Some Great Thing Read online

  “They’re trying to rattle you,” Mahatma said.

  “They’ll suspend me if I screw up again. They blame me for Betts’ errors in that story on the mayor. They say the story never would have run if I had found some library clipping about the mayor stopping off in the States before he flew to Nicaragua. Okay, I missed it. I missed one clip. So what am I, an axe-murderer?”

  “Don’t let it get to you,” Mahatma said.

  They walked back to The Herald. Chuck blew his nose, threw his head back and took three deep breaths. “It’s okay. I’m all right now.”

  His name was Hassane Moustafa Ali, but friends called him Yoyo. To sharpen his journalism skills, he was working temporarily for a French weekly in Winnipeg. All his life he had dreamt about travelling outside Cameroon. Recently, he had won a scholarship to work for ten months in Manitoba. Since his school days in Cameroon, he had known it to be the fourth most westerly province in a huge nation of ten million square kilometres. Yoyo had longed for years to visit North America. Now, after several days in Canada, he was already counting the months remaining before he could return to his people.

  Of the many things that confused him about Canada, one was most irksome. It had to do with a massive tree on Provencher Boulevard in St. Boniface. A tree with white letters painted sloppily on its bark. Yoyo considered the lettering poorly done. Unaesthetic. Unprofessional. If he were to name a tree, he wouldn’t do so in such a slapdash manner. A great country like Canada and a great province like Manitoba could surely produce a sign on which the tree’s name in English, French and Latin could appear in neat letters, as one saw in the botanical gardens of Yaoundé, his home town.

  Who had made the decision to identify the tree in such a fashion? In his first days, Yoyo paused to look at the tree as he travelled to and from work. He planned to contact civic authorities to suggest another naming procedure. The name itself, sprayed on the tree, also troubled him. Yoyo, who had read a book on Canadian nature before leaving Cameroon, was sure it was an elm. An American elm. He recognized the leaves: oval-shaped with serrated edges and bold parallel veination. But he had never heard of this tree name. Clitoris. He checked the letters carefully. Canadian handwriting differed from that of his countrymen, but Yoyo felt confident after several examinations: the name painted around the bark was Clitoris.

  Yoyo noticed something else. Whenever he stopped to stare at the tree, people stopped to stare at him. The problem became dramatic on the third day, when he attempted to question a woman passing by on the far edge of the sidewalk. “Excuse me, Madame,” he said, pointing to the letters, “this is the name of the tree?” She coughed and began trotting down the sidewalk. Without even having the decency to reply. Yoyo was troubled by the manners of Canadians. Even if his French accent were strong, he saw no reason for the woman not to answer him. It was highly impolite. In his country, if a foreigner had stopped him to ask the name of the tree, Yoyo would have been honoured to provide the answer in English, French, Latin and in Bamileke, his maternal tongue. Then he would have befriended the foreigner and invited him to dinner.

  When he returned home, he would tell his family and friends that Manitoba was a great land. But he might have to concede that its inhabitants perplexed him.

  Today, however, he planned to straighten out at least one difficulty. He would ask a friend at his newspaper about the name of that tree.

  It wasn’t a great story. It wasn’t even a particularly good story. But it wasn’t a total sleeper. So Edward Slade, crime reporter for The Winnipeg Star, went after it. As a matter of principle, Slade pursued all tips about cemeteries. Readers devoured anything to do with corpses. This one was about some kid who quit halfway through his first day as a backhoe operator at the St. Vital Cemetery. He quit because he dug up a bone. That’s what he was telling Slade on the telephone.

  “How do you know it wasn’t a stick?”

  “It was a leg bone! A big one! Here I am digging my third grave and I come up with a bone in the teeth of the backhoe. I freaked out, man!”

  “Did you take the bone home?”

  “No! It belongs to God!”

  Slade wrote, “Boy says bone belongs to God.”

  “Where’d you put it?”

  “I hid it in the cemetery.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Denis Fortin.”

  The kid met Slade at the cemetery entrance, but he didn’t want to go inside. “I don’t work here any more. They might charge me with trespassing.”

  “Nobody’s gonna charge you,” Slade said. “You and I are just visiting. What good’s a boneyard without visitors?” Slade led the kid toward fresh plots of earth. “Is that where you dug?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s filled up now.”

  “Like I said, they were burying someone there.”

  “So there’s no bones left.”

  “I guess not,” Fortin said, shivering. It was cool, for a July afternoon.

  “Where’d you hide the bone?”

  “By the fence over there.”

  “Go get it.” Slade unslung his camera. When the kid didn’t move, Slade growled that he had discussed this case with the police and he hadn’t driven all the way out here to piss around.

  Fortin trudged over to some shrubs. “It’s here.”

  “Lift it!”

  Using a paper bag stuck against the fence, the kid picked up the bone, careful to keep his fingers from touching it. It was about one and a half feet long, covered in slime. It looked like a human femur. It had a head like a tennis ball, and a socket—like the inside of a giant tooth—to fit a knee joint.

  “Kneel by that gravestone,” Slade ordered. “That’s it. No, you’re too close to the flowers. Get back. Hold up the bone. Look serious. Don’t smile. Don’t move.” The kid still held the bone with the paper bag. Slade lowered his camera. “Get rid of the paper.” Fortin grimaced. He let the paper drop. “Okay now, both hands on the bone!” The kid inhaled deeply. He held the mud-coated bone in his bare hands. The camera shutter clicked repeatedly for ten seconds. “Okay,” Slade said.

  The kid ran back to the fence. He hid the bone again and wiped his hands on the grass. “Can we kinda get out of here?”

  “Believe in ghosts?” Slade asked.

  “Sorta.”

  Slade’s story and photo ran the next day under the headline Mystery Bone Spooks Gravedigger.

  Don Betts told Mahatma to match the story. Mahatma tried, but the cemetery manager claimed Fortin had dug up a stick. And Fortin wouldn’t cooperate. Edward Slade had warned him he could face a lawsuit if he spoke to The Herald. Maybe even a jail term. It was against the law to speak to two newspapers about the same story, Slade had said. It was breach of trust and fraud. Mahatma wrote a brief story and hoped it didn’t run. But it did run, on page three, and it carried his first byline.

  During his first week on the job, Mahatma felt guilty about not doing anything substantial. He killed time by reading the paper. The horoscopes amused him. After his cemetery story appeared, Mahatma checked Aquarius. It said:

  When someone asks you to perform a foolish task, assume your responsibilities as a thinking adult. Refuse!

  “Right,” Mahatma mumbled to himself. “Refuse, and I’m out of a job.”

  Three times in as many days, Mahatma heard reporters arguing on the telephone, saying, “But the public has a right to know!” Once, Mahatma guessed that the information the reporter was demanding was somebody’s age. To Mahatma, the most striking thing about journalists was not what they did, but that they seemed to believe in it.

  Jake Corbett didn’t like the letter from the welfare people.

  “The Manitoba Social Assistance Allowance program has ruled against your request for an increase in benefits. Therefore, $8.90 will continue to be deducted from your monthly cheque of $178.10. The deductions will continue until they offset the $602.38 overpayment you received in 1976 as a result of an administrative error…”

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nbsp; Jake threw the letter down. He sank onto his bed in his tiny room above Frank’s Accidental Dog and Grill. His leg ached. On $169.20 a month, he wouldn’t even have enough to buy a new bath towel. His only towel was seven years old.

  The words “Fort Garry Hotel,” his last place of employment, were barely visible on the cloth. Jake propped his leg on a pillow. At least he had a place to stay. Some people didn’t even have that. Jake had a feeling he would win this battle. He had no job, no family, no hobbies, no friends—and that made him lucky. He had nothing to do but fight the welfare people.

  Jake wrote to his Member of Parliament. He complained about his overpayment deductions. He described his honourable discharge, For Reasons of Serious Bad Health, from his job as a doorman at the Fort Garry Hotel. Jake folded his letter into a stamped envelope. He even included his one-page Testament to the Good Character of Jake Corbett, which had been signed by the hotel manager. Jake hobbled downstairs, marched across Main Street and deposited the letter in a mailbox outside the entrance to Winnipeg City Hall. But the instant the letter slipped from his fingers, Jake recoiled in horror. He had included his only copy of the reference letter from the hotel manager. He needed that letter to fight for justice. He put his arm in the mailbox mouth but couldn’t reach anything, so he hurried back into Frank’s Accidental Dog and Grill, ignoring the pain in his leg.

  “Frank,” he called out, breathless.

  “Whaddya want?” Frank emerged from the kitchen with hamburger meat on his hands.

  “Lend me your vacuum, okay?”

  “It’s in the corner. Put it back when you’re done.” Frank disappeared back into the kitchen.

  Jake lugged the vacuum across Main Street to the mailbox. Stepping into the foyer of City Hall, he ignored a crowd of people listening to a speaker at a podium, and found an electrical outlet by the door. He plugged in the cord and rolled the vacuum outside. Turning it on, he plunged the naked, sucking nozzle deep into the mailbox. It made an awful racket. Something flattened against the nozzle, making it rattle and buzz. He fished out four letters. None of them was his. He held them in his left hand and shoved the nozzle back down the mailbox. He got two more letters, but neither was his. Jake dived down again with the nozzle. At that moment, a large hand gripped his shoulder.

  “Drop that vacuum! You’re under arrest!”

  A crowd formed while two police officers led Jake Corbett toward a cruiser. A black man identified himself as a reporter for The Winnipeg Herald and asked a lot of questions. Jake tried to explain about his overpayment deductions. The officers pushed him into the cruiser. They also seized the vacuum and put it in the trunk.

  Mahatma was having an awful time writing the story. He had the name and address of the accused. He had checked with police to verify the charge. He had even learned that letter boxes were considered post offices according to the Criminal Code of Canada, which said: “Every one who steals anything sent by post, after it is deposited at a post office and before it is delivered…is guilty of an indictable offence and is liable to imprisonment for ten years.”

  Mahatma couldn’t come up with a lead paragraph. He wrote one sentence, deleted it from his computer screen and tried another. Half an hour later, Chuck Maxwell came up to him and said, “The trick is to not think about details. Just write the sucker. Bing bang, put it out.” Mahatma sighed. Chuck persisted. “Be like me, Hat. Let the story write itself. Stop looking at your notes!”

  Mahatma ignored him.

  “I’ve been doing this for years. Don’t even look at your notes. Put ’em away! You’ve got a deadline to meet.”

  Mahatma thought Maxwell was crazy. Writing a story without notes!

  “Just give it a try,” Chuck said. “Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Good,” Chuck said. “Look at me. Now tell me just one thing. What happened today?”

  “I was covering a speech by the mayor at a reception for Franco-Manitobans. The mayor talked about the historic place of French people here. He mentioned constitutional talks between the government and francophone leaders.”

  “Forget that stuff,” Chuck said. “Tell me something unusual. Something weird!”

  “In the middle of the reception a guy came out of the blue with a vacuum, plugged it in and began sucking letters out of a mailbox.”

  “All right! Then what?”

  “The cops dragged him off.”

  “You get his name?”

  “Jake Corbett.”

  “You get the charge?”

  “Theft from the mail.”

  “So whaddya got so far?”

  Mahatma showed Chuck a lead paragraph about the mayor urging the province to recognize the constitutional rights of Franco-Manitobans.

  “Never mind the French stuff! Put the vacuum in the lead.”

  Mahatma wrote: “A civic reception ground to a halt yesterday when a man walked into Winnipeg City Hall, plugged in a vacuum and began sucking letters out of a nearby mailbox.”

  “Better,” Chuck said. “Second paragraph you say the cops arrested the guy with a pile of mail in his hand. Third graph you name the guy, say he’s on welfare and say what they charged him with. Then you get into the mayor’s reception, toss in a graph or two about that French stuff, and bingo, your story’s done!” Mahatma produced a second and a third paragraph. Chuck stood behind him, watching the computer screen, keeping Mahatma on track. When he finished the story, Mahatma stood up. His legs were stiff, his neck ached and his eyes stung from staring for so long at electronic fuzz.

  “Thanks, Chuck.”

  “You just needed a jump-start. You should have seen me when I started. You’ve got it all over me, Hat. I couldn’t even spell when I started! I dropped out of school in grade ten.”

  Mahatma was too tired to listen. He’d been listening and thinking all day. He drifted out of the newsroom, ate two hamburgers in a greasy spoon, walked home and fell asleep on the couch.

  Mahatma left home early the next morning to buy The Herald in a drugstore. Standing at the corner of Lipton and Portage, he let two buses come and go as he pored over his first page-one story. The headline ran across two columns below the fold: Cops Stop Mailbox Theft. The minute Mahatma arrived at work, Betts sent him to the cop shop to cover Corbett’s hearing. “The cop shop?” Mahatma asked.

  “The Institute of Public Protection. Opposite City Hall. Hurry.”

  The halls outside the courtrooms were packed with bikers, hoods, women with black eyes and relatives of the accused. There were also lawyers and Crown attorneys. Mahatma saw a black judge walk by in his robes. Everyone looked at him. Mahatma heard one man advise another, “Stay away from that judge. If you’re on his docket, tell your lawyer to get you another date. The man’s crazy.”

  A clutch of men and women crowded around four sheets of paper taped to a wall. There was one sheet for each courtroom. Each sheet had a list of names and offences. Mahatma found what he needed on the sheet for Court B: Jake Corbett—Theft From Mail.

  The dimly lit courtroom had no windows. In the back, divided by an aisle, were two sections of public seats, each with twenty-five chairs. Every chair was taken. Latecomers leaned against beige stucco walls. The Crown attorney and defence lawyers stood near the front, working at podiums. At the very front, the judge’s chair rose above the courtroom, and higher still rested a portrait of Queen Elizabeth. To one side was the prisoner’s dock. Behind the Crown attorney was a long desk marked Media Only. Reporters occupied four of the five chairs. Mahatma took the last place on the right. The man to his left was in his early twenties, but he looked to Mahatma like a schoolyard brat. He wore jeans and a purple shoestring tie. His ears seemed as big as satellite dishes under punkish needle-points of blond and yellow hair.

  “You media?” the brat asked.

  “Yeah,” Mahatma said.

  “Journalism student, I bet.”

  Mahatma smiled vaguely. The young man unfolded The Herald to scan the story on Jake Corbett and the va
cuum. “You know this Mahatma guy?” he asked.

  “How come?” Mahatma said.

  “Well, if I didn’t have to be following his story, I could be doing something interesting. And who has a name like that? Sounds like a goddamn saint.”

  A voice called out, “Order please, all rise.” Everybody stood. The judge entered the courtroom.

  The brat shoved the newspaper back under the table. “Old man Hill doesn’t like me reading in his courtroom,” he whispered.

  Everybody followed suit when the judge sat down. He was the dark-skinned judge Mahatma had seen in the hall. He wore a black robe with red stripes running over the shoulders and down the chest in two lines. He was a short man with a slight build, but he had a big head with salt-and-pepper curls combed back.

  “Let’s get this going, Mr. Peters,” Judge Hill said to the Crown attorney. “We’ve got a full house today.” The first prisoner came to stand in the dock. His lawyer remanded the case to the next day. The prisoner was sent out.

  “Call number 37, Jake Corbett,” cried the court clerk.

  A door to the adjacent prisoners’ holding cell swung open; a guard shouted into it, “Corbett! Jake Corbett!”

  In rumpled clothing and unbrushed red hair, Jake Corbett limped into the prisoner’s dock and leaned on the wooden counter before him. The charge was read. Theft From Mail, contrary to Section 314(1)(a)(i) of the Criminal Code of Canada…Corbett pleaded guilty. Judge Melvyn Hill asked for details. The Crown attorney checked a file on his lectern. “It appears, Your Honour, that Mr. Corbett placed the activated nozzle of a Hoover vacuum cleaner into a Canada Post letter box and removed a quantity of mail by means of air suction.”

  “That is an indictable offence, Mr. Corbett,” Judge Hill said. “It can lead to incarceration. What do you have to say for yourself?” Corbett embarked on an explanation about the Charter of Rights and his overpayment deductions. The judge cut in, “Get to the point. Why were you stealing letters?”

  “I wasn’t stealing, Your Honour!”

  “The accused was holding six letters in his left hand when arrested, Your Honour,” the Crown said.