CHAPTER FOURTEEN

D was now walking along the starboard side of the Upper Levels highway, one huarache gone, his bare yellow lizardish right foot learning to go beyond the pain of the pebbles. He had just achieved the top of a rise, and the whole of the city was spread out before him, grey and low in the mist. He counted himself luckier than most men because most men were dead. And also because about a mile earlier he had found an Eat More bar, still in its wrapper, lying among the sunbleached cigarette packages along the verge. On a muddy spring day not long before, G had taught him the felicities of what G called the ideal varsity lunch - an Eat More bar and a bottle of Creme Soda. D kept one eye on the misty city, one eye on the road traffic, and one eye on the verge. If someone had ejected a bottle of Creme Soda - or even Hires Root Beer - it would not be too warm to drink in this weather.

He did not know it, but a mile behind him, right where there had been an Eat More bar still in its package, trod M, trying to eat up the miles with the illusion that he exhibited a military bearing, and reciting to himself all that he could remember of the poems in the thick pinkish Oscar Williams anthology.

"onetwothreefoursix indians, just like that," he intoned.

Neither D nor M knew that far behind them G was still a captive of the thugs in the Bulgarian gloves. He and the thugs were sitting in the Oolichan Hotel beer parlour at Squamish, watching an early-season game between San Francisco and the Cubs. G had been trying to build a reputation as an expert in baseball, hoping that it might distinguish him as a poet, but here he sat, unable to put a name to any of the players on the blurry screen up high above the bar where the radio used to be.

Neither could G invent a method of extricating himself, and if it came to that, his fellow knights, from all these overcoated people and their expensive cars. He decided to give himself up to fate.

"What the hell can we do," he said, surprised that he had said it out loud.

"Never give up," said one of the large fellows, with a Hapsburgian accent. "Willy Mays is up third in the eighth."

Back in West Point Grey a beautiful young woman with a long white neck that ordinary underclasswomen would maim for was standing in the front yard of a stucco bungalow, with a damp newspaper in her hand. She looked up and down the avenue, cast her eyes to the roof of the house and the nearby trees just in case, and with her other hand did up the top button of her white blouse.

This modesty was inspired by the banal stare of a swart man whose face was framed in the rear window of an ugly and oversized automobile with déclassé white-wall tires. It was snugged to the curb across the avenue, and there were already new patches of white pigeonshit on the roof.

A held the newspaper so that she could scan the headlines on the first page. Brewery Receives New Paint Job, said one. It was a slow news day.

Now a burly man in an overcoat and homburg and gloves got out of the driver's seat of the big car. He walked slowly toward A, who was buttoning the sleeve of her blouse.

"Okay, Goldilocks, get in the car," he growled.

"Do you perhaps mean 'get into the car'?" she inquired, allowing no condescension in her voice.

"Get into the god damned car," said the bozo. He had not had the manners to remove his hat when he made his invitation.

A did not obviously grip the Vancouver Bun any tighter. But she shifted her feet slightly, so that they were positioned according to the second illustration in the textbook she carried to her weekly night class at the Point Grey Community Centre.

"I don't think so," she said then. "It's a rather ugly car, and not very clean."

The plug-ugly in the coat stopped in his tracks. His forehead furrowed like a septic pool on a windy day.

"That's a Rolls Royce!"

"Since when did they start making Rolls Royces in Bulgaria?"

"Get in the car, Cinderella."

He was walking again.

She saw the other doors opening in the Rolls, but her attention was mainly for Igor under the hat.

"You can forget it about the car," she said, sweetly. "I do not go for rides with strange men, and I certainly do not go for rides with even lower species."

Igor had apparently not run into this problem in his earlier grabs. He approached more quickly. He reached out his gloved hand. The hand was about the size of Scrooge's turkey. He was making what his bosses would later inform him was a mistake.

A executed the procedure on page twenty-four without a hitch, and the behemoth was soon lying at the base of a thick poplar, the top of his homburg at an acute angle against the bark of said deciduous tree.

Three other overcoats came as hurriedly as their rectangular shapes would permit out of the car. One slammed a door and a pigeon that was just about to land on the roof veered away.

The first one to reach the lawn in front of G's landlady's bungalow was induced to keep going, without reducing speed, until his homburg came to an abrupt stop against the third step of the concrete porch. A threw the unread newspaper into the face of one of the remaining goons, to delay him for half a second while she used page twenty-six on the other. As she did so she plucked at his overcoat pocket.

Thus when the other man got the Bun out of his face he was looking at a handgun that, while it had first been fired seventeen years ago in World War II, was still impressive enough in the length of its barrel and the excellent European styling overall, that he lifted, unbidden, his gloved hands into the air.

"Drag them," said A.

"Duh?"

"Those sleeping simians. One by one, grasp them by some item of their clothing and drag them to your hideous automobile. Put them inside. Then drive away. Tell your masters, wherever they are, Washington, Plovdiv, the UBC Players' Club, tell them that you found that your assignment needs more planning."

"Huh?"

"Take slobbos. Put in car. Vroom vroom."

"Can I have Alexi's pistol?"

"Drag. Or I will make boom boom."

The man in the overcoat started dragging his co-workers toward the expensive British car. He tried to repair the three homburgs, but then settled for throwing them into the car after the sleeping men.

"You!" intoned A.

"Yes, ma'am?"

"If you people have G and D and M, I would appreciate it if you were to let them go."

"Uh, you want them, lady?"

"I didn't say that. Listen carefully. Let alphabet men go. Do not return here."

She watched the English steel proceed up the avenue, belching smoke from its tail. She hoped that if she and G ever got married and she learned to drive, that she would not end up with an English car.

She buttoned up her other sleeve and went back into the basement room. She took the gun apart so that G would not hurt himself with it. Then she made some instant coffee. It took a long time to make. She let the kettle try its best while she thought about what she should do. She should do her hair. The hell with it.

To divert her mind, she opened the English 435 essay that G had at last finished. Taking up a ballpoint pen with the name of a Canadian bank on it, she set about correcting G's more egregious errors.

"No, no," she said to the empty little room with the odor of basketball shoes. "Kafka was the fiction writer. Rilke was the poet."

When she had met G two years ago he was a C+ student. She had managed to get him up to B and occasionally B+. Once he had got an A in a creative writing course, after she took all the hoky similies out of his long poem about cigarettes and beer.

The water boiled, and she poured some into the IGA crystals in the coffee mug that had been used by hundreds of mouths at the UBC cafeteria.

She reached under the cot and pulled out the novel that G had been writing since the day after his seventeenth birthday. She was on page 111, and she would do her usual twenty pages, sipping the hot liquid that tasted like horse skin. At first she had simply smoothed G's spelling and punctuation. Lately she had taken to removing and replacing the most jejune clichés. It was a novel about a young man smoking cigarettes and drinking beer and trying to describe women's paps.

Today she could do no more than eight pages. This may have been partly due to the rudeness of the four animals in the big car. But some of it had to be because of her life of romance. For a moment she thought of messing the room up, bringing in all the detritus she had carried out to the garbage bin.

Cary Deneau appeared before her eyes.

Not the whole, corporeal Cary. Just the certain fresh beauty of his scarred face and the deft angularity of his body in repose. She remembered that when he put the fingertips that usually touched saxophone keys to certain areas of her skin she felt like the growly low parts of "'Round Midnight." Cary Deneau had made her a melody when she was eighteen years old. He had ears that stuck out at the sides of his head, and they moved when he was playing anything above high C. She liked to grab his ears in her hands. She would never do page twenty-four to Cary Deneau.

But now she did not know whose club Cary was playing in, and she was a poet's girl. She prayed that he would be reluctant to publish.

M stood on the side of the Upper Levels Highway and tried with all his might to extricate an insect that had been carried in the wash of a passing Rolls Royce and plunged into M's ear. A passing motorist mistook his gestures for antic hitch-hiking, and yanked the family Turbocharger to a stop a hundred feet in front of the gnat-maddened man.

But habits and expectations die hard. M hobbled to the car and climbed into the back seat, to find himself sitting next to a little old lady who reminded him of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and a pre-teen boy with mercurochrome on his fingers. A woman and a man were in the front seat.

"We just been overnight in Squamish," volunteered the man as he looked hopefully for an opportunity to pull back onto the road. "Took in the Son et Lumiere. Liked the Lumiere part the best."

"A wise choice," said M, trying to tone down his gestures aimed at insect-extraction.

"How far ya going?"

"Oh, Vancouver will be fine, anywhere in Vancouver. The Georgia Hotel, if it's not out of your way."

The preteener stared and stared.

"What happened to your hair?" he asked.

Just then two things occurred. The insect, which M had mistakenly thought dead and even eviscerated, crawled like a Seabee out of his earhole. And he saw D limping along the verge, his head down, his beard like that of a saviour carrying a cross through a heartless mob.

"Stop, please," begged M. "That is my friend D. He's a sad case. We all try to look after him. He won't do you any harm. He once published a villanelle. Please."

The dad pulled over, and they waited for D to hobble to the car. M had to lean out and pull him into the Turbocharger.

"How far ya going?" asked the driver.

"Seattle," said D. There was a chocolate stain on his teeshirt. "San Francisco."