Dirty Work

by Anna Maxymiw

  I hold my hands out, stupefied. My palms are nacreous in the lodge floodlights, but there isn’t the shadow of a single nocturnal moth along my lifelines, no other movement anywhere. The throbbing quiet clings to me when I pull my underwear down.

  When I lean against the cobwebbed cabin wall, I’m so scared. I think about ghosts. I think about that wolf patrolling the hem of the forest. I think about all of the things I don’t know about the land I’m trying to live on. I keep my eyes closed the entire time and pray that I’m good enough to be passed over.

  It turns out that it’s too stressful to keep negotiating with the land; it’s a losing battle. So I lay rules out in my head: no more pissing outside the cabins at night; no more lazily flinging broken branches into the forest’s cusp instead of properly burning them for firewood; no more calling the animals names behind their backs. The land isn’t changing for us, something I should have realized by now. I should be changing myself for the land—at least for these last few weeks.

  When the sun sets late on a nastily hot day, the housekeepers leave our clothes on the shore and breaststroke into the amber light, dipping below the surface and letting the water turn us beautiful again. When the entire camp, guests included, is rain-lashed into a ground-bound rain day, we pin up a makeshift tarpaulin shelter, light a fire, and learn to make bannock from some of our Cree guests. We nod to the bears; we stop pestering the pike. We work. We buckle down. We dig, we haul, we chop, we lug, we transfer dirt and rocks from one side of the shore to the other, but we do it all knowing that our efforts are never going to stick, that we’re a temporary mark on the land. And we become okay with that. We learn to value ourselves just a little bit less, revere the land just a little bit more.

  We learn to laugh at ourselves, even in the face of fear. One night, a few days after Wade’s story, enough time that we have started to forget it, the four of us return to the back cabin sweaty and tired. We’ve taken to walking outside in groups, talking and making noise. Some of us have even started singing 1980s songs like “Eye of the Tiger” and Tommy Tutone’s “867-5309/Jenny” as loud as we can, to try to lessen the intensity of the quiet woods.

  We slink through our front door, trying to get the nightly dinner menu out of our heads. Now is the time for shucking serving whites and slipping into well-worn sweatpants and sandals. I stretch the muscles of my feet on the bench by our front door as Robin starts to undo her braids, closing her eyes as she digs her fingertips into her scalp. At the end of the night, we can smell one another’s sweat, meat grease from the grill, soap and bleach from the dishpit. But it doesn’t matter; we still lean into one another with exhaustion. Syd reaches up and turns on the overhead light. The cabin lights up, and all of a sudden, I see a hand sticking out from under Syd’s bunk. The hand is holding a hamburger bun.

  Before I have time to get scared, to wonder why a dismembered ghost hand is holding a hunk of bread, Gus erupts from under the bed. He stands up to his full height, howling as loud as he can, arms outstretched like branches.

  We all scream at the absolute top of our lungs. We jump into one another, grabbing at arms and legs and shoulders and whatever meat we can get our hands on. My heart contracts and expands in a quick rhythm, and Syd and I bury our faces in each other’s necks, breathing in the scent of familiar female. I know it’s just Gus, because I can see his giant grin through the fragile fence of Sydney’s hair, but I’m still scared.

  His howl turns into laughter. Slowly, we start to laugh, too, disentangling from one another, because it’s only Gus pulling a prank on us and because it took him so long to unfold himself from under the low, dirty bunk. He has dust bunnies down the front of his polar fleece, and he still hasn’t let go of his bread.

  “I couldn’t fit all the way underneath that little bed!” He’s laughing so hard that he can’t get the words out, and I join in. This is how emotions come out of us: in big swoops of expression. It feels good to funnel the fear of the past few days out of my body giggle by giggle.

  “Why do you have a hamburger bun?” I ask, gagging on my own fear-spit. “Is that supposed to scare us?”

  Gus tears into the bread with sharp teeth, and speaks through a full mouth. “No,” he says. “I stole it from the kitchen because I was hungry.” He smiles a lupine grin as he ambles out of the cabin, leaving a trail of crumbs, the wood door banging shut behind him.

  * * *

  That timber wolf never reappears. A week later, Wade thinks that he sees paw prints on the shore of the staff beach. We all run down to see, but after a day of lake weather, nothing is distinguishable except hollows that could have been left by anyone or anything. Go on, we say, shoving at Wade’s shoulder and laughing, and he laughs, too, no longer completely affected by whatever it was he saw. We link arms with one another and march through the forest to dinner, humming softly. But as we walk, I keep my eyes glued to the trees around us. I look for movement, for a flash of thick white. Where are you, where are you? I strain my eyes and look for that something, silent and old, something that sits on its heels and stays still until the sun melts, something that waits and waits and waits to croon that ancient answer: I’m here, I’m here, I’m here, I’m here—

  THE BUZZ

  On the evening we take our staff photos, the lake is calm and the skies are clear. The sun is a blush-pink and orange band on the horizon, and the water has the smallest of chops. It’s warm, and welcoming, and the guests are in a good mood. Henry herds us down to the shore after dinner service, so some of us will be photographed in serving whites and wearing makeup, and some of us will be photographed in our green staff shirt with messy hair. We’re all ready to make our mark, to document our year and have our own picture hanging on the wall. But there’s a bunch of people missing at the moment.

  “Wait, where are the guys?” Syd cranes her neck, peering back into the bush, where the paths lead to the guideshack. I can hear a kerfuffle, but can’t see anything.

  “Oh no,” I murmur.

  “What the—”

  All of a sudden, Jack, Pea, Kev, Aidan, Wade, and Connor, and then even Gus come marching out of the forest. Pantsless.

  “Of course!” Alex hollers.

  All seven of them sashay down to the shoreline like cabaret dancers, showing off their legs—lighter up at the thigh meat, bronzed and brown down at the calves and ankles—and mincing around as Henry rolls his eyes with an exasperated smile.

  “Christ, look at Gus’s legs,” Syd says, elbowing Emma in the stomach and making her exhale a little with the force of it.

  “They’re nicer than a woman’s,” Tiff says, laughing, as the guys line up in a can-can formation and each fling one leg into the air, boxers riding up.

  We expected this from Jack, but the other guys aren’t usually as forthcoming, and so some of these legs aren’t ones we’ve seen. The ridge of inner thigh, the soft sulcus at the back of the knee, the swell of the calf—all such intimate body parts on display for us and our assessing female gazes. In between our reams of giggles and our fumbled attempts at taking pictures, we eye their bodies, making mental notes, creating rankings in our minds.

  Finally, Henry puts an end to the show. “Go put your pants on,” he says, half-exasperated and half-capitulating. The guys filter back up the main path to wherever they’ve left their clothes, but not before Jack, unsurprisingly, pulls down his boxers and moons the rest of the staff. I snap my own picture: he’s blurry, wild-eyed and guffawing, looking back over his shoulder, his ass out, the other men clumped around him, grinning the widest I’ve ever seen them and lit up by the sunset like a bunch of young gods.

  * * *

  After weeks together, our interpersonal connections have finally become clearer, honed from hours spent observing one another and listening to gossip and offhand comments. We create a web: Kev seems to have a girl back home who writes him letters, but he maybe likes me, while Emma likes Kev. Jack and Tiff have been dating for years and they share a bunk: they met at the lodge, s
easons ago, when Jack was dating someone else. Aubrey has a boyfriend back home. Wade has a maybe-girlfriend, but he seems to have a soft spot for Alex. Alex has a boyfriend, so she spends all her time burrowed in her bunk, writing letters to him. Syd and Connor are sleeping together. Connor has an infant son, and we think that his baby’s mother is in her teens, but we can’t be sure. Henry has a girlfriend, and when she flies up for a few days, she makes him play Christina Aguilera on the sound system, much to our amusement and delight. I’m single. Emma is single. Robin is single, and so is Aidan. Pea is single, but he dated Alex the year before. Gus has an ex-wife, a new girlfriend, five kids.

  This is the way our lodge love lives go: staccato cycles of hormones, a delicate dance around one another in a desperate bid to keep our work lives and personal lives separate. At the beginning of the summer, we were sussing each other out, and so there wasn’t room for mania. Now we’re too familiar with each other to be aloof. We’ve seen too much of each other to pretend not to get a flash of heat that pins us in place and makes us rethink the way we look at someone. Sometimes, the wanting is so intense all there is to do is wait it out, teeth clenched and fingernails digging into skin. All of this sexual energy revolves around us like a solar system; we’re caught in the thick tautness of it, helpless, suspended.

  * * *

  I feel like I’m burning up. I press my lower belly to the chest freezer in the laundry room to try to relieve the pressure. When we do grocery haul, I ask the dockhands to load my wheelbarrow as much as they can. I read like a crazy woman, chewing through two, three, four books a week, so that I have something to do at night. I clean my bunk. I fold laundry. I sweep the floor. I sort and stack the tangle of shoes that grows in our cabin entranceway. Sometimes, these things help. Most of the time, they don’t.

  It all comes to a head one afternoon, when Wade and Connor are teasing me as I try to clean the staff dining room table. Wade is at one end of the room, shoving leftovers in his face; Connor is in the doorway, behind me, talking to Wade over my head. They volley comments about the guests, chores for the day, small talk that normally doesn’t bother me. But it’s hot, and I’m tired, and the dull buzzing in my ears is growing louder. As I turn to sort the staff cutlery, Wade makes an offhand comment about my dishpit outfit. Admittedly, it’s a hideous look, with a tattered President’s Choice apron tied overtop of worn leggings, orthopedic shoes, thermal socks pulled up my calves. A strange dart of anger shoots through me, up from my stomach and through to the ends of my fingers. Before I know what I’m doing, I’ve picked up a fork and hurled it at his head from across the room; in the background, I can hear Connor hooting. Wade shields himself with his hands and my aim is shit, so the fork doesn’t hit its mark. This is a new emotion: white-hot animal anger, stoked by proximity and desire. Wade and I stare at each other, me with my mouth stupidly open and him with almost an amused look on his face. When I apologize later, we fist-bump. Fishing-lodge problem solving—all is forgiven, dude. I’m not worried about him holding a grudge, because it’s the first time we’ve clashed, but I am worried about my reaction to simple teasing, and how I couldn’t control myself.

  This odd aggression becomes hard to contain. It’s as though the reins have snapped. I find that when the sun is highest and my arousal peaks with painful acidity, I can no longer control what I once had tabs on. The smallest things set me off—a wayward look, a comment from one of the guys, Henry nagging—and the anger plows through me. That’s when I feel like a puppet, and when my body takes over: I fling pieces of kindling at Connor, yell expletives at Kevin from across the shoreline, throw my clean dishes down in the sink so hard that the plastic glasses crack and even Sam backs away.

  And then the Beaulieu party arrives.

  * * *

  One night, Emma, Alisa, and I get fed up with the boys’ ribbing. “Hey Big Rig, you dumb fuck! You ever going to show us your paper-plate tambourine?” “Which one of you dummies clogged that toilet today?” “Housekeepers are about as useful as a fart in a spacesuit, gee fucking whiz!” We decide to turn in for the evening, starting the despondent trudge from the guideshack back to our cabins.

  I’m able to laugh at myself like anyone. But lately, it feels as if the boys’ teasing is going too far and crossing over into malice. I understand why. The hot summer days tend to make young men stir crazy and a housekeeper is an easy target. I try my hardest to be a feisty sparring partner—I toss off fuck yous faster than anyone, I try to keep up, try not to be a pissbaby and get my feelings hurt—but tonight I’m too tired to fight back. In fact, I feel close to tears.

  The three of us walk the dark path in silence, too defeated to even try to prop one another up.

  “Hey. Hey! You guys like euchre?”

  The Beaulieu party consists of about twenty guys: fathers, sons, uncles, great-uncles, nephews, cousins. They’re wealthy and self-made—construction-business managers, grocery-store-chain owners, carpenters—and they’re here to party and unwind, not just to catch trophy fish. These are our favourite kinds of guests, people who work to afford the trip and then actually have fun while they’re here. Serving a table of people who want to have fun makes my job easier, and I know that the tips will probably be good; serving a table of curmudgeonly, silent fishermen in camo means I’m scrambling to make conversation, struggling to find common ground, and I usually don’t end up with much spending money. The Beaulieus stroll happily into breakfast, they don’t rush down to the dock, they’re never late for dinner; they always say please and thank you; they laugh a lot—big, whooping chuckles that fill the corners of the dining room and make us smile back in the dishpit.

  Most important, there are six young men our age in the Beaulieu party, all of whom are standing outside of Cabin 1, looking at the three of us. Inside the cabin, I can see the glow of the fireplace, their uncles and fathers sitting around the cheap plastic table with playing cards in hand. Everyone is drinking rye or rum, and everyone is shouting good-naturedly. It beckons, so unlike the tenseness we just left behind in the guideshack that my feet almost move of their own accord.

  Henry has a strict policy about not mixing with the guests. In our summer contracts, he told us:

  …Light social contact only. Do not get involved with any of the guests. Staff are welcome to chat with guests but conversations should be light and informal. No discussion of politics or religion. Do not question guests about their families or how they make their living. Do not butt into a conversation. The rule “speak only if spoken to” is the spirit of this rule of etiquette. Do not ask to join into an activity with guests (i.e., ask to join a card game or game of darts or pool.)…

  Personally, I think that some guests don’t want a silent waitress. Instead, they want someone to gasp at the trophy pike they’ve caught that day, someone to call them out on their bullshit, someone to laugh at their jokes and feed it right back to them. This makes me feel most capable: figuring out how to read people while handing them their oatmeal and bacon, balancing a tray on my hip, remembering their orders without using a notepad. I become a telepath. I divine people’s needs and the reasons they decided to escape their city and come to the woods, and then I use what I know to make them happy. When I serve a taciturn Ohioan, I salute him and call him “sir” until he finally cracks a grin and tips me twenty dollars. When I serve a group of miners from small-town Northern Ontario, I let them waltz me across the dining room, keeping my head up as they twirl me around their suntanned legs and up and over their bare feet. Somehow, I already know that the Beaulieu boys are good people, wouldn’t try to take advantage of us, wouldn’t set us up for a fall.

  “Yeah?” Alisa is the one to reply, always the bravest. We stand, far enough away from the boys to be able to run if we need to, and I get a sense of what it must be like for hunters pursuing deer. The guys don’t seem to want to move for fear of spooking someone. The dark means we can’t see their faces, only their silhouettes lit up by the warmth and jollity behind them.

/>   “We need more players,” one of them says, almost shyly. “Do you guys—maybe—do you want to join us?”

  I start, half-turned around to get the hell out of there before I do something that Henry could fire me for, but something in his voice stops me. I have a feeling that they’ve spent the past day and a half trying to figure out how to ask us this question. We’re frozen, three velvety does. I can tell that the boys are all sort of smiling.

  “Well,” Emma exhales.

  “Okay.” It’s my voice that says this, somehow, but it seems to be the magic word because their shoulders relax at the same time as Alisa lets forth her perfect laughter, and the moment is a pact.

  The Beaulieu group has booked a number of the cabins in camp, but No. 4 seems to be where all of the young men are staying. When Emma and Alisa and I walk in, the boys run in front of us, strangely polite, pulling out chairs and slamming cups down on the table. This makes us unsure, because we’re used to the guys shoving us around and yanking on our braids, trying to stare at our asses and pulling the chairs out from under us to see how hard we fall. By comparison, this is chivalry.

  “Do you want a drink?”

  I’ve never had a drink with a guest. Before I can refuse, one of the boys—Hunter—darts from window to window, pulling the drapes shut.

  “Look,” he says, “I know you’re not supposed to be here with us. So we’ll lock the door and keep the curtains shut, right? And if Henry knocks on the door for whatever reason, we’ll just tell him to…to…fuck off.” The other guys cheer in response to Hunter’s words.