The Path of Most Resistance

by Russell Wangersky

A week ago, Jane had read him the riot act when he’d asked her to help him get groceries. “Honestly, Dad, I can’t be at your beck and call. I’m not even in the province half the time. We’ve got to find a better way.”

  Five years ago, she would never have said that. Five years ago, he thought, she would have gotten the groceries herself, brought them over, helped him with supper, and they would have eaten together, cleaning the kitchen with an easy hand-off of the tasks between them.

  He wasn’t sure what time it was now. The clock on the bureau was slightly turned away, and he couldn’t see the numbers clearly or reach it without getting out of bed. Art decided it must be close to ten.

  By then, he’d practised his first sentence several times, listened to it rattle around his bedroom when he said it out loud, astounded by how thin and reedy his voice sounded.

  “I haven’t been out of bed in three days.”

  No, not quite.

  “I haven’t been strong enough to even get out of this bed for three days.”

  That was better — if that didn’t make them stop and take notice, he didn’t know what would. Maybe he could act drowsy and a bit confused when someone finally came upstairs. And he could muster up a deep, rattling cough with no problem. When he thought about coughing, he could feel the fluttering in his lungs, a cough that wanted to start, and he managed to hold the reflex at bay until it faded away.

  As the urge to cough faded, a memory rose, flickering like an old film: Patrick and Jane, both still children, somewhere between five and ten, in their aunt Anne’s yard in Maine, during a summer when Anne had been breeding setter puppies. He remembered bright sunshine, the clumsy new puppies tumbling and rolling over in the grass, Jane on her then-pudgy knees with her hands held straight up over her head in the air, Patrick holding a puppy carefully while the dog chewed busily on his thumb with its new, needling teeth. Both Anne and the puppies’ mother carefully attentive, not interfering but clearly concentrating on everything that was happening. Tolerantly on guard. Anne had already explained that the mother dog — was its name Dex? Art couldn’t be sure — might nip if she felt her puppies were in danger. Both children smiling, concentrating on the small dogs. The kind of memory Art could hold in his mind and see as sharply as if he were holding a photograph of it in his hands.

  It’s all in here, Art thought, one hand behind his head as if he could safely cradle every thought. All of it. He was watching the light behind the venetian blinds changing.

  All they had to do was ask.

  Afternoon came.

  Then evening.

  Three days folded gently into four.

  Art slept.

  Heavy Load

  We’re going to trundle eighty tons over that overpass with the concrete side rails, two inches to spare on either side, two inches, and everybody had better have gotten their measurements right, because if someone’s measuring tape slipped and they didn’t go back and measure it again, we’re going to be stuck in there like a cork in a bottle and there’s going to be hell to pay.

  And I’m the only one who’s going to be there for the whole ride. The other project engineers come into the office real bright and chipper and ready for their first coffee in the morning, then they’re out the door at five, home and then straight to bed in the evening after watching Dancing With the Stars or whatever. And they’ve got no idea we’ve worked right through the night, sixteen hours straight, and we’re still out there the whole time they’re sleeping. That we’ve been creeping along with the multi-wheeler and the hard hats and eighty tons of module for the project, eight hours overnight to get the haul done with the road closed — main route, straight to downtown — with cops sitting there with their lights flashing, stopping traffic, wishing they were anywhere else than babysitting us.

  The whole parade moves at two miles an hour, fourteen miles to cover in all, a little extra time because something always goes wrong and that’s why I’m there, to make decisions instead of having everybody just argue back and forth and waste time. Expensive time.

  They built the module in a fabricating yard out by the highway, at an industrial park with all the electrical lines buried, so at least I don’t have to worry about a mess overhead, just on the road. It’s going from there to the waterfront and then onto an offshore supply boat and out to the oil fields, but I don’t have anything to do with that part. I just have to get the module safely to the wharf. It doesn’t really matter what it’s for, that’s not my worry, but I know that it’s an oil/water separator, just like I always want to know what it is. Not that it would matter to anyone else — but it does to me. It’s a great big thing, pipes jutting out from it everywhere, and it’s painted bright yellow and bright blue and orange like the industry’s just suddenly discovered this thing called colour.

  I’ll go with it the whole way, yard to wharf, not because anyone told me I have to, but because that’s the way you get something done.

  You get things done by doing them yourself. And that’s what those new kids don’t understand.

  I’ve picked up parts at the airport from Learjet pilots who just flew them in, driving right out to meet the plane on the back side of the airport, the box still warm from the factory — still warm — and I had them on site and out into assembly before anyone else had even had their morning coffee. And when I did, I was the one on the phone, yelling, the day before, “Yes, you are going to fly them out because you made a commitment and we have a schedule, and if they’re not here by six a.m., you’ll be paying every cent of the penalty clause.”

  They were “Yes sir, yes, Mr. Campbell, it will be there.”

  And I said, “You get it here like you’re supposed to, and you can even call me Robert.” Because I don’t miss deadlines, not even one. I never have, and I’m not about to start now. I’ll get it done on time if I have to pull the trailer in by myself. With my teeth.

  Every year, we get a couple more interns, engineering students in their last year, and they all think exactly the same way, that you can manage a project or a move sitting in your car, or, better yet, from the comfort of your chair at the nine-to-five office, spitting out long-distance orders that just get followed, sure that everything will go right. Not understanding for a moment the consequences of the whole damn thing going wrong. Not even thinking it could go wrong. People say old ways die hard, but these new guys think they’re all white-collar guys and they think the white-collar guys stay in the office while the blue-collars do the grunt work.

  Maybe by the end of the three months or six months they have with us, they’ll have learned a thing or two, like the fact that eighty-ton modules don’t spin around the room on the coasters under your office chair.

  That’s why I find myself working right through.

  In the middle of the night — not midnight or even one a.m., but the real night, well after two and closing in on three or even later, when even the drunks go quiet. The trees are absolutely still, the only sound the grumble of the big machines sitting and waiting to start moving, the only light the shine of the flashlights and running lights and headlights from the reflective lines on the safety vests. Men moving quietly, without instructions, like they do on the docks, shifting lines as the ships bend and knuckle out into the dark of the harbour. There’s a purposeful preparation in it, everyone ready and moving in a pattern, as choreographed as a dance, each person doing their own part of the checklist before we do anything else. Unconnected, but in concert.

  We move out like the slowest kind of parade, with not a soul there to watch us, the night so still that you can actually hear the lenses of the warning lights spinning inside their clear orange plastic covers, the big “Wide Load” sign tied on the back even though the road’s closed and no one’s going to see it anyway, because that’s exactly what the regulations say you have to do. You hear the big engine bend into the job: you actually do, you hear it lean forward and pull every bit as much as if it were a team of horses putting their shoulders down into the
traces. It’s not like that with a car, but with a big-cycle diesel, that’s different. The sound of it drops low, powerful, torque introducing itself to inertia.

  For a moment, nothing happens. Nothing moves.

  And then, it does. You can watch the wheels and imagine that there’s no way they will ever turn, and then there is that first slight shift, so small you almost wonder if your eyes have got it wrong. From motionless to motion, just like that. Slow at first, speeding up really gradually. And everybody starts to walk, keeping pace.

  Flashing lights catch in the trees the most, playing across all those trunks and branches, especially on the highway. There’s the repetition of them in every one of the bright Xs of the safety vests. Orange lights from the hauler and the trailer, red and blue and white from the police cars until they get tired of the whole thing and drop back. The first thing you’d think, coming up on us, is that something momentous, something tragic has happened in the night. But absolutely the last thing we’re looking for is excitement — we spend the whole quiet, slowly moving night hoping that nothing happens at all.

  We’ve got the eastbound lane all to ourselves, and the whole highway’s different when you’re only creeping along. You sweep along the road at a hundred kilometres an hour — never stopping to think about how much work is built right into it. Walking, you can feel the summer heat battering back up at you from the pavement, surrendering slowly back into the night air. You can feel the heat coming up around you in waves, the way you might see it shimmering as you looked across the length of a parking lot.

  For the first two miles, it’s a series of gentle bends, a long swing to the left, and then two overpasses. On the bends, you can feel the road sloping down under your feet, feel just that little bit of banking that manages to keep a handful of speeders from crashing, despite themselves, every year. This road’s fifteen years old, and I can’t help but think you could get down on your hands and knees and measure, and the angle of the banking would still be bang on the mark, not a single driver the wiser, probably not one in a hundred who even knows it’s there. But it’s my job to control everything — to know every single thing before it even has a chance to happen. The inclinometer on the trailer is reading six degrees, but that’s no surprise, because that’s what the highways department told us the incline would be. I called a guy I know with the road builders too, and he told me that we wouldn’t hit anything steeper than that, which is nowhere near steep enough for anything to slide sideways, for the load to overcome inertia’s steady grip.

  I know about inertia’s grip. For forty years, Bev and I had the same breakfast: two eggs over easy with whole wheat toast for me while Bev had oatmeal and fruit. We married when we were in our twenties and had three kids, almost exactly two years apart every time. Both of us at that kitchen table every morning while the kids grew up, went to school, and finally moved out. Breakfast was the time when we had a chance to talk about the kids until one day when they weren’t there anymore and there wasn’t anything left to talk about. Eventually, we just sat and ate our breakfast with only the sounds of forks and spoons randomly ringing off plates and bowls. I’m torn over whether it was a sign that we’d succeeded at raising kids or failed horribly at something else.

  I mean, things wind down. Nobody would expect that we’d be like teenagers once we found ourselves in an empty house. I’m older — she’s older. She’s not the beauty she once was, though she’s still beautiful. I’m not the guy I used to be, either. It’s only natural that some things would fade, that I wouldn’t be as interested as I was. Natural or not, that was the sticking point for her.

  I still don’t think it was a bad suggestion — maybe I could have put it better. It wasn’t like I was drawing up a flow chart or something. What I said was that, when you look at the week, Monday and Tuesday are the busiest, and all things considered, maybe the best thing we could do was to just plan for Thursday nights.

  Bev shouted at me: “You can’t just calculate everything, no matter how hard you want to.”

  But you can — you can calculate anything. You just have to know what all the variables are. Bev shouted, loud enough to be heard outside, for Christ’s sake, that she wanted to be “desired, not pencilled in.”

  All I wanted to say to her was that we should calm down, that we’ve each got a job to do. We know what our jobs are. Stay focused on the task at hand. We can work our way through this rationally.

  But she didn’t want to listen. And the whole load was starting to slide.

  When we came to the first highway overpass with the module, we slowed down even more. Expansion joints may just be another piece of everyday highway engineering, but we’ve got to get over them real slow and onto the bridge deck proper as gently as we can. Ever been stopped on a bridge and had a dump truck go by fast? Felt the ground jump? The heavier the load, the bigger difference even a little speed makes. Higher bounces, bigger flex. So we crawl over, stop, and check everything on the other side and use the slope to start us going again.

  Along that stretch, there are houses on both sides, tucked in behind earth berms and a noise wall, all we can see from the road are the different-coloured roof shingles and the occasional top few courses of siding. There’s not a window in sight, like each house realizes that it’s something to be ashamed of, and is ignoring whatever’s happening out here.

  Sometimes, sound is your best friend. Right away on the downhill, there’s a metallic ping like something under tension or maybe a strand of cable’s let go, so I shout, “Whoa!” and we crawl all over the module like flies on dessert, checking every tie-down. We’re losing time, but we’ve got a bit of a cushion built in for just this kind of thing.

  We don’t find anything, but it’s a good thing to do in case anyone’s attention’s flagging.

  I can hear everything. A quiet night, no wind, and I hear a police car or a fire truck in the distance, the siren rising and falling. A couple of motorcycle engines, blatting flatly, the sound stuttering and clipped by the summer air. Once, someone shouting, so far away that his words were indistinct, but close enough to know it was a guy. If it had been June, I know that by now we would have been hearing the first birds of the morning, a few chirps and warbles from the early risers when the horizon’s just starting to get an almost greyish-white band. But this is the first week of August, so it’s still solid dark.

  Soon, we’ll be on the last big uphill before the narrowest part, the most challenging part, the curving overpass with the long concrete wall. There’s always been a shipyard there and they put up the wall to keep some yo-yo in a car from flinging an empty beer bottle over the side and having it fall forty feet down and smack some riveter in the side of the face. It’s that wall that makes the overpass so narrow. It’s too big to take down, and there just isn’t any other way to get around.

  The wall’s not going to be a problem for us for another hour or so because the hill we’ve got to climb first is the steepest yet. The hill is the biggest variable, the one point on the trip that I had to factor into all the loading. The hauler’s down in its lowest gear and it’s blowing black smoke with the effort, the engine making a kind of deep-set humming that I can feel between my teeth. It’s going flat out and time is running away on us, because we’re not making any speed at all. I try to look at my watch only when everyone else is busy doing something else: if they think we’re behind, I worry they’ll start to rush and let something slip. I’d rather have time penalties, rather eat shit from the city for missing our time window, than have the module slip off the side of the rig or something. Rushing too much could mean we’d end up caught there for a day or more while we try to figure out the safest way to get the module back on the trailer and squared away. Not to mention trying to figure out if it had been damaged in the fall and what that could cost.

  We were right in the middle of the sharpest part of the hill and the whole rig started to lose speed — well, lose whatever scrap of speed it had — and the engine sound wasn’t
changing and I was just waiting for the whole bottom of the motor to blow right out and spray oil and hydraulic fluid all over the pavement, and boy, if that happened, you’d better get the wheels chocked in a hurry and hope the chocks all hold. I could even see it in my mind’s eye: the trailer and the module and the rig all lit up by morning sunshine, everybody underneath packing absorbent sheets into the spilling fluids and waiting for a heavy equipment mechanic to tell us that the whole thing was shot. It isn’t the kind of thing that’s anyone’s fault, but that doesn’t really matter, does it?

  Finally we found ourselves at the crest and the rig was coasting down toward the curve, and just when we started to really get going, we stopped. Stopped dead.

  The air brakes came on full with a hiss that sounded too loud. The driver sat back, shifted the controls, and took his hands off the wheel.

  He stayed in the cab with his seat belt on in case all hell broke loose and he had to do something. He’s not even supposed to touch the steering for this part — the hauler goes over to remote control. I can’t imagine how hard it is to sit there and do nothing, or let someone else take over the lead when you’ve been doing the job and you haven’t done anything wrong.

  Thing is, Bev wasn’t willing to let it go. I wondered if, with the kids gone, I’d become the focal point, the ant destined to burn under the magnifying glass. With no one else to be angry at, it was like everything I did was suddenly lit by a spotlight. She was lashing out at the world, I thought, except I was the only part of the world that was within reach. I didn’t make any time for her. I didn’t think about what she wanted to do. I was always late getting home from work. My day is always more important than hers. It’s all true, but at the same time, it isn’t any different than it’s ever been. The fact that we lie next to each other in bed like statues until we fall asleep isn’t helping anything. Even when I want to reach out, I can’t — I can’t even force my hand to make the trip, even though it’s only inches. The one easy comfort we’ve had for our entire married life — physical touch — the one thing that we could depend on through all the other crap that falls into families, and now it’s run aground. I can feel her right there next to me, and it is like I can read her thoughts, and she’s every bit as paralyzed as I am. I want to sit up in the dark and shout, “We’re killing everything.” But I don’t.