He moved north-east along Pelham Road and turned off into Glendale Avenue, where it crossed the Eleven Mile Creek, and followed it parallel to the base of the escarpment through the vanishing farms and fields that are now subdivisions and shopping plazas until it crossed the Queen Elizabeth Way. This was major traffic, and for a moment I thought that I would lose my prey either to Toronto or Buffalo. But he didn’t join the highway, he crossed over to the other side and picked the old road to St. David’s and Niagara-on-the-Lake.
O’Mara’s apparent destination pricked up my ears. I took my eyes off the colouring trees, and the blowing eddies of fallen leaves and the bright red of the sumachs and thought about Jack Dowden’s shoebox of credit-card flimsies. Niagara-on-the-Lake was popular with Jack too. I was doing something right for a change.
I kept a pick-up truck with bushels of squash and turnips between me and O’Mara. The pick-up’s suspension was dragging and raised a few sparks when the asphalt got rough. O’Mara had the road ahead of him clear; he didn’t seem to be out to set a new speed record. Maybe he was looking at the changing leaves too.
Niagara-on-the-Lake has become a sand-blasted antique early-nineteenth-century town since the days when I first knew it. Then it was just a sleepy backwater with a jam factory. Now it was a tourist mecca because of the success of the Shaw Festival, an annual theatrical tribute to the bard of Ayot St. Lawrence. Apart from the theatre, of course, there was the fudge. Places like Niagara revolve around fudge in the summer. Every other store sells it, tourists munch it as they stare through store windows at paper flowers, local history books and expensive soap smelling of sandalwood. People seem to be able to concentrate on fudge, which you could see being made through other store windows, long after interest in antiques, theatre and shopping has worn off. In August the stately brick homes of Niagara, the old Presbyterian church with its Greek columns, the sand-blasted façades along Queen Street dissolve into a mad rush of tourists with a need for a sweet fudge fix.
O’Mara stopped at the lights on the way into town, then headed straight up Mississauga Street to Queen. From here, over the fairways of the golf course, I could see the point where the Niagara River empties into Lake Ontario. Across the water, on the American side, three flags flew from Fort Niagara. Three hundred years ago, Fort Niagara was the only man-made structure around here except for teepees and wigwams. On the Canadian side, the smaller of the two Canadian forts looked like an up-ended flower-pot or a child’s one-scoop sand-castle in the middle of the golf course.
The truck turned east at Queen; then, after a block, it turned off the main drag into Simcoe and headed towards the river. I followed at a safe distance, catching a glimpse of the clocktower in the middle of Queen Street further down by the old town hall. With the golf course on our left, we both continued down Simcoe to the corner where it met Front Street. The houses along the other side of the street were big and old, going back well into the last century.
O’Mara took a left at the corner, where a temporary construction road headed off across the open terrain of the golf course in the direction of the fort. I turned the Olds in the opposite direction along Front and parked in the lot reserved for guests at the Oban Inn. I watched his rig bounce over the uneven ballast of the work road, seeing it grow smaller as it approached the Canadian Fort. I dismissed the idea of following it; out on the fairway, I’d be as conspicuous as a dead fly on a white sheet. That would have got O’Mara in trouble as well as yours truly. And I needed O’Mara. There were a lot of things he’d forgotten to tell me the other night.
I got out of the car and raised the hood, just to give me something to do in case there were eyes behind the window curtains of the Oban Inn. Across the warm motor, Fort Mississauga looked like it was painted by an amateur against a blue backdrop of lake and sky. It looked squatter from here than it did from Queen Street. There were no crenellated walls, no bastions, ravelins or parapets as far as I could see, just a row of loopholes around the waist of a brick tower. For musket fire, I guess. The curved surface of the otherwise unadorned wall suffered from a skin disease; the plaster was peeling off to expose red brick underneath. For years the fort’s thick hide had withstood the seasonal barrage of countless duffers from the second tee. I don’t remember hearing whether it ever exchanged shots with Fort Niagara across the mouth of the river.
The truck disappeared behind a temporary enclosure that had been thrown up around the fort. It didn’t look solid enough to protect it from tourists’ golf balls, but it was a gesture in the right direction. A wind had come up, blowing eddies of dry leaves around in front of the Olds. There were whitecaps on the slate blue tops of the waves in Lake Ontario. It was hard to tell from where I was whether I was looking at the river or the lake. I wasn’t expecting to see a dotted line separating the geographical features, but from ground level it was confusing.
There was no movement at the fort as far as I could see. O’Mara’s truck had been swallowed up into what must be a depression in the ground close to the walls. I got the feeling that there was activity going on behind the fence, but I couldn’t prove it until another truck emerged from the gateway. It had its headlights on and it headed over the bumpy construction road in my direction. By the time it reached the corner of Simcoe and Front to turn towards the highway, I was apparently lost in thought as I contemplated my distributor under the hood. The truck had a yellow panel on its door. It read: Sangallo Restorations, Niagara-on-the-Lake. It was a Euclid truck and the hopper in back was full of Ontario real estate. I was closing up the hood of the Olds when I remembered seeing the yellow Sangallo sign on a truck parked outside The Fifth Wheel less than half an hour ago. I knew I was going to see a lot of similar signs now that I was aware of Sangallo’s existence. That’s the way life works. Alex Pásztory had mentioned Sangallo. Something to do with Tony Pritchett and his mob.
I started the engine and slowly drove down Front Street, away from the golf course, and parked again not far from the corner of Front and King. King Street is the dividing line in Niagara. Streets crossing it change their names when they continue on the other side. Front becomes Ricardo, Prideaux becomes Byron, Queen becomes Picton and so on. It made the town seem bigger, I guess.
Through the car window I could see an athletic-looking man of middle age busily raking leaves from the lawn at the corner house. It was one of those picture-postcard houses that the town is famous for. This one wasn’t given over to the fudge trade; its sign advertised Bed and Breakfast. The man with the rake paused to see what I wanted. With his pointed beard he looked a little satanic, but there was a twinkle in his eye.
“We’re closed for the season,” he said before I’d fully got out of the car.
“That’s a shame,” I said. No sense disillusioning the man whose enthusiasm causes him to rake leaves even in the off-season.
“Fellow in an antique Bentley parked outside yesterday and we had half a dozen people asking if we were open. You wouldn’t consider parking right in front, would you?”
“Sure. Anything to help.” I didn’t know whether he was joking or not, so I moved the car just in case he was serious.
“I thought of renting a Rolls to park out front when we first opened, but business caught on. It just took time and word of mouth.” He told me this when I joined him again on the sidewalk. I looked at the Olds. It wasn’t in the first blush of youth, but it wasn’t that bad.