Dirty Work

by Anna Maxymiw

  * * *

  Even coming up on the halfway point of the summer, it’s still sometimes easy to think that we’re the only ones on this land. It’s typical human egoism to believe that the world revolves around us weak, noisy humans, and that we’re the top of the food chain. And while species diversity drops off the farther north you travel—a large portion of the Canadian taiga supports only 45 mammalian species; in comparison, Mexico supports 150, Costa Rica 163—up here, we’re definitely not alone, nor are we the masters of our domain. Aside from the insects, we also live alongside beavers, muskrats, coyotes, wolves, deer mice, martens, foxes, little brown bats, black bears, moose, hares, caribou, chipmunks; we’re thankfully a tiny bit too north for cougars and raccoons, and a little bit too south for polar bears. We have our regulars. There’s a huge garter snake that lives under the concrete walkway to the lodge from the motel and suns itself on the path, scaring Alex every time she sees it; the angry red squirrels that eat mushrooms that grow in the forest and get stoned, screaming at us from the trees; and a groundhog we’ve named Chunk who hangs around the back door of the kitchen.

  And then there’s us. The filthiest, cruellest animals of all, bare-skinned weaklings who spend more time yelling at one another than is wise, who waste energy on stupid things like pleasure or reading or hanging out. We’re a strange bunch, trying to eke out a summer together. But we’re getting better at being with one another, and everyone is starting to go a little wild, deliciously, crazily so.

  The mania spreads slowly, leaking out from my cabin and into the hands and veins and eyes of everyone else. Or maybe every cabin has its own core of frenzy, bred hot and compact, that grows with every wild laugh, every wild chore. Our group reversion starts at the breakfast table one morning, when Jack leans over to grab some more oatmeal and lets a fart rip. Not one of us blinks; a few of us even nod appreciatively. We slap at one another’s asses and bellies, pass the bacon without lowering our cups of coffee from our mouths. “You still have crusty shit around your eyes,” Robin howls. “I didn’t sleep a good goddamn,” Pete says. “Gee fucking whiz—ever loud thunder last night,” Gus gripes. “Right over my head.” We talk loose and easy: free, truly free, the small talk melted completely away as if it had been a piece of hard candy we’d been carrying around in the pouches of our cheeks. Now that the sugar is gone, the real taste comes through. And it’s good. We’re good without the saccharine niceties. We’re better.

  Our talk gets looser. We swear with more confidence and alacrity. We swear more creatively than we ever thought possible. The insults get meaner. The jokes get meaner. The jokes get dirtier. I’ll tell you how to have sex with a fat broad, Gus says to us one night at dinner. Roll her in flour and look for the wet spot. And we all giggle, because we need to laugh to fuel our days, and so we do. It’s times like these, when we’re a pack around the staff table, relishing in something so incredibly politically incorrect that it wouldn’t even make me smile back home, when I’m stunned at how lucky I am that I decided to apply for this job, and that I was hired.

  There are many different reasons for a twentysomething to leave her life behind and come up north for a job like this one. For the dockhands and guides, this is often a career step to running their own outfit or going into competitive fishing. For the housekeepers, it seems to be something else altogether.

  “I wanted to go on an adventure,” Syd tells me. “Is that weird? That’s my honest answer.”

  “Not weird,” I say.

  “I just thought it sounded wild, and I wanted to take off for the summer and be free. Adventure sounds cheesy, I know. But my older brother always went off on adventures in the summer and I wanted the same thing.”

  Robin uses strikingly similar language. “I thought it would be a good opportunity for some sort of summer adventure. Something new and completely out of my realm,” she says. “I figured what the hell, why not? I didn’t have anything at that point.”

  Still, this adventure can get overwhelming. Sometimes it’s so much, all of this animal magnetism held captive in our small bodies and our small rooms. That’s when some of us disappear. The veterans know the nooks and crannies; the rest of us have had to figure it out. The brave ones go to the dump to be alone. The canny ones manage to finagle chores—rock haul, buoy dropping—that require them to jet off in a boat for an entire afternoon. The taciturn ones stay in bed and zip their sleeping bags over their heads and yank down their bug nets. The green ones, like me, know nowhere else to go except the staff beach, and so that’s where I head.

  Standing on the shore, I close my eyes and breathe in and out. I’m not entirely alone: I can hear the on-shore guides yelling about firewood and tackle and chores and boats and motors. Their voices curve around the point that separates the staff beach from the guests’ shoreline, and it’s almost like they’re right next to me, leering, laughing like they always do.

  I peel off my uniform and hold it to my face for a moment; it smells like oily hair and greasy skin, the result of only being able to wash my clothes once a week. We live in our own filth—the wax that skin creates from friction and sweat; the crotches of pants that haven’t been laundered in weeks—and therefore to smell our bodies clean is sometimes alien. Before coming up here, I might have found the scent of dirty human distressing, but now it’s oddly comforting.

  I walk into the shallows, leaving ripples of oil behind me, the remnants of bug spray and lotion and cooking grease that have accumulated on my skin throughout the week. As I slide my feet along the pebbly bottom, I keep my eyes down, looking for movement. Being in water makes me nervous; I’m out of my element, vulnerable. If I close my eyes, I can picture the lake full of fish, all of them staring at my pale legs. I wonder, irrationally, if pike would slide around my ankles like a cat might. Marking me with mucus. Marking me as their own. I walk farther, the water ringing my torso, lapping at the bottoms of my breasts, stealing the breath from my lungs. I lean my head back and feel the tips of my hair get heavy with water; I ease my body into the lake, part by part, until the water curls at my collarbone and I can slip under, running my fingertips across my scalp and across my eyebrows as I stretch under the surface.

  It’s times like these when I feel as though I could bring magic to my body. Being alone here stokes different emotions: either I feel panicky, uncomfortable without someone near me cracking jokes and touching me and being in complete close contact, or I feel powerful. Today, as exposed as I am, I feel like I could raise my hands and take the energy from this land, this mean, fierce land, and lace it throughout my body. I want to take this place with me and keep it forever, put it into the bones of my pelvis and the skin on the soles of my feet. I’m on the cusp of some new form, a raw core of sexuality and power that exists in the stripped-down, scrubbed-off version of myself that is emerging day by day.

  Caught in my own thoughts, idly touching my hip bones and waist, the water rocking against my knees and the pale insides of my thighs, I remember something Jack told the girls on our first day.

  “For chrissake,” he said. “Your painted toenails probably look just like fishing lures.”

  I think I feel something slide up against my ankle. Fierceness is momentarily forgotten as I kick up my heels and run back to the beach, water slicing around me as I lurch, laughing and laughing and laughing.

  * * *

  One afternoon, I’m pulled out of a face-down nap by a dull buzzing. I come slowly out of sleep, confused and drooling a little. As I raise my head, I try to assess the sound. It could be anything—a Whippersnipper, a boat motor, a faraway chainsaw. But as I shift from asleep to nearly awake, I feel a vibration, something that pushes up against my white bug net. I squint. Three fat bumblebees float thickly on the air, circling.

  I rip my net back and dart from my bed, ducking through their invisible sign of infinity. I pull on a pair of shorts and a thin tank top, for a little decency, and open the cabin door, stumbling out into the forest and right into Jack’s path.<
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  “Help me,” I sputter, bare-legged and dumb-mouthed. My tongue feels swollen with sleep, my eyes sandy. It’s so goddamned quiet. The generator seems to be off, probably for refuelling, and I can’t hear anybody else. Where is everyone? Where are the girls in my cabin? If I had to guess, I’d say the others are out having a lake shower, or sitting on the shoreline writing letters, or maybe watching old movies on VHS in the main building, but it feels wrong to be alone, like everyone flew back home and somehow Jack and I are the only ones left. Maybe I’m half-asleep; my brain feels cloudy and strange. I’m hot and also clammy, and I rub my upper arms with my hands to create some friction and also to try to cover my chest in the bright beam of the afternoon light.

  Despite my vague two-word bleat, Jack doesn’t hesitate—he slips inside our cabin, dark hands in front of him and at the ready. I wonder if he’s curious about what he’s walking into. It could be anything: a bear at the window, a snake in the bed, a leak in the roof. My bees will seem stupid in comparison to any of these, but I can’t bring myself to smack them down. It’s so much easier to get help, to be a little bit weak in this moment. As I follow him, I’m immediately conscious of the way our living space smells so very female, like salt and dirt and that odd, deep smell that women get when they don’t wash their hair every day. It smells like our sleep, our bodies, our beings, maybe even our dreams, and I turn pink.

  Jack looks around perfunctorily, noticing the pictures of shirtless men we have taped up on our wall. Of course he hasn’t been in here this year—the back girls cabin of this cohort was probably a bit of a mystery to him.

  “Nice art, eh,” he murmurs.

  “Shut up,” I whisper.

  The bumblebees hum in the air around us.

  “This what you need help with, Big Rig?” He jerks his thumb at the bugs. “Why don’t you just roll up one of those dumb magazines and kill them?” He gestures to the Cosmopolitans on the table.

  “I don’t want to kill them. I just want them out of the cabin.”

  He gives me an odd look. “All right.”

  I spend the next few minutes watching Jack cup his hands around the bees, crooning at them in a low and patient voice. Come on, big girl, come on, pretty, he says, jerking his head at me when he wants me to open the door and when he wants me to keep it closed. Shush, shush, he says, ushering the bugs out of the cabin one by one, and then he leaves. I don’t say thank you and he doesn’t expect it.

  * * *

  Throughout the summer, guides are flown in for stints of various lengths. During the busier times, Henry tries to have as many men on hand as possible to take guests out on the lake. Later this summer, we’ll meet Cedric, a pewter artisan who runs his own fishing outfit most of the year. And Murphy, the gruff, bearded guide who looks like Hemingway and is nicknamed Chief Stormcloud by the dockhands because he calls all the young men “peckerheads” and goes to bed at 9 p.m., getting grumpy if anyone in camp dares to be audibly rowdy after his bedtime. And Max, well into his eighties and still going strong. I fished with Max last summer. He’s my father’s favourite guide because of his gentle nature, his patience, and his sneaky sense of humour. Max can get a line into the water faster than anybody I’ve ever seen; he can tie knots one-handed and still drive a boat with the other hand.

  Sometimes, guides come in for most of the summer, unable to swing the whole nine weeks because of other commitments but not willing to say no to time up north; this is the case with Wade, a quiet hunk of a man from Lion’s Head who flew into Kesagami a couple of weeks after we arrived. When he landed, the girls were lined up on the dock waiting for the groceries to be unloaded, so we didn’t notice the tall figure unfolding himself from the front seat. Then one of the housekeepers elbowed another, hard bone wedged into soft breasts and tight ribs, and jabs and nudges and hissed words travelled down the line, our eyes widening and our postures improving as he made his way up the dock to the shore.

  Wade is a catalyst. He turns the housekeepers into some rom-com version of themselves: whenever he enters a room, the female staff members sigh like some corny chorus; whenever he smiles, with that kind of male half-smirk that makes women fan themselves and rub their thighs together, the girls bite their lips and have to look away for fear of being teased by the other boys. Robin, who up until now hasn’t shown any interest in hanging around the male staff cabins, seems to be spending more time in that quadrant of camp. Quiet Emma ends up persuading Wade to give her a ride on his shoulders back to her cabin one night; I watch as she furrows her fingers into his blond hair and shrieks as he sprints along the back path.

  Wade’s easy to get along with, rolls with the punches, and he’s also somehow kind. He never bullies the girls, doesn’t prod at us until we cry, stays quiet when the other guys are causing a ruckus. This could be because he didn’t join the pack at the very beginning. Maybe he hasn’t had enough time to learn how to get under our skin, or feels that he doesn’t have the right. Maybe, because he’s twenty-nine, older than the rest of us, he feels above it. Conversely, we won’t have a chance to get to know his character flaws, or really get to know him as well as we know each other, because he’ll be flown out of camp a couple of weeks before the rest of us.

  Wade’s presence amps everything up: a new man is a new choice in our games of Fuck, Marry, Kill that we play on our afternoons off. We figure out that it’s better to embrace the animal than to fight it. We start ranking one another in terms of attractiveness. We discuss our bathroom habits more often than is necessary, often over lunch. We want meat. We want alcohol. We want to masturbate—preferably in private, but we’ll do it among our sleeping roommates if need be. These are topics and urges and conversations that have little to no place in the real world. But here, the rudeness I repress in my normal life pours out of me. It pours out of all of us. This is no-man’s land. No-woman’s land, too.

  And at the end of our day, we slink through the door of the guideshack in shifts. We flop onto the bench by the fire, or burrow into one of the guides’ beds if it’s been a particularly bad night shift. There’s also bootleg alcohol in the guideshack: half-bottles of rye gifted to us by understanding guests, leftover cans of Molson snatched by housekeepers from empty cabins. Sometimes, we pool our money and ask obliging guests to buy a case of beer for us—but not too often, because two-fours of beer cost seventy-five dollars up here. We scrounge and save, and on some nights we have wild, short-shift parties before stumbling off to bed. Gus keeps a mini-fridge in his bunk, and on the good nights, the Coors Light and the Canadian cans roll out fresh and frosty, and we share them back and forth. This is how so many of us end up hungover on some mornings. It’s also how so many of us get sick in waves of group phlegm and sticky shared fever. But those repercussions don’t matter when we’re piled in, five to a bunk, listening to bad, loud dance music and swigging shit beer. This is the way we slough off the stresses of the day.

  During one of these get-togethers, my camera goes missing and I’m frothy with panic. I have so many pictures and videos on there, artifacts I’m not ready to lose. Tiff steps up, walking me along the paths between cabins and up and down the staff beach, where we scour the ground, our eyes straining in the wavering dusk light. When we return to the guideshack, me close to tears of frustration, Gus comes out of his bunk with my camera.

  “Where did you get that?” I’m not even accusatory, just so relieved to see it. I feel like I could cry, but I don’t want the dockhands and guides to see me lose it over something as small as this.

  “I found it wedged between my mattress and the wall. It must have fallen out of your pocket when you were in my bunk or something,” he says, handing it back to me. The story checks out: Gus is the keeper of the beer and we spend a lot of time in his room.

  I lurch at him, wrap my arms around his body, and hug him as tightly as I can, mumbling thank you thank you thank you under my breath.

  A day later, I flip the camera on. Alex has been looking over my shoulder, and her
scream can be heard from the shoreline all the way to Cabin 6.

  The photos are crude boy photos—bums and hairy chests, a couple of testicles from where a few of the dockhands leaned over too far when posing with their asses out. There’s even a picture of one of them basically pulling his asshole open. I smack a hand over my eyes, groaning, peeking through my fingers. As I flick through the pictures, I realize that I never lost the camera; somehow, the guys grabbed it when I wasn’t looking, whether it was slipped out of my pocket or swiped from a bench, and booby-trapped it with half-naked snapshots. And then Gus lied so smoothly and convincingly that I fell for it, hook, line, and sinker. I’m partly angry, partly amazed at what a team of sneaks they are, that none of the girls noticed. I wince at a picture of three of them all bent over with their ass cheeks out.

  And then I get to the last photo.

  “What is this?” My voice has reached a melodramatic shriek-pitch, but I can’t help it. Alex is in shock beside me. She’s shaking her head. “Who is this?”

  Whoever the boy is has pulled his penis back between his legs and pushed his thighs together, so his crotch looks vaguely like a woman’s. There aren’t any distinguishing characteristics. I try not to look too hard. All I can see is that the pubic hair is dark.

  Tiff scuttles over, peering at the screen. Her voice changes as soon as she sees the picture. I can hear the hardness in her throat—it comes up to her eyes when she turns to look at me.