Last of the Independents. Sam Wiebe
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as most of us are. Facts have to cohere into a story of some kind before we can deal with them.”
Katherine had placed an ATM envelope on the corner of the table, currency visible through the holes. “What’s that?”
“Five hundred dollars,” she said. “Half of Laws’s bonus. I couldn’t take it all once I saw how much it was.”
“It’s yours,” I said. “You earned it.”
“When I worked at White Spot, management took a portion of the tips. Take it. Or put it into the business. Upgrade some of this shitty furniture.”
I took the money. “What’s your schedule for this semester?”
“I’m yours Tuesdays and Fridays starting next week.”
“Drop out of school and come work for me.”
She laughed. “Seriously?”
“I need the help.”
“You want me to drop out and do this for the rest of my life? On what kind of wage?”
“You just got five hundred dollars.”
“Is that likely to happen again?”
“We can negotiate,” I said. “This isn’t about money, it’s about you fulfilling your calling.”
She smirked. “Which is what?”
“Every person has a purpose to serve. This —” I swept my arm majestically around the room, Charlton Heston style “— is yours.”
“And what’s your calling, Mike?”
“I’m here to make sure you don’t squander another three years on a bachelor’s degree, and then the rest of your life in government service. Smart as you are, why the fuck would you want to work for the Canadian government?”
“Money. Security. Benefits.”
“That’s the language of fear.”
“No, Mike, that’s the language of adults.”
I said, “Work here.”
She said, “I’ll think about it.”
III
The Blessed Peacemakers
In the lobby of the Cambie Street police station, above the plaques commemorating the dead, is stenciled an excerpt of witness testimony from the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.” Every time I step inside I’m drawn to that wall. I look from the scripture to the plaque beneath the word peacemakers. I stare at the bottom row. I find the photo of the clean-shaven man fourth from the end, and I lock eyes with him.
It’s a photo my grandmother doesn’t display. He is so eager to do good. His is the expression of a man who has never reckoned with deep uncertainty. His world is one where the law, the Sovereign, and God are perfect and infallible and in no way contradict one another. It’s hard to look at that face and believe he would know anything about living in the world today.
My grandfather, Jacob Kessler, was born the year of Stagecoach and Gone with the Wind. A rawboned Mennonite from Moosefuck, Manitoba, he rebels, runs away from home, gets drunk, and enlists. After a stint in the navy he moves west, joins the Vancouver Police, meets a thin, sharply beautiful girl with a glint of prairie poverty in her eye. They have a son and a daughter: a nuclear family in the nuclear age. The son eventually hangs himself. The daughter meets the draft-dodging scion of the Drayton & Kling Paper Products empire. They’re together twelve years before they have a kid. The pressure gets to Jacob’s son-in-law and he splits for an ashram in Southern California. His daughter follows as soon as she sheds the pregnancy weight. The kid only knows them as abstracts.
Around the house, Jacob was a dark presence, a stoop-shouldered, apelike, Victor McLaglen-type who drank lemon juice during the afternoons and Crown Royal in the evenings; who watched hockey scores and Hee Haw and owned three long-playing records, all of them Merle Haggard. Doted on me, took me camping and hunting, always teaching.
As a cop he never sought advancement and hated the brass. He stayed CFL, Constable For Life. In the seventies, his heyday, he was part of an anti-gang unit charged with taking the neighbourhoods back from the local gangs. Rumours abound about members of the H-Squad descending on the East Vancouver parks, preying on the predators, beating them senseless or worse. He didn’t talk much about those days.
Six weeks before mandatory retirement, Jacob rousted a drunk who had passed out after rubbing fecal matter on the cenotaph in Victory Square. The drunk stabbed him in the throat with the broken-off handle of a sherry bottle, then hightailed, taking his gun and radio.
Legend has it Jacob completed the walk to St. Paul’s Hospital, passed out at the door, and never woke up.
Four years later, the moment I’d met the recommended minimum of post-secondary education, I dropped out of college and applied for the job.
It didn’t work out. Which is why, on a cool Friday in September, three days before Labour Day, I was staring up at my grandfather’s face, a stranger amid the day-to-day traffic of the Main Street station.
Gavin Fisk had said he’d be down in a minute. Seventeen minutes later he strolled out of the elevator, a hockey bag slung over his shoulder. A tall, muscular white man with a stubble-dotted head, wearing grey sweats and a shirt that said POLICE: The WORLD’S LARGEST STREET GANG.
He grinned and grabbed my hand in an alpha-male handshake. I upped the torque of my own grip. Rule one for dealing with people like Gavin Fisk: never show weakness and never back down. Otherwise you’ll spend every morning handing over your lunch money.
“Encyclopedia Brown,” he said. “What’d you want to see me about?”
He didn’t wait for my response but kept moving. We walked out of the station, down Wylie to the high-fenced lot beneath the Cambie Street Bridge that contained the motor pool and the staff parking.
“One of Lam’s Missing Persons cases from earlier this year. Django James Szabo?”
“Lunatic father,” Fisk said. We stopped by a white F350 spotted with gull shit, parked over the white line so it took up two spaces. He unlocked the canopy and hefted his hockey gear into the bed.
“I talked to him,” he said, “took him through his story a couple times. He was real calm till we get to the questions nobody likes — did he hit his kid, did he fuck his kid, and I’m being diplomatic as hell — then out of nowhere he overturns the table and lunges at me.”
“He was distraught.”
“Yes, Mike, I guessed that too.”
“You look into his story?”
Fisk unlocked the door of the cab and propped one foot on the running board. He rolled down the window and threaded his arm through.
“If I remember right, he’d dragged his kid to a bunch of junk shops. They all remembered him, frequent customer or seller or whatever he was. He sold some old junk to a music studio. The hot piece of ass that owns the studio said the same thing, though I grilled her very thoroughly on the subject.”
That wolfish grin. “What about the pawn shop?” I said.
“Not much to get out of them. Store tape shows the kid goofing around, his dad sending him to the car. Dad leaves, comes back, acts upset or a reasonable facsimile. They call the cops, the cops show up.”
“Anything suspicious on the tape prior to their arrival?”
Fisk’s good humour chilled a few degrees.
“No,” he said. “’Magine that, no one walked in with a sign round their neck saying ‘I plan to take a kid.’ Has the dad unloaded his conspiracy theories on you yet?”
“He thinks