CHAPTER FIFTEEN

After much rain, it was a sunny morning, Monday, October 11, 1959, and John Holsun's breakfast was ready for him the instant he brought his last and best foot down off the last linoleum-clad step. The stairs were those of his fine south Cambie Street house, and the breakfast, Kellogg's All-Wheat cereal, Jersey Farms homogenized milk, Rogers sugar, and Nabob coffee, was prepared and served to him by his wife, Marlene Nisbett Holsun. Marlene Nisbett Holsun, born a Nisbett, wooed in a Pontiac, married to a painter, went by that three-sided monicker only on the most formal occasions, such as her memorial service in the Broadway Funeral Chapel, on Monday, October 12, 1998.

That same October morning Brian Stewart came downstairs in his parents' house in the 7000 block of Larch Street and tucked into two Fraser Farms eggs expertly and lightly fried in Parkay oleomargarine, and two slices of McGavin's (brown) bread, toasted and spread with honey or raspberry jam, this latter adulterated with "added pectin," both from Woodward's Food Floor. These items prepared and served by Dorothy (Dot) Stewart. Her family of origin and expiry date not known or not important at this time.

In mid-egg Brian tapped his knife against the edge of his plate, and again, and again, a sharp chink chink chink. "Brian, stop that," said his mum. But the young fellow was in a brown study, or let's say a muddle. Peculiar dreams had assailed him as he lay in his bed under a map of the world with Tanganyika and Bechuanaland depicted in strawberry red to show British responsibility. He'd had, in these dreams, intimacies with the Stewart family dog, a Lab named George, and Brian could neither countenance such images, events, and feelings, nor connect them usefully with any part of his real life or his restless libido. He had had some difficulties with his girl friend Marjorie, difficulties that were driving him crazy. A guy is a guy, as Doris Day crooned. He headed off to work.

Getting off the Number Ten bus near Apex Painting, Brian fell in, just outside the office, with co-worker Dave Powell. Powell had narrow hunched shoulders, several prominent yellow hounddog teeth, and yellow freckles and freckle-coloured hair. He attended the University of Oregon, where he managed athletics teams. He had worked as a copy boy in the sports department of the Vancouver Bun, and he knew well the downtown East End and the waterfront, including the street that bore his own name. He knew Hastings and Water Streets. He knew all about Carrall Street, whose name alone, turning in the mouth, made a bitter taste. History, orient winds, the seaport, rusting iron plates, shadows, opium!, stabbings in the alley, a drawn-out sigh as a body slides down a wall, glistening blood, horror and boys' delights. Grown-up delights, the delighted imagining of the boys in-between. Powell knew all about Frince's rooms and what men went up there with what kind of creature, and what they did, illustrated with startling gestures, fingers and tongue.

Hunched and hustling he guided Brian into the lunchroom, where the young men sat at varnished plywood tables and rooted in their black lunchboxes for cookies or cake that mum must have put in there somewhere, gobbling some down and yarping up gossip and hearsay.

"So we're up the side of the Coca Cola building and Holsun says it's supposed to be at the seventh floor, but he says I can't see any letters, do you see it Brian? And I'm looking up maybe eight, nine feet over my head, we're at the fifth floor, and I can see just these big shapes, not letters but these wiggily shapes."

"The Bun said they were letters, they were hieroglyphics."

"They weren't letters, they were just wavy dark shapes. But in the middle of the bunch of them there was, it looked like, letters tee, eeh, and something not so clear, and an ell, or two ells. It was maybe just more wavy lines. And there was another word beside it."

Danny Charles, silent to this point, absorbed in the blinding clarity of a darkly secret vision, said, "You're full of shit, Brian."

"I'm not, I saw a real word, at least two words, up there."

"So how come Holsun didn't see anything."

"I'm... "

"Holsun said there wasn't nothing up there but some smudges, like the bricks were dirty or something."

A giggle from Dave Powell.

"Jesus Christ, I know what I saw, I saw some words, some letters... "

"You're so full of shit, Stewart."

Silence fell on Brian Stewart; silence fell from him.

Jack the crew chief leaned in the door. "Who's going to Malkin Brothers?"

"Me and Tim," said Danny Charles, getting up and following Jack out into the hall. The lunchroom group dwindled out after them, leaving just Brian Stewart there.

After a minute a navy blue uniform appeared in the doorway, a man in it with a lot of white skin around his ears and hairline. Another behind him.

"Brian Stewart?"

"Yeah?"

They walked in.

"We want to talk to you."

On the hospital's fourth floor, by the elevator, faltered a man who could equally have been patient or visiting relative, a man in that age and condition where there is no real difference between hospital visitor and visitee. He uttered a sighing snuffle from deep in his throat, like the Atom Man in the Superman serial on Junior Radio Theatre, or The Mummy in Edge of Time. He wore white leather shoes and a sweater the colour of arterial blood.

At the nursing station of Ward Four West a nurse recounted her Sunday endeavours.

"I had the table laid with peach place mats and a white cloth with dark green napkins and pink roses, and it looked really neat. I made this really nice rice...meringue with a tart, creamy sauce."

Nearby, under white hospital sheets, M lay aswoon. He dreamed of Davis, California, where he had never been. He knew, he saw its broad macadam streets, eucalyptus, palms, giant cactuses in the back yards, red tiles, the swimming pool. Davis, the calmness of the landscape by the Sacramento river, the broad valley, the drying, healing heat. Mexicans nearby? He could nearly taste the sombreros.

But voices pulled him away from his dream. Voices, and a Demerol-hazed glimpse of two forms near his doorway, one in deepest blue, another in deepest red. Voices pointed quietly at M.

"...don't want him yet."

"...should do that right away... "

"...want to send him home first."

The forms faded. M nodded again in slumber.

And twelve days later, he resurfaced at an infamous "pub" party, this one hosted by a brushcut law student named Gerry Lambskin, a winsome lad, half faggot, sometimes dated by A. With his face looking like an old leather waffle, M was in the kitchen, wearing his black corduroy suit. He was whirling and shrieking in front of a huge black iron dutch oven, two-thirds full of nude spaghetti. Four empty blue and yellow Catelli boxes were on the counter. M was saucing the spaghetti with tinned tomato sauce that thopped into the kettle like flung melted lead, and thorp after vigorous thorp of Paterson's Worcestershire Sauce. Again and again the young man pushed and thrashed into the mixture a wooden spoon laden with Rogers Golden Sugar. "Damned dirty heathens!" he cried to D, "They have no demerara!"

"I didn't know one put brown sugar in spaghetti," said D, whose ideas of food, being English, were quite limited.

"Who the hell knows what they put in spaghetti?" said M, "And who the hell cares what they put in spaghetti? This is what I put in spaghetti, and what I put in spaghetti - "

Here he flung a full handful of black peppercorns out of a Spice Islands jar into the kettle.

" - is what needs to go in spaghetti! Nuff said!"

M was, in truth, as drunk as a lobster, on gin and soda water.

"Now that is solipsism," said a blonde girl in poison-green taffeta from the kitchen doorway.

M half whirled, wooden spoon clutched knoutlike before him.

"Tartan, you sharpmouthed philosophical! Keep away from my mixings."

Growling, he spun away. He fixed his small red bear eyes on Kathy Richards, who'd unluckily stashed her mickey of rum in a kitchen cupboard and was now about to pour herself a refill. M harangued her about house-building. His brother Ron, an affluent operator in commercial circles, areas quite beyond the ken or interest of the bearded younger brother, was having a house built for him on a rocky and woodsy outcrop in West Vancouver. M, himself unable to saw a straight line or get a pup tent up (do you inflate the thing perhaps?), was entranced with the arts and complexities, the portentous mysteries of joinery, plumbing, electrification, the building trades. He compared these arts to the fine arts, and found all advantage, all merit, in the former.

"Next to a good carpenter, Praxiteles was a prat," he bellowed.

Kathy R clutched her rum and coke, ducked her head and shot for the hall.

Gerry Lambskin's parents, just arrived home by Mutual Taxi, gazed at one another with a wild surmise as they started up the walk toward the house. Out of the mock-Spanish frontery of their very own lil home in the west rolled and reeked a great effluvium of yeast-ridden youth, vomitings, noises, cries, rhythmic lurching, bell-like smashes of things, sudden, sharp grunts of pain, the popping of tears, wails, whales dancing in the dining room, eight thousand crows shitting and laughing in unison. Their house was in danger.

Hear the guests, locked into the drone of their own voices, let knock at door who may:

"So they have this neat floor, black and white squares... "

"...kick your frigging teeth in - "

"Anyway, Audrey is writing her novel in longhand, not using a typewriter."

"Marlene!"

"And they have these new french fries; they're crinkle-cut... just root beer, you can only get root beer."

"And what's going to happen when Russia gives atomic weapons to China? You know they're gonna do that."

"I figure the eyes at the window are The Asp, and Punjab is standing behind him in the dark, you can't see him."

"Marlene!"

"He tried to grab my leg and I kicked him, kicked his hand, and he's saying that I broke his thumb...but you know I was laughing, I couldn't stop laughing, can you imagine, I could have really hurt him and I couldn't stop laughing."

"I can't give you a ride home because she's sleeping in my car."

Against all this hubadeehub and Beelzebub came a stentorian knocking at the door. 'Twas not the Lambskins; indeed those bonny folk, about to plunge with courage into the house, were thrust back against the railing of their own front porch doorjamb by a lank and skinny arm as the door was opened by A, to whom a voice cried out, "Collecting for the heart fund!"

It was an old woman, scrawny but endowed with demon strength, with a leather case, a purple shawl, and mad, bulbous eyes.

"Well, I don't know... " A was in some confusion. "Mr. and Mrs. Lambskin aren't home right now" (The Lambskins in fact teetered and gibbered in the shadows just outside the doorway).

"Now look here, dear. Don't you claim that you don't know what the heart fund is all about," shouted the crone. "Here!"

She grabbed A's wrist, circling it with her bony grip. A was frightened, felt four years old, the witch had her. The old horror clamped A's hand against the witch chest, no breast at all. "Feel that!" she shrieked.

A felt the great, mad engine banging the cage, the little ivory bars, felt a black spirit swooping toward her.

Then came another sound, a wailing behind them in the night, and the Lambskins are once again pushed aside, and the old crone, in the midst of her diatribe, faded into the laurel hedge bordering the walkway. Four of Vancouver's Finest now barged through the door, marched down the central hallway to the kitchen, and without pause seized the tilting, snorting M, the largest cop grasping a Goliath's handful of black corduroy jacket. With another large cop shoring him up under the shoulder, M went down the hall, his desert boots scarcely touching the floor.

And out into the night, the five of them, no words, no warrant, no by-your-leave. Jesus, thought G, thronging on the porch with several others, gaping at the dark car sliding away. They're going to get us.