Jericho by George Fetherling

then, when one day she came into the office to tell me her good news.
    “I’ve just got a lead on his whereabouts,” she said.
    I’d never seen her so excited, and I tried to imitate her tone with necessary conviction. “Tell me!”
    “He was seen in Bella Coola.”
    “Who saw him?”
    “A woman had a vision.”
    I didn’t know what to say, so I just sighed appreciatively. I fear I knew whom she was referring to, but I held my tongue and let her unwrap the story. That cretinous psychotic Bishop had befriended the woman who calls everybody riff-raffs. She’s a well-known local character, one of the harmless homeless I call them, sometimes delusional but not actually unstable and certainly not dangerous or potentially violent like Bishop, the phony. I could hear what had happened between the lines as Beth told me her version of the events Bishop had related. The oracle, as he called her, can slip into another dimension if you believe in her. I once heard her say in this very office that she could predict earthquakes. (She thought a big one was coming, which is how the subject came up.) Bishop got to talking to her about Beth’s quest and “the oracle,” as Beth was now calling her, apparently said, “I know of such a man,” or words to that effect, and then recounted the missing man’s life in intricate detail such as she could not know except by extra-empirical means: at least one and maybe two daughters (one of them certainly named after a place in the Bible), his alcoholism, his desertion of the family and his drift over the mountains into the flophouses and beer parlours of the Downtown Eastside. According to Bishop, she said things about Beth’s father that she couldn’t have known if she was not telling the truth about what she saw in her head—for example, how when he was a kid his father used to tie him to a chair andread the Bible to him, both Testaments and the Apocrypha. Beth said that was one of the few details that her mother ever offered in trying to explain why her husband had acted the way he had.
    “Are you taking all this at face value, or has the woman herself repeated it all to you?”
    “I wanted to find her right away, of course, and show her the photograph and see if she recognized his features. But I went to Victory Square and some of the other places where I usually see her—in the doorway of the Dominion Building and outside the old cinema, and so on—but I couldn’t find her. But I will. Anyway, I think I’m going to head up to Bella Coola and make first-hand enquiries.”
    “Oh, Beth,” I said. “Beth Beth Beth.”
    I gave her a big hug but did not know what to do after that.
    The first dead person I ever saw wasn’t in a funeral parlour. It was on the street over in Deetroit and there wasn’t much to see. The cops had covered up the body and made a chalk outline on the sidewalk, right next to where some girls had chalked out a hopscotch thing. I only got a glimpse for a second or two. I can’t say how old I was except that I was walking between the grown-ups, with one of them holding my left hand and the other my right. They hurried me right along, almost lifting me off my little feet; the red lights on the cop cars were going round like they had something to brag about. I haven’t thought about this for years and years, but it comes back to me now because of what happened in Yaletown that night. Everybody’s still talking about it. What a mess.
    Sometimes your first reaction to news like that is really your instinct warning you to move on to the second or even go straight to the third. At other times, though, the first thought’s the truest because it’s won the race to the surface. Learning to tell the right one from the rest—that’s the trick. I’m talking experience here. Judgment.
    I never knew his real name till I read about him on the front page of that copy of the
Province
left behind by the last guy having breakfast. Everybody just called him Boots. I