Lake on the Mountain. Jeffrey Round

aghast. No! Arman would be furious — he might even tell her family. Didn’t Dan know her brother well enough by now? Anyway, she’d already decided to have an abortion.

      Dan’s stomach spasmed. It sounded worse than the spectre of marriage. He haltingly suggested an arrangement between them, wondering yet again if she were trying to snag a citizenship.

      She turned her mocking eyes on him, reminding him even more of Arman. “You’ve got to be kidding,” she said.

      “Why?”

      She saw his hesitation and reached out a hand to him. “I didn’t expect you’d be emotional about this,” she said.

      “Am I?”

      She nodded vigorously. “Oh yes, clearly you are. No offence, but I have ambitions to be more than a housewife, and I think you may realize one day that you’re gay.”

      Dan’s eyes flickered away.

      “Besides,” she continued, “no one in my family has ever married outside our culture. It would be a disaster.”

      The double slap came as a shock. “I’d keep it,” he blurted out. “I’ll raise the child.” He had no idea what that entailed, and years later he often wondered at his outburst, but somehow the thought of saving the baby was foremost in his thinking.

      “You’d do what?”

      “I’ll look after it. I’ll raise it.” The idea had taken control of him, driving his impulses.

      Somehow it was imperative to make her understand this baby meant more to him than anything in his life so far. He rambled on, spinning himself deeper and deeper into his daydreams, his improvised fables of fatherhood. He thought she’d refuse, but her whimsical side won out. To his surprise, she agreed to consider it.

      She began to scheme. She had an aunt, rumoured to be a lesbian and considered even more of a renegade, who lived in California with a bunch of crazy artists. The aunt could take her in for the final months of the pregnancy, which, she calculated, would coincide with the end of school and summer holidays. If all went well, she wouldn’t be showing before then.

      Her light-hearted smile returned. It was an adventure. Suddenly she was Holly Golightly making an impromptu appearance at the Go-Go-A-La-Mode, clearing everything up for him where he thought he’d come to rescue her. Afterwards, Dan was never sure if he’d made up his mind or if she’d made it up for him.

      “Let me think about it,” she told him.

      Years later he related the story to Donny, who sat quietly through the tale of youthful courtship and terror.

      “So you fucked her to be with her brother?”

      Dan looked sourly at him. “No — I fucked her because I was drunk.”

      “Ah! That’s different. I’ve always said we’re all just one beer away from being straight.” Donny winked. “I think it’s cool that the kid owes his life to a pint of Heineken. You should have named him after it.”

      The prospect of a child to look after made a huge change in Dan’s life, far greater than he could have imagined. He suddenly found himself willing to do anything as long as it would bring in money. Anything but hustling — that part of his life was over. There’d be no lonely middle-aged men this time to take him in and provide. Providing was what Dan would be doing.

      It was agreed that Kendra would return to school in the fall, after the baby’s birth. In the meantime, Dan would do whatever he could to bring in money. She would remain independent and they would live apart. Custody agreements could be drawn up later, but she already knew she didn’t want to raise a child.

      Dan had signed up for a third year at university, but even before his acceptance came through he realized he wouldn’t be able to afford the tuition. Somewhere along the line, practicality won out.

      He bought a newspaper and dug out the classifieds. With his limited experience and incomplete degree, there was little he was qualified for that would support a family. The smiling man who answered his call and greeted him an hour later made him feel he’d been waiting for someone like Dan forever. That probably wasn’t far off. The sort of people who tracked insurance scammers were little short of sociopathic misfits, Dan learned. While there was no shortage of those in the city, few were capable of holding down jobs, and the ones who were seemed even more dubious specimens of humanity than the supposed criminals they were tracking. If they were good at exposing scammers, it was because cheating was in their blood, low-life losers who thought, pissed, and shat scams till they became experts at them.

      Dan accepted the comedown in expectations — from stalking bones in the Sahara to stalking flesh-and-blood rats in the gutters of the city — with equanimity. At least he was making money. He reported to the townhouse on Queen East near Logan each morning at seven a.m. before hitting the road with his assignments. This meant tracking a wide range of people who were in some way disabled — from those who’d lost the use of limbs, through those claiming whiplash and soft tissue injuries, to people with repetitive strain syndrome. Some had found themselves dismissed from their jobs outright. Others were luckier, having had the relative good fortune to have their mishaps occur at the workplace, making it harder for their employers to get rid of them. All became targets for insurance companies looking for an excuse to opt out of paying benefits.

      While waiting for lawsuits to be settled, some disappeared and were last heard from at Tijuana addresses or luxury chateaus up north. Others were luckier in having spouses support them for the duration. Still others, having lost their income, got swallowed up by welfare rolls or were glad-handed from relative to relative while waiting out the endless doctor reports and psychiatric assessments — the company doctors always finding reasons why the claimant should be working and the lawyers’ doctors finding equally valid reasons why they should not. It was all a matter of perspective, unless you happened to be the sufferer.

      This was where Dan came in. He was there to challenge the perspective. He became adept at disguising himself outside claimants’ homes, snooping through their garbage, and making discreet enquiries of the people next door who were sometimes only too eager to divulge their neighbours’ secrets. “He operates a business in his basement, customers come and go at all hours.” Or, “I see her working down at the pub on the corner on Sundays.” Many of those Dan caught in lies later expressed shock that the young man on their corner had been able to keep invisible till it was too late. After a handful of incriminating pictures, the potential lawsuits and hoped-for insurance payments became history.

      His first month on the job, he located ten claimants who’d been impossible for others to find. He got incriminating pictures of seven. His supervisors were impressed and commended him every chance they got. He’d had misgivings about a couple of the ones he’d shadowed, wondering if they really were scamming or just making do the best they could. A guy who claimed to have a bad leg and got caught playing football was one thing, but several claimants he’d photographed doing everyday things that had to be done, like it or not. The pictures didn’t show whether it had been easy for them to perform those tasks or how costly it had been in terms of pain and suffering.

      He expressed his concerns to a supervisor. She gave him a wormy smile, the veins of a chronic drinker mapping her nose. “We know,” she said. “It’s a tough call. Just get the pictures and don’t worry about it. Let the courts decide who’s lying.”

      “Luck of the draw,” a co-worker told him with a shrug. “Hey! It’s not up to us to judge.”

      The more he got to know his colleagues, the more Dan realized he was working with people who’d rubbed themselves sideways against the law more than the norm. Confessions of impaired driving, assault, tax evasion, drug possession, and fraud were commonplace amongst his co-workers. Most of them talked freely about their pasts. Some bragged about the things they got away with. One admitted he was working off the payments of a paternity suit. Dan began to feel he’d been drafted into the city’s virtually unemployable fringe set.

      One cold April afternoon, he watched an older woman hobbling