by Leo McKay
He put the book back into his pocket, slowly raised himself onto his feet, and continued his circuit through the neighbourhood.
The light was still on in the living room when he got back around to his parents’ place. He crept up to the big new window in the west wall of the living room and tried to peek in again. Maybe the bastard had fallen asleep in front of the TV. There was a narrow space at the right where the blind did not completely cover the window. He could see the far edge of the TV set. It was turned on. The pole lamp was still on as well, and he could see an arm of the La-Z-Boy, but he was seeing it from behind. His old man could be in it and he would not be able to see.
He heard the light crunch of a footstep a split second before the voice: “Hey!” It jolted him. He straightened up so fast he lost his footing and landed on his back in the driveway. His drunkenness, the snow, and his heavy clothing cushioned him, but he lay on the ground for a moment, his limbs twitching with adrenaline.
“Jesus Christ! It’s you, Arvel!” a vaguely familiar voice said, someone mistaking Ziv for his brother, who was two years older. Ziv had not managed to make it to his feet, but craned his neck around to see who was there. The short face, ruddy-brown hair that curled out from beneath a toque, and the heavy eyebrows were familiar.
“Jesus, Bundy, you scared me shitless.” It was Bundy Burgess, who lived on Rutherford Street, and whom Ziv had not seen in years. Before they’d been old enough for school, Bundy and Ziv had played together, and they’d chummed around through elementary school. But Bundy had failed a few times in junior high, and Ziv had gone right through. When he reached an age when he was allowed to go by himself outside of the Red Row, Ziv had started hanging around with the boys in his grade. By the time he was in high school, there weren’t many Red Rowers left in school, so Ziv had grown out-of-touch with most of his old friends from the neighbourhood. He looked at the thick, curly mutton chops on Bundy’s face and realized that the last time he’d spoken to him, neither of them had even begun to shave.
“It’s Ziv,” Bundy said, having got a closer look at Ziv’s face. “You two guys look so much alike now.”
“I’ve heard that before,” Ziv said. He made his way woozily to his feet, spreading his arms out at his sides to maintain balance.
Bundy was a tough, raw-boned, sinewy man. But even with Ziv stooped over drunk, Bundy only came up to Ziv’s chin. In a heavy winter coat, Bundy’s narrow shoulders and torso were a fraction the size of Ziv’s.
“You’re drunk as ten barls of shit,” Bundy said.
“Two hours ago I was drunk as twelve,” Ziv said. “Right now I’m down to about seven, I figure.”
“I didn’t think college boys got drunk,” Bundy said.
“Then you’ve never been to college.” As drunk as he was, Ziv knew that this was a mistake. Bundy hadn’t finished high school, and even though Ziv had meant the remark as a swipe at university students, there was no way for Bundy to take it except as a swipe at him.
“Some of the biggest piss tanks I’ve ever seen are at university,” Ziv continued, trying to erase what he’d just said with what he was saying. “I knew a guy stopped going to classes in January, never left the residence building in January or February. Put in a big order at the liquor store whenever somebody was going. Got people to smuggle him food from the cafeteria. Stayed drunk night and day for two and a half months. Every couple of weeks his roommate would do some laundry for him and force him to shower.”
“What in Jesus’ name are you doing snooping around your own house in the middle of the night?” Bundy said.
Ziv was starting to worry about someone inside hearing their conversation. He grabbed the sleeve of Bundy’s coat and led him out to the end of the driveway. “Aw, I don’t want the old man to see me this tanked up,” he said.
“The old man! Jesus! How old are you?”
“Still the same age as you.”
“It’s freezing out here.” Ziv shrugged.
“Come away down to my place, if you want. You can sleep on the couch. It’s better than your mother finding you stiff as a board on the back step in the morning.”
Ziv sniffled in the cold. He knew his feet and hands needed warming. His face was beginning to become numb, and he’d either have to keep walking all night or go indoors at some time.
“Well, I don’t need a place to sleep,” Ziv said. “But if I could just warm up a bit. The old man is guaranteed to go to bed in the next half-hour or so.”
Bundy’s house was just on the far side of Ziv’s backyard. In a couple of minutes, they had walked around the corner on Rutherford Street and into Bundy’s driveway. The Burgess house had had no major upgrades, except for a reshingled roof, which Ziv could remember seeing Bundy pounding away at a few summers back, and a fresh coat of paint that had left the house, which had been a pale rusty red, a brooding shade of blue. The front step was crumbling and lopsided and the two-by-four pillars that elevated the roof over the rear porch showed signs of advancing rot.
For Ziv, entering Bundy’s kitchen was like walking back into his childhood. The chrome kitchen set with cracked vinyl padding. The varnished plywood cupboards. Even the worn pattern of the linoleum on the floor, and the smell of boiled carrots, which Bundy’s mother used to press through a strainer and serve mashed, like potatoes. Nothing had changed since he and Bundy had played together with Lego and Hot Wheels under the table.
“Should I make some coffee or tea or something?” Bundy said and moved to fill the kettle.
Ziv took off his boots and coat, piled them together just inside the door. There was a water glass beside the sink on the counter, and Ziv went over and filled it at the cold tap. “Just water is all I need,” he said. He gulped down a glass, then another, then another.
He and Bundy sat at the kitchen table. Ziv looked through the doorway to the living room and saw the TV. It was the same one he’d seen in there the last time he’d been in this house, years ago. Bundy’s family had the first colour TV in the neighbourhood. Ziv and Arvel used to love coming here to Bundy’s place to see the blue faces of soap-opera stars, their bodies outlined in yellow.
“Last time I talked to you must have been in Grade 8,” Ziv said.
“Grade 8 covers a lot of years for me,” Bundy said. They both laughed. “What have you been up to since you finished college?”
Ziv fidgeted. “I never finished,” he said. He stood up and looked out the window over the sink. He could see his parents’ house from here, but he could not see the living-room window he’d been monitoring when he was outside. The street light over on Foster Avenue haloed the house in yellow.
“Well, you done a couple years there, didn’t you?” Bundy asked.
“Ya, I lasted two years.”
“That’s more than a lot of people do.”
Ziv had never thought of his two years of university as anything he’d accomplished. In his mind all they stood for was the two he hadn’t completed. “I guess that’s right,” he said. “I had … troubles. Woman troubles. I don’t know what the hell happened. I wasn’t university material to begin with.”
“You used to go out with Meta Nichols, didn’t you?”
Ziv nodded.
“Hear she’s in Japan now.”
Ziv nodded again.
“Do you keep in touch?”
“Yeah, I guess,” Ziv said. He shrugged. “The odd letter.”
“Arvel’s on at the new pit, I heard.”
“He’s there. We got on together.”
“You were up there?”
“Arvel and I had a joint interview. A guy Arvel went to vocational with got us through the door. Some kind of favour deal.”
“So you were underground, were you?” Bundy asked.
Ziv nodded. “Lasted one Jesus shift. Arvel was working on the surface. Using his trade, there. Electrical work. Then when I quit, they put him down on the job I was doing.”
Bundy’s father had been killed in the pit. When Ziv and Bund
y had been children, the big coal boom of the industrial revolution had all but petered out. That coal boom had swollen Pictou County from a few farms and some trees into an industrial centre, a cluster of small, blue-collar towns. Before either of them had been born, the Red Row had been company housing for the workers at the bustling pits spread through Albion Mines and the next-door town of Westville. In those days, just about every adult male in the area, and many of the children, would have been employed at the pits in some capacity. But by the late sixties and early seventies, when Bundy and Ziv had been children, there were only one or two pits still running, and those at a capacity so small as to hardly compare with the glory days.
Bundy’s father had been one of only two or three men from the Red Row to work underground when they were kids. And they had it easy, the old-timers said, compared to the pick-and-shovel days. Machines did the work for them. All the same, Bundy’s father went below one shift and never made it home again. Ziv remembered the day it had happened, though he couldn’t have been more than seven or eight years old. He remembered coming down the Catholic School Path at lunchtime, always at the head of the neighbourhood kids coming from the elementary school. He remembered stopping at the corner of Rutherford Street and seeing Bundy standing behind the screen of his back door. Bundy had always been slow and poky and had never gotten home this quickly. He stood absolutely still, a shadow with his head inclined on the screen.
“Doesn’t matter how they ventilate the thing,” Ziv went on. “You can’t breathe down there. The whole fucking weight of the earth is pressing down on you. The tunnels aren’t lit right and you got a light on your helmet that’s like going out in a hurricane with a candle. People weren’t meant to get that far away from the sun.”
Bundy was looking at him. Ziv wondered if he was making any sense.
“All I could think of was how my grandfathers, both of them, did this for forty years. And my uncles. I kept thinking of the miners’ monument over on Foord with more names on it than both sides of the war monument put together. I had this picture in my head, like a diagram, a cutaway of the earth, like that ant farm with the glass walls we had in Mrs. Sutherland’s room in Grade 3. With me down there in one of the tunnels: a puny little ant.”
“Arvel’s down there right now working the back shift,” he pressed an index finger hard into the tea-stained top of Bundy Burgess’s kitchen table, as though he could hold his brother there under his finger.
“They’re not organized, what I heard,” Bundy said.
“They fucked up the certification or something. That’s Arvel’s thing. He’s organizing. Doing the union stuff. Taking after his fucking old man.” Ziv found himself pacing to the window where he could look up again and see the outline of his parents’ house silhouetted against the yellow street light behind it. His legs felt weak and wobbly, even on this walk of only a few steps. He was glad now to be inside and warm instead of wandering the town drunk in the cold.
“I wouldn’t go underground for a thousand bucks a day,” Bundy said. “And without a union, I wouldn’t go for a million a day. I’m going to make some tea.” He opened a canister and took out two Red Rose tea bags, dropped them into a white teapot on the counter.
“So what are you up to these days?” Ziv asked.
“Unemployment enjoyment,” Bundy said. “I do a lot of work in the woods, a lot of spacing, things like that. Silviculture, my crew foreman calls it. Tree farming, BYO chainsaw.”
“That’s the hard work,” Ziv said. “Arvel used to do that. Before he got on at the pit. I used to see him with ice packs or hot-water bottles at night. Popping Aspirin like candy.” He shook his head. He couldn’t imagine going out into the woods, getting paid piecework, breaking his back at five in the morning. And when you took into consideration equipment maintenance, and layoff times, he was probably making almost as much at Zellers for stuffing Cabbage Patch dolls back into their boxes.
When the tea was ready, Ziv did not argue or refuse. He let Bundy pour him a cup with sugar and tinned milk. They each took their cup and went with it into the living room. Ziv sat on the couch. They sipped their tea.
“I’ll get a blanket and you can sleep right there,” Bundy said after a time.
Ziv waved the offer away, but Bundy poked his head into the cubbyhole and emerged with a grey-and-black wool blanket. “I don’t need to stay the night,” Ziv said. “Twenty minutes or so, when we finish this tea, the old man should be in bed.”
“What’s the big deal?” Bundy said. “You’re twenty-three years old. What’s he going to do, ground you?”
“All he ever does is harp on me. He spent his whole fucking life reforming the world and now he’s got nothing to reform but me. I come home drunk it’s just one more thing.”
“It’s not like he don’t drink,” Bundy said.
“Drink? He doesn’t drink. He swims in it. One of these days I’m going to open that door and his big fat carcass is going to be lying on the floor dead. Keeled over with a heart attack or drowned in his own puke, and it’s going to be the best day of my life, you can be sure of that.”
The only light in the room came from a lamp on a table beside the couch. The wallpaper carried a faded blue paisley and floral design. The patterns cut into the wooden trim around the door frames were obscured by layer upon layer of poorly applied high-gloss paint. Bubbles and drips from old brush errors were preserved and compounded by new errors coated on top.
The tea and milk in Ziv’s stomach had felt good at first. It had warmed him and stopped the aching he’d felt since shoving his fingers down his throat on Hudson Street. But now he felt queasy. He put a hand to his mouth and ran to the closet under the stairs where there was a toilet and sink. He didn’t have time to close the door behind him before he was vomiting the milky tea into the toilet water.
“You want to try to put something solid on that stomach, some dry bread or crackers,” Bundy said.
Ziv washed and dried his face, then went back into the living room, lay again on the couch, resting his head on a frayed armrest. “No,” he said. “What I need is just to get off my feet for a while. I’m more tired than anything.” He closed his eyes and felt the earth open up and swallow him.
Ziv opened his eyes when the room began to move. It took him seconds to realize that he might still be drunk. He sat up on the couch, pushed the blanket aside, and placed his feet on the floor. It was a little late for the bed spins, which he’d only ever had when drifting off to sleep. In a second he remembered where he was: Bundy Burgess’s house. He made for the toilet under the stairs, but when he clicked the light switch on the wall, the single bulb, hanging from its cord in the low ceiling, was swaying back and forth, casting moving shadows of itself against the walls. The boards of Bundy’s house creaked against the nails that held them in place. Water in the toilet sloshed back and forth against the sides of the bowl.
Cigarette smoke in the Tartan Tavern was as thick as Bay of Fundy fog. The floor was sticky with the residue of spilled beer. In the evening light, the ceiling was a washed-out grey, mostly invisible due to the glare of the recessed bulbs that lit the room inadequately, but in daylight, you could see that the dust-hung stipple had once been white. The smell of onions frying was so heavy that you could almost, by means of smell alone, hear them sizzling.
“They’ll get it worked out,” Ennis was saying. “It’s my young fella doing the organizing. They’ll be organized all right.” Ennis was sitting at a table near the snooker floor. His big, meaty face was florid with anger and excitement, and he thumped his big fists into the table as he spoke. At the table were Leon Dudka, Dan McGraw, Elvin Carter, and Allie McInnis. This wasn’t the first time any of them had seen Ennis excited. In the background came a clatter of snooker balls. “Bad Case of Lovin’ You” started up on the jukebox, and the crowd around the snooker tables began to moan and complain at the sound of it. The server returned to the table and placed the beer pitcher in the centre of the men with their empt
y and half-empty glasses. “The United Mine Workers didn’t get in because of its ties with the competition. I don’t blame the miners for not signing on with that union. It’s not really a conflict of interest when one union represents workers in competing operations, but it looks enough like a conflict to scare people off. The Auto Workers will get them signed up, you watch. It’ll be my young fella that gets them signed up and voted in.”
The mine where his son Arvel worked had only been in operation for about a year. So far, the miners had been unable to get a union certified, and Ennis talked endlessly of Arvel’s involvement in the union drive. It was right and natural that the son of a labour leader would draw on his father’s experience, this is what Ennis wanted people to believe. But the truth was that Ennis was not on the best of terms with his son. Arvel had not once asked Ennis for any union-related advice, and Ennis only knew of Arvel’s involvement in the attempt to organize the Eastyard mine because he’d read it in the paper.
“They’ll keep the union out. They will, all right,” said Allie McInnis, goading Ennis as he liked to do. He was the only one at the table who approached Ennis in size, and the only one who came to the Tartan Tavern as a regular who wasn’t intimidated by Ennis’s self-taught vocabulary and knowledge.
“They’ll put up a fight,” Ennis said. “But they can’t keep it out.”
“Look at Michelin,” McInnis said.
As though an ejector button had been pushed, Ennis rocketed out of his seat, the ridge over the top of his great stomach caught the edge of the table, sending the beer glass before him over the edge to the floor. Now stretched up to his full height, his leg-sized arms arching outwards from his shoulders, it would be impossible for almost anyone not to feel threatened merely by the presence of someone so big.
