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view. Get a little perspective on the river, that trough of chopping blue. Between the lakers I can almost see down through the polluted azure to Grandpa Bill entombed there in his lonely mud, bottles smashed around his soaking bones. The fucker.

6. Voodoo Unchained
    Windsor. Where else could you fall for a Scottish-Chinese Canadian? Kate Chan. Scottish father, Chinese mother, met in Windsor. When they split up, Father Scotsman returned to the motherland, and Mom took baby Kate to Toronto, changing her last name as quickly as she could. Bit of a pattern, that.
    I could date her with a drug smuggler’s wallet but had to hope this law student could look around the fact that, to her at least, I was just a house painter. She had rocked the LSAT; ostensibly, I rocked a roller pole. A self-employed house painter with deep pockets, but still. I wanted to pull out all the romantic stops from the get-go but couldn’t tell her the most exciting thing about me.
    A first date. The pre-date. The maybe this is a date, maybe it isn’t date. What to do for the exhibition game? A drink or three? Sure, it’s convenient and enabling, but if I’d wanted another bar girl, I’d have gone to a bar. A drink is too predictable, every dude’s reliable grease. And Windsor wasn’t big enough to have nice watering holes where we weren’t certain to see people one of us knew. Time for Voodoo to earn his keep.
    That’s right,
Voodoo
. Part border collie, part attitude. (What colour is he? See, we’re getting to know each other already.)
    On the phone with Kate, I was instantly tipsy on the cello-y sound of her voice. “You free for a dog walk in Ojibway Park?”
    The park was crucial. First and foremost, Ojibway is genuinely beautiful, especially in the fall. Every tube in nature’s paintbox opened up. And more than just trees. Think grass but not that cancer carpet you kicked a soccer ball on. Seven-, eight-, even ten-foot-tall grasses, brown by June but standing proud ’til late November, countless stalks clattering in the breeze. And the trees are forest trees, not rakes of ordered pine. Windsor sits in the most treeless non-Arctic county in Canada. What isn’t paved is ploughed. With its meandering, mulch-covered trails, the enormous park was a dog’s delight, sometimes even frolicking ground for deer. The pumpkiny smell of leaves underfoot. Half-naked branches and tall grasses swaying in the breeze. All this, plus wingman Voodoo.
    When Kate agreed to the walk, I pumped an unseen fist above my phone. “Would you like to meet me there or should I pick you up? I gotta warn you: in the car, my dog will sniff your hair.”
    All week I increased Vood’s teeth brushing to get his breath down from dragon foul, then gave him his quarterly bath the night before.
    She didn’t dress as if nature required a hundred zippered pockets on easy-to-clean fabrics. Ass-music jeans and a soft sweater she was sure to show me was a V-neck before zipping up her vest. Her black hair was pinned up in half a dozen places, a flickering little movie of two crows fighting. The sight of her worn hiking shoes flooded me with interest and relief. For some, the Ojibway Park walk risked being too un-urban, no thump-thump music, no lattes. Not Kate. “Wow,” she said when we arrived, “so this is what life outside the library looks like.” She stopped to read a plaque I’d never bothered with that claimed the grasses around us were the last preserve of species that used to blanket the entire region. “From tall grasses to tall gases,” she joked, and nodded at Detroit’s Zug Island smokestacks visible above the tree tops. “Ojibway Park—right. The park’s for the First Nations, while the local police force have scabs on their knuckles from the last time they got to write up a Driving While Indian.”
    When the three of us hit the large and shallow pit Vood and