The Journey Prize Stories 32

by The Journey Prize Stories 32- The Best of Canada's New Writers (retail) (epub)

  “So what tree?” Eileen asks, watching the sun bleed pink delirium over the abandoned Libcor refinery. Eileen in her chair and the van parked behind us. In front, the overgrown refinery that shut down thirty years ago after a mercaptan leak. When they left, the company kept the lot. Took down all the tall buildings and left a waste of concrete with a railway running through it, surrounded by a barbed-wire fence.

  I ask for clarification and Eileen asks what tree I’d want to be buried in and I pause to think about it, looking out over the crabgrass and goldenrod and firepits full of scorched goldenrod. “Think there are any animals in there?”

  Eileen says yeah, probably, like Chernobyl. She knows about Chernobyl from a documentary. In the Exclusion Zone, there’s a place called the Red Forest. It’s a bit stunted and the trees have a strange ginger hue but the wildlife is thriving—boar, deer, wolves, eagles. Eileen says how nuclear radiation might actually be better for animals than human habitation.

  I stand quietly, holding Eileen’s chair and watching the sun pulse and glow and vanish. She reaches back and takes my hand, rubs the valleys between my fingers. Eventually, without saying anything, we turn for the van.

  “You ever think about concrete?” Eileen asks as I’m fastening her chair into the van. “How it seems so permanent. How it’s all around us and we walk and drive on it believing it’s hard and firm and solid as the liquid rock it is but really it’s nothing like rock at all. Weeds and soil beneath it and all of it ready to rise up at the gentlest invitation. It’s very fragile, very temporary.”

  On the way home we pass by the rubber plant and the abandoned Blue Water Village and beyond it Aamjiwnaang and Eileen says, “Incredible shrinking territory.” The reserve used to stretch from Detroit to the Bruce Peninsula before being slowly whittled down through centuries of sketchy land deals. Eileen’s maternal grandmother was Ojibwe and she has three cousins on the reserve and we go over once in a while but mostly her tradition is just to say “incredible shrinking territory” when we drive by.

  It comes to me when we drive by a bungalow, spot a clutch of them crawling up from the cleft of the foundation. “Sumac, I guess.”

  “What?”

  I say sumac again and Eileen clues in and says aren’t those basically weeds. I tell her no, they can get pretty big and I like the fruit, how they go red in autumn. I like how they’re sort of bushy and don’t have a prominent trunk. How they’re spunky and fierce and unpredictable.

  “Sumac.” Eileen does her pondering frown. “Noted.”

  It’s dark now and the lights are on in Port Huron, flickering out over the river. Looking out the window, Eileen asks me to tell her again how the county used to be. I hold on to the wheel and steer through the great chandelier and tell it how Mum used to. I say about the plank road and the Iroquois Hotel, how Petrolia was incorporated the very year Canada became a country, so we’re basically built on oil. I tell about the gushers in every field, soaring up fifty feet and raining down on the fields, clogging up the river and the lakes until the fisherman in Lake Erie complained about the black grit on the hulls of their boats. I tell about the notorious stench of the Lambton skunk, and about the fires. No railway or fire trucks and so when lightning hit and fire took to the fields they often burned for weeks at a time, a carnage of oil-fire raging through the night.

  “Wild,” she says. “Can you believe all that’s gone now? That whole world.”

  I don’t say it’s not gone, just invisible—racing through stacks and columns and broilers. I tell her what a perfect word, “wild.”

  Eileen goes to bed early so I head down to the damp lull of the basement. The hole is the size of a Frisbee now, and it’s starting to stink. Sit on the old plastic-plaid lawn chair and talk to Mum about work, about Suzy, about the fish and the pigeons and the ratio.

  There’s a long silence. I didn’t know the whole thing was getting to me. Didn’t know how it was building in me, fierce and rank. I tell Mum I’m worried. Worried I’m going to lose her. Worried about the smell, the rot, the secrets. Worried someone’s going to figure it out, maybe talk to the taxidermist. And I can’t tell Eileen and what are we going to do, what am I going to do?

  Mum sits there and listens sweetly. Then she twinkles her gold incisor toward the muskeg hole and I see something strange, something wrong, something white. So I step closer, grab an old chair leg and stir the muskeg a little and yes it definitely is what I think it is: a small bone that could easily be a piece of a raccoon thigh but could also be a human finger.

  I wake up at 5 p.m. and find Eileen making pesto which means it must be a good day. As I’m making a Keurig, she tells me there’s another one in the toilet. And once she says it I can hear the splashing. “Sorry,” she winces, pouring olive oil on a mound of basil and parm. “I wanted to. Just didn’t have the energy.” She presses a button on the KitchenAid, makes whirling mayhem of leaf and oil.

  I put on my spare Kevlars and head into the bathroom, pull the lid up to find the rat floundering, scrambling, its teeth bared and wet with fresh blood from where it must have bludgeoned itself against the porcelain. The water the colour of rust. The rat keeps trying to run up the side of the toilet, losing its purchase and sliding back down in a mayhem of thrashing legs and sploshing water.

  Without quite knowing why, I reach in and pin the rat and squat down to look into its eyes. I guess I want to know what it’s like to be a rat. Its head flicks back and forth in rage or terror, never meeting my eyes. Maybe it doesn’t know how to.

  If I let it go it’ll just end up back here, in the toilet, in pain. So I hold its head under the water. Pin it as it thrashes and bucks and wheels its legs, switching its ghost-pink tail. Exhausted, the creature doesn’t fight much. More or less lets it happen.

  I walk it through a Stonehenge of pylons and descend into the guts of the exhumed city street. I lay the rat in a puddle at the mouth of a culvert and throw some sludge over it. Walk back between a mound of PVC piping and a wrecked Jenga of blasted asphalt.

  Back inside, I tell Eileen I released it alive. “Good,” she says. “I’m getting tired of this. Must have something to do with the plumbing, the construction.”

  “Should be over soon.”

  “What should?”

  “Want to go down to the river?”

  We park at Point Edward and I wheel Eileen down to the waterfront, where the river curls and snarls and chops its dazzling blue. Underfoot there’s a belligerence of goose shit. We watch a pair and Eileen tells me they mate for life and get fierce about their young. They’ve been known to attack adult humans to protect them. I look at the geese and wonder how long their families have been nesting on this river.

  “When did they stop migrating?” Eileen asks.

  Which makes me think of a book I read once, where the main character keeps asking where the ducks go in winter. I can’t remember what book or what the answer was if there was one. I tell her I don’t know and she tells me how weird it is that there’s this whole big thing about Canada geese flying south in winter but as far as she can tell they never leave.

  “I think it’s the northern ones, more so.”

  “And what, they migrate down here? Winter in scenic Sarnia?”

  Beneath the bridge a teenager launches into a backflip. Executes perfectly to uproarious applause. His audience: a chubby redheaded boy and three thin girls in dripping bathing suits. Eileen stops for a moment and I can see her watching them and maybe she’s thinking how comfortable they are. How cozy. How nice it must be to just have a body and not think about it.

  Above them, transport trucks arc through a highway in the sky.

  The four off blurs by in a haze of Domino’s and Netflix and assuring Eileen there’s no smell from the basement, that it’s probably just the construction. Eileen and I watch all of Jessica Jones then all of The Punisher, listen to the bleats and chirps of loaders and
excavators. On Saturday I find a bone like a human elbow joint in the muskeg, another like an eye socket. Rodent hip, I convince myself. Racoon brow. Squirrel bits. More rats.

  Then it’s Sunday, meaning back to night shift for eight more on. I whiz past cornfields on the way to work when I notice something strange, something I’ve never spotted. Which makes sense because it’s in the very back of the field and it sort of blends in with a little patch of windbreak trees behind it but there it is: a rusted old derrick in the middle of the cornfield. A wrought-iron steeple rising up through the swishing haze like a puncture in time, a throwback to the days of gushers and teamsters, when the fields were choked with oil and fires burned for weeks.

  Eileen texts me to say there’s still that weird smell in the house and she’s pretty sure it’s oil or gas. Maybe it’s the stove, should she be worried. She’s thinking of texting her brother to come check it out. I tell her no, don’t text your brother, I’ll open the windows when I get home. Which is when I hear the enunciator.

  The blare of the Class A and then the radio crunches and Suzy comes on saying there’s a few malfunction lights on in Zone 1 and a flare shooting off. “Main concern is FAL-250A. Flow transfer failure could be a big one, let’s get on it.”

  When a Class A sounds, everyone goes. So it’s not just us CDU operators scurrying around, it’s also Naphtha and Alkylation and Plastics and the unit is full of bodies. Todd puts on an scba though nobody’s sure why. Derek and Paul smash into each other at full speed on the Tower #1 scaffold causing Suzy to yell, “No fucking running rule still fucking holds.” Stan, one of the night engineers, says maybe it could have something to do with the sludge blanket level in the wastewater valve.

  Suzy wheels on him. “How the fuck is that?” When Stan starts to explain she tells him to go back to his craft beer and his Magic card tournaments.

  Jack tries again: “Backpressure?”

  Suzy glares at him, leaking chew-spit onto the floor. Stan walks off muttering something about valve monkeys. Suzy stares at her board and calls orders out while the rest of us scramble around checking valves and lines and readings.

  Sal finds the problem: a release valve is down and there’s buildup in the main flare. A buildup of hydrocarbon waste in the thirty-six-inch flare where the tail gas should be burning off, which means a lot of flammable gunk and Suzy’s board is telling her the flare’s going but the flare is not going.

  “Looks like a problem with the pilot flame,” Sal shouts from halfway up the tower.

  “Getting enough oxygen?” Stan shouts back up.

  “Should probably call research,” Sal says. Suzy says fuck those fucking lab monkeys then moves toward the tower with a gunslinger strut. Grabbing a rag from a maintenance cart, she starts tying it around a plunger. She sets a boot down on the rubber cup and yanks the wooden handle free. Then she climbs up the tower to the first platform. As she’s heading up Sal races down and I’m backing off too as Suzy leans back, shouts, “Heads up,” and sends the plunger handle arcing toward the mouth of the flare.

  The workers scatter—scurrying into the warehouse and the delivery building, hunching behind trucks and the board. I find a dumpster and cling to the back of it. Sal hits the concrete and joins me just in time to watch the plunger arc and arc and land in the maw of the stack.

  The air shimmies and buckles.

  The flare lights.

  Lights and blasts seventy feet into the moon-limned sky. Air swirls and booms and I clutch my chest because I can’t breathe.

  The dumpster jumps.

  The dumpster becomes a toad and leaps ten feet across the floor. The flare lights, a hissing rage of tail gas, a seventy-foot Roman candle stabbing up at the sickle moon.

  No one gets hurt. No one gets in trouble. Stan walks away shaking his head along with the ten or twelve operators gathered on the floor. The enunciator goes quiet and Suzy walks down from the stack, brushing off her knees.

  Sal looks over at me, muttering something about being too old for these shenanigans. He walks away huffing, pauses to curse toward the dumpster’s skid mark, which is longer than a car. Suzy calls me over and tells me I didn’t see shit, then tells me to look after the flare for the rest of my shift.

  “What do you mean ‘look after it’?”

  “Stand there and watch it Stephen fucking Hawking.”

  So I stand there and watch it.

  The moon grins down and the flame shoots up beside it for ten minutes, then twenty, with no sign of abating. I pace around Tower #1, checking pressures and temps and turning valves as needed but always keeping that flare in eyeshot.

  One hour. Two.

  Down by the river I see the lakeshore going liquid and sort of throbbing. At first I think it must be gas. Then I think I must be hallucinating because the shoreline itself has turned semi-solid as it refracts the flare’s corona. It looks like there’s flesh down there, a great beast sidling up to the fence.

  I walk down and shine my flashlight on them and see that it is flesh. Not one creature, but thousands. Smelt. Thousands and thousands of smelt cozying up to the shore, coming as close as they can to the flame.

  I don’t notice Suzy until she’s gusting sour breath over my shoulder. “The fuck is that?”

  “Smelt.”

  She stands there looking at the fish awhile, spitting into her Coke can.

  Then she turns back to her flare, gives it the up-down. For a moment I think she might genuflect.

  “Fucking smelt,” she scoffs, walking away.

  I spend the rest of the shift watching the smelt shudder in the balm of the flare. Thousands of fish inching toward the tail gas column as it roars and rages through the punctured dark. Light licking them silver and bronze, the smelt push and push against the shore—close and closer but never close enough.

  I drive home past the wind turbines thinking as I often do about a hundred thousand years from now when maybe someone would come across this place. I talked about this once, with Mum. We walked into a cornfield just to look at the turbines and when we got there I asked what would happen if there were no corn or soy or farmers left, just the turbines marking the graves of fields. How maybe a thousand years from now there would be a new kind of people like Mad Max and they wouldn’t remember farms or electricity or the nuclear power plant in Kincardine. How these future humans might find this place where turbines sprouted up taller than any trees, their arms like great white whales. The surrounding farms all gone to wild again. And what else would these new people think but that these massive three-armed hangmen were slow-spinning gods? “That’s very well put,” Mum said then, as if she were the teacher she’d always wanted to be instead of being a woman who answered the phones at NRCore three days a week. She stood beneath that turbine, staring up at its bland white belly for a long time before she finally said, “It does sort of look like a god. A faceless god.”

  Eileen’s still sleeping when I get home so I pour some merlot and head straight down through the oil-reek into the basement. Eileen was right. The smell is getting bad. Detectable from the kitchen and almost unbearable in the basement itself and what this means is a matter of days at most. Below, the morning sun winks and flickers through the cracked foundation. The hole is the size of a truck tire now, and there are more bones floating at the surface. I grab an old broken chair leg and stir the muck around, transfixed by the bones. One that looks like a splintered T-bone, one that may be a gnawed nose, another that I’m pretty sure has part of a fingernail attached. A row of molars like a hardened stitch of corn.

  The teenagers. In the yard. The story I’ve never believed.

  “It’s all right,” Mum would say if she could speak. “It’s all right, sweet Sonny Boy. You’re all right, you’re here, everything’s going to be fine.”

  And Mum would be right. For the moment everything is nice and cool and dark and we sit there in the ge
ntle silence until Mum wants me to tell her some of the old stories so I do. I tell them the way she used to tell me. I tell about her grandfather, the Lambton oil man who sniffed for gushers and got ripped off on the patent for the Canada rig. I tell about the last gusher and the time lightning struck the still and all the dirty land sales the companies made to get things started in Sarnia. Water, I remember her saying once. It was all about water. They chose Sarnia because they needed to be by the river. I tell her the same now and she sits there smiling faintly, a twinkle in her gold incisor and for the moment the two of us are calm and happy and together.

  When I creep into bed Eileen wakes up. She reaches for her bedside table, produces a rectangular led blear. “It’s almost noon,” she says. “What were you doing?” I tell her I was in the basement. She asks if I was playing WOW again and I say no just reading some old volumes of Turok. She murmurs the usual: just don’t take up Magic like her brother. I laugh and tell her no, of course not.

  Then she rises. Sits up in bed and I can see even with the blackout blinds that she’s gone serious. She asks if there’s something going on with me lately. I tell her the usual bullshit, just a hard day at work. And how could you expect what comes next:

  “You know I’m never going to get better?”

  Times like this, I’m not good at saying the right thing because there is no right thing.

  “It’s just,” she continues, “sometimes I forget, myself, that it’s not ever going to end, that it’s just going to keep going like this for who knows how long. And I just want to be sure that you know the full extent of that.”

  I tell her yeah, of course.