The Journey Prize Stories 25

by Various

  The Industry is the last parcel of riverside development on the grounds of the old Jenn Cola bottling factory all owned now by ARC, the company Clive started from scratch. Every Industry unit is two narrow floors. The centrepiece bay window is triple-glazed, framed by steel inset cedar planks with prominent ingot work around the corners. The floors are polished mocha concrete, intentionally distressed then resined. Starting at $375,000 you can have your oatmeal in view of the waterway and the metal recycling plant on the other bank only 150 feet away. It’s not a terrible ugly view. It’s a wonderful show. The jaws of the crane plummet into a pile of steel and rise, drooling bumpers and rebar, furry with metal around the mouth. It drops the steel into a crusher while all day long, six days a week, trucks arrive through the chain link bringing garbage, hauling away giant wrinkled cubes of faded wreckage.

  It’s a stroke of genius. That’s what it is. What’s objectionable becomes the attraction itself. Part of The Industry’s appeal is: the industry. The way the angle of the promenade – a wooden dock with a slanted stainless steel roof and faux girder columns – points directly across the water was Clive’s idea. A separate sister dock, slender and inviting, is anchored by two sunken posts and the tip of it, holding the kayak stands, floats on clean white pontoons right on the water. It’s the stairs to the theatre. The front row to the show. Clive feels great ownership. Anything is beautiful framed by glass and steel and concrete. It’s all about the frame, he keeps telling himself.

  Though. Every weekend for the last month a watchman has had to sit nights on the water because some young scumbag keeps tagging the great curve of lacquered spruce that supports the stainless steel roof. “SeXriTe” or some such bullshit. And there are seventeen more units that need to sell before a dime of profit can be realized – and the Americans stopped buying, stopped even looking, over two years ago. And there’s the columnist from the basically communist local weekly who’s making whatever stink he can about the statistics on a soil sample taken from the neighbouring lot almost twenty years ago. Twenty years ago Jenn Cola was a toppled factory, a condemned ruin that people drove up to in the night to dump their old refrigerators. It was a rat paradise and an eyesore and ARC took it off the city’s hands, removed everything, including the first six feet of earth, and buried the ugly past in new exotic materials that rise now like the realized dream it is, so handsomely in the brown, green, and red tones of the designer’s selected Scandinavian theme.

  So handsome and yet there were some who had the audacity to complain, to suggest that the polluted rubble of some forgotten industry was preferable in some demented sense to this. Who waited until thirty million dollars of investment had already been sunk into equipment rentals, materials securing, labour – waited for that moment to convene the “town hall” and to raise their concerns about heritage and safety with the ARC board in attendance. Dear people, Clive wanted to say, have you never seen the clawed bucket of a giant backhoe break through a crust of ancient cement and not felt some inner sigh of relief? Will you forever save the broken thing just because it reminds you of some imagined rosy, honest past? You life-ruining, bead-curtain-hanging potheads. You foot-dragging crybabies. You lead-fucking-buckets. I do what I can to make this life more ergonomic and pleasing. Jenn Cola is gone, but the world is still full of abandoned wooden warehouses filled with broken glass and stained with industrial lubricant. Go and see them. Enjoy. Let me get your bus fare.

  Dear Carl, he’d write. Dear Carl. I often think of you and wonder how you’re getting along in the world. I see you’re still in Windsor. How are your mother and Stephen? I seem to recall something about a hip problem for her. She tripped and fell in front of Lazenby’s, right? You see? I’ve kept track a little myself. I hope you sued them for the lifetime of trouble that a hip operation can be. Believe me. I’ve got problems all over this body of mine and your mom’s got years on me! I don’t mean to impose, but could you use a little money? If so, how much? I’m enclosing a cheque for five hundred dollars. I’ve done well for myself. I hope this is not presumptuous.

  or:

  Dear Carl, Any good student of biology knows that we’re rebuilt every seven years in every cell of the body. You must have run up against a little biology at some point in your life, I suppose? So think of it just like a building whose boards and mortar and tile are replaced slowly but completely. Since the events you speak of we’ve been renewed, made over, in every cell of our bodies almost five times: can it even be said that we’re the same people at all?

  or:

  Dear Carl, Fuck off.

  The first of the attendees are arriving. Unit owners parking their Subarus and Volkswagens on a Superseal coated Industry lot. A woman is the first person to emerge from her car. She’s got a light green scarf fashionably bundled around her black hair. She steps out of the open door and unfurls her long slim body. Her shoes gleam dully and the scarf catches the breeze and departs like a ghost of mist through the air. Not so fast that she can’t catch it in three steps, but she looks great, really great. She’s a taste of what Clive has hoped for. It could be a telecom commercial. If one was imaginative one might even hear the moan of some synthetic opera duet to complement the moment. The event coordinator appears stage right to welcome and guide them all into the Roccacio Juice and Latte Bar on the ground floor for a round of wheatgrass and white cacao and vanilla-foamed africanos, or whatever. There is no reason, thinks Clive, that today will not be a perfect day.

  In 1974 Nelson Derrick lived, or slept anyway, at the mercy of St. Bart’s in a tiny annex of the church once used for storing gym mats. It had its own door to the outside that opened onto an alleyway that’s just outside the frame of the photograph Clive looked at this morning while stirring, stirring, stirring his Metamucil into a cold glass of apple cider. The alleyway ran behind backyards from Ray Street through to Locke where the Salvation Army sat in a small brown building on the corner. Nelson Derrick wore flowered bell-bottomed blue jeans that he would have been too old to wear even during the summer of love. A denim jacket and sole-thwacking sneakers completed the year-round wardrobe. In the winter, he had a giant swaying brown bag of a coat given to him by someone at the church. He had gorgeous long hair, like a woman’s, and he kept it clean and silky and he never drank or smoked but only lugged his faithful duffle bag through the alley up to the Salvation Army where he spent his days largely in silence, reading every last word of yesterday’s newspapers by the side doors to the soup kitchen.

  He had a halting half-lidded shyness about him and said things along the lines of “Uhuh. Oh, uhuh. Now, well. My,” if you asked him something specific, like: “Hey Nelson, what’s in the bag, man?” None of that “wisdom of the downtrodden” for Nelson. There were Derricks at Clive and Carl’s school but they disavowed any connection. Clive’s grandfather seemed to remember something about pop bottles for a bus ticket to Halifax, but as far as Clive and Carl were concerned Nelson had been living in the gym-pad cupboard forever. They don’t make bums like Nelson Derrick anymore. He was of those days when young children walked themselves to school through back alleys and large parks, and after supper were asked only to be home before the streetlights came on. His shambling hobo-hippy self, blond and blown, burdened and slow, was at one with the neighbourhood and nobody gave him a second thought.

  The thing that Carl has written about in the letter – the thing that had Clive digging through the photo albums this morning – happened in a storm sewer that could be accessed by prying open a manhole cover at the halfway mark between Ray and Locke in the alley behind the church. That they could open this secret door at all was a trick they’d discovered the summer before when Carl had taken a piece of fence pipe and wedged it diagonally into one of the holes in the iron. The two of them bouncing on the lever until it magically came lip up with a satisfying scrape onto the crumbling asphalt.

  There was a dainty metal ladder that disappeared into the blackness and a smell that steamed up as though every rotten head che
ese and kielbasa in the city had been dumped at this one spot. Dropped down fifteen feet, the inside was dark like a cave and dripped and echoed – a low tunnel with a slimy pebbled, plastic-garbaged trench in the middle, concrete, brick, and mud seeping through the cracks.

  They found the body of a dead raccoon twenty feet from the manhole entrance in near complete and stinking darkness. The animal’s skin was in such a state of desiccation that a stick could be pushed through it with little effort. Creeping further and further into the blackness with the ebb and flow of droning Locke Street traffic like sucking giant’s breath never failed to titillate. The still and foul tunnel seemed to somehow represent a truer, or at least more possess-able, world for little boys. It was as though they’d discovered the location for the private thoughts of the city where secrets were stored that, while hidden, were nonetheless imminent, dark, and poisoning.

  When the snow began to fall it was early on a Thursday morning, and there was no wind at first so that giant flakes fell in lacy columns from the sky and patted hugely on faces and hands at recess and continued to accumulate on top of the grass yard at Borden Elementary. It was almost knee high after school with no sign of letting up. The talk was of a coming snow day and the feeling of melt soaking through Clive’s and Carl’s pants on the trudge home was the feeling of wild freedom. Clive celebrated by slam-dunking Carl into a mound of snow by the tire swings. “I yam what I yam!” he yelled. “And I’ll be swimmin with bare naked women!” Carl yelled back.

  The alley was already drifted steeply on its northern side and only just traversable on the opposite edge, even then there being some necessity to hand-over-hand it along the top boards of the occasional fence. There was a smooth bowl at the halfway point where the rising heat seeping upward through the manhole had resisted the storm somewhat and Carl had the idea to jimmy it open now before continuing home so that they would be able to find and enter it the next day.

  Carl slept over on the floor of Clive’s room that night. They ate their macaroni in the back section of Clive’s room in which a huge blanket with a spaceman motif had been hung to create a fort for Clive’s monster models. It was a childish thing but it was okay for Carl to see it since Carl had helped him build it. They consulted Clive’s book of Ancient Egyptian Mysteries and talked themselves into a frenzy of fear, imagining the “dead eyes of the boy king held open in his golden sarcophagus” and the beating hearts of bald and beaded slaves sacrificed up for devouring by a god with a head like a collie. They felt the mysterious kingdom, its secret knowledge and power, stretch its sinewy arm across forever and scoop them up into its confidence.

  The photograph was taken the next morning when the snow had stopped and the radio had confirmed the school closing. Everybody in the city just waited it out, relieved and happy. They were Egyptians all morning, that morning. Egyptian 1 and his sidekick, Egyptian 2. And in the afternoon they adventured up the alley in search of passage to the mummy underworld. The yawning opening, its shucked lid just a slender new moon of metal peeking out from under the white, was surrounded on all sides by deep snow that had to be bodily ploughed through in their parkas.

  And what it was, the thing that Carl raised in his letter after such a long time removed, was that Nelson Derrick had obviously come home the previous afternoon. And he’d obviously not seen or hadn’t had the wherewithal in the first place to simply watch his footing in the deep snow. Hadn’t thought, couldn’t think. And Nelson Derrick lying there, broken, blond hair clumped and twisted, at the bottom of the ladder and his duffle bag snagged and torn on one tip of it and thousands and thousands of old lottery tickets spilled out around the rim of the manhole and plastered with wet to everything.

  And it was like nothing to push it all safely into the sewer, where it belonged and dig free and slide the cover closed and simply leave and wait until the snow had melted away in the sun and washed down through the intakes along the streets. That long and still like nothing. And wait even for the spring to disappear the winter, and the small mystery of Nelson Derrick, all together with new greenness before Carl took a flashlight and shone it down through one piercing in the manhole while Clive put his eye to another. A hint of grey and echo and then the first taste of a whole and unexpected universe of experience, the flip side to everything exposed, its horror spun face up, its pleasure spun face down. And the possibility of ruin.

  Dear Carl, I haven’t given a thought to Nelson Derrick in many, many years. Not to say that I didn’t feel regret, etc., during the odd moment in the shower all through high school and even leading into my early years at university. But I’ve got so many things on my plate now – as you likely know, since I can see from your letter that you’ve done your homework for Clive 101. The past is behind us, Carl. For a long time now it’s been my philosophy to blinker out the noise, focus on what’s in front of me, and let what’s moved beyond take care of itself. It doesn’t concern us anymore. There’s a new world being forged and we have to chew through the old one to get it. We don’t dwell on the old. We process its parts into something new. See things my way, I guarantee you’ll feel better.

  Clive’s watch says 1:34. Minutes, minutes. He works a seed from this morning’s muesli loose from between two molars and crushes it between his teeth. A slight bitterness. Brandon has climbed onto the very top of the kayak stands and Fiona has given up or is just beguiled by the play of light on the moving water. His watch says 1:34. The moment was soon or the moment could be now. No one has yet bothered to remove the paint can. It’s as if life is a constant rehearsal for some people, and never the real thing. He himself is ready where he should be. A large silhouette against the sparkles.

  “Go get them, will you?” Clive motions his daughter down the dock with a sweep of his arms. She looks at him like he’s an infomercial for denture cream. There are people watching. The cameras are trained on the ribbon stretched and waiting. Bob Nausmann’s hypocritical Smart car is turning the corner and about to come right into the complex. They’ll be five minutes gathering and making their way to the rise and down to the water. He remembers to take off his gloves.

  With considerable management of the pounding pumps and pistons inside of him, he clops down the grated aluminium toward the pontoons and the water to settle things himself. A photograph seems so real. It begs to be taken seriously. But it’s just a trick of emulsion, of chemicals and human perception. There is no such repository for the moment.

  “Brandon – Brandon – do you remember what you’re going to say to … look at me … Please. Do you remember … ! Fiona? Can you do something to help? Can you turn the fuck around and please drag him to the ribbon where everybody is now on their way?”

  Fiona sucks in a whisper and comes to from some minor reverie. “Brandon, listen to your daddy.”

  “I thought you were going to be on my side today,” says Clive. “I am starting to feel so disappointed.”

  “Do you think it matters to anyone but you who gives Bob the scissors?” says Fiona.

  “Come down here, Brandon.” Clive stomps the dock and the reverberation travels through the wood and plastic and ripples out into the waterway.

  The members of the board are coming. The event coordinator is talking to the woman with the green scarf. Bob Naussman is smoking a cigarette by a brushed-steel bin. There’s nothing wrong. They can all meet at the lampposts. They can rise up to meet everyone, like a family that’s just been having fun, that’s just been looking for the shadows of playful fish around the slime-free moorings that anchor the dock to the sea bed.

  Clive steps back from rack and the opens his arms. “Come on, Brandon, jump down. I’ll catch you. It’s fun.” He smiles up at his son, imagining the way the two of them might look from above against the water’s sparkle and flash. A strong father and his gleeful son, relaxed enough to forget themselves and play on such an important day.

  “Who’s your Baghdaddy!” says Brandon and leaps with a mid-air back-kick flourish of total trust.

>   The two of them fall after the paint can into the water. The paint rises to the surface in swirling Tremclad Cotton globs as Clive loses Brandon in a blast of cold against his chest and his heavy overcoat turns him round and up and round and up in a current whose strength he’d never imagined staring down into the water from the promenade. The surface is mirrored above and there’s a vague sense of his own self, a flash of shape, some colour, reflected on the dull tin of it. The undersides of the white pontoons, a set of almost two-dimensional ovals, are all that remains of the ceiling world. All around him there’s a soft sound like muffled pan pipes.

  Brandon is a writhing tangle above him and his panicked boot catches Clive in the face, spinning him downward and deeper. His clothes offset the natural buoyancy of his body and he sinks then floats underwater like a sleeping humpback whale. The bottom of the waterway is shot through with veins of astonishing blue that disappear into the gloom of the deeper coursing. Hundreds, thousands of worn Jenn Cola bottles are crusted to the seaweed with tiny armoured life. The bottles are broken, scrubbed soft and porous but also lucent and unsullied. Clive floats. And before he breaks the surface directly in view of his first, most precious unit buyers, before he lugs his wailing child up the finger of the dock toward the crowded landing full of everything groomed and polished and loaded, before he himself sullies the viewing platform at the head of the promenade with diluted drips of white paint draining in a circle around him from his eight-hundred-pound coat, Clive feels the current tug at his boot heels and struggle to release him deeper, set him drifting toward the shapes of things further away – fish, garbage, fallen leaves – that flicker and glint in and out of perception as they race through the dim water, ceaselessly surrendered to the persistence of that flow out into Victoria’s inner harbour, out beyond the breakwater which stills the waves for the cruise ships in dock, before finally disappearing into the appetite of the pounding ocean.