The Higher the Monkey Climbs Read online

  “He’ll need tanks to move all of them,” Forzante said.

  “And no politician would dare,” said Gord.

  Weeks passed. Gord decided to delay his matriculation at McGill until the end of the strike, even as it appeared that Clarence Krull was willing to wait as long as necessary. The other workers were touched by his sacrifice. They shook his hand, patted him on the back, promised him pints and shots when it was all over.

  “Ever thought you’d be a union man?” one of the strikers asked.

  “Well,” Gord said. “My family is United Church.”

  They offered to introduce him to their younger sisters.

  And none of it escaped Allistair Forzante’s notice.

  When it was over, thirty-three weeks later, the strikers declared victory and Gord finally shipped off to Montreal. The next summer, he had a job waiting for him at Krulls, guaranteed by the newly chartered UCF. The following May, he returned again to his hometown in time to help Allistair Forzante organize line workers at Pincer Automotive. A year later, his analysis helped break the stalemate in negotiations with Nickson Textiles. Law school was Forzante’s suggestion.

  “They’re going to use every trick in the book to bring us down. We need someone who knows the book as good as them.”

  “I’d rather stay here. I could organize Dominion Dash and Concord Forge, they both look ready to fall.”

  But Dominion and Concord could wait. “Don’t worry about the tuition,” Forzante said. “The UCF has it covered.”

  Forzante was right when he said the UCF would need a well-trained lawyer on its staff and that my father was the suitable candidate. But there was a subtext, suddenly important given what Tony had been telling me. It was sometimes suggested out loud, but never mentioned in our history lessons that Allistair Forzante, suspicious of Gord’s popularity among the workers, was eager to get rid of his most trusted advisor for a few years, time enough to consolidate power in his own corner. Time enough for the workers to forget the sharp eighteen-year-old who had toughed it out with them for the whole thirty-three weeks. Forzante knew that seven years later, with two degrees and a closet full of white collars, dark suits, and patent leather shoes, Mr. Gord McKitrick, Esq. B.A., LL.B, Barrister, Solicitor & Notary Public, a certified gentleman and inextricably linked by his profession to the bourgeoisie, would always be an outsider and never fully trustworthy to the rank and file.

  Which, for all I know, may have been how Allistair Forzante preferred it.

  9

  “Lazy teachers get what they deserve,” I remembered saying. “Keep it to yourself, though.”

  I passed another copy of the Grade 13 English mid-term to a skeptical classmate, stuffing the page into a jacket pocket, swivelling my head to check for enemy agents. But it was no joke; the fix was really in. The previous day I took advantage of Mr. Atkins’ lengthy smoke break to search through our dim teacher’s briefcase, copy out the exam in shorthand squiggles, and slip the golden pages back before he returned. That night, using the machine at UCF headquarters, I made enough copies for all my classmates.

  Out of thirty-something students, only my cousin Tony refused a copy. “Cheaters only cheat themselves,” he said, the phrasing familiar to me, if not the exact words.

  “But everyone else is doing it,” I said.

  “What difference could that make?”

  I shoved a paper into his chest. Tony shook his head.

  “Suit yourself,” I said.

  This was before Tony had quit school for good but after he began to work temporary/part time at Krulls. He grabbed every shift they offered, setting his earnings aside to support the unborn Bernie. It left him with less time for studying and on that test, he was the only student to score below eighty, falling two points short of a passing grade. Everyone else spent half an hour memorizing the correct answers and scored an easy average of ninety-three, the overall score shaved by some slackers who worried about the red flag a perfect grade would raise next to otherwise dismal results. Far from suspicious, Atkins was delighted at the performance, proud that his methods had yielded such success. To celebrate, he raised the weight on the final grade from fifteen to twenty-five per cent.

  After that class I could not bring myself to mock Tony’s double misfortune. A few of the beneficiaries of my thieving wanted to take me out and buy me beers to honour my heroics. Normally, this would have been automatic. But although I was as happy as everyone else with my elevated grade, I didn’t much feel like celebrating. Instead, I went home, shut myself in the gloom of my bedroom (soon after Gord died, I changed the wall colour from sky blue to gunmetal grey) and flopped on my unmade bed and sicked my thoughts on the events of the previous two days. Part of me knew that he was right not to cheat, that Tony’s sleep might be less disturbed because he didn’t. But part of me also knew that there would be times in his life when such rigid adherence to this code of his would hurt Tony and because of it, the obstacles he faced would seem all the larger. I felt some shame in realizing that because of my willingness to dip my toes into grey areas of ethics and morality, to look out for number one, that is, I would have a smoother ride than Tony.

  Over the next few weeks, I spent a lot of time refusing to think about all that Tony had tried to tell me in Wanstead and also the strange phone call from my mother in its aftermath. Like trying to unsee something revolting, it wasn’t easy. Because after those conversations, something started to nag at me, occupying my head like a squatter, robbing me of clarity. Though I recall the feeling clearly, it remains hard to describe. It wasn’t quite pain, though it was as agonizing as a migraine and in some ways at least, left me just as immobile.

  To distract myself I worked, the cause of immigration never so dear to me. I filed a claim on behalf of a twenty-something Cuban looking to marry a seventy-something widow from Mississauga, their engagement announced fresh off a seven-day romance at a Varadero all-inclusive. I helped one of the partners with a case involving a Peruvian chemical engineer, Stanford-educated and successful in his career, but doomed by too close a friendship with the disgraced Alberto Fujimori and wanted by federal police in his native land.

  Around eleven, Amanda Lu came in. “Who do you know at Newsys?” she said.

  “Nobody,” I said. In fact, I had never before heard of Newsys.

  “Well someone there knows you,” she said and handed me a fat file. It was full of visa applications, each on behalf of a Mexican citizen.

  Amanda explained. “I got the call this morning,” she said. “They’re having trouble getting visas for all these techies from Monterrey they have to train. I don’t know why, it looks pretty straightforward. Once you figure out the first one it’s like, lather, rinse, repeat. And there’s plenty of repeating. Hundreds over a few years. ‘No problem,’ I said, ‘I’ll handle it myself.’ ‘No, no, no,’ they said. ‘We want Richard McKitrick to take it on.’ So here it is. You can already look forward to bonus time. Seriously, who do you know?”

  “I can’t think of anyone,” I said. “No one.”

  “I guess it’s just the luck of the draw then.”

  With Amanda gone, I looked up the Newsys website. But scanning a list of senior executives and the Board of Directors revealed no familiar names. Maybe it had just been luck, I thought, and looked again at the thick file, each page representing a four-figure billing item, the file itself worth several hundred thousand to the firm.

  And that was just the beginning, Amanda had said.

  Calculating the trickle-down, I began to get giddy. I clenched my teeth and then my fists and shook them with the silent joy of a fussy baby. In my head, I composed the note that would go into the alumni magazine when I was named partner. Years later than most of my classmates, of course, but still worthy of attention. I made plans to stop by The Barrington on my way home, one foot resting on the rail, an assured finger pointing to the bottle of Bal
venie 18 Lena kept on an upper shelf, asking if she’d have one with me. I whirled in my chair, spinning five or six times until my glasses fell loose from my face.

  “I’m going to get laser eye surgery,” I said out loud.

  I buzzed for Lydia.

  “We need to open a new docket,” I said. “Newsys.”

  “I know that company,” Lydia said. “My brother-in-law works there.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Hates it. No benefits. No overtime.”

  “Well they ought to form a union, then,” I said. “But we’re not concerned with that.”

  “They have a union.”

  “Which one?”

  “The UCF, I’m sorry to report.”

  I felt a small implosion in the pit of my stomach. When Lydia closed the door, I searched the corporate website to confirm what she had just said. Newsys workers were proudly represented by the UCF, Local 4848, Allistair Forzante, national president.

  What did that mean? I didn’t quite know. It might have been a coincidence that the company whose workers were represented by the union run by my godfather were about to hand me a career’s worth of business with no previous contact. It was ­certainly possible. I allowed this bit of self-deception to settle in, hoping it would harden with my inaction. I put my hand on the file and closed my eyes and forced a gob of saliva back and forth between my molars until the muscles in my tongue and jaw turned sore and the only thing I decided in that lengthy pause was that there was nothing to celebrate and that I would not be ordering expensive drinks at The Barrington that evening.

  10

  Back at the townhouse I sat down with Sagipa to watch Jeopardy, the best of a short list of choices. We didn’t subscribe to cable, Inés’ idea: “There’s enough stupidity in this world,” she said. “Why invite more of it into our home?”

  We made do with free channels and DVD rentals. I confess that I didn’t mind or even notice, really. Accustomed to the deprivation, Sagipa only occasionally complained, most recently at being unable to watch the bits of the Beijing Olympics not shown on the CBC. What’s more, he read five times as much as other kids his age. I was able to tell myself that we were doing the right thing as I sat through another episode of Tudor Family Farm (Ruth washes the sheets with urine!). It made me feel like a responsible adult. Good for me, I thought. Though really, I also liked saving the sixty bucks a month.

  Sagipa lit a cigarette and Alex Trebeck launched into a new category. His eyes fixed on the screen, Sagipa blew smoke in the air and told me about Zheng He.

  “The first Chinese came to the new world in 1421,” he said, still concentrating on the show. “What is thermonuclear?”

  “I thought the story was that Columbus arrived first,” I said. “Or the Basques. Or the Vikings. Haven’t you seen those little mounds they left in Newfoundland.”

  “Only because it suited us to tell that story. It was convenient to imagine a Westerner discovering America. A white Italian. A whiter Scandinavian. It made it easier for Europeans to assume historic rights over the land,” Sagipa said. “What is solar?”

  “So there’s another story?” I said.

  “Isn’t there always?” Sagipa said. “The eunuch admiral, Zheng He, who sailed for Emperor Zhu Di, commanded a fleet of seventeen hundred ships with a mandate to ‘proceed all the way to the end of the earth to unite the world in Confucian harmony.’ What is steam?”

  “Eunuchs? To make a colony? I think I see where he went wrong.”

  “Not colonizers, traders. The eunuch admiral Zheng He sailed for three decades and traded with everyone. Spices from South Asia; elephants, tigers, and leopards from Malaysia and Sri Lanka. Ivory from Africa. ­They crossed the Pacific to the coast of California. Within twenty years, they had half the world in their grasp. They might have been as big a colonial force as Spain, France, and England combined.”

  “What happened?”

  “Emperor Zhu Di died and his heir, Hongxi, didn’t share his father’s ambitions,” Sagipa said. “What is horse?”

  “So they discovered America. So they were great traders. That was nearly 600 years ago. What does it prove?”

  “So it means that we were one unenlightened emperor away from speaking Mandarin instead of English right now.” He stubbed his cigarette in an otherwise clean ashtray. “What is absolute?”

  Downstairs, feeling more needy than deserving, I poured a shot and a half of Teacher’s, adding three cubes of ice. In the kitchen, Inés was frantically peeling overripe plantains, smashing garlic, tending to a large pot of something steaming on the stove. Sagipa followed me into the kitchen and lit another cigarette and I wondered how many he’d smoked that day. Inés asked me to pass a bowl and began to slice into a mango.

  “What’s the occasion?” I asked.

  Inés stopped slicing and looked at Sagipa. “I thought you were going to tell him,” she said.

  “We got to talking about other things,” Sagipa said.

  “Tell me what?”

  Inés wiped her hands on a towel and Sagipa slipped from the kitchen. I heard his steps scurrying upstairs as Inés explained to me in a reluctant but steady voice how Manolo Palacios, ex-number four man in the FFLC, formerly the second largest guerrilla group in Colombia, had successfully emigrated to Canada, contacted Inés, his old girlfriend, the mother of his son (and my wife, don’t forget) and would be joining us for dinner that evening.

  Arriving, in fact, any minute.

  “Don’t act so surprised,” she said. “It was your firm that processed his papers.”

  “Impossible,” I said. “I handle everything from Latin America. I would have heard about it.”

  “That’s why I gave him your name. But Manolo said his lawyer was an Asian woman.”

  I remembered the client I had shuffled to Amanda Lu and thought of long-ago university readings of Greek drama and a note in the margin of my second-hand text left by a more astute reader about the tragic hero being the unwitting agent of his own undoing.

  “I see. So why is he coming here?”

  “If it was only me, I wouldn’t have invited him here. No way.” Inés said. “But for the sake of Cuxinimpaba . . .”

  “Who?”

  “My son.”

  “Sagipa?”

  “He is no longer called Sagipa. He is called Cuxinimpaba now. He was supposed to tell you that, too.”

  “What the hell kind of name is Cuxinimpaba?”

  “He was the last legitimate cacique of the Muiscas.”

  “I thought a guy named Sagipa was the last cacique of the Muiscas,” I said. “That’s what I’ve been telling everyone who asks. And I don’t think I need to tell you: a lot of people ask about a name like Sagipa.”

  I followed her into the living room, where she began to fluff the throw pillows on the arm chairs and sofa. “We had it wrong. It turns out that Sagipa was a usurper. He stole the throne from Cuxinimpaba. He was an imposter. Look, I just found out myself.” She touched the flaming tip of a lighter to a pair of votive candles in glass holders and dimmed the overhead lights.

  Standing, I took my glass to the old sewing machine cabinet that had been emptied of its machinery and refitted to serve the better cause of holding our liquor. I refilled, taking the bottle with me. Inés was fanning a pile of magazines on the coffee table.

  “How does Sagipa feel about this?” I said.

  “Cuxinimpaba was resistant at first,” Inés said. “But then he asked if he could call himself Cuxi and I thought it would be okay. We think Cuxi is a bit effeminate, but he is a young man now and this is his choice. Don’t put your feet there. I just ­polished.”

  In fact, it was not just the coffee table. Now that I looked, the whole place seemed cleaner, differently ordered. Picture frames had been dusted, the glass wiped of grime. The rug showed the lines of recent vacuuming,
seat cushions were overturned to conceal stains from wine spilled at more careless times. The bulb in the table lamp had been replaced, candle wax scraped from the surface of a radiator cover. The books had been rearranged on the shelves to give prominence to works in Spanish by the likes of Manuel Puig, Juan Rulfo, Álvaro Mutis, and Eduardo Galeano. Inés had overstuffed the shelves, laying several paperbacks horizontally atop vertical hard covers, as though this were a house of journalists, editors, or university professors. She had dug deeply into her boxed collections in the basement and there were thick volumes of Colombian histories by Jaime Jaramillo Uribe and Germán Arciniegas, leaving no room for a tea cup souvenir from the coronation of Edward VIII.

  “That tea cup belonged to my grandmother,” I said.

  “Maybe so, but that man was a fascist. I’ve never been comfortable with having it on display. Don’t worry. I’ve wrapped it in tissue. Which is far more than Edward VIII would have ever done for my people.”

  I squeezed the scar on my ear lobe. “I wish you had told me about this,” I said. “I wish I’d had some warning.”

  “I tried calling your office around lunch,” Inés said. “You weren’t there.”

  Once again the author of my own undoing, my thoughts returned to the Greeks. I rubbed my eyes, the tips of my fingers wet from condensation on the glass of scotch. Too slippery to get a good grip, should I decide to rip them from their sockets.

  “Can’t we cancel? Do it another night? I’ve had a hell of a long day.”

  “Look, we have to do it sooner or later. This way, we get it over with. He sees Cuxi, we eat, and he leaves.”

  “It doesn’t seem fair to dump this on me now. So unexpectedly.”

  “What’s fair? Consider Cuxinimpaba.”

  The doorbell buzzed. I heard Sagipa’s shoes shuffling above. As he reached the top of the stairs, Inés swept the bottle of Teacher’s from the table, capped it, and rushed to return it to the sewing machine. I checked my fly, rolled my sleeves down to the wrist, and fastened the plastic cuff buttons. There was a vague smell of aerosolized flowers where Inés had spritzed the room with air freshener. For the first time in years I craved a cigarette, if only to foul the air.