The Cardinal Divide Read online

  Cole hung up. He sat back in Mary’s chair and looked at the scrap of paper with Peggy McSorlie’s name on it, and her phone number.

  It must have been six or seven years since he’d heard from Peggy McSorlie. At the time he had been working for a national conservation group as its young and enthusiastic National Parks Conservation Director. Jasper National Park’s Management Plan was up for its mandated five-year review when Peggy McSorlie contacted his Ottawa office to ask for help thwarting a proposed plan for increased white-water rafting on the fragile Maligne River. Harlequin ducks, endangered in some parts of Canada, nested on that river in the spring, and raised their young there before migrating to the west coast in the fall.

  With McSorlie and a coalition of other conservation groups, Blackwater managed to put the kybosh on the rafting proposal. They argued successfully that white-water rafting had no business on the narrow Maligne River whatsoever, given that waterway’s value to the secretive harlequin ducks.

  Cole Blackwater remembered Peggy McSorlie as a feisty and competent biologist who studied the Maligne and other National Park rivers to assess their value for harlequin ducks. She was middle-aged, with a Master’s degree in something or other and, as he recalled, the mother of two school-aged boys. She lived on a farm on the eastern edge of Alberta’s foothills near Oracle, Alberta, with her cabinet-maker husband who ran a small woodlot.

  Like many before her, McSorlie had worked diligently on contract to Parks Canada, helping the federal agency understand the complex resources that they were legally mandated to protect, only to watch her years of study and labour collect dust on a shelf while the Park Superintendent and Chief Park Warden ushered in plans from the local business community to expand development, use, access, and ultimately, corporate profits in the National Park.

  But McSorlie, Blackwater recalled, wasn’t one to sit on her hands. When the Jasper Park Management Plan review called for more rafting on the Maligne, she went to the media, and was “fired” for her action. Nobody had actually written her a pink slip. No, she was simply informed that her contract was complete, and was asked to hand in the keys to the rusty 1980 Dodge Ram that served as her research vehicle. That’s when she called Blackwater.

  He looked at the number again, and at his watch. It was 6:45. An hour later in the Mountain Time Zone. He stood up, heard his knee pop and felt his back creak, pushed the slip of paper with the number into his pocket, and walked to the door. His keys still hung in the lock. He closed the door behind him, locked it, and stooped to scoop up the litter at his feet, jamming it, along with his keys, in with the note. He had a couple of hours to kill before he could call Peggy back. He walked to the elevator, stopped to peer down the long spiral of stairs, and then punched the “down” button. Blackwater had become good at killing time of late. He knew just what to do.

  He stepped from the Dominion Building onto West Hastings Street and walked west to the lights where he waited with a dozen others to cross the road. It was a cool evening, and clear. He turned the collar of his coat up against the chill. The Dominion Building sat on the very edge of Canada’s poorest postal code, the area of Vancouver known to the world as the Downtown Eastside. Looking east along West Hastings, Cole Blackwater saw the shops and storefronts fade and deteriorate. Looking west, toward the downtown business core, he viewed glitter and flash. Cole Blackwater stood at the intersection of two worlds.

  Cole’s best friend – his only real friend, not just a drinking buddy – Denman Scott spent night and day advocating for the rights of the people on the streets of the Downtown Eastside. But powerful interests opposed him.

  Waterfront property along English Bay and False Creek was quickly being bought up by American, Asian, and European investors, and twenty-, thirty-, and forty-storey high-rise luxury condominiums were being built over the rubble of some of Vancouver’s poorer neighbourhoods. Handfuls of the million-dollar condominiums were being bought by wealthy Americans as safe havens for themselves and draft-aged sons who could be conscripted for American’s new war – the same old war with a new name, thought Cole. More and more dilapidated Eastside hotels, flop houses, and ancient warehouses were being bought and renovated or razed and rebuilt as flats and condominiums for the upper-middle class.

  The light turned green and Blackwater stepped into the street. The consequence of this gentrification was evident: more people on the streets. Now that their $30 a week hotel rooms were converted to one room apartments for Vancouver’s chic business and arts community, with rent starting at $1,500 a month, more and more people were forced into alleys and doorways. And not just on the streets of the Downtown Eastside, where the problem could be contained and “managed” by police and what social service providers remained after deep provincial cuts to mental health facilities and services for those living in squalid poverty. Now the Downtown Eastside’s drug, prostitution, and crime problems had spread throughout the city as the most desperate people sought shelter, food, and a fix elsewhere.

  Blackwater stopped on the corner of Cambie and West Hastings to drop a quarter into the hat of a man he recognized.

  “God bless,” muttered the man, looking into his greasy ball-cap at his take. Blackwater said nothing, but turned down Cambie toward the water.

  Many of Cole’s acquaintances, those who had lived in Vancouver longer than six months, learned to look right through the homeless, the vagrants, dope dealers, and the beggars in the Downtown Eastside. Not Blackwater. Not yet. He was deeply cynical about many – most – aspects of the human condition, but so far he hadn’t formed a callous over the part of his heart that encouraged him to drop a quarter (and sometimes in the winter a dollar) into the hand, cap, or cup of someone who desperately needed it.

  He understood why people turned away. “There but for the grace of God go I,” he thought many times as he strolled through the neighbourhood between his office and the Stadium SkyTrain station just a few blocks away. When faced with such terrible human suffering, when confronted with such a staggering waste of human life and potential, how could you not eventually turn away?

  Cole paced off the short walk to his favourite tavern and remembered a man named Sam, who three years ago had panhandled outside the Dominion Building. Sam had taught Cole about the bond that existed between people no matter how different their lives were.

  Sam approached Cole each evening for spare change, and one cold, rainy night in November Cole gave Sam fifty cents, reached the street corner, turned, walked back, and gave him five dollars. Sam’s face lit up even as the rain poured from his eyebrows onto his cheeks, over his nose, and down his unshaven chin.

  Cole said nothing and was about to turn and walk away when Sam tugged at his coat. “I can sing and dance,” said Sam in a voice that was at once happy and terribly sad. “I’d like to bring a smile to your face.”

  Cole stopped and looked at Sam. Cole guessed that like many on the street, Sam was plagued with mental illness and possibly addiction troubles. But through the rain and the hardness of his life, he was beaming at Cole Blackwater.

  “You already have,” said Cole, smiling for the first time in a week.

  He didn’t care if they used the money he gave them for booze or drugs or food. Who am I to argue with a good stiff drink, he thought, as he turned into the Cambie Hotel to wet his whistle and while away a few hours before calling Peggy McSorlie.

  He pushed his way through a clutch of young people on the sidewalk hunched over cigarettes puffing furiously, and stepped into the bar. Rock and roll and the excited voices of the crowd settling in for a night of enthusiastic drinking broke over him like a warm wave on the beach, and he pushed through the people toward the familiar draft counter. Luck was with him and he found an empty stool. Elbows up on the bar and wearing his heavy black leather jacket, worn and weathered from many seasons of use, Blackwater looked more like a menacing hoodlum than a sophisticated political and environmental strategist. His dark hair fell in shaggy curls around his forehead a
nd ears, and his eyes – not blue, not grey, not green – darted up and down the bar in search of friend or foe. When he wasn’t slouching, Cole stood just over six feet tall, and while he had been willowy with corded muscles as a young man, he had gone soft of late.

  A male bartender stepped in front of him. No uniform for this chap, barely out of high school, just a loose-fitting T-shirt and a pair of factory faded blue jeans. The bartender was new to the Cambie and Cole did not recognize him. He would be gone in another few weeks. Cole wouldn’t much care.

  “What’ll it be?”

  Cole looked up and down the bar. He hated being served by a male bartender. If he wanted to be served a drink by a man he’d drink alone at home. What his bones and joints ached for right now was a beautiful woman to ask him what he would like. To drink.

  “Pint of Kick Ass,” he said sombrely.

  The young bartender pulled back on the handle and dispensed a pint of golden ale. He flipped a coaster under the pint before setting the frothing glass before Blackwater, who handed him a five dollar bill and left the quarter change in the runner along the edge of the bar. A woman would have warranted digging into his pocket for another quarter or two. A quarter was all a boy in a T-shirt could expect from Cole.

  It would be easy to mistake Cole’s trajectory to the bar for a single-minded desire to obtain ale. But nothing could be farther from the truth. Cole Blackwater turned his back on the bartender and looked out over the plank tables of the Cambie and through the tall windows to the night beyond, and began his careful assessment of the raucous and familiar crowd.

  It was spring again and the city was coming alive. University students, under pressure to finish assignments and prepare for exams, were also obviously under the influence of spring fever and the nearly irresistible mammalian urge to prowl for food and frisky fun after a long winter’s nap. Cole too sensed the energy of the city change as the damp winter winds were replaced by warm rains and the occasional blue sky. Winter’s rubbish washed away into False Creek, English Bay, and Burrard Inlet, and new life blossomed everywhere.

  Blackwater drank deeply, then stood to survey the room. Before he strode purposefully through the front doors, Cole had done a quick visual sweep of the room to determine any initial threats. Now he made a careful assessment of each table, scanning for faces he might know, friendly, or more importantly, otherwise.

  Cole Blackwater had his reasons: in more than fifteen years of activism, he had made his fair share of enemies. He prided himself on being aggressive and uncompromising in his approach to conservation. And while he wasn’t troubled by the politicians and corporate executives that he’d taken to the mat over their plans to clearcut some swath of ancient forest or to bore into the side of a sacred mountain in search of precious metal, he did worry from time to time about the unstable sorts.

  Though he’d been called every name in the book by yahoos and goons in the newspapers, on television, and face-to-face at blockades and rallies, he worried more about the quiet powder kegs waiting to explode, and that he might be the match it took to ignite them. He worried about the disgruntled and possibly mentally unstable mill worker, longshoreman, or miner angry that radical environmentalists had stolen his job to save some “itty bitty spotted owl.”

  Blackwater didn’t buy that bunk; he saw it for what it was. It was tough to explain his point of view: that corporations who raped the land and the seas cut and run when the profit margins grew thin, leaving entire communities in the lurch. For every hundred honest fellows who toiled in the mill or the mine or on a boat week after week and year after year to put food on the table for their families, there were always a few angry, frustrated sods who looked for an excuse to mash someone’s nose or stomp their face.

  So Blackwater had got in the habit of scanning the crowd whenever he entered a public house, looking for likely candidates for trouble. Cole knew he was recognizable – for fifteen years his face had been on the evening news. His enemy wasn’t. In the last couple of years he had begun to regard nearly every stranger as a potential foe. In the grocery store, standing in line, he regarded his fellow shoppers with suspicion. On the SkyTrain an innocent jostle made Cole Blackwater’s six-foot frame stiffen and prepare for a blow.

  Cole Blackwater was growing paranoid.

  But Cole’s surveillance wasn’t driven purely by fear. He was an opportunist as well as deeply suspicious. Cole also scanned rooms like the rocking Cambie for a little sport. While all men were potential adversaries to Cole, he regarded all women as potential conquests.

  At thirty-seven Blackwater wasn’t the catch that he once was. His nose, broken twice in high school, was bent awkwardly to the left, the result of too many right roundhouse punches. His once slender and well-muscled body had grown soft over the last ten years. Truth be told, thought Cole, while Ottawa’s pace had been gruelling, it was Vancouver that had put the nail in his once limber and lithe corporeal coffin. It wasn’t for lack of opportunity for fitness, Vancouver having one of the most active populations in the country. No, it was a lack of will. Cole Blackwater had lost his resolve to keep himself up.

  Scanning the room and feeling fleshy, a Paul Simon song played in Cole’s head: “Why am I soft in the middle now, the rest of my life is so hard?”

  Cole grimaced. Even if he did face trouble with a few thugs or, more optimistically with a skirt, he wasn’t sure he was up to the challenge anymore.

  It wasn’t only the lack of time on the trail, in the mountains, or on the rivers that had softened Cole Blackwater. It wasn’t the years that he’d been away from the gym. It wasn’t the time. It was the miles. It was the many, many miles that had turned Cole soft. He finished his ale, disgusted with himself.

  He shook his head a little to slough off the feeling. Straightening, he took comfort that it wasn’t all for rot and ruin. Allowing his gaze to troll the sea of churning humanity before him, he found solace in the fact that he still had most of his hair, and his face, never a candidate for an Oil of Olay commercial, was yet ruggedly good looking, though by no means handsome. Years and years of Alberta sun and wind, a lifetime of riding the range herding his family’s cattle, weeks in the mountains skiing and climbing, and months in the backcountry paddling wild rivers, had etched Blackwater’s face into a maze of lines. Even after three years on the wet coast, when months passed without the sun showing its rosy face, Blackwater still wore the appearance of a tan, though it was more from wear and tear than basking.

  Then there was the boxing. Nothing puts years on a man’s face like being hit, again and again, with a leather glove, every day and night for nearly two decades.

  He finished his sweep of the room, elbows resting on the bar, one leg cocked back and jammed against the boot-worn wood. The room was getting busier, the decibel level rising with the frenzied excitement of young people on a Friday night. Blackwater spotted a solid dozen women who fit his description of beautiful, but nearly each one was guarded by a man ten years younger than he was, and perceptibly more good looking. He would be content to let his fantasies play out from afar.

  Cole Blackwater’s third reason for making a careful assessment of this bar was to see if any of his cronies had taken up residence to hoist a few without him. Gregarious by nature, Black-water loved any chance to swap a week’s worth of political gossip with his acquaintances. Also, he hated the thought of being left out. Of being left behind. He feared nothing more than missing something. Some decision might be made without him. Some plan hatched in his absence. He had spent his professional life scrambling to be in on all the big opportunities. Cole Blackwater knew that those opportunities were often conceived over a beer-stained tablecloth, or across a cocktail table littered with tumblers and highball glasses.

  Where had those years of scrambling got him? Drinking alone on a Friday night after laying off his only employee, not knowing where the next paycheque would come from. Then he thought of Peggy McSorlie and, out of habit, checked his watch. Desperation will make a man
do funny things, thought Cole Blackwater.

  He saw nobody he knew in the bar, which saddened him more than his unfulfilled search for potential adversaries or conquests. He was lonely. He reached to plunk his pint glass on the bar behind him without taking his eyes from the room.

  “Another?” asked the boy bartender.

  “Please,” he answered over the din.

  He took stock of himself: he was paranoid, lonely, and fighting so far below his weight class it embarrassed him.

  “Bottoms up,” said the bartender, and Cole fished another five from the garbage in his pockets to pay for the beer.

  The note with Peggy McSorlie’s phone number fell out and landed on the floor. He reached to pick it up. He looked at his watch again. It wasn’t yet eight o’clock.

  He tipped the beaded pint glass toward his lips and drank half of the ale before returning it to the coaster. He blew out through pursed lips and felt the beer settle into his belly. That’s better, he mused, the pints doing their work to loosen his limbs and calm his frenzied thoughts. Cole settled into a familiar funk, assessing what he considered to be the ruined landscape of his life. Maybe his critics were right: he was a failure as a consultant. Maybe it was time for a change. Take a job. Stop trying to save the world single-handedly. He let his gaze fall on one of the TVs in the corner of the bar, and became absorbed by his next pint and the silent hockey game on the Sports Network, and let half an hour pass this way.

  A heavy hand on Cole’s shoulder startled him, and he tipped his fourth beer, spilling a trickle of it down the front of his shirt. “What the!...” he growled, turning on the man next to him.

  He was greeted by the grinning face of Dusty Stevens. “Easy, champ.”