One: More or Less than Meets the Eye The view from that high was tremendous. To Tony Vicar''s right he saw the Strait of Georgia, a dark bluish-purple, laid out beneath him in mosaic-like cells, the tideline a margin where colour changed dramatically to a milky aqua green. To his left stood the Beaufort mountain range, imposing, snowcapped and gleaming in the sun, crowned by clouds that looked like a nicely stiff meringue, brilliant white, a little grey where cloud met mountaintop, and with a base of royal blue. When the sun angle was right, he could even catch a glow of pink tinging the high plumes. Vicar had been offered by the Merchants'' Association of Tyee Lagoon - a tiny, miserly group that sounded much grander than it was - had offered Vicar a free flight in Gunnar Bering''s Cessna, in reward for his generosity to the local: a sightseeing joyride around the gorgeous environs surrounding his hometown. They had to spring for the fuel, nothing more; even so, there had been some hushed grumbling. Vicar let a great number of folks hold their club and team meetings in the Vicar''s Knickers, on a regular basis, for no fee. Winters here on Vancouver Island were very slow, so getting a few bodies in the pub made a big difference to his bottom line.

He had invested in "velvet ropes," which did nothing more than surround little areas within the pub for their events with an uppity looking, glorified snow-fence. Really it was as pointless as a non-smoking section in a jetliner, but people thought it looked legit and treated those ropes like they were an impenetrable barrier through which non-members may not trespass nor even listen. The local Book Club held their monthly meeting there, but that event was a loss because they were all prim teetotalers and brought their own snacks. Vicar could have kicked about that but didn''t; they were almost all old ladies and he had a soft spot, even when a couple of them acted supercilious and lofty, bitching about spelling and punctuation on the menu. For a couple of years, Ann Tenna and Beaner Weens, the cook, had been in a low-grade war over authorship of the accursed and often indecipherable chalkboard. They both tended to communicate like trick dogs that use talking foot pedals. Vicar gave up refereeing when he realized how stultifying their arguments had become. The near brawl that erupted over the spelling of "Cosmopolitan" was one for the ages.

Kosmopulletin, Cosmapahlitain, Kusmoballintun . He''s listened, baffled, his head twisted sideways like a foot pedal pup. The sporadically charming Book Club ladies held a raffle every meeting and the prize was usually something knitted or crocheted, and invariably non-essential. Occasionally they made pottery. One of the oblivious ol'' gals had actually made and donated a white ceramic elephant statuette. Vicar snorted audibly and one of their membership glowered at him. Realizing that the glaring metaphor was invisible to most of these women, Vicar coughed up a loonie, placing the coin respectfully on the raffle table - just to make nice - and won an oven mitt made of Phentex or other ghastly flame accelerant that instantly snagged a fingernail when he tried it on. The sensation was extraordinarily grating; he waited until they departed and threw in the trash.

He had found a comfy wingback chair for Mrs. Oliver, one of the nicer ladies, a long-retired school librarian who attended Book Club''s monthly gatherings religiously. He set her chair nearer the ladies'' room, at her request, right next to her companion Mrs Parker, with space nearby to stow her walker, where it could sit unobtrusively. As customers, Book Clubbers were el cheapo grande: long retired millionaires mostly, but tight enough to squeak. A few even brought their own tea bags and just ordered hot water, but Vicar got a good snicker from his new "walker parking" area and the ten-dollar honorarium they always bestowed him, presented with desultory golf-claps, slipped into a dollar-store thank-you card. In Vancouver there were establishments that offered valet parking for Ferraris and McLarens. Here . well, he personally acted as attendant for the Zimmer frames and knew better than to expect a tip.

Vicar had given them back their thank-you card early on and told them to reuse it, knowing how colossally miserly a few of them were - he had heard the minutes of their meetings a dozen times. He wanted to see how far he could push his subtle commentary, and one of the ladies, invariably preoccupied with piddling budgetary issues, had thought it was a splendid idea, and so they''d recycled that same card for a dog''s age. Vicar just blinked and pasted on a vague smile, realizing then that subtlety bounces off cheapskates. The Tyee Lagoon Angling Society, on the other hand, drank like the fish they claimed to catch and perhaps might have done if they hadn''t gotten so remarkably drunk every time they met. The whole organization was only an excuse to get pissed up. Their president, a crinkly old scoundrel with the antique-sounding name, Hotchkiss Cooper - known as Hotchy-Coochie - invariably read into the minutes that they had been "over served" at the previous meeting, and officially censured Vicar, who was not even a member; of course they toasted the censure, making additions and amendments to it, and toasting each of those in turn. They went through this charade every time and laughed uproariously without fail. Vicar would shake his head in bafflement.

Hotchy-Coochie was mysteriously eager for this sort of shit, especially for a guy his advanced age - he seemed up for anything and had been for decades. Privately, Vicar referred to him as "Enthusula." Most recently they had declared Vicar a "pusher" and "manipulator of peer pressure" and accused him of wanting, for an unknown and probably nefarious reason, to ply them with what they called "the demon rum." Hotchy-Coochie glanced accusingly at Vicar, his nose in the air aristocratically, then turned away in faux-dismay. A rumbling of "hear, hear" always bubbled forth and then of course they drank to that, too. That old fart hoovered booze like a sink and couldn''t have given a rat''s arse what anybody thought. At any rate, it was all in good fun, and Tyee Lagoon needed a dose of that at times - things in this burg were a tad calcified. Vicar had once spent some time sipping coffee on a bench that overlooked the town''s four-way stop, agog at the mind-melting malfunctions of the local geriatric drivers as they attempted to run that daunting gauntlet.

It was true that the only times Tyee Lagoon got into the news it was thanks to Vicar, but that was because, without him, the bloody place was as boring as watching creosote drip. Vicar had matured enough that he could sometimes hide his antipathy toward skinflints - a.k.a. most of the population of Tyee Lagoon - and tried to laugh it off, adding it to the lengthy ledger that recorded his bent reality. However, the one or two most dominant Book Club ladies lived in a tightly patrolled irony free zone, their stony, disapproving faces the only response to anything light-hearted. Vicar was all too aware that icy disapproval was the safe default response for people who can''t understand the most rudimentary joke but have decided their offended-ness must look "high-status." The little splinter group believed strongly in parliamentary procedure and board governance, and so took such nonsensical reports as Vicar''s "over serving" very seriously, dragging the rest of their malleable membership along with them.

Mrs. Morrison most particularly - a busybody''s busybody - seemed to derive purpose by disapproving of, well . everything, including things that didn''t affect her at all, and in fact, a few things that she had dreamt up. Inevitably dressed up in conspicuous tartan, occasionally looking like the lady on the Export "A" tin - including the goddamn bonnet - she''d pass judgment on matters like parking (her husband, a thralled marionette, chauffeured her everywhere and maneuvered torturously to get her as close to her destination as any human could do) or downtown noise (although she lived, she would constantly brag, in the "highly desirable seaside subdivision of Sandringham Mews, a good ten minute trip from town centre). Vicar was certain that she kept book on people who illegally tore the tag off their mattresses, in contravention of its clearly stated injunction. Her most recent bugbear, the "shocking traffic," was now a "daily nuisance." Shocking traffic, to her, was three cars passing in front of her clinically tidy house on the same day. He liked little old ladies a lot, but Mrs.

Morrison had really begun to chap his corn-chute.