“This is unreasonable, sir. They are only children.”
“There’s a war going on, Bauer. Look, those lads told me they were of the appropriate age. Lots of these outport kids don’t even have birth certificates. How am I to say who’s lying and who isn’t? Hard times, Mr. Bauer. The worst of times. We need capable bodies on board. Navy’s got all the good men. We do what we can.”
Kyle realized that the world outside of his island was an unfair and inhospitable realm. He stared down into the cold, dark waters of the narrow harbour entrance as they steamed from St. John’s and met up with a convoy coming from New York. Safety in numbers, he hoped. They had a military escort. But he knew his ship was a prime target. Airplane fuel — high octane. One good hit.
Sylvie woke to the sound of thunder. She ran outside but it was dark and the sky was full of stars. The wind was sifting through the high branches of the spruce trees and it was a cool, clear night. She had dreamed the sound. But she could not go back to sleep that night and sat up listening to the radio, listening only to the music, always turning it off when it came time for news. She felt panic in her limbs, made tea and tried to be quiet but ended up sobbing and rubbing tears out of her eyes and smoothing them onto her cheeks. She felt the tide ebb and begin to retreat. She could chart in her dark mind the necessary paths of migrating birds and schools of fish, the avenues of whales and dolphins. Wondered at the uselessness of all these things she was feeling and wondered again why she was feeling them.
Kyle saw the first vessel in the convoy take a hit two days into the Atlantic crossing. He was on watch and called the sleeping captain to the bridge. The Piccadilly was rear and centre, supposedly well protected by flanking ships, navy ships with weapons to the ready. Within minutes, one of those escorting vessels took a hit that echoed through the night. She did not go down, but Kyle saw her slow her pace. One engine had been damaged. She could not keep up with the convoy.
“Bloody hell,” the Old Man said.
Kyle knew as well as his captain that the Piccadilly was now perfectly vulnerable. He studied the surface of the night sea, understood the certainty of the hidden danger in the waters of the North Atlantic, felt a hot surge of something forged of anger and fear within him. “We’ve got kids on board, Captain. Boys. They don’t have any idea.”
“We tough it out, Bauer. Try to change position to get some more protection.”
But there was no protection to be had. Kyle felt the torpedo hit beneath the water line of the ship as if it had just impacted upon the soles of his feet. An explosion ensued that ripped metal plating apart and killed Newfoundland outport boys as they slept. The Old Man was quick to insist they abandon ship. “I don’t know why she didn’t blow on the first hit,” he said. “Nothing for it now but to get in the friggin’ water.” He gave the order to abandon ship, and his words were barely out when the Piccadilly took a second hit and an explosion roared out of her belly with deafening and terrifying force.
Kyle found himself at the rail looking down into the dark sea. Fire swallowed up the sky behind him. A young man with his back ablaze was running towards Kyle. One of the Newfoundland kids. Kyle looked around for the Old Man but he wasn’t there. He heard yet another explosion and saw a ball of flame racing towards him. He grabbed the screaming boy and jumped with him into the sea.
The water grabbed at him with icy claws as he hit. He lost his companion, and Kyle felt the sea close in around himself as he went under, but his life jacket brought him back to the surface. He began to swim away from the ship in an awkward stroke. But then the boy surfaced, sputtering, calling for help, wailing,“I don’t want to die! Don’t let me die!” Kyle could not see him but swam towards the voice, grabbed hold of an arm, felt the hand go into a clenching vice that seemed to want to hurt him. The kid clawed at Kyle’s life jacket and Kyle pulled at the cord, undid it and jammed the kid’s arm through it, pushed him around backwards and got his other arm in as he screamed. Then Kyle tried to hang on to the boy, keeping himself at arm’s length, but all too aware of his own inability to stay afloat without the jacket. In the light of the burning vessel, he saw it had been nearly ripped in half. The Piccadilly was starting to go down, and its descent was creating a current that was pulling both of them towards it. He was unable to continue to hold onto the boy now. Reluctantly, he let go of the life jacket and started to swim away from the insistent, invisible force dragging him towards the sinking ship.
All he knew was dark, cold, and wet, oily ash falling on his face, even on his tongue so he could taste it. He swam, pulling himself away, but towards what? The other ships in the convoy were already moving on, trying to get back into formation and out of range of the German subs.
And then the ship was beneath the sea and it no longer wanted him for a crewman. He felt the insistent tug at his limbs cease. Kyle was barely afloat, trying to calm himself, but his legs were numb with the power of the cold water. He reached out his arms to see if the boy was anywhere nearby, but he could not be found. Suddenly he became fascinated with the idea of having been attacked by an enemy that could not be seen. An underwater ship with a crew of men with German blood like him. He wondered what could have lured them away from their homes, their lives ashore. He tried to fathom what he himself had been thinking. How could anything have led him away from the happiness and safety of Sylvie and the island? For a few quiet seconds it seemed that he was floating without effort. A calm presence came over him. He wondered if there was another sailor whose last name was Bauer on board the sub that had attacked them. He wondered how any man could learn to kill strangers with such detachment and ease.
And then he tasted the sweetness of the air. Despite the smell of burning fuels and scorched metals, he realized how good it was to bring air into his lungs once, and then twice. But he was tiring quickly. When the salt water found his open mouth, he thought he tasted something familiar now, the taste of Sylvie, her mouth upon his. The taste of love and life and all that was meant to be.
By sunrise, Sylvie had calmed herself and imagined dozens of ways that Kyle might have died. All of the horrific possibilities that had crowded her overzealous imagination. As the sun began to pull itself up out of the sea and grace her with its warmth, Sylvie, still pregnant with Kyle’s baby, huddled within her coat, went back to the tidal pool and slipped her hand into the water, then tasted her fingers, closing her eyes at the powerful sensation of cold salt water upon her tongue.
That afternoon, the anguish she felt in her heart was compounded by a terrible physical pain. At first, she believed she had brought it upon herself, but it was more than that. The sea was rough as she was ushered to the mainland in Noah Slaunwhite’s boat, but the nurses were kind to her in the small Mutton Hill Harbour hospital and they wept with her, like sisters, at the loss of both husband and child.
Chapter Sixteen
Brian Gullett had been with the Halifax Herald for almost twenty years now. He was forty-three but still envisioned himself as a young hotshot reporter, believed himself to be an investigative journalist, a crusader. Around the office, he was known as “the Gull.” He’d staked out patronage in the Buchanan government, gone hard on the real culprits of the Sydney tar pond, and relentlessly hounded politicians of all political persuasions accused of being on the take. He even went after Mulroney once when the great jaw was prime minister. He couldn’t peg anything corrupt on Mulroney but had some verifiable stories about him when he was in Dalhousie Law School. Flunked out due to venereal disease, more or less. It wasn’t Watergate, but it should have been worth something.
The Herald didn’t print that one, nor a couple of Gullett’s other best pieces. Pity, really. But the Westray Mining tragedy had come along — all those young men killed underground — and that had taught him how brutally cold, hard, and unfair the world really was. He metaphorically buried himself in that blasted-out coal mine and immersed himself in the lives of the victims’ families. He nailed it down good: the way government bureaucracy fa
ils, the way corporations try to make a profit at nearly any cost.
In a way, he had dug too deep into the story. Brian Gullett lost his edge. He once had a cheery defiance over exposing corruption, over attempting to right a few wrongs through freedom of the press. But the price had been a high one. He now had few friends. He had never gotten around to investing the time and energy into forging one good, lasting, serious relationship with a woman. Westray had soured him in a way that he couldn’t quite recover from. He saw exactly how the whole tragedy could have been avoided. He saw how a hundred business and government decisions that followed were leading down similar paths — offshore oil and gas exploration, government cutbacks in health and education, landfill issues, human rights agendas that were backfiring.
Recently, Brian Gullett wrote about what he saw and how he felt about it. Amazingly, his editor,Trent Stoffler, gave him a pretty long leash. Legal was always on his heels, but he knew how to make them listen and he could get away with ninety percent of what he wanted. Brian should have been smart enough to know that he’d been too long without a vacation, too hyper on every story he got his teeth into. He was getting addicted to his own brand of slash-and-burn crusader journalism, and everywhere he turned in Nova Scotia, he discovered a deadly seam of coal, a collapsible roof, explosive dust ready to go off. He saw the world in terms of Westray. If he could only head off one or two disasters, save a few lives, he’d have spent his time well on this planet.
He thought he was getting a good lead on a pretty weird but interesting story when a secretary at the Department of the Environment called to tell him that her office had decided to ignore something about a toxic waste site on Ragged Island. “The deputy minister says we just don’t have the staff to deal with it and it’s far enough off the mainland so that it probably won’t do anybody any real harm. Sounds like this island is like some kind of wild west town. Lawless. No Mounties. Unregistered cars with drivers who have no licenses. Lots of guns. Like some kind of militia thing, maybe. The Mounties know all about it but just want to keep hands off.”
Brian knew all about that kind of cavalier attitude found in Tory and Liberal governments alike. Ignore the problem and it will go away. Son of a bitch. He punched up Ragged Island on his computer and got a few old stories about fishing and cabbage, stuff about old boat building traditions, recent clips about whale tours, eco-tourism, a feel-good piece about a family of American tourists staying for the summer. Not much to go on. Gullett began to wonder if the woman at Environment had some mental health problem. Was she just making it all up?
But he needed to chase it. He couldn’t help himself. It was a wild tale that didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense, but then nothing made much sense to him these days except the fundamentals of human motivation: greed and power. If he dug away the apparently organic topsoil of this island, what might he really find buried beneath the surface?
Gullett had lost track of his true sense of fairness, however, and stopped worrying about Ms. X’s motivation for spilling her inside information. She was a part-timer at Environment, a pool secretary who spent most of her time at D. O. T. Sim Corkum promised her a good shot at a more permanent desk with some newer computer equipment if she’d make the phone call to Gullett. The task allowed her to use some of her skills as an amateur actress that she’d honed under the tutelage of Jeremy Ackerman and the Dartmouth Players. Sim and Ms. X were both pretty proud of the way she handled herself on the phone and he almost made the faux pas of suggesting there was a lot more money for her to make in the dark netherworld of phone sex than in government offices. But he knew when to keep his mouth shut, these days.
As the ferry docked at the government wharf on Ragged Island, Brian Gullett smelled a familiar fecund fishy smell. It was an intoxicating aroma to him. The smell of the real Nova Scotia, not the stench of a room full of computers and body odour and janitorial disinfectants like back at the newsroom. It was the fragrance of life. A light fog hovered over everything and glazed every particular of the island, including the people, who had big drops of mist in their unkempt hair. He took off his glasses and wiped the lenses clear on his shirt. It was a damp day but a warm one. He walked off the wharf and pondered the proper phrasing. Anybody know of any toxic waste sites? Ever hear of someone trying to form a secret military organization? Weapons training, that sort of thing?
He need not have worried. “You headed to Phonse’s are ya?” a friendly man on the wharf asked him.
“Phonse’s?”
“The junkyard thing. That’s ’bout all that brings the visitors now. Figured it was what you’re looking for.”
“Yeah, that’s it. The junkyard thing. Which way?”
“Straight up the hill road. Can’t miss it. Have some fun, eh?”
Fun? Brian wondered. Junkyards and fun. Damn strange place, this island.
Brian trudged up the hill and walked through the gate with the neatly scripted lettering: “Doucette’s Recycling. Welcome.” He knew that in the States, the word “recycling” often meant out and out environmental decimation. It was always the worst environmental rapists who called themselves environmentally friendly, and wasn’t it the Mafia that owned half of the waste disposal operations of North America these days?
Phonse had a glass of home brew beer in one hand and a rifle in the other when Brian walked in through the door. The man with the gun smiled broadly.“G’day, my friend. What’s yer pleasure?”
Brian looked off toward the field of old cars and the crazy assortment of washing machines, dryers, and various rusty appliances.“I, ah, well, I’m just getting into rebuilding old cars. Classics, you know. Late sixties, early seventies. Thought I’d just see what you have here in your yard, ya know, in case I need some parts.”
Phonse nodded, winked an eye.“Wonderful hobby, restoring old cars. Had a Pontiac once that I’d give my eye teeth to still have in one piece. A sixty-five, she was. Big-bellied beast with a good engine and a nice smooth ride. I was young then, though. Drove it to hell. Straight away. Wrecked the transmission and then drove it right into the ocean just to be done with ’er. Young and foolish. Should have kept her, bunged-up transmission and all. If I’da put her in a shed and hauled her out nowadays, car buffs would be green with envy. Young and stupid was all I was. Worked hard at it, too. Nowadays we appreciate the old things better.”
“Some of us do, it’s true. So it’s okay if I just wander for a while? Be like a kid in candy shop for a guy like me.”
“Oh, Jesus, please, wander all you like. Stay off to the left there. Down to the right, might get a little noisy with the practice range and all. Safe to stay up thataway, though. Make a day of it. C’mon down for a drink or a sandwich from the Aetna if you get hungry.”
“Thanks.” Brian liked Phonse immensely. The guy reminded him that he’d spent way too much time around city people — editors and proofreaders and other journalists as cynical as he was. He wandered off, but already began to wonder what the “practice range” was. And what should he think of a man with a beer in his fist at this time of the morning? Hmm.
The fog was thinner here up on the hill and he could see above the bulk of it, like he was on some great mountain peak, above the clouds. But instead of pure, snowy white mountains, he was surrounded by junk cars. Hoods up, doors half pried off, engines disembowelled, tires piled into ugly foothills. Visions of the future. The world as junkyard. Chevy. Ford. Toyota. Nissan. Bronco. Jetta. Shadow. Taurus. The hulks would all eventually rust and crumble into the soil and all that would be left would be the nameplates of cars, stainless steel or chrome-plated, to be found by future generations. Code words from the past, as meaningless as television.
Brian sat near a pile of pancaked wrecks at the top of the hill, looked out to sea, saw the mists below his Kilimanjaro thinning out, disappearing. It was quiet here except for birds and squirrels chasing each other across front seats and into the glove compartments of GMC trucks. A couple of convertibles had young spruce trees growing r
ight up through the upholstery. Apocalyptic and peaceful. Made him feel like he was missing something in his life and he didn’t quite know why.
The place was much bigger than he had thought at first and Brian wondered how all these old automobiles had found their way to an island. Completely illogical to haul junk out to sea like this. Stolen cars, perhaps. Most of what was left here looked unsalvageable, though. Couldn’t be much of a market for pure rust, seized engines, bent wheels, hammered hoods, and carburetors that had moss growing in their throats. What the hell was going on here anyway?
Brian walked on until he came to the gravel lane that snaked down to Oickle’s Pond. Ringed with weeping willow trees, Oickle’s Pond might have almost looked beautiful except that it was covered with a thick, tarry oil: almost looked like a frozen dark pond in winter. An old Rambler station wagon, a ’58, was nosed in at one end of the pond, and there were dozens of unlabelled, rusty barrels, some along the edge, some floating like ugly fat swans. Frogs burbled up through the muck, and there was a great blue heron standing with blackened legs and tar-stained feathers across from him. Whatever had been dumped here, Brian knew that it was an unpardonable sin against nature.
He took his old reliable Pentax out of his bag and snapped photos, the sort that Greenpeace would have loved to use for posters. Save the world before it’s too late! A pile of shopping carts stuck out of the muck on the other side of the gooey, black pond water. Random household garbage had been dumped along part of the sorry shoreline and looked like it had been set on fire once. Big gobs of plastic had melted into a convoluted mass that had flowed partly into the pond, like lava spewed from a volcano, until it had set. Brian turned over a couple of the barrels near where he stood to try to read the contents, but they were too rusty. Some clearly had the skull and crossbones, however. He’d found his toxic dump. Wondered how that charming and friendly chap was responsible, then didn’t give it a second thought. People’d do anything for a buck. What better place to dump poisonous waste that would otherwise cost you a mint to legally dispose of properly? He took a full roll of thirty-six pictures and reloaded for more.
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