“I detect insincerity.”
“Okay, then maybe I don’t have any larger-than-life heroes.” Dan shrugged. “My heroes are the people who manage to get through the day without doing damage to themselves and others around them. The ones who do the best they can, without throwing the towel in and crying foul because they wanted more than life’s meagre offerings allowed them. People like my Aunt Marge.”
“Good one.” Donny nodded, downed his coffee with a flourish. “Me? Angela Davis. She was my hero as a kid — and still is now. Black rights, human rights, women’s rights, the struggle for truth and justice. She fought for what she believed in and she paid the price. All those years in jail and all those words written for the cause. That woman had more conscientiousness and compassion in her little finger than … I don’t know what. But is it not the very definition of tragedy,” here his eyes glinted mischief, “that this woman who did so much to further the cause of race and class struggles and fight for human dignity, should be reduced in our collective consciousness to a hairstyle?”
Dan grinned. “But a hairdo with attitude — or latitude. It was a pretty big ’fro, remember.”
From self-pity and childhood heroes through to the shear absurdity of life. A trip across the universe over a cup of coffee. That’s what he loved about Donny. You could never tell what would come out of him next: gloom or joy, kindness or anger. He was a jazz riff tossed from horn to bass to sax, used up and carried around and turned inside out till it was almost gone, only to return triumphant in another key. That was his genius.
“Compassion, huh?” Dan said.
“That’s the word.”
“So just how compassionate are you feeling these days?”
“I smell a leading question,” Donny said, eyeing him with suspicion.
“Are you willing to do your part for the cause? To help further the struggle, given the opportunity — and I gather that you have time to do so, given the inclination.”
“Now I’m really suspicious. Tell.”
Dan took a sip of coffee, tried not to gag on the taste, and added another spoonful of sugar. “I only do this for you, you know,” he said. And proceeded to fill Donny in on his adventures with Lester and his upcoming trip.
“Another chapter in the Craig Killingworth Saga?”
“Uh-huh. And what I need,” he said, “is for you to take Lester for a few days while I’m in B.C. Because I still haven’t found a place for him.”
Donny’s face was impassive. Dan felt the need for a sermon coming on, one of those “Here Are Ten Good Reasons Why You Should Do This” manifestoes. The kind he’d invariably failed at with other kids at school. “Ked’s going to stay with Kendra, of course. But I can’t ask her to take in a stray.”
“Okay,” Donny said. “I’ll do it.”
“Okay? Just like that — okay?”
“Do you want me to say I’ll think it over?”
“No, I want you to say okay.”
“And then you say…?”
“Thank you.”
Donny nodded. “You have a need. I have time and opportunity, as you put it. I’m out of work, feeling suicidal, and in need of distraction. Plus I am deeply concerned about you, so I will do this for you. A few days, you said? As in three or fewer?”
“Guaranteed.”
“And then the Craig Killingworth Story will be over for good?”
“Absolutely.”
“Done.”
Dan watched the big boat manoeuvre the cliffs and head into the harbour, water dividing white and dark behind it. The Queen of Nanaimo. The wake rebounded off the island. He’d watched with a feeling of regret as they passed between Mayne and Pender Island, but there was nothing to be done about that. He’d sensed the unvoiced questions in Trevor’s emails, heard the hopeful tone when he asked if Dan might be coming back that way for a visit. It wouldn’t do to contact him if he had no intention of staying.
Once off the ferry terminal, he noted the wary faces that marked his progress up the coast. They seemed to sense his outsider status, the eternal other-ness about him that followed no matter where he went. He passed farms and homesteads. Here the roadside stops were less inviting, less intriguing to his eyes. He recalled the angry dogs running alongside his car on his last visit. Having retreated to an island in their minds, these people were relegated to one in time as well, cut off, isolated, and dwindling slowly to nothing. On Mayne Island he’d felt a sense of community. Here they were lost in the landscape and wanted nothing so much as to stay lost.
He was at the dirt road leading to Magnus Ferguson’s trailer in less than half an hour. From a distance he saw the tall white-haired scarecrow tugging at the earth with a hoe. For a second, it seemed as though he were looking at a badly aged version of Craig Killingworth. He thought he’d found the missing man. A whole scenario flashed through his mind, how Killingworth had simply disappeared to escape his past and ended up in the woods of B.C., aged but alive, and mostly nuts.
Magnus leaned the hoe up against the trailer and came over to meet him with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity, the way the Natives must have regarded the first white men to land on their shores right before it all went wrong for them.
They walked slowly around the trailer as Dan described his search for Craig Killingworth and the events that had led him to contact Magnus. As they walked, Magnus appeared to be taking inventory of what he’d left behind on this plot of land as much as the measure of Dan’s intentions.
Dan tried to look interested when Magnus pointed out the stubby basil and flat-leafed parsley. “They don’t thrive here — not enough light except in the morning. Then the deer eat the leaves down to the stems.”
Crows hung and dipped their heads in the rust-flecked fronds of Western Redcedar waving overhead. “You must enjoy the solitude out here,” Dan said.
Magnus scratched his chin. “Tell you the truth, most days I hate it. It’s a lonely life. Blacker than black. People always romanticize places like this. You’re still stuck with your own company, whether you like it or not.”
He turned away and looked into the forest as though searching for a sign, some encouragement that what he’d endured hadn’t been in vain, or maybe just wanting a reason to go on. When he turned back, his face was set. “All right — I guess I trust your motives. Ask me what you want to know.”
Dan nodded. “When we spoke on the phone, you said you had proof that Craig Killingworth was dead.”
“I do.”
“I was hoping you could show it to me.”
Magnus waved him around to the front of the yard. He walked up to the steps of the trailer and pulled the door open.
Inside was a world in decline. Everywhere were signs of hopelessness: cramped quarters that bulged with household goods, piles of discarded clothing, boxes making an obstacle run of the trailer’s length. The interior had been turned into a museum, a monument to lost time. There was more than a hint of mould in the air. Papers languished on shelves, letters whose corners had been nibbled by mice thieving for their nests, with droppings left on the counters and on the unwashed vinyl floor curling at the edges. It was a catalogue of despair, a last refuge of broken dreams.
Dan watched Magnus insert his hand into a pile of papers and turn something over. A bundle of letters teetered and splashed to the floor. Magnus looked down at them with contempt, scratching through the refuse flattened into piles on the shelves. For a moment, Dan was afraid he’d come all this way to interview a crazy person who just wanted a little company.
“Here — look at this.” Magnus handed him a photograph. Dan was expecting