Foregone. Russell Banks
that it would invite her to transfer her affection and admiration over to him, a sick and dying old man who hasn’t tried to seduce a pretty young woman in a decade. He believes the implicit comparison between him and Malcolm as filmmakers would diminish Malcolm in her eyes. That would please Fife. Sick and dying and old, maybe, but he still competes with other men for the affections and admiration of young women. It’s in his DNA. Like everything else that’s wrong with him, it’s not his fault, right? Acknowledgement without apology.
Sloan thinks Malcolm is a guerrilla filmmaker. It’s what he calls himself, despite having bankrolled his soft-stroking films—thanks to Diana’s money-raising skills—with support, as they like to call it, from multinational corporations and government film boards and private foundations and millionaires. Fife could show Sloan how a real guerrilla filmmaker works. He could tell her mic and Vincent’s camera the truth of how and why he was led to uncover the Gagetown spraying, instead of sitting here telling them who he was before he became a Canadian.
He could tell them how he first heard about the mysteriously desiccated crops up there in Gagetown, New Brunswick, from the US Navy deserter who’d become a truck farmer on land adjacent to the support base. The deserter was called Ralph Dennis, a tall, pear-shaped Oklahoman in his early thirties with a gentle smile and hippie spectacles and a permanent peach-coloured blush on his cheeks. Fife met him late one mid-April night at the Montreal Council to Aid War Resisters down on Alymer Street, where he went for help finding his first job in Canada. There’s a blousy, wet snow falling, the kind that marks the start of spring more than the end of winter. In front of a three-story greystone town house, tight to the sidewalk, outside the painted yellow door of the Yellow Door coffeehouse near McGill, where the Montreal Council keeps office space on the second floor, Fife enters and Ralph Dennis exits, and the two literally bump into each other.
Fife apologizes, and the man apologizes back, and Fife recognizes his Oklahoma drawl, though he thinks it’s probably Arkansas or Missouri, possibly Tennessee. It’s definitely not Anglo- or French Canadian. Fife thinks of himself as an expert on American accents. He asks the man if he’s American.
One hundred percent. I guess you must be one of us, too, the man says. It’s more a question than an observation.
Yes.
The fellow asks Fife where he’s from, and Fife hesitates and then says New England.
Just up here for a visit?
Yes. Sort of. His answer hangs in the air a few seconds.
They’re closing up inside, but there’s still time for a coffee. Care for a coffee, brother?
Fife follows the man inside, where they shake hands and introduce themselves by name. Ralph Dennis says he works part-time as a volunteer for the Council to Aid War Resisters, and Fife says that’s who he came to see.
I figured. You speak any French?
Not really. I can kind of read it. From a year of high school French.
Level of education?
Again he hesitates. A little college. Not much.
No degrees then. You got a trade? Some kind of professional skill?
Fife shakes his head no.
So you’re one of the guys with talents, but no skills. You don’t speak French. And you don’t own any property here?
No.
It don’t look good, brother. You need to get landed status to stay in Canada, and you’re not going to get it in Quebec. You’ll have to go to an English-speaking province, where they have a use for Anglos with talents but no skills. After you get landed, you can pretty much go anywhere in the country, if you want. Ralph says that during the summer months he manages a truck farm in Gagetown, New Brunswick, for an absentee owner. Mostly it’s cucumbers for pickling trucked to Fredericton, the provincial capital. The owner runs a big canned food corporation out of Ottawa, he says. Ralph likes working in winter with the Resisters here in Montreal, but he’s in the process of opening an office in Fredericton and from now on will stay up there in New Brunswick year-round. A lot of your fellow New Englanders have started coming over from Maine, he says.
An hour later Fife has a job. He follows Ralph Dennis back up to Gagetown and goes to work that summer as a labourer on the cucumber farm. In his downtime, he studies French from a high school textbook, and at Ralph’s suggestion that he try to shape his talents into a skill, maybe journalism, he borrows Ralph’s portable Sony cassette recorder and starts taping interviews with Ralph and his neighbours.
Most of their conversations keep coming around to the mysterious waves of silver mist that in the last year have begun drifting off the base whenever the wind shifts to the east. Crops and gardens and animals have begun to sicken and die, and all the locals are convinced that it has something to do with the mist. The Canadian military has admitted that in order to clear the brush for manoeuvres they’ve been spraying some kind of defoliant, but no one at the base will tell the locals what’s in it. Ralph loans Fife his 35 mm Leica Rangefinder and asks him to take pictures of the dead fields and gardens and the stumbling, maddened calves and sheep.
We may need a record of all this someday, Ralph explains.
Fife visits the farmers and farm workers in and around Gagetown in Ralph’s pickup and spends endless early-morning and evening hours out by the fence that surrounds the vast acreage of the base, where he shoots black-and-white stills of the helicopters, the famous American Hueys, while they spray the land below and the Canadian troops reconnoitering in the dense brush and among the low conifers. He shoots pictures of the empty orange barrels of 2,4,5-T dumped into bulldozed ditches near the fence. He works alone and tells no one, except Ralph Dennis, what he’s recording, because he doesn’t know yet what he’s recording.
He could tell Sloan and Vincent and Malcolm and Diana and the rest of the world that it isn’t until four years later, hunkered down in his rented room in Pointe-Saint-Charles in Montreal, that he finally figures out what he taped and photographed in Gagetown. Ralph Dennis and his neighbours have long since stopped trying to grow anything in their poisoned fields. Ralph fell in love and married a local woman. He gave up his work with the Resisters and moved with his new wife to Winnipeg, which he calls Tulsa North. He’s homesick, and Winnipeg is as close to home as he can get without going to jail, he explains. He lets Fife keep the photographs and taped interviews that he made back in the summer of ’68.
Fife is no longer trying to write a novel and poetry by now. Most of his friends and lovers in Montreal are aspiring writers and artists and folksingers and filmmakers, and all of them seem more talented and purposeful than he. He supports himself, barely, by writing English-language book reviews and freelance cultural essays for the Montreal Star and the Gazette. He likes to say that he dabbles in several of the arts, but practises none. As when, on a borrowed Cine-Kodak Model B-16 editing viewer, he merges the taped interviews and black-and-white stills from Gagetown with archival newspaper and TV clips and charts pilfered from the Grande Bibliothèque and a soundtrack of pirated Byrds, Dylan, and Doors songs. He thinks he’s making an avant-garde metafictional film with nonmoving images and tape recordings and TV news footage, a covertly autobiographical cinematic collage about his first months in Canada, more or less for his own amusement, he claims. Six months into the project, alone in his room one night, discouraged and frustrated and about to give up on anything that can be called creative, he runs the hour-long film from start to end. He pretends that it was made by a stranger, and suddenly he realizes that it isn’t autobiographical at all. He sees that, if he doesn’t think it’s by him or about him, he can nudge it rather easily into becoming a suspenseful, dramatic exposé of a crime. Without intending to until he’s nearly abandoned it, he has made In the Mist, the film that kick-starts his career as an investigative documentary filmmaker, the film that five years later, once he gets it shown on Canadian TV, becomes an unacknowledged inspiration for Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.
He can tell all that to Malcolm and his crew. It’s the story they want to hear from him. And he won’t have to mention that his story of the origins of In the Mist is paved over a lie. He can let the lie stay buried beneath the truth, and it