King of The Road

by Alex Deborgorski

  So I was selling these little pigs. Everybody wanted one. They are cute, too. I would tell people to feed them table scraps for a few months and then they would have themselves a real nice pig to butcher. But it’s never as easy as it looks. Pigs pee a lot. The water goes right through them. And some people were complaining about the smell of the pigs, the way they root up the ground and turn everything into a swamp. And the little buggers are escape artists. Guys would take them home and in no time they would slip out of the yard and go running off. Before you knew it there were little pigs running all over town. So the bylaw officer who enforces the local laws was going nuts.

  After a while people did not want to take them home alive. They wanted them butchered and ready to eat. So I had about fifteen of these pigs left and realized that I had to kill them myself. I felt really bad about that because these pigs and I got along real well. They were my little buddies. I would climb in the back of the truck where they lived and they’d get all excited that I had come to see them, and they’d crowd all around me and I’d scratch them behind the ears.

  But that’s life. Pigs aren’t pets, they’re livestock. So even though I felt sorry for the little guys I went into the truck with a ball peen hammer and started cracking them on the head right between the eyes. The first one was pretty hard to do, but I got used to it and started butchering them right there in the driveway. The other ones didn’t mind. They would just stand there and watch. I was boiling water inside the house because, of course, when you’re butchering pigs you have to dip them in boiling water so the hair will come off. So I kept pouring boiling water into this barrel in the driveway and scraping the pigs. Then, of course, you have to open them up and remove all the innards and do a proper job of it. Let me tell you, that was quite a performance. I think the first one took me two hours. I used to butcher pigs when I was a kid on the farm, but I hadn’t done it by myself for a long time, so it took quite a while to get the hang of it. But I think when I did the last pig I was down to about twenty minutes.

  Now I’ve got all these butchered pigs and this barrel full of scrapings. It’s too heavy to lift into the back of the truck and I can’t figure out what to do with it. So I decide, to heck with it—it’s the supper hour, nobody is around, so I’ll just pour it into the road. My house is on the top of the hill, so I give the barrel a kick and this great cascade of hair and water and pig fat goes rolling down Bigelow Avenue. I’m thinking, Good, that’s all taken care of, and I put the barrel away and go into the house to have some supper.

  About halfway through supper I’m thinking, What’s that terrible racket? I go and look out the door and here’s a mob of ravens stretching all the way down the hill. That river of water and pig fat had run a couple of hundred feet down the hill. The ravens were lined up in a perfect row, fighting and feasting on those juicy little tidbits and making a heck of a racket. As I looked down the hill I saw my other neighbors standing in their doorways sticking their heads out looking at this lineup of a hundred or so ravens leading right up the hill to my driveway.

  I guess they were thinking, What the heck has Debogorski done this time?

  My back yard was basically like a zoo, and the city was getting mad at me. We had only one bylaw officer. Some people called her Billy the Terror. I called her Billy Bylaw. She was a big woman, as big as me, more than six feet tall, with big shoulders and Ukrainian blood in her. The first time I saw her she was jogging up the airport road on a hot summer day. She was coming toward me up that Jackfish Hill with the heat coming off the pavement, and I swear you could see the asphalt breaking under her feet. I figured, Holy mackerel, that’s one good-looking lady.

  Billy Bylaw was nobody to be messed with. If she ever practiced favoritism, you’d never know it, because she treated everybody equally badly. She showed up this one time and I had the pigs enclosed in three sheets of plywood against the wall of the trailer. We had a lamb in there, too, because we had butchered its brother and now it was running around the yard all the time going bah bah bah looking for the other lamb. So I had put that lamb in with the pigs and it was happy to have the company. But it was a noisy little bugger and I hoped that it wouldn’t start bleating while Billy was standing there.

  She says, “I don’t mind those chickens and ducks, but you better not have any pigs here.”

  “Oh, no, Billy, I have no pigs. Just a few birds.”

  And of course the pigs and the lamb are only forty feet away and I’m hoping that the sheep doesn’t go bah, or that one of the pigs doesn’t step on another, which always sets off a lot of squealing.

  Shielo Debogorski

  I’m Alex’s daughter, the oldest one in the family. They say the firstborn kid has to break the trail for the other ones, and I believe it. My dad didn’t exactly coddle us. I remember when we were little, if we were making a big fuss in the car, he would drop us by the side of the road and just drive away, leaving us in the middle of the wilderness. Then he would come back about ten minutes later. That usually did the trick.

  When I got to be sixteen, we had this yard full of old cars and I thought that Dad should fix one up for me. He pointed out this old 1979 Ford Fairmont and handed me a shop manual and a box of tools. “There you go. Fix it up.” He would never show you how to do anything. He would just expect you to figure it out by yourself. Around that same time he got hired to break up this old mobile home and haul it to the dump. It had been in a fire and it was a write-off. “Come on,” he said. “You can help me.” We drove over there with the truck and a backhoe and he told me to climb into the backhoe. He said, “This lever makes the bucket go up and down and this lever makes it go sideways. Just knock the trailer apart and load into the back of the dump truck.”

  I thought, I’m sixteen years old! I have no idea what I’m doing! As soon as he left I stepped on the gas and accidentally drove right into the dump truck and put a big dent in it. I knew that he would be mad at me, but I was even madder at him. And when he got back I started jumping up and down and yelling at him. He just stood there with a big grin on his face.

  Then it was time for me to go away to college. He had this motorcycle and he arranged to get a photograph taken of himself in a muscle shirt, standing beside the bike looking tough. Then he turned the photograph into a poster and had it laminated and ordered me to put on the door of my room at college so that it would scare the boys away. He would drive all way down from Yellowknife without warning and show up at my door in the middle of the night. The first year, he must’ve done that about five times. Then he would take my friends to the bar and entertain them with stories.

  When Norm and I announced our wedding, my dad put a big notice in the Yellowknife newspaper with a photograph of a grumpy old man in a rocking chair with a shotgun across his knees. My future husband was not amused. But it was just Dad’s way of breaking him in. My dad likes reminding people that nobody gets a free ride. I remember all those summer days when we were kids, and our friends were out having fun, and Dad would make us go out to the topsoil pile to pick roots. He said he had to do it when he was a kid, and now we had to do it. Boy, it was hot and dirty. But he taught us how to work. And after that my other jobs seemed pretty easy.

  Norm Fillion

  I first met Shielo at the Gold Range Bar in Yellowknife. The bar might not be the best place to start a good relationship, but I really liked her. When we started dating, a lot of guys said to me, “That’s Alex Debogorski’s daughter. He’s a great big tough guy. I’ve seen him fight, and you don’t want to get on his bad side.”

  But I was serious about her. One thing led to another, and we had premarital sex, and she got pregnant. Now what? Alex and the whole family are Catholics, and I knew he wasn’t going to be too happy about this news. I had a job up at the Distant Early Warning line in the Arctic, and I wanted to meet with Alex and have a talk before I went away for three months. Shielo thought that was a bad idea. I guess she knew her dad better than I did, and she was afraid of what he was going to
do to me.

  She won the argument, and I went up north. And when I got back she was starting to show her pregnancy and she had told her parents. I couldn’t put off my man-to-man talk with Alex any longer, so I went up to the job site where he was working on a backhoe. Everybody had warned me that he was basically going to take me apart, but I figured I might as well take my medicine. I climbed up on the machine and asked him if we could talk. He turned off the engine and listened.

  I told him I wanted to do the right thing, get married, and support my family. He nodded in agreement to all this, but he said one thing that stuck in my mind. It wasn’t exactly a warning, but it made a strong impression. He said, “I don’t want my daughter left alone with three kids, all used up, sitting in the Gold Range looking for another guy.”

  He has a knack for summing up all his concerns in one sentence. He loves his daughter and he’ll back you up all the way as long as you do a good job as a husband. You can’t ask for anything more from a father-in-law.

  “What Kind of Dog Is That?”

  The best pig we ever owned was a cross between a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig and a Russian wild boar. We got her in 2000. She grew to four hundred pounds and was covered with curly black hair. We called her Oink.

  She was a big, hairy, impressive animal. She lived outside and roamed the neighborhood looking for things to eat. She would eat everything, including the tires off cars. Some people liked Oink and would feed her, so of course she got in the habit of approaching anyone she saw. If people didn’t know her, she’d tend to scare the hell out of them. One time Oink approached a guy who was walking down the road, and the guy jumped into a flooded ditch. It was freezing cold and the guy stood in hip-deep water for about half an hour until someone came along and told him the pig was harmless. All the time Oink was standing there staring at him with these fierce little eyes and big razor-sharp tusks sticking out.

  Another time a Mountie came to the house, and Oink cornered him. The cop retreated to the top of the front steps and stayed there until one of the kids came along and shooed the pig away.

  Even dogs were afraid of Oink. You could see them cowering under their porches when she came trotting down the street. And this was the most mild-mannered animal. The kids taught her to climb stairs so she could come in the house. Great, I’d come home and there would be a pig the size of a compact car lying on the couch. My wife, Louise, didn’t know what to do. I said to her, “She’s just a pig, for Pete’s sake. Show her who’s boss.”

  The next time Oink started coming up the stairs Louise whacked her with a broom and she fell all the way down the stairs. I don’t think it hurt her, but she was impressed enough that she stayed off the stairs.

  She was basically wild. Oink lived at our place, but she had free run of the neighborhood and we never penned her up. I don’t believe in penning up animals. Let them run free and take their chances. So I was always getting in trouble with the city.

  Billy Bylaw would come and see me. “Okay, I can’t get you on the roosters, but you have to do something about that pig.”

  “What can I do? She’s a wild animal. I basically don’t even own her. She just comes and hangs out here.”

  “Don’t bullshit me, Debogorski. I know she’s your pig. Pen her up.”

  “You try penning her up. Have you seen her teeth? She could eat your patrol car.”

  I didn’t want to push her too far. Bylaw was not someone you messed with. So I built a pen out of pallets lashed together with heavy-gauge steel wire. I put Oink in the pen and she just looked at me. I left, and she bit through the wire like it was dental floss and went off to panhandle the neighborhood. She never hurt anyone, but she cost me a fortune. There was a vet down the street with pet food supplies, and Oink would hide, watching for her chance. You’d just see this black beady eye peering around the corner of the building ready to eat up what she could find.

  One time she ate up $254 worth of dog food in one shot. Another time she ripped open a dozen bags of kitty litter, hoping there was food in there. Obviously she couldn’t read. I wore a radio on my belt because one of my many sidelines was the topsoil business, and all day long the radio would be squawking with people complaining about Oink. “Your pig ate my groceries! That animal of yours is in the schoolyard again! There’s a bear in my garden!”

  One day this Native woman pulled into our yard and squinted at Oink through the window. There was no way she was getting out of the car. “What kind of dog is that?”

  That gave us an idea. They have different competitions in the Yellowknife Spring Carnival, so we entered her in the “Ugly Dog” category. When the judges were finished deliberating they awarded her the prize for 1st Most Ugly Dog and 2nd Most Ugly Dog.

  Oink finally died at the age of three. We suspect that someone poisoned her. I fired up the backhoe and buried her in the yard. The only place with enough soil was right under our bedroom window. Louise said, “Where did you bury Oink?”

  “Never mind.”

  For quite a while afterward we’d be sleeping, and Louise would sit bolt upright in bed.

  I’d say, “What’s the matter?”

  “I can hear her oinking.”

  “You’re just imagining it.”

  “No, I swear I just heard her oinking out in the yard.”

  We were being haunted by the ghost of a pig.

  My Growing Family

  For some reason, working-class white families are having fewer and fewer kids. What’s that all about?

  People will say, “We can’t afford to have more than two kids.”

  So at what point in history could people afford to have a lot of kids? Do you think the pioneers could afford large families? Do you think the farmers with one little tractor and a couple of horses could afford to have a large family? The fact is, people have never been able to afford large families. The previous generations recognized a simple truth—kids are not a liability, they are an asset. People have to turn their thinking upsidedown.

  My aboriginal friend Richard Cadieux says we’d better watch out because the population of Indians is growing like crazy and we white people are having small families. And he’s right. The aboriginal people know that kids are a joy. Money isn’t important. People are important. And your family is your only true wealth in this world.

  So by now I was in my late twenties and life was good. I was making some money. I had built a comfortable little home, and Louise and I were doing our best to repair the breeding imbalance of working-class white people by raising a whole mess of little Polacks—Shielo, Curtis, Alexander, Nelson, Andrew, Dominic, Amelia, Julaine, Ezekiel, Benjamin, and Gianna. We were working hard and playing hard. Yellowknife is a fun town. Nobody gets on your case. Everybody speaks their mind. There’s a bartender in Yellowknife who keeps a special bottle tucked away for me under the counter. He’s never told me what’s in it—he claims it’s a secret blend. But he gets it out and gives the air a good misting whenever I walk into his place. He calls it Polack Repellent.

  There’s no political correctness in this town. You can joke about anything. You could be any kind of oddball and everyone would leave you alone. We’ve got a sizable gay community in Yellowknife, for example. Everybody thinks northerners are a bunch of rednecks and we’re not going to tolerate a homosexual lifestyle, but it’s not like that. The north is full of people who wind up here because they can’t fit in anywhere else. I’m not in favor of the homosexual lifestyle, but I’m a big believer in personal liberty. You live your life, and I will live mine. I’m a conservative, but that doesn’t mean I support hypocrites in conservative clothes. How can you say you believe in liberty and small government and then keep bugging the government to pass laws against people you don’t agree with? I take the dirty old cow pie approach to the government. If they leave me alone, I just lay there not bothering anyone. But if they step on me I raise a big stink and they have a hard time cleaning me off.

  One time I was at a wedding, and there was
this gay guy there. Nice guy, worked in the mine. All the miners knew he was gay and they didn’t give a damn. Anyway, I asked him to dance. We were waltzing around the floor, having a grand old time, but I guess he thought it was some ass-backwards way of making fun of him, because he gave up on me halfway through the song and went and found himself a woman to dance with!

  Sports

  Yellowknife also has a number of good sports teams. I gravitated to broomball. I like it because it’s a violent game—all these big tough guys running around clubbing each other with brooms. The referees were always carting guys off the ice. When I joined the team it wasn’t doing very well. I thought, We need to do a better job of intimidating the other teams. So I decided to start growling. I would go into the corner with guys and growl like a werewolf.

  The guys on the other team would say, “Why is that guy growling? Has he got a screw loose or something?”

  It started freaking out the opponents. We went to this game in Hay River and my teammates started growling. It seemed to work, and we went on to become one of the best broomball teams in Canada.