Knife Fight and Other Struggles (18 page)

The words were prophetic. The following week’s monthly city council meeting was attended by not only the mayor and all his councillors, but also the senior staff and their assistants, all of us, and delegations from wards across the city. This meeting had been scheduled to go long. Merchants from Abattoir Mall had come with a petition demanding greater police presence and the installation of video cameras. There was to be discussion of a cost overrun on the light rail line into Smelt, and a committee of residents were asking for additional stops to better service the rehabilitation hospital. The city’s poet laureate had composed three new stanzas of an epic retelling of our amalgamation fifteen years ago, and there was to be a presentation no later than three p.m.

These things, combined with several dozen routine items, ought to have added up to a sometimes vigorous but relatively straightforward session, finishing no later than seven; meetings under the mayor were famous for running with brutal efficiency.

It was not to be.

The merchants were joined by a local civil liberties group shouting down the Abattoir Mall manager’s deputation, requiring the services of the City Hall security squad and a recess to clear the chambers and restore calm. The debate continued for three solid hours after that, the matter becoming so confused with amendments that, on the clerk’s advice, council finally deferred the item until the Christmas session.

Through all this, the denizens of Smelt hovered at the back, stoking their grievances one upon the other until their matter came up, and as a group they demanded that the light rail line be ripped out altogether and the remaining funds be reallocated to the restoration of the Smelt Arms Bijou—a cinema that had been derelict since the war, but held many fond memories for the elder Smelters. Despite vigorous lobbying by the mayor’s staff, council sided with the deputants, and narrowly voted to kill the rail plan.

The poet laureate, meantime, had grown bored early in the meeting and, as poet laureates do, comforted himself with the contents of his hip flask throughout the afternoon. When his time came, he’d drunk himself into sufficient belligerence to substitute an obscene limerick in place of his more sublime stanzas. While some of us might have commented that the limerick was an improvement overall, the mayor obviously did not agree.

“This city is swirling into the toilet,” he was heard to mutter, unaware, momentarily, that his microphone was still on.

The third time nearly finished it.

Mayor and reporter went at one another savagely from the outset, crashing together, each wrestling the other’s knife-arm with his free hand. The mayor smashed his forehead into Stan’s, twice, and Stan at a point managed to loop his arm between the mayor’s legs and so hoist him above his head, slamming the city’s chief magistrate hard onto the hood of a midsized sedan. Had this been a wrestling match and not a knife fight, Stan would have won it.

The savagery grew. The parking garage onlookers gasped as one when the mayor missed slashing Stan’s throat by scant inches—and again seconds later, as the tip of Stan’s blade hovered an instant over the mayor’s right eyeball.

In the third round, it seemed, the knife fight had transformed into a killing fight.

Yet, for the third time, not a drop of blood was shed.

On Friday morning, the Doucette Greeting Card Company held a press conference at which their president, Wallace Doucette, announced that they would be ceasing production by November; by year’s end, they planned to have moved all remaining operations south of the border, where a more favourable tax regime combined with a more eager labour market in a city more attractive to executives and their families would ensure the company’s survival. The workers received their layoff notices at the beginning of the morning shift.

The mayor spoke to reporters afterward, attempting to downplay the impact of Doucette’s departure and deflect the suggestion that our city was no place an executive would want to raise a family. But he could carry it only so far; the Doucette family was the third-largest employer in the city, and as a boy the mayor had played Lacrosse with Wallace. The betrayal was both civic and personal.

On the weekend, it rained. The rains started early Saturday, coming down in thick, grey sheets reminiscent of flying knives, and did not relent until early Sunday. Creeks overflowed; storm sewers clogged; and unlucky householders found their basements filling with sludge as the sewer system overflowed. Three footbridges washed away in parks, and a great sinkhole opened at an intersection to the east of the downtown, all but devouring one of the city’s two dozen new ecofriendly buses.

The mayor did not immediately respond to calls from our weekend reporters.

How could he? He had other things with which to occupy himself.

He had to become better.

On Monday evening, Stan joined us for drinks after deadline. The storm had given way to awful humidity, and so we gathered in the pier district in the back room of a Czech pub well known to reporters.

As he had been since the fights began, Stan was quiet. Fortunately, drawing information from a quiet man is a hallmark of our profession. So we speculated—making note of the fact that the mayor’s fortunes seem to have turned over the course of the long, stalemated battle between himself and Stan. We supposed that the stalemate may simply have sapped the mayor’s confidence, although that, as we thought about it, didn’t explain the rainstorm, or the drunken limericks, or the perversity of the men and women of Smelt on matters of public transit.

Stan smiled at that, and shook his head, and concentrated on the shape the foam took atop his ale.

And so we wondered: how was it that there wasn’t any blood in the fights? How was it that Stan Bollixer and the mayor, both experts with the blade, could not land so much as a nick as they battled so energetically? The blades had cut cars, light fixtures, even a senior bureaucrat; what unknown agent so thickened the hides of the mayor and of Stan Bollixer?

Would this battle of titans ever end? To the victor went the spoils, said the rules. What if there was no victor?

And Stan shrugged, and smiled, and downed his beer in a single, long swallow. “Good question,” he said.

We persisted. What if there was no victor?

“What if it stopped, you mean?” said Stan. He slid his glass across the bar and signalled for the cheque. “What if the long fight that has shaped the mayor—shaped the city—just came to an end?”

Yes, we said—what if no one took the spoils?

“Well,” he said, grinning a little, “I guess this city wouldn’t go to anyone. I guess it would be on its own. I guess it might be
free
.”

The budget committee began deliberations three weeks later. This time it did not go smoothly. The city’s treasurer had underestimated revenues, putting the city tens of millions of dollars in the red for the coming year. Flooding from the rainstorms had created an emergency liability that the city would have to cover through tax revenues, and the collapse of the greeting card sector meant a precipitous drop in assessments. While no one spoke the words aloud, several of us found well-placed sources who hinted that the city could be on the verge of bankruptcy by Christmas.

Meanwhile, council members and senior bureaucrats quietly found other places to park their vehicles than the VIP parking lot—at least on Thursdays. For who, really, wants to leave their cars unattended on a battlefield?

Guided by the same principle, the audience grew smaller each Thursday—some nursing wounds from errant slashings; others sensibly retreating to their offices, or their homes, while the mayor fought his nemesis to a standstill, week after week after week.

Some of us stopped attending as well. Partly it was self-preservation, but also something more fundamental: work.

Termites rose up from the earth in the fashionable Palm District, devouring the stout oak-trimmed homes of our leading citizens. The garbage workers went on strike just before Halloween, and the bus drivers joined them in solidarity a week later. Three more atrocities followed the Abattoir Atrocity in quick succession, each incident delivering more mayhem and making less sense than the last, causing our editors to deem this The Year of the Atrocity.

On the Thursday before Christmas, none of us attended. How could we? The city was bankrupt, its homes crumbling to sawdust, the busways silent but for swirling snow, and garbage piled up in mountains outside the shooting range by the river. . . .

We had our hands full.