out of jail, if not out of trouble. His uncle had often thought a bit of jail time might scare him straight, but his grandmother, at his mother's pleading, had always bailed him out with expensive lawyers or less conventional means when the going got tough. She once paid one of Donny's buddies to take the whole blame for a break and enter that three of them had committed in Victoria. Steve Gorman did nine months in Wilkinson Road Jail. The third guy, Leon Renner was forever indebted to Donny and his grandmother.

Donny and his gang roamed a lot, but their home base was in a small suite in an old house in the James Bay area of Victoria. From there, Donny dealt drugs. LSD was his specialty, but he would also dabble in pot if the profit was there. They traveled to Galiano and Admiral's on sales trips, frequenting the bars and staying at friends' places on Admiral's and his Grandmother's on Galiano. When they were on Admiral's, they hung out and did most of their dealings at The Crow's Nest Inn. Two nights was all they would stay in one place. After that, they moved on like wolves on the prowl.

*****

The Crow's Nest Inn was the only bar on the island in those days, and had a dedicated clientele, from old soldiers swapping war stories to young hippies on a break from tree-hugging, to older-looking teenagers fooling the bartender for a few illegal beers. Most people mixed well in The Crow. It was just like at school. You couldn't afford to be too picky about your friends, because there just weren't enough to go around. In a small place like Admiral's, if you get too choosy about your company, you soon won't have any.

The Crow was owned and operated by Wolfgang Hertz. He had acquired it in 1966 after the previous owners had died in a sensational car crash on Vancouver Island. No one really knew much about him, especially where his money came from. The few locals who had met him said he liked to keep things about himself secret. As a going concern, the Crow was a gold mine, and its property value was huge even in those days. Rumours had him as an heir of the car-rental family, others said he was a descendant of the German physicist who discovered radio waves. Or both. Either way, he had enough bucks to pay cash for the Crow.

The Crow was situated right at the head of Ganges Harbour. From the second story where the 16 rooms were, a visitor had a great view of the water, stretching right out to Pender Island. It also overlooked one of the few clay tennis courts in the province and a huge swimming pool for guests only. With so few rooms, neither got a lot of use, but Hertz kept it in tip-top shape. Built in the twenties, it was a wood-frame structure, but stood like a rock.

In the back was the entrance to the pub. At the front, facing the water and the road, was the main entrance. Where the property met the road there was evidence of an ancient Indian settlement. Crushed shells, arrowheads and other artifacts were a sure sign of some sort of activity. It was likely a great place for an open-air kitchen, or maybe just their compost heap. The anthropology department at the University of Victoria had studied many other sites around Admiral's and each summer had requested permission from Hertz and the previous owners of the Crow to conduct a dig at the site, without success. It was well known even in those days before political correctness was coined, that a find of even minor archaeological importance could be a major commercial hindrance to any business on that property. Being in the tourist industry, you would think that Hertz could see the upside of such a scenario, but all his efforts in this regard were in keeping the diggers out. Once, Mary, Ann Torrie and myself had hitched a ride to town and were walking back home past the Crow. Ann, being curious of the shell-laden dirt, started doing a little digging with her fingers. In less than two minutes, Hertz was running across the lawn at us, screaming in German. We didn't have a clue what he said, but the message was obvious. His nostrils were flared, his eyes were bulging, and there was drool at the corner of his mouth. Were it not for the thick blackberry bushes between us, there might have been some physical contact. The three of us ran like hell up the road toward home.

There is a story dating back to the mid 15th century that a great massacre was waged on the beach across the road from the Crow between the Viking-like Haida from the north and one of the more peaceful Cowichan bands of the Coast Salish tribes. There really isn't much of a beach there, so I could see it spilling out onto what are now the Crow's front grounds.

The Haida were an aggressive warrior society with an advanced culture. Art was an important part of their life, but so was war. Though they were feared because of their reputation, intimidation was often all that was necessary to achieve their goals. Their domain was further north in the Queen Charlotte Islands, but they roamed as far south as present day Seattle on trade missions. Unfortunately for the southern tribes of the Coast Salish, the Haida's trade was mostly one-directional and their favourite commodity was human lives for the purpose of slavery. Southern tribes feared them as the superior warriors that they were, and always had to be wary of the lightning raids that the Haida were known for.

They were great boat-builders and would travel this thousand miles of coastline in 60-person dugout canoes that were made from a single cedar tree. The first white men to see these marine marvels called them wave-eaters, they handled the ocean so well. The Haida attacked some of the much larger ships that white men arrived in and even captured a few against much superior fire power.

The Haida were well known to accept slaves from southern tribes in exchange for peace, a primitive form of extortion. According to legend, one of the Salish tribes dishonoured the Haida by sending a weak, effeminate man to be a Haida slave. A raiding party was sent to find the nomadic chief and his clan. After weeks of searching, they were finally found on the beach near the Crow. A typical Haida sneak-attack was impossible on this spot so the Salish were readied for battle when they saw the two-canoe fleet. Though the Salish were formidable fighters in their own right and they out-numbered their aggressors, the Haida turned the battle into a slaughter. Only about thirty Haida men, roughly a third of the attacking party, were killed. There was no distinction between genders when tribes were at war, and only three were spared. One hundred and twenty Salish men, women and children were slaughtered. Adults were disembowled. Small children were swung by the ankles to have their head smashed on large rocks. Only the chief and two children were spared. Mercy was not practiced in raids like this and vengeance was only the secondary reason for it. The primary reason was to send a message to other chiefs that such disrespect would not be tolerated. The offending chief was brought back to the Queen Charlottes and made a slave of the lowest order for the remainder of his life. The two children were left on the beach to spread the story when they would eventually discovered and adopted by some other nomadic clan.

Looking back now, and remembering the look on Hertz's face I can only imagine that the raiding Haida had the same look as they charged up the beach on their killing mission.

5

July 1st is Canada's birthday. It's also the only day of the year back in Steveston that Fitz was chained up in our back yard. The rest of the year he was free to roam. A parade and a fair with rides, games, and food was a big deal in Steveston, and Fitz wasn't going to spoil it with his boorish dog ways.

Dad had been on the Reserve Force of the RCMP when we lived there. His duties were mostly restricted to the ceremonial type things when somebody needed an RCMP in traditional uniform. One July 1st, he got to flank one side of the stage in the lacrosse rink as Steveston's Salmon Queen was crowned. It was a big day for the Green family because Pam was one of the five contestants, so there were two Greens on the stage. But Pam didn't win and Dad, unimpressed with his role, complained bitterly about how hot the Red Serge suit was. To make the day complete, Fitz got out of his confines at home and terrorized every food vendor on the grounds as Mary and I tried to catch him. Mary finally snuck up on him as his attention was heavily focused on a black lab bitch right beside the line-up for the Tilt-a-Whirl. Fitz had a ride of his own in mind, but Mary got his leash on him just as he was about to mount the lab and dragged him home instead. The lab followed them, but Mary locked Fitz in the garage. Fitz wouldn't wag his tail around her for a couple of days after that.

One of Dad's best friends from those days was a captain in the force named Bob Walker. He would always joke that the only reason Dad volunteered for the Force was to drum up business for his funeral parlour, but only some Reserve cops were allowed to carry guns, and only in extreme situations. Those that were, were mostly retirees from the regular Force or the Armed Forces, which Dad wasn't.

Bob Walker had spent the war years in the Army's intelligence division. He hinted that he may have worked for the spy code-named Intrepid who Winston Churchill had credited with turning the tide in favour of the Allies in World War II. Two years after the war was over, Walker was moved to the inner circle of the RCMP's intelligence department, known as the Security Service. He was posted to 'E' Division in Vancouver. Just before the war, 'E' Division's main focus was keeping an eye on any suspicious Japanese-Canadians on the west coast and determining if there were any who might be spies.

While Japan was overtaking country after country in the Pacific, there was concern in British Columbia that it could be next. The Japanese were attacking their neighbours and easily overrunning them with little or no resistance. In B.C. a movement was underway promoting the movement of Japanese-Canadians to internment camps east of the Rockies. It was not a popular-based movement, however. The main thrust behind it was a radio-preacher named Art Linden. His fear-mongering broadcasts raised concerns among politicians if not the citizens. 'E' Division was charged with determining the real threat the Japanese posed to Canada's defenses. The advice they gave to Cabinet was that there was no real threat and that internment would be pointless. Most of the Japanese were second- and third-generation Canadians who could trace their roots in Canada as far back as most whites of British descent.

Steveston was a fishing village with a large Japanese population. The town itself was about 5000 strong and about 1/3 were Japanese. As my Dad would retell it many times, the internment of the Japanese was one of the blackest spots in Canada's history. He watched families he had grown up with since he was little, born and raised in Canada, be shipped off to places far enough from the ocean that they weren't a threat to national security. Art Linden's broadcasts got more feverish with each day of news of the Japanese successes. When Hong Kong fell, the screams got louder. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, his rantings hit a frenzy. 'Ocean-going' fishing boats in the hands of Japanese; the 'unknown' of where their loyalties really lay; and the possibility of spies in that modern age of communication were all topics of Linden's ridiculous diatribes. Even though the white people who lived among the Japanese knew there was no threat from their friends and neighbours, and the RCMP, a conservative, err-on-the-side-of-caution group if there ever was one, judged them as low-to-no risk. Yet two months after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese were shipped inland, and their property confiscated 'in trust' until at least the end of the war.

Bob Walker was part of the team that oversaw the orderly return of the Japanese to the coast five years after the war ended. Some did not return, perhaps feeling an unwarranted shame, or they just found a better life where they were sent. Walker's job was to ensure there were no false returnees. When studying the need for internment before the war, 'E' Division's biggest fear was that illegal immigration after the war would be too easy for undesirables from Japan. With a large influx of Japanese returning from the camps, an illegal alien would have a much easier time blending in. There was no rule that said people had to return to where they were before the war, so a war criminal could have an easy time settling in anywhere on the coast if he could speak passable English. 'E' division had to rely mainly on the concerns of white people who were suspicious of their new post-war neighbours.

Now, though, in the fall of 1971, Bob Walker was retired and living on Admiral's just down the road from us. He had a waterfront lot with a small cabin and a saltwater swimming pool poured right into a rocky outcropping on the water. The pool was unique. It was 25 meters long and four meters wide and about 4 1/2 feet deep with one string of floats running the length of it up the middle, making two lap lanes. It was designed so that it could be filled at high tide by opening a couple of valves. When the water got murky or anything, it could be drained at low tide. He had to supplement the top foot of water with a pump at the shore, otherwise on the rare super-high tides, the pool would be flooded over the top. He circulated the water through a heater so that it was kept warm, but he didn't add any chemicals to kill off unwanted creatures of the deep. Instead, he scraped barnacles, swam with whatever was small enough to get through the inlet screens, and kept the pump flushed with fresh water after use. In the fall, he had a plastic, warm-air-filled dome covering it so that his fitness program wasn't put off by bad weather. It was the strangest thing to see for the first time at night with lights on inside. With the pool being the shape it was the bubble looked like a neon hot dog at night.

Though he seemed to live richly, he really only had mediocre means, which were his two pensions and whatever he socked away over the years. He had no family, neither his own nor any siblings, but he liked kids. I was always welcome to bring friends down to his pool as long as I phoned ahead. I only did once, though, as it was really built for doing laps and not much else.

Whenever he came up to visit Dad, they would get into the home-made wine that Dad was famous for. When their lips were loosened, the two of them could tell some pretty interesting stories between all the people they knew in the Vancouver area over the years. There was the womanizing, hard-drinking, married United Church minister they played poker with several times a year. He presided over many funerals Dad directed, and was almost always drunk. He really liked Dad's wine, too. Most people didn't even know the minister drank until the first time they met him sober. Bob once caught him ministering to an alderman's wife one afternoon. Why Bob was there could best be explained by saying that it wasn't just Dad's wine that Bob and the minister had a common taste for.

Bob had some good war stories, too. He once had to transport some papers from Ottawa to London, England straight to Churchill himself. He was prepared to meet a man who would have little time for someone of Bob's station, but instead, Churchill gave him a tour of his top-secret war command center, all the while praising the Canadian war effort, especially in intelligence and infantry. When Churchill came to Canada, Bob was a requested part of his entourage.

Bob would have been a great guy to take for show and tell, but I don't remember having that even in elementary school. He knew many famous politicians including Tommy Douglas, who was coming to speak at our school sometime that fall. He could talk about a lot of public people and never make it sound like name-dropping. It was just the life he had led.

When he did talk, it would be without ever giving out secrets, but he did like to tease a person's curiosity by giving out little hints and innuendo. The more wine he had, the bigger the hints got, but a lot of the stories were of dead politicians and army-types who I'd never heard of.

That fall, I had to do a project at school about the war and was searching for ideas. Bob was visiting Dad one afternoon that week after Thanksgiving so I asked him about his post-war work involving illegal immigration.

"I can't tell you anything about that, Mark. It's classified and sealed. I can tell you that it's not very interesting anyway. If that part of the war interests you, why don't you do a report about how internees were cheated out of their land while they were gone? There's a real good example of that right here on Admiral's."

Bob was referring to the Matsuzaki family. They owned a lot of rich, valuable farm land before the war, but when they returned, found it had all been confiscated and auctioned off just months earlier. The fact that the family of the local government official responsible for holding Japanese property were the lucky winners of the auction didn't raise an eyebrow at the time. Though the Matsuzakis made a very good living off the land, it wasn't in high demand. There were no other bidders at the time and there really wasn't any suggestion of wrong-doing on the part of the land-manager, Calvin Parker. But the timing seemed fishy and CBC national news did a special story about it in 1970, with some of Parker's sons defending their father's wartime actions. Their reasoning was that the end of the war was not in sight and the land was being overgrown and going to waste so something should be done. The fact was that the federal government had ordered the sale of all Japanese property two years previous to pay the cost of the internment. It was unbelievable. The government had uprooted these people from their homes, separated families, made them live in squalid conditions, and then made them pay the bill for it all. Calvin Parker had actually held off putting up the land for sale as long as possible and was pressured by the government into the sale. No one on Admiral's wanted to steal the Matsuzaki's property, so Calvin Parker bought it himself with the intent of holding it in trust for the Matsuzaki's return. When the government announced that they had no intention of ever allowing the Japanese back to the coast, the Parkers developed the land and subdivided it. About half of it was sold in a patchwork kind of way, but most stayed within the family. When the Matsuzakis finally returned in 1950, the Parker family offered what was left of the land back to the Matsuzakis, but it was too chopped up to return it to a market garden. After working and saving several years, the Matsuzakis were able to buy some other property and managed to rebuild what they once had, turning some previously unused land into a profitable new market garden. They would not even take the remainder of the land back from the Parkers and sell it to get a fresh start. And Parker never sold another lot from it. Today, on the largest contiguous piece of the land is a Peace Park, in honour of the friendship and history between Canada and Japan with a promise to never go to war again. The rest sits empty.

The Matsuzakis were not bitter about their misfortune. They were typical of the Nisei, the North American-born Japanese who rolled with the punches and got on with being happy. I really think they were ashamed of what their relatives from Japan were doing and took any misfortune in stride as their punishment for being from the same lineage.

I didn't want to do this story, though, for three reasons. Firstly, it had been hashed over enough since the CBC story aired the year before. Second and third, two of my good friends were Mel Matsuzaki and Calvin Parker III, both grandsons of the original parties. And they were the best of friends who I didn't feel like hurting.

"What does classified and sealed mean?" You often heard the terms in spy movies, but didn't really stop to think about what it meant.

"Classified pretty much means top-secret. Sealed means that its a done deal. Nobody sees it now unless it's opened up in a hundred years and made public. There's stuff in sealed files that would rewrite history books if it was made public. You can't exactly write about that."

Dad got up and poured them both another glass of wine from the gallon jug. I sensed I might get a little more info if Dad kept that up. They never drank from 'wine' glasses. They used regular kitchen glasses you would have water or pop in. Gallon jug, big glasses. It was no wonder retirement felt so good.

"Like what?" I tried to sound just mildly curious.

"Nice try, Mark," he chuckled.

"Maybe you're completely full of shit and never worked for any Intelligence," I challenged with a smile, but he was too much of a pro to take bait as lame as that. I could swear in front of Dad without any admonishment since I was about eleven as long as it wasn't used unnecessarily and not in front of Mom. Dad's idea was if I could work like a man, then I could talk like one. But, he said, a man didn't swear liberally or he sounded unintelligent.

Maybe I am, Mark. If you really think so, you better get out of here and at your homework." He knew I wouldn't leave that easily, either.

"Tell me about Churchill."

"He's dead." Bob took a gulp of his wine and rocked a little in one of the chrome-tube frame chairs that adorned Dad's kitchen.

"Where exactly was his war command center? Was it underground?"

"That I'll tell you. Yes it was underground. And I don't really know where it is because they blindfolded me and drove me around for half an hour before we got there. It might have been anywhere. It's still a secret that very few people know. They want it kept that way in case they need it again."

"Okay, but that's not much of a story. I think a little more meat would help." He wasn't about to give in to a fifteen year-old kid with a bit of curiosity.

"Tell you what. When's this report due?"

"Actually it's not a report. This is an English essay and it's supposed to be fiction. We're supposed to take a piece of history and change it. Sort of a 'What If It Happened This Way' story. I just wanted a little realism. It's due next week."

"Perfect. Have you ever heard of Dieppe? It was the raid on Europe that failed before Normandy. You do a little research on that before the weekend and if I come up here, I'll tell you a little about it. And since this is an English essay, I just might make some of it up. And I might not. But do some research. I'm not going to do any teaching, just a little helping." He downed his wine in two big mouthfuls. "I should go. Thanks for the wine, Jim. Mark, if I'm not around here, give me a call in time to get that done. But don't forget the research. See ya both later."

With that he was out the back door.

His reminder also made me think about what Oscar wanted me to do. I just didn't feel comfortable talking with Dad alone, so I didn't bring up anything about family history. I'd felt that way since I was about twelve, when I thought he might bring up the topic of the birds and the bees. Mary had told me all she had known about that when I was eight, and the thought of having to talk to Dad about it was mortifying. He never did give me that talk and I knew he wasn't going to bring it up now that I was fifteen, but there were always other uncomfortable topics like what I was going to do with my future. I wasn't ready for that so I avoided it like the plague.

From the front of the house, Mom called us to supper.

***

Hamburg, Germany

May, 1945

Willie Herzog had made it to the sanctuary of his sister's home. On the last day of April, he and all the other guards at Stalag Luft I had abandoned the camp that was soon to be liberated by Russian troops. It was in their best interests that they not be found and become captives as the Russians were known to be even more ruthless and merciless than they themselves had been.

In civilian clothes, Herzog had made it to Hamburg on foot and by horse-drawn cart in thirteen days. Had the trains been running as before the war, it would have been an overnight trip. Had he been in the uniform of the German army, he may not have made it at all. The Russian liberators were checking all men of military service age for their identification. Herzog had planned for just such a situation and had phony documents made up two years previously. He was prepared to play up his short leg as proof that he couldn't have been in the military. He was now Wolfgang Hertz at least until the heat was off. This also would mean that he would be his sister's husband for this period, a thought that disgusted him to no end, but to survive, he would make concessions.

The real Wolfgang Hertz was a rich heir who married Willie's beautiful younger sister, a woman thirty years Hertz's junior. On leave in Hamburg, Willie stole his brother-in-law's identification papers and had them copied to match his year of birth and physical features, including his short leg. Willie had the papers back in place before Hertz knew they were missing.

On his next leave, Willie visited his sister and her husband again. It was Oktoberfest 1943, and Willie and Wolfgang partook in the festivities at a nearby hausbrau. They ate, drank, and sang together like old friends in front of dozens of witnesses. Both men flirted with the waitresses as part of the evening's entertainment, Wolfgang not thinking it at all wrong that he was with his wife's brother. Willie kept up a front of camaraderie with Wolfgang even though he despised the man, for a major part of his plan would happen this night.

On their walk home, the brothers-in-law took a short-cut through an unlit park where Willie pulled a knife on Wolfgang and slit his throat. He marked himself up as well, though only superficially, claiming an attack by several youths, possibly Jews, who robbed Wolfgang of his cash, then fled. Willie would have been killed, too, he claimed, had he not fought them off, giving himself time until some other revelers coming through the park scared off the attackers. He couldn't explain to the police where those revelers went nor several other inconsistencies in his story, but being a good patriotic soldier in Hitler's forces, he was never under any serious suspicion. The second part of Willie's plan was complete now that his sister was a very rich widow.

With his military career now over and the history attached to it a huge liability, he would assume the role of the man he murdered and take control of those fortunes from his weak-willed sister. She had not been devastated by her loss and had she known of her brother's involvement, would have thanked him and rewarded him with a large piece of her new riches anyway. Her loving brother Willie was all she really had left in the world and she would most certainly protect him in any way she could.

They could not stay in Hamburg for long, as anyone who knew her knew that Wolfgang was dead. They would have to take up new residence as far away as possible where no one knew them. Willie decided on Canada as a safe haven and his sister blindly followed along with his plan. Several cities there had large German communities and with the real Wolfgang's riches, they could comfortably blend into anonymity in any one of them.

***

6

The next day at school I did a little reading about the Dieppe raid during my spare. It happened in August of 1942. The Allies, mostly Canadians, raided the small French port of Dieppe. They never stood a chance. The Germans were ready and waiting for them. The textbook said the Germans were actually practicing for such an invasion right there, right then, so were more than armed and ready. Almost 1000 Canadians died, and over 3000 spent the rest of the war in German POW camps. I figured that would be about as much as Bob would expect from me, so I left it at that.

I had gone jogging the night before but Oscar wasn't there to quiz me about my family. When I got home from school, I asked Mom for some info about her family. Her parents had come to Saskatchewan from Ontario where they were also farmers. All their parents were born in England. I remembered Gramma once saying something about us being descendants of Oliver Cromwell. Dad said that with all his whoring around, half of England was related to him. Kind of like Fitz in Steveston, I thought.

Mom didn't know much about her grandparents, only her maternal grandmother, much the same as I. When you're the youngest in a big family, people start dying off before you're even born. She told me a lot about her living relatives and I remembered a lot of them. Since we moved to Admiral's, our summers were always full hosting someone for a week here or a weekend there, and a majority of them were Mom's relatives from Saskatchewan, but I never really got to know them as none were even close to my age. There weren't any extraordinary life stories there, though. A lot of prairie hardship and people dying young. I decided to read about Oliver Cromwell someday.

On Dad's side of the family, there weren't too many people to speak of. I knew his aunt and uncle, as they lived near Steveston, and there were a couple of old aunts that would visit, but I didn't know the exact connection. The thought of talking with Dad and possibly bringing up family suicides still made me uncomfortable. I decided to put it off some more.

I went jogging again that night and Oscar was there this time. As I expected, he was curious about my family, though I didn't really know why. I told him the little I had found out and remembered. Oliver Cromwell seemed to pique his curiosity.

"There was a mighty interesting character. You know anything about him?"

I had to admit that I didn't. Something about abolishing the monarchy in England and killing a lot of Irish.

"You should do some reading about him. If he is an ancestor, you might have some of his qualities. With Cromwell, you just don't know if that's good or bad!" he chuckled. Then he got serious. "I've got this theory about ancestors. There's so much talk these days about reincarnation and past lives and stuff, I think my theory explains it. It also explains what people think is love at first sight, or going to some place and feeling right at home when you've never, ever been there." He took a long sip of his coffee and looked out the window at the Queen of the Islands in the dock, then turned back to me. "You know what genes are?"

I nodded.

His speech was slow and deliberate. "Your genes make you what you are. Put simply, there's a tall gene, a skin colour gene, a nose size gene, and on and on. The genes you have can only come from your ancestors and it's just a roll of the dice which ones you're gonna inherit. After all, with all the ancestors you have, there's likely been tall ones and short ones and big noses and small noses. Some genes are stronger than others, what they call dominant, so some qualities seem to be a family trait, then all of a sudden one of those other genes sneaks in and you get a black sheep in the family 'cause, like I said, it's always just a roll of the dice. Some genes got better odds, though. For instance, you ain't likely had any black people in your heritage, so if you marry a white girl, you're gonna have white babies. But in my case, not that I'm gonna have kids at my age...." that infectious smile ".....but a black woman and me could have a white child 'cause there was so much foolin' around with the black slave girls by the white masters years ago. There was lots of chocolate-coloured babies that prob'ly had white daddies, but it wasn't recorded by the master that way. That'd bring shame on the white master and his family. He-hee-hee." Oscar wasn't mad or preachy about this subject at all. He could find humour in just about any situation. "So even though the odds are small, every once in a while two black people have a white child 'cause there's some white genes in them."

I was starting to wonder where he was going with this. I was impressed by his knowledge, but it was starting to sound like grade ten Biology with a down-home spin to it.

He must have read my mind. Or my face. "Anyhow, I don't see why there can't be a memory gene just the same as any other one. Every once in a while a kid is born with a very good recollection of something which is actually some ancestor's memory. That would explain why people feel like they've been somewhere before when they haven't or take an unusual interest in a particular point in history. Or explain why some people have a strange fear of something, you know, a phobia. Or feel like they were someone else long ago. And love at first sight? That girl's pretty face might have belonged to one of her ancestors centuries ago and one of your ancestors might have been married to her. Which would make you and that pretty girl more than kissin' cousins, wouldn't it? He-hee-hee!"

I tried to digest this a little and found it quite plausible. Oscar sipped his coffee. One of the things that made him a great talker was knowing when to pause and for just how long.

I had a big chug on my water which he took as a signal to start again. "Animals have a memory gene, only in them we call it instinct. We don't think of ourselves as havin' instinct 'cause we don't like to think of ourselves as animals. Plus we got a brain, which we usually let override our instincts. Havin' a brain is a great thing, but it's also a curse for lots of people. Some of the happiest people I can recall meetin' are pretty dim-witted." He chuckled. "But they sure are happy. Don't have to be that way, though. Like I said, it's people's brains that get in the way of them bein' happy. But that's another theory altogether. "

"Being stupid doesn't guarantee happiness, though, either," I said. "I can think of some pretty stupid people who are awful cranky as well."

"Now who would that be?" he asked, happy that I was contributing to the conversation.

"Those old Sampson brothers that live near us. They've got lots of money, too, and all three of them bachelors. And dumb. And cranky! Any time Fitz gets into their yard, they're phoning Dad right away. By the time we could do anything about it, Fitz is usually wandering away on his own."

"Those old boys are all bachelors 'cause they didn't trust women. Their papa drove it into their soft heads that women were evil and would only want to marry any one of them to get their money, so none of 'em ever even courted girls."

"Where'd they get their money, anyways?"

"Their papa invented some kinda machine a long time ago for use in sawmills. It's still used today. Money just keeps comin' in. Those boys never had to work a day in their lives."

"Well they sure didn't get his brains. Unless he just got lucky with his invention."

"He-hee. Why do you think they're so stupid?"

"Lots of things. I've been walking down the road a few times when they were coming home from wherever. They've got a gate at the top of their driveway and they must like to keep it closed all the time. They drive up to the gate, three of them in the front of their pick-up, and stop. It looks like they argue over who's gonna get out and open the gate. Cranky as heck at each other. Finally, one of them gets out, opens the gate, and, instead of just waiting there for the truck to drive through, he gets back in the truck! And if he was in the middle, he gets back in the middle! Then they drive through the gate, the same guy gets out, closes the gate, gets back in, to the middle again if he came from there, and they drive the remaining hundred feet to the house!"

"Ha-haa!! I knew those boys weren't too bright!"

"That's not all! There's no fence and there's room on either side of the gate to just drive right around it! And they probably wonder how Fitz gets in their yard!"

We were both chuckling pretty hard. When he caught his breath, Oscar took a sip of his coffee then pointed his head in the air with his eyes closed and let out a small sigh. He still had a smile on his face, though, when he said his closing line. "Gettin' too old for these night shifts, I'm afraid. I sure like the peace and tranquility I get with them, though."

7

Bob hadn't been around our place for a few days, so I phoned him and arranged to go to his place and hopefully get some of the secrets he's kept hidden all his life. Dad often said if anyone could ever get Bob to talk about his life, he'd likely put Ian Fleming and James Bond out of business.

Fitz came for the walk and when Bob opened his door, Fitz wandered in just like it was he who was invited. He sniffed around for a while and, finding no morsels on the floor, curled up near the fireplace, which wasn't burning. It was late November now, and we were still experiencing great weather.

Bob's cabin was built for himself with no provision for the future. When he designed it, he knew what he needed, what he wanted and what he could do without and built it to those specifications, to hell with resale value. It was a simple A-frame with a loft bedroom accessed by a ladder. On the main floor was a decent-sized kitchen, bathroom and living room. In one corner of the living room was a desk with a typewriter and lots of unused paper. A small, heavy safe doubled as a shelf for more paper. The walls were lined with shelves full of books: novels, reference, non-fiction and magazines on almost any topic. The kitchen was well-equipped except for a dishwasher.

"Want some tea?" With Bob you never really answered that question, you just took the cup offered to you as he asked it.

"Okay, so you wanna know about Dieppe, eh?" He usually used a lazy laid-back street talk around most people, but I've also heard him talk like an English professor. It was one of those quirks about Admiral's. Many intelligent, worldly people go there to melt the stiffness of their everyday lives and in that change from suit and tie to t-shirt and jeans, the speech gets altered as well. "Did you do any research?"

I nodded and told him the little I knew. "Yeah, that's what the history books know. What else was happening in the summer of '42?"

I shrugged. I didn't have a clue.

"The Germans were pounding the Russians on their front and Stalin was demanding help from his 'allies'. The States had entered the war six months earlier when Pearl Harbour happened and were busy as hell in the Pacific. He paused here and sipped his tea.

He looked out the big picture window toward his swimming pool. His voice softened. "Churchill called on the Canadians to plan a raid that would get a foothold on the Continent and give the Germans a third front to defend. Churchill knew that the odds of success were near zero, but he remembered the Canadians at Vimy Ridge 25 years earlier. They fought against huge odds and won there. Churchill said if anyone could do it, the Canadians could. That sent a shiver of pride up the spines of our boys. They had been readying themselves in Britain for almost two years and were itching for action. But no one was really ready for a raid except the Germans.

"Someday the history books will tell us that the raid was doomed from the start. 'New' information will be found saying that Dieppe was just a practice run for Normandy, too bad about the tragedy. War is war and all that.

"All intelligence reports told them that they would be outgunned and outmanned. They couldn't supply enough air cover to help the landing party. It was doomed right from the planning stages, but the commanding officer, Lord Louis Mountbatten, was eager to prove himself. He was full of Churchill's confidence in the Canadian boys and managed to convey it to his troops. But he, too, knew the odds were ridiculous. He sent over a thousand men to their deaths and another four thousand to POW camps for the duration of the war. Churchill deemed this phony battle and the loss of many good men as necessary to appease Stalin and keep him fighting the Germans in the East. To show Stalin that we were trying to do our part. Dieppe bought us time to fortify for the real raid. But no one wants to hear that all those boys gave their lives just to buy time. They were heroes and should die with heroic memory. So Dieppe was built up as a well-intentioned assault on the forces of evil which went wrong.

"In 1990, twenty-five years after Churchill's death, that story will become public. Historians will start 'finding' documents pointing to what I have just told you, and when they do, they will unwittingly be aiding in the continuing cover-up of the real truth of the Dieppe mission."

I didn't say a word. I could tell he was serious and that I was hearing something that maybe Bob shouldn't be telling. If I even cleared my throat, he might stop talking. I didn't even take notes, relying on memory for my story.

"Among the landing party was a team of eleven men, one a German Jew, considered the world's leading expert in radar technology. The rest were his escort party. The mission was to infiltrate Dieppe's radar station, have the expert examine the workings of the radar, taking pictures in his head of the schematics, and then we were to destroy it. That was just to make it look good. If they wanted it destroyed, it should have been done from the air before the raid, and the landing might have been more successful. But this was the real mission. It turned out that this expert had designed the radar system being used at Dieppe, which was what we had hoped for. This meant that the Germans hadn't improved on their radar technology since he had defected to our side. If they had, they certainly would have been using the technology at Dieppe, as it was a prime target for a raid, as was all the French coast. Gaining this intelligence allowed us from then on to jam the German's radar at will, but we rarely did. If we had, they certainly would have seen the need to improve it and we would have had to start all over again. We wanted to save that ace in the hole for the real invasion. They did improve it, but not significantly. We had the expert on our side, and he could anticipate what they would do to change it and he was right every time.

"The apologists for Dieppe are wrong when they say a lot was learned there that helped in the Normandy invasion. We already knew everything the Germans had except that radar system and how to jam it. But they were right in that it did help in a crucial way. The Germans had superior anti-aircraft guns. By jamming the radar, we were able to provide the air cover for a successful beach landing. But at the time of Dieppe, we didn't have nearly enough planes for such a mission, anyway. We built our forces for almost two years before the Normandy invasion when we knew we could be successful. The men at Dieppe were sent to their deaths. It was a suicide mission: a cover for the real prize and a show for Stalin all in one. And though it looked like a farce, it went off exactly as planned." He was staring out the window, silent now. He took a sip of his tea.

I didn't speak. He kept staring out the window, almost like he was in a trance. It scared me, but I didn't want him to come out of it. Then, Fitz started to bark in his sleep.

In a louder voice he said, "Of course, what I just told you is purely fiction, you understand," through a slight smile that betrayed his words.

"Yeah...right..." I wished I could have tape-recorded his monologue. He probably had anti-bugging devices in his cabin, though.

"Can you write an essay with that little story? Any questions?"

Little story, my ass. I did have a question, but wondered if I would be pressing my luck. I wanted to keep him talking, though. "What did you mean by 'we'?"

"Our side. We." He looked at me like I was too simple to have just learned what I did.

"You said after the expert checked out the radar, 'we' were to destroy it. You were part of that team?"

"I said 'we'? I guess I just meant our side. Just caught up in the story. And that's all it is, is a story. There was no 'they', either." That smile again.

I wasn't thinking about my essay anymore. I wanted to hear more about his role in this thing, so I played along with him. "Okay. I can use that. How should I say they got back when so many others were taken prisoner or killed? Can you throw a little realism into that?"

"You could say they had their own landing boat and just got away safely. The radar station wasn't near the heart of the action, anyway. It was about two miles north of the main landing beach. And being a few hundred yards inland, it wasn't heavily guarded. The Germans knew if it was going to be hit, it would be from the air, and ground defenses weren't needed. They protected it with anti-aircraft guns." He was throwing that smile at me, as if to say it happened but it didn't happen.

"Wouldn't the Germans wonder why it wasn't hit first? And from the ground instead of the air?"

"Good question. They probably just thought in their own arrogance that they did a great job of defending it. And as for it being hit from the ground, well, we made it...." he caught himself and smiled with a cold stare again "....you could write that part of the team was a demolition squad. It was blown up so well, it looked like an airstrike and that the men inside died from the blast, not gunshots."

Another slip-up. I think he was teasing me now, but I still believed he was telling the truth. I wanted to get more out of him. "So your job was to get this guy in and out safely? What if you were caught or didn't make it?"

"Their job. If they didn't make it, I suppose it would have been an even longer war. And knowing intelligence missions as I do, if they were caught, the team's secondary job would have to have been carried out. The radar guy would have to be killed." He still smiled and stared coldly.

I'd known Bob Walker almost all of my 15 years. He often came to supper on Sundays even when we lived in Steveston. He spent a few long weekends with us on Admiral's before he decided he liked the lifestyle there so much he bought his own place. I knew he was in the Army and the RCMP, but to visualize him as a killer was hard to reconcile. And a little scary.

I must have had a stupid look on my face, because he felt the need to explain. "We couldn't afford to let the Germans have him. He was better dead than in their hands. We needed to know that we could jam their radar to give us an element of surprise. Just bombing the radar station would only put them on full alert. In fact, for a few days before Normandy, several other stations along the coast were bombed to divert their attention. Normandy wasn't touched so that they would think no invasion was going to happen there. Jamming it was much more effective. It gave them a false sense of security which gave our side several more miles of undetected channel crossing. It made all the difference in the world."

I had just been told one of the biggest secrets of WWII and had the freedom to use it in my next English composition which counted for a good chunk of the term mark. Could I use it? Would it make any difference? My English teacher, Mr. Frame was already used to wildly imaginative tales from me and didn't mark me well in them.

I can't really remember leaving Bob's or the walk home except that the evening turned cold enough to make me shiver and that Fitz took off into the bush chasing something. I wished Bob had the fire going while I was there. I was high on the feeling that I knew something that almost nobody else alive in the world did. I started writing that night while it was fresh and finished it a couple of days later.

8

"The Crow burned down last night!" Mom said when I came out to the kitchen for breakfast. "They figure old Hertz died in it, too, because they can't find him. It was on the radio."

Wow. Getting on the Vancouver radio news was big time for Admiral's. "What happened?"

"It said they're not sure, but 'arson hasn't been ruled out'," she quoted.

Dad walked into the kitchen as she said it. "Likely an insurance scam. Old Hertz was probably off-island with an alibi."

"Doesn't sound like it. The way they were talking, he was there earlier and now they can't find him. He must have died in it." Like most people, Mom liked to speculate on the news before it came out as fact.

"Well, no big loss for Admiral's if he did," Dad said, "Shame about the Crow, though." Dad still had a business-like way of looking at death from years of being a mortician. It was inevitable no matter who you are or what you do. If you were a good person, hopefully you left a lasting mark somewhere. If you were a bastard, the rest of us are better off without you, and hopefully you didn't leave too many wounds.

"I'll drive you to school, Mark. I'd like to have a look at the Crow." Dad didn't make unnecessary trips into town, but if it saved me the half-mile walk to the bus stop, I wasn't going to question him. I'd never heard him talk about Hertz nor the Crow before, and wondered why he cared at all. I guess that big news this close to home was something to get a little excited about and life can always use a little spice, especially if you're old and retired. And the Crow was one of the few landmarks on Admiral's and now it was gone.

As we came down the long hill past Churchill Road, we could see smoke still rising from behind the trees and bushes that yesterday obscured the Crow. Dad slowed down past the driveway entrance and we could see that there was absolutely nothing left. Bedsprings lying in ashes was about the best way to describe it. The stone chimney and fireplace which had stood in the middle of the pub was there but the pub wasn't. A fire truck and four members of the volunteer fire crew stood by, but they weren't using any water. The cops were just sitting in their Ramcharger, not picking over the ashes or looking for clues like you would expect to see.

"They're probably waiting for a pro investigation team from Vancouver or Victoria to get here," Dad answered my question about the inactivity. "These guys aren't trained to do intense crime scene stuff, if this is a crime. But they have to treat it as one until they rule it out. And the volunteer fire guys sure aren't trained to, either. You can't believe everything you hear on the radio or TV, you know. They often get stuff screwed up because they only know how to write and don't really know much about the things they're writing about. Sports reporters might come close, but most of them are guys who couldn't make the team in high school, so they wrote about them instead."

Dad had a grade nine education, but he was one of the smartest people I had ever known. Other adults had told me that, too. He was always reading, be it National Geographic, Science Journal, a novel or a newspaper. He believed that learning was a never-ending process and that a person should be doing it right up until he dies. Of course, as a teenager, I didn't listen to him, but every once in a while something would stick. On that day, as I would find out, not believing everything that you hear or read would get drilled into my brain.

Before classes started, there must have been a hundred different rumours about what happened at the Crow the night before. They ranged from a guest smoking in bed to a Jewish action group that bombed the Crow because Hertz was a Nazi war criminal.

"Donny Henrik did it. Oh, yeah, he's hated Hertz ever since he was thrown out of the bar once. And he torched the dorm, everybody knows that."

"Donny Henrik died in the fire. His van was still parked out back of the Crow. He was probably smoking in bed and passed out. Or maybe an addict killed him."

"Hertz did it to kill his wife and collect insurance."

"Hertz's wife did it to kill the old bastard."

"Hertz wasn't even married."

The glut of rumours had created a buzz among almost everyone by the time the homeroom bell had rung. At first I listened to my friends as though they knew what they were talking about, but it didn't take long to realize that everybody was just trying to top the last speculation. Obviously, they couldn't all be right, and likely none of them were. It would be almost a year before I found out the real truth and many more before I found out the entire true story.

*****

My first class that day was English. We were getting our marks back for our long essays and I wanted my Dieppe story back in my own hands. I started to feel possessive about what I knew and wished I hadn't written about it, nor shared it with anyone. I was in total shock when I read my mark. Ten out of twenty-five. Mr. Frame was always hard on me when it came to essays, but he had never given me a failing mark before. His comments through the pages were 'good imagination' 'poorly written' 'do some research' and 'poor subject matter'. I stuck my arm up in the air.

"Come and see me after class, Mark," was how he acknowledged me. He must have known that I wouldn't be happy.

At the end of the class, while everyone else was filing out of the room, I went to his desk. "What's wrong with my essay? I did research. I think Dieppe is a good subject. You told us to pick a piece of history and change it."

"You certainly did that, Mark. Dieppe was nothing like that. Those brave young men died trying to beat the Nazis, not just fool them for the real battle. They gave their......... To think that they died when their commanders knew it was a hopeless cause is an awful thing to say. They weren't killed for a distraction. They were heroes and your little story can't take that away from them." His next class was starting to fill the room.

"It's fiction," I told him again. "and it's not poorly written."

"It's a load of crap and it is poorly written," he burst out. "Maybe you misunderstood my instructions. I'll give you a second chance. Have another essay for me on Monday morning and I'll ignore this one. I'll have to deduct marks for tardiness, however." The classroom was full of grade nines now.

Mr. Nice Guy. I took my paper and left. Now I was late for Guidance with Morrison. Only Morrison wasn't there. The principal, Mr. Harding was filling in for him. He more or less gave us a free study period and we all dispersed. I decided to complain about Frame to him.

"Mr. Frame was quite emotional about your essay. He showed it to anyone in the staff room who cared to listen. He was a little mad that you would pick such an important part of history to rewrite. His brother died at Dieppe, Mark. I'm afraid he took it a little too personally. Actually I thought it was an interesting story."

So that was it. It wasn't the writing at all, but the subject matter. Frame was hurt by my story and wanted to hurt me back. And the teachers are always telling us to grow up. Too bad about his brother, but it wasn't my fault. "Can't you do anything about this mark? I deserve more than this!"

"He's the teacher, Mark. I can't overrule him. Why don't you just write another story over the weekend and forget about this one? At least he's given you that opportunity."

Teachers. Always sticking up for each other even when they know it's wrong. Harding didn't even like Frame. I decided right then that I wouldn't do a rewrite. That would take up most of my weekend and probably not get me a much better mark, anyway.

*****

I wondered where Morrison might be and if his absence was in any way related to the Crow and his infamous nephew.

The noon news reported that one body had been found in the ashes of the hotel fire on Admiral's Island. Still missing were the owner and three men who were staying at the hotel that night. All other guests and staff were well and accounted for.

My afternoon classes were History, Biology, and Phys Ed. Morrison wasn't there for that, either, so Harding let us out of school early rather than try to keep up with a bunch of rambunctious boys in a gym for an hour.

It had been a hectic day, and I wanted to get at least one thing straight in my head before it was over. "Is Bob coming up for a wine today?" I asked Dad.

"Bob left for the Bahamas this morning," he replied. It was the end of November and Bob always spent B.C.'s rainy months of December and January somewhere warm and sunny.

"Did he ever tell you much about his war years?"

"He keeps that stuff pretty much to himself. Why?"

I told him all about the Dieppe story. How Bob acted when he told it. How I got a lousy mark for the essay. Then he asked to read it.

"That's a good story. Your English teacher should be a little more professional and a little less subjective." He sat and thought for a minute. "Bob said he was the leader of this escort group?" His question had a touch of shock in its tone.

"That's just how I wrote it. He never actually said what role he played. I think it's a true story, though, don't you? I mean his story, not mine."

"Knowing Bob, I'm sure it's possible, but I wouldn't want to guess. It sure would change the way people look at Dieppe. And Churchill. Churchill was considered the brains behind the Allies in Europe. It wouldn't look good on his legacy if people knew he sent those boys to slaughter. There's no way to tell if it's true or not. Not for certain. Bob sure wouldn't ever give anything up. I've known him for over twenty-five years, and he's never told me a story that even came close to being a state secret. That's probably why he was what he was. Because he could keep a secret."

"You'd think after all these years that it wouldn't matter anymore. How could it hurt if a secret like that were made public? The war is long over and Churchill's dead. Who cares anymore?"

"People like your English teacher." Dad was right. There were still a lot of people alive who would be affected by the war to their dying days. For many, a sugar-coated version of their loved-one's end is much easier to handle than a harsh reality.

I went for a jog that night and saw Oscar. When I got there, he was sitting at his desk, sipping his coffee and looking out the window at nothing in particular.

"Evenin', Mark." He already had a glass of water poured for me. He must have been scanning the windows and saw me coming before I got there. "Pretty cool night to be runnin' ain't it? You look like a steam engine comin' around the corner the way you can see your breath like that." He smiled. The Infection. I had to smile back. "What's new with you? You hear about the Crow? 'Course you did. You have to go right by it to get to school, don't you? I got some juicy gossip for you. Old Jack Newton, he's a watchman at the Fulford ferry, told me those boys the police are lookin' for, well they slept at the terminal in their van, waitin' for the first ferry back to Victoria. Said they showed up there about 3 AM, parked in the line-up and just went to sleep. That's not so unusual, but the police came there and asked him if anything like that specifically happened. And they had a picture of one of them. Said it looked like a mugshot. Name's Steve Gorman. There were three of them altogether. Old Newton's pretty proud of himself. Figures he's pretty much a hero for peeking in those boys' van while they slept so's he could identify the one. The other two are from Galiano and the police figure they're drug pushers. Don't know why they can't just throw 'em all in jail if they know they're doin' it. You know, there's lots of criminals never go to jail even though everybody knows what they're up to."

Steve Gorman. The other two had to be Donny Henrik and Leon Renner. So one of the rumours being spread was a close guess, anyway. I knew Oscar wouldn't be spreading non-truths. After all the crap I'd heard that day at school, and learning not to believe any of it, I felt like I had finally heard something I could believe in about the Crow fire. In the back of my mind somewhere, I was wondering what truth to believe about Dieppe.

9

We received our first letter from Barry in the Yukon on the day after the Crow fire. He was fixing huge dump trucks that hauled ore rocks from the open-pit mine up to the crusher of the mill. He wrote how he enjoyed working with living people rather than the stiffs at the funeral parlour. He described the Northern Lights as a dance of purples and greens and yellows and reds spiraling and waving to their own unheard beat. The cold was like nothing he had ever experienced and it was only November. The surrounding countryside was forested and hilly with a river running through the townsite. The town itself wasn't much, but not much was needed. There was a general store, post office, school, jewelry store, theatre, nursing station, and liquor store. Most of the people there were tradesmen like himself, and most had no plans of a lengthy stay. They were going to make some fast bucks and get back to civilization as soon as they could. A few like Barry loved it and could stay forever.

Barry's letter put nearly as much imagination in me as Bob's Dieppe story. After seeing his long depressing struggle in the funeral business, the tone of his writing was like seeing someone miraculously cured of a terminal illness. Cheryl and the girls would soon be making the move up there, and Barry was sure they would love it every bit as much as he. Cheryl, too had been depressed with their meager existence as funeral directors, and their marriage had suffered. Barry didn't use as many words, but still conveyed the sureness that a happy new beginning was in the offing.

After reading the letter once, I read it again. It was so full of hope and optimism, I figured that Barry had the same feeling that a religious convert must have on his first day of Christ. I made it my goal to save enough money to fly up there the next summer. I didn't yet know how I would do it, but I would.

10

***

Donny did the thinking for the three of them. When they got to the Victoria side, they would ditch the van somewhere and walk on to the first ferry to Galiano and lay low at Granny's for a few days.

"Steve, drop Leon and me off at the terminal and you go ditch the van someplace safe. We'll wait for you, but hurry. No sense all three of us walking that far."

"Uh......OK, but don't go without me. I mean it." Steve wanted to sound tough, but his tone was always submissive when talking to Donny. Steve was the only one who had done time and figured that he was tougher for it.

Donny and Leon got out and Steve sped away. It was still only 7 AM and the first ferry to Galiano would leave in an hour. Back on Admiral's, news about the Crow was barely out.

Swartz Bay ferry terminal is about 15 miles from downtown Victoria, at the northern tip of the Saanich Peninsula. There are a lot of marinas and boat-related businesses close to the terminal, and Steve figured the van might look less conspicuous in one of their parking lots than just stuck in the woods somewhere. Being inconspicuous was one of the things he had to learn during his nine-month stay in the government hotel. Even now he kept his blonde hair above his ears, though longer at the back. Blue jeans and a jean jacket over a button-front shirt were his normal attire and he rarely varied from it. Steve stood about five foot nine with an average build. Brown eyes and no distinguishing facial features rounded out his nondescript physical persona. He looked like twenty percent of the kids of the day.

He tried to hitch a ride back to the terminal but was unsuccessful. He should have been able to hide the van and walk the three or so miles back easily, but indecision over the perfect parking place cost him time. When he got back to the terminal, the boat had left, and so had Donny and Leon.

*****

The boat pulled away from Montague Harbour on Galiano Island as Donny and Leon made their way on foot to the Morrison home. It was now 9:30 AM and news of the fire was widespread. Granny Morrison was in the kitchen of her Victorian-era home when the boys came in the side door. The house was built on a small point of land so that the rear and both sides of it faced the ocean. On the street side, the house was obscured by tall firs and an arbutus as well as a holly bush hedge. The ocean view was of Trincomali Channel and the north shore of Admiral's Island.

"Did anyone see you come here?" was the first thing she said after seeing the pair.

"Probably." said Donny "Who doesn't know me around here?"

She looked out the kitchen window. "Where's the van?"

"Steve's got it over in Vic." Donny was staring at the floor when he realized how submissive he was acting toward the old woman. He sat at the kitchen table and took an apple from the bowl in the middle of it. The bite he took was noisy and sloppy and intended to irritate his grandmother.

Kathleen Morrison was a tall, well-built woman in her late sixties. She was used to being in charge of her life and many of the people around her, especially her family. She dressed contemporarily, made herself up well, and fancied herself a pillar of the Galiano Island community. Had it not been for her daughter and grandson, she would have lived a scandal-free life that might have supported her impression of herself. As it was, the Galiano ladies thought of her as someone you didn't want to get on the bad side of, but someone you wanted to keep close.

"Young man, you're in a whole bunch of trouble this time. What happened on Admiral's last night?" Her tone told Donny that the apple-bite worked.

Donny was in the middle of swallowing. "We were there, but we didn't do nothin'," Leon offered.

"Shut up, Leon." Donny turned back to Granny. "Yeah, we were there, but I didn't set that fire. Who cares anyway? It's just a piece of shit building, anyway."

"You will not use words like that in my house, Donny. I think you two should clean yourselves up and I'll fix you a late breakfast."

"Where's mom?" Donny asked. Though it was still early for her to be up, Donny sensed that she wasn't in the house.

"She went to Vancouver a couple of days ago to meet someone and go to some show or something. I'm not sure. She said she'll be back on Thursday." Granny and Donny both knew that this meant nothing. She would be back when she ran out of money.

"I'm going to have a shower," Donny said casually, trying to make it sound like his idea and not Granny's.

"There are lots of clean clothes in your room," she said as though it were something new. Though the commanding matriarch, she was a mother foremost. She always had fresh clothes for Donny and his friends and would always wash what they came in.

Leon continued to sit at the kitchen table, alternately staring out the big bay window at the panoramic view of Admiral's across Trincomali Channel and the bowl of fresh apples. Of the three of the boys, Leon was by far the largest. He was also by far the stupidest. He was just over six feet tall and weighed two twenty-five. He could eat a tremendous amount of food and was well known at buffet restaurants up and down Vancouver Island. The span of his hands were like small dinner plates and his feet were size fourteen. His brown, stringy hair was short, and he was balding prematurely. It wasn't unusual to catch him with his mouth slightly ajar and a blank look in his eyes, however, engaged in conversation, Leon was always eager and could keep an adolescent audience amused. Older listeners, though, had to be polite to pretend they were interested in his stories of cars or strength or gluttony. He was an imposing figure which Donny felt was necessary in his business. The two had known each other since early childhood, and Leon was totally devoted to Donny, but the relationship was not mutual. Donny only used Leon for the moment, though so far, it had been a long moment.

With Donny upstairs, Mrs. Morrison quizzed Leon. "So tell me what happened last night, Leon. Were you bad boys or what?"

"Naw. We didn't do nothin'. We were havin' beers at the Crow most of the night. Some guys got a little rowdy and broke a pool cue. Somehow the owner blamed Donny, but he didn't do it. I seen the other guy do it," Leon whined.

"Saw."

"No, just broke it. Smashed it on the table."

"Yes, Leon, but you saw it happen, not seen. What happened then?"

Leon looked confused but shook it off. "Old Hertz, he's the owner, he wanted to throw us out of the pub. But we didn't do anything! Donny got mad and they started yelling at each other. Hertz called the cops, so we left. We paid for a room, too, but we didn't even get to use it."

Leon was just smart enough to leave out the parts about the cue-breaker being high on Donny-supplied LSD and that having a lot of acid was what scared them about the cops. And he certainly said nothing about the fire, just as Donny had instructed.

"And that's it? You know nothing about the fire?"
"Swear to god! We drove to Fulford and slept in the van 'til the first ferry left. We didn't know nothin' about the fire 'til we heard it on the radio."

"Thank you, Leon. I feel much better." Granny was warranted in suspecting the boys of something at the Crow, and was only too happy to accept their story of innocence, but at the same time was not totally convinced. She knew that Donny had done the dormitory fire on Admiral's and had bought him out of trouble that time, too. She loved her offspring so much, she didn't know how much harm her love caused. The difference in her son and daughter was huge, though, and only served to reinforce her theory that their upbringing had nothing to do with their life's accomplishments. Or rather her daughter's lack thereof. Though she always was ready to help her polio-stricken son, he wanted more to make it on his own, while her healthy daughter was more than willing to take every handout offered. Since she felt that she treated both children equally, she had long ago ruled out the possibility that her mothering practices had anything to do with her daughter's and grandson's lack of morals and responsibility.

Donny came down the stairs, wiping his hair with a towel.

"Guess I'll take my turn now," Leon said and headed up the stairs. Donny settled in at the kitchen table.

"Leon tells me you had nothing to do with that fire. I hope he's telling the truth."

"Sure he is. He's too stupid to lie. We just got the hell out of there because we knew we'd be suspected. I don't know what happened."

Just then the noon news came on and they heard the same as everyone else. So far, one body was found in the ashes of the Crow but was still unidentified. Still unaccounted for were the owner, Wolfgang Hertz and three male guests of the hotel.

***

Steve Gorman spent three hours divided between walking around a marina close to Swartz Bay looking at the yachts like the one he would have some day and laying low in the Blue Peter coffee shop in the ferry terminal. He was mad at Donny for leaving him behind and was increasingly madder at him for the way Donny treated him after he took the rap for that break and enter they got caught doing three years ago. Steve thought he deserved more respect from Donny for being so faithful to him. Someday he would strike out on his own, becoming the biggest drug dealer on Vancouver Island, then he would have that yacht and a Jag to go with it. And girls all over him. But for now he would wait around to catch the next ferry to Galiano, and see what Donny had planned.

***

"I think I'll go to my sister's," said Leon. Though Leon's sister was his only living relative that he knew of, he spent most of his time at Granny's when they were on Galiano. His sister didn't care to cook or clean for Leon, so Granny's was the preferred place. But he still liked to see her once in a while.

"Yeah, why don't you do that, Leon," Donny said. "I think I'll have a nap, and catch up to you later." They walked out the front door together, out of Granny's hearing range. "If Steve comes to your sister's place, tell him to stick to the story. We don't know anything. We left because Hertz kicked us out. Remember, there's witnesses to that."

"Why would he come to my sister's? I don't think he's ever been there, has he?" Leon wasn't really sure.

"Well, whatever.....if he does. Stick to the story." Donny had to give Leon instructions on a regular basis and Leon was not offended by it. He knew that Donny was smarter than he and Steve put together, and was more than willing to follow orders from Donny. He only had to look at how far it had gotten him so far. He loved that line in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: "Stick with me, kid, and I'll have ya fartin' through silk"

Leon started walking to his sister's and Donny went back in the house. He didn't have much time to put his plan into action. The noon news had scared the hell out of him, but he wasn't about to show his fear to Leon nor Granny. There was a body in the fire, and whether it was Hertz or not, if they could pin the fire on Donny, it was a lot more serious than arson. Donny wasn't going to stick around for that kind of action. He packed as many clothes into his backpack as he could along with all of their drug cash. That should keep me going for about two months, he thought. Then he took out a pair of jeans and re-filled the space with enough LSD to replenish the cash when needed. He slipped quietly out of the house and walked back to the ferry dock but kept out of sight. When the boat had docked, Donny saw Steve Gorman walking off with a handful of other foot passengers. Donny managed to hide under the hood of his kangaroo jacket while Steve walked past within a few feet of him. As soon as Steve had passed, Donny hustled onto the boat that would take him back to Swartz Bay.

***

"Donny's upstairs sleeping, Steve. He didn't say you were coming over here. Leon's at his sister's. Where's the van?" Granny was suspicious and still not sure she believed the boys' story.

"It's over in Vic gettin' a tune-up. It's missin' on at least two cylinders. I hitched a ride to the ferry." Steve was cautious around Granny. He knew she could outwit him and already once she had talked him into spending time in jail to save Donny. At her suggestion, Steve had purchased the van with some of the money Granny had given him for his nine months. With the rest, they had bought their first major supply of drugs for the resale market. It often occurred to Steve that Donny benefited as much from Granny's hush money as he did.

"Are you hungry? I can fix you some lunch."

"No, thanks. I've had some." The truth was he wasn't feeling well enough to eat.

"So you must have had quite a scare last night. With that fire and all. What happened?"

"I don't know, but we didn't have nothin' to do with it, Mrs. Morrison. Honest. When we realized what was goin' on, we got out of there. We figured we'd be suspected of settin' it 'cause Donny got into a scrap with old Hertz. The owner. When we heard the alarms and saw the blaze, we got the......we got out of there. Fast. It was probably that big old fireplace in the pub that started it."

"I don't know if you heard, but they think this man Hertz died in the fire. It would be a very serious matter if that fire wasn't an accident."

Steve's eyes grew a few sizes and he rubbed them to cover what he knew must look like fear to Granny. "Well.....like I said, we didn't have anything to do with it. Mind if I have a shower? I'm feelin' a little grimy." He wanted to avoid her questioning and get away from her. She couldn't trip him up if he didn't talk to her.

"No, you go right ahead. There are clean clothes upstairs." Kathleen Morrison knew the truth wasn't coming out. Leon had told her they didn't hear about the fire until they were on their way to Victoria. Steve just said they left because of the fire. One of them was lying. That meant the truth was not good.

She took a cigarette from the pack of Export Plain in the cupboard above the fridge and put it in her mouth. She kept them in a hard-to-reach place, reasoning that she would smoke less if it wasn't convenient to do so. She loved the feel of smoke being pulled down her throat and the light head rush she got from the lack of oxygen, but she hated the smell on clothes and the stains that tobacco left indoors. She put on a light jacket and went through the back door onto the deck which faced the ocean and Admiral's. She took a lighter out of the jacket pocket and lit up. Smoking helped her to think, she knew, as it tended to calm her. She also knew that it caused cancer, but smoking a pack a week certainly wouldn't hurt her.

It was a bright, warm day with little wind. Tomorrow would be December and the forecast was for the great weather to continue for at least a few more days. She stood leaning on the railing of the deck and looked out over the water of Trincomali Channel. When things got hectic in her life, this is what she did. Between the tobacco and the immense calm of her home's view, she was able to let her mind drift, and when it did, it often did its best work.

The boys must have had something to do with the fire, she reasoned, otherwise why would one of them be lying? Could one of them be confused? No, not even Leon was stupid enough not to have noticed a hotel burning down as they left it. It wouldn't make any sense for Steve to be lying and Leon's version to be true. They either set the fire or they were truly afraid they would be blamed for it. It's not likely anyone else set it except for the owner, and if it was, he should have been more careful about it. But if they didn't do it, what evidence would there be against them? Are they just scared little boys? She let those questions float for a second and got back to reality. All she could do right now was wait. Wait until more word came out about the fire because she couldn't trust the word of the boys. If it wasn't arson, no problem. If it was, she would have to make plans. She knew that what was called justice could be bought. She had done it. It was rather cheap, really.

***

Steve came down the stairs after she had gone back inside. "Where did Donny go?"

"Isn't he upstairs? He went up for a nap at about noon." She looked at her kitchen clock. Quarter to two. "I was outside for a few minutes, but I'm sure I would have noticed him come down. Maybe he's sleeping in another room."

"I looked all over. Did you say Leon's at his sister's?"

"That's what he said."

"What's her phone number?" Steve was getting anxious.

As Granny was looking up the number, Leon appeared at the side door. "Hey. Ya made it, eh? Donny up yet?"

"He's not here. I was hoping he was with you. Did he say he was goin' anywhere?"

"Just that he was gonna have a nap. But he was expectin' you."

"I need a smoke." He looked at Leon wide-eyed and jerked his head toward the back door. They went out, leaving Granny inside. "Of course he was expecting me, ya dummy. Did ya think I was gonna stay over in Vic by myself? Christ, you're stupid sometimes, Leon." He took a long pause. "We gotta find Donny. I don't know what to do about this thing. I don't think there's any way they can link us to the fire, but I'm not sure."

"Donny just said 'Stick to the story.' If nobody says nothin', they can't do anything to us. Right?"

"I don't know, Leon. I wish I knew where Donny was."

***

11

A week later, the Crow seemed like old news. I rode by its remains every day on the way to school and the emptiness of the old estate where the Crow had stood seemed as normal as before when seeing it there also attracted no special response. It just was. Now it was just gone. I guess it goes to show how quickly we adapt to the changes in our surroundings.

Morrison had been back at school for a couple of days. In guidance class we had taken a side-track and were studying the Seven Deadly Sins and the Seven Heavenly Virtues. Yesterday he had talked about the consequences of sin. His story was about a ten-year-old boy and a fire and the damage caused by his Anger. Today his subject was the virtue of Justice and how it makes all things right in the long run.

It was December 7th and the Fire Marshal from Victoria had finally publicized his findings that morning. The Crow fire was deliberately set, in at least three places where evidence of an accelerant such as gasoline were found. A gerry can containing trace amounts of gasoline was also found by police in bushes on the property. That afternoon, the lone body found in the ashes was identified through dental records as that of Wolfgang Hertz. What was shocking was that the cause of death was neither smoke inhalation nor burning, but a small caliber gunshot wound to the head. This news had elevated Donny Henrik from uncaring firebug to cold-blooded murderer.

***

Jim Morrison had taken time off from teaching on Admiral's to help his mother sort out what he knew was going to be a big mess. He assumed that his nephew was the perpetrator of the Crow fire and knew that his mother would hide Donny from the law if she could; he was going to get Donny to do the right thing and turn himself in. But neither one could carry out their opposing plans without Donny being there. He hadn't been seen by anyone who knew him since Leon left him to go to his sister's house.

The RCMP had been to Kathleen Morrison's house looking for the boys two days after the fire and again the day before Hertz' cause of death hit the news. She hid Leon and Steve both times, much to her son's displeasure. He was there on their first visit, but didn't turn the boys in, as their reform was not his immediate concern. He was interested in getting Donny on the road to goodness by teaching him Justice; Leon's and Steve's Justice would sort itself out.

The two RCMP officers from Admiral's weren't as polite as they were on their first visit. Constables Hardy and Koral were certain that Kathleen Morrison was hiding the three boys or at least knew their whereabouts. Ken Hardy stood six-foot-four and had a trim, lean build. Dan Koral was only five-foot-eight but appeared almost half that wide, and was solid muscle. Back on Admiral's, they were called Laurel and Hardy, but were nothing like the incompetent oafs of the movies.

"Ma'am it's very important that we talk to your grandson and his friends. If you have any idea where we might find them, you should tell us." His voice got louder and more urgent toward the end of his sentence, but Dan Koral's impatience was a well-planned act. He was trying to rattle Kathleen Morrison into letting out some kind of information about the boys, but she was a tough old woman. Hardy stood behind Koral, looking over Koral's head into the house. She held the door wide open to show she had nothing to hide, but she wasn't about to let them in.

"I told you. I haven't seen any of them in weeks. When I do I'll tell them to get in touch with you on Admiral's. They do spend a lot of time there, you know." She smiled as though it should be not alarming for police to be searching for her grandson.

"Ma'am, my partner and I don't really think that the boys will come to us willingly. As you well know, we want to talk to them about the murder on Admiral's and we strongly believe they were involved. Ma'am it's a criminal offense to harbour criminals from the law. It's not taken lightly by us or the courts."

"I'm not harbouring anyone. And what murder? I thought you wanted to see them about that fire at that hotel?"

"One and the same, Ma'am. It'll probably be on the news tomorrow, so we'll tell you now. The hotel owner died of a gunshot wound to the head. Whoever did it wanted the man dead. It wasn't just a fire or any accident. Your grandson is in serious trouble, Mrs. Morrison."

She tried not to let the news look like it stunned her, and she wasn't sure how good a job she did. She continued to smile at them until she realized it wasn't an appropriate cover for her shocked emotions. "But Donny doesn't have a gun. You must be all wrong in thinking they had anything to do with this. I'm sure this is all a big mistake."

Koral could sense only a slight change in her composure, but his psychology training told him it might be all he needed to have her turn her story around. "Ma'am, I'll ask you one more time. Where is your grandson and his friends? If you know, you should tell us. Now." Again he raised his voice at the end of his sentence, to the point of sounding menacing. He didn't get the response he had hoped for.

Kathleen Morrison did not need much time to regain her composure after the news of the shooting. Though it rocked her like a knockout punch, she shook it off in a few seconds. "I've taken enough of your accusations, sir! The boys are not here! Now please leave!"

Ken Hardy spoke for the first time. "Mrs. Morrison. This is ...." The door slammed shut on his words.

The two walked slowly back to the patrol car looking for any signs of the boys in the driveway, in windows, in the surrounding bushes and trees. They sat in the car and wrote notes for longer than their actual conversation with Mrs. Morrison had lasted.

After they had pulled out of the driveway, she could see the car pass back and forth down the road several times. She learned later that they had visited her neighbours and asked questions, but none of them had seen the boys recently. Most of the homes were well hidden from one another by thick firs and cedars.

When she was certain they had caught the 3:30 ferry back to Victoria, Granny called the boys up from the basement. "Alright, who wants to tell me what really happened last week? I've kept you boys from the police for today, but I won't do it forever, especially if you don't tell me the truth."

Leon looked at Steve for guidance. "What did the cops say?" Steve finally asked.

"They asked for you first, Steve, if that means anything. I suppose that's because you have a record. Then they asked for Donny and then Leon. They didn't tell me much except that man Hertz was shot in the head. If I don't start hearing the truth, you will leave my house today. Did you kill that man?"

Leon almost exploded. "We lit the fire, but I didn't know Donny was gonna shoot him!"

"Shut up, Leon!" He turned to Kathleen Morrison. "I don't know anything about any shooting! We lit the fire and got the hell out of there! Nobody shot him!"

"Well that's how he died, Steve. Somebody shot him in the head." She spoke quietly and slowly, as though she wanted the words to be more effective, but it was numbness setting in to her body as she realized what her grandson had done that caused her speech to weaken. She sat down at a kitchen chair and gazed out the bay window to the ocean.

"Mrs. Morrison?" Leon walked over and put his hand on her shoulder.

She continued to stare out the window. "Leave me, boys. I need to think for a while."

They left for the basement and when she heard the door shut and the footsteps on the stairs stop, she broke down crying. She cried for Donny, she cried for her daughter, and she cried for herself. She cried for how they had all failed each other, for how her love for her offspring was so misguided and destructive and most of all unreturned. She felt guilty for her son's affliction and knew that guilt was the root of her subsequent overcompensation. She thought of the recent loss of her husband and how his death had given her the greater freedom of choice she now enjoyed and she felt more guilt. It took her another hour for the thoughts running around her head to wear themselves out. When they did, she was able to pull herself together enough to go outside for a smoke. That would bring her thoughts back on track.

*****

"Why did you tell her Donny shot Hertz? We were with him the whole time! You're such an idiot, Leon."

"Well, not the whole time, really. Donny was gone for a little while before he decided we'd light the place up. He could have shot him then." Leon was stupid, but at least he watched a lot of TV.

"That was like five minutes! He couldn't even have found Hertz in that time. And he would have had to go to the room to get the gun, too. No way. No way!"

"My backpack was under the table in the bar, Steve. That's where the acid was. Remember? And the gun was in there, too."

Steve's head almost fell into his chest. "I can't believe Donny would do that! We were there nearly the whole time! Jesus, he was mad, but I've seen him madder! I can't believe it! Christ! I wonder where he is. We gotta find him."

"Maybe he's at the apartment."

"The cops'll be watching that place. Granny probably gave him a pile of money and sent him to Australia or somewhere. Then when she knows he's safe, she'll turn us in. We should split, man! I never thought of that! She's just holdin' us 'til Donny's long gone. Then she'll rat us out!" Steve was having memories of his nine-month vacation coming back to him. He wasn't ready to be Donny and Granny's fall guy again.

Mrs. Morrison called from the top of the stairs. She had regained her composure completely. "Boys? Would you come up here, please? I want to talk to you." From the sound of her voice the boys never would have known that only two hours earlier this was a woman near total collapse. She had thought the problem through and came up with the only solution she could that would keep Donny out of prison.

"Supper will be ready in an hour. Would you like some wine?" The boys had never been offered wine at Granny's before. They had stolen from her stock and drank lots of it, but she'd never before offered it.

"Sure."

"Okay. I really like that apple stuff that your neighbour makes." Leon didn't stop to think that officially they had never had any of Granny's wine. It made Steve roll his eyes and Granny smile. She had a boys-will-be-boys attitude to her inventory depletion whenever the boys came for a visit and on this occasion she was going to be as gracious as she ever had.

"That alright with you, too, Steve?"

"Sure, I'll try that." He was not trying so much to act innocent of their previous binges on her wine as he was trying to sound smarter than Leon.

"Steve, would you mind getting a fire going? There's some kindling in the carport."

"Sure."

Until supper was ready, Granny let the wine flow freely. She made small talk with Leon about his late parents and his sister, leading him into pleasant reminiscences of island life as a child. Steve had a great fire going in the fireplace that, along with the wine made them all much more relaxed. Leon was feeling a warm glow, but when supper was served he was in heaven. Granny had made pork chops smothered in cream of mushroom soup with creamy mashed potatoes and creamed corn. She knew it was one of Leon's favourites.

Steve, on the other hand, knew what was going on and felt dread with each smile she directed his way. He sensed that he wasn't part of her plan, though, and, for the most part, stayed out of the conversation, tending the fire and drinking his wine. While this wasn't how she had made the deal with him to take the fall for Donny in the break and enter, Steve could see what she was up to with Leon and he didn't like it. Leon was going to get sucked into her trap and never get out.

Her years of entertaining the Galiano society ladies was good practice for her efforts on this night, even though she didn't have time to prepare a dessert worthy of her campaign. More wine was served since she feared that the huge meal might have absorbed most of the buzz Leon had before it. After a couple of glasses, she got down to business.

"Where do you boys think Donny is?" she started.

"We were hopin' you knew," said Steve. "You honestly don't know where he is?"

"If I did, I would have him back here to clear this mess up. I can't believe he's really responsible for this mess. Where on earth would he get a gun from? Why would he shoot that man?"

"He hated Hertz. Bastard was gonna rat us out, I think. He was always threatenin' to call the cops on us. I mean.....like I don't know what for... he hated Donny, too, I guess.....but we didn't do nothin' wrong." Leon didn't talk more intelligently when he was drunk, but it gave him an excuse for sounding stupid.

Granny didn't want to know the ugly details of why anyone would turn her grandson in to the police. She had been in denial for so long about his lack of innocence, she was certainly not going to face the truth about his lawlessness now.

"Well, I think we have to come to the conclusion, like the police obviously have, that one of you boys killed him." She was talking to Leon with a calm, almost happy voice that would work to get a small child into an agreeable mood.

"Well, it sure wasn't me! And Steve didn't even know where the gun was. So it had to be Donny."

"And that brings us to a little problem, doesn't it? Donny's not here. And sooner or later, the police are going to find you two. And if you can't lead them to Donny, they'll be happy to take you, instead. I'm sure it won't matter to them whether or not you pulled the trigger. They must be able to link you to the fire, and that's as incriminating as it gets. If you claim that Donny did it and they can't find him, you'll probably go to jail and do his time, too."

As she spoke, Leon actually began to understand the gravity of his situation, and almost exactly what she was trying to tell him. As it sunk in, he began to sob, and tears appeared in the corners of his eyes.

"What should we do?" he finally let out and started to bawl. She went to the big chair, sat on the arm and hugged him around the neck. She held him until he stopped shaking and hit him with the punch line.

"You should probably turn yourselves in. They'll probably go easier on you if you do."

"But we didn't do it! I mean we lit the fire, but we didn't shoot him! Donny did!"

Steve had considered himself an observer for a while, but when she used the plural about turning themselves in, he got scared.

"Leon, I can make it easier for you, too. I'll get you a very good lawyer from Victoria. He'll come up with a defense that will get you the minimum time possible. There's no sense in all three of you going to jail, now is there? Steve here did his time once for you and Donny, remember that? You didn't go to jail that time did you? Now I think it's your turn."

"Well, when the hell is it gonna be Donny's turn?! He does the shooting and disappears and nothing happens to him! It's not fair! It's not fair!"

"You're right, Leon, it isn't fair, but I'm prepared to try to make it at least a little easier for you. For doing this for me, and for Donny, I'll pay you twenty-five thousand dollars, plus two thousand more for every year you have to spend in prison."

"Years!? God! I can't do it!"

"Leon, that's a shitload of cash. You know she's good for it. You'd be set for life, man. And you probably wouldn't have to do a whole bunch of time, either....they'll go a little easier on you than they would Donny or me 'cause you're .... ya know...not real smart." Steve could see how Granny's plan benefited him just as much as it did Donny. His previous dread lifted like a balloon and Kathleen Morrison had a new ally in her scheme.

"That don't make a lot of difference, Steve. Ya kill somebody, ya kill somebody. Don't matter how smart ya are. 'Less ya don't get caught."

"Steve's partly right though, Leon. A good lawyer can see to it that that makes a big difference in a sentence. And I'll pay for a good lawyer. I mean that. The best. I've heard of people getting out in ten years."

Leon looked ready to vomit. He loved Donny, adored him, but ten years was a long time to give away to anyone. "Can we just talk to this lawyer first? See what would happen?"

"Of course, Leon. I'll take you both to Victoria tomorrow."

"Why do I need to go?!" Steve was rather shocked that he should be included.

"Leon will need help, Steve. Between the two of you, you will have to make up a good story of how Leon did this himself, without you and Donny knowing anything about it until it was too late. You were the only other one there and you'll have to help Leon get some facts straight. There must have been other people who saw you together. And two people giving the story makes it much more believable."

Steve was beginning to think that she had thought this right through to the day Leon would get out of prison. He was wary of Leon's inability to lie well. He could see that she was right. He'd have to think up the story, coach Leon, and help him practice it or he would be sunk, too. Steve found the thought of his role distasteful, like ratting someone out. But it beat going back to prison.

***

Donny got off the ferry at Tsawassen on the Vancouver side of the strait. Hitchhiking was not allowed on any B.C. highways, but the rule was actually enforced on the long, narrow causeway leading to the ferry terminal, so he had to walk a long mile to natural land where the highway had wider shoulders and he would be able to stick out his thumb without fear of attracting police attention.

An old, beat up '61 Vauxhall stopped for him almost as soon as the causeway ended. Donny opened the front door and looked at the driver. His age was hard to pin-point, but probably 35 give or take 5 years. He was dirty and wore a black and red checked jac-shirt, blue jeans ripped at the knee and untied work boots. He looked big and hadn't shaved for at least a week.

"Where ya goin', kid?" he asked in a voice much more pleasant and refined than his appearance.

"Chilliwack," Donny said. He named a town far enough away that the driver was unlikely to be going to so that he could just get away from the ferry terminal.

"It's your lucky day, kid! So am I! Throw your pack in the back seat. My name's Cliff. Cliff Olson. What's yours?"

***

12

"Evenin', Mark! How ya doin' tonight?" Oscar was in a festive mood with Christmas only ten days away. He had his little office in the terminal decorated with cedar boughs and holly branches and a string of blue and green lights.

"Not bad. How 'bout you?" I managed to huff or puff out. My nighttime meetings with Oscar were getting to be the highlight of my days, even with Christmas so close. The first semester of school would be finished in a month and the only final I'd have to write would be English, so school was more or less breezing by. Soccer season was over and basketball hadn't started yet, so there was a big lull as far as extra-curricular stuff went, too. Oscar was about as stimulating as things got. "How was your trip to Victoria? You all ready for Christmas?"

I already knew most of the details of Oscar's shopping trip. Since Tony was ten he'd been aching to drive Oscar's '65 Thunderbird. He saw Oscar drive it into his carport the day he brought it home from the dealer and fell in love the way boys do with cars. Now Tony had his driver's license for almost two years and finally Oscar asked him to drive him and the T-Bird to Victoria to see his optometrist and do some shopping. Tony was so excited when he told me he was going, I thought there was going to be a mess to clean up.

"It's only a trip to Victoria," I tried to put it in perspective for him.

"But in the T-Bird!" he shouted

"You've driven it before, man. Get over it!"

"Only to move it around in his driveway and stuff. When he's at the eye doctor, I get to cruise around town in that baby. What a chick magnet! Baby!"

"Too bad it's not summer...you could have the top down. That'd be cool."

"It'd be bloody cool now, too!"

"And wet, too, I bet."

"Yeah, probably. But I'm gonna make the most of it, top up or down."

When they got back, Tony told me every minute detail of driving the T-Bird, what Oscar had bought and about his eyesight. His eyes were still good enough to drive around the island, the doctor had said, but trips to the city should probably be left to someone else. To Tony, that meant more chauffeur jobs in the T-Bird, but Oscar likely went to the city only once a year.

"The trip was fine," Oscar smiled. "Tony sure was excited to drive my car. He-hee! That was a real treat for him. Think I'll get him to do that every year as my Christmas gift to him! Ready for Christmas? I don't really need to get ready much. I make most of my gifts all year long and try to keep the so-called Christmas spirit in me all the time. Too many people act different around Christmas. They're nice as heck to people they don't have much time for the rest of the year. They do a whole bunch of shopping and spending money they don't have just because they feel obligated to get somebody something. It just don't make a whole lot of sense to me. They get themselves all in a tizzy when all they have to do is slow down a little and enjoy life and be nice to one another. 'Course I ain't really talkin' about here on Admiral's. Life's pretty slow here at the speediest of times, like now. But over in the city! Hoo-ee! Maybe we should change our name to Christmas Island 'cause we're always so friendly and slow here! He-hee! I think that name's taken, though!"

He was right. Many people on Admiral's treated each other all year as though it was Christmas. Your house was always open to friends and neighbours; invitations were not necessary. Almost everybody on Admiral's lived there for the same reason: to simplify their life. Or their parents' did. A lot of kids didn't like the slow pace and couldn't wait to leave for the city and opportunity. But many returned, or looked forward to the day that they could.

"Well I still like to get presents," I said feeling not the least bit guilty. "But it does seem to get more commercial every year. I try to make presents, too. I made my mom a fine lighting fixture in metal shop last year."

"Good for you! A hand-made gift means a lot more than something bought in a store. And I can tell you're proud of that lamp, too!"

"Lighting Fixture, Oscar! I cut and filed and bent metal, riveted brackets on it, molded plexiglass for the shade, wired in a socket and painted it all up. I've never seen a finer one in a store!" I mock-boasted.

"Ah, you're just teasing me! I mean it when I say a person should always be proud of their true accomplishments, no matter how large or small. It's important to feel good about yourself, but you have to have some real reason for it. As long as it's something honest and something accomplished. Lots of people are proud of their acquisitions, like a car or a boat or a house. Unless you built it yourself, or had a big hand in it, those things aren't much to be proud of. People're just mistaking treasures for accomplishments and true accomplishments are what give you pride and self-esteem.

"I remember when I was just little going to my momma's school. She would have Awards Day at the end of the year. Every little kid up to grade three would get an award of some sort. Making the best this or doing the biggest that-always for doing something, not for having something. She would have to make up something new for some kid almost every year 'cause she sometimes had to search real deep for an area of proficiency. I remember one kid got best frog-catcher one year. Anyhow, in grade four, not every kid would get an award and some went home crying, but my momma always sent a note home to their parents saying little Johnny is still the best frog catcher or whatever, but now that he's getting older, he needs to start having bigger accomplishments. If the kid had good parents, he came back in grade five and tried harder to get an award. If he fell short, he'd still be told he was doin' a fine job 'cause he was tryin' real hard. Momma seemed to have a lot of students that tried real hard no matter what their abilities. I think they kept trying to please her 'cause they realized her praise meant even more now that they were older."

I'd heard this story a few times, but Oscar thought it was an important lesson that what you have does not define who you are; that what you do is much more important. I looked out the window at the gleaming '65 T-Bird convertible owned by this 75 year old night watchman who dispenses wisdom as casually as others talk about the weather. It was easy to learn that what he said was very true, indeed.

13

Christmas had come and gone for 1971, and it was now late February. Bob had been back from the Bahamas for a week, but this was the first time I'd seen him. He was in the old part of the house with Dad having a glass of wine as was customary at around five in the afternoon. Our house was built over two stages, and it gave Mom and Dad each their own kitchens-Mom's at the front for meals and Dad's in the old part for beer- and wine-making and preserving. Mr. Torrie was there, too, and when I walked in from the front part of the house the topic was whether or not to plant parsley this year in what had become our community garden. It was our property, but both Bob and Mr. Torrie helped out in the planting and tending of it through the growing season. It covered almost an acre in size, not counting the potato patch, which was just about half as big. The main garden was surrounded by a twelve-foot-high deer fence made of salvaged fish net donated by a friend in Steveston. The deer seemed to leave the potatoes alone, so our front yard was basically a potato patch, plus a little bit of grass.

Dad loved his gardening and winemaking. When we moved to Admiral's he had a romantic notion that we would live off the land and not need much money for anything at all. He was close to being right. There was an unorganized system of barter on Admiral's that anyone with marketable skills or products could easily be welcomed into. It was really just a neighbourly give-and-get, because no one kept track of whether or not anyone owed them or vice-versa. People who keep track like that, Dad would say, might as well just stick with cash and live in the city. The type of people who bartered always wanted be sure that the person they were dealing with got a good deal so that they didn't lose a friend. Admiral's was too small a place to risk that. I watched Dad many times giving and getting things in great bounty and people being so happy that they just got something for what they considered nothing. People he barely knew would phone and offer fruit from their trees because they heard he had a fruit press and made wine. First they would be happy that the fruit didn't rot on the ground and make a mess of their yard but when Dad showed up later with jugs of either juice or wine for them they would be overjoyed. Fishermen from Steveston would call Dad when they were in harbour on Admiral's and for a few gallons of wine, we would have so much fresh salmon, I'd get sick of it. If we got too much all at once, Mom would can it and we'd never do without salmon. We occasionally needed a backhoe or an electrician to do some work on the property, and while a bill like that couldn't be paid for entirely in wine, after several glasses upon job completion and a jug to take home, the bill that came in the mail was always much less than the regular rate. Dad's wine was a marketable product.

The garden was a slightly different story. The Torries and Bob helped tend it and we all shared in its yield. Some stuff was given to other neighbours, but anything that could be preserved to be eaten through the winter often was, hence the incredible volume of veggies.

"For the amount of room it takes up, we might as well put it in again. So what if it's only decoration? The women seem to like it," Bob said.

"You still talking about parsley?!" Dad joked.

Hugh Torrie laughed. "And I chew on some on my way home. Takes the wine breath away so I don't catch so much hell when I get there."

"I don't worry about that. All I'm saying is for the little bit of room it takes up along the fence line, what's the harm?" Bob repeated.

"We could put more mint in there, that's what I was thinking," Dad said.

"How much mint can you use? You can only use it fresh."

"True, but that damn parsley usually goes to seed before it's all used up. You look queer giving it away and you can't make wine with it."

"Maybe a little more mint and a little less parsley."

"Sounds like an idea. More wine?" Dad offered.

"Maybe a little one. Don't want to keep you from your supper."

"My supper's prob'ly cold already," said Hugh, getting up. "I'll see you tomorrow," he said as he went out the door.

"Hi, Mark! How ya doin'?" Bob noticed me standing behind him at the door.

"Good, thanks. How was your holiday? Nice and hot?" I asked.

"It's absolutely beautiful down there." Dad was pouring them another glass of wine. "Thanks, Jim. Admiral's is probably the nicest place I've ever been, but it's nice to have the luxury of following the sun in the winter. How's school going? Hey, how did that essay I helped you with work out?"

"Not so great. I ended up having to write the final, but it wasn't the fault of that essay. My English teacher's a dick. Just my luck that his brother was killed in the Dieppe raid."

"Well that's better luck than his brother had. Too bad. If you want any more stories, come and see me, but I wouldn't blame you if you might be a little reluctant now."

"Hell, no. I still think the story was good. It's my teacher, that's all.'

"Mark," Dad broke in, "your English teacher might be a dick, but that's not why you had to write the final. You had to write it because you didn't keep up a seventy average. Plain and simple. That's not his fault. Accept responsibility and you take control. You know that."

"Well, I still think I was good enough for at least a seventy. When half the marks are based on his opinion on your writing and he doesn't like you and you still get sixty-eight point five, you don't feel like you have much control. It's pretty frustrating."

"But when you take responsibility and truly believe you have it, you'll feel like you're in control. And it feels pretty good."

Dad didn't talk like this often. At least not around me. I thought it might have been the wine, but it didn't seem to have any larger than normal effect on him that day. He was sounding like Jim Morrison in Guidance class and he usually made sense. To hear my Dad talking like that was almost scary. I still thought Frame was a dick who didn't like me. I had him for English every year in high school except grade nine, and that year I was getting marks in the nineties.

I turned to Bob. "How about tonight? You got time for a story?"

"Isn't the semester over? You won't have English 'til next year, now, will you?"

"Yeah, but I've got the history part of Social Studies now. I could probably submit that same story for history and get a great mark!"

"Ha! I told you that was just a story! Your teacher won't appreciate you rewriting history, though! Do you still have the story you wrote?"

"Sure. Wanna read it?" I turned to go to my room to get it.

"Hold on. I've gotta get going. Why don't you bring it over about eight o'clock tonight? I'll see if I can remember a good story for your history class by then."

I was glad Bob had invited me over. I wanted to hear another story like the Dieppe one. I was sure he was full of them-not full of it.

When I got there, Bob was doing laps in the pool. It still had the dome cover, and with the light on inside, I knew he must be in it. I figured he'd lost track of time because he swam for another ten minutes before he noticed me on the narrow pool deck.

"Hi, Mark. I'll be with you in a minute. Go on into the house. Did you bring Fitz? I've got a nice big steak bone he'd just love." He hopped out of the pool and sat on the edge, catching his breath. It was hard not to notice the tattoo on the back of his upper right arm, close to his shoulder. It was a knight in full white metal armour, mounted on a beautiful white horse. He held a sword in his right hand at his waist that went diagonally across his chest with the tip just above his left shoulder. The tip had those little shiny rays extending from it, as did a few spots on the armour. The angle of view was from the Knight's right, standing about ten or fifteen feet away and looking up at him. The artwork was intricate and complicated, even though it was only in black and white. It was not just outlined in black, the horse and rider were much whiter than Bob's skin. The whole image was not much more than three inches long, but it made a strong impression. I guess I'd never seen Bob without sleeves before. If I'd seen the tattoo, I'm sure I wouldn't have forgotten it. There were some Latin words in an old script underneath, but I couldn't make them out before he turned around.

"Okay, I'll meet you in there," I said, assuming he was going to dress in the little change house attached to the dome. Fitz was sitting on Bob's doorstep waiting, wagging his tail, as though he knew what Bob had said about the bone.

We went in to the dark house. Fitz went straight for the fireplace and lay down in front of it. The fire was nearly dead, so I threw a couple of quarter-round logs on it and blew on the embers. They were still hot and it didn't take long for the new wood to catch. Fitz was already fast asleep.

The door opened. "Oh, good, you got the fire going. Thanks, Mark." He went to the kitchen, filled the kettle and plugged it in to the receptacle on the stove. "So, did you bring your story with you?"

I took it out of the folder I had brought and handed it to him. Still inside were some blank pages and a pen. As he read, I looked around the room for some clues to the mystery that was this man I'd known all my life. My Dad treated him like a brother and he was as familiar as an uncle would be, but the more time I spent with him, the less I seemed to know him. On the walls were no pictures of family, no diplomas, no service awards, nothing of a personal nature except his books and magazines which were so eclectic, they offered no evidence of a theme to this man.

The kettle started to boil loudly. "Nothing wrong with that story. Your teacher's an idiot." He got up to answer the kettle and poured the boiling water into the brown two-tone teapot. Then he went to the fridge and brought something out. "Fitz! You wanna bone, boy? Huh? C'mere Fitz!"

Poor old Fitz couldn't hear a thing. He didn't move from his warm spot in front of the fire. Bob walked over and waved the bone under his nose. Fitz's eyes slammed open, he jumped to his feet and lunged at the bone. The two of them had a friendly tug-of-war for a minute before Bob let go and Fitz lay down in front of the fire again and focused on his prize.

Bob went back to the teapot and poured two mugs. "Want some tea?" he asked as he handed me a mug.

"Thanks," I said. I took the cup and blew on the surface of the liquid.

"That story I told you is pretty much all true, Mark. Yes, I was there. I was in charge of the team that took the radar guy to Dieppe. You could use that story for a history report, but as far as anyone but about a dozen people know, it's just a story, not history. A couple of other stories come to mind, but they have the same problem. They're true, but your history teacher wouldn't know that." He took a long sip of his tea.

"How about your work in screening Japanese returning to the coast after the war? That's well-known. Did you ever come across ones that were actually Japanese soldiers trying to hide from war-crimes trials?"

"There were a few." He stared into the fire as if remembering way back. His elbows rested on the arms of the big chair he sat in and he held his tea mug in both hands close to his lips. "But I can't tell you about that right now."

"How come?"

"Some of those cases are still going on. And some have only recently come to a conclusion. The public isn't going to hear about any of them for awhile. Having you write about that would be dangerous."

"What do you mean?"

"Well let's just say that some of these cases can't be proved in an ordinary court of law. And there's very little passion on the government's part to bring these types of criminals to justice."

"Why?"

"Japan has emerged as a big trading partner with Canada. And the States. In the government's eyes, if we started prosecuting a bunch of old Japanese men-- without one hundred percent proof-- we'd insult Japan- something the government is very sensitive about. They think the Americans wouldn't look too kindly upon it, either, and they're our biggest trading partner. I don't know why. There's still a lot of anti-Japanese sentiment down there. But that's what our government thinks and it's almost impossible to get justice the normal way without their help."

I thought Bob was starting to drift off as he had the night he told me about Dieppe. Two phrases stuck out in my mind. 'Justice the normal way' and 'ordinary court of law.' I knew from experience with Bob, though, that questioning him on what he meant would only alert him to how much he was saying and how closely I listened. I wanted to hear more, so I only said what I thought would keep him talking.

"Who cares? Isn't justice important? Even if I were Japanese, I'd like to see them punished." At this age in my life, I had only an elementary knowledge of the horrors that befell ordinary people at the hands of wartime Japan. But I would learn a thing or two that night.

"That's how we feel, too. We know that there are a lot of men in Canada and the States who haven't been brought to justice. Japanese men and German men. We know who a lot of them are, and we get information on a few more every year. When we have a person under suspicion, we check him out thoroughly. We make totally sure we have the right man and when we are, he's brought to justice. I'm not just talking about men who were following orders in their chain of command. War throughout the centuries has been filled with men of good intent who have had to do what seem like evil things. But there are rules in War and all good soldiers adhere to them. The men we go after were not just caught up in the craziness of war and turned into killers. They used war as justification for profit or their own sick pleasures. They're sadists, torturers, murderers and thieves. Their loyalty is not to their country nor their principles. They have no principles. They are loyal only to themselves and are the lowest form of human being. Without war to justify their crimes, they would have been lesser criminals perhaps, but they are the same, evil person. Without war, their crimes just become less overt, a little scaled down."

Bob stopped and took a sip of his tea, not moving his eyes from the fireplace. He was in as deep a drift as the Dieppe night now. I hoped like hell that Fitz didn't make a sound this time. Suddenly, he got up and threw two quarter-round logs on the fire, poked around in it a little then sat down again without a word. I watched him but didn't speak. Fitz slept and didn't hear.

"One of the men I checked out when I was on the force, Toshiro Hamata, had been a pimp in Kobe before the war. Kobe is renowned for its tasty and tender brand of cattle and Hamata liked to call his girls Kobe Beef. His uncle was an officer in the Japanese army, but he himself had never been in any of the forces. The uncle hired him to manage his regiment's rotating collection of 'comfort women' in their campaign in China. 'Comfort women' were locals that special soldiers captured. Regular soldiers were allowed to rent these women for twenty minutes as a reward for their conquests. Most were basically gang-raped as there were never enough for every man. They were given no rations, only water with which to clean themselves in preparation for the following night. Hamata would allow them to drink the water only after cleansing themselves of the soldiers' foulness. This he supervised personally. It seems he got some kick out of it. If a woman did not drink the water after her bath, Hamata suspected that she snuck a drink before bathing and he would force her to drink the filthy water. Even if they were camped near a stream or river, Hamata would not allow the women to bathe in it. Water would have to be brought to them and he would supervise their cleansing.

"The Japanese army was extremely disciplined during their fighting and were not, under the rules, allowed to seek out pleasures on their own. Unauthorized raping was punished. Pillaging was seen as much too dishonourable for the ordinary soldier. After all, the rewards of victory belonged to the Emperor. But the comfort women kept morale in the army high, or so it was believed, hence the practice was unofficially condoned at the highest levels of the army. It was simply not spoken of. Most of those ordinary soldiers cannot be called to account for using the services of a man like Hamata in a time of war. Most of them were being victimized almost as much as the women they paid Hamata to use. On the front lines of war, desperation can drive good men to do bad things. Men like Hamata, however, were using the war for their own gain and people for his sick pleasure. It would cost a soldier about a days pay for a twenty minute session with a woman, so few ever had any money. If a soldier was the queer sort, Hamata would provide him with a young Chinese boy, if that were his pleasure. Or a young girl. Or even a baby. There was nothing Hamata couldn't provide for the soldiers, for all the spoils of war were at his disposal as was a captive market for his product.

"Obviously, the women didn't last long under such conditions. The same six soldiers who worked directly for Hamata 'recruiting' the women also disposed of them after four or five days of hard use. They were easily replaced and he reasoned that his men deserved variety. Sometimes their deaths were merciful, sometimes Hamata would torture a woman to her death. Sometimes, he could sell the woman to other pimps when they were near cities. This is how we first got information that this monster existed. Some of the survivors turned up at our doorsteps in Hong Kong after the war.

"Proving Hamata was who we thought was not easy. Somehow he had gotten into the country and into one of the concentration camps in the interior and applied for reassignment to Steveston. Kind of ironic. He had to prove he was a captive in order gain his freedom.

"Anyhow, the Brits in Hong Kong had enough complaints to do some investigating. It was widely believed he fled to Canada, as he talked about it as an option even before the war turned in our favour. And he did have distant relatives here as well. So the case was sent to RCMP in Vancouver. Several of us worked on it off and on, but all we could come up with was a list of possibles, people who might be Hamata. After a couple of years, one of these guys on the list was arrested in Vancouver for pimping. He beat the charge, but we started to watch him more closely. All of a sudden, he goes straight. He starts working on a fish boat, earning honest money. He even buys a house in Steveston and looks like he's going to settle down. Then he buys a mail-order bride from Japan. That wasn't uncommon at all among Japanese bachelors, but with this guy, we didn't know what to think.

"By this time, we had sent photos of him to Hong Kong and eleven out of twelve women picked him out of a line-up. The twelfth just wasn't sure. We knew we had our guy but pretty flimsy proof as far as any War time prosecutor was concerned. And like I said, the government had no will to dredge up the past. The war had been over for ten years by then.

"We checked out all the other guys on his fishing boat to see if he ever talked about the war. We found out that one of them was one of the six soldiers he had in his pimp squad. Immigrated here legally and hooked up with Hamata later. Not that he volunteered the info. We tried to put the squeeze on him to testify against Hamata. On their next fishing trip up north, he went overboard in the middle of the night and was never seen again. Accidents like that do happen -it's insane how many fishermen can't swim and never wear lifejackets- but we think he tipped off Hamata or tried to shake him down and Hamata got rid of the only evidence that could hurt him.

"So it was quite obvious that Hamata hadn't changed his spots at all. He was maybe a little braver now. Or desperate. He actually killed someone who could fight back, though we don't know how. It was likely a cowardly act on Hamata's part. But we lost any chance we had at bringing him to justice the normal way." He stopped and took a long pause, staring into the fire. Then, "Do you believe in justice, Mark?"

I was shocked that he was still cognizant of my presence. His monologue had gone on like a practiced, private storytelling. He had been staring into the fire and moving only his lips and taking the occasional sip of tea. I was totally unprepared for a question, trying not to make a sound that would bring him out of what I thought was almost a trance.

"Do you believe killing is justified if that person is evil?" He went on before I could answer. I think it was just his way of telling me that he wasn't out to lunch. "I do. I always have. It's almost like it's an idea that I was born with. You grow up with stories of good versus evil and almost everybody cheers for the good guy. Of course I did, too, but I wanted to be one of those good guys so badly, I felt life just wouldn't be right if I didn't somehow become one. And not just be good, but work towards totally eradicating evil. A knight in shining armour."

The tattoo. That explains the tattoo.

"You know that guy who writes in The Sun, Eric Nicol? He wrote a short story called The White Knight. You should find it, read it and tell me what you think of it. What a White Knight means through that story."

It was like he could read my mind. "I've read it!" It was the first noise I'd made in almost half an hour. "It was in a book of short stories that was one of our text books in English last year."

"Do you remember it well enough to summarize it for me?"

Luckily the story had struck a chord in me and I had read it many times and wrote a report on it in English class. It was one of the better marks that Mr. Frame had given me ever. I felt it hard to talk, but I didn't want to appear undeserving to a man who was sharing state and life secrets with me, so I did the best I thought I could. "A good man - a white knight- is sent by his king into the countryside to look for the black knight and kill him. The White Knight represents good and the Black Knight, evil. When he enters villages, he is greeted as a hero with offers of free food and lodging. He hears tales from the villagers of the black knight –where he has been, what he has done- and thinks he is on his trail. He searches for months but can't find him. During this time, he notices that people in the villages he comes to don't greet him with as much appreciation as they did when he started his quest. They are less generous with lodging and meals and when he does get hospitality it seems like it's more out of fear than appreciation. One day, when people's generosity seems to have run dry, he gets desperate and steals a chicken or something like that to eat. Then a few days later he comes across another white knight. He is very happy to see someone of his own status. Maybe he has a message from the king. But the thing is, he has been traveling for so long, he is no longer white. His horse is dirty and disheveled; he is muddy and tarnished. Compared to the new white knight, he's filthy- black in fact. The new white knight believes him to be the black knight whose most recent bad deed was stealing a chicken or whatever it was from a farmer. The new White Knight kills him."

"That's really good, Mark. So what is the lesson to be learned from that tale?"

I thought back to when I studied the story for English. Watergate hadn't hit the news yet, but there were lots of other examples of corrupt politicians flying around. That was one of the things the story made me think about--corrupt politicians. Probably some had started out with the most admirable intentions, but along the way found out that structure of politics is hard if not impossible to change. It's just easier to go with the flow, and if you do a bad thing or two along the way, it's okay as long as you don't get caught because everybody else is doing it.

"I guess not becoming corrupt or evil when you start out with good intentions? That good has to be pure and not tainted by even a little evil, even if circumstances change? That if good is tainted with evil, it is evil? To stick to your principles no matter what?"

"Excellent, Mark! That's very good insight for a fifteen-year-old. That story has a beautiful irony to it in that the knight becomes what he had set out to destroy, simply because he focused too much on his purpose and wasn't diligent enough in his conduct. He thought the end, killing the black knight, would justify his means, stealing the chicken to feed himself so he could continue. It shows that there's a thin line between the good and the bad in any of us. It reminds us that we have to take a step back and look at ourselves, assess ourselves once in a while or we might forget where we're going and head down the wrong path.

"A good knight cannot let his conduct fall to the level of his enemies, or in the long run, he is really no better than they. His actions must always be well intended, well planned, and well executed." His voice slowed and lowered back to his serious tone.

"I brought Hamata to justice in 1959. By this time he had his own boat -a small one-man-crew job. The sockeye season was set to open the next morning and a lot of boats were out in the delta, anchored right where the brown water of the Fraser meets the blue of the Pacific. They'd be ready to take off at the crack of 2 a.m.

"I swam from the end of the Scotch beach out to his boat...a good mile or so. Finding the right one was the hard part- they were all pretty much the same, and I had to do this on a night with no moon. I only knew that the transom was painted blood red with white lettering- Kobe Maiden. I rested in the water for a while before boarding her, and when I did, the job was almost too easy. I woke him from a sound sleep. Clamping his jaw shut to keep him quiet, I told him that the women of China had finally found him and I was delivering their justice for them. Holding his chin and the back of his head, I gave a quick twist and snapped his neck. I dragged him out on the deck and banged his head on the gunwhale, to make it look like he had slipped and hit his head, just in case he washed up on shore. Then the two of us quietly slid into the water. I held him under for over a minute just to be sure he was dead, forcing water into his lungs by compressing his chest, letting air out and water in. Again, just in case an autopsy were ever done, drowning would be found to be the cause of death, but dumping him where I did, his body never should have been found. This was an important part of the plan, for there could never be any suspicion that he was murdered.

"He died much too mercifully for the pain he caused while he was alive. But a knight must remember to be focused as much on his own conduct as much as his purpose, or he may be mistaken for evil like his enemy."

At the time, I thought he was talking pretty weird, and to a fifteen year old listening, it was. I believed everything he said, strange as it was, but the white knight thing was kind of corny and his reference to 'we' was a question mark as well. It was kind of like watching a spy movie.

"I don't think I can use any of this for my history class, Bob. But it's all true, isn't it?" I needed some assurance this time other than his sly smile that he gave me with the Dieppe story.

"I'm a White Knight, Mark, and I can't lie to anyone who isn't my enemy. You are certainly no enemy."

"Who are the White Knights? Are they an RCMP Division?"

"No. We're international, but we aren't an organized group. We've been around in one form or another for centuries. Our work has varied from toppling evil governments to killing men like Hamata. But we don't work for any government, either. We are almost freelancers in that we know what is good and what is evil, who can be brought to justice the normal way and who can't. We follow no particular political doctrine as there is good and bad in almost any 'ism'. We also don't follow any particular religion because when you boil any of them down to their basics, they're pretty much all the same. Almost all of them have a form of the seven deadly sins and the seven heavenly virtues and those are the guidelines used in defining good and evil almost universally.

"White Knights work alone. I've never met another one, but I know they're out there and always have been. Always will be, as long as there's a need, and I don't see the need ever ending."

"So White Knights aren't actually some organized group? That's just what you like to call people like yourself who you have never met but you know must exist? And other guys like you might call themselves something else?"

"I see a look of doubt on your face, Mark. But everything I've said is true. Everything. Whether there are or aren't other White Knights and what they call themselves isn't important. I've read enough history and enough crime reports to know that what has happened throughout the ages didn't just happen by chance--helping hands were everywhere. Classic example: Jack the Ripper. Never caught, but he stopped murdering women like a door slammed shut. It's long been thought that he was an important man in London-a well-respected doctor. Well it just so happened that one of the ones on the cops' list died suddenly in his sleep. Young, healthy man. Coroner couldn't explain it. Of course he didn't have the science we have now, but that made it easier for Knights back then. I'm certain this guy was the Ripper and some cop got to him, knowing his stature in the city would mean he would never be prosecuted.

"You see, Mark, I believe there are three types of people in the world when you're talking about good and evil. There are predators, prey, and protectors. The three p's. I consider myself a protector, a guy like Hamata or the Ripper a predator, and most ordinary people, like their victims, prey.

"You're probably wondering why I'm telling you this. It's because I want you to tell my story. I can tell from your Dieppe story that you're a good writer and I know I can trust you. And you're young. You're fifteen and I'm pushing sixty. I don't plan on dying anytime soon. But when I do, I will leave you access to all my files and memoirs. Hell, most of the story is already written. You'll just have to organize it and pretty it up. But you can't publish it until at least five years after I die. You can't tell anyone until then, Mark. I need to hear you promise me that."

As if I would go against someone who just told me how he killed a man. "I won't, I promise" I said, almost choking out the words and not knowing what else I could say. I was feeling small and insignificant after hearing his story, and now he was putting a huge responsibility on me which I wasn't sure I was up to nor why it was me he asked. Why not a proven writer? Or write it himself? But I had just made a promise. And that was all that mattered now.

"Thank you, Mark. And I promise you, it will be worth your while. I think it's important that people are told these stories so that they know that there is still some good in the world that is as strong and as large as some of the evil that they are reminded of every day. Almost all people are basically good, but hearing only of bad things-the things that sell newspapers and TV time-can wear on people until they think there is no good left even in themselves. If people start thinking that, this world is really in trouble."

I supposed he was right, but I didn't think it was likely that I could change much. I wanted to change the subject and go home, but out of my mouth came "Was Hamata's body ever found? You said it shouldn't have been. Does that mean it was?"

"You're a better listener than I thought! Yes. That night was perfect except for the tides but I thought he would sink long enough to be taken out with the next ebb. Apparently, he didn't move much at all. He washed up on the Scotch beach three days later not a hundred feet from where I swam out to his boat. It didn't matter. His death was quickly ruled an accident and he was cremated before anyone was the wiser. His widow collected a little bit of insurance and went back to Japan, probably a lot happier to be rid of him."

"Cremated? Did my dad have anything to do with this?"

"He cremated him, but he had nothing to do with Hamata's death. It was just another client to your dad."

"It might be more exciting if he did have something to do with it."

"Your dad may not have had as exciting a life as I have, but his honour is second to no one's, Mark. If I had to trust anyone with my life, it wouldn't bother me a bit if it was your dad."

"Does he know about what you just told me?"

"No. But he does know that there are things about me he doesn't and shouldn't know. And he doesn't ask. He knows better than to ask."

"I think I should be getting home now. Fitz!" Even though the fire had been blazing all night, I was as cold as the last time I had been there. It was about ten o'clock, and I had wanted to visit Oscar that night, too, but I was way too tired to go jogging now.

"Remember your promise, Mark."

"No problem. Fitz!" I couldn't think of any way to say thanks to Bob or even know if that was appropriate. The man had world secrets in his head and in journals and he was sharing them with me. Me! And then holding me to silence for who knows how long. With his health the way it seemed, he could live for a long time.

"Whenever you're ready, come back for another story. I want you to know as many as possible."

I had to shake Fitz awake to get his attention. He got up slowly and we went to the door. "Thanks for the tea. See ya." Fitz and I climbed the long, steep driveway up to the road and back home.

14

The next day we went jogging in gym class. The high school is built on the top of a rocky hill in the village. At the bottom of the hill is old Parker Hall, the cultural centre of the island for almost eighty years. A large wood-frame building, it was built by community-minded pioneers who wanted it to last forever, and so far, their labours had paid off. Turning left onto the main road from there is a tourist info sign and a small spot where a car could pull over to read it. Twenty feet straight down from the sign was the rocky beach at the head of the harbour, about two hundred yards from the Crow. As I came around Parker Hall, I was startled by the action at the info sign. Pressed in on either side of the road were three cop cars, a plain car, a cop van marked 'RCMP Diving Services' and mobile units of both CTV and CBC from the Victoria stations. Standing by the tourist info sign was Leon Renner, cuffed behind his back and looking out to the ocean. As the twenty of us joggers approached, a cop directed us to the opposite side of the road where we couldn't see the beach. We had to slow down almost to a walk, single file, dodging in and out of the parked cars and the backed-up traffic of grey-haired men and women heading for the village to get their shopping done before the rush that never happened.

Another cop removed the cuffs from Leon and handed him a rock which Leon threw into the water. Immediately, the cop put the cuffs back on him. It wasn't hard to put two and two together. There must have been divers in the water searching for something that Leon threw into the water. Leon must have thrown the gun that killed Hertz into the water from this spot.

The six o'clock news confirmed it.

"Leon James Renner, one of three men wanted for questioning in the arson and murder of Wolfgang Hertz on Admiral's Island just over two months ago, turned himself in to RCMP on Admiral's today," the announcer began. "Renner has confessed to the crimes and says he acted alone." A shot of Leon throwing the rock into the water came on the screen. "RCMP divers searched for the murder weapon in Ganges Harbour where Renner threw the handgun, but came up empty-handed. A second man who police were looking for, Steven Bruce Gorman, brought Renner in to police and is still being held for questioning. The whereabouts of the third man police were originally looking for, Donald Thomas Henrik are still unknown."

It looked like Donny Henrik had avoided justice again. The newscast was just like any other to a casual listener, but people on Admiral's who knew these guys or their reputation, knew that what was being passed for the truth was far from it. It was obvious that Leon was taking the rap for Donny, who was safely hidden until the cops completely bought Leon's story and put him away. Everyone who knew Leon knew he was too stupid to do it alone and evade the cops for over two months. And Leon wasn't even mean, but he would do just about anything Donny told him to. So if he did it because Donny told him to, it wasn't exactly acting alone, no matter where Donny was at the time.

I thought about Bob. Would this be a job for a White Knight? Today, being at school and amongst my friends, Bob's story sounded like a Spiderman comic plot whereas last night it was so real, I could see myself on Hamata's boat with him. One of the things he said-- "...an idea I was born with..." referring to his sense of justice and that it was okay to kill someone if they were evil--kept coming to the surface of my thoughts. I felt the same way and, like Bob, couldn't really explain it, it was just there.

Was Donny Henrik evil? I didn't know him well enough to make that judgment. I knew him to see him and I knew a lot of him, but had learned not to believe everything I'd heard, either. Myths are often bigger than truths. Evil people don't feel regret like most of us. They only feel themselves and their needs without regard for others. A good person can do a bad thing, but that doesn't make him evil. Whether Donny was evil or not I don't know, but it was quite obvious that this time he had gotten away with murder.

"I wonder if someone will ever rebuild the Crow again?" Mom wondered after the newscast.

"Whoever gets that property now will have to do something with it," Dad said. "I'm not even sure who does own it now. I heard Hertz didn't have any relatives to leave it to."

I wasn't too interested in the Crow that night. I had some homework to do while I digested supper and then I planned to go for a jog and see Oscar.

***

Ken Hardy was talking with Leon Renner in the Admiral's RCMP detachment's only jail cell while Dan Koral was questioning Steve Gorman in the interrogation room. The room was eight-by-twelve, had a single door and no windows, but was adorned with a mural on the twelve foot wall opposite the door. The mural was a detailed map of Admiral's, with the outer islands and a bit of Vancouver Island on the extreme left and some of Washington State's San Juan Islands on the extreme right. Admiral's was in the middle, showing all roads, landmarks and ferry routes. The ocean was a deep blue, fading to almost white at the shores of each piece of land. The other islands were hunter green, while Admiral's varied in shades from hunter at the shorelines to almost yellow at the peaks, growing lighter with each two hundred feet of altitude. Major roads on Admiral's were thick black, snaky lines that hugged the contours of the green shades with short, narrow, vari-spaced centipede legs shooting off from them.

The mural was done by a local artist as a community service sentence for his part in a minor altercation at the Crow pub. He had done a pencil sketch of a fisherman's boat coming in to the harbour and traded it to the fisherman for a large salmon. That night, both were in the pub and, fuelled with beer, started arguing over the value of each other's bartered product. They were both big men and neither would back down from the other nor accept the insults being volleyed between their tables. A small tussle ensued, but neither was in a sober enough state to hurt the other much. They did a little damage to the pub with draft beer being used as liquid missiles and a few tables getting knocked over. Wolfgang Hertz wasn't going to stand for any of it, however, and the fisherman spent the night in the jail cell and the artist was locked up in the interrogation room with a cot.

Weeks later in court, in typical Admiral's style, the fisherman was given a small fine and the starving artist was given eight hours of community service. The artist suggested painting the drab room he had spent the night in at the RCMP building. The judge accepted. The fisherman offered to help, claiming he had started the argument in the pub. The artist accepted his offer. Together they spent more than three hundred hours making a masterpiece that few people ever saw and became great friends whose bartering products were much sought after, thanks to the publicity of their argument and the mural which resulted from it. The police over the years had found it much more useful than the smaller desk-sized maps and charts available to them, and it was now adorned with multicoloured push pins to indicate different points of interest to them.

"You know, son, when two stories match up so well like yours and Leon's do, we get a little suspicious. It's almost like you guys compared notes for a long time before coming in here. It's hard to believe Leon did this whole thing on his own." Dan Koral had spent four hours with Steve so far but wasn't about to give up hope that something new would come out of the interrogation. He faced the mural while all Steve could see were three plain white walls, a door and the flimsy card table in front of him.

"That's because all I can tell you is what Leon told me. Except for when we were together and of course that'll be the same." Steve's tone was part defiant and part sarcastic due mostly to his stubbornness in the story and the weariness of the repetitive questions.

"Okay, so the pub closes and the three of you go to your room and pass out."

"I told you. It was before the pub closed. Hertz kicked us out. It was about 12:30. I passed out almost right away. Donny probably did, too. The next thing I know is Leon's trying to wake us up screaming that the place is on fire. We grabbed our stuff and got outside. We were watching the old dump burn, but Leon was in a big rush to split, so we got in the van and headed for Fulford. Simple as that. I went back to sleep in the van almost right away. I didn't wake up until we were on the ferry. It's all I really know."

"Why'd you run? You said you didn't know Leon had anything to do with it at that point."

"We didn't run! We were gonna catch a morning boat back to Vic anyway, and we didn't have anywhere else to go."

"Who drove?"

"Leon. He's the one that was in a big hurry"

"Was he intoxicated at the time?"

"Probably. You want him to confess to that, too? Give it a rest, man!"

"Where's Henrik?"

"Haven't seen him since that next day. When Leon told us what he did, Donny said he couldn't be around that kind of heat and split. He was always talking about hitching down to California for the winter. He's probably still down there."

"I think you know where he is, Steve, and we want to talk to him. We don't believe your stories. We could charge you with obstruction. You could get damn near as much time as Leon. You might want to think harder about where he might be."

"I...don't....know." He let the last word trail off slowly, staring Dan Koral straight in the eye. It was meant to let Koral know that he wasn't scared, that he was telling the truth.

"We've got you here until 10:00 tomorrow morning, Steve. Do you want to do this all night? Why don't you come clean and tell us the whole story? We know Leon didn't do this himself. Maybe Henrik helped a little? Maybe it was just the two of them that did it. If you tell the truth tonight, I'm sure they'll go easier on you in court."

"Listen. I've told you the truth. All of it. It doesn't get any more complicated than what I've told you. Donny and I passed out. Leon shot Hertz and torched the place. He woke us up and we went to Fulford. On the ferry he told us he torched the place and shot Hertz. Donny gets antsy and splits. Haven't seen him since."

If there was one thing Steve Gorman could do, it was stick to a plan. He was as resolute in his lie as Dan Koral was persistent in trying to trip him up. Though he had a lot to lose in coming in with Leon, he felt he had a lot more to lose in not. Leon needed the moral support Steve could provide in just being in the next room. Steve had worked with Leon for over a week, coaching and rehearsing their story until Leon was pretty much convinced himself that it was the truth.

In the single jail cell, Ken Hardy was having a more frustrating time interviewing Leon than Dan Koral was with Steve. Hardy was the less experienced of the two police and was not well trained in interrogation. His method was simple: Have Leon repeat the story over and over looking for even slight differences in each version. But Leon's tale was robotic in its recital, never varying. When Hardy tried to trip him up with a question, Leon's answer would be consistent with the story, because the memory of the truth was almost erased from his mind by Steve's week of drilling.

The police had switched rooms and tried their own styles of interviewing on the other subject. Dan Koral asked Leon to go through his story again.

"How many times do you wanna hear it? I told the other guy at least six times. I'm tired. And hungry."

"Just a couple of times, Leon. Then I'll get some sandwiches for us. You want a coffee?"

"No, thanks. Got any more Coke?"

"We're all out, Leon. Sorry. Stores are all closed now, too. Why don't you tell me what happened that night the Crow burned?"

"There's a pop machine outside at the Gulf station. It's got Coke in it. Couldn't somebody go get some there?" Leon was getting agitated, which is exactly what Dan Koral wanted. The more confused Leon was, the more likely something new would surface.

"There's only two of us here, Leon. We have to watch you guys. Tell you what. Tell me your story of that night and I'll take you down there later for a Coke. Deal?"

"Okay. From the top?"

"From the top, Leon. What were you guys doing here?"

"We came over just for the night. We were just gonna have some beers and shoot pool at the Crow. See some old friends and stuff. We got a room soon as we got there. Only paid for two people, though. They don't care much about that, anyway.

"Steve and Donny were playin' pool. They owned the table that night. Nobody could beat 'em. One game, a guy named Keith woulda beat 'em but he scratched on the eight ball. He got pissed off and hit his cue on the table. Not really very hard, but the cue broke in half. 'Bout ten minutes later, Hertz came in to the bar and threw us out. The bartender told him that it was Donny that broke the cue. Him and Donny yelled at each other a whole bunch, but we went to our room when Hertz said he was gonna call you guys. That was about 12:30. Donny and Steve passed out pretty quick watching the tube. I was still pretty mad at Hertz. Donny had a gun 'cause sometimes we run into some pretty shady characters in the places we hang out. I took it and went to the van and got a gerry can of gas and poured some of it around a few places outside of the bar. All of a sudden, Hertz is there, yellin' and screamin' at me in English and German. I don't know what he's sayin', but when I pull the gun out and point it at him, he shuts up pretty quick. Then he yelled somethin' and turned. I just pulled the trigger without really aimin', and down he went. That scared the shit outta me. I never even fired it before.

"I figured the only thing I could do was light the gas and hope he'd burn up good enough that there wouldn't be any evidence or nothin'. I just lit one of the spots where I dumped gas and ran upstairs and woke up Donny and Steve. The fire got goin' pretty fast by the time we got to the van. They fell asleep again almost right away. I started driving to Fulford, but decided to pull over at that tourist sign and ditch the gun, in case you guys pulled us over on the way.

"We just slept at Fulford until the first boat. I told Donny and Steve what I did on the boat. We got to our place in James Bay and Donny packed some stuff and split, saying he couldn't be around me with that kinda heat. He didn't say where he was goin' or nothin', just left walkin'. We haven't seen him since. Steve and me been stayin' at friends places since but they don't let us stay too long. And my sister's. It kinda made Christmas crappy, everybody knowin' the cops were lookin' for us."

The interrogation went on until early morning. Leon didn't get his Coke until 8 AM. Several times he fell asleep when Koral paused to think or left the cell for a drink or to pee. But Leon never wavered from his story even the slightest bit. And Ken Hardy was having no more luck with Steve in the interrogation room. Tiny parts of their stories that didn't match were explained away with memories affected by intoxication or fright.

Though accused by the cops, the boys totally denied selling LSD and the police couldn't find anyone who would admit to buying any from them. They tried to get them to admit to hiding out at Kathleen Morrison's on Galiano, but on that they were also steadfast. Kathleen Morrison was a big part of the lie, and if her name were brought up as a conspirator after the fact, there would be no fancy lawyer, and no cash bonanza when Leon got out of jail.

The lawyer was also a conspirator. He was a good lawyer, as Mrs. Morrison had promised, well known in criminal law circles, but he was also a little shady himself. He had helped the boys in their story, consulting on points of law, what would sound good to the police and what would not. He never took notes in his meetings with the boys, never had a file in their names, and made their appointments with aliases. He was ready to take Leon's case when the charges were laid and would claim to do it for free as a public service for the mentally retarded. If he could convince a judge that Leon was borderline retarded, it could soften his sentence or even put him in a hospital for the duration. Mrs. Morrison would never be connected to them at all. She would pay the bill as part of the 'Estate Planning' services the lawyer's firm provided her.

With no charges to hold Steve for, the police had to let him go at ten AM, twenty-four hours after he and Leon had walked in to the detachment.

***

15

I jogged right past the ferry terminal and up the hill to the Scott Point road that night. The lights were on in Oscar's office and I could see him watching me go by and I waved to him. He knew I'd stop in on my way back. It was a beautifully calm, starry night and the narrow strip of land that was Scott Point had great views to the south and the north. Every house on that road was waterfront, no matter which side it was on. In daylight, the south side had panoramic views of the ocean stretching for miles to the southern end of Admiral's with the opportunity to see a variety of ships from small dinghies to the enormous ferries traveling between Vancouver and Victoria. On nights like this there were no lights on the water, but the surface of it was still visibly flat and glasslike. On the north side of the road, the more secluded houses, tucked in amongst tall Douglas Firs and the thickest concentration of arbutus trees on the island, had a cozy, womblike comfort to them. These looked out over narrow Long Harbour and the heavily forested land of Nose Point.

As I ran, the smell of the fir trees saturated my lungs with each deep breath I took. I felt I could taste the energy of the forest seeping into my blood and giving me the strength to run, if not faster, at least as far as I wanted. When I got to the loop at the end of the road, I sped up a little for the return to the ferry terminal. Pushing harder for that three quarters of a mile didn't feel like it would be a strain on this night.

I stopped running at the top of the hill where I had fallen on the night I had first met Oscar. I walked down to the terminal catching my breath and he greeted me in his little office with the customary glass of cold water.

"Evenin', Mark!" Oscar was beaming tonight. I hadn't seen him in almost a week, and for some reason he was more ebullient than usual. We sat close, facing each other in wooden stacking chairs. I had turned mine around to lean on the back of it. "I heard some interesting news today! Those boys that they figured burned down the Crow turned themselves in today at the police station right here on Admiral's! They must have figured they couldn't get away for long anyhow so they're takin' their punishment and movin' on."

"Oh, sure. That was all over the news today, Oscar. The island's been buzzing about it all day." I was surprised that he was so excited about this. I would have thought that in his many years, he'd seen more than his share of crime stories on the news. I wondered if he was getting a little senile or something.

"Oh, yeah. I suppose it was! See I don't listen to the news or read the big papers. I read the Gull's Cry only because it's local, and this news won't be in there 'til next week, now. Obviously what happens here on Admiral's affects me so I like to know the local stuff. But any other news I mostly get from talkin' to people. Only reason I have a TV is to see sports. I don't think what they pass as news is necessarily the things that are important to people. 'Course people think it's important 'cause they're told it is. What'd they say about those boys?"

"Well, actually only two of them turned themselves in. And one guy admitted to killing Hertz and setting the fire. The other just brought him in, but they're still questioning him, probably overnight. The third guy, who probably really did it, or told Leon to do it is long gone. They figure he went to the States."

"Isn't that ironic. All those draft dodgers from down there livin' here on Admiral's and he goes the opposite direction. Maybe he'll end up in Viet Nam! That just might be poetic justice if he was the one! He-he-Hee!"

That Admiral's and other islands had become havens for U.S. draft dodgers was no surprise. Boys from California, Oregon, Washington and states further afield were common in the hippy communes that dotted the islands. There were several entire U.S. families living on Admiral's for the sole reason of opposing the war and the draft. They didn't want their boys fighting in a war which they saw as unjust and unnecessary. The anonymity and non-judgmental attitudes of islanders was perfect for people in this situation. As long as they were law-abiding, decent people, their political beliefs didn't matter much to most people on the island.

Oscar didn't need to read the paper or watch TV to know about draft dodgers. There weren't many stories about them, anyway. On an acreage about a half mile from his place was a hippy commune, populated with about a dozen adults and several kids. Five of the men were draft dodgers. Oscar visited them often, trading his island history stories for a jar of homemade jam or a loaf of fresh-baked bread. These hippies had a true commune, living off the land, making all their own necessities. The land was owned by the father of one of the draft dodgers and the son managed to put it to good use during his exile.

Not all hippies and draft dodgers were so productive, however. A common perception of less-than-liberal old farts was that all hippies and draft dodgers lived on welfare or some other form of social assistance. They squatted in abandoned shacks and did drugs all day, not contributing to Admiral's society, just draining it. While those ideas were probably based on a grain of truth, most hippies were closer to being like the ones near Oscar's- friendly, functioning, and harmless. A little different perhaps, but differences were usually the first thing the inhabitants of Admiral's found that they had in common.

"Well I doubt that Donny would ever get trapped into the U.S. Army somehow. I don't think he's the type to find war as an adventure," I said. "He'll probably end up on Haight-Ashbury selling drugs to people. It seems to be his trade. Of course they use flame-throwers in Viet Nam don't they? He might just like that!"

"Well, I just don't know why the police can't do something about people who they know are bad or doing bad things," Oscar was looking down and shaking his head, then looked up at me. "If this boy's been selling drugs, burning buildings, and now killing people, he needs to go to jail. His momma shoulda spanked his rear a little more when he was little! Some people say spankin' ain't right, but I know darn well that in almost all cases it works when a child is little. It's just like training a dog. You give 'em praise when they do something right, and a little jerk on the choke chain when they do it wrong. They learn. But you can't be mean when you correct 'em. They gotta know that you're doin' it 'cause you love 'em. Then they'll love you right back. If you're mean to your dog, your dog'll be mean to you and everybody else. A child don't think much different than a dog when it's little.

"There's a lot of argument in psychological circles over whether personalities are developed because of the way kids are brought up or whether it's in their genes and they're born with a particular personality. It's called the nature/nurture debate. Some folks say you can't change a person because they're born the way they are. Others say you can if you bring 'em up a certain way. I'm sure there's a little of both influences involved in what makes a person who they are. Then there's always the wild card where a kid can be bad right from birth. I've known of cases where a baby starts crying right after it's born and is cranky all its life, no matter how much its parents tried to please it. I think that could be some kind of birth defect just like any other. Often those kids grow up being just bigger trouble. Maybe this Donny was like this, maybe not. But it just ain't normal for a person to like doing bad things just to hurt other people unless they're feeling a lot of pain themselves."

Oscar's monologue reminded me of Bob's three p's for a second. "Well I don't know Donny really at all, but my sister, who only did one year of school here, said that when he was around, she felt really uncomfortable. She said everybody else on Admiral's treated her like they'd known her forever, unlike over in Steveston or other bigger schools, but when Donny showed up at a party or something, everybody would kinda change their mood. There aren't any other kids like that on Admiral's." I was just adding to the conversation rather mindlessly, thinking more about the things Oscar was saying and where he came up with that kind of knowledge. He said that he read a lot. It must have been science magazines because it wasn't the kind of light stuff you'd get from Time or Newsweek. You could tell his knowledge was deeper than what they had to offer. And besides, he said he didn't read news, which is what those magazines were. Then it occurred to me. I never knew what he did before being a security guard. This ferry terminal had only been here for about eight years and Oscar had been here for seventy five. What did he do before that? Most security guards were retired army veterans. Oscar had never told me a war story. I never got the chance to ask him that night, though.

"Anyhow, that news ain't the reason I'm a little bouncy tonight. Have you talked to Tony since supper time? I got him a little excited, I'm afraid, and you might not see him as much as before! He-hee-hee!"

"Geez, Oscar, you better clarify that statement!"

"He-Hee. You know that mobile car crusher the government sent over here to 'beautify' the island? To get rid of old junkers? Well, I called them up to come and get an old '48 Chev half-ton that's been growing moss in the woods at my place for years. I called Tony to see when he could help me move some brush around it so the tow truck could get to it easier. Well, he was right over. He never knew the truck was there before, that's how overgrown it had gotten. Anyhow, Tony asks if he can have the truck to restore it. Of course I said he could. Well, he pumped up the tires with a hand pump and darned if they didn't hold air. Then he ran home and got his Mom's car and his little brother and towed that truck home with his brother steering." Tony's 'little' brother, Alan, was fourteen and already six-foot-two. "Between the truck and his new job, he'll be pretty occupied."

Tony had just started working at Len's Lucky Dollar stocking shelves in the evenings. "Oscar, he's been talking about finding an old pickup for a project for months. And there it was almost in his own backyard! He must have nearly crapped his pants! Hah!"

"Well, I hope not, but he sure was excited! He-hee-hee!" Oscar was smiling from ear to ear and no matter how infectious the smile itself was, I doubt even Tony could get as much joy out of the episode as Oscar did. "That old truck has been absolutely worthless to me for nearly ten years. But to Tony it's priceless 'cause he doesn't set his sights too high. It's a good day when you can do something like that for someone." The smile wouldn't go away. He was genuinely pleased with the results of his accidental joy-spreading. The fact that the giving was so simple made the pleasure even better.

I truly believe this moment caught the essence of Oscar William Wood. Joy in his life came from two things. Making people happy and teaching people how easy it is to be happy. He did the first to Tony with a simple old rusted piece of metal and worn rubber, and he was doing the second by showing me how simple life really is and how easy it is to be happy if you only want to be.

He sighed deeply through the infectious smile. "No, Tony doesn't ask for much so he really is easy to please. Most folks would be a lot happier if they'd only lower their expectations. Happiness ain't much different than a simple math equation. You take your achievements, divide them by your expectations and the result is your happiness quotient. The lower that expectation number is, the higher your happiness number will be. Simple."

I thought about Jim Morrison's teaching us that you should always give your all in whatever you do--to have the willpower, the positive attitude, the self-discipline, the conviction and resolve to do what you believe in and carry it through to the end. "That takes away a person's reason to try real hard at what they're doing, then, doesn't it? It's like saying 'I can't do it, so why try?' isn't it?" I wasn't really buying his philosophy one hundred per cent.

"People with a negative attitude are going to keep their attitude until they realize it hurts them. It's something they have to learn on their own. People who give their all aren't going to stop just because less makes them happy. The higher achievement number also drives up the happiness quotient."

Life really was very simple for Oscar. "If it's that simple, Oscar, why isn't everybody happy? Just add more sugar to sweeten things up."

He took another deep sigh, but the smile still hadn't left his face. "Not everybody knows what happy is. Not everybody wants to be happy. It's also hard work being happy when people around you aren't. There's lots of reasons why not. But first a person has to really, really want to be happy. Then they have to know what it is that makes them happy. And not make it too complicated. Some people never find out what that is." He was still smiling. I thought if everyone had a picture of that smile, they would at least know what happy looked like.

At that moment, I realized he had hold of my right hand in both of his. I was still leaning over the back of my chair, and he was leaning forward in his. Just when he reached out for my hand I didn't know, but when he saw that I realized I was holding hands with a man, his grasp tightened in case I pulled away, but his smile never changed, nor did mine.

"Mark, you're young and you don't know yet what makes you happy. But I can tell you'll find out some day." His grasp began to loosen. "You're one of the lucky ones. Remember to share your happiness with others. The same thing won't necessarily make 'em happy, but give them the message I just gave you." He had totally let go of my hand now. He stood, still smiling, and turned to look out the window at the Queen of the Islands with her perimeter deck lights shining, mirrored off the glassy water surface.

"Gettin' too old for these night shifts, I'm afraid. I sure like the peace and tranquility I get with them, though."

I was gone not twenty seconds later. The run home felt more energy-filled than any other I had experienced. I'm sure the time was a personal best, though I wasn't keeping track. And I smiled all the way.

16

The very next day, three noteworthy things happened, though only one was of immediate importance to me. Tony and I went for a drive in his mom's car in the hour between school getting out and him starting work. As we were cruising through the village, we saw Oscar's T-Bird parked in front of Len's Lucky Dollar. A few stalls over was Oscar, talking to my dad, each leaning on opposite sides of the box of dad's big old Merc three quarter ton. I never realized they knew each other at all and here they were talking like old friends.

"That's weird," I said.

"What?" Tony saw them, too, but thought nothing of it.

"My dad and Oscar. I didn't know they knew each other."

"That is weird. I've seen them talkin' lots of times."

"Whadaya mean 'lots of times'?"

"Well... a couple anyway. What's the big deal?"

"Nothin' really, I guess. Kinda weird, though. I talk to Oscar lots and I'm around dad all the time, and neither one has ever talked about the other."

"Everybody knows everybody here, man. No big deal. They've prob'ly swapped stuff."

He was likely right about that but it still seemed strange that, if they knew each other, neither one mentioned it to me.

The second noteworthy thing that happened that day was about a boat. One of our neighbours, an older widow who I did odd jobs for, had a boat in one of her sheds. She called me up around supper and asked if I wanted it. No charge.

"It's pretty old and needs a little work, but I'm sure you can fix it up. It's on a trailer. You'll have to take that, too, I'm afraid. I'm trying to make room for my sister's car. She's coming to live with me. If you don't have any use for it, I'd appreciate you hauling it away for me. I'll pay you for your trouble. If you can sell it, the money's yours. I wouldn't mind if you do that, either. I just want to make room in that shed."

Mrs. Betts had a heart of gold. Our road was lousy with widows that needed odd jobs done from time to time and they all employed me. I'm pretty sure they conspired at one of their bridge games or something to pay me the same hourly rate so that one of them wouldn't look cheap or anything. When I worked for one for the first time, she wouldn't ask me how much I charged per hour-she already knew. Last spring one of them gave me a raise and they all did the same without asking or telling me. But Mrs. Betts was always giving little bonuses of things she couldn't use anymore. Some of it was just junk, but often Dad would find somebody who could make use of the useless.

She once gave me an old washtub that leaked at the seams. Like other times, I didn't want to hurt her feelings, so I took it home and figured Dad would toss it. Somebody took it home, patched it up and used it for washing their black lab. Another time she decided to get all new garden tools, so the old ones had to go. It was about time, too. A bent rake, a few split shovels, an impossible to use post hole auger, a dull set of lopping shears, and some half-there hoes came home with me in a holey wheelbarrow with a flat tire. I felt pretty stupid walking down the road like that, and even Dad laughed at the sight of me. But some guy who welded metal crap together and called it art took it home and sold it as one solid unit to some off-islander who thought it 'really made a statement.'

But the boat was another story altogether. I'd seen it in the shed many times and wondered what she would ever do with it, but was never forward enough to ask her about it. It was just a twelve foot fibreglass runabout, but it was still free. It needed a little wood work on the deck and gunwhales, but the hull was in perfect condition. The trailer needed a paint job and one tire fixed, otherwise it was in almost new condition.

I could see my trip to Barry's in the Yukon that summer materializing because of this boat. A boat was pretty useless without a place to moor it or wheels to tow it. I had neither. I also didn't have the money to buy a motor to go with it. But I knew lots of people who would buy it for the inexpensive price of a return ticket to Whitehorse and a little spending money. Unlike the old truck Oscar gave to Tony, I would only use this boat to finance my trip. I knew Tony would lovingly restore that truck and treat it like offspring.

The third thing that day was the TV news that Steve Gorman was released by the Admiral's RCMP, Leon Renner was taken to Victoria to spend a little time in the jail there, and a hotshot lawyer was telling the cameras he would help Leon get off easy because of his 'mental state' at the time of the murder. There was still no sign of Donny Henrik, but, officially, the police were satisfied that he had nothing to do with it, anyway.

That night I wrote Barry a letter about the boat and my plans to finance my trip to visit them. I didn't mention anything about Bob or what he said to me about Hamata or the White Knight thing. I thought about it, but it was just too odd sounding to be believable. Barry liked talking about clandestine things. He read a lot of spy novels and I knew he would like to hear about Bob. A story like Bob's could really earn a little brother some respect. I was sworn to secrecy, though, and I took that seriously. Besides, it could also make Barry think I was full of shit. Instead I told him about how Fitz's hearing was almost totally gone, but that he was still in pretty good physical shape. For sixteen. I told him Tony might be coming with me, although I was beginning to doubt it myself. With his job at the Lucky Dollar and now his restoration project, he hadn't talked about going north lately.
17

***

Kathleen Morrison was putting the final touches on her fresh crab sandwiches. Little toothpicks with tiny colourful ribbons tied on them and poked into the middle of the small triangular morsels topped off the fare she would offer the girls in her Hearts club this afternoon. In the ladies' rotation, which had lasted seventeen years, she hosted the get-together on the first Tuesday of each month. This being May, she would have liked to have the card game outdoors, but rain was threatening over the skies of the Gulf Islands.

She reached for the pack of cigarettes above the fridge and went outside to the deck to have one thoughtful smoke before her guests arrived. She knew the conversation could get particularly touchy today. Leon Renner had just been sentenced for the murder of Wolfgang Hertz. One of the ladies was a near neighbour of Leon's sister and would undoubtedly bring up the topic in the conversation. It was no secret that her grandson and Leon were roommates.

She lit the cigarette and inhaled deeply, holding it far down in her lungs to get that first drag buzz that infrequent smokers could enjoy. She wondered where Donny was. Had he spent the winter down south as Steve had guessed, or was he somewhere close by, waiting to come home now that Leon had completely covered for him?

She exhaled and scanned the vista from her deck. The beautiful blue ocean and the green of Admiral's in the distance were always there, always colourful, even on gray-skied days like this. How would Leon make out in prison? My, he was stupid, she thought, but, in the end, his stupidity worked as much in his own favour, as it did her's.

Her doorbell rang. She put the smoke out and hid the ashtray inside a deck bench that opened up to double as a storage container.

She went back inside the house to the front door. "Betty! Come in! Sam! Ronnie! Come in, come in! Isn't this weather dreary? My gosh!" The ladies had all come together in Samantha Clark's new 1972 Dodge Dart Swinger.

"At least it isn't raining. Yet!"

"Could be worse. It's supposed to clear up by Thursday, though."

"Oh, they never know what's going to happen from one day to the next! Never mind two days away. How are you today Kathleen?"

"Just fine, Ronnie, thank you. How about you? "

"You know me, just keepin' on boogeyin'! Hahahah!" Veronica Lake was her real name, but bore no resemblance to her Hollywood namesake. She was a short, pleasantly plump woman who tried to dress much younger than her seventy-two years. Her lime-green pantsuit was tighter than even the Fortrel it was made from had been intended to be and her long, straight, enhanced red hair was in too much contrast with the suit and the wrinkly, white skin of her face. She smiled much more than she frowned as was evidenced by the upward curves of those wrinkles. Her friends found her fun to be around, though, if she had a fault, it was her unintentional bluntness.

"How's the new car running, Sam? It's still pretty shiny. Does Gord polish it every day?" Mrs. Morrison asked with a smile as the women all sat at the big card table she had set out.

"No, but probably about twice a week. He really needs a hobby! Oh it runs like a dream! A little more power than I need, though. Gord says its better to have too much than too little. I don't know where he thinks he needs to go so fast, though!"

The women decided on the seating and settled into the first card game, but they were only into the second hand when Ronnie Lake brought up the topic of her neighbour's now-famous brother. Leading the ten of clubs she said, "Of course you heard about Summer Renner's brother Leon? I was talking to her the other day and she still can't believe that Leon did what he said."

"Well, he must have," said Sam, following Ronnie's club lead with the nine, "Who would confess to a murder if they didn't do it?" Sam Clark had done a little preparing for the inevitable topic herself and wanted to avoid any conversation that could get bitter between her two close friends because of one's mindless intrusiveness. She really thought that Ronnie had lost her edge over the last year. There had been a time when she knew to hold her tongue, yet still had the brashness to speak up when necessary. Lately, however, she never held herself in check.

Her ten of clubs won the trick after Betty played the four and Kathleen the seven. Now she led the jack. "Oh, the police have their ways! Leon's not too smart. Almost retarded, actually. Anybody could talk him into anything. How is Donny taking it, by the way, Kathleen? I imagine he'll visit Leon often?"

Sam played the eight of clubs and Betty the three.

"I haven't heard from him in months, actually. But he didn't take it well, I'm afraid. He said he couldn't be friends with a murderer and arsonist so he packed up and hitchhiked down to California. He called me from San Francisco to say he had gotten a job as a truck driver's helper." As she spoke, she played her last club, the six. "He said he would be travelling all over the southern states and would write when he had the chance." She kept her eyes fixed on her cards so they could not betray the lie to her friends.

They all wanted to scoff at the absurdity of her statement, but even Ronnie kept quiet. She looked around the table at the other three, eyes buried in their cards. Then she led her queen of clubs.

"I was surprised he got only ten years," said Betty Charles trying to inject some neutrality into the chat. She played her two under Sam's three.

"That was thanks to that hotshot lawyer he somehow got. I still can't figure that out. That guy defended that whatsisname- the highways minister- when he got caught with his hand in the cookie jar and that rock and roll star who got caught with drugs at the Vancouver airport. He's not cheap! It sounded kind of phony to me that this guy would donate his time 'for the retarded.' He doesn't sound or look like the charitable type to me." Ronnie had her opinions and that was that. Her friends thought that common sense and logic rarely entered into her opinions. However, had they been as free thinking as her, they would realize that she used her brain more than they, except for knowing when to shut her mouth.

"Well, he probably didn't spend a lot of time on the case, anyway. There was no trial, just a sentencing hearing." Kathleen, too, tried to quell Ronnie's curiosity and the discomfort the three of them felt because of it.

"Well, that's true enough. There were no relatives or anybody to speak for that German. I heard he was a Nazi during the war and snuck into Canada with a new name. No great loss then, if that's true. Maybe Leon should get a medal!" Ronnie was lightening up a little now. "Are you going to play, Kathleen?"

She dropped the thirteen point queen of spades onto Ronnie's trick.

"Oh, you detestable bitch, Kathleen!"

"You were low!" Kathleen said with a smile on her face. "Always get the low gal!" Holding the king and queen of hearts, Kathleen was fairly confident Ronnie wouldn't get power and give all the other girls twenty-six points. Betty had passed to her and Betty always passed one medium heart away.

Someone being called a detestable bitch was just the ice-breaker the ladies needed. The topic changed to gardening, the next fall fair, the recent labour unrest in the province, poor ferry service, winter travel plans, and the Viet Nam War. They played six games in total. They ate all the goodies, drank two pots of coffee and three bottles of homemade wine. It was all over with by 5:30 and except for the precarious moments in the second hand of the first game, a good time was had by all.

At 9:00 that night, Kathleen went out to her deck for her second and last smoke of the day. The skies had cleared of clouds and were now filled with thousands of stars. With scarcely any artificial light to contaminate them, the skies of the Gulf Islands were an incredible place to watch stars from. She had turned all her house lights off before coming outside. It was warmer now than it had been during the day. She leaned back on the bench with a chest full of smoke and looked up at the sky and let her mind wander.

She thought of Donny again. She wanted him home, yet in many respects it was much easier not having him there. Just like his mother. She took another deep drag, still staring up at the stars. She thought of how beautiful this place was and wondered how anyone could grow up wicked in such surroundings. Well, no, Donny wasn't wicked. He would smarten up one of these days, marry, have a family. Probably make a damn good businessman like his grandfather. His mother was starting to smarten up. She went to Victoria last week and didn't need to borrow any money at all. And now with Leon in jail and Donny not wanted for murder, things were really beginning to turn around in this family's life. Of course she didn't need to worry about her son, Jim. He was always a shining example. Mentally, at least. Physically he was sad to look at and she had always felt bad about that. Not that it was her fault. It was difficult to get to the city for medical reasons in those days.

She finished her smoke and went back inside to prepare for bed. She had justified her life for one more day and would sleep well now. But still she wondered: Where in hell is Donny?

***

18

The Vancouver International Airport is not as huge as my mom led me to believe. Domestic flights were in one area, international in another. Pretty simple

"You'll probably end up in China or something. Do you know where you're going?"

"Mom, if I end up in China, they'll have to fly me back and pay for my stay while I'm there. That wouldn't be so bad for the cost of a one-way stand-by ticket to Whitehorse. Look, it's easy. Gate nineteen. It's right down here."

"Don't be a smartass. I've flown more than you." Technically she had flown more than I, but only by the thinnest of margins. When her Mom died the summer I was ten, I flew with her to Saskatchewan. When her Dad died and she flew there, she was pregnant with me, but since she didn't know it at the time, she doesn't think it counts.

"Mom, I'm gonna be okay. Stop worrying." She was a lot more nervous than I, but that was her nature, and I was a sixteen-year-old trying to project as worldly an image as I could. You never know when you'll have to impress someone.

"Keep your wallet close all the time. There's pickpockets everywhere."

"Yes, Mom."

"Don't be a smartass."

"Yes, Mom."

Mom jumped at the chance to come over to Steveston and put me on the plane. She didn't get off Admiral's often, so when there was a reason to, she took it. She had a close cousin in Steveston she would spend a couple of nights with before heading back to the island. She liked Admiral's, but she wanted to travel a little. Dad was content staying right where he was. It caused a little friction between them, but somehow they each got their way.

It was June twenty-first, the longest day of the year and I was heading to the Land of the Midnight Sun. School was over except for the mailing of the report cards, but I knew what my marks were already. As I had predicted, Tony lost interest in coming with me, preferring instead to work on his pickup truck, financing it's restoration with his job at Len's.

The flight was a milk-run. Before hitting Whitehorse I would stop at Prince George, Prince Rupert, Dawson Creek, and Fort St. John, and, flying stand-by, I was in danger of getting bumped at any one of them. Four more things for Mom to worry about. If I did get bumped, though, the airline would have to put me up for the night. I viewed the whole thing as an adventure.

I sat beside a nice lady on the plane who was also going to Faro. Her husband had recently been hired on a short-term contract and she was going to visit him for a week. We agreed to sit together on the bus as well, since we had both been warned of the perils that could befall a traveller with an empty seat beside him or her on the Whitehorse to Faro bus. The bus trip was another five hours, the same as the plane. It picked up people anywhere, not necessarily at any depot. If you started out with an empty seat beside you, chances were pretty good it would soon be filled by someone with less than desirable qualities. Barry had relayed stories of people with horrid B.O. falling asleep on someone for the entire ride or being puked upon by someone who had just a little too much to drink. I really didn't want anything like that to be happening. I wasn't sure but it was possible, I thought, in my sixteen year-old mind, that my travelling companion wanted more than just a non-stinking, non-puking white butt filling the seat beside her. Maybe she couldn't wait until she saw her husband in five hours. But my fantasies were soon dashed. Not long after we left Whitehorse, the rocking of the bus on the gravel road had put her to sleep, head against the window, snoring like a tractor.

I had the aisle seat, but I could still see out both windows well from there. The scenery was beautiful, different than the coast, with lots of stunted evergreen trees, and no ocean. It was hilly, but not mountainous. We seemed to follow a river valley for a lot of the way. Signs of any kind of human occupation were few and far between, but deer were frequent sights. There were black bear and grizzlies in the area, but none came out to greet the bus on this trip.

We got into Faro just before midnight, and, as promised, it was still daylight. More like twilight, really, but strange nonetheless. We stopped in the hotel parking lot which served as the bus depot. Through the opposite window, I could see Barry in front of the hotel talking with someone. My travelling companion made a point of saying goodbye on the bus and I never saw her again.

Barry was a heavy duty mechanic by trade. He went straight into trade school after high school, seeming to know exactly what he wanted to do. He had the best grades in his class, a stark contrast to his career at Steveston High, and was offered a job at the local Cat dealership right after graduating. He had been working there about four years \--just enough time to realize that he wouldn't be going much further in the company-- when Dad announced his wishes to retire from his funeral business. Barry and Dad worked out a deal whereby Barry would take over the business and start an apprenticeship under a hired undertaker. All of a sudden, after 23 years of comfortably supporting one family, Steveston Funeral Homes & Crematorium would have to support three. Business would have to liven up a little.

To make the extra money, Barry spent a lot of time on drumming up new business, not learning much in his phony-baloney apprenticeship. Dad's niche in the death business was low-cost cremations, not really believing in burials at all, though he did provide them. People came from all over the Lower Mainland of Vancouver for his no-nonsense funerals and the much lower cost that went with them. Barry thought he could build the business to do the whole price-range of funerals, but instead found the cremations dropping off and the bigger burials not increasing fast enough to make up the difference. He could feel the squeeze getting tighter and tighter, so, after three years of stress and poverty, Barry finally gave up.

The hired undertaker agreed to buy the business, knowing it was a gold mine for one person to operate. Dad got his retirement nest egg, Barry would walk away with his sanity, and Steveston's only funeral home would still be alive.

"Hey, how's it goin'?" he asked as I got off the bus.

"Good. Jesus, isn't that thing hot?" He had grown a huge beard which suited him as a mechanic, but would have scared off customers at the funeral home.

"Almost. It's only hot around here for about four weeks all year, so it's kinda nice to keep it on for winter. How was the trip?"

"Long. Shit, it sure doesn't seem like midnight, does it?" The driver was still unloading bags from the storage bins on the bottom of the bus. The crowd thinned as passengers retrieved their baggage and left with their rides.

"You hungry?" Barry asked as I threw my suitcase into the back of his truck. "Cheryl's already in bed, but she said she'd make a plate of sandwiches for us. There's not exactly any late-night pizza joints around here, as you can see."

In fact, for a town that boasted to be the Yukon's second largest community, behind only Whitehorse, there really wasn't much to see. There were a lot of townhouse style homes which all looked the same, kind of like an army base. We passed a few stores and a school on the way down to a long, curving hill to another part of town.

"This is called the 'Lower Bench' where we live," Barry explained. "That's a mining term you'll figure out when I take you on a tour of the mine. It takes seniority or being in management to live on the upper bench. Also down here are the bunkhouses where all the single guys stay. That's where I was before Cheryl and the girls came up." We were passing a small complex of trailers grouped in threes, making up the bunkhouses, cookshack, and recreation facilities. We turned into the first driveway of the second triplex past the trailers.

"This is it! Home sweet home!" Barry was trying to make light of the military style surroundings that he now called home, but I knew from his letters that he was truly happy about where he was for the first time since he took over Dad's business. He may have been living in cheap company-subsidized housing, but he was more than making ends meet and he was close to the great outdoors, which he loved.

"I'll show you around the house tomorrow, at least upstairs. Don't wanna wake anybody up" There was a kitchen, dining area and living room on the main floor. A stairway up was off the living room, and another, with a door just at the entrance to the kitchen, led to the basement. "There's a bed for you downstairs, but that's where the girls play, so you have to fight with them for your privacy, and I sleep down there when I'm on graveyard shift. We'll figure that out when the time comes. I'm on afternoon shift for three more days. I just left a little early tonight to pick you up." He was in the kitchen now, digging in the fridge. "Ready for a sandwich? Cheryl made quite a few. I always eat when I come home from afternoons." He brought a plateful of a variety of different types.

"Those ones that look like roast beef are actually moose. Just a little drier than beef, but it makes you fart something awful. Cheryl doesn't like me eating it too much!"

I tried the moose. "It's good. Where'd ya get it?"

"A guy I work with shot it last fall around the time I got here. I didn't get settled in quick enough to do any hunting, but I'll be right in there this year. Wanna beer?"

Now this was a big deal. Barry was twelve years older than I. I had always been the much younger brother, who, though tolerable, was never included in his plans. Now here we were about to have a beer together.

"Sure." I said it in my most nonchalant voice.

Barry kept me up for an hour with hilarious stories of guys he worked with. The riches of the North attracted an odd array of southerners from a wide area of the world. He worked with a welder from Chile who complained about tasteless tomatoes; a millwright from the southern states who had to leave his home behind because his family disowned him for marrying a black woman; Newfies galore, because, once one Newfie finds a good paying job somewhere, all his cousins and neighbours follow him there; a Pakistani who almost freezes to death even in the summer; an Austrian who is one of the ugliest men alive but has more girlfriends in town than all the other single men put together; and a number of other characters with stories too funny to be true.

We had another beer. This was Barry at his best. Telling stories and laughing so hard while he told them, that he could barely get them out. Almost every story involved someone doing something incredibly stupid. I remembered how he was now before he took over the funeral business. His years there were obviously no fun for him or Cheryl and it was nice to see the reversion to his old self.

"Well, I think I should hit the sack," he said. It was 1:30 AM and still twilight outside. "I'll take you on a tour tomorrow before work. And we'll see about getting you a job." He showed me the bed in the basement and I crashed in it pretty quickly. I was dog-tired, but my mind was racing. The plane, the bus, the woman, midnight sun. The best part was Barry. Though we were twelve years apart, there was a connection as real as if we were twins. Now that I was older and becoming closer to being a man, we could communicate on close to the same level, whereas when I was eight years old, a young boy, he was twenty, a man with his first child on the horizon. I felt this would be a great summer.

19

I awoke alert to whispering, but when I heard the accompanying giggling, I knew what was up.

"Uncle Mark! Hi! Are you gonna get up? It's almost eight o'clock!" It was Jenny and Jamie, Barry and Cheryl's two little redheaded hellions crawling onto my bed. When they got up they started jumping on it like it was a trampoline.

"Two little monkeys, jumpin' on the bed; one fell off and bumped his head. Momma called the doctor, the doctor said, 'No more monkeys jumpin' on the bed!'" Jenny was six, and Jamie four. I got them to stop jumping and we had hugs and kisses all around.

"It kinda smells down here. Did you have moose sammers when you came home last night?"

"C'mon, Uncle Mark! You gotta get up! We gotta show you our rabbit! His name's Button! He's got a big black spot on his belly! C'mon! Get up!"

"Okay. Why don't you guys go upstairs while I get dressed? Are your mom and dad up yet?" I had to pee like crazy and had the morning predicament that goes along with it.

"Of course! Who do you think made us breakfast?"

"Okay. You guys go upstairs. I'll be up in a minute!" There was a makeshift bathroom in the basement: a toilet and sink in one corner, but no walls or door to actually define it as a room. At the moment it was all I needed.

I went upstairs and before I could say hi to Cheryl for the first time since I had gotten to the Yukon, I was again tackled by the girls.

"C'mon, Uncle Mark, I wanna show you Button! He's right outside the back door!"

"Leave Uncle Mark alone for a minute, you guys! I haven't even seen him yet!" Cheryl held out her arms for a hug. Cheryl was just like a third sister to me. She and Barry had been dating since I was about five years old and for almost as long as I can remember she has been a part of our family.

"Mmmm! How are you? You've sure grown since the fall," she said as she finally let go of me. Want some eggs? I'd like to offer you some bacon, but it's so expensive up here, we don't even bother thinking about it anymore. Everybody makes good money here at the mine, but some stuff is really expensive. Some isn't so bad."

"Eggs would be good. Don't worry about the bacon. Where's Barry?"

"He's gone out to help a friend mount his camper in the back of his truck. He should be back any minute. Did you sleep okay? Besides the wake up, I mean?" The sound of the girls giggling could be heard through the open kitchen window.

"Oh, sure. I was pretty tired. I coulda slept anywhere, but not on that bus." I took a seat at the kitchen table while Cheryl cracked two eggs into the frying pan.

"Isn't that an awful ride?! When the girls and I flew up, Barry had lined up a car to trade with the truck for a weekend to pick us up, but it had broken down. He loaned the truck to the fellow anyway, so he couldn't even cram us all into the truck. I had to take that hellish bus ride with strange people and a strange place with my two little girls. This one couple-old Indians- stopped the bus in the middle of nowhere like they crawled out of the bush and got on. They were drunker than skunks. The man started talking to Jamie as he walked by to the back and she started to cry instantly. Jesus, I've never been so scared in my life. Anyway, they get to the back of the bus and start making out like crazy! We were about six rows up, but they were making a hell of a noise, so the girls were asking me questions I didn't want to hear... or answer! Did it still smell like puke last night?"

"Yeah, but it was probably fresh puke. That was December when you came up wasn't it?"

"Yes. I suppose they clean it once in a while. Want some peanut butter or jam for your toast? Honey is another one of the expensive things we don't buy often."

"Peanut butter would be good, thanks. Yeah, I guess bees don't survive the winter well around here."

"No, probably not. Do you want your eggs flipped?"

"Yes, please."

"Do you still have that disgusting habit of putting ketchup on your peanut butter? Uugh! How did you ever start that?!"

"I dunno. Don't knock it 'til you try it, though!"

"No, thanks!" She put the eggs and toast in front of me on the table. "Ketchup's in the fridge...I'll get you a knife and fork. Want a coffee?"

"Please." This was Cheryl's equivalent of Barry offering me a beer last night. She had never offered coffee before, however I hadn't stayed at their place since I was about twelve. They were finally treating me like a grown-up, though they hadn't been condescending since I was the ten year old pesky little brother trying to be as big a nuisance as I could. About that last time that I stayed with them in Steveston, I had such a growth spurt, everybody thought I was going to be a giant. I had gone from just under five feet to about five foot seven in just under two years. But I haven't grown an inch since.

As I finished the last of my breakfast, Barry came in the front door. "Geez, I should've woken you up. We coulda used your help with that stupid camper. Three guys could do it a lot easier than two. The truck has to sort of back up into it while somebody, preferably more than one person, holds the camper from getting pushed back, and kinda guides the driver as well." He went to Cheryl who was wiping off the counter and gave her a kiss.

"You get enough to eat?" he asked me.

"Oh, yeah. Always enough around your place." Barry had always been a big eater and Cheryl loved preparing for him. Company never left their house hungry.

Barry got a cup of coffee and sat at the table with me. "Feel like going to the mine? I asked my boss last night if I could bring you there for a shift. He doesn't have a problem with it."

"Sure! But I have to stay there for eight hours?" I was wondering just how much there was to see.

"I don't think you'll get bored. There's the pit, the shops, and, I rarely go there, but the mill as well. It's a dirty hole, but pretty interesting."

"Sounds okay! When do we go?"

"We'll leave about three. I'll take the truck 'cause I want to do a bit of work on it if I'm not busy. It needs a bit of a timing adjustment. I can do it by ear, but we have a timing light at work and that's a lot more accurate."

"They let you work on your own stuff while they're paying you? That's pretty good!" My idea of working for a big place and making big money was like a picture of slavery, a mean-looking boss standing over you with a whip, 'encouraging' you to produce.

"This company makes a ton of money. My job is to fix the big shovels that dig up the ore. If I'm not working, that means the shovels aren't broken, which means the company is making money. And that's a good thing for everybody. Especially me!" Barry found the absurdities of the world especially humorous and laughed at his situation at work. "We shut them down and do preventative maintenance on them at regular intervals, too, so it's not like I never work. It's just funny that the less I work, the more money the company makes."

It made sense, though it hardly fit the conception I had of productivity at the age of sixteen. I figured the more money you make, the harder you have to work. The complexities of big business might take a little while to learn.

Just then someone knocked on the back door, and Cheryl walked over and opened it. "Hi, Cindy! C'mon in! Wanna coffee?"

"Sure! How's everybody? I see you've got company." In the door walked a woman, the likes of which I had not expected to encounter in Faro, Yukon. Whitehorse, maybe, but not Faro. She stood about 5'6" tall with reddish-brownish hair hanging loosely to the middle of her back. Her big green eyes and full red lips contrasted with the baby-blue hotpants jumpsuit she had on over a tight, bright white T-shirt. The bib of the jumpsuit stopped just under her breasts, helping to hold them up, which they looked like they needed, and the suspenders pushed them together to protrude further than they might have normally. A matching belt pulled her waist in, accentuating her hips. As she closed the door behind her, she slipped off her white sandals, then stepped over them, turned, and picked them up and put them against the wall. It was a totally unnecessary action, but as she was bent over, the perfect pear-shape of her hips was staring me straight in the face. It looked like a planned move.

"Cindy, this is my brother, Mark, from Admiral's Island. He's here for the summer, possibly working at the mine or somewhere," Barry said.

"Well, pleased to meet you, Mark!" She held out her hand and clumsily, I half-stood up and reached for it. We shook and it took all my effort to look her in the eyes and not the chest as we did. I could see she wasn't as perfectly beautiful as at first glance. She was ever-so-slightly wall-eyed, and a wide nose filled the extra space between them. The full, red lips were not completely symmetrical, though just where the fault was, I didn't have time to tell. I let go, but somehow she managed to keep our unclasped hands in contact, however softly, for nearly a second longer. "Cheryl's told me about Admiral's. It sounds like a beautiful place."

"Yeah, I guess so, but there's not a lot to do there." Under the circumstances of my awe, I thought it was masterful conversation.

Barry pulled the table out away from the wall so that all four of us could sit around it. Cheryl put a mug of coffee and a spoon in front of Cindy in a way that would suggest that this was a common get-together. There was no milk or cream on the table nor any offered. As she reached for the sugar, I got another glance at how far her chest protruded. "Mark, if you want to know where there's not a lot to do, you've come to the right place! Faro is the capital of nothing to do! I'll bet Admiral's has a lot in comparison."

"Actually, it's a pretty good place, but I want to get out and see the world. It's quite isolated there." I still thought I was making pretty skillful talk. She did nothing to let me think otherwise.

"No, no! Faro is isolated! Even guys like Barry who find there's lots to do here have to agree that it's isolated." She pointed a sideways thumb at Barry as she said it.

"Yeah, but some people find the isolation to be a good thing," he said.

"Sure, but they're all nuts!" she said with a laugh. She played with her hair, flinging it back over her shoulders so it didn't hide her large chest for too long. The way her suspenders pushed them together and out reminded me of rockets.

"We should go if you wanna have a little tour of the surroundings before work," Barry said to me. "We can go to the river. Might even catch some trout. It's not the right time of year, really, but you never know, they might be a little early." Something told me he was uncomfortable at the moment. I knew I was, but not in a bad way.

"Would you take the girls, please? Let them run around for a while in that river air before you go to work. What would you like for your lunches?"

"Whatever you've got lots of."

"Mark?"

"I'm easy. I'll eat just about anything," I said casually to Cheryl.

Cindy smiled buoyantly at my choice of words. Cheryl and Barry were turned away from her but my reaction probably didn't hide anything. "Mark, when you get bored of Faro life, you come over and we can play cards. I'm right next door, you know. Do you play crib?"

"Sure. I'll do that! See ya later!" I walked out the open door that Barry had already exited after giving Cheryl a huge kiss.

There were two other girls about the same age as Jenny and Jamie playing with them in the back yard. "Those are Cindy's kids. I suppose we should take them, too," Barry said to me. "Who wants to go for a truck ride, girls? Louise, go inside and ask your mom if you and Angela can come with us."

The bigger of the two girls ran inside Barry's house and came out ten seconds later, smiling. "Yep, we can! Can we ride in the back?" All four girls were giggling.

"Sure, why not?" Barry was back to his old self, now, and I had a feeling he was going to tell me why he acted weird around his neighbour.

The four girls jumped into the canopied box of the truck. There was an old tumbling mat in there for them to sit on. Jamie did some forward rolls on it, landing with a foot in someone's mouth. The giggling only got louder.

Barry closed the truck gate and before he swung down the canopy door he gave them a few rules to ride by or they would have to come home in the back seat of the truck. I'm sure neither he nor the girls wanted that to happen.

We got in the cab of the truck and as he turned the ignition, he said, "Well what did you think of that?"

"Holy shit! Are all your neighbours like that? I never expected anything like that up here!" I wasn't containing my excitement very well.

"Yeah, she's a real piece of work, alright." Barry pointed out the window as we crossed a small, high bridge spanning a deep creek. "That's the town dump. We'll go there sometime and see the black bears. There's a sow and two cubs kind of think they own it.

"Cindy's one of the nurses that works at the nursing station. That's kind of like a walk-in clinic. She's been here longer than almost anybody in Faro--about six years. Since the town's only eight years old I guess she's a pioneer. Anyway, in case you couldn't tell, she's just a little bit on the flirty side."

"And that's just a little bit of an understatement. Does her husband work at the mine?"

"Trick question. Louise's father was living with Cindy and the alleged father of Angela was living in the bunkhouses. Hubby comes home sick in the middle of his shift one day and caught Cindy in bed with the other dad. Beat the crap out of him, I guess. Roughed her up a little, too. He's supposedly the size of a gorilla. They called him the Primary Crusher at work. That's another mining term. He's doing a year for assault at the jail in Whitehorse. This all happened before I got here, so I've never met the guy. Either of them, actually. The one that got beat up spent some time in the Whitehorse hospital and never came back. So to answer your question, she doesn't have a husband, but, yeah, they both worked there."

"So she's kinda lonely?"

"I doubt it. Word is she's got all kinds of single guys in the bunkhouses to choose from. When they come into the nursing station she checks them out, and if she likes what she sees, I guess they get lucky. Here's the Pelly Bridge. They spent close to a million bucks building it even before there was a road or the town."

"Do guys get hurt that much at work?" I wasn't really interested in a bridge right then.

"What....?"

"The nursing station!"

"Oh...no...it's just that her reputation gets around. Guys will go in there with any little ache or pain. The reputation is probably bigger than the reality. We live right next door, but we've never seen any guys coming or going. Or her going to the bunkhouse. But it looks like you can have some of that reality if you want it."

"Me?!" I was still trying to figure out how she would fit into my fantasies, never mind my reality. "What do you mean?"

"Holy, shit, are you stupid? She doesn't get into the hotpants for just anybody. She was practically salivating over you in the kitchen, there. What do you think a game of crib means?"

"I thought she was just being nice, but I was gonna check it out, anyway. You really think she wants me?" This was not just a case of teenaged inexperience. It is a condition I've suffered with my entire adult life. When a woman is sending me signals, she had better hit me with a frying pan and spell it out. I have some incredible examples of a finely honed sense of intuition, in being able to feel and sense things that have literally saved my life. But, as strong as that is, I am equally deficient in receiving the feminine transmissions that make for a healthy love life.

"Being nice? You've spent too long on Admiral's, haven't you? No, she was definitely trying to get you over to her place to 'be nice'." We had just turned down a smaller, rougher road and I could tell we would end up at the river's edge. When Barry killed the engine, muffled laughter and screaming could be heard from the back of the truck. "They're a little excited, by the sound of it. I don't know what it is about this place, but they go nuts running around. Maybe it is the river air like Cheryl says, but when they get home, they're pooped right out."

There was not a lot of water running in the river that day. Being June, most of the snow in the Pelly watershed had melted and flowed into Little Salmon Lake a month previous. Heavy rains could make the river flow heavily again, though it wasn't likely there would be any fish in it until the fall spawning season. Barry had brought his casting rod and we took turns with it anyway, but neither of us got a bite. The girls did do a lot of running and screaming, bringing us interesting rocks and things to show us, wearing themselves out.

Barry looked at his watch and decided that we should head home if he was to get to work on time. With long faces, the girls all piled back into the truck box, but it wasn't five seconds before the giggles and screaming started all over again.

On the ride home, Barry pointed out more features of the Yukon landscape and about the trout in the Pelly River and Little Salmon Lake that the natives call salmon. We didn't talk about Cindy any more that day. In fact, it would be years before either would mention her to the other.

20

The trip to the mine that afternoon was about thirteen miles of thinned out forest. Much of the area just a quarter-mile outside the town and half-way to the minesite had been burned in a bad fire the year the town was being built. Had it not been for the natural barricade of the river, the new town of Faro likely would have gone up in flames as well.

As we got near the mine, a huge, frothy, rainbow-coloured lake appeared on our left. "What the hell is that?" I asked Barry.

"That's the tailings pond. That's where all the leftovers from the mill end up."

"It looks like a sewage lagoon. Not that I've ever seen one."

"It kind of is," Barry said. "It's basically the waste from the mill after they've taken what they want out of the ore. They say there's enough cyanide in there to kill everything in the Yukon."

"Cyanide? What for?" I asked.

"It's what's called a re-agent. It helps separate the different parts in the ore. That's mill stuff. I don't know too much about it. They also say there's enough gold in there to make you a millionaire. But it just isn't worth trying to get it out."

"Holy shit." I was stunned as I looked at the expanse of it. This was a huge lake of poison and metal in the middle of what one would expect a pristine, untouched environment.

We went around a corner and up a hill and were now approaching the guard shack. Barry stopped and rolled down his window. "It's okay, Ron. This is my brother. He's going to tour the place with me. I already cleared it with my shifter."

"Okay! Take 'er easy!" the guard said with a wave as we took off. There were huge metal buildings everywhere.

"That's the mill over there," Barry was pointing to a massive structure on our right. What I could see must have been as big as three football fields. "Over here are the shops." The equipment maintenance shops were smaller, perhaps only one football field in size, but the height of the doors was what really stood out. Some of them were thirty feet high and a pair of new ones in what was obviously an addition, stood at least forty feet high. All the buildings were sided and roofed with corrugated tin, reminding me of many of the cannery buildings in Steveston.

Barry introduced me to a few of the guys he worked with, whispering to me later which character they were in the stories he told me at home the night before. "Ball Bearing is the guy who thought it was too cold to go outside to weld a crack in a loader bucket. We can't pronounce his name, but it sounds like Ball Bearing. He's okay with it." I recalled his story of a Pakistani welder who, when the shop was already full of frozen equipment, would not venture out into the minus-fifty degree cold to do an hour worth of welding. Instead, he went outside and spent twenty minutes with a cutting torch to remove of a rectangle of thick steel surrounding the cracked piece and brought it inside to weld. It wasn't until he finished a beautifully artful job on repairing the crack that he realized he had to take it outside again to weld back on to the bucket. Total time in minus-fifty degrees-- three hours.

We drove in a pick-up to the pit. This was where the ore was mined. Looking down into it, you could see how the layers of dirt and rock had been removed over the years. Each level was terraced away like steps making the whole thing look like the blimp's eye view of the Rose Bowl on New Year's Day--without the people. We drove down the road into the bottom where all the action was. Everything got a lot bigger as we descended. Rock trucks whose boxes could fit ten of the pick-ups we were in were being loaded by even larger crane-like machines that were scooping up rock and dropping it into the trucks.

"Those are called shovels. Those and the rock trucks are what I work on mostly. This truck here is a Dart. It'll haul 65 tons at a time. There's four new ones called Wabcos that'll haul 120 tons. The new shovel can load them in four quick scoops. The three older shovels would take about eight scoops, so they load the Darts and the big one loads the Wabcos." We got out of our now-tiny pick-up and I followed Barry up the ladder of the shovel to the operator's cab. Conversation was now near impossible with the roar and whine of the motor and the scraping of steel on rock.

"This is my brother Mark," Barry screamed at the operator. His name was Dick.

"Hi!" he screamed with a smile, but kept focused on his loading. We just watched him work, but when he finished filling the Dart, the motor quieted to an idle and he stood up. "Sit down and give it a try, Mark!"

I was stunned. We had a little hobby-farm tractor on Admiral's that I was quite proficient with, but this was a monster in comparison.

"Just play around! There's no truck to load right now, anyway. When one comes, I'll take over. That stick lifts the outer boom to scoop the rock, that one tilts the bucket. You don't have to worry about the main boom. That button opens the bucket to drop the rock. The pedals swing the whole thing around. Right for clockwise and left for counter-clockwise. Go ahead!"

I was still stunned, but had to do something to show I wasn't afraid. I started moving the levers slowly and gradually got the hang of it to the point where I could pick up rocks and drop them in another spot. Then another Dart showed up. Actually it was the same one.

I thanked Dick and followed Barry down the ladder as he got back to work. Another Dart was waiting in line and we went toward it. The tires stood a little over six feet high. Barry climbed the ladder, but motioned me to stay on the ground. A minute later the driver came down the ladder and told me to go up. He went and sat in the pick-up and lit a cigarette.

Barry was at the wheel of the Dart, watching the first one being loaded. "I'll drive it to the crusher, and you can drive it back!"

The thought of this was even more daunting than playing with the shovel. When the other truck left, Barry pulled the Dart into the spot it had vacated. When the first bucketful of rocks dropped into the box, I thought some dynamite had gone off. The truck rocked back and forth for a few seconds and then the second bucket dropped. It wasn't as loud, but it shook us just as much.

"Holy shit!" I laughed, holding on to whatever I could.

"That's nothing!" Barry laughed back. "Dick is one of the smoother operator's there is! Some of these guys are a lot rougher on the equipment. But that keeps me in business!"

After two more quake-like scoops, Barry drove off. I watched what he was doing so as not to screw up when I got my turn. "These things are really easy to drive!" he screamed. "The transmission is automatic to the point that there's no clutch! You still have to shift, though! All you have to do is watch the tach! When you get to just below the red line, you shift up to the next gear!" There were six gears, but we only used four until we had finished the climb out of the pit. "You can go a little bit into the red zone of the tach, but if that pin gets moved, you've over-revved it, and you're fired! So don't do that!"

"Has that ever happened!?" I asked. Now I was worried that I would cost him his job.

"Nah! That's a big part of my job--turning back the pins before the shifter sees them!" he said with a huge smile.

We were now at what looked like the mill. He was turning the truck around to back up a short incline. When he was in position he said "This is the primary crusher. Hop out and have a look while I dump the load."

Barry gave me time to climb down the side of the truck. I walked to the back and stared down into a round, metal pit containing a slowly gyrating cone, about twelve feet in diameter and ten feet high, with the narrow end pointing up. The cone had an array of square knobs protruding from it, designed for breaking rock. The walls of the opening were the inverse shape of the cone, and, if still, there was probably an eight-inch gap between the wall and the bottom of the cone and about a three-foot gap at the top. As it rotated in its seemingly chaotic orbit, however, the gap ranged from almost nothing at the bottom up to about six feet at the top. As Barry tipped the load, the hard metallic rocks from the mine were chewed up like so many raw potatoes in a thundering din. One was the size of a coffee table, and the crusher had no problem devouring it.

I got back in the cab and Barry vacated the driver's seat to let me take over. He was right. It was, in fact, very easy to drive, but we were so high, I felt we might tip over.

The rest of the night was not so eventful. Barry had to do a few minor fixes and he got his own truck timed properly like he wanted.

During the late coffee break, the topic of a summer job for me came up. The wife of one of the other mechanics worked at the hotel and said that they needed a night cleaner. It sounded like something I could do. It paid about double what the old widows on Welbury Road paid me, and it was unlikely I could get hired on at the mine at my age. Even though I could pass for nineteen or twenty, Barry had already told a few guys that I was just sixteen. Maybe next year, I figured. For now, hotel night cleaning, whatever that entailed, sounded good to me.

Though I had seen and done a lot of new things that night, for some reason, the thing that had the most lasting impression on me was that gyrating cone-shaped crusher and how it had pulverized those rocks. Then I couldn't help thinking about Cindy or why her husband was called the 'Primary Crusher'.

21

The next day I went to the hotel, and rather than interview me, the owner showed me what had to be done, asked me if I was interested and could I start tonight at 11:30?

It was the first job that I would need a Social Insurance Number for and the place in Faro that did all government licenses and forms was the liquor store. You would think that it would be the post office, but it was so small, there was no room for another teller to deal with requests for such things. The liquor store, on the other hand was state of the art in Yukon architecture--big. There were lots of employees, too, only too eager to help. So the same day I applied for my S.I.N., I also got a Yukon fishing license, and a learner's driving license that showed I was nineteen. The clerk was an older man, probably some mine worker's father who just took the job to get out of the house and be with some guys. He never batted an eye about why a nineteen-year-old would just be getting a learner's license nor did he ask for any other I.D. to prove my age. I think he was more than eager to be a part of a mostly harmless teenage conspiracy. If I had told the truth about my age, I could have saved two dollars on the fishing license, as youths are free, but I weighed the benefits of suddenly becoming of legal drinking age and forked over the cash. But when Barry and I got to the truck laughing, we agreed I could have told the clerk I was sixteen for the fishing license and nineteen for the learner's license and he likely would have laughed along with us as he filled out the forms.

The excitement of starting my first real job was hard to control. I would have to get some sleep before my shift or I might not be able to stay awake. I went to the basement to my 'room' just after Barry left for work, but about ten minutes later, I heard Cindy come in the back door to have coffee with Cheryl. I hadn't really thought about her on my third exciting day in a row, though now, the thought of her added to the excitement. I got dressed and went upstairs. Cheryl and Cindy were sitting at the kitchen table with coffees.

"Howdy, Mark. Where have you been hidin'?" She sounded like she was faking a Texan accent, or maybe I just didn't detect her drawl the day before when I busy noticing other things.

"Oh, I haven't been hiding. Just busy."

"Mark got a job at the hotel cleaning up after everything closes," Cheryl told her.

"Yeah, I start tonight, so I was just trying to get some sleep."

"Then I guess you won't join us for a coffee?" Today she was wearing her nurse's uniform. It was a little less sexy than the hotpants jumpsuit, but she still looked good. It was the typical uniform of the time, though I noticed that the front zipped up from the waist and the hemline was maybe a little higher than normal. Or maybe it was my imagination. There probably wasn't much she could wear that would make her body look unattractive.

"Naw. I have to be up all night. I might have coffee then." I detected a twinkle in her eye at my choice of words. There just didn't seem to be anything about her that wasn't sexy.

"I'm on my way to work pretty soon. My shift is from five til one, then the station closes down, except for emergencies. It's usually pretty quiet at night. If you can't sleep you can come up there for a game of crib before you start work."

"Thanks. I'll maybe do that."

"Well, I should get goin', I suppose. Thanks for coffee, Cher. See ya, Mark." She flashed a huge smile at me as she walked to the back door. She couldn't have been there more than ten minutes and her coffee was barely touched.

"Boy, she's really got it for you, Mark," Cheryl said as she poured Cindy's coffee in the sink. "She comes over for coffee maybe twice a week, now that's twice in two days. You better watch out, young man!" Cheryl was teasing, but knew Cindy's reputation as well as Barry did. Maybe better. Women tell each other things about men they would never want men to know. Men tell each other things about women that they only think they know.

"I'll be okay," I said with a smile. "I think I'll try to sleep again."

"I'll save some supper for you. I'm doing hamburgers."

"Thanks," I said and went downstairs.

I was able to sleep and woke up at about 9:30. I had much earlier decided that I wouldn't go for a game of 'crib' before my first day of work. At 11:00 I walked up the path connecting the upper and lower benches of the town and made my way to the hotel.

The first part of my job was to clean the floors of the dining room, kitchen, and the lobby, plus washrooms, all of which were on the main floor. When I had done that, I got a coffee from the night auditor and went outside. It was still eerie to know that it was 1:30 AM and still quite light out.

The beer parlour and lounge were now closed and ready for me to do the second part of my job, which was cleaning them. I had never been in a bar before. I now had the teenager's dream fake I.D. with my own name on it, but not had the chance to use it. But I also had two empty bars all to myself.

My coffee drained, I was just about to get up off the steps when a car pulled into the parking lot. Out stepped a woman with long, platinum blond hair in a denim miniskirt and black high heels. Something was familiar, but the hair threw me off for a few seconds. It was Cindy in a wig.

"Hey, sug. You on your break?" the drawl I detected in the afternoon was thicker, the words longer.

"Hi, Cindy! Yeah, I just finished a coffee. Kinda have to get back to work now." I was a little hesitant about what to do.

"Can I come in and see what you do? I'm not tired after my shift and I need to wind down a little. How do you like my hair? It's supposed to be just like Farrah Fawcett's."

"It's beautiful." I was lying a little. Though she looked as sexy as anything I could imagine, natural has always been my preference. I got up off the step and opened the door for her. Taking a quick peek up the stairway to the lobby, she took the stairway down to the basement where the pub and lounge were.

"I think I'll clean the lounge first," I said, fumbling with my new set of keys. She stood close enough that I could feel her body heat, which did nothing to calm me. I finally got the door open and she followed me in, closing it quickly behind her. The room was dark except for a few mirrored lights around the bar. I couldn't find a light switch.

"Maybe I can help and you can be done a little quicker? And maybe have time for something else?" She had moved in and was just inches from my face. All I did was smile like an idiot, frozen with disbelief at what was happening to me. "Maybe I'll stop asking questions and start answering some for you, sugar." Her voice was a husky whisper now. "I can see you're stuck at what to do next. That's okay. Cindy's gonna show you everything you need to know about sex before you head home at the end of summer. Tonight's just the beginning." With that she put her arms around my neck and pulled me in for a kiss.

The heat of her body was intense. As we kissed, she rubbed our chests together and wrapped one leg around the back of mine. I held her leg up and could see in the dimly lit mirror of the bar that she had nothing on under the miniskirt. My body must have been getting quite hot, as well.

An hour later we were pulling our clothes back on. "Tomorrow night it's the pool table in the pub. Sweet dreams, Mark." With that she slipped out the lounge door without another word. She did everything to me in that hour that my dirty little imagination had already done with her.

The next night she was true to her word, but we both found the pool table less comfortable than either bar stools, the lounge floor, washroom countertop, or standing up.

This never-dull routine continued for another five nights at the hotel until she was finished with evening shift. On her days off and when she started day shift, I visited her at home after her kids were asleep before I went to work. Every night was a new lesson plus a review of what was already learned.

Because of the midnight sun, the town didn't waste money on fireworks for the July 1st celebrations. When Cindy informed me of this, I told her I'd provide her with the fireworks.

"Don't get corny on me, sugar. You can use that one on a girl when you get home, but an older woman like me has heard that one a million times. Besides, I don't see fireworks. It's way more intense than that. Kinda like surfing on the biggest wave imaginable -almost weightless, looking down on everything- while getting a mild electric shock to the rhythm of your heartbeat, then being flung off that wave to a long, soft landing in a huge pillow. Then the wave catches up to you, but now it's many small waves that rock you to a feeling of peace. Then the electricity starts to tingle again. And you start all over!"

"Wow. And I'm just happy getting my rocks off," I said with a giggle.

"You're a good lover, Mark. Unselfish. That's all it takes, really. Too many men are selfish about sex. Or lazy. There's your mental lesson for tonight. Don't ever get selfish or lazy."

At the age of sixteen, I didn't realize she was trying to instill in me knowledge she thought was a necessity for every man. I was just a horny teenager who lucked in to a treasure trove of sex. As I've grown older, I've come to appreciate her lessons more than the summer of sex. She was the best teacher an inexperienced sixteen-year-old could have had in the subject of sex. She was patient when I was not and showed me what to do when I fumbled. She pleased me while showing me how to please her. Not every boy gets an initiation like the one I had that night in the Faro Hotel lounge after hours, but it should almost be law that all do. Looking back, I realize she was as much a mentor as Oscar, Bob Walker, Jim Morrison, Dad or Barry. Just a very different kind.

22

I hadn't seen much of Barry in the last week of June or the first week of July. Following his afternoon shift and a couple of days off, he went on to day shift, so while I slept, he worked, and vice versa. We had a few hours together in the evening which he split between me and his family and I split between them and Cindy. He and Cheryl were usually in bed by 10 PM and that's when I went next door. He must have suspected what was going on and I'm sure Cheryl knew, but nobody said anything.

We managed to get in a little fishing together one Monday at Little Salmon Lake when I finally had a day off after almost two weeks of straight work. We brought a few trout home that Cheryl fried up with some home-made french fries. It reminded me a bit of fish fries we had on Admiral's. Hugh Torrie often hosts a big party with his outdoor deep-fryer and home-made wine as the big attractions, usually on long weekends when a lot of family -either his or ours or both- were there.

This time, in Barry's back yard, Cheryl invited Cindy and her kids over and another family from the next triplex. Cindy was polite but quiet, tending to her kids, and keeping a proper distance between us. We had been together the night before, but already knew that tonight would be our first one apart since that first time in the hotel lounge. I was ready for a rest and liked to think she was, too.

Before she went home, Cindy took the lawnchair beside me when Cheryl and Barry took some stuff inside. The other neighbours had already left.

"I got a call from the RCMP in Whitehorse today. Angela's dad is being released from jail on Wednesday. He's applied for his job back at the mine, but hasn't got their decision yet."

"I thought he had a few months to go, yet." I was trying to be cool, but I knew this could mean the end of our good times together.

"They're giving him extra time credit for the time he spent in jail before the trial or something. He could be here by Thursday."

"Are you going to let him back in? He beat you up, didn't he?"

"Not a chance. If they hire him back, he'll be in the bunkhouse. The cops said he'll have to stay away from me unless I consent to it, but he's going to apply for rights to see Angela. There's not much I can do about that. He wasn't a bad dad to them at all. He treated Louise like his own, too. It's just his temper gets him in to so much trouble."

"He caught you messing around with your ex! He had a little reason!" I thought I was pointing out the humour in the situation but I took a wrong turn somewhere.

"Is that what you've heard? That is so far from the truth it isn't even funny! That's what Dwayne thought when he came in, but Gerry was just picking up the girls to take them to the dump to see the bears. Dwayne's temper got the better of us all. I guess I shouldn't be surprised you heard that, but I'm disappointed that you believed it. I sometimes dress raunchy and flirt a lot, Mark, but I don't mess around. Gerry was out of the picture when Dwayne came in and you're the first since Dwayne."

"I'm sorry I believed that. I shouldn't have. I'm sorry." I truly felt like shit about what I had said. She was obviously upset with me, but I was also kissing ass as hard as I could to not have her put an end to my summer's recreation.

"You're lucky you're a kid. And a good lay." She smiled so sexily. "I'll give you a pass this time. But if and when he comes here, we'll have to be even more discrete. We won't be able to see each other as often. Probably only when he's working, assuming he gets a job. Assuming he even comes here."

I could sense Barry and Cheryl watching us from the kitchen window. There was more stuff to take in to the house, but they weren't coming out for it. I think she sensed it, too.

"I should get home now. See ya tomorrow night." She called for her girls who were off playing with Jenny and Jamie somewhere in the neighbourhood.

I picked up the remaining paper plates and plastic forks and took them inside.

****

Dwayne Coulter was rehired at the mine and started that Friday. His presence in town did put a huge obstruction to the time Cindy and I could spend together. Mostly it was at the hotel while I worked and once we risked carrying out my lessons at the nursing station. We decided that was a stupid idea when an emergency came in and interrupted us. It would be one thing to get caught at the hotel and lose my summer job, but she would have a hard time finding employment in all the Yukon if we were caught there.

My first glimpse of him was at the hotel. I was trying to get a head start on the downstairs jobs before the pub and lounge closed and I spotted him in the pub shooting pool. He was about six-foot-six and must have weighed over three hundred pounds. He was as hairy a man as I had ever seen. His thinning hair curled down to his shoulders. His black beard flowed mid-way to his chest and his too-small t-shirt could not cover enough of his long arms or lower back to dispel any thoughts of a huge, smelly ape. He looked at me as I passed the pool table to check the mess behind the bar.

"Who's that monster?" I asked Tony the bartender just to confirm what I was sure of.

"Dwayne somebody. Just started last week." Tony had only been in town a few months and didn't know anything about Dwayne's history.

There were only a half-dozen customers in the pub and closing time was just a few minutes away. I straightened out some tables and moved some chairs out of the way in an empty corner. I was trying to imagine what Cindy had seen in him but the only thing I could come up with was that he could protect her. Yet she did not seem the type to need male security. Perhaps one or both of them were much different people a few years ago, but there must have been some drastic changes. Cindy was a petite, well kept, good- looking, always well-dressed woman. Dwayne Coulter was a big, fat, unkempt, dirty-looking hairy gorilla in grey sweat pants and a black t-shirt.

It looked like Tony might have trouble getting all his customers out on time, so I went upstairs to get a coffee and sit outside on the step. It was 1:30 am in the middle of July and the nights were starting to get a little darker, but not much.

I could hear voices coming up the stairs. The door opened and out stepped Dwayne and his three drinking buddies.

"Okay, kid, you can go in and clean now," Dwayne said to me. His voice was surprisingly soft. Deep and comforting, every word smoothly coherent. He sounded like a professor, not the hard-hat mine worker that he was and looked.

I watched as they walked across the parking lot toward the path that would take them to the bunkhouses on the lower bench. Just then, Cindy's car came around the corner and would have hit them all if she had turned in to the parking lot like she had started to. She swerved back on to the road and stayed on it as if she had no intention of turning in to the hotel.

"What the hell is she doing here at this hour? You think she tried to hit us, or what? She must have somebody up here she's screwin' to be dressed up like that at this hour." The sound of Dwayne's voice had taken a complete turn from the smooth, professorial diction to a rough, slang-filled growl. He turned and looked back at me sitting on the steps. At that moment, I wished I was wearing a diaper, but I took another sip of my coffee as casually as I could. Even though they were almost a block away, I tried to convey the image that the incident meant nothing to me.

"C'mon, Dwayne! She prob'ly just got off work." One his buddies was trying to get him pointed back toward the path. The other two had walked a little further before stopping and they were now split into two pairs.

"Dressed like that!? I doubt it! Goddamn slut. She wouldn't be going this direction anyway." He was still looking in the direction Cindy's car had gone, but he was also looking in my direction. I took another sip of coffee as nonchalantly as I could.

"Whatever. Let's go. Forget about it." His one buddy seemed to have more sense than the rest of them. They started walking again. Once they were out of sight, I went back inside. Cindy must have taken the road behind the hotel and headed back down to the lower bench. I hadn't been expecting her that night and she didn't come back.

****

When I woke up at three the next afternoon, Cheryl had coffee ready for me as usual.

"Morning, Mark," she liked to say that every afternoon. "Cindy was here. You just missed her. We had a real good talk and I know what's going on between you. Not that I didn't figure it out before. And it's none of my business if you're discrete, especially around all the kids. She asked me to tell you to lie low for a while. Her ex is back in town and she thinks he's watching the house. Mark, she wouldn't have told me any of this if it wasn't serious. Her and I aren't that close. Be careful around him."

"I saw him last night. He's scary enough alright. Where's Barry?"

"He got called in at noon. Some shovel broke down and they needed a few more guys. Want some breakfast?"

"I can wait 'til supper, but thanks." Cheryl was busy enough without having to make an extra meal for me.

That night, I left the house at 11:15 as usual. As I passed the bunkhouses, I noticed a huge man smoking in the shadows at the back of one of the trailers. It had to be Dwayne. I just kept walking, minding my own business. I didn't have to get any closer than a hundred feet from him, but I felt his eyes on me the whole time I was walking, even up the path to the upper bench.

He was there smoking for the next five nights, always alone, and always watching me. But at least he wasn't in the pub when I was working. After that he was on midnight shift so Cindy came to the hotel for a few nights then we switched to her home when she was on days off and until Dwayne finished his midnights. I should have been keeping track of everyone's schedule on paper. The only constant in this chaotic schedule was my midnight shifts and Cheryl being home most of every day. I wanted to see as much of Cindy as I could, but it was totally out of my control. I wanted to see Barry, too, and he was almost always working something different from me.

I had just started my shift one night, on or about the tenth of August. I was sweeping in the kitchen, a rectangular room with three rows of prep counters forming four aisles. The cooks were notorious for letting everything stay where it dropped. Something they spilled in the morning would still be there at midnight waiting for me to clean. An egg that had dropped sometime during the day had crustified on the floor and I needed to deal with it with something other than a broom or mop. I found a spatula and decided it would make a good floor scraper. As I was on my hands and knees, I sensed someone in the room with me. I looked up and for the second time in a few weeks wished I was wearing a diaper.

Dwayne was standing at the end of the aisle I was in, not ten feet away. His bulk filled the opening at that end and I doubted I could get up and run in the other direction before he could be on top of me.

"Hey kid." His voice was so smooth and mellow it took away some of the fear. "You know Cindy Palmer?" That brought back any vacated fear.

"Yeah, she lives next door to my brother. Who are you? You're not supposed to be in here." The challenging words surprised me. I was scared shitless of this man who was nearly a foot taller and almost double my weight, yet my words didn't give me away.

"That's your brother's place, eh? What's his name?"

"Barry Green. I'm Mark. What's yours?" I got up off my knees and stood facing him.

"Your brother happily married? You don't think he's screwin' Cindy do you? I see her goin' over there lots." His voice was still smooth and mellow and his words weren't slurred. I didn't think he had been drinking, but what else would he be doing in the hotel at night? He was concentrating all of his mental abilities on discovering the identity of Cindy's sex partner.

"Barry? Uh-uh. She goes over there for coffee with my sister-in-law. Who are you?" I couldn't believe the confidence I must have been displaying. Inside, I was trembling.

"Maybe you're screwin' her! I never thought of that until this minute. You were here that night she almost ran me over! It's you, isn't it?! You little shit!" His voice was getting louder and speech faster, but still strangely soft. He took a step forward and seemed to grow in size.

"What are you talking about?! I barely know her! Get out of here, man! You're nuts!" Again, I couldn't believe the confidence and now, defiance in my own voice.

He took another step forward but I didn't move. He stopped for at least a minute that seemed like an hour. His face looked like King Kong's trying to figure out a math problem.

"You're actin' pretty goddamn brave, kid." He was about six feet away now, but his bulk made it seem like he was right over top of me. "Don't imagine you'd be talkin' like that if you were screwin' 'er. If I was in your spot right now, I'd've shit my pants and run like hell the other way. 'Course I'd've caught ya and ground ya up like hamburger. That would've been fun. It would've been worth goin' back to jail for. But not if ya didn't do anything. That'd just give whoever is screwin' 'er free reign, right? But I'm gonna find out who it is and make it worth the trip back to the can. If you see any guys visitin' her, tell 'em that Dwayne's gonna find out who they are and take care of 'em, okay, kid? You'll be doin' him and me a favour." He turned ninety degrees from me and walked sideways between the prep counters until there was room for his mass to go straight out the door. Seeing that, I wondered if I had turned and ran, if he would have been too slow going sideways down the aisle to catch me. I was glad I didn't try. In his mind, that would have made me guilty, and even if I escaped from the hotel kitchen, he now knew where I lived. And I sure didn't want Barry and Cheryl dragged into this craziness.

The rest of the nightshift was a blur of shaken nerves and locked doors. As I operated the noisy vacuum cleaner, I was constantly looking over my shoulder and around the rooms for any signs of intrusion that I could not hear. With one visit from a stranger, the comfort blanket that is Admiral's Island suddenly seemed like the greatest place on earth. Adventure be damned.

***

King Kong was pulling me apart piece by piece and feeding my parts into the hopper of Dad's fruit press. He didn't bother to squeeze the grindings, but just watched with amusement as my blood trickled out on to the ground. He dipped a banana in the red stream and ate it with a smile on his face. He took another banana and when it turned into my penis right in his hand, he dropped it in the hopper and laughed and pounded his chest as it came out the bottom unrecognizable.

I woke up, checked between my legs for all my body parts and went to the makeshift bathroom near my bed.

A few minutes later, I was lying on my back. Cindy was straddled atop me rocking slowly back and forth. Her breasts seemed even bigger than usual and were gyrating over my face as she rocked back and forth. As she lowered her chest toward my face, her nipples turned square and hard. More square knobs popped out of her breasts as they turned the ore-dust-coated steel-gray of the Primary Crusher. Their rotation got more mechanical as a loud rolling sound like thunder got closer and closer. Two cone crushers, which only seconds ago were the most delectable things I had ever laid hands or lips on in my years, were now coming for my face, about to chew it up without a pause. Cindy was gone and I was now falling end over end into the two now-giant cones. The thundering noise turned into the gorilla laughter of my previous dream, getting louder as I slowly fell closer into the pair of cones which were capable of crushing a rock the size of a stove.

I woke again, and it was probably the first time since hitting puberty that I did so without an erection.

After being ground into hamburger two different ways, I collected my nerves and came up out of the basement. Barry was having an afternoon coffee in the kitchen. He was reading a letter and it looked like he had been crying. I had never seen him cry.

"Fitz is dead," he said, looking up at me.

"What!? What happened?" I was stunned. Even though Fitz was now sixteen, besides being deaf, he seemed in pretty good shape when I had left. And though he was Barry's dog, he had always been a part of my life. It would be weird without him around.

"Oh, god! Dad ran over him! He was sleeping right under the back tire of the truck. On the passenger side. Dad got in and took off. Fitz didn't hear the truck start up. Dad couldn't see 'im. He died right away, though." Barry continued to read the letter.

"God! Poor Dad. He loved Fitz. He's gonna feel so guilty."

"Mom says he cried the rest of the day and hasn't talked much since. She wrote this two days after it happened."

Barry handed the letter to me. "I got called in to work for midnight tonight. I agreed to go in before getting the mail. I can't back out of it now. I think I'll go have a nap." His voice sounded like he was about to choke. I couldn't remember what shift he was supposed to be on but I guessed it must have been days off. His coffee was barely touched. I'm sure he hadn't planned on a nap until the letter.

I started reading. Barry had pretty much covered the content of the letter except for one thing that I picked up on immediately: Mom hinted that it would be "really nice if one of you kids were here." Mary was living in Steveston with some friends and had a new job. Pam had just moved to the north end of Vancouver Island to start teaching in a few weeks. Barry obviously wouldn't be leaving. This was just the excuse I needed to head home early without looking like a coward. I knew it was wrong to just up and leave Cindy with Dwayne back in the picture, especially using grief as an excuse. We both knew it would come to an end before school started, anyway, and I would just be fooling myself if I thought that Cindy was hung up on me enough to mourn my absence for too long. It would be pretty sad around home on Admiral's, but a hell of a lot safer for me right now than Faro. And there was enough summer left for a beach party or two.

Strangely I didn't feel badly about Fitz. In the past year, I had spent as much or more time with Fitz than anyone, yet his death to me felt natural, even though it was a violent one. At the time, I thought that my lack of feelings over death were the result of growing up in a funeral home and always being around it. Yet, I remember, I couldn't get out of my head the picture of Bob Walker swimming out to Toshiro Hamata's fishing boat in the mouth of the Fraser and giving him the natural justice he deserved. And I recalled Oscar's happiness equation. Fitz had already lived much longer than anyone could expect a dog to live, so we should all be happy he lived to be sixteen. No 'poor Fitz' or 'poor Barry'. Dad did not expect to accidently kill a family member, but he did and will have to live with it. Poor Dad. Mom signed on to be there with Dad through good and bad so no 'poor Mom', either. I would go home and help her, but I had no feelings- nor deserved to have any feelings- of 'poor me'.

Cheryl and the girls weren't anywhere around the house. They were probably in town shopping. Over coffee, I started making plans in my head and figured I could be on a plane out of Whitehorse in two days. I had to give a little notice at work, say good-bye to Cindy, and spend some time with Barry, Cheryl and the kids. Maybe four days.

23

Fall, 1972

"You going to the Koral and Hardy show?" Mel Matsuzaki asked me in the courtyard on our way to Guidance class. It was mid-September and I'd been back on Admiral's about a month.

"We have a choice?" I tried to sound less than enthusiastic about going to this episode of Career Choices. In grade twelve, Jim Morrison brought in as many different people of different careers as would come in to a class of teenagers and give a talk about how great their chosen field of work was. Today it was the police, and, though I didn't want any of my friends to know it, I was already leaning toward signing up for the RCMP. Another talk with Bob Walker, this time in Dad's kitchen and he little under the influence, had convinced me that it might just be an exciting life, especially the path Bob had taken. I learned that summer from my encounter with Dwayne Coulter in the kitchen of the Faro Hotel that I had the ability to think and act coolly and unemotionally under pressure. Gleaning things from conversations with Bob, I knew that being able to turn off emotions was a highly prized quality in his line of work, but could make you seem pretty odd in other surroundings if you couldn't control the switch.

"Yeah, we could go to the Rec Centre and shoot some pool instead," Mel responded. Mel was likely going to work in his family's market garden and eventually inherit it with his sister. Career Choices didn't mean much to him. And Mel's favourite crop was one that didn't mix well with any interest in police work.

"Naw, I'm gonna save my get-out-of-jail card for something I really don't want to go to," I said. "It shouldn't be too bad. Maybe we'll learn some stuff that'll keep us out of trouble on a Saturday night."

"Yeah, maybe. Wanna shoot some pool after school instead?"

"It's too nice out to hang around inside. Cusheon Lake is still warm enough to swim." I have always tried to cling on to summer for as long as possible. Mel spent his summers in the garden rain or shine. Indoor activities were a luxury to him.

"Yeah, maybe." We were almost at the door to Morrison's class. "Let's see what these dummies have to say. You might have to wake me when it's over."

Dan Koral didn't make it to the presentation. Ken Hardy, all six-foot-four of him was at the front of the class talking to Morrison. He was definitely an imposing figure and would make a perfect poster-boy--in looks at least-- for the recruiting job he was about to undertake.

After giving an introduction, Morrison sat facing the class giving his threatening stink-eye, which warned us all to be on our best behaviour. Hardy talked about the physical requirements for eligibility in the force. I would just barely make the height at five-foot-seven, but could easily pass all of the fitness tests. School marks were also not a problem, but I would have to take another French class in the second semester, which I had hoped would be a spare. He pointed out that new constables would be placed where needed in the country, but were asked for their first three choices of provinces, excluding their home province. Training was in Regina where winter was harshly cold and summers were blazing hot. BC boys like us would not have ever encountered such conditions. You were paid while training, but only minimally, as room and board were already covered in the barracks. He outlined some of the specialties which they could go on to, but stressed that being a regular cop like himself was a skill all its own-not glamorous like a detective or undercover narc, but every bit as important. He mentioned the recent murder of Hertz as an example of getting to do more than ordinary work.

"That's about it. Anybody have any questions?" I knew that everybody wanted to ask if they were still after Donny Morrison, but just couldn't with his uncle in the room.

"How much do you get paid?" someone in the back asked.

"You start out at about the same as you could make as a tradesman, but there are premiums for danger and isolation and things like that. Then there are raises on a schedule according to time and performance appraisals."

"How do you become a narc?" from another voice.

"To specialize in other areas, the force offers courses that you can take. It's on your own time, but the RCMP pays for the course. Taking the course is no guarantee of getting into that field, but not taking them guarantees that you won't."

"That's just like any other education," Morrison said, still giving the entire class the stink-eye. Somehow he could look everyone in the eye at the same time, even moving his head from side to side and the glare would still be fixed on everyone. "Learning is a life-long process. I'm sure Constable Harding would agree with me on that. Even if it's not a formal education, your learning doesn't stop next June when you walk out those big gates in the courtyard for the last time. Any other questions?" He scanned the room, still staring down everyone. "Seeing none, let's all thank Constable Harding for coming in today." He put his hands together until we joined in a small applause.

They shook hands and Harding left the room. "Okay, men. I hope you enjoyed that because next week, one of the more prominent island real estate agents has agreed to come in and give a talk. Might not be as exciting as police work."

24

A few nights later, Oscar was on the evening shift when I was jogging. "I think I'm going to join the RCMP after I graduate," I told him.

"Right after? You not going to take a little time to enjoy yourself first?" I thought his reaction might be more negative than what it was.

"I'll take the summer off. Depends on when the classes start." That was a question I should have asked Hardy. There wasn't a waiting list to get in as they were trying to replace a big block of potential retirees over the next few years, according to Hardy.

"Well it's a good career choice, Mark. I'm sure you'll be good at it. Your Dad was." It was the first time Oscar had even hinted that he knew my dad. I had forgotten about seeing them talking in town.

"Dad wasn't in the real RCMP," I said, "the reserves, sure, but that's not the same thing. He just did the ceremonial stuff and crowd control at Halloween and big events. Do you know him?"

"He hasn't told you? Sure, we knew each other on the Mainland years ago. He was just young when he joined the force and I had been working there nearly twenty years. I worked for the office in charge of the Lower Mainland reserves then. That's how I met him. He might not even know about Admiral's if we hadn't met." I doubt it. Dad had spent a lot of his youth working on fishing boats and could tell a story about almost any place on the coast.

"So you were in the RCMP, too? Guess I never even thought about it, but I guess you weren't a security guard your whole life were you?" I was a little embarrassed that I had never asked Oscar about his past in all the talks we had about island history. I had wondered, but not too seriously. And Tony had never said anything, either, if he even knew. It didn't make lot of sense, though. I think of a cop as being a hard-ass with a serious outlook on life. Was that me? No. So I guess Oscar being a cop was plausible. It was just hard to imagine this 76-year-old home-spun philosopher being a hard-nosed cop. Then he answered some unasked questions.

"No, I wasn't actually in the force. Civilian employee is what I was called. Did just about everything the trainers did, though. I went to university to be a teacher like my momma, but I wanted a little more excitement, so I tried to join the RCMP. Couldn't do it, though. The recruiter I was dealing with suggested I apply for a civilian job and I got it. The position was both administrative and helping train the reserves. My education helped in that.

"I retired as soon as I could and came back to Admiral's. That was twenty one years ago. Crossed paths with your dad's friend, too, Bob Walker. He was a very serious law guy back then. Worked on some pretty important stuff, they say. He was in the intelligence service when he retired. Met Churchill during the war. That's an exciting life if you don't have much family to look after. Family should always come first, that's why lots of cops don't go past bein' a regular cop. Committment's just way too much to move up the ladder very far." He took a long pause hoping I'd say something, but family wasn't something I'd thought much about with my career choice. "What sort of work do you think you'd like to do in the force, Mark?"

"Just a posting in some small place for starters, I guess. Then see how it goes and where it takes me from there." I could sense Oscar was a little sad from looking back at what sounded like a less-than-exciting career in the Force. There wasn't a lot of the usual spark in his speech. I didn't want my dreams of a James Bond lifestyle to make him any sadder. "Teaching later on might be alright, I guess."

"Ha-haa! Don't try to make me feel good about my choices, Mark. Everybody has somethin' they're good at, and if you can find it and make a living at it, you're a very lucky person. Remember what I told you my momma taught her students. Everyone's good at something. And no calling is less than another. People may look down at the man who drives the honey wagon, but when their toilet don't work, they're in a whole heap of you-know-what. And who they gonna call? The man with the honey wagon, that's who. And they'll be happy to see him and greatly appreciate the work he does.

"Ain't no unimportant jobs out there, Mark, or the job wouldn't exist. I'm very happy with the choices I made and I was very good at what I did, and very thankful to have found my calling and be able to do it for a living. Very thankful for that." With that, he put his head back in his chair and closed his eyes, smiling a huge satisfied grin. I was glad that I misread sadness in him. I was prepared to hear about the peace and tranquility of night shifts but Oscar wasn't done, yet. He brought his head forward and opened his eyes. "Even this little job here, which doesn't take a lot of skill, is not unimportant. The government has a big investment in that boat there and they want to make sure it's safe, as well as the men on board. I look after them and they usually look after me, but to somebody driving by, it looks like I don't do anything. 'Cept maybe talk to joggers all night. He-hee! Point is, Mark, every job and every person's important. Must be or they wouldn't be here."

"I guess. So how long were y-... hey were you in the army before that, like Bob?"

"Yes, I was in the army. In an engineering outfit called the Number 2 Construction Battalion. All black men, 'cept our captain. We never fought, though, we were, like the name says, a construction outfit. We built barricades, dug trenches, sawed wood for lumber and fires—lots of things you don't think of in a war. We were really glorified labourers, but like I just finished telling you, no job is unimportant. We were still right there on the front lines and I saw many of my workmates get seriously hurt and a few killed, both by work accidents and by enemy fire." The cheer had gone out of his voice again. "It's not something I like to think about, but I've learned to stop hurting from it. It's a long time ago, now. We were only over there for a little over a year, but it was enough for me. That was the first World War, though. I'm a lot older than Bob Walker. I believe he's retired now, too, though, isn't he?"

"Yeah, he's here most of the year, but goes to warmer places in the winter. Bermuda, Bahamas, places like that."

"I see. Must be nice to get out of the rain for a while." He took long pause. "I think I'm gettin' too old for these nightshifts. I sure like the peace and tranquility I get with them, though." His head was back in his chair again, his eyes closed and a big grin on his face.

"I gotta get goin', Oscar. Thanks for the water."

"Good night, Mark. Thanks for the company! Run carefully, now."

I left his office and started running. Also running were some questions through my head. Why did Oscar sound sad about his time with the RCMP? Why wasn't he a cop rather than a 'civilian employee'? And how did his army outfit happen to be all-black?

I stopped running about a hundred yards before our driveway to catch my breath on the way up to the house. It was still early enough that I could talk to dad before he went to bed. I showered, changed and went to the front room where he was reading his latest National Geographic. Mom was on the couch crocheting and watching TV.

"So you know Oscar pretty good, dad?" I started right in.

"Yup. He worked at the depot where I was stationed for the reserves. He worked in the office, but also trained with us. He couldn't be in the regular force or even the reserves, but the captain had him train with us, anyway, just as a favour. Oscar was a well-liked guy. We trained only one night a month and a full weekend every two months or so--normally--more if something was coming up that we were going to be on duty for, but Oscar wouldn't be in on that."

"What do you mean? What was wrong with him?" I was expecting some physical problem, or maybe he wasn't just old. Maybe he was a little simple.

"Back then, the force only hired white men, Mark. Black men only started getting hired a couple of years ago. Back in the '30s when Oscar tried out, it was unheard of. He was incredibly fortunate to get hired at all, never mind the force. It's an old-boys club mentality at the top and probably will be for a long time." He paused for a puff on his pipe. "We Canadians think we're so superior to Americans in our attitudes and tolerance, but we're not as advanced as we like to think. When higher-ups back east found out that a black man was working in the office on the Lower Mainland, they wanted Oscar's captain to fire him. He wouldn't, though. Oscar had proved his worth both as an efficient worker and an off-duty volunteer. Plus he was the nicest guy you could ever meet. He could have gone far in any field if it wasn't for his skin colour. Sad."

"What about the army? He said he was in an all-black regiment. How'd that work?"

"Same thing. The white powers-that-be wouldn't allow 'inferior' black men to fight alongside white men. Thought that it might be a sign of disrespect toward the whites. Someday—I hope—everyone will see just how ridiculous our old ideas are. But I think we're a long way from there."

To learn a little of Oscar's past trials as a black man was a revelation. I had always thought, hearing his stories of his mother's life that being black in Canada was not a barrier to success; that blacks in Canada did not face the treatment that we saw daily in the news south of the border. I now knew he had good reasons to be bitter about past treatment, yet he was still the most satisfied and thankful person I had ever known. It was just the same as the Matsuzakis. They'd been shit on by their own country for having common ancestors with a modern enemy, but wiped it off, smiling, grateful for the chance to rebuild what was taken away. What was it about these people that they were able to still be happy after such treatment? It's a common theory that the Japanese as a nation are like this because of their religion. Maybe Oscar was fairly religious, too, though he never said much to me that would give that impression. Was it something about Admiral's that made people more tolerant? After all it was really tolerance that allowed the Matsuzakis and Oscar to forgive their persecutors--tolerance of the others' ignorance. Oscar's parents living on Admiral's Island in the 1880's didn't have to endure the bigotry that Oscar had to 50 years later in a city less than 30 miles away. Had Calvin Parker been able to stall the government a little longer, the Matsuzakis may have come home to their land intact, while in Steveston, Japanese homes were occupied by white families mere weeks after their owners were shipped off in box cars. What had Oscar said? 'I retired as soon as I could and came back to Admiral's.' It wasn't just running back to the comfort and safety of home the way I did back in the summer. Something about Admiral's made you keep coming back. In a few short days, I would find out that Oscar had a theory for this, too.

"What about Bob?" Talking with dad was comfortable for a change, so I kept on going, hoping to learn more about my mysterious mentors.

"What about him?"

"Where did you meet him? Was he in the RCMP in Steveston, too?"

"Yep. But we go all the way back to grade school. We were in the same school, but he's a couple of years older. We got to know each other better in the force after we found out our common roots. I think Oscar and Bob knew each other better than I knew either of them, both working in the headquarters office. But Bob liked to join in the poker games and boys nights. So did I. Good camaraderie. We got to know each other on those occasions. But not Oscar. He didn't drink or gamble. I've never even heard him swear."

Sounds like the same Oscar I know. "Did Bob do a lot of secret agent-type stuff? He's told me some pretty wild stories. I just wonder if they're true. Some of the things he's said he's done aren't really above-board, either."

"Bob was in the Security Service for about twenty years by the time he retired. I couldn't tell you what he did there. But I've never known him to lie. I've never known him to tell any stories about his work, though, either. Next time his lips are loosened with wine, I'll prod him a little."

Our conversation faded out and my attention shifted over to the TV, where any minute Steve McGarrett was about to say 'Book 'im, Danno'. It was nearly ten o'clock. I went to bed and lay awake wondering a few things. Why, if Bob and Oscar had known each other well as Dad said, did Oscar refer to him as 'dad's friend'? And Oscar said training was part of his job, while dad said his captain let him train with them. That might not mean anything, but they weren't both right. I still slept well that night. Jogging does that for you.

25

Fall 1971

"Donny. Donny Harper," he replied. Donny had many aliases ready for encounters where he didn't want to be known. Now, on the run, he'd have to make up an entire new persona. "Thanks for stoppin'." He kept the hood of his kangaroo pullover up over his head so that Cliff would have less chance of recognizing him, if in fact Donny's face had been on TV. At this point, he didn't know, but wasn't about to take any chances.

The beat-up Vauxhall pulled out onto the highway. "No problem, Donny. Nice to have some company." But it seemed it was more of an audience than company Cliff wanted. He talked steadily on any subject. Sports, news, weather, history- his knowledge seemed vast, but he couldn't find any one topic that interested Donny. Donny simply replied with a series of affirmative words and grunts, wishing his host would shut the hell up.

"Whatcha gonna do in Chilliwack? I got a construction company. We're building a big cow barn out there right now. You wouldn't be lookin' for work wouldja? You look like you could swing a hammer and use a spade. We pay well. Four-fifty an hour to start. Five bucks after two weeks if you prove yerself. Lotsa work, too. Won't lay ya off all winter. Waddya say, Donny?"

"Yeah, maybe. Hadn't thought about work much." Donny had enough money to last a while, but he didn't want to let this guy know. "If you drop me off at my uncle's place there and he lets me stay awhile, I should be able to work for you."

"Right on, Donny! You seem like a smart kid, maybe you'll go places in construction. My partner's gettin' old and wants to retire in a few years. Ya never know when opportunity knocks, Donny. Maybe you could buy in some day." They were in a rural area now, on the Trans-Canada Highway about an hour into their drive and an hour from Chilliwack. "I gotta take a piss, Donny. I'm gonna pull over behind those trees. I hate pissin' in gas stations."

Staying out of the public eye suited Donny just fine. Cliff had the radio on at a low volume so that his rambling could be heard, but when the news came on Donny focused his hearing on it and heard no mention of himself. It was early evening and dark out, so he felt quite safe, for now. He'd have to pick out a house in Chilliwack for his fictitious uncle to live in, then maybe hop a Greyhound into the States. That was an easy way to get the acid across the border in the dark. Cliff had opened the trunk and stood behind it as he pissed.

"Ah shit! I dropped my wallet in the mud somewhere! Hey, Donny, hand me the flashlight in the glovebox, willya?" Donny opened the compartment and felt around for a flashlight. He tried to roll down the window to hand it out, but the window didn't budge. "Ya gotta open the door! Windows buggered!" Cliff shouted. Donny opened the door and handed Cliff the flashlight. "Thanks. Wanna help look? Sooner we find it the sooner we get back on the road."

Donny got out and walked to the back of the car where Cliff had pissed. Cliff was bent over, straining to see in the fading glow of the cheap flashlight. "There it is! Over to your left, Donny," Cliff said as he directed the light. Donny turned his back to Cliff and bent over to see the ground better. "Can'tcha see it? Here take the light." As soon as Donny took the flashlight from his hand, Cliff reached into the open trunk and pulled out a hammer and brought it crashing down on Donny's silhouettted, hooded head. The hood saved Cliff from being sprayed with Donny's blood. He used the shoulder of Donny's jacket to wipe the blood off the heavy hammer and threw it back in the trunk. Still careful not to get blood on him, he picked up Donny's limp body under the arms and slumped his torso over the rear fender-- head, arms and shoulders hanging in the trunk. He stopped for a minute to catch his breath, then gently pulled off Donny's pants. After having his way with him sexually, he went through Donny's backpack and couldn't believe his good luck. Close to two thousand dollars in cash. 'I could use a beer,' he thought with a smile.

But first he had to cover his tracks. He got a shovel out of the trunk, walked about a hundred feet near some trees and bushes and began to dig. 'This was well worth the trouble,' he thought as the spade hit the soft dirt. 'I'll have to do this again soon.' In half an hour, he had dug a substantial hole. After he dumped in Donny's body, his pack, and the hammer, he filled in the hole level to the rest of the ground and spread the rest of the soil to leave no suspicious mounds.

Clifford Olson had been doing medium-security time for burglary in nearby Oakalla jail. He had broken out just two days previous, setting his sights on stealing a Vauxhall because of their low security. A position on the ignition switch permitted starting without a key and the trunk could be opened without one as well. A shovel and hammer were easy to find in a backyard close to the car. 'Time for that beer,' he thought.

26

I had thought about Bob's offer on the night he told me about Hamata. He said that I could come down anytime for another story, so I thought I would take him up on it at least once before he left Admiral's. He was due to head for the sunshine of Bermuda or wherever he went soon. Since my talk with Dad, Bob hadn't drank enough on his almost daily visit for Dad to ask whether his stories were true or not. In fact, Dad said, his visits the last week or so had been shorter than usual. I dressed up to go jogging, but planned to go no further than Bob's. The absence of Fitz, now buried in the woods, made the excuse of taking him for a walk impossible to use. Something about a teen-aged boy visiting a middle-aged bachelor at his home at night seemed a bit queer, so I didn't want to let on to Mom and Dad where I really was going. I only felt like I was betraying myself a little for not actually going jogging. When I got down the long, steep driveway and close to his cabin, I could tell that he was in his hot dog pool. As I got closer to the pool, though, I heard voices and noticed an unfamiliar car parked next to Bob's. I stopped in my tracks and listened. There were definitely two voices-- Bob's and a woman's. I couldn't make out what they were saying, but I could tell that a third party wouldn't exactly fit in to this situation. I turned and headed back up the driveway, then jogged my usual route, hoping that Oscar would be working.

"Evenin', Mark!" he greeted me as he held the door. The infectious smile seemed brighter tonight than last time I saw him. Since Dad had explained some of Oscar's tribulations to me, I could appreciate the sadness in his voice and face that night. But with Oscar, that sadness could disappear in a flash, never mind a few nights.

"Hi, Oscar," I puffed out, catching my breath. I held on to the glass of water he had given me, not quite ready to drink it. I sat with my legs stretched right out, only my shoulder blades touching the back of the chair and my butt on the front edge of the seat.

"Looked like you were runnin' faster tonight than normal. Shootin' for a new record?" The Smile.

"No, just don't want to get into a lazy period. I knew that I couldn't apply for the RCMP until I'm eighteen, but I just found out today that I can't actually get a position until I'm nineteen. I'm only going to be seventeen in March. I'm not sure what I'll do for a year and a half after I graduate school." I took a sip of water.

"I'm sure you'll find something, Mark. Always a contractor needing a strong back to move things around."

"I just don't want to get stuck in a rut here on Admiral's and end up never leaving. A year and a half is a long time to change my mind about the force if I find something here that isn't half-bad."

"Yeah, but what's the chances of that?! Hee-hee!"

Oscar was right. There was little opportunity for young people on Admiral's. The biggest employers, the Ferries and the Highways department, took forever to get established in, so I was safe from those traps. I just had to keep my dream alive and stay in good shape until I was nineteen.

"I suppose I could go back to the Yukon. If I could get on at the mine and stay in the camp, I could save a lot of money in a year and a half." I thought about Cindy and how nice it would be to be with her again.

"That might lead you astray from your goal...money, I mean." The Smile. This time The Smile was accompanied by an extra a twinkle in his eye which he got whenever he talked about women, or in my case, girls. Jesus! Could he read my mind? I never told him anything about Cindy after I got back. Maybe he did just mean money and I only imagined the double-entendre. "Yeah, but it can get pretty boring up there for a single guy. I'm sure I'd be itching to get away after a while."

"I'm sure it'll all work out in the end, Mark. I'll keep reminding you of your dream if I'm around to tell you." He paused and watched out the window at a passing car making the turn up to Scott Point Road. "Have I ever told you about the history of Admiral's name-changes over the years? It's a pretty revealing story about this place. On the first English maps it was called Chu-An Island. The captain of one of the first boats to land here asked the natives what they call the island." Oscar's eyes were bright and his voice went to its professorial tone. "Since neither knew the other's language very well, the natives replied Chu-An, which means 'facing the sea'. Obviously, there was a miscommunication—that wasn't its name at all, but it got on the maps for about twenty years. In the 1850's when Captain George Henry Richards was sailing around mapping the place and claiming everything for England, he named it Admiral's Island. He did this to please his boss, an Admiral who was the head of England's Pacific fleet." Oscar was leaning forward in his chair, his long arms and hands making gestures as if they were doing the talking. "Now, the word admiral has a very stuffy meaning to it. The stereotype of an Admiral is someone who is by-the-book to the point of having absolutely no humour in him at all. He looks like he's never smiled... and is probably constipated. Hee-hee! Does that sound like this place? Not in the least. Why, it's the exact opposite. People come here to get away from silly rules, and for the most part live by common-sense rules that would make an Admiral pull his hair out at the thought of the chaos he would expect. Chu-An makes more sense as a name than Admiral's, but what island doesn't face the sea? No, the original name that the natives used was Iskum, and it goes back to a few years after the great massacre at the Crow beach. You know that story, of course. Everybody learns that one in school on Admiral's. It was my momma that kept that story alive. Well, the next chief after the one who ordered the massacre was his daughter, and she had lost her betrothed husband in that battle. But rather than being vengeful, she worked at making peace with all the tribes of the South. She wanted there never to be war again. She came here and on that beach, she traded blood with many Salish chiefs, who all accepted an historical pact of peace between the north and south. There was a big celebration with dancing and bonfires and shamans blessing the beach and the island and naming it Iskum. Iskum Beach and Iskum Island. Iskum is a Cowichan word meaning 'accept'. The tribes and clans all accepted each other and on that beach is where they all accepted the pact. During her reign, a few other peace pacts were 'accepted' there because that beach became a symbol of the difference between war and peace. It became a place to hold treaty ceremonies.

"When she died, her half-brother's son became chief and the era of peace ended. There was no all-out war or anything, but slave raids and extortion returned. Iskum Island, however, remained neutral ground because of the blessings by the shamans, so that chief and all of his descendants kept a hands-off policy toward Iskum to show others that they weren't violent, whether they were or not. It was more likely that their superstition made them afraid to break the blessing."

"How do you know all this, Oscar?" I felt like I had just read a good book or seen a really good movie. Oscar had a way of telling a story that was highly entertaining. Like when I listened to Bob, I was transfixed, but their material and styles were totally different.

"My momma passed this down. I told you I went to university to be a teacher. History is what I studied. Especially the history of this coast. But like I said, my momma dug up this story. There were still natives living here when she was a little girl. She was friends with the native kids her age. She listened close to the old storytellers and wrote a lot of it down. I still have her notes."

"Wow. Those should be in a museum or something."

"When the time comes, I'll donate them to the Admiral's Archive Society. For now, I'll hang on to them. For selfish reasons. I like to read things she wrote every once in a while when I want to feel her presence. It brings a lot of comfort to an old man like me." He went silent and smiled. Not the infectious smile. The eyes were a little sad.

"I should go, Oscar. Thanks for the water and the talk. I really learned a lot." It was still early and I might have to wait a while for him to comment about the night shift tranquility.

Standing up, he took my glass and opened the door for me. Then came the infectious smile. "Good night, Mark. Don't twist an ankle or anything."

After showering, I sat at my desk and started in on some homework. After about half an hour of math, my mind drifted. Iskum. I'd heard Admiral's had been called Chu-An and something about some hot springs that have long been dry, but I'd never heard of Iskum before. Maybe what I had thought a few nights previous about tolerance was slightly off. What Admiral's really offered people was Acceptance. Iskum. Tolerance suggests just putting up with differences, while acceptance is an actual approval and maybe even an understanding of them. Maybe this crazy island and all it's crazy people were under the spell of a five hundred year-old blessing that made them more accepting of each other. And maybe I was getting tired.

27

December 1971

Clifford Olson had spent the first two weeks of his re-imprisonment in solitary confinement. Today, he was being taken to the maximum security area of Oakalla, where his chances of re-escaping were almost none. The cindercrete block walls and concrete floors which made up the hallways had once been painted bright white, but now, what flakes of that original paint remained were gray and dull. Two guards escorted him. Wearing prison-issue coveralls, his ankles and wrists were shackled, as much for show as for precaution. Clifford Olson was not big nor powerful, and at this time in his career, unknown to be violent. The two large guards would have no trouble controlling him physically in the unlikely event he tried anything foolish, even without the shackles.

Maximum security at Oakalla meant your own seven by eight foot cell with a lumpy cot and an unbreakable toilet and sink. The weakly-pressured water was never hot enough to wash properly and ventilation was non-existent, making toilet usage in the same space where one ate and slept an adventure for even those with a strong stomach. Olson would spend another two months of his visit here until he had been taught his lesson for escaping. He would then be released among the general population and start planning his next escape. He already decided that his few days of freedom were more than worth it and a double punishment next time would still not deter him.

***

TVs in all four corners of the dining hall were tuned in to the evening news as inmates ate their supper. Clifford Olson, on his second day among the general population was eating quickly and talking to Daniel Hendricks, an inmate doing time for petty theft, like Olson, without the break and enters nor the escape. Olson was bragging about his recent taste of freedom and his plans to do it again.

"It was too easy, man, I tell ya. This place can't hold me except in solitary or max. This general shit is a piece of cake. Danny, you should come with me next time. I'm gonna leave again soon."

"Sure you are, Cliff. Why would I crash out with you? How much time did you get tacked on? Three more years? I got less than that now and with good behaviour, it'll prob'ly be less than one. No thanks." Most of the inmates thought Olson was a bullshitter and wanted little to do with him. It was also rumoured that he was a snitch, but no one who would mete out jailhouse justice really believed it. Snitches were stereotyped as quiet and loners. Olson was loud and drew attention to himself as much as possible.

"Leon James Renner, one of three men wanted for questioning in the arson and murder of Wolfgang Hertz on Admiral's Island just over two months ago, turned himself in to RCMP on Admiral's today," the news reporter said in front of a picturesque scene of Ganges Harbour. "Renner has confessed to the crimes and says he acted alone. RCMP divers searched for the murder weapon in Ganges Harbour where Renner threw the handgun, but came up empty-handed." A video shot of police cruisers and uniformed RCMP brought a chorus of boos from all watching. Olson turned his attention to the TV to see what the fuss was. "A second man who police were looking for, Steven Bruce Gorman, brought Renner in to police and is still being held for questioning." The TV screen was now cut in half with Gorman's mugshot on the left and Donny's grade twelve yearbook picture on the right and their names in print near the bottom. "The whereabouts of the third man police were originally looking for, Donald Thomas Henrik are still unknown."

"Holy shit, Danny!" Olson looked around, lowered his voice and leaned in closer to Daniel Hendricks. "That kid on the right. I killed him when I was out! I missed the first part. What the hell did they want him for?" Olson was almost bursting with excitement at the thought of being connected to TV exposure, but knew he had to keep quiet about his deed. He was torn between wishing he hadn't said anything to Hendricks, and wanting to whisper it to everyone. He was bouncing and fidgeting in his seat like a kindergartner.

"I didn't hear it either, Cliff," Hendricks said, appearing uninterested, spooning up more peas. He put it off as another of Clifford Olson's bullshit stories, but made a mental note of Olson's story and Donny's name. Being so similar to his own, it would be easy to remember. It just might come in handy someday.

28

July 1988

I was home on Admiral's for my summer vacation for the first time in five years. The Force kept me far from home and I hadn't seen Mom or Dad in all that time. Mom hadn't changed much, but Dad sure looked older. He couldn't manage the acreage like he used to, and had to hire people to do odd jobs, but still, some parts of the house were showing neglect. They were considering selling, but wanted to keep it in the family, if possible. That was part of my reason for finally holidaying there this year. I was sizing up the possibility of buying it, and if not, helping them reach some other decision. Pam and Mary were both married and living in Powell River and Vancouver, respectively and were not in a position to buy. Barry and Cheryl had left the Yukon and were now in a mining town on the northern tip of Vancouver Island. There were no job opportunities for Barry on Admiral's, and now with four girls, two in university, their purchase of the place was out of the question, too. I was the only one of the family with the money or the freedom to buy it. It wouldn't have been practical, but the place owned a huge chunk of my heart. If I did, it would sit empty most of the year and would get even more run down, meaning my holidays would be spent fixing it up. But could I really imagine better holidays? I had been many places around the world already on holidays and was still wondering what the allure was.

I was half-hoping that someone else would just come along and buy it. That would take the decision out of my hands. If that happened, Mom and Dad planned to move into a new retirement condo complex built close to the village which would be perfect for them. Some of their friends were already living there and Mom was excited at the prospect of more companionship. I sensed, however, that Dad's heart was still bound to his little hobby farm, even though he knew he couldn't look after it the way he once did.

"C'mon, George, get out of the water. Your mom'll never let you in the house like that! Go dry off." Dad and I were walking by the pond, just checking things out. Dad had taken the plunge nearly ten years ago and finally gotten a new dog. It took seven or eight years after Fitz's tragic death for him to get over the guilt. George was a Golden Retriever cross that loved the water. He was in the pond every day unless it was frozen over and then he would stand on the ice scratching and crying at it. Dad had long ago given up keeping him clean, so he spent most of his indoor time in the back half of the house where Mom couldn't smell him. If they sold the place, George would likely have to be part of the package. He loved the place as much as Dad, and only small dogs and cats were allowed in the retirement complex.

"Ya know, there's a lot you could do with this place if you bought it," Dad said as we went through the gate between the pond and the garden. Without the help of Hugh Torrie who passed away the previous winter, Dad planted much less this year. "And you wouldn't have to live here year-round. If we moved to Eagle Ridge, I could come and check on it every day. Hell, George could still live here!"

"I dunno, Dad. It seems like a hell of a lot of work and I don't know if I'll ever get stationed back here in B.C." I'd been in the RCMP for thirteen years now and was eligible to be stationed in my home province, but so far hadn't been so blessed. "If I was stationed anywhere close to Admiral's I wouldn't think twice. You and Mom would be moving. As is, I need to think about it some more."

"It's really your Mom I want to do this for. If I was still healthy we wouldn't need to move, but she deserves a nice place after living here for so long. Not that this was bad, but she'd like something a little more modern." It wasn't like Dad to tug at anyone's heartstrings. He was a 'let the chips fall' kind of a guy—at least after moving to Admiral's--and never tried to exert much influence. He was even subtle when it came to pushing me toward a career—though it was the right choice. He must have really wanted me to buy the place.

"Like I said, Dad, I have to think about it some more. D'you think lunch is ready?" Mom had promised potato salad with cold cuts and devilled eggs—one of her specialties and one of my favourites. I think she was trying to butter me up, too, but also she hadn't seen me in five years.

"Have you seen Oscar lately, Dad? I think I'll go and visit him after lunch. Hard to believe he's still kicking. Must be over ninety." I bit into one of Mom's incredible devilled eggs. I think the secret was her home-made mayonnaise-a family recipe from Grandma.

"Ninety-two this year. We saw him at the Remembrance Day ceremony last year. Still looked pretty good then. Tony still drives him wherever he needs to go in that old T-Bird. Looks like Tony keeps it going like it's brand new." Tony had become a mechanic at the local Gulf station. Cars were his passion, and so was living on Admiral's. Working at the Gulf, he got all he needed in life. I would have to make time to meet him for a beer.

"What were you guys doing at that? I can't ever remember going when I lived here."

"Donna asked us to take her. She took Hugh's death much harder than anyone would have expected." The Torries were never thought of as one of those couples that were really close. They practically lived separate lives and often made fun of the other when he or she wasn't around. They both golfed, but never together. But as I've learned in the force, you never know what goes on when people are home alone. "We went to the Legion after the ceremony and had a hell of a good time. They built a new hall up by the hospital. Pretty nice."

The new legion had been built for a few years even the last time I had visited Admiral's, but I didn't want to point out Dad's memory lapse to him. I ate the last bit of potato salad from my plate. "That was delicious, Mom. How are you gonna top that for supper?"

"I thought I would get you to barbecue some hamburgers. There's still lots of salad and I'll bake some fresh buns. You'll be home won't you?"

"Wouldn't miss it. I better get going to see Oscar, though. I hope he's still in good shape. It'd be sad to see him in poor health. Hey, can I take some of this food for him?"

"Sure, I'll get a paper plate."

***

Oscar's house looked pristine. Tony not only looked after the T-Bird, but he kept the house from falling over, too. It looked to have a fresh coat of paint and the yard was bright and cheery with colourful bushes I didn't know the names of. Oscar was sitting in a rocker on the covered porch, looking like the model for a cliché painting. When I pulled in to the driveway, he stopped rocking and leaned forward tipping his glasses down and looking at my truck. When I got out, the brightness of the yard and house looked dim compared to that smile that I hadn't seen in five years. It felt so good to see him, and if the smile was any indication, it was even better to think that the feeling was mutual.

"Mark, is that you, son? My, my come up here so I can see you better." He stood with ease, not betraying his 92 years. We shook hands and hugged. The smile was as big as I'd remembered and the eyes still shone.

"Good to see you, Oscar. My mom sent some lunch over. I'll put it in your fridge."

"Well you thank her for me. I've had my lunch, but don't have supper planned yet, so that's what it'll be."

I walked right in as he sat back down in his rocker. The inside was not as clean or bright as the outside, but it wasn't bad, either. Pictures of family were all over, many of them likely the same people at different ages and events in their lives. Only one of the families, the Wallaces, still lived on Admiral's. There were three girls in high school at the same time as I, but none in any of my classes, so I didn't know them well. I put the plate in the fridge and went back outside to sit with the coolest person I'd ever known.

"You're looking well, Mark. Tell me what you've been doing these last five years. Put away any real bad guys? Where are you posted now?"

Oscar amazed me. At 92 years old, he knew that it had been exactly five years since I last visited. "Always putting away the bad guys, Oscar. We always get our man, you know."

"Hee-hee! What about women? You get yourself a girl, yet? You know you gotta settle down someday." There was that extra twinkle in his eye that accompanied The Smile.

"Someday, Oscar," I had a couple of serious girlfriends, but the RCMP life got in the way both times. Local girls who didn't want to leave their families when my posting was changed. "I'm posted in Fort McMurray, now, Oscar. I've been there about three years. Most of our dealings are with drunken oil workers and domestic disputes. Too much money flowing around up there, and too many people who don't know how to handle it."

"Ah, yes, money. Makes people do stupid things doesn't it? Now let's see, Dauphin, Manitoba, Lumsden, Saskatchewan, and Fort McMurray, Alberta. Do I see a trend happening here, Mark? You gonna be back in BC next?"

"I hope so, Oscar. It would be nice to be closer to Mom and Dad. And hopefully on the coast. I've had enough of five month winters to last me the rest of my life."

"Yeah, they sure weren't too nice to you when it comes to thinking about winter."

"True, but except for the coast, most postings are pretty bad in the winter. I was really hoping that talk about that Caribbean country joining Canada would come true and I could be posted down there. Wearing shorts and riding a bicycle around the beach at work!"

"Hee-hee! That would be nice, Mark! Don't hold your breath, though!"

Oscar and I continued talking for about an hour. Nothing serious, just enjoying each other's company. "Should we go for a little walk? I like to check out my property in the summer afternoons. Then I come back here and sit on the porch and have a little nap before thinkin' about supper. People make a fuss about how 'active' I am at my age, but I don't really see it that way. Long as you got the energy, I don't see why your age should matter what you do in a day." Putting on a straw hat from a table beside him, he got up out of the rocker with the ease of a man twenty years younger. He didn't sigh or make any grunting sounds like a lot of old people would. Grabbing a walking stick leaning against the stair post, he walked slowly but steadily. It was obvious his eyesight wasn't too bad despite the glasses. As we rounded the house to the back, I remembered Oscar owned ten acres, but a lot of it was unused, steep hillside.

"Tony fixed up this deer-fence for me this winter. I wouldn't have much of a garden if I'd relied on the old one. It was getting pretty tattered from the weather. And now you gotta defend against rabbits, too. Some fools in the neighbourhood set their pets free when they got tired of them and now there's hundreds of 'em. If you need to practice your shootin'..."

"Oscar! I've never known you to advocate killing animals for target practice," I said with a smile.

"I just want to help out your career. You gotta be a good shot," he said, returning the smile two-fold.

"Who's helping you with the garden? You didn't do all this yourself, did you?" I could see corn, peas, beans, tomatoes, carrots, and onions as well as separate potato and pumpkin patches. This man amazed me.

"I did all the planning, but the agriculture class at the high school came and planted it all for me. I do a bit of weeding, but a couple of the girls from the class live close by and still come over to help even though school's out. I'll share the bounty with their families, but they're just doing it 'cause they're good kids. Got way more than I can use, even though I preserve as much as I can. The irrigation you and Tony put in 'way back still works fine. He drains it for me in the fall."

We were now walking around the back side of the garden where Oscar's chickens roamed freely within their fenced area. "Haven't lost one of the girls in over a year. I designed what I figured was a raccoon-proof coop and had some kids in the shop class build it. It wasn't quite perfect, though, but some kids from the aggie class put their heads together and came up with a few better ideas and fixed it up. Got all kinds of gizmos to scare them and mink and otters away. Even got a wire roof so the eagles and ravens can't get 'em." He proceeded to name all the chickens, pointing at them and telling a little about their personalities, as well as Rocky, the rooster. "I eat a lot of eggs," he said with a smile. As he went through the roll call, I couldn't help but think about what a natural teacher Oscar was. Here he was at 92, using the resources of the high school in a symbiotic relationship, he passing on a lifetime of knowledge in exchange for the physical attributes of youth. He probably still had fifteen-year-old friends just as I had been seventeen years ago. I hope that they appreciate him as much as I have since our first meeting.

We were back at the porch now. Oscar climbed the steps easily, put his walking stick in its place and sat in his rocker. He placed the straw hat back on the table and looking at me turned on the big smile.

"It's really good to see you, Mark. Thank you for walking with me. I sure like the peaceful feeling I get walking this property."

I had to smile. Oscar was still dismissing me the way he had on nightshifts at the ferry terminal, just changed a little to fit the situation. "I should be going now, Oscar. It's really good to see you, too. I'll come for another visit before I leave, I promise."

"Okay, Mark. Thank your mother for the plate of food. I appreciate it very much. Go back in the kitchen and take a dozen eggs out of the fridge for her. I've got lots." The smile.

Even though Mom and Dad had plenty of eggs from their own chickens, I didn't want to insult Oscar by not taking his offer. Eggs in hand, I walked to the truck and as I turned to get in, I waved back at the porch, but it looked like he was already asleep. The chair had stopped rocking, the eyes were closed and the lips were turned way up at the corners. Peace never looked so peaceful.

29

On the drive home, I couldn't stop thinking about buying the acreage. I wanted to say yes for sentimental reasons, but it also made no sense when I was posted so far away. I could be just like Oscar, tending my chickens and garden and living to be the happiest, oldest man around. But I was a little young to be thinking like that.

I pulled my truck around the back of the house and saw the garden. It certainly wasn't in its prime anymore, but it wouldn't take much to bring it back to its former glory. The chicken coop needed a complete rebuild, though Dad talked about giving away the flock. That would have to happen because there was no way to keep chickens from a distance. It was with this thought I realized that I was making the case for myself to buy the place. There were no negative thoughts coming through—only the positive ones and what would have to be done to make it happen.

I walked past George, who was sleeping in the sun, to the open back door of Dad's kitchen to a pleasant surprise. Sitting there with Dad at his kitchen table was Bob Walker. They both had a glass of homemade wine in their hands, leaning back in the springy chrome set chairs that seemed to have lasted forever. They were on opposite sides of the square, old, wooden table, both facing the back door, wine arms resting on it. Obviously his afternoon visits were still occurring, just not as often as they used to.

"Hello, Mark. Good to see you." Bob stood up. Now in his mid-seventies, Bob's aging since my last visit showed only in the wrinkles on his face. His hair had been grey for many years. Body-wise he looked as though he could still do a hundred laps in his pool. And likely still did.

He got up as I walked toward him and reached my hand out to his. We grasped. He held on for longer than a casual handshake. It was warm, almost familial. "Likewise, Bob. You look well." Now in my thirties and Bob now in his seventies, I felt no change in our relationship since I was in my teens the way I had with Oscar. I considered them mentors of equal importance who shaped me into the person I have become. On that day, with Oscar, it felt like I was the only one of the two of us who had aged—he had always seemed old. Bob, though he had kept himself very fit, aged along with me.

"Wine, Mark?" Dad asked, putting his wine hand on the table to push himself out of his chair.

"I'd rather a beer. I'll get it." Dad relaxed back in his chair as I went to the old fridge. I poured the beer in a glass and as I adjusted an old wooden chair that didn't match the table, I realized that everything in this old part of the house was also old. It was old when I was a teenager, and it was all still in use. It wasn't antique old, it was junk old. I would inherit all this stuff if I bought the place, because a retirement condo would have no room for two living quarters. Dad was promising Mom all new furniture in the new place, too, so the more modern, only-twenty-year-old-stuff in the front of the house would also come with the place. I likely couldn't put my own stamp on the property until they died, for fear of insulting them. On the plus side, I wouldn't have to buy a bunch of stuff.

"How do you like Fort Mac, Mark? You must be just about due for a transfer, aren't you? BC's gotta be next if the pattern keeps up." It was sounding like the same conversation I'd had with Oscar. That was the bad part of going home for holidays. You had to repeat the same light chatter every time you ran into someone from the past.

"I hope so. It'd be nice to be close to home. How are you doing? Looks like you're still making good use of the pool." The light banter went on for half an hour or so, topics ranging from my buying the place to how badly George stinks at times. Wine glasses were staying full and I had just poured a third beer, when Dad announced his intention to go outside for a pee.

When he was sure Dad was out of earshot, Bob said, "Come down to my place tonight, Mark. We need to talk without your Dad."

"I'm not sure I can do it tonight. I was going to phone Tony to go out for a beer."

"I'm going away tomorrow for a couple of days. You'll want to hear what I have to say before you leave, or make any decisions about buying this place."

That piqued my curiosity. "What about?" I asked as Dad came back in the door.

"Sure, Mark! You can use the pool anytime. Times haven't changed any, even if you do live in Alberta! Come down anytime tonight."

"Okay, I'll be there around seven," I said, trying to be as cool as him in front of Dad. I had no idea what it was that he was trying to keep from Dad, but I had to hear it now.

30

It seemed a lot like old times. Having George by my side on the way to Bob's was so much like having Fitz there, it was eerie. Ten years is old for a retriever, so George was in about the same physical condition then as Fitz was at fifteen. We took the beach route and he ended up in the water as no surprise. Bob wouldn't have a fire going this time of year, though, so George would have to dry his stink off outside.

As I approached the door, I remembered the time I had come here hoping for a new story but heard Bob and a female voice instead. I wondered who it was for many years, but never did find out. Bob was rarely seen in public, and never with a woman. It was likely an unhappy wife, who, like Bob, wasn't perfect. But that didn't make them evil, either.

"C'mon in, Mark. Like a beer? Let's go sit beside the pool. It's still nice and warm out." Two long-necked bottles in his hand, he flipped a switch before closing the door, which turned on a few dim lights around the pool. The cover was off for the summer, so the giant hot dog illusion was gone.

"Still do lots of laps?"

"About two miles a day. Usually one in the early morning and another around noon. But I mix it up some days. Always get it done before cocktail hour, though. You have any exercise regimen, or does work keep you this fit?"

"Fort Mac doesn't have many gyms. People there are into making money and getting out again, if they don't drink or smoke or snort it away. No, I still jog a lot, but that's as much to clear my mind as it is to keep in shape. I'd probably keep fit just wrestling drunks on night shift."

"Sounds like you're ready for a change, Mark." He looked out across the harbour. We were sitting in sturdy, wooden lawn chairs, ninety degrees apart from each other, a matching table forming a corner. He was looking west toward the sunset, I south, toward the opening of the harbour. "Remember that promise you made to me a long time ago? About writing my story from my memoirs? I want to soon give you all that stuff, but I want you to keep it in a safe place. Not in Fort Mac. Your parents wanting to move and have you buy their place has given me an idea to make a few things happen that will solve a few little problems."

"Like what? You know, I haven't written anything but boring, generic cop reports since high school. Hardly even any letters. I phone home rather than write. I'll keep my promise to write the story, but I can't promise it'll be good enough to get published."

"I have every faith in your writing abilities, Mark. You need to forget about that shitty teacher you had in high school and judge your work for yourself. It was good. And the material you're going to get is top-notch."

"Thanks. So what's your idea to solve some problems? Just make me a famous writer? I still like being a cop."

He looked out toward the harbour again, perhaps hiding his emotions. "If you're willing, I can get you a transfer to the Security Service in Vancouver. No one outside of the office knows, but I still do some work for them and still have a lot of juice to twist some arms and make that happen."

I was incredulous and ecstatic at the same time, but I still felt the need to be cool and calm in Bob's presence. "I thought intel was disbanded when CSIS was formed. Everybody was moved there, weren't they?" CSIS was the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. It was formed a few years previous in order to separate spying and policing in the RCMP.

"Most of the young guys moved over. A few of the older guys were given 'retirement packages' but still work for RCMP intel, even though it doesn't officially exist. I was already 'retired' when the change came, so I'm fairly high up the ladder-which doesn't exist."

There were rumours around the force that intel was still alive and well, just further underground. The reasoning was that someone was still needed to spy on CSIS. Being civilian, the RCMP felt that CSIS was susceptible to political interference and, being para-military, CSIS felt the RCMP could be fall to political sway. So they both did a bit of wheel-spinning keeping an eye on each other.

This was a prospect beyond anything I could have hoped for at this stage in my career. If Bob could make this happen, I probably wouldn't have to transfer around the country any more. But Bob was a step ahead of me.

"And if you had a job over there, you could easily commute to Admiral's on days off. You could buy your Mom and Dad's place and be over here often enough to give it--and them--the attention they all deserve."

"When do I start?" I couldn't hold back my excitement any longer. It was not a prospect I ever considered, but in the space of a few minutes, I was ready to jump all in.

"I'm going over to the Mainland tomorrow. The main reason is to pick up a bunch of files and other personal stuff. I'm finally retiring for real. This will be my unofficial retirement and few will even know it's happening. Had all the fanfare a dozen years ago. But while I'm there, I'm seeing the superintendent and we'll make this happen quickly. I'd say about a month. You'll be bumped up to Sergeant, but right to the top payscale. We treat our guys well in intel."

"You sure? No interview or anything?"

"Mark, I've been interviewing you for twenty years. The force keeps tabs on all members from the start. The Super wants to meet you right away. He's gone over your file already. That, and my recommendation is all he needs to feel comfortable with taking you in. When do you plan to drive back to Fort Mac? You don't mind stopping in on the way do you?"

"No, not at all. Early next week. Monday or Tuesday. Try to make it in the morning of either day so I can hit the road again."

"Okay. 'Nother beer?" he asked as he got up. Handing him my empty was his answer.

I couldn't believe my fortune. I always somehow knew that having Bob as a friend was a good thing, but never really thought nor expected that it could ever be this rewarding. I wondered how I would tell Mom and Dad without talking about the Security Service. Dad was well aware of its official demise but probably not its current secret existence. Then, thinking about how smart Dad was, a strange bit of concern came over me. As Bob slammed the door of the cabin, two bottles in hand, I wondered: What if the old guy isn't all there anymore? He looked great and sounded sane, but he was in his late seventies. Would he really still be working? How could I ask him without offending him? I decided candor was the best way to go.

As he handed me a beer and sat down, I asked him, "Bob, you're not shitting me about all this are you? You're sure this will go through? I'd like to tell Mom and Dad to start packing tomorrow. I could live with not getting this job, but it would be cruel to dash their hopes if it didn't happen. Should I wait to tell them, or is this a certainty?"

"It's a certainty as long as you want it. I would have hoped you wouldn't doubt me, Mark." He only pretended to be hurt and I was glad he wasn't. "I know it all sounds a little too easy. I'll be back on Wednesday. I'll have transfer papers with me. They'll notify your Sergeant in Fort Mac and you can start packing yourself."

His words were reassuring. I listened to him closely for any hint of dementia but heard nothing. I'd dealt with my fair share of geriatrics during domestics and learned certain speech patterns of the demented. I heard no hint of it in Bob, but I had been fooled before.

"Thanks, Bob. I should get going. I assume you're getting the early boat, so you better get some sleep." I chugged the rest of my beer and got up. So did Bob. We shook hands and he put his left hand on my shoulder.

"Go ahead and tell them. I'll see you in a couple of days."

George and I made the uphill trek home and came in the door at about quarter to ten. Mom and Dad were still up.

"How much are you asking for this place?" I asked with a huge smile.

31

Two months later, I was working in Vancouver in the criminal investigations unit, which was where the secret intel division was covered under. Our unit was not really in Vancouver, but in Richmond. People from the islands and the interior of BC often just called the collection of seven cities in the Lower Mainland Vancouver. I would be partnered up with an older veteran for two weeks at a time, then rotated to another partner until I had worked with all seven of the current staff. It would be almost Christmas before I would be working independently. I would find that it really was a criminal investigations unit and that intel was more like a sideline for us, though, officially, the RCMP did not have an intel unit

I rented a small basement suite—a place to hang my hat, really-and could almost walk to work. Not much was expected of me during my training period, so I was able to go back to Admiral's every weekend. I could catch the bus to the Tsawassen ferry terminal on Friday afternoon and be on the direct ferry to Admiral's, where I could walk home from Long Harbour, the place I met Oscar.

My plan was to spend Saturdays fixing up the property and Sundays relaxing and visiting. Sunday supper with Mom and Dad. After thirteen years as an outsider in strange towns, it was a great feeling. I could return to the mainland on Monday morning and make up for being a little late by working longer in the afternoon.

On one of those Sunday mornings in October, I took a bottle of expensive scotch down to Bob as a small thank you.

"You didn't have to do that, Mark. But I'm glad you did! Thanks! How are you enjoying the new routine?" He had a big fire blazing and George, who was now lived with Bob during the week, was out like a light in front of it.

"It's great! I just finished working with Douglass this week and I think I'm with Rainsford on Monday. I'm just getting into it, but everybody seems quite professional. I haven't seen any huge egos or displays of excess testosterone in anyone. The Captain is well-organized and keeps things moving forward. Don't see the Super much, but my one talk with him went well." I took a sip of coffee that Bob had offered. "This work is so much more interesting than bar fights and domestics. I really am grateful for the opportunity you gave me."

"You should thank yourself, too, Mark. But I expect some great things out of you soon."

"You're not giving me your memoirs now are you? I didn't expect to tackle that job until after you're gone."

"No, but I will give them to you in the spring, after your training and you've had a few months to get comfortable at it. I'm still writing a few things down, anyway. Details, mostly. I've been reading some old stuff and adding some things you'll need. Some years, I didn't have time to write down details. I just hope my memory is accurate. It can play tricks on you."

"I guess. You know, so far all I've done is crime investigating. Nothing wrong with that—it is the job. But I've heard nothing about any intel work yet. What's up?"

"You won't until you can be on your own. When a job comes up--when the Commissioner deems it necessary something be done or someone be watched, it goes to the Superintendent of the particular territory and he'll assign it to one of the investigators. It may be a while before you get a job. Just be ready."

I had a question itching inside of me for years and it got a lot harder to scratch in the last few months. When it jumped out of my mouth, the words surprised me. "Are the White Knights affiliated with the RCMP at all? I remember you told me they weren't, but I need to know for certain." I wondered where the hell it came from and how it sounded so natural. Bob and I had not talked about White Knights except that one night.

"Of course not," Bob answered, sounding just as natural. "I also told you a Knight can never lie to someone who isn't his enemy, and that you are not an enemy. The Knights are...well... even more secret than the Security Service. I can't say that the two organizations don't share intel, but it is a rather one-way street, if you understand my meaning." There was a smile in the corners of his mouth.

I began to understand, alright. Bob used RCMP intelligence to mete out his own justice when regular ways didn't work. And I did remember him saying he couldn't lie. In fact, his words from the night he told me about the White Knights were with me since then. I'd done a lot of thinking about the Knights and came to the conclusion that Bob was telling a little White Knight lie. Nothing he said to me that night, or ever, were outright lies. There were partial truths and embellishments that could be debated, but not disproved. The White Knights were Bob's way of collectivizing all the do-gooders of history, to group them as if they all belonged to one club. I'd long suspected that there was no organization, but Bob's smile and word dance confirmed it.

"How many people have you killed over the years, Bob?" I was still being matter-of-fact in my words. I realized Bob may not tell me everything, but he wouldn't lie. I had nothing to lose, nor did Bob. If he still wanted me to write the story of his memoirs, I'd know it someday soon, anyway.

"Meting out untraditional justice isn't always about killing people, Mark. Sometimes it's about being merciful. That's an important aspect to remember. Also remember that anyone who can legitimately call himself a White Knight is not evil. Killing people is not necessarily evil. You know that. But to answer your question, 88. That's counting the war. And most of those 88 were during the war and mostly in combat. Satisfy your curiosity?"

"A little." Outwardly, I tried not to let the number show any effect on me. And perhaps at the time, it didn't. It wasn't really high, depending on his combat duties, and no number was low for an assassination toll. "You're still not specific. I think after I start reading your stuff I'll have a lot of questions for you. Will you still be vague then? You want the right story to come out, don't you?"

"Whatever you write will be the right story, Mark. But, yes, I'll answer questions. There would be a big elephant in the room if we visited and didn't talk about it, wouldn't there? But let's not talk about it until you've read some of it in the spring. Can we agree on that?"

"Deal. Say, I've got to get over to Mom and Dad's for supper. You'll pick up George in the morning?"

"Or your dad will bring him down. You remember I'm going to Nassau in three weeks, right?"

"Yeah, Dad thinks he'll be able to sneak George into the condo for the winter, but Mom herself would probably turn him into the association. I think Tony will take him while you're gone. Anyway, see you next weekend."

Mom was preparing her usual Sunday roast beef dinner with mashed potatoes, thick brown gravy, Yorkshire pudding, creamed onions and brussel sprouts right out of my/Dad's garden.

She seemed quite happy in her new place with nice furniture and modern appliances. But she was beaming today for another reason. "Barry phoned this morning. They're all coming down for Christmas! So with Pam and Marilyn, there'll be 17 of us by my count! Hope you don't mind a little company in the old house."

32

Christmas, 1988

Actually there were 'only' 15 of us for Christmas. Marilyn and her husband, Steve, stayed in the extra bedroom at Mom and Dads. So there were only 11 of us in my house—nothing we hadn't done on many long weekends in the '60s. We all congregated at the old house to visit and party at night starting Friday night the 23rd. After Mom, Dad, Marilyn and Steve left, most of the others went to bed, or couch or floor, as the case was. Barry and I stayed up drinking and talking in the old kitchen, probably looking and sounding like Dad and one of his friends. A couple of the older kids were watching videos in the front front room. Someone brought their VCR from home because "Uncle Mark's too cheap to get cable." I just didn't find any TV worth paying for when I was there less than half the time.

"Mining is shutting down all over this country," Barry was lamenting with slurred words. Two years after they had left Yukon, the mine shut down as the price of lead and zinc fell through the floor. "Copper still has a good price, but our mine is just running out of high grade ore. It doesn't pay to dig the low grade. I'd say within two years it'll be closed. But we're planning on moving anyway. I'm applying at equipment places in Van, already. Something a little more long-term."

That was news. But I knew what it was like to move all over the country for work. The towns get old after a while. Moving, or the knowledge you will eventually have to move, gets mentally tiring. The town's characters seem to move with you because they're the same all over. But in Barry's case there was the added feeling that your skills may no longer be needed. A lot of guys like him just want to set down some roots, have a little security and raise a family without having to change venues every five or ten years.

"You were smart to be a cop. You know you're always going to be needed. How ya likin' the new job?"

"It's good. Lot's to learn." I wasn't as drunk as Barry and I was hoping he would go to bed soon.

"Hey! Remember Cindy? Guess that's a stupid question! She was murdered. She was livin' in some town near Calgary. She was found dead in her home. Shit beat right out of her. Some time this past summer, I think. Nobody ever charged for it. Rumour has it her first husband Dwayne did it. You ever meet him? Fucking Neanderthal Sasquatch. The Primary Crusher we called him in Faro. He's been working in the mine at Hardy for a couple o' years, now. We were on the same shift for a while. But he had a friend say he was in Vancouver at the time."

That brought back memories. Good ones thinking of Cindy, a mixture of emotions thinking about Dwayne Coulter. First, he scared the hell out of me in that kitchen in the Faro Hotel, but he also made me realize for the first time the small gift I had. Fear turned on a source of positive energy within that heightened all of my senses to the point where instincts took control of my entire body. This happened to me many times in uniform. It's never failed me and has given me such self-assurance in dangerous situations that fear was gradually eliminated from my consciousness. I've seen many men without fear, but few channel it properly.

I looked at Barry. His eyes were almost shut. "I'll have to check that out next week. Remember the name of the town?"

"What town?"

"I think I should pour you into bed before you crash right here. You're in Mom and Dad's old room aren't you?"

I walked him down the hallway from the old house to the front, all the while thinking about the names of towns around Calgary.

33

After the Christmas holidays, I got my first assignment on which I was the lead investigator. Partners were rotated every two weeks to keep minds and relationships fresh, so when a new case came up, one guy was the lead and that case stuck with him until closed. It was a break and enter at a pizza place in Brighouse, the biggest commercial area of Richmond. But my mind was on Cindy and how to find out about her murder. I had already researched towns around Calgary for murders and found that she actually lived in Calgary and that's where it happened. I contacted the Calgary Police Service, requesting info on a local suspect who once lived in Calgary, and, oh, by the way, what was the name of Dwayne Coulter's alibi witness? Was it John Doe and, if so, I might have something on him. No? What was his name?...we might have something on him. Hoping for any kind of lead, they faxed me the complete file.

The name was Billy Grainger. There was nothing in our files on him, so Calgary had no reason to not believe his claim that Dwayne was with him on the Saturday night back in August that it happened. He said they mostly hung out at a favourite watering hole, shooting pool, went to the Lion's game on Saturday night—stuff two guys do when they get together in the city for a weekend.

I started going over the logistics of the possibility of Dwayne's involvement. He could easily have flown to Calgary, killed Cindy and flown back in a matter of ten hours. With the new highway built for Expo 86, he could have driven and done it over a weekend. But what could his motive have been? It looked like a passion and rage killing. You don't fly into a rage and travel that far and kill someone. At least normal people don't. Yet, there were no other suspects. She was engaged to be married to a doctor who was on duty at the Calgary General emergency at the time of the murder. Over a dozen people could account for his whereabouts. Money and jewelry were in her house, so robbery wasn't the motive. Could Coulter have been jealous enough to plan and execute this? From my experience all those years ago, the answer was yes.

Louise Palmer was Coulter's daughter with Cindy. She was now 22 and living in Edmonton, just finishing her nursing degree. Her boyfriend drove her down from Edmonton as soon Cindy's fiancé had phoned her with the awful news. Angela, Cindy's other daughter with a man long-forgotten, lived with Cindy but was away for the fateful weekend.

"My dad did this, sure as hell!" Louise told the Calgary police. "Angela's lucky she was away or he probably would have killed her, too!" The sisters hugged, crying and shaking at the thought of such a close call.

Coulter was interviewed in his home by an RCMP constable in Port Hardy. He gave him the story of his weekend in Vancouver on his days off staying and partying with his friend, Billy Grainger. It was just a weekend out of the bush and in the big city for some fun. Friday night drinking and shooting pool, Saturday night at a football game. Sunday travelling home.

"Lions beat the Stampeders 27-21. It wasn't a great game. Stamps got two garbage touchdowns at the end to make it look close. I've probably still got the ticket stub in the jacket I wore if you want to see it." While going to the closet to look in his jacket, he expressed thoughts for Louise. Yes, the constable assured him, she already knows, but made a note of it, thinking it might be significant that Louise had not contacted her own father.

The Port Hardy RCMP also checked the schedule at Island Copper and found that Coulter was at work on Monday morning for his regular shift.

Vancouver PD had checked out Billy Grainger's story about the weekend Cindy was murdered. They came up with nothing that could contradict his alibi for Coulter, nor anything or anybody to corroborate it, except for people who saw them in the bar Friday night when they were shooting pool.

With this evidence, Calgary police all but ruled out the deceased's ex-husband. But my instincts told me differently. Maybe I wanted it to be Coulter too badly, but something told me I wasn't wrong about this, and I figured I could put the pieces together.

I re-read the report to see if I could glean anything more from it. What wasn't in it told me more than what was. There was no verification of Grainger's story except for the Friday night in the bar. The Vancouver cops didn't do a house-by-house of Grainger's neighbours to see if any of them saw Coulter that weekend, specifically late Saturday afternoon or evening. I decided this is where I would start.

Checking the flight schedules, I found that Coulter could easily have flown to Calgary Saturday afternoon on Air Canada and back Sunday morning on Canadian Airlines or later on Air Canada. If I could prove he wasn't at the game with Grainger, I'd only need a flight attendant or car rental clerk who could remember crossing paths with a huge, conspicuous man like Coulter. He may not be a genius, but he's not stupid. If he planned all this at all, he would have used a different name to fly under. I would request the passenger list and staff rosters on those three flights and interview any of the crew that lived in the Lower Mainland.

The Calgary cops did report that they questioned all of the car rental clerks and none could remember anyone matching Coulter's description. There was, however a 1981 Ford pickup stolen from the airport long-term parking and returned to a different stall sometime between the Thursday night and Tuesday afternoon of the weekend in question. Its rear passenger side vent window was smashed and the ignition hotwired. Coulter would have had the skills to do that. It was dusted for fingerprints, but none were found in the usual places, not even the owner's.

I was able to interview the crews of all three flights I was interested in and came up completely empty. I was dealing with faded memories, having been almost six months previous, but worth the try. I decided to put my interest in Coulter on the back burner and concentrate on my own cases for a while.

The work schedule for our unit was not rigid because often things came up or had to be done at odd hours. There was a lot of overtime, which was paid in time off, so my weekends on Admiral's got stretched out at times to the point where I could take an entire week off bookended by two weekends. This suited my lifestyle well. I was able to get a lot of things done around the property and get away from the city for longer periods at a time.

Bob returned from Nassau in the middle of March that year. We arranged for me to pick him up at the Vancouver airport and take him to the ferry terminal so he could get to Admiral's. Dad would pick him up on the other side.

"Haven't been in one of these babies for a while," Bob said of the ghost cruiser I drove. I still kept my truck on the island and had the Force-issue Crown Victoria to use while I was on the Mainland. "They sure haven't changed much."

"I guess not. How was the winter? Get any snow?" I asked and laughed. Bob proceeded to tell me how his friend in Nassau, whose beach house he stays in while there, has never seen snow in person.

"It wouldn't bother me if I never saw any again," I said. "But compared to the prairie towns I've lived in, I'm happy with the coast. Most of the people who live here just don't know how good they've really got it."

"Working on anything interesting lately?" Bob asked as I pulled out of the airport terminal.

"Just some B and E's, and a hit and run of a cyclist. Broke both legs. I'm watching a Colonel from Paraguay who made it up here last month after the military coup there. He was loyal to Stroessner and didn't participate in it. He's likely on a hit list, now." Then I told him about Dwayne Coulter and my involvement with his ex-wife, Cindy Palmer.

We were on the long causeway to Tsawassen terminal by the time I finished my story. "When will you be back on Admiral's?" Bob asked. I could see wheels turning in his head.

"Probably Thursday night," I replied, looking forward to a four-day weekend.

"Come and see me Friday. Or I'll come up to your place." I pulled up to the foot-passenger drop-off zone and stopped. I got out to get Bob's suitcase out of the trunk, but he didn't need much help for an old guy. "Thanks for the ride. See you Friday."

I was home and in bed early that night. The phone woke me from a log-like sleep at 10:30.

"Mark, it's Bob. Your guy—Coulter. Did you check Edmonton?"

"Bob? Wha...Edmonton? Whaddya mean?" I still wasn't sure if I was awake or dreaming.

"Edmonton. Your guy could have flown to Edmonton, rented a car and driven to Calgary. It's about a three hour drive, but can be done in under two and a half without much trouble. That's how I would have done it. With an alias, too, of course. And go back to the passenger lists. Flight crews see hundreds of passengers every day, but if this guy is as big as you say, some passenger who sat beside him will definitely remember how cramped the seats were on possibly the one flight he or she took that summer. To Calgary or Edmonton. I'll see you on the weekend," and he hung up.

The next morning I got flight schedules from Vancouver to Edmonton on that Saturday and returning Sunday and, adding in an extra five or six hours for driving, decided Coulter could have done it using this route and still been at work on the Monday morning.

I got the flight manifests of four possible flights from the two airlines. Five hundred and six names of people from all over Canada and twenty seven from outside the country. I was going to have to try to contact every one of these people who were sitting next to a man. This was going to be a monumental task which would take weeks in my spare time, but that was the only time I could spend on it. It wasn't even my case.

That night, I got out the manifest and started browsing through it. Then something struck me. There were likely few people who flew to Edmonton for an overnight, so I looked for any names that came up once in each direction. This was still an eye-blurring exercise but I was right and was paid off. There was only one, a Mr. William Harper. That narrowed things down considerably. Sitting next to him on the way there was a Vancouverite, a Miss Jill Hornsby, and on the way back, an Edmontonian, Mister Brian Yamamoto.

Miss Jill Hornsby travelled to Edmonton the previous August 20th to visit cousins for a week. "All I really remember was that there was a huge man in the window seat. The stewardess offered the lady sitting next to me in the aisle seat to move to an empty seat in the back and I moved over to hers and there was a lot more room for me. He was still cramped, though, even with the arm between the seats lifted up."

"Do you remember what he looked like?"

"No, I only saw the side of his face. We didn't talk. He kinda scared me, 'cause he seemed agitated or nervous or something. I do remember he had a big, bushy black beard, though. Wasn't wearing anything out of the ordinary-jeans and a t-shirt. I dunno. Sorry I can't help you much."

"You've been a tremendous help, Miss Hornsby. Thank you very much."

Brian Yamamoto had a similar story, except that the huge man with the bushy black beard slept almost the entire flight to Vancouver and there was no empty seat for anyone to move to.

It was Thursday and I was heading back to Admiral's that night. I would leave what I had found until Tuesday when I got back. It wasn't exactly an open and shut case just yet. Maybe Bob would have some more good advice.

34

"I agree, I don't think there's enough there to convict him. Are you going to check out the car rental companies next week?" Bob had come up to the house Friday morning and we were sitting in the back kitchen with my Coulter file and a pot of coffee. I had already returned from Tony's where I retrieved George.

"Yeah, but there we are again dealing with a minor incident seven months ago. If an agent rented him a car he's likely done it hundreds of times since. At least I have a name to look for now."

"Be sure to find out how many miles he drove." If he went to Calgary and back, it'll be significant. I think it's 180 miles...360 return... probably more than 400 in less than 24 hours. Might have raised an eyebrow at the time and jog a memory."

"Kilometers, Bob. We're metric, now, remember?" I said kiddingly.

"Sorry. That's about 650 klicks, give or take," he said without a pause to do the math. Another moment where I hoped I was as sharp or in shape as Bob when I hit my late seventies. Not that any of this was rocket science. Most investigations are the tedious elimination of possibilities or following the obvious trails. But even the tedium of details still kept this old cop focused and metric conversion didn't slow him down.

"This Grainger guy. He's squeaky clean, you say? Nothing to twist his arm with?"

"Not that I can see. He hangs out with some bad asses, but there's nothing on him. He's a good alibi witness. Probably why Coulter visited him for the weekend. They met in the Yukon where they both worked."

"What about his neighbours? Did they see Coulter around late Saturday or early Sunday?"

"I haven't done a house-by-house of Grainger's neighbours yet. I put it off as being a long-shot, having been so long ago." I got the sheepish feeling a little kid gets when he knows he hasn't done a job as well an authority figure expects him to.

"The clock's still ticking. I think you should get there and do that ASAP. You're right, it is a long shot, but you never know. It has to be done."

***

Billy Grainger lived in an older neighbourhood of Vancouver known as Riverview. His street was mostly two-story houses packed onto narrow lots. There were rear lanes and the odd garage, but street parking was at a premium. I parked around the corner and walked to his house, which was about mid-block. All I could do was start knocking on doors, so I went to the house to the right of Grainger's with a plan to do the entire block clockwise and then a few houses on the next street that could see into Grainger's back yard. He didn't have a garage, but he did have parking from the lane. The first stop was a little old lady in her housecoat. She must have been eighty-five and showed it.

"Excuse me, Ma'am, I'm Sergeant Green of the Richmond RCMP," I said, showing my ID. "I'm investigating someone who may have stayed with your neighbour, next door, Mr. Grainger. Do you have few minutes?"

"What's he done? He seems like such a nice man."

"Mr. Grainger hasn't done anything, ma'am. We don't know if anyone has. We're just checking to see if you remember back one weekend in August when Mr. Grainger had a houseguest. He was a very big man with long black hair and a beard to match."

"In August? Oh, that was a long time ago. Can't say as I'd remember that. My sister might, but she's passed away since then."

"Well thank you for your time, ma'am. Sorry to bother you."

And so it went. Most houses were empty and the ones that weren't were conversations just like the first one. Until I almost completed the circle back to Grainger's. The house had tin foil on one of the windows indicating a shift working day sleeper. The man at the door was in his mid-forties. It didn't look like I woke him, though. He turned out to be quite talkative.

"Yeah, I remember that weekend because Billy took me to the football game. You don't get much for free from Billy. And I guess I didn't, really. His buddy hooked up with a woman he met the night before and I ended up with his ticket to the game. But I think I spent more on beer for Billy than the ticket cost. It was the only Lion's game I went to last year, so I remember. We played Calgary."

There went Coulter's alibi out the window. With this, and if Jill Hornsby or Brian Yamamoto could pick Coulter out of a lineup, we had him. I'm sure we could threaten Grainger with being an accessory and get him talking. I thanked the man and got his particulars.

"Did you see Mr. Grainger's friend?"

"Not really. I knew he had a black pickup and I saw him drive away in it from my window that morning. Didn't get a real good look. Filled up the cab of that truck, though."

"This is probably nothing Mr. Baxter, and it's not really important, but I'd appreciate you not mentioning our conversation to anyone, even Mr. Grainger. Thanks for your time." I turned to go and made it down one step then turned back before he closed the door. "One more thing," I said, turning around, just like Columbo, "you wouldn't have the ticket stub from the game would you?"

"I can look in my ja—no, wait. Billy asked if he could have it. He collects them. Weird, but, whatever."

"Thanks, Mr. Baxter, you've been a big help."

Something prevented me from contacting the Calgary police that day and two new cases the next day kept me busy for the rest of the week. As well, I'd used quite a bit of paid time working on Coulter's case, so I had to put in extra hours playing catch up on my real work. I worked through the following weekend and planned to go to Admiral's on the next Wednesday night unless something urgent came up.

I got a call on that Wednesday morning from a very nervous sounding Jim Baxter.

"Sergeant Green, sorry to bother you, but I think I made a mistake when we were talking last week. That Lion's game I went to was in late September, not August, like I thought."

He couldn't keep his mouth shut about our talk. Grainger, or maybe even Coulter got to him. Back to square one.

***

"I'd say you've proved your case, Mark. Coulter looks as guilty as sin," Bob said as we finished going over my notes. "Just covered his tracks really well." It was Friday night and we were sitting in Bob's cabin hashing over the facts.

"Yeah, but the Crown can't prove anything in court. They wouldn't touch it the way it stands."

"No, they need more of a lock on things than this. If Baxter is too scared to tell the truth, you don't even have circumstances being a possibility." He sat back on the couch and let out a small sigh. "I know what I'd've done when I was your age. That man killed someone you once loved, Mark, and he might get away with it."

For the last twenty-five years or so, ever since the night Bob told me his White Knight story and about killing the Japanese war-time pimp, I knew in the back of my mind that it was leading up to the conversation we were about to have. And here we were again in his little wood-heated cabin, a dog snoring by the fire and the two of us sipping, not tea this time, but scotch.

"Killing a person isn't necessarily a bad or wrong or evil thing, Mark. You know that. I taught you that years ago, and time on the force has shown you that the world would be a better place without certain people. I believe in rehabilitation, but it only works when the person wants it to work. Your boy has already done time once and instead of going straight, he's escalated. That's a sure sign he'll do it again if the need arises."

I should have been feeling some sort of intense pressure, or at least some highly conflicting emotions. Here was one of the men I looked up to nearly my entire life trying to talk me into going against my beliefs, into killing someone. But with Bob, it was just another day at the office and his calm was as infectious as Oscar's smile. As a policeman you hope you're never put into a life-or-death situation, but if you are, you're trained to respond with lethal force and to try to do it calmly, without emotion. Yet here we were planning a killing. At least Bob was. I still wasn't convinced that we couldn't squeeze someone enough to get a confession of some sort.

"There's no one to squeeze," said Bob. "It doesn't look like Baxter knows anything. Grainger appears tight and he may not know anything either except that Coulter wasn't at the game with him Saturday night. Unless Coulter told him he was going to Calgary, or he murdered the ex, he's useless. It could be he believes Coulter had hooked up with a woman he met in the bar the night before the game."

"What if we scared him enough into thinking he could be next on Coulter's list for what he knows?" I was trying to talk Bob out of this, but not sound afraid of doing it at the same time. My voice didn't betray my fears, just as it hadn't the night Coulter trapped me in the kitchen of the Faro Hotel nor hundreds of times since while on the job.

"That could backfire badly, especially when I don't think he knows anything for certain. If he told Coulter he was getting heat, and he might be stupid enough to, that could be a self-fulfilling prophecy that we can't control. We don't want that on us. That's what an execution does. It stops this man from doing it again. We're Protectors, Mark. Killing Coulter protects everyone from him." Bob's voice was very calm and matter-of-fact. He didn't want the discussion turning into an argument.

"So you think I should go up to Port Hardy and kill Coulter? Simple as that. I've never killed anyone before, Bob. I'd rather keep it that way unless I have to." I, too was keeping my voice calm. Still using my not-scared voice. But I wasn't scared, just taken aback at Bob's eagerness to initiate me into his one-member club.

"I think you do have to. Or at least someone does. I'm too old for it now. I'll help you plan it, maybe even help carry it out, if that'll help."

"I'm smart enough to plan it and good enough to carry it out myself. I just don't have the complete, hundred per cent, will. I'd like to think he can still be charged with her murder. I agree he needs to be punished. I'm certain he did it. I'm just not sure this is the way. I'll think on it a couple of days. Thanks for the scotch. George! C'mon boy. Time to go home."

35

George and I were heading home on the new Island Highway that connected Port Hardy to the rest of Vancouver Island to the south. For many years the only access to it was a ferry from Campbell River or a treacherous logging road through a denuded forest of large-diameter stumps that had devoured many a good truck like mine. We had about a five hour drive for me to reflect on the events of the last few days. The original plan had been for this weekend to be a scouting trip to check out Coulter's habits and schedule. I would not be able to visit Barry and Cheryl as I would have to devote my time to watching Coulter. Explaining my absence from their home would be difficult.

Bob had helped me decide on this reconnaissance mission two days after the night of his pressure tactics with scotch. It was Sunday and I would be heading back on the last ferry to the Mainland for work Monday morning. Conflicted about killing Coulter, I slept poorly both Friday and Saturday nights, which might have affected my judgment. Bob had come over in the morning, knowing that I was avoiding him. Over coffee, he'd laid out his case for killing Coulter again, and two hours later, I had agreed to the scouting weekend.

I would take George and stay at a fishing lodge motel. Coulter liked to fish, so I might need the use of a boat. Bob's Hamata story came to mind, but I doubted I could take a man the size of Coulter and do what Bob did to Hamata. I would also take Bob's old, unregistered pistol with a silencer just in case I got into trouble or an opportunity arose where I could do the job and not get caught. No one who knew Coulter would be surprised if his life came to a violent end. He'd made quick enemies everywhere he'd lived and he'd been in Port Hardy almost ten years by then.

But on the ferry back to the Mainland that Sunday evening, I fell asleep in the passenger lounge and awoke with a revelation from my dream. All I could think was 'not yet'. Something was bothering me that had been missed, but I didn't know what it was. I tried to figure it out on the drive to my basement suite and for a couple of hours before I went to bed. It wasn't until having a good sleep that it hit me on Monday morning. I had never followed up on the possibility that Coulter had rented a car in Edmonton. There had been a lot of 'real' work distractions that week and Bob and I talked like the rental was a fact, when, in fact, I hadn't confirmed it. We had hoped that because car rental companies require picture ID from customers, Coulter may not have been able to use an alias there.

When I got to my desk at work, I was about to call the detective I'd talked to with the Calgary police a few months earlier. I was going to give him all the info I had from the plane passengers, about Grainger's and Baxter's stories and tell him that he should follow up with the rental companies at the Edmonton airport.

"If you can tie him to a car in Edmonton with a lot of miles on it for one day, you've got 'im," was going to be my grande finale statement. But again something said to me 'not yet.' If Coulter couldn't be tied to a rental in Edmonton, neither a prosecutor's nor Bob's standard of proof had been met. And if something came along later that met Bob's standard, but not a prosecutor's, who would be getting a good look at for Coulter's murder? When the Calgary cops heard he was murdered, it would be me, the cop who wasn't on the case, but spent an awful lot of time and energy on it focused on Coulter. So I stuck with 'not yet.'

We had a small library in the basement of our building. There, I got out the Edmonton Yellow Pages and copied the page with all the car rental companies with outlets at the airport. There were only the big three- Hertz, Avis and Tilden, so it shouldn't take too long.

"Yes, sir, a Mr. Dwayne Coulter rented a Ford F-150 at 2:45 PM on August 20, 1988-last year-and returned it at 8 am, August 21," the young woman at the Avis office answered.

"How many miles did he put on it? Do you still have that?" I was getting excited with this new info.

"Of course, sir, we don't throw out any information. It helps us in our marketing. He put on seven hundred and eleven point seven kilometres."

"Thank you very much. You've been a huge help. Is there a way I can get a copy of all that info?"

"I could fax it to you if you have a fax machine."

"That would be fantastic," I said, and gave her the number.

It took nearly three weeks to tie everything up, but in the end, George and I were going up to Port Hardy to aide in the arrest of Dwayne Coulter, not to kill him. The Calgary police had found one small drop of blood in the carpet beside the gas pedal in the rental truck which was of the same type as Cindy's. They sent a team of investigators with a search warrant for his house and an arrest warrant for him. I met them there on invitation of the lead investigator in the case. He was annoyed that I had cracked the case, but only he, I and my Captain knew it. He kept the glory for himself, but wasn't so small that he didn't call my Captain and let him know that I was the one who solved it and could I be let go to meet them in Hardy for the arrest?

The search of Coulter's house turned up what we thought was very little at first, but a woman's necklace in thick gold with a gaudy big-horn sheep's head on it raised the curiosity of one of the investigators. He had seen watch bands and rings just like it when he was stationed in Whitehorse. The thick gold sheep was kind of a trademark for Yukon tourist jewelry. It turned out to be the biggest nail in Coulter's coffin. Coulter had given the necklace to Cindy in their Faro days and Angela, Cindy's younger daughter, could testify that it was in Cindy's jewelry box sometime at the beginning of the previous summer.

"How did you like fishing, George?" Because of the change in plans, I was able to spend a couple of days with Barry and Cheryl and we got out fishing in Barry's small boat. We took George, who spent most of the time crying, because he could see the water and wanted to swim, but was too afraid to jump overboard. It would have been a nightmare trying to get him back in the boat.

George took his co-pilot and navigator duties seriously but broke his concentration on the road when he heard me say his name. He turned toward me and, putting his front paws on the console that separated us, wagged his tail and gave the side of my face a few big licks. I was in a very happy place right now. Coulter was in jail and would likely be sent away for twenty-five-to-life, but mostly I was relieved I didn't have to carry out whatever plan Bob and I would have come up with to kill him. I decided I was not afraid to do it, just that normal justice is the preferred option. Somehow Bob knew that I was going to crack the case before killing Coulter.

I saw Bob at his place before heading to Port Hardy. "You're a great cop, Mark. I knew you'd think of the missing piece and figure it out. It's too bad I had to put so much pressure on you, but you had to find out what you're made of. I probably sounded like I couldn't wait for you to do your first take out, but I needed to push you, to make you weigh out all the options. I would have been disappointed in my assessment of you if you had jumped at the idea of killing Coulter.

"You and I have grown up in different times. The war shaped me into what I became and there was a lot of cleaning up to do, accounts to settle, after the war. Your generation has lived a charmed life here in Canada, Mark. No war, low poverty, low crime. Cop methods are getting ahead of the bad guys so it's easier to put them away than it used to be. You may never have to do what I had to, but I know that you can, and more importantly, I think you know that you can. When you read my memoirs, I think you'll know how necessary it was at times, and that will help you to recognize when it may be necessary for you.

"Speaking of my memoirs, do you think you're settled in at work enough to start tackling them on your weekends?"

"If I can get a little help in the garden to free up my time a little more!" I kidded him. He and Dad had actually been doing a lot of work around the place especially during the week when I usually wasn't there. They were looking after the garden well, but my focus was the house itself, and they didn't care too much about that, as long as the roof didn't leak into their wine. Dad was still using the place to make wine and beer, but he had really cut back his consumption knowing he had to drive home.

George and I were now on the south side of Nanaimo, half an hour from the ferry terminal in Crofton where the ferry would take us over to Admirals on a twenty minute crossing. It was a Monday, late in April, and I had the week off and thought that resting and making renovation plans might be a good way to spend it. George was busy keeping his eye on the road straight ahead, but I thought he could likely be okay with that plan as long as he could get some beach time in as well. He was doing such a good job of navigating for me, I figured I could accommodate his needs, too.

36

It was now June 1989, two months since the Port Hardy trip. Bob had given me his entire memoirs. They were organized by cases he had worked on, with the focus on jobs he had to carry out himself. Cases that went to court and ended with normal justice had thin files. When that happened, he just stopped writing in them with a single word-'resolved'. These weren't case files, they were Bob's personal notes on files he thought might need his helping hand. When Bob needed to 'resolve' a case himself, the file was thick, with intricate details of his and his subject's every moves leading up to the case's conclusion. Most of the files were on post-war immigrants from Germany and Japan from Bob's work in 'E' Division and Intel, before CSIS officially took over the spying duties from the RCMP. I spent a rainy Saturday drinking coffee and reading the files. I got through the first five completely, but the repetition of Bob's style got rather boring and I knew my work was cut out for me if I were to make them more readable. I then just scanned through the rest of the files to see if anything jumped out at me and something did. It didn't just jump, it exploded out of the file and smacked me in the face, leaving my chin on my chest. I read the entire file, almost two hundred pages, without putting it down.

When I'd finished, I was shocked and I wanted to go to Bob's and talk to him about it, so I phoned to see if he was home.

"Sure, c'mon down. You probably want to talk about the files. You should bring a bottle of last year's peach wine."

I drove down there about seven in the evening. It was cold as well as raining all day, so Bob had a fire going, but it was still light outside. I was probably visibly agitated when I came in the door. I sat down in my usual chair and waited impatiently for Bob to finish playing tug-of-war over a bone with George before he sat in his.

"Hertz!" I said loudly when he finally did with two glasses of wine. "You killed Hertz? That stupid kid Renner did time for that! Eight or ten years as I recall and he's still on parole for fifteen or twenty more! And he got off that easily because he was borderline retarded!"

"Relax, Mark. It's not as bad as you think. Did you read the entire file?"

"Yes"

"Then you know that those kids set the fire. It wasn't me. They were hardly innocent. And it's pretty obvious the dumb kid took the fall for the other two. That's probably why they let him hang around with them. The way I see it, between the three of them, ten years isn't bad for all the shit they pulled off back then. If anybody owes him anything, it's the other two that he took the fall for. But I never could figure out why he confessed to it.

"With Henrik missing, the third guy...Gorman wasn't it?...seems to have gone straight. No new arrests for anything, anyway. So the unintended splitting up of those three was a good thing for him. And Renner, too. He's probably better looked-after on parole than he ever was with the other two."

I was starting to understand Bob's rationale in the overall picture and it calmed me down. Leon Renner, Steve Gorman and especially Donny Henrik deserved some form of punishment for all the crimes everyone knew they did back then. The first two mostly just sold LSD and probably more than just the one B&E that Gorman took the rap for, but Donny...Donny liked to burn things. It was considered fact among us school kids that he torched the outer islands kids' dorm and according to Bob did the Crow as well. Who knows what else he turned into ash? Yet Donny hadn't done time for anything and had been missing ever since the Crow fire.

"So this doesn't bother you that justice wasn't served in Hertz' murder?" My anger was gone and I had lost all conviction in my argument.

"I sure as hell didn't want to do time for it! That's the number one goal. Live to kill another day." Bob said with a chuckle.

"I need more wine," I said with a surrendering sigh, holding out my glass.

Bob came back with two full glasses. "You probably don't remember, but I headed off to the Bahamas the very next day after the Hertz job. I didn't sleep that night, as I wasn't back home until about 3am. I had left my car in an unused driveway down Churchill Road and walked to it from the Crow. When I was driving back home, I could see the glow from the fire-it was already fully aflame. I turned right off Churchill and headed for home, though, as I had to catch the six-thirty ferry at Fulford in the morning to make my flight. I had to drive right past the Crow again on my way to Fulford and saw the mess. I spent a lot of that winter wondering how it caught fire. I knew I had nothing to do with it. Turns out those idiots were on the same boat as I was, but I didn't know who they were then. It wasn't until I came back that I found out what happened. I was shocked when I heard that Renner confessed to the murder."

"I wonder what ever happened to Henrik," I mused, not knowing then that researching and verifying Bob's memoirs would one day lead me to the answer.

37

December 19, 1990

I was getting ready to start two weeks off at Christmas in a couple of days when my Captain called me into his office. "I just got word from the consulate in Nassau that Bob Walker's body washed up on shore two days ago. He swam every day. They figure he had a heart attack while out in the surf. He was seventy...eight... I think? He has absolutely no living relatives, so the friend he lives with down there notified us because Bob had told him to if anything ever happened to him. You've had more contact with him the last few years than probably anyone. Sad news. Bob was a good cop. Very old school, but very good."

This was a shock. Bob was in good shape when he left a month or so earlier. But at that age, every day you wake up above ground is a bonus, I guess.

I had gone over most of Bob's memoirs with him, clarifying facts and names and other things until I knew some of the better stories inside out. I now had a five year period to wait until the first could be published. Because of its personal connection, I thought I would start with the story of the Crow.

38

September, 2005

I was sipping coffee and talking with Mary Wood, a girl I'd gone to school with and was one of Oscar's great, grand nieces. "Those are my magical twin grandkids over there," she said pointing to a white girl and a black boy of about four years. "They're a curiosity to a lot of people, but I remember Uncle Oscar once telling me years ago that such a thing was possible. He was an incredibly smart man, yet so humble."

"He told me the same thing. He was full of theories on genetics. He taught me a lot of things. A natural teacher," I added. After a few more niceties, we went separate ways to mingle with other people. There weren't many tears at Oscar's funeral. Everyone realized what a full and long life he had lived and there was nothing to be sad about because all the memories were good ones.

The All Saints Multi-Faith House of Prayer and Worship has a large deck that overlooks Ganges harbour with one of the greatest views I think the island has to offer. It was very warm for late September, so I went and sat outside to cool off. Mary's grandkids were playing on the deck and when they saw me, came over and talked.

"Do you know our Gramma? I saw you talking to her."

"Yes, I do. We went to school together. Many years ago."

"Then I guess it's okay if we talk to you."

"Sure it is. What are your names?"

"I'm Linda," said the girl, standing in front of me, "and that's Kevin." The boy was at my right side. He smiled a big toothy smile that reminded me of Oscar.

"Did you know Uncle Oscar?" Linda asked.

"Yes I did. He was very special to me." Kevin was trying to crouch down and look up at the same time. Then I realized what he was doing.

"What's that?" he asked, trying to look up the short sleeve of my shirt.

"It's a tattoo," I said. "Wanna see it?"

"Yeah! Where did you get it?"

I pulled up my sleeve so they could both see it. "At a place in Victoria. They do all kinds of neat stuff."

"Who's the man on the horse?"

"He's called a White Knight. He's a good guy. Wanna see another one?"

"Yeah!"

"Me too!"

I pulled up my other sleeve to show them my artist's rendition of Oscar, asleep in his rocking chair on the porch of his house, the epitome of peacefulness.

"Who's that?"

"That's your Uncle Oscar. That's how I like to remember him."

"Is he dead?" asked Linda, as she traced his outline with her finger.

"Oh, no, he's just sleeping."

"Is he a bad guy? Like the horse man is a good guy and he's a bad guy?"

"Oh, no. Your Uncle Oscar was one of the best good guys ever! They're both good guys."

"Mom wants us! Kev, race you to the car!"

And they were gone. I decided it was time for me to go as well.

###

Thank you for reading my book. If you enjoyed it, please tell others you think might enjoy it as well, and take a moment to leave me a review at your favourite retailer.

Thank you!

Rick McConnell

**About the Author** :

Rick McConnell is a retired electrician living on Salt Spring Island with his wife and four dogs. Admiral's Island is his first novel and plans to write more based on Bob Walker's memoirs and Mark Green's experiences.
