Free The Last of the Lumbermen by Brian Fawcett

I’d take my lumps, do my time in jail, accept whatever anyone wanted to dish out to me.
    Fred Menzies didn’t see it the way I did. He sat me down the Sunday afternoon after the accident while my mother was out at a church auxiliary.
    â€œYou know,” he said quietly , “that your life here is over.”
    Warily, I nodded agreement. “I guess,” I answered. “What’s going to happen?”
    â€œIf you’re convicted, you’ll spend time in jail. And believe me, you’ll be convicted.” He began rummaging around in his jacket pocket, and stopped. “But that isn’t what I mean.”
    He looked at me long and hard. I let the silence hang between us without trying to excuse myself or apologize. I had a lot of things coming to me, and this lecture was the least of them. Fred had his right to it — he’d bailed me out of jail, and since then he’d somehow kept everyone away from me.
    But the lecture didn’t start, and I found myself looking back at him the way he was gazing at me. I really hadn’t r ealized that he gave a damn about me, but it was there in his hard face — along with the more easily recognized emotions. Finally, I couldn’t stand his pain any longer.
    â€œSo, what do you mean, Fred?” I asked.
    His answer, after another long silence, was a single question: “What’s your name?”
    â€œWhat are you asking?” I answered. “I’m Billy Menzies.”
    â€œThat isn’t your name from here on in,” he said with a dark, simple patience in his voice. “As of right now, your name is Andrew Bathgate.”
    He slapped what he’d been rummaging in his pockets for onto the table in front of me. It was a folded sheet of paper, and an envelope. I opened the piece of paper first. It was my original birth certificate, and it named me Andrew William Bathgate. In the envelope was two thousand dollars in hundreds and fifties.
    I looked up into Fred’s face for the explanation.
    â€œI want you out of here,” he said, “before your mother comes back.”

NINE
    G ORD PUSHES HIS WAY into the dressing room carrying three huge bundles of freshly dry-cleaned uniforms. He drops one into my lap.
    â€œChrist, Weaver,” he says, leaving the uniforms atop me and moving away to slam open the metal door to his locker. “ You looked so peaceful there I was tempted to put the tubes in and drain you.”
    Aside from being my closest friend, and the district coroner, Gord is a trained mortician. He stopped practising long before I knew him, but the mortician’s sense of humour has stayed with him. I’ve seen him and Jack put perfectly sober people on the floor laughing with their Undertaker routine from the WWF , and he and I have a running joke about what morticians do with the gold teeth from cadavers.
    Gor d got tired, as he puts it, of the makeup business, and went to medical school. But there’s a part of him that doesn’t forget what he’s seen and done, and he doesn’t give up trade secrets, even to his close friends.
    And there are secrets, you know. Ever heard of anyone who’s asked what becomes of the gold from their loved one’s teeth after cremation? Well, neither have I, but the gold must be going somewhere. I figure there’s a lucrative underground trade in cada- ver gold that goes on between morticians and dental mechanics, but I’ll be damned if I can get Gord to confirm it. He just laughs at me, and claims the gold is vapourized by the heat.
    â€œI don’t think I’m quite ready for what you have in mind,” I laugh, pushing the bundle off me and onto the floor without sitting up. “Where have you been all afternoon?”
    He sighs. “Some kid drove his car off the road about forty kilometres south last night. No one knew they were missing until his girlfriend crawled back up to the road this