Jericho by George Fetherling Page A

think he probably told me to call him that the first time we met.
    “How can I find you?”
    “People know where to find me.”
    “What’s your name?”
    “People call me Boots.”
    His left eye had a nervous tic, it was always twitching. Talking to him was like trying to carry on polite conversation with the Point Atkinson lighthouse.
    At the time, I hadn’t really found what you could call my niche and I’d already had a lot of different jobs, usually in the kind of places where everybody else is in the country illegally, including the owner. There was this little weasel that ran a landscaping outfit. A lot of property management companies in charge of West End condos used him. You got paid at the end of each day. Another time I worked with a really bad-tempered Chinese guy moving reconditioned stoves and fridges. He couldn’t decide if he wanted to steer from the front or the back. Either way put him in a mood. Once he almost dropped a Maytag on my goddam foot. When I pointed this out to him, he spit on the front lawn. It was a spit of indifference but it was also a spit of contempt.
    Anyway, one afternoon I’m down in the part of town where all the no-fixed-address people live, and I’m just standing there, looking at the action that’s going on across the street, kitty-corner. As it happens, I was in the market for some quality home furnishings at that time as I had to get out of my Strathcona place cause the cops turned it into a circus after one of my neighbours suddenly died and I just left everything there when I went, to confuse whoever might come around. So I was watching this guy set out an assortment of junk on the sidewalk like he was having a garage sale. He had a turntable and a lamp and then a broken-down chair—but no, he then started using the chair to sit on, so you didn’t know if it was for sale or not. He had really a lot of stuff, little pieces of this and that, spread out along a six-or eight-foot stretch of concrete, and I went over to take a look. Up close, the turntable looked like someone had lost their temper at it and the lamp didn’t have a cord. It was all like that. Something strange was going on. This was in the middle of summer. I went back to the shade where I’d been before and waited, figuring I’d scope out things. I didn’t have any appointments to keep.
    I know now that at one time Hastings Street was the centre of bustle in Vancouver, what you might call the hometown of play, locally. Gambling, you see, is what people did before there were a lot of drugs to take: it’s the same story everywhere. Every cigar store made book and in olden times there were really a lot of cigar stores, as I understand the situation. There was a lot of action at the tables too because there was an endless supply, year-round, of guys with their pockets full of cash coming from logging camps and fish boats up the coast, looking to get their hair cut, get drunk,get laid and get lucky at cards. The first two were easy and the third pretty simple too but the last one was more or less impossible. After all, this was the part of town that originally took off when shopkeepers started selling tennis rackets and necessities such as that to suckers on their way to the Klondike gold rush. Pretty expensive tennis rackets, too. On the West Coast, this was the place to be, I think, right through the forties and fifties, when the world was still lit by neon. There was also another little island of Civ down Granville by the bridge. (Now it’s all pawnshops, sex shops and other legitimate businesses.) Lonnie would have felt at home here as long as he didn’t look up and see the mountains. This was his kind of place and that was his time to be alive. As always, the main problem was the cops, but not in the way you think, cause here they were competition. That’s how it had been for a long time. In the twenties, I guess it was, the chief of po-lice was shot dead by somebody who was a little too fond of