Death on a Rocky Little Island Read online

So first, I went to see Dwayne. Dwayne knows stuff. Actually, Dwayne, you see, knows everything.

  He knows how to skin a deer and fly a plane (though he hasn’t actually done either of these things himself) and is a storehouse of miscellaneous facts like Canadians eat more pickles and make more phone calls per capita than anybody else in the world.

  And none of it has ever done him enough good to matter. I guess that’s because he’s either too logical or not logical enough, I don’t know which.

  A fellow will advise him to buy shares in Acme Products, and he’ll say, “Acme! Their products suck and the management’s looting the company and they haven’t done anything but lose money for years.” Then he’ll buy shares in Betta Products, which make “good stuff that’s the wave of the future.”

  Eventually Acme will take over Betta, but only after Betta’s gone bankrupt and the shares are worthless. And he never figures it out, even later.

  Not that I should talk. I’m a former economics prof who never made the right investments, either, and I should know better.

  Dwayne’s a big guy, to say the least. He’s a few inches taller than me and a hundred pounds heavier. He’s thickly bearded and has a love of flannel plaid shirts and work pants that make him look like the bad guy in a movie about people lost in the woods.

  If I had that great a mass-to-surface ratio, I’d have an electric fan strapped to my back and go around in a thong, but Dwayne never seems to get hot.

  When I phoned him, he invited me into his apartment, ten floors up, with a good view of the Zellers parking lot and a new housing division. He was into blue plaid with jeans, so I knew he was in a good mood. He’s usually in a good mood, anyway although he complains a lot.

  “Tea?” he asked. I nodded, although most teas taste like dead weeds in water to me. But at least I wouldn’t finish it too quickly, which I have a tendency to do to most beverages.

  “So what can I do for you,” Dwayne said, when we’d passed the small talk and actually had cups of tea in front of us on his Arborite table. The table has dozens of burn marks, because he often solders circuits there. It also had a hard hat, which seemed odd, since Dwayne had an office job. He put a carton of milk between us like a Great Wall of Skepticism.

  Let me tell you about Dwayne’s apartment. Dwayne collects things. He’s got things stashed around the apartment in bundles and shelves. He’s got whatever anyone might need somewhere in his apartment, in the storage area in the basement, or in a barn that he and another guy rent.

  I visited the barn, once. It was like finding a lost treasureland of the non-valuable, a collection of that stuff that inhabits the gray netherworld between stuff that’s valuable enough to sell and stuff that should be left out in front of the house on Monday for the big green city truck to haul to it’s newest methane mountain and covered up with dirt.

  The whole barn should have been covered with pumice, so some day some archeologist might dig it all up and say, “What the fuck did they need that stuff for?” I wandered around the barn for an hour and found a whole wagonload of stuff that I’d needed in the last year and stuff that I might very well need in the next year. I’d escaped, jogging out of there before I got infected with some sort of accumulating infection and started my own barn.

  What he can’t keep in the barn, he keeps in his apartment. One wonders how many girls Dwayne’s brought back to his place, only to have their first thoughts be, “I gotta get a new phone number, quick.”

  And he likes it all visible, so things get stacked on the floor, which means it’s visible if you don’t count stuff piled on top of it or the dust that collects in places that are just too hard to clean.

  “I want to go canoeing,” I said. “Out on the 30,000 islands in Georgian Bay.”

  He gave me a thumbs-down. “Can’t come,” he said. “Got some sort of a date. That day, whatever day it is. Guy out Stony Creek way has something to sell. An almost complete set of women’s curling trading cards. I got a chick. She’s interested in going with me.”

  Now, I doubted that. Dwayne’s love life is always rocky, and lately it had been a real dry spell. He’s a real guy sort of guy, and finds it as hard to understand women as women find it hard to understand him.

  But I wouldn’t have wanted to take him canoeing, anyway, unless I got a lot bigger canoe. And he learned to like camping. And learned when to stop talking.

  But his assumption that I came for information was accurate, anyway. Not that it was a hard guess, since even guys tended to tap into his knowledge. He resented it at times, till he realized that was all the company he was likely to get most of the time.

  “Darn,” I said, as sadly as I could. “You’re always easy to talk to.” I added more sugar and milk to the tea. “I guess I’ll have to try for someone else. Aisha doesn’t want me to go alone. Got any ideas?”

  I tried to categorize the stuff closest to the table while Dwayne ruminated a while on mutual acquaintances, with a tendency to dwell on those of the opposite gender. “Take Patty, he said. “She’d be a great little companion on a trip. Unless she got sunburned nipples out in the canoe. You’ll have to put some lotion on them. If she forgets.” He looked at me earnestly, leaning forward. “There’s flat rock. And lots of sunshine out there, you know. Great place for suntanning. I’ve always wondered if she has an overall tan. I bet she does. She’s the type. Outdoorsy, you know. And cuter’n a spaniel puppy.” He winked at me. “And she’s not speaking to that idiot boyfriend now. So I hear.”

  “Or,” he went on, “there’s Alma Hetcher. Good old Alma. She’s on the plump side. But you’ve got a big canoe. And she seems so eager. I imagine you could get her to do anything you wanted. Just ask. As well,” he added, “as paddling your canoe. And carrying a packsack or two. Great little snuggler, I bet. ‘Specially on a rainy night. Get a double sleeping bag. Lots of room to move around in, and you’re set.”

  I let him go on a while: an active fantasy life is pretty well essential in Dwayne’s case, most of the time. Either of those two girls would have made better travelling companions than anybody I was likely to come up with, but much as Aisha might accuse me, half seriously, of “canoeing” with other women, if it ever really happened she’d know it within a day somehow, and the consequences wouldn’t bear imagining. I got a small shudder down my spine just not imagining them.

  Sometime in there a small black-and-white cat came quietly and nervously out of the bedroom.

  “Where’d you get a cat?” I asked.

  Dwayne glanced around, his face reddening, as he whispered “Shit,” and reached for the phone.

  “Well, I thought of Phil as a backup plan.”

  “Phil?” Dwayne shook a shaggy head. “I guess if you’re stuck he’d do.”

  I scratched my chin. “First I’ve got to think of a way to get him interested in canoeing out there. Know of any treasure buried out on one of those islands?”

  “There’s one,” Dwayne said, to my surprise. “I’ll get a map.” He rose from the table.

  The phone rang. Halfway across the kitchen Dwayne looked from the phone to the table, with a tiny hesitation. It was enough.

  The cat was on his head before Dwayne could reach either the phone or the hard hat. The cat yowled, and Dwayne yowled, and they headed as a package for the bathroom.

  I picked up the phone. It was someone I didn’t know, and I told the person that Dwayne, unfortunately, wasn’t available at the moment. I offered to take a number, but the other party hung up. From the bathroom I could hear the sound of the shower.

  In a moment the cat ran out, soaking wet, and vanished back into the bedroom.

  Dwayne came out, a towel wrapped around his head, his shirt dripping.

  “Bleeding much?” I asked.

  “A bit. The first time it happened I tried to pull the cat off. That wasn’t a good idea. Or so the people at the clinic said.”

  “You could wear the hard hat all the time.”

  “I find it uncomf
ortable. Anyway most of the time I can get it on before Jinny gets to me.”

  “This happen a lot?”

  “Every time the phone rings,” Dwayne said. “I don’t know why.”

  “The cat could be put outdoors.” The apartment was eight floors up and had no balcony.

  Dwayne grinned. “Haven’t I thought of it often enough. But it’s not my cat. Jenny left it here for me to take care of. I guess its her new boyfriend’s. Allergic to cats.”

  I remembered that Jenny had been a former girlfriend: obviously she still thought of Dwayne as a convenience of sorts. “Jinny’s the cat. Jenny’s the girl?”

  “You remember Jenny. The one with the spiky hairdo.” He loosened his collar.

  Jenny was one of Dwayne’s big passions. She tended to come back and live with him between her episodes with other boyfriends. She always returned with some story about what a bastard her now-ex boyfriend had been and how great Dwayne looked in comparison. Dwayne seemed to believe it. Personally I’d have sent her and her cat out for a walk to Havana. To each his own, I guess.

  “You understand, then. About the cat.”

  “Sure.” I took a sip of the tepid tea. It was like something from a puddle in the driveway on a July afternoon, but without the chewy bits.“You were looking for a map?”

  Dwayne disconnected the phone cord. “Right. Right.” He got a road map of Ontario and spread it out on the table. “First thing you have to understand,” he said, “is about the money. It was made during prohibition.”

  “Prohibition?” I asked.

  “1919 to the end of 1933” he said. “The Americans voted down alcohol. And us Canadians smuggled the stuff by the gigagallons across the lakes. Hundreds of millions of bucks flowed into Canada.” He looked at me. “You don’t insist on pirate treasure or anything, do you?”

  “No, no. Phil is happy with any sort of buried money. He’s not fussy.”

  “Thought so.” Dwayne removed the towel and inspected the cuts in a hand mirror. Downstairs a dog started barking. Dwayne pressed a button under the table, and the barking turned to a couple of yelps and stopped. “Well, I might have some buried money up in those islands.”

  “I never heard of any smuggling up that way.”

  “Most people haven’t,” Dwayne told me. “Almost all the smuggling was across Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. And across the Detroit River. Maybe eighty percent of the stuff getting into the States came across around Windsor. Into Detroit.”

  “Makes sense to me,” I said. “For one thing, the US is only a mile or so across the Detroit River.”

  Dwayne nodded. “A lot of boats crossed that river. There was even a rumour of a pipe. People said it was laid across the bottom of the river to pump whiskey over.”

  “Why didn’t Canada vote prohibition in,” I asked. “Were we more sensible, or just a bunch of lushes?”

  “Oh, we did. Canada had given women the vote in 1917. Then just like the states, Canada went dry. Ontario voted in a Methodist preacher as premier and the next thing you know there wasn’t a legal place to get a drink north of Mexico. Except Quebec, of course.”

  “Except for medicinal purposes,” I guessed.

  “One doctor wrote over two hundred prescriptions in one day. After that before they doctors to writing 30 a month.”

  “So how do the Thirty Thousand Islands fit into this?” Dwayne is capable of infinite digression and I wanted to get him back on track.

  He smiled an all-knowing smile, as though I was asking him about one of the things only he knew. He’s got enough of those things, stored in his head so maybe Id tapped into one of them. We come,” he said, “to the strange case of the freighter, Jeannie Rogers.” He poured some hot water into the leftover tea in my cup and dropped a tea bag onto the mix.

  “We have, late in the game, a guy named Big Paul Stanley. At least that’s what the newspapers called him at the time.”

  The tea could have tasted worse, but only if the cup were also used as a cat-litter scoop. Maybe it was his way of making sure guests didn’t stay. I nodded.

  “Big Paul Stanley had a plan, it seems. From what little we know of the story, and most of what I tell you is speculation and probably fiction anyway.” He sipped his own tea, then added some diet ginger ale to the mix and put it into the microwave for a few seconds.

  “Big Paul Stanley decided to ship a freighter-load ─ the Jeannie Rogers being the freighter - of Canadian Whiskey straight to Chicago.” Dwayne scratched himself a couple of times on the head. I wondered if the cat had given him fleas as well as scratches.

  I had cats and dogs, one after another, when I was young, and if I were living by myself in a cabin in the woods I’d have one or two of each, just to chase the squirrels and welcome me home.

  But Aisha can’t keep up with a dog, and I’m away too much to be a companion to one. And I found that dogs aren’t all that much fun if you don’t have one yourself. My brother-in-law’s got two. They howl and bark when I show up, then spend their time watching me to see if I’ll do something that requires tearing my leg off. Or maybe I’m sitting in one of their ten favorite chairs or I might have something to feed them.

  If the constant staring doesn’t get me (and it does) I have only to turn my head and one of them’s got its head in my crotch, wet nose against my balls, for reasons known only to dogs. I drive into the yard pretty fast and leave pretty fast, but haven’t run over one yet. Not that I’ll stop trying.

  Cats are different from dogs. I’ve often wondered if some artist with an intergalactic government grant from an alien spaceship created them once, decided they were the ultimate in organic parasites, and departed for Regulus, smiling happily. There are about twenty different physical varieties and about three personality characteristics to cover all the cats on the planet. Here’s an animal that not only could be duplicated by animatronics, but be. A solar-powered three-button cat would have all the charm of the current organic ones, but wouldn’t have to have its litter changed. I love cats. Sure I do. Aisha has three. All of them watch me warily, and have since the misunderstanding with the chain saw.

  “By this time the States was shipping us raw industrial alcohol. There was no prohibition against making industrial alcohol. And the Canadians were adding colour and flavor. And shipping it back as quality aged Canadian whiskey.”

  “Chicago,” I pointed out, “is a lot further from the Canadian border than, say, Buffalo.”

  “Ain’t it ever!” Dwayne put one foot on a chair and leaned over the table. “But all the middle men and all the cops were along the areas close to the border. What if you could get a load into the heart of the States and past Capone and all his men? You could make about five times the profit on each case.”

  “I thought Al Capone’s headquarters was Chicago. At least it was when I watched the movies,” I said, going to the sink and pouring the tea into the fuzzy drain. “I should think that would be dangerous.” I searched his unlit refrigerator and found a can of Pepsi. I held it up.

  He nodded. “Oh, for sure. You wouldn’t want to try to do it twice. You could buy a sailboat today and ship a load of drugs into the country as a freelance. But someone would be waiting for you on the second trip.” Dwayne reconnected the telephone ─ I didn’t ask why - and put on the hard hat.

  “But,” Dwayne continued,” the feds got Capone in ’31. For tax evasion. Now in Detroit there were a bunch of well-organized gangs. But in Chicago Capone was the only game in town. So they gave him eight years in Alcatraz. At that point the city was a wide-open power struggle. A person had a chance to bring in a lot of booze. Or at least before the next big shot started taking his share. Especially since the police were finally starting to close down the Detroit corridor.”

  “So this boat….”

  “The Jeannie Rogers. He shipped twenty-eight or thirty boxcars worth of Quebec whiskey across Algonquin. Used the logging trains. loaded the boat at a place called Depot Harbour.” Dwayne began a rapid walk a
round the kitchen.

  I knew Depot Harbour. There’s nothing but concrete ruins there now. It had been a scenic ghost town for a few decades before some local kids torched the whole place.

  It started with the logging of the province of its stands of white pine. One of the motivations for the industrial revolution was the fact that Europe finally used up the last of its wood and began mining coal and making houses out of brick.

  Then Britain discovered just how much pine there was in Ontario and began cutting and shipping it back home as fast as they could cut it.

  At one point some enterprising businessmen, having cut all the easy stands, decided to build a railroad from the Algonquin area to Georgian Bay. The locals at Parry Sound, which had a great natural harbor, rubbed their hands and raised their land prices in anticipation.

  The businessmen decided to extend the railway onto Parry Island, without stopping in the town of Parry Sound. There was the difficulty that Parry Island was part of an Ojibway First Nation, or reservation as it was called then. But the Canadian government had set up the reservations with a number of conditions, including the right of government to use any of the land for roads and railways. So they chopped out enough land for a town, harbor, and railway terminus, and the businessmen got it on a ninety-nine year lease.

  Long after the place was abandoned and overgrown with weed and sumac, the Ojibway took the matter to court and got their land back. Good for them.

  “Then Big Paul Stanley,” Dwayne went on, slowly, “loaded the Jeannie Rogers and set sail for Chicago.”

  I finished the Pepsi. It had somehow managed to go flat inside the can. “And?”

  “The story is that the Jeannie Rogers went down on some sunker. Out among those islands you want to canoe, but over a week later, presumably on the way back. Big Paul Stanley showed up in Parry Sound one May morning. A bunch of people with bad reputations picked him up the minute he stepped out of the lifeboat.”

  “So he sold the booze,” I said, “and presumably got off the ship with the proceeds.”

  “That’s where the locals begin their fairy tales,” Dwayne said. “According to the locals a crew of baddies took him back out to the islands in a hired boat. For reasons unknown. Also according to the locals, his body was found nailed to a tree trunk a week later on Bateau Island.”

  “Ah,” I said, comprehension dawning. “The baddies thought the money was hidden out there.”

  “That’s the story. They say that Big Paul Stanley died without saying where it was hidden. A lot of locals did a lot of fishing around those islands for years after that. But I never heard of anyone finding the money.”

  “Well, then,” I said. “We can assume that Big Paul hid the money after the ship went down, and that he died without telling the bad guys where it was, and the locals haven’t found it.”

  “What a crock of shit,” Dwayne said.

  “What a crock of shit,” I agreed.

  “Like, the whole story was probably made up to start with.” My host leaned back in his chair and scratched his ankle. “And if some really mean boys took me out into the island and offered to mediate the finding of the money, if there was any, I’d tell them.” My ankles started to get itchy, too, so I scratched them.

  “And if I were a local boy and I found a pile of loot, I’d make sure nobody, even my friends, ever found out about it.”

  “Revenue Canada,” Dwayne said.

  “And the historical societies,” I added. “They have a tendency to confiscate stuff you find.”

  “But that won’t matter to Phil.” Dwayne tapped the side of his head.

  “Sure won’t,” I agreed.

  “So you’ve just got to point Phil to the correct island,” Dwayne said. Somewhere a door banged, and a dog started barking. Phil reached under the table, and the barking turned to a yelp and stopped. “Hamilton,” said Dwayne. “A bookstore on Patrick Street, not too far up the hill. You can get old books there.”

  “Something about prohibition?” I was puzzled and wondered if I’d picked up fleas, because my ankles kept getting itchier.

  “Think about it. You’ve just hidden a million or two in American money or gold… Yes, gold, that’s better. And you’re surrounded by islands that all look the same. What do you do?” He squinted at me.

  “Ahhhh…”

  “You write the location in code, of course! In a book you took off the ship.”

  “We’re talking like ten-year-olds,” I said.

  “Eight-year-olds,” Dwayne said. “Ten-year-olds are a lot more sophisticated nowadays. They’re into video games. And planning how to get laid as soon as they hit puberty.”

  “Whatever. Eight-year-old boys, then.” “I don’t believe it,” I added.

  “You will when you want to. Phil wants to, so he’ll believe.”

  He had a point. I got up to leave. “What’s the button?” I asked.

  “Who?”

  “The button under the table.”

  “Oh that!” Dwayne walked over to a broom closet and opened the door. “My latest experiment.” He kicked at a box on the floor. “The great dog debarker.”

  I knelt and squinted. “What does it do?”

  Dwayne shut the door. “It’s a set of high-power high-frequency speakers. Hooked up to a frequency generator. The delightful Ms Albertson in the apartment below has a Jack Russell terrier.”

  “They allow dogs in this apartment?”

  “Not dogs or cats, actually. But at least my cat doesn’t bark each time someone slams a door somewhere.”

  “You could tell the superintendent.”

  “He knows. He could hardly miss it, since he visits her for afternoon tea. At least a couple of times a week. When his wife’s out shopping.”

  “So what does this do.”

  “When I press the button, the dog gets a blast of sound. High-frequency sound, at about a hundred watts. At a frequency too high for humans to hear.”

  “Jeez,” I said. “Doesn’t the cat go crazy? And jump on your head?”

  “Doesn’t seem to bother her much. She hisses, and ignores it.” Dwayne smiled. “But nobody in this part of the building gets birds at their feeder any more. Anyway, it’s just temporary Until the damn dog learns to stop barking. Or goes deaf.”

  “And the super doesn’t know about it.”

  Dwayne tapped the side of his nose. “Let’s not tell him. He’s not that bright. He’s been up here a couple of times. To find out why the plaster’s been falling off Albertson’s ceiling, but everybody assures him I don’t pound on the floor or anything. To he can’t figure it out. Anyway, it gives him an excuse to visit her. Which could come in handy if his wife comes home early some afternoon.”

  “Patrick Street,” I reminded him.

  “In Hamilton. I forget the name of the bookstore, but you’ll find it. The guy there will know, if he hasn’t got stuck in the shelves and died.”

  Actually, I think Dwayne came up with the name of the bookstore from a book marker. Anyway, I found the place.

  Love lower Hamilton. It’s a maze of one-way streets that’ll get you anywhere but where you want to go. Should call the place, “Can’t Get There From Here.” Once or twice in my life I’ve gone down a street the wrong way, backing up to confuse people, just to get to the street I needed to get to.

  From the secondhand book dealer, a fat guy who could barely squeeze through the narrow aisles of his store, I got a book.

  "Look," I told the fat guy. "I want a book that a rumrunner in the twenties might have found useful. It doesn't have to be in good condition, and I don't want to pay too much."

  He looked at me. It was obviously his job to decide whether or not I deserved a book. He had lots of books in his store that he didn’t particularly care for, but what the heck, you’ve got to make a living.

  I figured he had quite a few books that he thought were worthwhile, would be happy to sell these, a compliment to his purchasing savvy and the taste of the
buyer. And he had a few that should go, like an old dog in the pound, to a good home, and nowhere else.

  "I have a number of books from that era..." he began.

  "I'm going to tear it up a bit," I threw in.

  A heavy sigh. A burp. Some people value old books. But book dealers get a lot of stuff whose sole reason for existence is that it's old. Not valuable, not in good condition, just old.

  He bumbled off among the shelves, hoisting his pants up a couple of inches. I followed.

  He bent over. It wasn't easy or pretty. He came up with A Mariner's Guide to the Great Lakes. The spine was gone, and the pages were yellow at the edges, like someone had left the book on a deck too long.

  It was dated 1942, but with the inside cover and date page torn off so it could be much older. Perfect. He said it was eight bucks. I liked that, too. Sometimes God smiles on villains like me.

  "You going to write in it?" he asked, wheezing his bulk onto a strong wooden stool. I wondered if one day he'd eat one cheeseburger too many, sit on that stool, and have to have it extracted by a muscle-bound proctologist.

  "Why do you ask?" I hesitated.

  "Even if you age the ink," he said, "they can use radiation-marking to find out."

  "I'm dealing with an amateur," I said, firmly. "He wants to believe."

  The guy scratched one of his chins. "Get some Waterman's black, number one-eleven. Bake the page for two days in an oven set at about 150." He looked at me. "Got it?"

  "Thank you," I said.

  "Will I read about it in the newspapers?" he asked, leaning forward.

  I thought about the storms on Georgian Bay, and said, "I sure hope not."

  Maybe he did read about some of it in the newspapers. But nobody read about all of it.

  I got a book on codes from the library. It was like being a kid, for a while. I wrote up a nice little code. I got some Waterman's black, number one-eleven and wrote the code with my left hand. Then I tried to figure how to bake the page for two days in an oven set at about 150. Eventually I got Dwayne to do it. I didn’t want to have to explain it to Aisha.

  When it was done, it looked good to me.

  Summer in Ontario. Everybody was having yard sales, and even in Phil's old Neighborhood people were madly selling things to each other. I love yard sales; because as long as there’s a yard sale, there’s hope. Not that I’m sure what I’m hoping for.

  I had a word with one of his neighbours, and slipped her a couple of bills.

  Phil phoned me the Wednesday after.

  "I've got it," he said. I slid my ear away from the phone. Sometimes it's better to rest the receiver against my cheek and let my molars act as a buffer.

  "Just what?” I yelled back,"have you got? The bubonic plague?" He dropped his voice a couple of hundred decibels and I slipped the phone back towards my ear. "I've found money."

  "Small bills, I hope, and unmarked," I said.

  "I don't know, yet. We've got to go get it."

  "We've got to go get it?" I was acting as puzzled as I could. I figured out he must have broken the code in three days. Not bad. “We?”

  “Look,” he said. “Can we meet at your place or my place soon?”

  Well Aisha had left me the job of getting a companion for my trip. But I was running the whole money scam without telling her. If you have to ask why, you haven’t been married long enough. So my house was out.

  And Phil’s been on his own since his wife took off with his brother five years ago to Alberta, and his house has degenerated into the worst possible place for a man to visit. He’s become a neat freak. It’s not a matter of taking my shoes off outside the front door; I get the feeling that he went out after my last visit and brushed my footprints off the concrete walkway to the house. I’ve seen him rub the postman’s fingerprints off the brass mailbox.

  I felt guilty exhaling in his place, and as for the occasional male fart - well, you get the idea. So I suggested the grungiest bar in town. Phil likes his bars low-level, and he was happy to accept.

  We met at Billy’s Place, an establishment without any redeeming virtue except that the beer was cheap. When I got to the door just after two there were two cars and a Honda motorcycle in the parking lot. I recognized Phil’s green Chev Malibu, polished to perfection. It was about ten years old, and the polish was the most valuable part of the car. His wife took the good car when she left.

  The bar was tucked into the underarm corner of a small shopping plaza. It had been a bar and a laundromat, and now was both, filled with sad-eyed humorless men who either didn’t have wives or needed to get away from their wives.

  Some places survive just because of their surroundings. There were a couple of closed stores on the plaza, including a large one that had held a Zehrs. With the plaza suffering, the owners would be happy to give generous terms to the bar. Which meant the place could survive on its clientele of old guys trying to make two glasses of draft last all day.

  There was a raised area at one end. It had obviously held bands on weekends, but, to judge by the chairs stored there, music had been a long time away from the place. If you don’t count some FM country station crackling quietly. And I don’t. There had once been a grill behind the counter, but I thought a bag of Lay’s salt-and-vinegar chips would be a better bet.

  Phil was there, at a table and looking as though he’d been sleeping under a bridge, so I bought a couple of glasses of Labatt’s Blue on tap and brought them to the table.

  Phil likes to try to blend in sometimes to some new environment. He’s been kicked out of a couple of temples and churches for being a fake rabbi, priest, or whatever, so I guess he was doing his bit here.

  He had on dirty jeans, a pair of running shoes with a hole in one side, a once-fancy shirt with grease stains around the neck, and a Blue Jays hat that was old before they won the Series.

  “You think it’s all genuine?” I asked, setting the beer down. The table and the chairs rocked, but not in the same directions.

  Phil spread a map onto the table, and let the beer glasses add rings to it. I was glad to see he was using an enlarged and laminated copy of the annotated map from the navigation book: I like maps, even copies. “Probably a crock of shit,” he said, watching the bubbles rise in the glass of beer.

  “You’re such a skeptic.”

  “On the other hand,” he said, “it could be genuine.” He added some salt to the beer in the Canadian way. A galaxy of bubbles rose to the top. All the old “beer parlours” in Canada had little glass salt shakers on the table, for pouring salt into beer. The salt in the shaker usually had a few grains of rice to keep the salt loose. People did this to keep the salt from clumping before the salt companies started adding iodine to the salt for health reasons. But beer joints are old-fashioned and some still have the rice in the salt.

  “I phoned the historical society in Parry Sound, he added.”

  “Oh,” I said casually, draining my second glass. “And what did they say? Aside from a request to send money.”

  “‘They’ is Mrs. Donna Parson, for the most part, and she is a mainstay of the local library and she knew all about the Jeannie Rogers.”

  “That’s the boat that went down?” I waved for another glass of beer but the bartender was watching something mind-squeezing on TV. I got up and got a refill at the bar, after clearing my throat a lot. So much for a tip for the bartender.

  A lumpy-cheeked man with a T-shirt that read “Isaiah 58 Ministries” looked sadly at me. He had a cup of tea in white-knuckled hands front of him, and I wondered if his presence in the place would generate a flow of psychic or moral electricity that would incinerate us all. I considered braining him with a chair and chucking him into the street, then wondered why such a thought had entered my head.

  “At least,” Phil said, “they confirmed that part of the story, as a local legend. But they’d never heard of the money or a map.”

  “You asked all that?” I raised my eyebrows as high as
they could go. “Aren’t you tipping off the locals?”

  “Let’s suppose the map’s a phony,” Phil said. “The problem with that is there’s no logical reason anyone would produce it. Ergo ipso facto quad es demonstato it must be genuine.” He checked the bottom of his shoes for some reason.

  “Probably a crock,” I said. “There’s no reason to produce the map, even for the guy who supposedly hid the money on the island.”

  “When can we leave?” Phil asked, looking me straight in the left eye.

  “Whoa there,” I said. “Why would I want to go out in the middle of Georgian Bay? I don’t even have anything bigger than a canoe.” I took a big sip of beer.

  “A canoe’s what we want. We’ll be roaming around in water too shallow for anything else. And you can bring your camera. Besides, it’s at the edge of Georgian Bay, not in the middle.”

  “A couple of hours of a good west wind and it’ll be hard to tell the difference.”

  “Lots of islands to hide behind. And half the time the place is dead calm, especially in the morning.”

  “I like the idea of the islands,” I said. “I like the idea of getting a few pictures in the rain of those islands.”

  Let me explain here. I retired early from a position, if you can call it that, at Peterborough University as an economics professor. Economics is called “the dismal science”, and I don’t know if that had much to do with the bouts of depression and migraines I had before I left. Maybe it was the snake-pit of politics at the place.

  Anyway, I took up photography, an economically unwise pursuit, specializing in pictures of water in rainstorms. Big pictures, sold as limited prints, mostly to businesses. A lot of the businesses are in Arizona and Utah and places like that. I don’t make much. Actually, I lose on a per-hour basis.

  But I couldn’t buy the soul satisfaction I get in the rain in a place where I’m all alone. I’ve always felt that maybe, far away from my normal world, in a rain, there may be unknown creatures walking around, but they won’t include the black dog of depression that hunts me too often amid the shops and cafes.

  Maybe that’s why Phil likes such grungy bars. No matter how bad you feel, odds are the guy at the next table feels worse.

  Across the room, a man who somehow looked like a middle-aged trucker put his elbows on the table, then laid his head in his hands covering his eyes. He was alone at his table. The bartender, who must have been just old enough to hold the job, brought him, unasked, a small glass of liquor. I thought of a few lines:

  The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop,

  The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.

  What was I doing there while birds were singing outside.

  The world comes around, I thought, and it goes around, and there’s enough misery for all of us. Some people are miserable without reason, and some people, like Phil, have had enough trouble to reasonably spend their last years hunched over a bottle of forget-it-all and still manage to smile. I have my ups and downs, but I’ve never had the reasons Phil had. I watched the guy who looked like a trucker and thanked my lucky stars.

  In spite of Omar Khayyam, I thought, the tavern isn’t always the answer to life. I remembered a cartoon where a world-weary working man announces to his wife at the end of a day, “Hey, I heard a spot of good news today - we shall pass this way but once!”

  You used to find a lot more people in taverns but the entire province has a smoking ban in public places and now people sit in their cars and smoke, and half the time it doesn’t seem worth shuffling inside and outside for a beer and a smoke. Some of the local taverns tried putting up sheltered patios outside for smokers, but if a patio’s got enough windbreak to actually break the Canadian winds, the local council deems it “inside” and rules out smoking there.

  Sometimes a beer and a tavern are good for me. Sometimes they’re not. I could feel the black dog inside my heart stirring. I’m a lucky man in many ways, I thought. I guess it’s time to go find an island.

  “Gotta die somewhere,” I told Phil. “Might as well be out on an island. When do we leave?”

  “Great,” Phil smiled. “I thought you’d feel that way. He brought up a rolled map from his backpack. “Enlarged and laminated,” he said. “One copy for me and one for you.” He spread one copy onto the table, bottom my way, and set the beer glasses on top of it.” The tabletop changed from chipped gray to blue, green, and white.

  I felt better. Just looking at maps of islands makes me feel better. Or lakes, which are islands in the landscape.

  It was three in the afternoon and there should have been nobody in the place but losers, but two women came in. Both were maybe in their mid-thirties, which made them just a bit old for us by the Martin Standard. The Martin Standard says that to find the age of a man’s ideal spouse, use the formula: half the man’s age plus 5.

  One was a blonde and one was a redhead, which seems like an ideal combination. The redhead was medium height and wore some kind of shirt and jeans. The blonde was taller and wore some kind of a shirt or blouse and jeans. At least I imagine they did; I never remember what people are wearing unless they’re wearing something really strange or nothing at all, and these were wearing clothes, except perhaps in Phil’s imagination.

  They adjusted their eyes to the dimness, then tentatively headed across the room. “Nice map,” one commented, as they passed our table. I wondered if she was the trucker’s daughter, come to take him home to his dying wife, mortgaged house, and AIDS-riddled son. If so, she committed an additional mortal sin by ignoring him.

  “Thanks,” I said, doing a quick ogle. Phil looked like he was about to throw himself onto the map to keep the contents secret, but couldn’t figure a way to do it.

  The two women settled at a table near the wall, and waited for the bartender to get their order. He did, after a couple of minutes, and I went back to looking at the map with Phil.

  “Just where are we going?” I asked.

  “You really need to know? Exactly? Now?”

  “I need to take out a full-page ad in the paper,” I said.

  “Don’t get sarcastic. Did you see the way those women looked at the map? I don’t trust anybody with this.”

  “I presume,” I said, “that you’ll have to kill me if you find anything.”

  “Only if I get a tailwind all the way back. Okay.” Phil lowered his voice and pointed out a general area of islands. “Somewhere in these islands here, most likely.”

  “You don’t know for sure?”

  “I’ve got some descriptions and coordinates, but I doubt if the guy that made them really knew exactly where he was.”

  “You think?” I was watching the women. The redhead was looking around like she didn’t customarily come into such establishments, especially in the early afternoon. The other one seemed rather confident. Not lesbians, I thought, as if I would know, but they didn’t seem that comfortable with each other, sipping on a beer. From glasses, for heaven’s sake. They reminded me of matrons who had wandered into a strip club just to see what men were going on about all the time. Or maybe me in a French restaurant, aware that I was permitted, but not sure what to do after that.

  “If the story’s correct,” Phil said, “the ship went down in a storm and nobody never got back to collect the loot.” He gazed at me intently. “At night, in a storm, they’d be burying loot in a maze of islands most of which look the same.

  “I don’t believe he was a local, so he probably took an educated guess.”

  “Or it’s all a crock of shit,” I said.

  “Likely all a crock of shit,” Phil agreed. His eyes glazed over and he went far away from me and the bar. I let him go; since his wife left him, he needed a few escapes.

  The trucker, if that’s what he was, had left the room. He’d been replaced by a trio with a deck of cards and a cat in a plastic cat carrier, three middle-aged guys with east coast accents putting in time.

  “You’re just going because you want to
humour me,” Phil said abruptly.

  “Goddamn right. Who else is going to humour you?”

  “There’s nothing out there.”

  “Wind, waves, rocks, and grief,” I said.

  “Drowned bodies.”

  “Bleached bones.”

  “Unpaid bills.”

  “You talked me into it,” I said. “Now when do we go?”

  “What’s today - Tuesday? How about Monday?”

  “You got no work anymore?” I knew about the government contracts for editing that kept him going.

  “I’ll make a four-day space for next week.” He drained the glass and rolled up the map, moving glassware as required. He wrapped the map with an elastic band, and handed me my copy.

  “I’ll get my list and phone you.” Without specific lists for all my activities, I’d forget too many essentials. Absent-minded professor to the core.