Every day, when journalists came to work, they knew how their work had been judged: their stories ran big or small or not at all. Reporters learned how to wring the most gratification from the least work. Helen worried about Grafton. On the cop beat, he exhibited a growing tendency to grab easy news. It disturbed Helen that so many young reporters tossed aside their values to succeed. Perhaps they didn’t have any values. Didn’t care about anything. “I don’t have an opinion, I’m a journalist,” they would answer if you asked them anything about anything. Should Canada withdraw from NATO? Bar American cruise missile testing over Canadian airspace? Idiots.
Hassane Moustafa “Yoyo” Ali met Helen Savoie on the bicycle path in Lyndale Park on the east side of the Red River. Helen was out for a stroll, and Yoyo had come to see the Red River, which, he’d been informed, had been a meeting place for Cree and Assiniboine Indians before the Europeans came. “Excuse me,” Yoyo said to her. He found her plumpness attractive. Yoyo worried about disturbing her. He knew that Canadians disliked talking to strangers.
“Yes?” she said, eyeing him directly.
He asked, “Is this the historic Red River, travelled once by Louis Riel, father of Manitoba?” He liked her big hips, big bones, big legs. She resembled a good strong African woman.
For her part, Helen noticed his heavy accent. She guessed that he was from Haiti. And so cute: small, like a boy, but in his late twenties, or older. Replying in English, Helen said yes, this was the Red River.
“Should I call you Madame or Mademoiselle?”
“It doesn’t make any difference,” she said. Oh yes, he emphasized, it made a difference. “Mademoiselle,” she said.
Touched by the man’s struggle to carry on in English, Helen made up her mind. She began speaking to him in French. Flawless French.
“Alors, vous êtes canadienne-française,” he said.
“Mais oui.”
“Vraiment?” He studied her with great interest.
“Oui,” she said, shyly. She admitted that she was French-Canadian. That she still carried the language with her.
Yoyo told Helen he was spending ten months in Winnipeg as a foreign correspondent while gaining experience as a contributor to the St. Boniface weekly. They spoke of St. Boniface, Canada and Cameroon as they walked through the park. A bitter autumn wind whistled across the river. She could see he was cold, and she, already wearing a heavy sweater, offered him her jacket.
He declined. “That is very kind of you. In my country, never would a white woman lend a black man her jacket.”
“There are whites in Cameroon?”
“There are tourists, and there are ex-colonials, and missionaries, and those who wish to rescue us from our misery,” he chuckled. “They come over, stinging from vaccinations, suffering diarrhoea from our water, melting under the heat, cursing the roads when it rains, carrying mosquito netting to protect them from malaria, never speaking our native languages, sometimes not even speaking French, yet still, somehow, they remain convinced that they must rescue us from our misery.”
“And do they do it?”
“No, they leave, after a few weeks, or months, to rescue themselves from their own misery.” Helen laughed again. A long, hearty, simple laugh, mirth that she had barely known in the many years she had worked at The Herald. Yoyo was a charming fellow. Handsome, in his way. But thin! His wrists and knuckles seemed particularly frail. Perhaps this was what she found attractive. She allowed herself to dwell for a moment on inconsequential thoughts that could never lead anywhere. Yoyo asked her name. For him, she pronounced it ‘Hélène.’ “Hélène!” Yoyo said it with urgency, as if he were warning her of a rushing bicycle.
“Oui?”
“Hélène, je t’aime.”
They met the next day in the park, on the bicycle path, under a tree with a strange branch that reached straight out and then curved up, like a bent arm. Yoyo told her it resembled the arm of an African woman reaching up to adjust a water pail on her head. Yoyo kissed her cheeks. His lips were thick. Dry. As dry as a twig in the sun. Dry, perhaps, but they exerted pressure. Promising lips! He said, “Hello, my lover!”
“And what makes you think I’m your lover?”
“Come now, Mademoiselle Hélène, if we were not lovers, why would you have met me today?”
He told her she had beautiful eyes. Stunning hair, dark brown, very brown, that hung straight down, grazing her neck. “Tellement foncés, tes cheveux,” he told her. As if she had ancêtres africains. She was going to tell him she couldn’t meet him again. She was going to say she didn’t want to get involved. She was going to break it off before it started, but then he told her he was returning to Cameroon in six months. Helen bit her tongue. If he were going soon, why not? He was staying in the home of an old widow; they couldn’t go there. So Helen took him home.
Yoyo was a wonderful lover. Less energetic, less thrusting, than her old boyfriend. Yoyo was no bigger than Helen. In fact, laughing, she put him on the bathroom scales and found out he was two pounds lighter. He didn’t perform gymnastics and he didn’t display Olympian endurance. But he was caring. He made her look into his eyes when they made love; his eyes were so dark that, whenever the lights were dim, she couldn’t find the line between his pupils and his irises. Sometimes he spoke in French and sometimes Bamileke, his mother tongue. He said the English language wasn’t fit for bedroom conversation.
They made love again. The phone rang. It was out in the hall, on the floor. Before he had undressed her and let her strip him, Yoyo had stared at the beige receiver in the bedroom. “Canadians leave telephones in their bedrooms?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, puzzled at his confusion.
“You leave them right next to a bed?” he asked.
“Yes, why?” she asked.
“And if it rings while you sleep, won’t it wake you up if it is so close to the bed?”
“Yes, of course.”
“And that doesn’t bother you? You would let the phone ruin your rest?” This was the first time the practice had struck Helen as absurd. But Yoyo hadn’t finished. “Now, one other thing. If you and I are making love, and this phone rings, what happens then?”
“Well, normally, I would answer it.”
Yoyo shook his head. Canadians really had their priorities mixed up. “I have entered you, and we are gasping together, and you are prepared to roll over and answer the phone?”
Helen grinned and said, “You never know. It could be important. Someone could be selling vacuum cleaners.” They laughed and kissed, but before going further, Yoyo carried the phone into the hall.
“Do you know what I would like?” They had slept for an hour.
“Anything you want, Yoyo.”
“Make me breakfast.”
“What?”
“Make me breakfast.”
It was two in the afternoon. “Why breakfast?”
“In my country, when a man and a woman make love, if the man does a good job, the woman makes him breakfast. A huge, whopping breakfast. She treats him like a king. It is thought that he deserves it, if he has satisfied her.”
“Well, how about eggs and orange juice and toast?”
“I’ll take the toast and the eggs,” he said. “Many eggs and much toast. But no juice! By no means juice! Just give me tea with honey.”
“You don’t like orange juice?”
“I don’t like what Canadians call orange juice! In those frozen cans? How can one freeze the juice of an orange? I nearly choked, the first time I tasted it. We have beautiful oranges in Cameroon and we know how to make orange juice. The richer a nation becomes, the less capable it is of producing respectable orange juice.” Helen laughed hard, hearing that. It sounded particularly funny when pronounced with Yoyo’s West African accent. She made him breakfast.
Nobody threw a party like Georges Goyette. He threw one in November in his second residence, a renovated farmhouse thirty miles south of Winnipeg. He had a fridge stocked with beer,
friends who were fiddlers, and a knack, himself, for clacking spoons. He invited a roomful of people who didn’t believe in letting a party die before dawn. He brought Yoyo along, telling him that it would do him good to get out of the city. “Ca va te déconcrisser,” Goyette laughed, slapping his friend on the back.
“Ca va me quoi?” asked Yoyo, who was unfamiliar with Goyette’s personal slang.
“You know, it will loosen your bones, let your blood pump, show you a good time.”
Yoyo nodded, unsure of what to expect. Georges Goyette, a man of many interests, was not one to invite only francophones to his parties. If certain language purists couldn’t cut their parties with anglos, then those purists, as far as Georges was concerned, could go roll hoops. Georges liked a party with two languages, loud music and wild jokes. His fridge never ran out. It seemed to get fuller as the night wore on. Asked about it, he would stroke his beard and refer to the Bible: “You have heard of the story of the multiplication of the bread? Well, this is the multiplication of the beer. Why not? Both have yeast, right?”
Georges invited Mahatma Grafton to the party. Grafton had originally struck him as a bright young journalist, but he was now giving Georges reason to pause. Grafton had been producing silly crime stories lately. Georges would have liked to talk about it, but Grafton couldn’t come to the party. Other journalists did come, however. Chuck Maxwell, a longtime drinking buddy of Georges’, came. And so did Norman Hailey. And Helen Savoie. So did Sandra Paquette and the mayor, John Novak, who had known Georges for a long time.
Sandra met Yoyo, whom she found fascinating and whom she introduced to the mayor. The two men hit it off. They spoke passionately about world politics. Yoyo spoke at length about Cameroon. He equated the tensions between the English and the French there with those in Canada. The mayor said he would love to see Cameroon. Goyette jumped into the conversation until fiddles sounded from the barn. The farmhouse emptied. Everyone flocked to the music except Helen, who hesitated, knowing that Yoyo would want to dance with her and not wanting to make such a public declaration about their affair. To avoid meeting Yoyo, she slipped out of the farmhouse and walked down a country road. A man appeared beside her suddenly, giving her a start. “Take it easy,” said Chuck Maxwell, “it’s only me.” After a moment he added, “It’s sure getting a little heavy in there.”
“Heavy?”
“Everywhere you turn, people are speaking French. It’s rude, if you ask me.”
“Nobody’s asking you,” Helen said.
“Don’t you think they could speak English when other people are around?”
“It’s a party. The host is French-Canadian. So are half the guests. So what’s your problem? You want rules for party talk?”
“They all can speak English, you know.”
Helen sighed. “What do you say we just enjoy the nature?”
“French extremists want the moon,” Chuck complained. “If they keep it up, Manitobans are gonna say, ‘Whoa! Enough’s enough. If you want to speak French everywhere, just move to Quebec!’”
“Chuck!” Helen said softly.
“What?”
“You’re a good guy and you’re my friend. But you still haven’t figured out that this province, and this country, were founded by the French and the English. So spare me your bullshit, okay?”
PART THREE
The temperature in Winnipeg dropped to -40 degrees Celsius, which was the same as -40 degrees Fahrenheit, on November 22, 1983. This was a record for the month of November. It was colder in rural Manitoba. Automobile gas lines froze. Block heaters had to be plugged in, but even then, many cars wouldn’t start. Yoyo was horrified. He feared the sub-zero merging of Celsius and Fahrenheit. Imagine! So cold that it didn’t even matter whether you were referring to one or the other! For a while, Yoyo refused to go outside. Inside, he wore a hat. He wondered what would happen if the heating system broke down in his house. He had stepped out two days before it hit -40. At that point, it was -20 and dropping. The cold had bitten his forehead. Yoyo had never suffered from headaches, but the stinging cold gave him one. He longed for the summer and for his country.
Midway through this cold snap, and shortly after Mahatma Grafton passed his probation at The Winnipeg Herald, Manitobans woke up to news of the most bizarre crime story in years.
It happened in the St. Albert-Princeton hockey arena, thirty miles south of Winnipeg, on a Thursday night. St. Albert, a predominantly French-speaking town, was bordered by Princeton, which was mostly English. Each town had its own mayor and city hall and bylaws, but they shared a library and recreation centre. Each town had its own hockey team, but they shared the St. Albert-Princeton arena.
The fight started around 8:30 p.m., peaked five minutes later and faded abruptly when the police arrived. Georges Goyette, who was watching his son’s St. Albert team play Princeton, witnessed the brawl. It started when a sixteen-year-old St. Albert player punched a Princeton player in the face. He hit him again and the Princeton boy fell to the ice. The players on both teams cleared the bench. The results: two broken noses, one concussion, a fractured wrist, a broken ankle, many cuts and much bruising. Nothing serious happened to the original two combatants. But a St. Albert player who had broken one nose and blackened four eyes in the brawl ran into fatal luck as police stormed the arena. When he turned to look at the cops, someone—nobody seemed to know who—clubbed his head. The boy died before he was carried off the ice. His name was Gilles Baril, the son of the town baker.
Some parents joined the fighting, but Goyette hopped over the boards and towed his son off the ice before the brawl had reached that point.
Edward Slade dived into the story. A good one. At last. He called the cops in St. Albert. A constable gave him the basics: one kid killed and six hospitalized. But the constable wouldn’t name the dead boy.
“Can’t you tell me anything about him?”
“He’s dead.”
Slade eased off. He started chatting about violence in hockey. Fighting was getting out of hand these days, wasn’t it?
“Yeah, but you haven’t seen the likes of this before,” the cop said. “You wouldn’t have believed it. Those kids went wild.”
Slade, who was unmarried and childless, said such incidents made him worry about the safety of his own kids.
“You got kids too, eh?” the cop said. “I got three little terrors.”
“I’ve got two,” Slade said. “And we’ve got another on the way. Try living on my salary with kids.”
“Don’t I know it,” the cop said.
“My boys will be hitting the hockey age pretty soon. I worry about what’s going to happen to them in those leagues. I mean, today’s violence, you think we’ll see more of it in the future?”
“Between you and me,” the cop said, “I think we can expect to see more of this. Things could get worse.”
“Even for kids that age?”
“You bet. They’re the worst. They’re animals.”
“How old did you say that boy was? The one who got killed?”
“Well, I’ll tell you, but you didn’t get it from me. Sixteen.”
“Thanks, buddy.”
“Sure. See you.”
“Bye.” Slade scribbled out a possible lead: “‘Bloody brawls in boys’ hockey will skyrocket after yesterday’s brutal slaying of a 16-year-old player in the St. Albert-Princeton arena,’ police predicted yesterday…”
Slade consulted a rural phone book and made several random calls to St. Albert residents. The third person he reached was able to tell him the name and number of the hockey coach. After dialling it, Slade got the coach’s twelve-year-old son. His father was talking to police at the arena. The boy answered all Slade’s questions: the name of the deceased, his address, his parents’ names. But he wasn’t able to provide directions to the victim’s home. Slade asked for the phone number of someone who could direct him there. “Who is calling anyway?” the boy asked.
“This is The Winnipeg Star
,” Slade barked. “And it’s urgent. We need someone else’s phone number. Someone who can give us directions.”
“I don’t think I’d better,” the boy said. Slade pushed the boy but it didn’t work. The boy simply hung up. Slade drove to the town. Someone there would direct him.
Ben was flipping through a magazine and chewing a toothpick. Mahatma, who lay on a couch, watched his father. Neither moved when the phone rang at 8:50 p.m. It reminded Mahatma of work. It made him think of hanging around court, taking notes, interviewing crime victims, squeezing information from cops. He wondered, as he let the phone ring, if he would dream of work that night, which he had been doing with increasing frequency. Mahatma hated dreaming of work. The phone finally stopped.
“What kind of foolishness is that, calling at this hour!” Ben said. “Anybody who phones at this time of night has been raised upside down!”
It started ringing again. Mahatma took it.
“It’s Don Betts. I need you to do some overtime. Got a car?”
“No.”
“Then take a cab over here, on the double.”
Mahatma hung up and turned to his father. “Don’t wait up for me.”
Only a few minutes ago, Ben had been planning to go to bed. But now he no longer felt like it. The house didn’t seem right with his son gone. Since Mahatma’s arrival four months ago, Ben hadn’t slept well until the boy got home from work. Ben would stay up and leave the porch light on and be watching by the curtains when Mahatma came home. He would greet his son, lock the doors and then sleep deeply.
Mahatma knew that Slade was onto the story. It was inconceivable that Slade would not be working on this. Slade would expect to clobber him. But Mahatma had no intention of letting himself get scooped. Not this time. This time he was giving it everything. He drove a Herald car straight to the town, knowing that his job would be impossible if Slade got there first. Slade had a reputation for erecting roadblocks for his competitors. When he could, he would cart off a family’s entire photo album so no one else could get it.