Chapter 128

Being a part of normal society, at least, gave a certain feeling of vague courage; just by having membership in the biggest gang.
In Rawle’s life now, though, that basic, underlying feeling of security normal people have, was gone.
He felt a continuous, gnawing, raw, low-level fear, like he was naked in the woods, all alone and exposed to the elements.
It was exciting.
He was spending so much time alone, hour after hour. It was jarring. Freedom!
He had no family or job now to take up his time, although he missed Athan’s white-toothed grin so badly it made tears squirt into his eyelids, from time to time.
But the rest of the time, he felt exhilarated.
After a few nights, he stopped staying under the bridge, feeling that it was getting too crowded down there. One of the young girls kept blabbing all night long in French, in a disrupting voice, always wanting someone to smoke one more bowl with her before bed, or take one more drink of whiskey. Are you still a-wake? Esqe tu a le Pot?
Someone in the dark would keep whispering and shouting at her to shut up and go to sleep: “Danielle!” over and over, “Dan-yell!”
Rawle started sleeping on the rooftop of the Gonquin Inn, instead, in a little spot he found tucked up against a low wall, with a tin overhang to keep the rain off his sleeping bag.
It turned out to be a good decision.
A few days later, Olivier and the other bridge hippies were all caught by a ranger and arrested.

The person Olivier wanted Rawle to talk to, Kurtis’ former boyfriend, Gillespe finally showed up, after nearly a week.
When Olivier introduced him to Rawle, they seemed to quickly fall “in like” with eachother.
He had long, soft brown cuffs of hair, like a prince in a Knights of the Round Table fairy tale. Creamy skin, high cheekbones, a tender voice and a strangely tall and solid, muscular frame.
It was getting close to 10 in the morning when they met and Gillespe stood up suddenly from the grass and said he had to go to work at his legitimate job as a dish-pig in the Cantonese restaurant downtown. He got up to leave, then asked Rawle if he wanted to come with him.
“They need another dishwasher today. My friend Chris’s away.”
Rawle agreed, although he didn’t understand why Gillespe was washing dishes in a Chinese restaurant.
They walked to work in two minutes. The owner of the restaurant met them in the front. She was a tall, thin Chinese woman. She seemed not to care who Rawle was, just as long as he, or somebody the work.
The restarant was empty but by 10:45 the lunch crowd started pouring in.
Rawle was shuffled into the back kitchen quickly and put to work, spraying syrupy blood and fat out of large plastic tubs and pushing piles of dirty porcelain and utensils through the steel dish machine, and prying the gunk out of a black tar-filled grease-trap.
Buckets of congealed blood and fat waited for some purpose in several corners of the kitchen. “Was that MSG?” Rawle asked Gillespe of one drum of fluid, but he got ignored.
Rawle also saw two enormous steel pots, in a huge metal sink, that were filled with 12-inch, cream yellow, flabby sea-worms of some kind. They smelled like saline and had a rubbery, fatty texture.
“What the fuck are those?” He demanded of Gillespe.
“Just don’t worry about it. It’s food,” Gillespe said. “Get back to work.”
Rawle tried all day to find out what the worms were, but none of the cooks spoke enough English to adequately explain it. They looked like old, pickled pig dicks.
One of the cooks chopped them up into rubbery cubes to be added into God-knew-what.
Gillespe, meanwhile, kept his head down and toiled away hard, all day, as if washing dishes was his actual bread-and-butter job, not dealing.
He was a bizarre person. His wallet was full of cash and yet he rolled cigarettes out of the stained tobacco he crushed from crusty old butts in the restaurant ashtrays, and he ate scraps of food out of dirty bowls, like a street kid.
That was the way these Montreal kids were. They were street kids at heart, whether they had money or not. They could have a thousand dollars in their pocket and they would still pick up a butt from the gutter and smoke it.
The kitchen grew busier and busier, filling with the smell of spice and fats, tinkling porcelain, bowls of warm water, sizzles, and the hot revolting smells of cooking seafood and pork.
Gillespe and Rawle whirred side-by-side around the dish machine, rubbing elbows, sweating through their white t-shirts and wiping slime off on their aprons.
The musical gibbering of the Cantonese cooks went on loudly in the background.
The gay maitre-d touched his finger to Rawle’s asshole, one time, when he walked by as Rawle was bent over the sink, then giggled and gave him a handful of tailor-made cigarettes when Rawle exploded.
“-What the fuck are we doing here?” He asked Gillespe over and over, but got no answer. Not until they finally took a lunch break at close to five o’clock in the afternoon.
They ate a plate of food each from the buffet and went out back behind the restaurant for a cigarette.
“I’ve got tailor-mades,” Rawle said, protesting, but Gillespe lit up one of his ashtray butts.
“No,” he insisted, “This one. This one...”
Some cooks came out briefly to smoke too and eventually a manager of some sort came out, wearing a dark, almost black charcoal business suit. He looked really well put together.
Rawle had seen him in the kitchen, he was the only guy with a suit, and he treated everyone like they were a piece of shit.
He sat down on the curb, but not before locking the door to the kitchen behind him.
“Hello,” he said to Gillespe.
“John Hon. This is a nice friend of mine, name Rawle. He’s from Nova Scotia.”
“Oh, you play the fiddle?” the Chinese man said, smiling.
“Yeah,” Rawle said. “I fiddle with it between my legs.”
The man Gillespe called ‘Hon’ offered Rawle a cigarette of a brand he didn’t recognize. The tobacco inside was a very dark, almost black.
“Thanks, Mr. Hon,” Gillespe said, politely. “My friend needs a job for a couple days.”
“Yeah,” Hon said. “I told you. I don’t care who you bring, just bring somebody, every day.”
Were they talking about dishes or something else? Rawle had no idea.
“And one other thing,” Gillespe continued. “He has a person from back in his home that he heard was here in town. He’s trying to find him. It turns out it’s John Dee. Except his name is really…. What is it?”
Gillespe looked over at Rawle.
“Kurtis Missions.”
“Mission? That a funny name,” Mr. Hon said, giggling almost. He had bright black eyes. “He a spy or something?”
“No. He just owes me some money,” Rawle said, although he knew Mr. Hon was trying to make a joke. “I want to talk to him, real bad. Do you know where he is?”
Hon stopped smiling and bent his long cigarette out on the back-alley pavement.
“I know this man, okay, he work for me, with Gillespie. But other time maybe the people I work with, not know him. He maybe fool me a bit. But what you doing here in the West Cose, I understand. I surprised no one come before. He seem like somebody after him. He seem very nervous.”
“Do you know where I can find him? Who he might be staying with? He’s got to have some friends. It’s important.”
“He gone. John Dee, he drive a van between Jasper and Kooteney. He disappear, after I find out he lie.”
Gillespe looked over at Rawle and gave a grim smile.
“I knew he was trou-ble. The first time I got with him,” Gillespe said in his soft French accent. “I warned all my friends to stay away. Before long, he did not have any friends in Jasp-er. I thought he was a dangerous man.”
“He is,” Rawle said, nodding his head. “He is. I appreciate you telling me this. But what was he doing, for you, if you don’t mind me asking? Was he driving a truck you said?”
Hon seemed upset at the question. “I don’t talk about that. You should know, someone who do that, you should know don’t talk about that. I don’t know you.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to give offense…”
Hon said nothing.
“I just need to speculate on where he might have gone,” Rawle continued, treading softly. “Was he driving and ended up somewhere? It sounds like he was run out of Dodge. You think he had friends anywhere? Would he go to Calgary?”
“You probably know more than me,” Hon muttered. “I look in Calgary if I were you. That only other place he would know people from me. Or Kootenay. He did have some connection there, and had our van, but he left the van in Calgary. The van was towed back to me, from Calgary.”
There it was.
Calgary.
Kurtis had been driving a van and it was abandoned in Calgary.
There was proof.
Kurtis was definitely gone from the Jasper, and his last known location was Calgary, probably heading west into B.C..
“His goodwill is gone in Alberta,” Gillespe said, confirming what Rawle was thinking. “He burned bridges here. If he went, he would probab-ly try B.C.”
Rawle nodded. “Kootenay? Where’s that?”
“The Interior.” Gillespe said. “You go to Calgary and turn left. I don’t think he would go there, though. The Kootenay’s is a mountain range. It’s a valley. He might think we would look for him there.”
A valley? Would Kurtis unconsciously seek out a valley, like home?
“So…,” Hon said, curiously. “John Dee. He was a biker? He say he was, but I catch him in lie.”
“Uh…” Rawle said. “I thought he was a hangaround. As far as I know.”
“With Gypsy?”
“Yeah. With the Gypsies. But I don’t know, he’s just a local dealer. Maybe he has no connections out here. That’s the problem. Back home he does, but maybe not out here, I don’t know. I don’t know what he’s doing out here.”
“-He said he knew some man in Calgary I work with. Turn out my guy not know him,” Hon said, crossly. He really had been fooled by Kurtis.
“I shit my pants, for a week. I think he’s definitely 6-Up.”
“No.” Rawle assured Mr. Hon of one thing. “He’s not police. That’s all I know. If there’s one thing I know, it’s that.”