Love for a Deaf Rebel - Derrick King (top 100 novels .txt) 📗

I had no way of spotting hearies who were skilled in ASL, and as long as I was incommunicado, there was no way other hearies could spot me. This was the reverse of how Pearl lived in the hearing world.

An attractive woman signed something to me in native ASL.

“Please sign more slowly.”

“You are so tall that I can see the hairs inside your nose.”

I laughed. “You have wonderful eyes.”

She smiled.

After a speech in ASL from an emcee, a band played Brown Sugar by the Rolling Stones. The music was amplified to the threshold of pain for hearing ears. The audience streamed onto the dance floor. As the band segued into the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations,” the tempo slowed down, but some dancers didn’t slow down. I felt angry to notice some musicians snickering at them.

“Jodi and Jeff are here,” Pearl signed. We sat down together.

“No need to shout. We can sign all night and not get sore throats,” Jeff fingerspelled.

“Sign language is perfect for discos. Where is Gavin?”

“At a family reunion. Gavin told me you two got engaged. Congratulations!”

Jeff’s fingerspelling was slow, like watching a telegram spool out of a teleprinter. Pearl showed Jeff her engagement ring and hugged him.

Jodi and Pearl switched to ASL, so Jeff and I switched to shouting at each other. We got sore throats, after all.

“You’re a lucky man! Pearl will be loyal to you provided she knows you are loyal to her. You’ll need to be sensitive to her culture. She’s a deafie!”

“She’s told me about deaf culture, and I’ve read about it, but I still don’t see how there can be a ‘deaf culture’ any more than a ‘blind culture’ … a subculture, maybe.”

“It exists because of ASL. It’s like an onion. In the core are deafies and people who have always been around deafies—their family is deaf, they went to deaf schools, they had deafie friends, they live in the deaf community. They see deafness as a language barrier. Out from the center, you get more communication with hearies until you get to the skin of the onion—friends of deaf people who don’t know how to sign. Just under the skin, you have the hard-of-hearing like Jodi.”

“Where’s Pearl in the onion?”

“Near the center, but she tries to move out. Her friends are in the center, except Jodi. Each layer tries to help the layer farther in, but the deeper you go, the more they believe that there are no layers!

The band played louder. Jeff bought a beer for me and two tumblers of wine for himself, and we walked to a fire exit where a few other hearies had congregated, far from the loudspeakers. The band played YMCA. The audience held up arms, wiggled hands, howled, and waved napkins in applause as the musicians took a bow. The recorded music resumed.

“Are you planning to buy a house?” shouted Jeff.

“We’d like to, but we can’t afford it yet.”

“Let me help—I’m an agent. The countryside is the place for you. ‘Be prepared,’ as the Boy Scouts say.”

“Be prepared for what?”

“Teotwawki—The End of the World as We Know It. I’m convinced we’re coming to the end of the longest period of peace in history. Read Life After Doomsday if you don’t believe me.”

“Your view is extreme.”

“Hedging does no harm. We are sitting ducks.”

“For what?”

“Terrorism, social collapse, the Bomb; it’s a matter of time. If you buy a house half an hour from town, you’ll be at the periphery of a one-megaton blast and out of range of third-degree burns. You’d get a half-minute warning between seeing the flash and being hit by the blast—that’s enough time to get to your basement. Our westerly winds would spread the fallout eastward, so west or north is where you want to buy your house, and on the lee side of a hill.”

Jeff’s thinking may sound fanatical today, but it was only eccentric during the Cold War.

Pearl walked over, with Jodi. “Why are you standing so far away?”

I realized that speaking at a deaf party was like having a secret conversation. “Sorry. It’s too loud over there.”

“Come. It’s midnight soon—time for the awards.”

While recorded disco music blared, the emcee presented awards in ASL. Volunteers passed out sparkling wine in plastic flute glasses. The music stopped while the emcee counted down the seconds to midnight in ASL. Then “Auld Lang Syne” thundered through the hall as everyone hugged and danced.

Part II: Partners in Adventure

Bowen Island

“Is this Derrick King? This is the British Columbia Institute of Technology,” said a female voice on the telephone. “Your students have been sitting in the classroom for half an hour. Why aren’t you here?”

I laughed, and Pearl stared at me. “Because no one asked me to teach! It’s been two years since I heard from you. How much are you paying?”

“We’re paying $3,000. Tuesday and Thursday nights, 15 January until 26 March. That’s $150 a night.”

“Fine, but I can’t start tonight. Tell the students your administration screwed up and to go home.”

“Come early on Thursday. See me, and we’ll sort out the details.”

“See you then.” I hung up. “Wonderful news!” I explained the background. “And because this will be my second time teaching International Trade Finance, it won’t be as much work to prepare. We’ll have $3,000 for a down payment!”

I brought some newspapers and real estate magazines home. I unrolled a topographic and signed, “Let’s find a place to live.”

“We are here,” Pearl signed. She put her finger on the map.

I nodded. I drew a line along the USA border. “We can’t go south.”

“Right. What about the east?”

“I don’t want to travel for more than an hour to work. One hour is about fifty kilometers.” I drew an arc fifty kilometers to the east on the map.

“That’s in New Westminster. I’ll never live there again.”

“Let’s look west. The limit is the sea.” I drew a line along the shoreline.

“What about the north?”

“North is the mountains. The limit is the altitude.” I put my finger on a contour line. “The highest road is at 700 meters, so that’s our limit.” I traced the contour line to the north, joining the arc, the US border, and the shoreline to enclose an irregular area around Vancouver.

“Everywhere is city.” Pearl stared at the map. “Living in the country and working in Vancouver is impossible!”

“We should have bought land a hundred years ago.”

We browsed real estate advertisements while we ate dinner.

“We can’t afford anything nice,” Pearl signed. She slid the Buy and Sell Press across to me. “Look! A four-hectare and an eight-hectare lot. Cheap. Where is Bowen Island?”

We looked at the map. Bowen Island, ten kilometers long with three paved roads, stood outside the line I had drawn. “Perhaps our limit should be the distance we can travel on a boat in an hour.” I telephoned BC Ferries to find out about the ferries to nearby islands. “Bowen is the only commutable island. There are ferries every two hours. They take twenty minutes to reach West Vancouver. Then a bus takes forty minutes to go downtown.”

“Very interesting. Let’s go see those lots.”

I telephoned the vendor and then signed, “I have the directions. The owner won’t come because he doesn’t live on the island. But one of my customers lives there. I’m sure he’ll show us around.” I called Rokus, then signed, “He said to bring our boots on Sunday. We’re invited for a tour and dinner!”

I stopped the car at the Bowen Island ferry tollbooth in Horseshoe Bay.

“Ask for a discount,” signed Pearl.

“How much is the handicapped discount?”

“Fifty percent,” said the woman in the tollbooth.

Pearl smiled. “Sometimes, it is good to be handicapped.”

The Howe Sound Queen arrived. We drove onto its deck and forward to the chain gate stretched across its bow. After the other cars boarded, the ferry juddered into beautiful Howe Sound, leaving a wake of parallel white lines on a canvas of deep green velvet ringed by snow-capped peaks. We climbed out and leaned against the ship’s rail. The sweet winter air blew through our clothes, so we climbed back inside the car, content to view the stunning scenery through a windshield. As the ferry approached the Snug Cove dock, foam spumed as the forward propellers guided the ferry into the creosoted wooden slip. We drove off to the smell of salt air and seaweed, and we passed geese grazing on the shoulder under arbutus and western red cedar trees.

We drove uphill past the Snuggler Inn, General Store, gas station, and a few craft shops and turned at the intersection. The pavement became gravel. Ten minutes later, we passed through a gate. A dog ran after the car as we drove beside the fence surrounding a vegetable garden. On the other side of the garden, ducks paddled in a pond. We drove past a shed, a greenhouse, and a rabbit hutch and halted in front of a double-wide mobile home. A propane tank stood next to the hitch. Blue smoke drifted out of the steel chimney poking out the end of the trailer.

A couple walked out onto a wooden deck and welcomed us. We removed our hiking boots and sat around the woodstove. A boy and a girl were curled up in the corner.

“Rokus and Jenny, it’s good to see you again and to introduce you to Pearl. So this is the bank’s collateral! How do you like living here?”

“We love it,” Rokus said. “Bowen Island is suburbanizing, but the ferry and gravel road keep out the riffraff. We have no TV. We love nature, privacy, friends, and doing things ourselves. We’re not homesteaders who eat fresh meat in autumn, salt meat in winter, and beans in spring; we’re do-it-yourselfers with a freezer and microwave.”

“Why do you have a kerosene lamp?” signed Pearl.

“For when the power goes out. But that’s all right. We don’t really need power. The woodstove is the center of our home. A stove mimics the seasons: spring while the fire builds, summer during the burn, and autumn as the embers fade. Winter, too, if we haven’t put in enough wood.”

“Pearl’s a country girl. We’d love to be partly self-sufficient but keep our jobs.”

“Your land is not going to save you money except on heat if you cut your own firewood.”

“It costs us more to raise rabbits and chickens than to buy them in the store. We do it because it’s fun, and they taste better,” said Jenny.

“There are other ways to make money on a homestead. Hobby farmers deduct farm losses from their other income. They don’t make money, but they pay less tax,” said Rokus.

“Are you safe here?” signed Pearl.

“We don’t lock our doors,” said Jenny. “Hitchhiking is safe. There’s no bus or taxi, so the first car to pass will usually give you a lift. We’re a community. Kids grow up with mink, ravens, eagles, owls, cormorants, and deer. Bowen Island has the highest per-capita child population in Canada.”

“Fifteen years ago, the population was 600. Now we have 2,000 in winter, 3,000 in summer,” said Rokus. “Doctors, lawyers, butchers, bakers, and hippies. Fifteen years ago, you could put a cottage on ten acres for $30,000. No more! And no more trailers. Now you have to build a real house, and few good acreages are for sale. The lots you came to see are so bad that agents won’t touch them—that’s why you found them in the free listings. I’ll show you why.”

Rokus and his dog led Pearl and me to his Suzuki jeep. While he dribbled a can of oil into the engine, he pointed at the power line beside his property. “For decades, the neighbors on the other side of that ridge had only kerosene, propane, and a generator for power. I sold them a right-of-way after I got my power. When their power was installed, it was as if they’d arrived in the twentieth century overnight.”

We climbed into Rokus’s jeep, which rattled down the lane, spewing blue smoke. Rokus drove us to another gravel road. We followed it for twenty minutes before stopping at a forested slope behind a sign: For Sale by Owner.

“The four-hectare lot is a strip straight up the hill, eighty meters wide and maybe half a kilometer long, too steep for a road. All you can do with this lot is build a house by the road. It’s dark and cold because the north end of the island doesn’t get much sunshine.”

We drove to the eight-hectare lot. Another gravel road led to muddy tire tracks pressed into waist-high weeds. Rokus shifted into four-wheel drive. He stopped as the