by Leo McKay
“Quit your crying. You’re crying about unemployment when you’re not even unemployed.”
Ziv spoke up. “Look,” he found himself saying. “We’ve both got jobs now. Good jobs. Why can’t we just sit here, drink a few beer, and act like normal people. Why do we always have to jump around each other screeching like a pack of gorillas?”
Arvel and Ennis backed off, each of them with a face his own shade of red. “I’m going to put on some music,” Ziv said. He stood up and jangled the change in his pocket.
“The boys won’t like it,” Ennis said.
Ziv ignored his father and walked past the pool tables, where the regulars were playing snooker.
As he approached the jukebox, the snooker players began yelling, “Don’t! Don’t!”
Ziv made a face in their direction and put three quarters into the slot. He pressed off some songs.
“No!” the snooker players shouted in unison. Ziv shook his head at them. As he was sitting back down at the table with Arvel and Ennis, the introduction to “Bad Case of Lovin’ You,” by Robert Palmer, started up.
“That’s not the song I pressed,” Ziv said.
“No matter what you press, that’s what it plays,” Ennis said. “That song got played so many times that some kind of groove must have got worn in the machine. That’s all it knows how to play now.”
The men at the snooker tables were covering their ears.
“I guess these guys are pretty sick of this song,” Ziv said. The three of them looked at the pool players, who were shouting at Ziv, giving him the finger.
“Well, they’re about to hear it six more times,” Ziv said. Ennis started to laugh, and his sons joined in.
Winter was still weeks away, but the fall feeling had already gone out of the air. There were no more earth-smells, no more scent of decaying leaves. As Ziv walked he could feel a fear building up inside him, as though he were making a big mistake. He’d grown up with the myth and the lore of the Pictou County coalfield, and that lore was about nothing if it was not about injury, perilous danger, and violent death. He’d learned about the Hundred Years War in Grade 11 history, but all that remained with him now was the name. The queasy, sick sensation that was starting to grow in his stomach might be something felt by a soldier going off to fight in a war like that, a conflict that had claimed or maimed or changed generations of your own family. The town was as grey as an old photo as he walked through it. Things moved, people, cars, but these belied the uneasy stillness that seemed to blanket everything.
As he turned off Foord Street and followed the twisty road through the little cluster of houses before the Plymouth Bridge, the silos at the mine site came into view. Constructed of ugly concrete and steel, there was nothing remarkable about the look of them at all. This was the same sort of unsightly industrial complex that scarred the landscape in other places in the county, except that this was new. Some parts of the above-ground operation were still under construction. In contrast to other operations Ziv had seen – ones with rusted machinery strewn about, or with buildings whose roofs had collapsed – the Eastyard site gleamed like a new Buick on the lot, the latest model, fully loaded with options.
The height of the silos, and their newness on the landscape, made them look large from a distance. But as he crossed the bridge and got to the straight stretch that lead right to Eastyard’s gates, the mine seemed to shrink. The whole industrial site itself, silos, shaft portals, buildings, stacks of materials and equipment, was a little larger than the Zellers store he’d worked at. But compared to the whole mall, with its huge parking lot and adjacent stores and complexes, the mine was small.
The work site was just being set up for production, no coal was coming out of it yet, so there were only a half-dozen or so cars in the parking lot, and aside from some low electrical humming, the place was eerily devoid of noise. He heard a voice and looked between two small shed-like buildings where two men in coveralls and hard hats were stacking metal rods onto a forklift by hand.
Once in the parking lot, Ziv walked immediately to the building with the most cars parked near it. As he got closer, he saw the word office stencilled on the plate-glass and aluminum door.
Inside, there was a small carpeted reception area and a secretary behind a desk. The woman was about forty, narrow-faced with straight black hair.
“You must be Mr. Burrows,” she said without looking up.
“That’s right,” said Ziv.
“Are you a friend of … that Kowalski … gentleman?” She looked him in the eye now with an expression that almost seemed suspicious.
Ziv cringed. “Well, I know him,” he began.
She turned her eyes up to the ceiling in a way that suggested she was somehow already fed-up with Roly.
“I’m Ziv Burrows,” Ziv said, trying to deflect the blame for whatever Roly had done to offend her. “Kowalski knows my brother. Arvel. He also hired on here, but he hasn’t gotten a call to come in yet.”
The secretary double-checked a list on her desk and shrugged. “He’ll get one before too much longer,” she said. “You’re the only one on the list for training this morning.”
She seemed to have said all she was going to about Roly, and led Ziv to a small conference room with plush leather chairs and beautiful wood-grained tables. At the far end of the room was a sleek, new-looking television on a cart, a VCR on the shelf below it. On a shelf beneath the VCR was a stack of video tapes.
“As you know, your first day is training and orientation,” the woman said. “So these are the tapes they want you to watch.”
“Begin with this one, then the rest you can watch in whatever order you like. This afternoon Mr. Brennan will come by to take you on a tour underground.” She smiled momentarily, as though she’d suddenly remembered something. “Bathroom is out this door and down the hall.” She closed the door behind her.
Ziv looked after her quizzically. Was this it? No one else with him? No other instructions? A stack of video tapes and that was all? He shrugged and put the first one into the machine. It was a forty-five minute PR video for Eastyard Coal, obviously designed to impress potential investors. Considering the lengthy, gushingly positive section on what life in Pictou County was like, it must also have been intended to lure skilled workers, most likely from Alberta.
The rest of the tapes were obviously video supplements to manuals that had come with various pieces of equipment and machinery. Most of them assumed that you either were already an expert in hydraulics, diesel mechanics, welding, industrial robotics, or some other discipline. One after the other, Ziv dutifully popped the videotapes into the machine and watched them, trusting at first that eventually this Mr. Brennan was going to come and make clear the connections between all the scattered information he was getting from the tapes.
At noon, after a brief bathroom break, he unrolled the brown bag he’d brought and ate a baloney sandwich, washing it down with partly skimmed milk that he drank from an orange juice bottle.
The last videocassette clicked to a halt at about 1:20 in the afternoon, after which Ziv sat, idle and disoriented, for more than half an hour before Fred Brennan showed up.
Brennan was a fat, hard-looking man with woolly, decades-out-of-fashion mutton chops and a purple-red complexion.
“You Burrows?” Brennan asked without introducing himself.
“That’s me,” said Ziv. He snapped to his feet in a show of vigour that was hard to pull off after such a day of lethargy.
“Christ, look at the size of you,” Brennan exclaimed. “There two of you or something?”
Ziv pondered this a moment, then said, “Oh, yes, my brother. He’s an electrician.”
Brennan nodded, a puzzled, almost cross-eyed look on his face. “He’s above-ground. We’ll have him in next week. We’re bringing people on in ones and twos as we need them right now. You watch this stuff?” Brennan pointed a thumb at the video machine.
Ziv nodded. He braced himself for a quiz on what he’
d spent the day watching.
“Better show you the mine,” Brennan said. He walked out the door and Ziv followed him out of the office building to another building, sheathed with blue sheet metal, containing showers, locker rooms, and equipment.
From a table in a locker room, Brennan picked a hard hat with a lamp affixed. “Put this on,” he said. He smacked Ziv in the chest with the helmet and glanced at Ziv’s boots. “Those safety boots?” he said, and without waiting for an answer, he walked out a door that led to the outside. A few metres from the door sat an idling tractor. Brennan retrieved his own hard hat from the seat of the tractor and hopped up onto the seat himself. The tractor was a modified John Deere farm machine. There was a platform on the back for hauling people and machinery, but Ziv could tell by looking at the engine casing of the machine that something had been changed to make this tractor suitable to go underground. There had been no instructional video about this machine.
Brennan waved a thumb at him to get on the platform at the back. Ziv did so, and no sooner had Brennan thrown the thing into gear than Ziv’s heart began to race. He was not comfortable entering a mine shaft on a vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine. He remembered a story his mother had told him, part of the lore of mining in Pictou County, about the dangers of bringing flammable materials into the mine. Her father had discovered one day that he’d accidentally brought two wooden matches into the pit with him. They’d been in the deepest part of a pocket since the day before, and he was eating his lunch when he discovered them. It was like a story from the trenches of a war. His grandfather had run with the matches like a live grenade, submerged them in a pool of sump water, and proceeded to mash them into a harmless chemical pulp.
If a couple of matches had sent his grandfather into such a panic, how could it be safe to drive into the same environment on this machine full of sparks and fire?
Brennan steered the rumbling tractor toward what could only be the portals of the mine, two doorways that angled sharply down into the ground. The pounding of Ziv’s heart in his ears drowned out both the tractor and Brennan’s voice as they descended. Without looking back to see if Ziv was listening, Brennan drove headlong down the shaft at what seemed to Ziv to be breakneck speed, pointing at this and that as they went along. Ziv heard the odd word: Quikrete, resin tubes, bulkhead, but he was swooning by the time the shaft levelled off and they’d reached what must have been a bottom, of sorts. Though he could see lights blazing around him, and the lamps on his and Brennan’s helmets were lit, being underground to Ziv was like being submerged in murky water. The hum of his own blood began to mix with the hum of machinery. He clung to the rail of the platform at the back of the tractor and did not respond for a long time when the machine had finally stopped and Brennan, who had moved to the back, was motioning for him to come down.
Finally, Brennan looked good and hard at Ziv’s face and said, “You’re white as a fucking sheet, man. Are you sick?”
Brennan’s voice came at him as though in a dream: faint and wavering, distorted into a series of endlessly drawn-out syllables. His mind held a sideways picture of Brennan’s face for an instant, then he was aware of his cheek bouncing like a poorly inflated ball off the corner of the rail he’d been clinging to.
He was face-up on the floor of the shaft when he came to.
“Christ, man,” Brennan was saying, slapping Ziv’s cheeks to help bring him round. “What the hell is the matter with you?”
Ziv sat up for an instant and looked around at the mine shaft. Brennan was talking, but his voice buzzed meaninglessly in Ziv’s head like a piece of far-off machinery. There was a dull ache in Ziv’s face from his fall and he slumped over like a little boy where he sat. He felt stupid for coming down here in the first place. Facing his father was going to be the worst, telling him he’d quit after a single shift, quit the only job his father had ever understood or approved of, quit the only thing his father had ever said he was proud of him for.
He covered his face with his hands. “You’d better take me back to the surface,” he said. He hoped Brennan was not able to hear the sob breaking his voice.
“We just got down here, man,” Brennan replied. “Are you out of your Jesus mind?”
“I’m finished,” Ziv said. “I’m done. You might as well take me back up.”
One of the teachers at her college had told Meta that on Christmas most Japanese who were going to observe the day did so by buying a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Teenagers went out on a date and exchanged small gifts. That was Christmas. Desperate to make the holiday at least in some way familiar, Meta braced herself and shelled out fourteen dollars for an ounce-and-a-half of glass with sparkles glued to it. Fourteen dollars for a set of four glass balls to hang on a tree. As she paid for it, the cashier handed the box to a young woman at a table near the cash register. The young woman quickly and deftly executed a series of moves that resulted in the box’s being wrapped artistically in pale-green and white paper. There was only a single short length of tape employed in the wrapping job, yet many fan-shaped folds creased the paper in interesting ways. On the white part of the paper a delicate texture rippled across the surface, giving the effect of a pond under a mild breeze.
The package was inside a plastic shopping bag, and when she emerged from the department store onto Shinjuku-dori, she peeked into the bag as if to make sure the tranquil pattern hadn’t been obliterated by the chaos of Tokyo. After just three months in this city, she had not fully accustomed herself to the sight and sound and smell of the city streets.
Only a small proportion of the vehicles in the central city were private passenger cars. The rest were passenger buses, green-and-yellow taxis with rear doors that gaped open and slammed shut at the push of a button from the driver’s seat, two-wheel, three-wheel, and four-wheel scooters, some with plastic bubble visors, some with roofs, used to deliver pizza, noodles, curry, coffee, developed photos, videos, groceries, alcohol, cooked rice in covered Styrofoam containers, uncooked rice in bulky plastic bags. Scaled-down cars that reminded her of Volkswagen Beetles with mumps, mini-garbage trucks, flatbed trailers, souped-up motorcycles ridden by messengers covered head to toe in red leather, chauffeur-driven sedans carrying government and company officials, limousines carrying gangsters with permed hair and tattoos, one-speed bicycles with rattly fenders and big parcel carriers fore and aft, carrying commuting business types from home to station and back.
Everyone dressed conservatively: blue or grey or brown business suits with white shirts and ties for men. Blue or grey or brown skirt suits with white blouses for women. Even on the weekends, the dress code was strict. Belted tan pants with a designer-logo sweatshirt and loafers for men, pleated slacks and loose-sleeved blouses for women.
Meta noticed that if she acted like a Canadian, said sorry when someone stepped on her toes, let others go ahead of her in line, she didn’t stand a chance in Tokyo. No matter what day of the week it was, the prevailing pace in Tokyo was one of urgency. Everyone had to get where they were going quickly, as though all were perpetually terrified of tardiness.
Isetan sat directly atop Shinjuku Station, which someone at her college had told her was the busiest train station in the world. Meta could have descended to the underground without leaving the department store and taken a train to Yotsuya San-chome, not far from her apartment, but she’d been lost underground in Shinjuku Station already and she’d vowed never to go down there again. Having emerged from Isetan onto the street, she instinctively sought shelter from the mad-with-motion crowd. She rushed headlong down Shinjuku-dori in the direction of Shinjuku San-chome. When the crowd thinned a little after four or five long blocks, she ducked down a side street to where she remembered a Kohikan she visited a week before. Her legs were tired from walking, standing, waiting, and what she most wanted to do was go home. But at present, she couldn’t face any of the means of getting there.
The Kohikan’s gleaming shopfront of glass and polished chrome stood out i
n contrast to the block of sooty and dusty brick. She slipped through the door and made her way immediately to the booth at the back that was surrounded by a brass-plated railing. She liked this booth precisely because it felt so isolated. The light from the windows at the front of the shop didn’t reach there, most customers didn’t peer this far back into the shop. The smell of fresh, strong coffee being ground and brewed began to revive and console her. She took off her coat and hung it on a coatrack beside the booth and sat down.
A slim young waiter approached her tentatively, afraid, she knew, that he’d face some unforeseen difficulty with this foreign client. He passed her a menu. Without looking at it, she said:
“Toki-meki kohi,” Heart-beating-fast coffee. “Onegaishimasu.” Please. He smiled with relief and bolted for the counter, where he would grind the beans, measure the grounds, boil the water, and filter her exactly one cup of coffee.
She took the wrapped box of ornaments from the Isetan bag, placed it carefully on the table and once again admired the beauty of its wrapping. The contents of the box were ornaments, but the box actually looked better than what was in it.
“I love you. I love you. I love you,” someone in the restaurant said in North American English. “Why do they make this so complicated?”
Meta closed her eyes and shrank into her seat. She wished she could vaporize herself, disappear in a stream of particles and reappear behind the locked door of her apartment. There were few enough foreigners in this city that it was relatively rare to find herself in a subway car or restaurant with another gaijin, but when she did, she was almost always mortified at how loudly other gaijin spoke in public. Hadn’t they noticed how rude it sounded?
“Toki-meki kohi desu,” the waiter said. She opened her eyes to acknowledge receipt of the coffee, and looked across the restaurant to the table directly in front of the shop window. There he was, the big obnoxious foreigner who gushed out loud about love in a public place. He was hunched over a piece of paper with a pen in his right hand, scratching. On the other side of the booth, two young women bantered back and forth in Japanese, now and then pointing to something on the paper the foreigner was filling out and explaining in broken English, so quietly Meta could barely hear what they were saying.
