The CARDINAL DIVIDE
Copyright © 2008 STEPHEN LEGAULT
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in
Publication
Legault, Stephen, 1971-
The Cardinal Divide/Stephen Legault.
(Nunatak fiction)
ISBN 978-1-897126-32-5
I. Title. II. Series.
PS8623.E46633C37 2008
C813’.6
C2008-902313-7
Editor for the Board: Don Kerr
Cover and interior design: Natalie Olsen
Cover image: Stephen Legault
Author photo: Dan Anthon
NeWest Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Edmonton Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).
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No bison were harmed in the making of this book. We are committed to protecting the environment and to the responsible use of natural resources. This book is printed on 100% recycled, ancient forest-friendly paper.
1 2 3 4 5 11 10 09 08
printed and bound in Canada
This book is for the future:
for Rio Bergen and Silas Morgen Legault for Jenn
The Cardinal Divide is a work of fiction. While the Cardinal Divide is a real place, the Buffalo Anthracite Mine, the town of Oracle, and the characters who populate it are fictional, and any resemblance to actual localities and people is purely coincidental.
Mike Barnes stood at the window of his fourth-floor office and looked out at the sweep of emerald forest stretching beyond the Buffalo Anthracite Mine’s fenced compound. The last fingertips of daylight tipped the dark spruce and fir forests with light the colour of smouldering embers and then were eclipsed by darkness. Barnes watched for another five minutes as the colour was sucked from the scene before him by the encroaching night. He looked at his watch: it was after nine. He was weary. The day had started early and was ending late, and he still had to drive the long, winding dirt road back to Oracle to his rental house on a hill overlooking town. It would be midnight before he crawled into bed. Alone.
He craned his neck and looked south into the darkness, beyond the existing mine, toward the Cardinal Divide’s jagged back. In his mind’s eye he saw the reef of stone rising abruptly from the rolling foothills that broke against the implacable wall of the Rocky Mountains. Though the Divide was beyond his line of sight, Mike Barnes knew it was there. Could not forget it was there. So much angst over a hill.
He stretched and turned from the window, the woods now completely dark, the mountains beyond pale shapes in the darkening sky. Barnes sat down at his desk and tidied up a few papers he had shown to his last guest. He filed them neatly in the hanging files in his desk drawer and cleared away his pens. Except for a portrait of his family, and his Day-Timer, the surface was pleasingly empty. His secretary, Tracey, urged him to track his appointments in Outlook, so she could have easy access to them from her own computer. But while Barnes was not opposed to technology, in fact embraced it, he preferred the old-fashioned full-sized calendar book that could be spread open each morning for a panoramic view of the day. It appealed to his sense of aesthetics and to his nostalgia. Barnes recalled his father’s Day-Timer, how each January he had given Mike the previous year’s to play with. Barnes had spent hours with those Day-Timers, colouring in his father’s doodling that adorned the margins of the book and carrying it around in a worn satchel that he pretended was a briefcase.
And now, with his computer sitting at Oracle’s only PC repair shop, Mike Barnes was glad for this outdated method.
Barnes took a deep breath, closed the calendar, and stood to clear away the glasses and water pitcher that sat on the low, round table at the centre of his spacious office. He collected two of the dirty glasses along with the pitcher and placed them on Tracey’s desk. She’d take care of them in the morning.
Mike Barnes’ final appointment of that long day hadn’t been interested in the glass of water he’d put out for him, though it might have cooled the flames of their heated discussion. Barnes had managed to keep his composure. His final guest had descended into red-faced shouting and livid finger pointing by the end of their two-hour meeting.
All this over a mine. All this over a chunk of stone called the Cardinal Divide. Barnes shook his head.
As he passed her desk again, Barnes thought about Tracey. She had taken it hard when he’d called it off between them, but that was necessary. In a week his wife and two children would arrive in Oracle to live with him for the summer. If he wasn’t done this job by the fall they would head back to Toronto on their own. If he finished, the family could head back together.
It was fun while it lasted with Tracey, and he didn’t relish sleeping alone, but all good things must come to an end.
He felt the water he’d consumed over the course of the last two-hour marathon meeting sluice in his gut. Time to tap a kidney, then retrieve his things and head for home.
He made his way down the corridor to the washroom at the far end of the hall, passing now empty offices as he went. When he had arrived six months before, most of these offices had been occupied, but slowly he was seeing to that. The operation was top heavy and he had a job to do. And while it wasn’t unusual for mining operations to lay off administrative staff, after a steady six months of cutbacks, some people inside and outside the operation were obviously getting wise to what Mike Barnes’ true purpose was in Oracle.
He opened the door to the bathroom and stepped in, flipping on the light as he did. He glanced at himself in the mirror, pushed a hand through his wavy blonde hair, pinched his nose where his wire-rimmed glasses rested, and then stood at a urinal to relieve himself.
His last two meetings of the night played out in his mind. He was surprised to find that he had actually enjoyed the meeting with Cole Blackwater. It was entertaining to see through Blackwater’s sketchy attempt at covering his environmentalist tracks by pretending to be a reporter. Wonders never cease, he thought. But his last meeting? That left a bad taste in his mouth.
But what did he expect? The cat was out of the bag.
He finished and stepped to the sink to wash his hands. Then he turned the water off and pulled a few paper towels from the dispenser to dry his hands. Mike Barnes heard footsteps in the hall. JP, the night watchman, had just made his rounds. Did he forget something? The footsteps stopped outside the door. Mike suddenly felt a chill rush through his body. He stood still, watching the door, and without knowing why, held his breath. When the door to the washroom opened, Barnes let his breath out through his teeth with a hissing sound. He turned back to the mirror and regarded himself as he spoke. “I told you there is nothing more to say on the subject,” he said as he removed a piece of dry skin from the bridge of his nose, stepping back from the mirror. Alberta is dryer than the desert, he thought.
The blow caught him entirely by surprise. The back of his head exploded with bone-crushing force, sending a thick rope of blood splashing against the bathroom’s tiled walls. Barnes pitched forward, his forehead connecting with the edge of the wash basin, blood spraying in a fine mist beneath the counter and across the walls. He collapsed in a heap on the floor, his eyes blank and staring into nothing, into a darkness as black as the hole in the earth called the Buffalo Anthracite Mine.
Cole Blackwater heard the phone ring as he locked the door to his eighth-floor office in Vancouver’s Dominion Building. He stood with his hand on the chrome doorknob worn smooth and glossy with decades of use. The key was still inserted in the door as he listened to one ring, then a second, and a third. He looked at his watch. It was nearly 6:30 PM. Friday.
He let his head fall forward heavily in a gesture of weariness and stared blankly at his scuffed and dirty black boots.
The phone rang a fourth time and then stopped. His voicemail would pick up and the caller would hear Mary’s voice ask if they wanted to leave a message. Until two hours ago Mary had been his assistant and sole employee. Now Mary no longer worked for him. He’d had to let her go.
He stared at his boots, his hand rested lightly on the door handle. He was dreadfully tired. More tired, he thought, than he’d ever been in his life. Whoever was calling could wait until Monday. If Monday came. Cole failed to see how he would make it through the weekend. He had no intention of throwing himself off Lion’s Gate Bridge or hurling himself in front of the B-Line bus on Broadway. It was simply that he could not imagine going on as he was, his only client almost a year behind on payments, no prospects for new work in sight, and a litany of personal problems that would give an advice columnist work for a year. Something had to give.
He locked the door and slipped his keys into a crowded pocket. On the etched glass window of the door simple black letters read, “Blackwater Strategies.” He turned and walked to the elevator and pushed the “down” button.
Three years ago he’d signed a lease on this office in the historic Dominion Building and pledged to take the stairs up to his office every morning and down to street level every night. Daily comings and goings, he imagined, would require the use of the elevator – rushing out to a press conference, or dashing to respond to a client’s urgent need. But at least once each day he planned to walk up and down the spiral stairs that climbed dizzily through the centre of the building. He peered over the railing – too short by modern standards – down the five, six, seven, eight stories to the bottom floor and imagined himself inside an M.C. Escher print.
But that was three years ago. It had been more than a year since he’d last run up those stairs to work in the morning, and probably six months since he’d jogged down them in the evening. It wasn’t because he’d grown too busy to spare the few minutes required for the trip. It was the exact opposite.
He stood in front of the elevator as it climbed from street level toward the eighth floor. He tried to see himself through to the other side of the weekend, going on as he was. Now without Mary. He sighed heavily, his shoulders hunched forward, his back slouched.
Of course, there were options available to him. There were always options. He hadn’t fallen so far that he couldn’t claw and scramble his way back out of the hole. But to take advantage of those options meant defeat to Cole Blackwater. And Blackwater did not take defeat – or even retreat – well at all. He had suffered the humiliation of retreat and defeat in the past, and he had sworn never to suffer their indignity again.
The elevator chimed to signal that its ancient door would soon slide open.
Then he heard the phone in his office ring again. He must remember to call-forward his office phone to his cellphone now that Mary was gone.
The phone rang again. Intuitively he guessed that it must be the same caller that had rung a few minutes ago. He looked at the elevator door open in front of him and his body shifted toward it.
The phone rang again.
The elevator waited.
Blackwater muttered under his breath. He turned away from the elevator and walked quickly toward his office door, his right hand searching in his pocket for his keys.
He reached the door in time to hear the phone ring a fourth time. He rummaged in his pocket, grumbled under his breath, and finally resorted to pulling the pocket’s entire contents out in his fist. Loose change, receipts, two shopping lists, a to-do list, SkyTrain receipts, gum wrappers, and an alarming amount of pocket lint came forth, along with a heavy ring of keys. Coins and wads of paper fell to the ground – one coin rolled toward the open banister that surrounded the spiral staircase and rolled over the precipice – while Blackwater found the right key and forced it into the lock. The door opened. The phone stopped ringing.
“Sweet Jesus,” Blackwater grumbled, looking at the phone on Mary’s reception desk, and then chided himself because he’d promised Sarah that he would watch his language.
The red light blinked, indicating at least one message. He closed the door behind him, ignoring the pocket detritus on the floor, and stepped into the office.
Immediately he felt sad. For the last three years Cole Black-water had occupied this space, and for nearly two of those years, Mary Patterson had been there with him. Most often she was there when he arrived in the morning, and most evenings she was there when he left. She had been stalwart in her service, and dignified that very afternoon when he had told her that there simply wasn’t any money left to pay for her services, regardless of how underpaid she was, and for how few days of the week she accepted pay.
Mary Patterson, of course, knew this. She had known it before Blackwater himself. After all, Mary kept the books for this two-person shop, and had more financial sense in her little toe than Blackwater had in his whole, ever-increasing-in-size torso. Months ago she had presented him with a financial forecast that predicted dark days ahead unless their fortunes should change. Two months ago Blackwater cut his own salary in half, and Mary trimmed her work week to three days. Last month Blackwater didn’t write himself a cheque. Finally, on the last working day of April, he told Mary that he simply could not pay her for May.
Mary smiled her sweet smile and said that it was OK. Then she said she would call him next week to check in and see how things were progressing. He saw in her eyes no malice or ill will, just the same kindness and resolute confidence she radiated when he interviewed her for the position of Executive Assistant. Like most of the women in Cole’s life, he had done nothing to deserve her kindness or loyalty. And like all the women in his life except one, he’d finally lost her.
He sat down behind her desk in the high-ceilinged room that formed the reception area and lunch room of his two-room office. The telephone’s red light flashed and Cole decided to wait a minute or two so that the caller, whoever it was, would have time to leave a message before he dialled into the voicemail service to retrieve it.
He looked around the space. The clear light of April filtered through the tall windows on the western wall. He had chosen the office not just for the lovely staircase, but for the deep sense of history that the Dominion Building radiated. Once the tallest building in the British Empire, its copper roof and irregular shape, along with its central location on the edge of Vancouver’s Gas-town, made it a regional landmark. The social and environmental justice organizations housed in it had dubbed it the Tower of Lost Causes, just as 1 Nicholas Street, his former office in Ottawa, had been known as The Green Building.
The whitewashed walls of this outer office were tastefully decorated with framed prints and posters of west coast landscapes and environmental campaigns. A large potted fern occupied one corner, and a used but well-maintained loveseat and club chair another. It was all in perfect order, clean and tidy.
His own office, however, suffered the same lack of order that afflicted his pants’ pockets.
Blackwater leaned back in the office chair behind Mary’s empty desk, sighed heavily, leaned an elbow on the desk, and looked at the phone. Maybe he should go and she should stay? It almost made sense to lay off the boss. Mary Patterson had learned a lot in the two years they worked together, and more often than not he sought and valued her advice on his few remaining projects. But he hadn’t taken on a new client in months. Blackwater’s one remaining client, a small First Nations band council from the north end of Vancouver Island who looked to him for advice on how to stop the spread of salmon farms, hadn’t paid him in a year. He’d stopped asking. He knew it was bad business, but they were good friends, and so he continued to help where he could. They had their own troubles.
I wonder if there are any things I do, Blackwater thought cynically, that Mary cannot?
He picked the phone from its cradle and dialled *98 and then, without listening, punched in his four-digit pass code and pressed 1 for new messages. Two messages waited.
He listened. “Hi, this is a message for Cole Blackwater. It’s Peggy McSorlie calling. From Oracle, Alberta. I don’t know if you remember me, but we worked together on a Jasper Park issue when you were still in Ottawa. That was a while ago. Anyway, the reason that I’m calling is that the group I’m working with now, we’re called the East Slope Conservation Group, could really use some help with a big issue that’s popped up with the local mine here in Oracle. It’s the Cardinal Divide, Cole. They want to dig a mine right below it and we need help figuring out how to stop them. I understand that you do that sort of work and we’d like to talk with you about it. Could you give me a call tonight? I’m tied up most of the weekend, so please call this evening if you can. Thanks, Cole. Hope to hear from you soon.” Cole jotted down the number that she finished the message with.
He used the speaker phone so he could jot a few notes on a scrap of paper from Mary’s recycling bin. He was about to hang up and quickly call Peggy McSorlie back, but decided to hear the second message.
“Hi Cole, it’s Peggy again. Listen, I have to run out to pick up the kids at basketball, and then we’re going to get some dinner in town. Pick up some groceries. I’ll be home around ten Alberta time, I guess that’s nine yours. I hope to talk to you then.” She left her number again.
Cole hung up. He sat back in Mary’s chair and looked at the scrap of paper with Peggy McSorlie’s name on it, and her phone number.
It must have been six or seven years since he’d heard from Peggy McSorlie. At the time he had been working for a national conservation group as its young and enthusiastic National Parks Conservation Director. Jasper National Park’s Management Plan was up for its mandated five-year review when Peggy McSorlie contacted his Ottawa office to ask for help thwarting a proposed plan for increased white-water rafting on the fragile Maligne River. Harlequin ducks, endangered in some parts of Canada, nested on that river in the spring, and raised their young there before migrating to the west coast in the fall.
With McSorlie and a coalition of other conservation groups, Blackwater managed to put the kybosh on the rafting proposal. They argued successfully that white-water rafting had no business on the narrow Maligne River whatsoever, given that waterway’s value to the secretive harlequin ducks.
Cole Blackwater remembered Peggy McSorlie as a feisty and competent biologist who studied the Maligne and other National Park rivers to assess their value for harlequin ducks. She was middle-aged, with a Master’s degree in something or other and, as he recalled, the mother of two school-aged boys. She lived on a farm on the eastern edge of Alberta’s foothills near Oracle, Alberta, with her cabinet-maker husband who ran a small woodlot.
Like many before her, McSorlie had worked diligently on contract to Parks Canada, helping the federal agency understand the complex resources that they were legally mandated to protect, only to watch her years of study and labour collect dust on a shelf while the Park Superintendent and Chief Park Warden ushered in plans from the local business community to expand development, use, access, and ultimately, corporate profits in the National Park.
But McSorlie, Blackwater recalled, wasn’t one to sit on her hands. When the Jasper Park Management Plan review called for more rafting on the Maligne, she went to the media, and was “fired” for her action. Nobody had actually written her a pink slip. No, she was simply informed that her contract was complete, and was asked to hand in the keys to the rusty 1980 Dodge Ram that served as her research vehicle. That’s when she called Blackwater.
He looked at the number again, and at his watch. It was 6:45. An hour later in the Mountain Time Zone. He stood up, heard his knee pop and felt his back creak, pushed the slip of paper with the number into his pocket, and walked to the door. His keys still hung in the lock. He closed the door behind him, locked it, and stooped to scoop up the litter at his feet, jamming it, along with his keys, in with the note. He had a couple of hours to kill before he could call Peggy back. He walked to the elevator, stopped to peer down the long spiral of stairs, and then punched the “down” button. Blackwater had become good at killing time of late. He knew just what to do.
He stepped from the Dominion Building onto West Hastings Street and walked west to the lights where he waited with a dozen others to cross the road. It was a cool evening, and clear. He turned the collar of his coat up against the chill. The Dominion Building sat on the very edge of Canada’s poorest postal code, the area of Vancouver known to the world as the Downtown Eastside. Looking east along West Hastings, Cole Blackwater saw the shops and storefronts fade and deteriorate. Looking west, toward the downtown business core, he viewed glitter and flash. Cole Blackwater stood at the intersection of two worlds.
Cole’s best friend – his only real friend, not just a drinking buddy – Denman Scott spent night and day advocating for the rights of the people on the streets of the Downtown Eastside. But powerful interests opposed him.
Waterfront property along English Bay and False Creek was quickly being bought up by American, Asian, and European investors, and twenty-, thirty-, and forty-storey high-rise luxury condominiums were being built over the rubble of some of Vancouver’s poorer neighbourhoods. Handfuls of the million-dollar condominiums were being bought by wealthy Americans as safe havens for themselves and draft-aged sons who could be conscripted for American’s new war – the same old war with a new name, thought Cole. More and more dilapidated Eastside hotels, flop houses, and ancient warehouses were being bought and renovated or razed and rebuilt as flats and condominiums for the upper-middle class.
The light turned green and Blackwater stepped into the street. The consequence of this gentrification was evident: more people on the streets. Now that their $30 a week hotel rooms were converted to one room apartments for Vancouver’s chic business and arts community, with rent starting at $1,500 a month, more and more people were forced into alleys and doorways. And not just on the streets of the Downtown Eastside, where the problem could be contained and “managed” by police and what social service providers remained after deep provincial cuts to mental health facilities and services for those living in squalid poverty. Now the Downtown Eastside’s drug, prostitution, and crime problems had spread throughout the city as the most desperate people sought shelter, food, and a fix elsewhere.
Blackwater stopped on the corner of Cambie and West Hastings to drop a quarter into the hat of a man he recognized.
“God bless,” muttered the man, looking into his greasy ball-cap at his take. Blackwater said nothing, but turned down Cambie toward the water.
Many of Cole’s acquaintances, those who had lived in Vancouver longer than six months, learned to look right through the homeless, the vagrants, dope dealers, and the beggars in the Downtown Eastside. Not Blackwater. Not yet. He was deeply cynical about many – most – aspects of the human condition, but so far he hadn’t formed a callous over the part of his heart that encouraged him to drop a quarter (and sometimes in the winter a dollar) into the hand, cap, or cup of someone who desperately needed it.
He understood why people turned away. “There but for the grace of God go I,” he thought many times as he strolled through the neighbourhood between his office and the Stadium SkyTrain station just a few blocks away. When faced with such terrible human suffering, when confronted with such a staggering waste of human life and potential, how could you not eventually turn away?
Cole paced off the short walk to his favourite tavern and remembered a man named Sam, who three years ago had panhandled outside the Dominion Building. Sam had taught Cole about the bond that existed between people no matter how different their lives were.
Sam approached Cole each evening for spare change, and one cold, rainy night in November Cole gave Sam fifty cents, reached the street corner, turned, walked back, and gave him five dollars. Sam’s face lit up even as the rain poured from his eyebrows onto his cheeks, over his nose, and down his unshaven chin.
Cole said nothing and was about to turn and walk away when Sam tugged at his coat. “I can sing and dance,” said Sam in a voice that was at once happy and terribly sad. “I’d like to bring a smile to your face.”
Cole stopped and looked at Sam. Cole guessed that like many on the street, Sam was plagued with mental illness and possibly addiction troubles. But through the rain and the hardness of his life, he was beaming at Cole Blackwater.
“You already have,” said Cole, smiling for the first time in a week.
He didn’t care if they used the money he gave them for booze or drugs or food. Who am I to argue with a good stiff drink, he thought, as he turned into the Cambie Hotel to wet his whistle and while away a few hours before calling Peggy McSorlie.
He pushed his way through a clutch of young people on the sidewalk hunched over cigarettes puffing furiously, and stepped into the bar. Rock and roll and the excited voices of the crowd settling in for a night of enthusiastic drinking broke over him like a warm wave on the beach, and he pushed through the people toward the familiar draft counter. Luck was with him and he found an empty stool. Elbows up on the bar and wearing his heavy black leather jacket, worn and weathered from many seasons of use, Blackwater looked more like a menacing hoodlum than a sophisticated political and environmental strategist. His dark hair fell in shaggy curls around his forehead and ears, and his eyes – not blue, not grey, not green – darted up and down the bar in search of friend or foe. When he wasn’t slouching, Cole stood just over six feet tall, and while he had been willowy with corded muscles as a young man, he had gone soft of late.
A male bartender stepped in front of him. No uniform for this chap, barely out of high school, just a loose-fitting T-shirt and a pair of factory faded blue jeans. The bartender was new to the Cambie and Cole did not recognize him. He would be gone in another few weeks. Cole wouldn’t much care.
“What’ll it be?”
Cole looked up and down the bar. He hated being served by a male bartender. If he wanted to be served a drink by a man he’d drink alone at home. What his bones and joints ached for right now was a beautiful woman to ask him what he would like. To drink.
“Pint of Kick Ass,” he said sombrely.
The young bartender pulled back on the handle and dispensed a pint of golden ale. He flipped a coaster under the pint before setting the frothing glass before Blackwater, who handed him a five dollar bill and left the quarter change in the runner along the edge of the bar. A woman would have warranted digging into his pocket for another quarter or two. A quarter was all a boy in a T-shirt could expect from Cole.
It would be easy to mistake Cole’s trajectory to the bar for a single-minded desire to obtain ale. But nothing could be farther from the truth. Cole Blackwater turned his back on the bartender and looked out over the plank tables of the Cambie and through the tall windows to the night beyond, and began his careful assessment of the raucous and familiar crowd.
It was spring again and the city was coming alive. University students, under pressure to finish assignments and prepare for exams, were also obviously under the influence of spring fever and the nearly irresistible mammalian urge to prowl for food and frisky fun after a long winter’s nap. Cole too sensed the energy of the city change as the damp winter winds were replaced by warm rains and the occasional blue sky. Winter’s rubbish washed away into False Creek, English Bay, and Burrard Inlet, and new life blossomed everywhere.
Blackwater drank deeply, then stood to survey the room. Before he strode purposefully through the front doors, Cole had done a quick visual sweep of the room to determine any initial threats. Now he made a careful assessment of each table, scanning for faces he might know, friendly, or more importantly, otherwise.
Cole Blackwater had his reasons: in more than fifteen years of activism, he had made his fair share of enemies. He prided himself on being aggressive and uncompromising in his approach to conservation. And while he wasn’t troubled by the politicians and corporate executives that he’d taken to the mat over their plans to clearcut some swath of ancient forest or to bore into the side of a sacred mountain in search of precious metal, he did worry from time to time about the unstable sorts.
Though he’d been called every name in the book by yahoos and goons in the newspapers, on television, and face-to-face at blockades and rallies, he worried more about the quiet powder kegs waiting to explode, and that he might be the match it took to ignite them. He worried about the disgruntled and possibly mentally unstable mill worker, longshoreman, or miner angry that radical environmentalists had stolen his job to save some “itty bitty spotted owl.”
Blackwater didn’t buy that bunk; he saw it for what it was. It was tough to explain his point of view: that corporations who raped the land and the seas cut and run when the profit margins grew thin, leaving entire communities in the lurch. For every hundred honest fellows who toiled in the mill or the mine or on a boat week after week and year after year to put food on the table for their families, there were always a few angry, frustrated sods who looked for an excuse to mash someone’s nose or stomp their face.
So Blackwater had got in the habit of scanning the crowd whenever he entered a public house, looking for likely candidates for trouble. Cole knew he was recognizable – for fifteen years his face had been on the evening news. His enemy wasn’t. In the last couple of years he had begun to regard nearly every stranger as a potential foe. In the grocery store, standing in line, he regarded his fellow shoppers with suspicion. On the SkyTrain an innocent jostle made Cole Blackwater’s six-foot frame stiffen and prepare for a blow.
Cole Blackwater was growing paranoid.
But Cole’s surveillance wasn’t driven purely by fear. He was an opportunist as well as deeply suspicious. Cole also scanned rooms like the rocking Cambie for a little sport. While all men were potential adversaries to Cole, he regarded all women as potential conquests.
At thirty-seven Blackwater wasn’t the catch that he once was. His nose, broken twice in high school, was bent awkwardly to the left, the result of too many right roundhouse punches. His once slender and well-muscled body had grown soft over the last ten years. Truth be told, thought Cole, while Ottawa’s pace had been gruelling, it was Vancouver that had put the nail in his once limber and lithe corporeal coffin. It wasn’t for lack of opportunity for fitness, Vancouver having one of the most active populations in the country. No, it was a lack of will. Cole Blackwater had lost his resolve to keep himself up.
Scanning the room and feeling fleshy, a Paul Simon song played in Cole’s head: “Why am I soft in the middle now, the rest of my life is so hard?”
Cole grimaced. Even if he did face trouble with a few thugs or, more optimistically with a skirt, he wasn’t sure he was up to the challenge anymore.
It wasn’t only the lack of time on the trail, in the mountains, or on the rivers that had softened Cole Blackwater. It wasn’t the years that he’d been away from the gym. It wasn’t the time. It was the miles. It was the many, many miles that had turned Cole soft. He finished his ale, disgusted with himself.
He shook his head a little to slough off the feeling. Straightening, he took comfort that it wasn’t all for rot and ruin. Allowing his gaze to troll the sea of churning humanity before him, he found solace in the fact that he still had most of his hair, and his face, never a candidate for an Oil of Olay commercial, was yet ruggedly good looking, though by no means handsome. Years and years of Alberta sun and wind, a lifetime of riding the range herding his family’s cattle, weeks in the mountains skiing and climbing, and months in the backcountry paddling wild rivers, had etched Blackwater’s face into a maze of lines. Even after three years on the wet coast, when months passed without the sun showing its rosy face, Blackwater still wore the appearance of a tan, though it was more from wear and tear than basking.
Then there was the boxing. Nothing puts years on a man’s face like being hit, again and again, with a leather glove, every day and night for nearly two decades.
He finished his sweep of the room, elbows resting on the bar, one leg cocked back and jammed against the boot-worn wood. The room was getting busier, the decibel level rising with the frenzied excitement of young people on a Friday night. Blackwater spotted a solid dozen women who fit his description of beautiful, but nearly each one was guarded by a man ten years younger than he was, and perceptibly more good looking. He would be content to let his fantasies play out from afar.
Cole Blackwater’s third reason for making a careful assessment of this bar was to see if any of his cronies had taken up residence to hoist a few without him. Gregarious by nature, Black-water loved any chance to swap a week’s worth of political gossip with his acquaintances. Also, he hated the thought of being left out. Of being left behind. He feared nothing more than missing something. Some decision might be made without him. Some plan hatched in his absence. He had spent his professional life scrambling to be in on all the big opportunities. Cole Blackwater knew that those opportunities were often conceived over a beer-stained tablecloth, or across a cocktail table littered with tumblers and highball glasses.
Where had those years of scrambling got him? Drinking alone on a Friday night after laying off his only employee, not knowing where the next paycheque would come from. Then he thought of Peggy McSorlie and, out of habit, checked his watch. Desperation will make a man do funny things, thought Cole Blackwater.
He saw nobody he knew in the bar, which saddened him more than his unfulfilled search for potential adversaries or conquests. He was lonely. He reached to plunk his pint glass on the bar behind him without taking his eyes from the room.
“Another?” asked the boy bartender.
“Please,” he answered over the din.
He took stock of himself: he was paranoid, lonely, and fighting so far below his weight class it embarrassed him.
“Bottoms up,” said the bartender, and Cole fished another five from the garbage in his pockets to pay for the beer.
The note with Peggy McSorlie’s phone number fell out and landed on the floor. He reached to pick it up. He looked at his watch again. It wasn’t yet eight o’clock.
He tipped the beaded pint glass toward his lips and drank half of the ale before returning it to the coaster. He blew out through pursed lips and felt the beer settle into his belly. That’s better, he mused, the pints doing their work to loosen his limbs and calm his frenzied thoughts. Cole settled into a familiar funk, assessing what he considered to be the ruined landscape of his life. Maybe his critics were right: he was a failure as a consultant. Maybe it was time for a change. Take a job. Stop trying to save the world single-handedly. He let his gaze fall on one of the TVs in the corner of the bar, and became absorbed by his next pint and the silent hockey game on the Sports Network, and let half an hour pass this way.
A heavy hand on Cole’s shoulder startled him, and he tipped his fourth beer, spilling a trickle of it down the front of his shirt. “What the!...” he growled, turning on the man next to him.
He was greeted by the grinning face of Dusty Stevens. “Easy, champ.”
“Didn’t see you come in,” grumbled Cole, using a handful of paper napkins to mop the beer from his shirt.
“You were in your own little world, as usual,” said Dusty, peering over his glasses at Cole. Martin Middlemarch stood behind his friend, looking thoughtful. “Little jumpy tonight, Blackwater?”
Cole grimaced and nodded and dumped the sodden napkins on the bar while Martin and Dusty ordered beers. “Let me get you a refill, Cole,” said Dusty, taking Cole’s glass from his hand. Stevens was in his mid-forties, but looked much older. He was a short, round man with closely cropped hair that had silvered long ago. He wore a green golf shirt under a shiny leather jacket. He sported tiny rectangular glasses and had a habit of looking over them when he spoke to people, as though the spectacles were meant only for reading.
“Rough week, Cole?” Martin asked.
Cole recounted the story of Mary’s last day on the job.
“You’ll be answering your own phone then for a while,” said Dusty Stevens sympathetically.
“For a while. Until things pick up,” sighed Blackwater, sipping his pint.
“What do the prospects look like for that happening?” Middle-march was younger than Stevens by a decade, taller by half a foot, and lighter by fifty pounds. He spoke in a mild, measured tone despite the din of the bar. He had the build of the long-distance runner that he was, and wore his sandy hair neatly parted to one side. He took a satisfying sip of his glass of beer. No pint glasses for Martin Middlemarch: he was here mostly for the company.
Cole just shook his head. Martin looked at Dusty. “You could always take a J-O-B,” he said, sipping from his glass.
Cole looked around the room and then at the two men who were standing beside him. He simply shrugged. The three men had known each other for a decade or more, but had become friends only since Cole Blackwater moved to Vancouver three years earlier. When Cole had been working for the Canadian Conservation Association, Dusty and Martin had worked in the Vancouver office of Greenpeace. Dusty’s specialty was the media. He had been employed as a communications officer in the provincial NDP government in the early 1990s, and took the post with Greenpeace after Glen Clark became premier.
Martin Middlemarch was a campaigner, who had come to Greenpeace by way of the social justice movement. They had recruited Cole and the CCA to help them stop a US nuclear submarine from docking at the Canadian Forces Base at Esquimalt, just outside of Victoria. For Cole and the CCA it was tit-for-tat: Greenpeace would help them with the federal Endangered Species Act.
Cole had used his contacts with sympathetic Members of Parliament to create a lengthy and acrimonious debate in the House of Commons over Canada’s tacit support of nuclear weapons on the high seas while Greenpeace activists in rubber Zodiac boats got between the submarine and the port. After that, whenever Cole visited Vancouver for work he had been a welcome guest at the Greenpeace office, and the three men drank beer and swapped stories in the pubs and bars along Commercial Drive.
But around the time that Cole was being ushered out of Ottawa, both Dusty and Martin had been lured away from Greenpeace to work for industry-supported consulting firms. Dusty and Martin couldn’t say no to the opportunity to work inside the corporations, media, and government relations firms they’d been fighting. The pay was too good and the jobs secure, and they were able to justify their moves by saying that they could now change the system from within. Cole Blackwater didn’t buy it.
“Worse things in the world, Cole,” said Dusty, his eyes fixed on Cole over his glasses. “We can’t all be holy crusaders. Some of us have to roll up our sleeves up and try to work from inside the belly of the beast to change things. We don’t get the spotlight, we don’t get any glory. We just slog away, trying to change things one step at a time.”
Cole drank deeply from his glass, his shaggy curls dropping in front of his eyes.
“Did you happen to get a call from Wild Rose?” asked Martin.
Cole looked up. “Yeah.”
“Good. What did you think?”
“Jeremy Moon just left a message.”
“Did you call him back, Cole?” asked Martin.
“Not yet.”
“Not yet,” echoed Dusty Stevens. “It’s a good job, Cole. It starts at like 70K a year.”
Cole shrugged again.
“I know, I know. It’s not about the money. It’s about changing the world. Well, there are more ways than one to change the world, sonny boy. You think it’s easy sitting in a room full of corporate suits and telling them that they are doing things wrong, and trying to convince them that what’s good for the earth is good for business too?”
Cole looked around the bar, appraising recent entrants.
“Look,” Stevens said, peering over his glasses. “If real change is going to happen in this world, someone is going to have to show these corporations how to do things differently. And who do you think they are going to listen to? You? Out there waving your arms in the air and shouting your fucking head off? Do you think they’re going to listen to the VW-driving hippies protesting the WTO and the World Bank and the IMF? Jesus, Cole. They aren’t going to listen to those people.”
Martin cleared his throat. “Cole, it’s like this: you and your clients are out in the public focusing in on these businesses that Dusty and I work for. So what do they do? Well, they do what every good cowboy would do. They circle their wagons, hunker down, and shoot back. But eventually somebody has to show these people how to drive those wagons through a little opening that you and your folks leave for them so that they can save face, and save some of the natural world that we three all believe in.”
“Take Wild Rose for example,” said Dusty, ordering another round from the boy behind the bar. “You should call them. We all know Jeremy. He’s good people. They’ve got a bunch of new clients, mostly mining and coal bed methane, and they’re looking for someone who knows the biz. You could help them. You could hold their feet to the fire. Make sure they do things right. Help them talk to the locals. Make sure they consult with Aboriginal communities. That’s right up your alley, Cole. “
“Cole, there’s more than one way to save the world.”
Cole was watching a young woman stand up and brush something from her jeans. He shook his head.
“What, Cole. Not pure enough for you?”
Cole looked at Dusty and smiled.
“We can’t all be white knights, Cole,” he said again.
Cole sluiced the beer in his glass and focused on the golden suds. “I really think you guys believe this bullshit you’re spouting,” he finally said with only a trace of a smile. “I do. But I think those corporations that you’re working for are just using you to show them how to drive their wagons through whatever hole they can find. Oh, there’s lots of talk about sustainability, and giving back to communities and all, but at the end of the day, little is changing in a real, meaningful way. And the reason is that guys like you two aren’t able to push hard enough from the inside, and guys like me can’t get any traction to push from the outside as long as the companies can point to guys like you and say, look, we’ve got respected environmentalists on staff showing us the way.”
Dusty Stevens opened his mouth to talk but Cole silenced him with a grimace.
“Save it, Dusty,” he said. “I’ll call Jeremy, but I’m telling you right now, I’d rather work for the little Aboriginal band or the community of ranchers that the coal bed methane or mining company is going to screw over than try to make sure Wild Rose uses the world ‘sustainability’ enough times in the Environmental Assessment.”
The three men stood awkwardly a moment. Then Martin said earnestly, “We’ve got to try, Cole.”
“I know,” said Cole. “God, don’t I know it? And I don’t blame you guys, really. Maybe I’m just jealous.”
“Look, Cole,” said Stevens, “we do what we can. Hell, if it wasn’t Marty and me doing this, some bastard who comes straight out of the Forest Products Association would be doing it.”
“Is that what you tell yourself so you can sleep at night?” asked Cole.
“No, that’s the way it is,” said Stevens.
“What about Sarah?” asked Middlemarch more seriously. “You’ve got to think of her.”
Cole Blackwater sighed and his shoulders slouched noticeably. “There is that,” he admitted.
“Look on the bright side,” said Martin, draining his glass and setting it on the bar. “There is no shortage of work in this biz, only a shortage of work as a holy crusader. Sooner or later even the great Cole Blackwater will have to cozy up to a corporate client.”
“Or the fucking Liberal government,” grinned Stevens.
That set the three of them laughing. Finally, his face still pressed into a grin, Blackwater said, “I’ve no illusions, boys. My white knight days are long passed. But today marks the beginning of a new era, though which era I’m not quite certain.”
The bartender set up a new round of ale for Dusty and Cole, with Martin opting for a soda water, explaining that he had a race on Sunday. The three men hoisted their glasses.
“To the good fight,” said Martin. “May there always be one!”
“For the sake of my mortgage, let there always be lost souls to wage them,” agreed Dusty Stevens.
Cole Blackwater drank deeply from his pint, but said nothing. He was thinking about the slip of paper stuck in his pocket with the phone number of one lost soul he needed to telephone.
It was just after ten o’clock when Cole stepped out of the elevator and slouched to his office door. He found his keys and tried in vain to poke them in the lock. Finally the keys found their mark, the tumblers turned, and he pushed the door open, stumbled, and groped for the light.
He flopped onto Mary’s chair, his head spinning. From his littered pocket he extracted the phone number and focused, then snatched the receiver from its cradle and punched in the numbers.
It rang. Rang again. Rang again. He was preparing his message in his head when a female voice answered: “Hello.”
“I’m looking for Peggy McSorlie,” said Cole.
“This is she.”
“It’s Cole Blackwater calling, Peggy.”
Her voice was just as Cole Blackwater remembered it. They had met face to face only once, on a lobbying trip she had made to Ottawa, but they had talked dozens of times on the telephone. He knew her phone voice far better than he knew her in person. In a big country you developed that sort of relationship – the conference call friendship, he called it.
“Hi, Cole, thanks for calling. I’ve just got the boys home from basketball. They’re having a snack. I can chat now.”
“I’m sorry to call so late,” he said.
“It’s fine. Like I said, it’s good timing. He heard her shuffling something, likely groceries or bags of sweaty teenage laundry.
“What was it that you thought I might be able to help with?”
“Where to start?”
“The Reader’s Digest version is fine for now,” he said.
“Well, it’s the same old thing, really.” Peggy McSorlie spoke in an even-toned voice that Blackwater figured she must have perfected for dealing with mining executives, Parks officials, and the media. “You remember a few years ago, even before the whole Jasper thing that you and I worked on together, there were plans for an open-pit mine south of the town of Oracle, along the eastern boundary of Jasper?”
“I remember it,” answered Blackwater. “Some sort of coal operation on the north side of Cardinal Divide.”
“That’s right, metallurgical coal, the stuff they use to make steel. Well, that mine didn’t play out. The market was in the sewer, and the company who owned the operation couldn’t get their act together and wrote a rotten environmental assessment. They forgot really to make any mention of the mine’s impact on any of the wildlife in the area.”
“Convenient,” said Blackwater.
“Yup, convenient. They likely thought that the assessment would just sail through with a rubber stamp from the province. You know, the good old boys in Edmonton would make some sounds about protecting wildlife and sustaining the local economy and the mine would be off to the races. But it didn’t happen like that.”
“It got bumped to the feds, as I recall.”