Stanley Park Page 2

  The Professor put his hands behind his head and stared up through the canopy of trees to find those pieces of the night sky that were visible. The fragments of constellations that, for those who could believe such things, would provide direction. He remembered how Hélène had disdained astrology, indeed most forms of the mystical. There was a certain cliché about the gypsy fortune teller with which she could not bear association. He learned this quickly after they first met. Nineteen fifty-six, Lyon. Hélène was living with her father and uncles, aunts and cousins, trying out city life after generations on the road. The Professor (not yet a professor) was over from Canada with his yellow pads and sharp pencils, observing. The first case study of a professional lifetime underway. His thesis named with some of the romance by which it had been electrified: Romani Alighted: Remembering the Vardo. Work from which all else had grown, the Professor thought now, branches sifting air above him. Their marriage, certainly. Hélène had been drawn to his interest in her. To his own unknowable history too, perhaps. Before his own father, now dead, there was only an expanse of unknown. A book of blank pages.

  But the work with Hélène’s family had also given birth to all his other work. Launched him across the anthropological landscape. Squatters in the Delta. Russian stowaways. The earliest Vancouver panhandlers who had peopled his successful book, Will Work For Food. Hélène might not always have appreciated her role at the root of things. And neither of them could have known how Stanley Park itself lay sleeping in their future.

  The fire was out. The Professor climbed into his tent to sleep. He didn’t dream of Caruzo. Didn’t lie unconscious under images of Hélène’s beauty, the unfolding of their years or even the October morning when he had awoken in the field with a very particular hollow feeling. The morning he had called Hélène, and the phone had rung and rung.

  A welcome relief, this dreamless sleep.

  In the morning he climbed down from the forest to the men’s room by Second Beach. Familiar steps. He removed the pane of glass at the back of the locked building, as Caruzo had shown him long ago. He climbed in, washed, shaved. Then he spent the day on his favourite cliff, high above the sea in a salty breeze, thinking of how it might all be finally finished. Ten years later than expected, but one could not schedule tragedy or the irregular dawn of understanding.

  When it was time to meet his son, the Professor pulled the fly-fishing net from his pack and walked down through the forest to the lagoon. At the trail mouth he stood in the shelter of a salal bush, eyes on the path. It was just before five. Caruzo appeared when he promised, leading Jeremy over the arched stone bridge and towards him. The Professor watched, but did not step from the bushes immediately, and the boy did as he would. He grew exasperated. His eyes found a pay phone nearby, a distraction. He stabbed the keypad with a finger, his back to Caruzo. Wishing, no doubt, to be anywhere but here. When he hung up, the Professor stepped from his hiding place, and Caruzo disappeared into the trees as agreed. The Professor enjoyed noting how the densely overlapping branches did not move as he entered the green face of the forest. Caruzo was merely absorbed.

  “I can’t stay long.” These were the first words his son found.

  “I thought maybe dinner.”

  “It’s Thursday. I can’t leave Jules alone.”

  His restaurant did not come up without mention of this name. “Oh, I’ll bet you can,” the Professor said.

  They stood face to face in the falling light, the Professor’s head just a degree to one side. The boy wasn’t sleeping well, he thought. There were dark circles under his eyes. Black hair strawing this way and that. Was I wiry back then, like he is now? A little pale? They were still around the same six-foot height, the Professor observed, looking steadily into his son’s eyes and thinking: I have not yet begun to shrink.

  Jeremy thought only that his father looked better than he might under the circumstances. His eyes were bright, his brows pranced upward with good humour. True, his hair was dirty and his fingernails were black, and he was carrying an old wooden fly-fishing net pinched under one elbow for no evident reason.

  “Perhaps you’ll stay long enough to see me catch my dinner then,” the Professor said. One needed darkness, he went on to explain. And so they sat on the bench and talked, circling but not meeting the matter at hand. Demand nothing, the Professor thought. And so they talked about the Stanley Park game-bird population instead. A point of mutual interest, the Professor imagined.

  “You eat duck?” Jeremy asked. A passer-by might have assumed he was about to provide cooking tips. Sear off the breast on a medium grill, skin side down. Render the fat. Finish skin side up, just a couple minutes. Sauce it and you’re good to go.

  But to which the Professor answered: “I’ve been here quite a few months and I didn’t bring groceries. Have you eaten starlings?” He was aware that it sounded like a challenge. “Delicious, although you’ll need two or three per person.”

  “I’ve eaten ortolan” Jeremy said, and then was irritable with himself for being drawn into the conversation on that level.

  “Now, the mallard is a fantastically light sleeper,” the Professor informed him.

  Jeremy looked away.

  “The canvasback even more so, fiendishly difficult to catch. The important thing is to learn a little each day here. Just a little. I spent a week trying to catch my first bird. A week. Do you know what I mean?”

  “I have no idea what you mean,” Jeremy answered. “I buy my ducks direct from a guy named Bertrand who lives on a farm up the valley.”

  “Although presumably someone catches them for Bertrand. Say though, I’ve been reading about you. Earlier this year. Anya Dickie’s review of The Monkey’s Foot. Brilliant job.”

  “The Monkey’s Paw Bistro.”

  “Purple prose but a nice conclusion. How did the Dickie woman say it again?”

  Jeremy sighed and looked out over the lagoon. The dynamic between them, he thought, didn’t change much with the years, the location, or their relative mental health.

  “ ‘Crosstown Celebrates Local Beverages and Bounty,’ ” Jeremy finally said, reciting the headline, which was also the lead line and the closing line of a typically enthusiastic Dickie restaurant review. She had been quite taken with the way Jules and he shared a passion for local meat, produce, cheese and wine.

  “I could use that,” the Professor said. “ ‘Local bounty’ is rather good. I think we share this passion, you and I.”

  Jeremy considered a retort along the lines of: “You and I share nothing but blood.” But he imagined this approach would end the conversation. He would get no advice and have who knows what other effect on his father, and so he sat there and listened as the Professor elaborated on their supposed professional overlap, describing what he called “the stories of the residents.” There was great deference in his voice. There had always been people here, the Professor said, solemn. There had been a First Nation, of course. Squatters later. Men who lived in trees. But this generation was the homeless, the new Stanley Park people. This was the story—collected lives and anecdotes, assorted obsessions and misfortunes—the Professor would now stitch together. The great Work-In-Progress.

  “Is Sopwith Hill taking it?” Jeremy asked. A prestigious if aging textbook house, Sopwith had done the Professor’s other books, some of these approaching mainstream popularity. Jeremy actually read one before the disastrous fall of 1987, before he fled to the culinary institute in Dijon. He couldn’t remember the title, but he thought the Professor had spent three months in the downtown east side, interviewing panhandlers. Panhandling himself and living in a range of unsafe outdoor places, including under parked cars left overnight in a downtown parkade. Jeremy heard this story after the fact, his mother’s bitter version. At one point (she had fumed) somebody had returned early to retrieve their car and had nearly run him over. He moved into an unused culvert behind the SeaBus Terminal at that point. “To be run over, that would maybe be the best to understand these people
. These ‘no-homes,’ ” she had said to Jeremy. “Only in dying like them, you can no longer write about them.”

  The Professor looked briefly away before answering the question. His son’s tone registered doubt, incredulity. “They’ll take it eventually.” But his voice was a little tight.

  So Jeremy sat back on the bench they had found, ran his fingers through his hair, which was in worse disarray than usual, a manic bristle. It was only appropriate that it started to rain lightly just then, fine drops hissing into the foliage around them.

  “Fires,” said the Professor, attempting to illustrate his point about learning a little each day. “Now there’s something I knew nothing about. Thank God for Caruzo.”

  It was, for a moment, the single most unexpected revelation of the evening: The Professor could light fires.

  They talked for over an hour this way, holding one another at a familiar arm’s-length, both in their own way reflecting that Hélène was all the distance between them. Alive, she provided the bridge. Gone, she was the chasm itself. They might not yet have filled any of that emptiness, but a silver distance opened between them and the city. They sat, at the very least, in the same descending darkness, looking across the lagoon to the now gleaming towers of the West End, a parallel universe separated from them by the surface of the water on which slept hundreds of ducks.

  “You stand watch,” the Professor instructed quietly, when he deemed the time was right.

  “For what?”

  It was only his first visit. “Others.”

  Jeremy looked distinctly concerned.

  “Not militant vegetarians precisely. More like the police.”

  “Oh, just that,” the chef said. “Well, then: Charge.”

  Jeremy took shelter under a cedar. The Professor got down on his knees and began to creep across the walkway. He held the old fly-fishing net in front of himself as he approached the clutch of rushes on the far side of the path. He rose to his knees and parted the papery stalks silently, the net aloft. Jeremy could make out several ducks within range. As he watched, all movement ceased.

  And then the Professor merely fell forward, arm outstretched, pitching across the water. It was like a silent movie until a quarter second before his impact, when every duck within sixty yards burst from sleep and the lagoon simultaneously, and all previous tranquility, all silver thoughtfulness and reflection, drained out of the water in a spray of violent splashing. The air filled with black thudding shapes. Several birds left the water in a confused tangle and collided with one another, falling back into the lagoon. One fell onto the path in front of Jeremy, where it skidded, spun, seemed to glance at him in reproach before launching into flight again.

  The one snared in the net, meanwhile, flew briefly in desperation, powerful wings holding it above water despite the Professor’s full weight. Fighting. Flailing. Sinking suddenly. His father’s head and upper body disappeared into the lagoon. He lay there, half-submerged, like he’d been shot. And then there was a gasping re-emergence, the duck now held by its neck, quivering, nearly drowned. The Professor breathing heavily. Water plastering down his hair, running down his face, his body blackened with it. He set the net aside, took the duck firmly in both his hands. He snapped his wrists sharply, cracking the neck. The bird was instantly still.

  The Professor raised a finger to his lips. They waited. No celebration was permitted yet. The circling survivors re-flocked above them, then homed in stupidly on another not distant part of the lagoon. As they swished to their new sleeping place the stillness slowly returned to the water.

  Still no movement from the Professor, except a slight cocking of his head to the breeze. Listening to some small sound, measuring an intangible indicator that he knew from experience must either dissipate or return before he dared move. And when the Professor’s variable fell (or rose) into the green zone, only then did they quietly scramble away from the lagoon, up through the grassy passageway to the Park Drive. Pausing just seconds at the edge of the new blacktop with its bright yellow markings for the angle parkers, then across this surface and into the cool forest. Even here they walked a distance without speaking.

  When the city was almost inaudible, replaced with the sound of clacking cedars and moaning wind, the Professor stopped. “Ha ha,” he said. Beaming again. He held his hands apart, in one the duck dangling by the neck, dripping water, beak and eyes serenely closed. “Look at that, would you? It never stops pleasing me to pluck from this forest the things that I need. Carefully and craftily I make my way.”

  He looked from his son to the bird and back again.

  “And you are off to work now, I suppose,” the Professor said, hoping he had stirred something. Guilt might do for now, although curiosity would be better.

  “It’s a nice bird,” Jeremy heard himself say calmly, although his heart was pounding. Against his own better judgment he reached for the duck, thinking of cooking school and of France, of the ducks he himself had been taught to kill. Here, as the trees rattled against one another above them, Jeremy reached across his father to touch this duck, wanting to hold it while he knew it was still warm.

  “Look at that. A nice redhead.”

  “Canvasback,” the Professor corrected.

  “Redhead,” he said again, more emphatically.

  “Oh no,” the Professor said. “Definitely a canvasback.”

  “This duck,” Jeremy said, irritated at their disagreement during this brief moment he had been enjoying, “is a redhead.”

  “This duck,” answered the Professor, wincing now at the error, “is no redhead. With all due respect to your culinary education, Chef, I fear it has failed you here. There are pheasants, there are guinea hens and ortolans. Then there are park ducks. If you want to know about park ducks, I am, as they say, your man.”

  “Chestnut head—” Jeremy began.

  “Cripes, Jeremy, shut the yawp just for a minute. Your red has a pronounced high forehead, a grey body and a much blacker tail. They are also a good deal less common around here, rare even. You see, my boy, I wouldn’t have taken a redhead had there been a redhead to take. Which there wasn’t, ergo this duck isn’t.”

  At which point he took the bird back and slid it into a plastic shopping bag he produced from under his sweater. And without warning to Jeremy, he peeled off to the left and disappeared into the black forest between a towering stump and a half-fallen maple.

  “This is ludicrous,” Jeremy said, stopping and speaking emphatically to the empty pine-needle path. “I mean, … shit,” he said. Here they were again, firing at each other in the blackness.

  He looked up the path, down it, into the still darker forest, listening to the Professor moving away from him through the underbrush, the soft sound floating back. This moment would be the time to come to one’s senses, Jeremy thought. To get the hell back into the city, to The Monkey’s Paw, where twenty-six covers would be seated, conversation rising. Jules was probably now riding a wave of incoming appetizer orders, beginning to slam, the soundtrack urging everything and everybody onward into the night.

  Or he could wait here. Thirty seconds from now the Professor would be gone. He might still be able to hear him, but he’d never find him. Not in that. In the darkness and the trees and the bramble. And the Professor wouldn’t even notice, or he’d notice, maybe, but not be particularly surprised. He would forge ahead through this forest to his hidden spot. (Perhaps he doesn’t want me to see his spot, thought Jeremy.) Either way, he’d be fine. Just listen to him.

  Somewhere up in the woods, the Professor was reciting a poem quietly. Jeremy had to hold himself very still to pick out the words.

  “With an hoste of furious fancies,

  Whereof I am commander,

  With a burning speare, and a horse of air,

  To the wildernesse I wander.”

  A challenge, of course, and it didn’t get any quieter; the poem now came floating out of the swaying blackness from a single spot where the Professor stood, smiling
and reciting, leaning his head back and looking towards the crack of black sky visible at the tops of the trees.

  Jeremy crashed into the forest towards him. And when he found his father, they stood for a moment and looked at each other. Jeremy’s favourite cowboy boots were past wet, the branches now reaching to soak his back and neck.

  “Is this it?” he said. Through the trees Jeremy could make out campfires spread in the darkness around them.

  “Not quite yet,” the Professor said, motioning with his head that they should continue. He turned and hoisted a leg up to a foothold on a large root-covered rock, gripped the gnarled wood with his fingertips and disappeared over the top.

  It was the root end of a gigantic tree, Jeremy realized. Torn from the soil by a gust of wind, torn up along with the huge boulder to which the roots had been clinging. Jeremy clambered inexpertly after his father and stood at the base of the broad trunk. It stretched out in front of them like a bridge, 150 feet long, silver in the moonlight. As they walked it bowed slightly beneath them. It surprised Jeremy, this slight bending of the massive trunk. He would have thought their weight was not enough to move such a great thing, a thing that vaulted them through the brush to a completely different part of the park. A denser part. A place that had no relation to anything that he had previously known.

  “What we want is a fire,” the Professor said from ahead of him, as they descended a slope.

  And he lit good fires too, Jeremy discovered. After half an hour tramping through the damp and the dark, the Professor made a small hot fire in just a few minutes. Built with few words spoken, in a trench at the centre of his camp.

  While the Professor changed into dry clothes, Jeremy squatted back-assed to the heat and considered that if he were abandoned here, he would be lost until morning. Perhaps even then. So busy a park, thousands of visitors a day. Never once had he felt lost in it, as he was now.

  A map and a global positioning system would have revealed to him that he was not far from things that he knew. Just a couple of hundred yards off the Park Drive, near Prospect Point, in fact. Here a densely forested slope fell from the road, down to the top of a cliff that towered a hundred feet above the seawall and the ocean below. The Professor had found a clearing between the trees at the very edge of this cliff. There were tamped-down ferns and a tent built against the trunk of a cedar, a space big enough for one very still, very accomplished sleeper. And through the branches of this tree, and the others that umbrella-ed over the small clearing, one had a view of the harbour, freighters silent at their moorage, well lit. At the bottom of the cliffs and to the left stood Siwash Rock, which pillared fifty feet out of the water near the shore. A rock that was once a bather, legend had it, a bather honoured by the gods with this permanent place at the lip of forest that had been his home.