William Deverell - Kill All the Judges

He backed away, looked about, and found a fine resting place in the crook of an arbutus tree. The base of its smooth, barkless trunk made an ideal chair-back, and the low-slung winter sun was directly on him. To the east, he could make out the Gwendolyn Cliffs, fractured by the Gap Trail. A mist hovered above Gwendolyn Pond, from which a pair of grebes took wing into the mist, raising wakes. He was thankful he couldn’t see the carnage on the flatland by the beach, the twenty acres of spilled giants, firs, cedars, maples.

Parks Canada had decided to let those giants rest in peace, a graveyard with its sorrowful epitaphs about the depredations of man. Matters could have been immeasurably worse-the developer had proposed hundreds of lots and condos for these 580 acres. Arthur’s case for an injunction had wound its way to Ottawa, to the Supreme Court. At the eleventh hour, as the court was about to throw him out on his ear, Parks Canada announced it had bought Gwendolyn Valley. This was Margaret Blake’s triumph-after eighty days in a tree fort she’d won the Battle of the Gap, holding off the loggers, inspiring a campaign, winning over the public, the TV-watching masses, and, finally, the politicians.

He’d been proud of Margaret when she got that award from the International Wilderness Society. Now he felt hollow and cheap. I’ve heard your speech about politics a dozen times. With a steely stare at the stubborn old mule. I’m not asking you to support me in this. “Damn you, Beauchamp,” he shouted, “nor should she have to ask.” What a wretch you are, what an ingrate, you have devalued her before her comrades with your feigned, lukewarm show of support.

Yes, he will charm her dinner guests, he will be the prospective candidate’s perfect husband, he will proclaim his support, extol her-a fresh voice, Reverend Al called her. She’s just what we need in Parliament. (Of course, she has the merest hypothetical chance-a recent poll had the Greens at 11 per cent-so he’ll not find himself spending his winters in a rented flat in the frozen hell of Ottawa.)

And with that resolved, pleased with his solution to a needless nuptial irritant, he sensed a burden lift, sensed it soaring off to join the three bald eagles drifting on updrafts from the Gwendolyn cliffs. He smiled and zipped up his jacket. He drifted off.

He awoke shivering, thinking he’d been blinded, then saw by the glow of his watch it was a quarter to six, already night, the early blackness of winter, hours after he was expected home. An owl whistling above him in the arbutus branches, that is what woke him, and the chill. Only starlight above, no lights below. As he scrambled to his feet, he sensed a whisper of wings, the owl abandoning him. Which way was down? How close was the precipice? He checked his pocket. Half a packet of penny matches.

Aheavy footfall up the stairs, the tight end making no secret of his coming. Lance supposed he could dispatch him with a well-timed scissor kick-his years of study under Master Dao should not be wasted-but just in case, he reached into his desk drawer for his insurance policy.

His 9 mm Beretta was gone!

April Wu spun toward him, smiling, the Beretta aimed low, horizontal with his testicles.

“So you’re with them,” Lance said.

“Loyalty is a delusion, trust but a false mirror.”

The hallway door crashed open. It wasn’t the tight end, it was…Cudworth Brown! Furious, stomping toward him, fists balled. “You sold me out!”

April Wu’s bullet tore a hole through his bent nose. Cud gazed at her stupefied for a moment, then slumped to the floor.

“He had bad chi,” she said. “So do you.”

The pistol was aimed at Lance again!

“It was you all along,” he said.

“I am but one of many.” She barked. “Hand me the manuscript!”

Trash this page!

Flush this manic excursus, a digression from a plot barely coherent to start with. He was wandering off in every direction like a lunatic lost on the sanatorium grounds. Insanatorium grounds.

Point proved, however: When sober, as he was now, nauseated, shaking, skin prickling with the coca-Joneses, Brian wrote crap. If this is what abstinence wreaks on a single Christmas afternoon, what kind of hell would several days of it promise? But he’ll soldier on, stay off the stuff a while, supplies were low.

He must start this chapter over, seek inspiration from the fountain of truth. April Wu will keep her day job at Pomeroy and company but will no longer moonlight at the Valentine Agency-it’s gone out of business. Goodbye, Lance, you arrogant ponce. Live happily ever after, Cud Brown-for you, the rustic embattled poet, are the true hero of this tragedy, its true victim.

Suddenly I’m dining at the best tables, me, Cudworth Brown, scion of an unemployed miner, formerly of the working class myself, surviving on grants and a piddly-ass disability pension. So don’t be surprised I never seen a dinner like that one.

It started off with jumbo shrimp on cracked ice with some wafers and what I guessed was real caviar, though I didn’t want to be naive by asking. And those were only the starters, the whore doovers, as we say on Garibaldi.

I figured the sockeye salmon was the main course, I even took an extra offering, and I was sitting back, thinking about dessert, and suddenly the caterers were bringing out tenderloins and asparagus and baby carrots, new cutlery, the works; it was like the feast had just begun. Man, I was glad I smoked a doobie on the ferry-it gave me the appetite to pound the chow down. I didn’t want it to go to waste; they weren’t handing out doggie bags.

Before I forget, let me go back, there were drinks first, martinis or wine, you had a choice, they were coming around on trays. “Please mingle,” Judge Whynet-Moir said. Mingle. Decoded, he was telling his friends to check out the hick in the red braces. One of these poshes, Shiny Shoes, I call him, some kind of downtown rainmaker, tried to fluff me off. “A peace medallion-I hadn’t realized they were back in fashion.” I told him I also got one tattooed on my ass.

I didn’t mingle, I wasn’t comfortable with all these pooh-bahs. Talked to the other two writers. One came dressed in a sari. She wrote right-wing political commentary, so she was right at home here. The other was Lynn Tinkerson, a dyke who is what they call an important writer, and I told her I intend to read one of her novels.

The table was set with little place cards, a practice I’ve never encountered in four and a half decades of hard living. Rafael Whynet-Moir had done the guy-girl-guy-girl thing and put himself at the far end of the table between the two lady guest writers.

Sitting on my right was a wrinkle-free woman with a ten-inch smile who’d obviously been in the shop for renovations once too often. She told me she’d never met a poet and wanted to know all about it. I was feeling rosy after a couple or three martinis washed down by a fine, crisp Bordeaux, and I told her how during misty shoreline walks my muse would rescue me from the heartsickness of wounded love.

Meanwhile, I am playing left-leg footsie with Florenza LeGrand, Flo she likes to be called. She’d kicked off her sandals, was casually running her toes up my leg. Judge Whynet-Moir would look our way occasionally, smiling, but I read a warning in his eyes.

Sometimes Flo also played handsie, squeezing mine under the big table spread, touching my thigh. I didn’t know she had a rep, I didn’t know anything about her-but I knew the type. Spoiled daughter of the rich, flirts with danger, likes to smoke, drink, and get laid, in no particular order. I was looking forward to tupping a member of the ruling class; she’s rich beyond belief. She might be persuaded to set up a starving poets endowment fund.