Chapter 131

He began to make inquiries in the tiny population of street people living in, or passing through, Kelowna.
He met a guy on the sidewalk who was selling hand-carved wooden marijuana pipes.
Rawle actually recognized him from high school. It was a guy who had been a year or two above him in highs school. He didn’t recognize Rawle, in the slightest, which either meant he had developed a convincing cover identity, or he was just a forgettable person in high school.
Either way, it was probably a good thing.
The guy’s name was Derek Baker. He had been traveling through the Okanagan to pick cherries, but then met a girl instead and moved in with her.
“She was my cherry, right? Hahahaha. It’s okay, her family hates me. They hate me so much, we fight all the time, me and her. I’m probably just going to take off. I’ve almost had enough of this bull-shit. Everyone in town hates the fact that I sell pipes, bud. This is not like the rest of B.C. here. You got to be careful in the valley, ‘cause it’s very tight-ass. They work together to squeeze out pieces of shit like you and me, especially if you are really homeless.”
Rawle asked if he knew anything about a guy with missing teeth named either ‘John Dee’ or Kurtis Missions. “Maybe he tried to buy dope from you?”
“Actually, there was a guy travelling through yesterday. He had a buzzcut. He was hanging around with a fat squaw, and they were on ‘er pretty hard. Drinking a quart of R and R’s between them. And she had a big stash. But fuck she was ugly. I remember ‘cause he was just a young fella. A good looking fella, but she looked to be about 50. She was a hard-looking ticket too. Anyways, he was hanging out at the waterfront. If he’s still there, I’d be surprised. He was making a lot of noise and people like him usually spend the night in the drunk tank and are disappeared in the morning. Know what I mean?”
After that, Rawle walked downtown in the direction of the waterfront.
Lake Okanagan was the largest of several beautiful blue lakes that ran down the valley like a necklace of blue glass beads.
He talked to anybody along the way who would listen.
“Have you seen a man with four front teeth missing?”
An old homeless guy with a white beard like Santa Claus gave him an earful of gibberish in front of the movie threatre, except Rawle was finding lately that he could understand the gibberish of homeless people, which meant either he was going crazy, or he was becoming more in tune with his fellow man.
There really was no such thing as gibberish, he knew now. People heard gibberish perhaps, but no one ever spoke it. Ever.
He sat on a concrete flower box with the homeless guy and just listened to him babble on, like Athan. Rawle didn’t even try to make sense out of what he said. He just listened to the sounds and the tones. It was like listening to poetry.
Rawle started chuckling, and said things back. They had a freestyle conversation, until they were both just smiling and chuckling at eachother like two-year-olds. Rawle felt like they could talk all night.
The old man was saying something about giving him his bicycle, which he said was stashed in a back alley. He didn’t want it anymore because the colour red was a jinx for him, he said. But, Rawle could see someone approaching from behind the old man. Creeping up, staggering drunk.
He walked around the old man and stopped in front of the movie theatre. Then turned around.
“You got a smoke, bud?”
It was Kurtis Missions.
Holy-
Rawle knew right away, it was him.
He had the same hallucinating brown eyes, as his mother in the old Gerry Godsoe photo. And in a weird way, he looked like Darlene, except skinnier, and with a shaved head, and four front teeth missing between his top two incisors.
Rawle had always been the type to never forget a face.
He felt like he predicted this would happen.
This meeting.
Like he was fated by God to find Kurtis Missions, and to set things right.
Rawle looked the young man up and down, slowly, just to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating himself, then took out his pack of loose tobacco and his rolling papers.
“Here. You can roll one, if you want.”
Kurtis sat down next to the old man on a concrete flower bed and began blaring in Rawle’s ear, talking about what a night he’s had, even as the old man continued trying to talk to Rawle in his tiny, poet whisper.
“Shit! So, what’re you guys -alking about?”
Kurtis was loud and obnoxious. Rawle almost wanted to tell him to fuck off and keep moving.
But there was a shift in the air. Rawle and Kurtis would be spending their time together from now on, Kurtis and Rawle. He felt it in his bones. Their paths had crossed for good.
After they were done their cigarettes, Rawle got up and moved along down the street with Kurtis, saying goodbye forever to the nice old man.
It was Cherryfest in the Valley and all kinds of people were milling around in the parks and at the beach at night. Two young people were screwing quietly in the grass square.
Rawle and Kurtis walked by and stared at the girl’s smooth white ass shining in the moonlight.
They slept in the park that night, overlooking Lake Okanagan.

In the morning, they got up early and headed for the highway, heading south down the valley.
Kurtis had no shirt on and his tiny blue knapsack bounced as he walked.
They talked about where they were from.
“Where you from?”
“Nova Scotia.”
“Me too,” Kurtis said, grinning ear to ear, his missing teeth were like a gaping hole inhis face. “Now, isn’t that a coincidence?”
They weren’t on the highway very long.
A big yellow Jeep hopped over onto the shoulder, with a muscular, tanned blonde guy behind the wheel. He said he could take them as far as Penticton, a few towns down.
Rawle sat up front and Kurtis climbed in the back.
The blonde guy pule dout into traffic and told Rawle to reach into the glove box and grab the bag of seed-encrusted buds sitting inside. “I’ll drive. You roll up a cannon, would ya? You got any papers?”
Rawle nodded, rummaging into his pocket.
“And keep on rolling til I ell you to stop. It’s kinda shite weed, so we’ll have to have lotsa cannons. Okay?”
“Look at all the seeds on this,” Rawle said, holdingup a large bud. It looked like a small bright green clump of grapes.
“I’m a grower, man. I got about 500 plants in a forest piece of land, in the Kootenays, but it’s not ready yet. I haven’t harvested yet, so all I got is this crap.”
Kurtis perked up in the back seat.
“Who do you grow for?”
The guy laughed. “Never mind that. But I sell it all in one shot, to one guy, then I don’t do any work the rest of the year. I make 60 grand a year. Just surf Tofino, travel, camp, mountain bike. Rock climb. All that shit. And I’ll never get caught unless my guy gets caught,” the guy said, looking at Rawle. “They’ll probably get me for my taxes though, eh? I know it’s stupid. I know I got to work. I should work, just for show, anything. Fuck, MacDonald’s. I just can’t ever get around to it.”

He dropped them off in Penticton, crackling high and incredibly thirsty.
It was only May, but the valley was going through a heat wave. It was getting hotter and hotter, the further down they went.
Kurtis and Rawle wandered along the beach at the north end of town, which ran along the underside of Okanagan Lake.
Penticton had a pure blue lake at each end of town, and was surrounded by golden hills covered with vineyards on the left and right.
It seemed like paradise.
And incredibly, Kurtis and Rawle were actually getting along fairly well, and were having a good time together.
Rawle had somehow willfully suspended his rage and memories and everything he’d come here to do, and everything Kurtis stood for. He’d detached himself. He gave himself over, temporarily, to his cover story.
He was a traveling street kid. He didn’t care who Kurtis was, or what he’d done. He just wanted to hang out, drink, cause shit and smoke dope.
The beaches of Penticton were burning hot, and laden with ripe, brown beautiful women in bikinis.
Rawle and Kurtis walked around chatting up girls all day, then ate some sandwiches from a Sub shop and bought a few forties of beer at the liquor store.
Fat blackberries grew wild along almost every sidewalk they walked down.
Everywhere Rawle looked was clay cliffs and cottagy houses tucked into them, and fat sun-washed clouds in the sky.
He felt alive.
When the day was over, they sat on the sand and watched the sun sink back behind the hills and turn the clouds from cartoon pink to deep purple gray.
For dinner that night, they went to Boston Pizza.
Kurtis told Rawle that he would get this one, since Rawle had bought the sandwiches and beer at lunchtime.
Rawle was glad because he had no money left, except for a small emergency funding source. He had left his main bank card at home in Wolfville, but he did have an emergency fund. An old savings account he’d gotten along with a student loan he got in university. He still had the old bank card in his wallet, and he was pretty sure there was around a hundred bucks there. But he was nervous to touch it. Once that was gone, he’d be left with not a cent to his name.
He also knew there was a slim chance police were monitoring that account’s activities.
It was possible that the RCMP in Nova Scotia had discovered the bloody clothing in his car and were either actively trying to find him, or already had him under surveillance.
He was so close. He couldn’t risk doing anything to get caught now, not until Kurtis confessed about the murders and the cocaine.
Not until he accomplished his mission.
They sat down at a booth with red cushioning, in the restaurant.
A cute waitress with black hair and white skin came by.
Kurtis ordered a large pizza, half all-meat and half with peppers and mushrooms, and a pitcher of beer with two plastic glasses.
“And what time do you get on?”
She gave him a bored look. “Get ‘off?’”
Kurtis gestured down to his lap. “No, I mean what time do you ‘get on.’ -Hahhhaaaa!”
She walked away.
The two men talked and laughed, for hours, over food and more pitchers. When they were finally done, the waitress brought the bill.
Rawle got up to use the bathroom and saw a set of pay-phones in the back hall. He picked one up and dialed Dee Lee’s calling card number.
“DF.” A gruff voice answered.
“Hi. It’s me.”
“Who the fuck is ‘me’?”
“It’s Raoul. Out west.”
“Raoul. What’s happening, brother?”
“Is this Dee?”
“Yeah.”
“How do I know it’s really you?”
“Darlene Missions is a fat pigfucker.”
Rawle covered the receiver with his hand and looked down the hall to see if Kurtis was coming. “Okay. I found the moose.”
“WOAH!!!” Dee yelled over his end of the reciever. “Already?”
“Yeah. But I can’t talk right now, I gotta go. He’s here with me. What should I do?”
“What do you mean? Keep it up. Keep doing what yer doing. Where are you?”
“Penticton.”
“Okay. Are you staying there?”
“No. We seem to be thinking about hitchhiking, further down the valley, maybe picking cherries to make some money.”
“Perfect. I’ve got people there already. They’ll find you. You’re hitchhiking? Try to stick near the highway, so we can find you. But stay with him, no matter what. And get him to talk about Jacky. But don’t push too hard. You’re a friend of his now. Remember that. Everybody needs a friend, Raoul. Even him. Everyone needs someone to bitch to.”
”Okay. I gotta go.” Rawle hung up. His pulse was racing and his breathe felt sharp in his lungs, like broken glass.
When he got back to the table, Kurtis was leaned across it, stealing a glass of beer out of his pitcher.
Rawle sat down.
“Let’s dine ‘n’ dash.”
“What?” Rawle said, grinning.
“I don’t got no money, dude. We gotta make a run for it.”
Rawle was reluctant to do anything that might get him arrested, but he also was feeling so buzzed he didn’t care. “Alright,” Rawle said. “Let’s do it. How do you want to do it?”
The waitress passed by, to check on another nearby table.
Rawle got up and followed Kurtis straight out the front door.
They dashed across two perpendicular streets and all the way down another heading south towards the south end. No one yelled at them to stop or said anything.
Rawle never looked back.
They walked swiftly, crossing several dark streets. After about 40 minutes of straight walking, they reached a park and stopped to rest and roll cigarettes on the cool grass.
Rawle could see Penticton’s other beach just ahead this time on Skaha Lake at the south end of town..
“She’ll have to pay for that out of her paycheck, you know,” Kurtis said, almost sounding guilty. “That cute little waitress…. Unless somebody inside pays the bill for us.”
He winked at Rawle.
“What do you mean?”
Kurtis chuckled. “Don’t worry man,” he said. “I know exactly who you are.”