by Leo McKay
“I know that.”
“Anyway, Ennis. More than one person has asked me to talk to you. I know others have asked you already. There’s an executive committee you know, Ennis.”
Ennis shakes his head. “I’m not interested,” he says.
“We could use your help, Ennis.”
“Things are going fine as far as I can see.”
“Seems an awful waste, Ennis. A man with your experience.”
“That young lawyer the executive hired. He knows more than I ever will.”
“Anyway, Ennis. I don’t want to be harassing you or anything like that. There’s some people know I know you. They asked me to put a word in, is all.”
Ennis looks out at the bare branches of trees in the valley. The sun is long down beyond the horizon and the clouds there are streaked deep red. Over in the east, the blue of the sky where it shows through clouds is deepening. Behind him, somewhere beneath the white and grey landscape he looks out on, lies the body of his son, soot-soaked and damp, rotting. Up over the little hill in front of him, the bridge that will take him across the river glistens.
“I’ll see you later, Allie,” Ennis says. He picks up the canvas bag and heads for the bridge.
Ziv is slouched into the leatherette padding of the stand-up bar at Stumpy’s, which is right across the parking lot from Zellers. He’s come straight from work and is wearing his dress shirt, the tie and collar loosened now in the heat of the overcrowded room. The dance floor throbs with writhing bodies. He looks at it sideways, trying to make out individual people, but can only see darkness and anonymous shapes. He fumbles through a front pocket and extracts all the money he has left: two dollars and fourteen cents in quarters, nickels, and pennies. It’s enough to cover one more beer.
He raises his head slowly and squints out along the periphery of the room, reorienting himself, then steers in the direction of the dark hallway that leads to the washrooms, shifting and elbowing his way there. Even the hallway is packed, and he stands at the end of it for a few moments before he realizes that the crowd here is not a lineup, but merely overflow from the dance floor. Some people are actually dancing in the hallway. The cigarette smoke is mixed with pot smoke. Ziv squeezes his way into the bathroom and empties his bladder into one of the urinals. He’s at the sink, washing his hands, gawking drunkenly at his own drunken face, when a firm hand claps him on the shoulder.
“Hey, man,” a voice says. “I haven’t seen you in a long time.”
As soon as Ziv turns around, he knows what is happening. “I don’t know you,” he says, and presses the button of the hand-dryer with an elbow.
“You don’t remember me, do you?”
“You have me confused with someone else.”
“Fuck! I can’t believe it. PRVS. You were in electrical construction, I was doing welding.”
“I’m telling you, you’ve got me mixed up with someone else.”
“The hell I do. We used to go over the bank at the back at noon and smoke pot. You remember.”
“Look,” Ziv says. “You got me confused with my dead brother.”
The man laughs. “Dead brother! You’re still full of it. What was your name again? I remember it!”
Ziv turns away, heads out of the bathroom.
“Some queer name … Arbor … Anson … Anvil … Axel …”
Ziv orders a Keith’s at the bar, dumps the change from his pocket onto the countertop, and heads toward the spot he’d been in before.
The space he left at the stand-up bar has been filled, so he steps back against the wall, guzzling down big mouthfuls of beer. These are the drinks he does not enjoy. He is already so drunk that he will be sick in the morning, and he knows himself and the limits to his capacity to drink well enough that the beginnings of tomorrow’s hangover are already hammering the big muscles in his limbs, pushing inwards on the sides of his skull. The last drinks of any night are a compulsion, not a desire.
He feels angry at himself for being this drunk, when he has not had more than a beer or two in months. He feels angry for coming to Stumpy’s, a place he swore off a long time ago. But he’s come here tonight because he does not want to face his father.
He holds his beer bottle up to the strobe light on the dance floor and sees that it is three-quarters full. He curses himself. The money he spent on this could have got him a taxi at least part way to Albion Mines.
“Excuse me. Excuse me,” Ziv says. He worms his way close to the bar and puts the beer bottle on it. He turns in the direction of the coat check at the entrance and begins pushing his way toward it.
“I remember now,” a hand clamps his shoulder and pulls him back. “Arbel. It’s Arbel. I remember because it rhymes with marble.”
“Listen,” Ziv turns around to face the man. “My brother’s name was Arvel, not Arbel. You must have a brain the size of a fucking marble. I told you he’s dead. He died in the Eastyard explosion. His dead fucking body is still a mile underground. Now leave me the fuck alone.”
People quickly shrink back from the immediate vicinity of the two men, eager to stay away from trouble. Ziv pushes the man hard at the shoulders, sending him backward into the crowd. He comes back at Ziv, fists flailing. “You big prick!” he screams. “Think you can bully me!” He cuts loose with a heavy boot that misses Ziv’s balls, catching him hard in the upper thigh. Ziv’s skin begins to burn where he was kicked. He puts a hand down and feels the loose ends of the thready fabric where the boot shredded his pants. He grabs the little man around the throat with his left hand and squeezes until the man squawks. He lets loose with a right in a downward arc on the end of the nose and blood sprays out over his left arm. The man gives up struggling and Ziv lets him go. The next thing Ziv feels is the side of his face careening off the edge of a table on the way to the floor. He is drunk enough that he hears the sound of his head striking the tile floor, rather than feeling the pain of it. He is impressed with the pitch of the smack it makes. Someone is yanking his right wrist up the centre of his back. “Ow, ow! You cracked my fucking skull,” he says over his shoulder to whoever has got him. His wrist and elbow scream with pain until his shoulder lets go with a snap, then all the pain zeroes in on the dislocated joint.
By the time the bouncer who tore out his shoulder is helping Ziv to his feet, the crowd is starting to go about its normal business of being drunk at Stumpy’s bar. Some are still focused on the shrinking spot of bare floor where the fight was. Some are yelling throaty monosyllables that, over the deafening music, Ziv cannot hear.
The bouncer leads him behind the bar and through a door he’s never noticed before. They go up a narrow, carpeted staircase and through another door to a modern, well-lit office. The place is clean and roomy and quiet, except for the muffled pounding of music that comes thumping up through the floor from the bar. There is a wall of black windows that look out on the night. The windows are striped across in white by several sets of venetian mini-blinds.
In a big, comfortable-looking chair sits a man with a broad, youngish face, salon-tanned unnaturally brown. His mid-length blond-brown hair is parted in the middle and brushed back at either side. As soon as he stands up, Ziv knows who he must be.
“Jesus Christ,” he says. “It’s Stumpy.”
The man is no more than five feet three inches, but beneath a pair of tan Dockers and a light-blue shirt, his thick, muscular body makes him appear almost half as wide as his height. His black leather belt is cinched snugly at the waist of his trousers, revealing that not a pound of his bulk is fat.
“I never dreamed you were real. I thought you were just some catchy name.”
“Guy was fighting,” the bouncer says to Stumpy. “You want me to stay?” Stumpy shakes his head and the bouncer leaves.
“I’m no threat to you,” Ziv says. “Your man ripped my arm off.” He moves to hold his right arm up on display, but cries out in pain when it budges only slightly.
Stumpy opens a wood-panelled door at the side of the office
and flicks a light, revealing a small bathroom. “Wash up,” he says, and sits back down in his chair.
Ziv goes into the bathroom and closes and locks the door. He looks at himself in the mirror over the sink. He looks like Rocky Balboa in the last fight scene of the first movie. His face is swollen where his head hit the table, and then the floor. His eye is black and getting blacker. The swelling will close it soon. There is blood smeared on his face and on the side of his neck, but he feels around with his good hand for a cut and cannot find one. It must all be the other guy’s blood. Where is that bastard? he wonders. Why isn’t he getting an audience with Stumpy? He wets some paper towel and wipes his face and neck. He lets the water run ice-cold in the sink, stoppers the basin, and sticks the swollen part of his head into the coldness, keeping it under for as long as he can hold it. With his head upside down, he feels his equilibrium go. He lurches forward and knocks the back of his head on the tap.
Even washing with his other hand, there are involuntary movements in his right arm that cause shrill spasms of pain to shoot out from his shoulder. He carefully slips off his shirt and T-shirt and moves his left hand tenderly to the hurt shoulder. The joint has been dislocated before, and he knows there’s not much to be done about it tonight. He pokes around at the joint, which doesn’t hurt to be prodded, only to be moved. The ball has come right out of the socket but has snapped most of the way back in on its own. He pulls at the outside of the shoulder, trying to snug it up to the side of his body and bring the two halves of the joint back together completely, but he knows from experience that it will take a few days to slip back in on its own and a few weeks before it has completely returned to normal.
He uses the liquid soap from the dispenser to wash himself as best he can with only one hand. He holds his head under the cold-water tap and washes his hair. The harsh suds run down and burn his eyes. He rinses as much blood from his clothes as possible, then dries himself off, wrings himself out, and goes out into the office.
He half expects to find the New Glasgow Police in Stumpy’s office, but Stumpy is still the only one in the room. “I’ve got this form here for you to sign,” Stumpy says. He holds up a piece of paper, then puts it back on his desk. “It bars you from these premises for one year. Sign this and I don’t call the police.”
Ziv looks at the document. It is printed in blue ink, in small lettering that is cluttered with lettered and numbered sections and dotted and solid lines in which information can be filled.
“I’m too drunk to read this,” Ziv says.
“Put your name and address here … your signature down here.”
Ziv considers protesting signing something he can’t read. He considers signing a false name. But he decides to follow the path of least resistance and puts the information where Stumpy asks him to put it.
“Now get the fuck out of here,” Stumpy says. He opens a door to the outside. There is a metal railing and a set of stairs that leads to the parking lot. A gust of cold air whooshes into the office.
“I can’t go out there,” Ziv says.
“What are you talking about?”
“My coat is at the coat check downstairs.”
Stumpy rolls his eyes and shuts the outside door. “Give me the ticket,” he says.
Ziv checks his pockets. “I lost it.”
Stumpy’s eyes go for another roll.
“I’ll go down and get it,” Ziv says, making for the door to the bar.
“You’re not going back down there until this time next year,” Stumpy says, moving between Ziv and the door. “Describe the coat.”
“It’s a green down-filled parka. The bulky kind. In the front pocket there’s a book called Four Philosophical Ideas.”
Stumpy frowns in disbelief. “Are you kidding me?” he says. “What are you, some kind of intellectual ruffian?”
Ziv shrugs, then winces as his shoulder jolts with pain.
As Stumpy is headed down the stairs to the bar, Ziv calls after him. “Hey, can I ask you a favour?”
Stumpy stops and exhales in disgust. Without looking back up at Ziv, he says, “What?”
“Could you get me a cup of coffee? I feel pretty weak and I have to walk to Albion Mines.”
Stumpy turns and looks up at him, half surprised, half curious. “You got fifty cents?” he asks.
“No,” Ziv says. “That book’s worth nine ninety-five.” Stumpy is turned around again, almost at the doorway that closes off the bottom of the stairs. “That’s less than two-fifty per philosophical idea!” Ziv shouts after him.
“Intellectual ruffian bum!” Stumpy says.
When he gets to his parents’ back door, the coffee and the long walk have sobered him considerably. Both his mother and father would be asleep by now. Since the old man has been on the keg, he gets up every morning at five o’clock for some sort of physical exercise. Ziv walks right into the kitchen, where he gulps four of his mother’s high-powered arthritis Aspirin and several big cups of tap water.
He looks at himself in the bathroom mirror. His swollen face is like a stranger’s looking back at him. His one eye is now completely closed and the swelling has spread all the way to his jawline.
He climbs up the stairs, pulls back the folding door of his bedroom, shucks his clothes at his feet, and slithers into his bed, careful not to move or bump his sore arm.
Sleep is racked by frightening dreams that consist mostly of loud noises, just the other side of identifiable, flashes of faces contorted with pain. At least three times he awakes moaning, having rolled onto his dislocated shoulder. Each time it takes him a moment to realize how to get out of the painful position he is in without the use of the injured limb. Then the real dream begins.
One instant Ziv’s grandfather is his grandfather. The next instant he is Arvel. They’re standing outside the house on MacLean Street, the house where his mother grew up. His grandfather says something. Ziv says, Pardon? His grandfather repeats the same syllables, which are still incomprehensible. It’s Ukrainian, Ziv realizes. Then instantly he knows he is dreaming. I wonder if it’s real Ukrainian or dream gibberish, he thinks in his dream. He wishes he could write it down, knows he’ll never remember it when awake. Over his grandfather’s shoulder, he sees his grandmother through the window. She is standing at the pump by the sink, washing apples. He’s only seen her in pictures; she died of TB long before he was ever thought of or born. He takes a good, long look at her, though it is difficult to see her clearly at this distance. He looks for anything recognizable, some small part of her that has survived in him.
His grandfather moves, shuffles his feet in the direction of the pit. Ziv moves with him and realizes they are both carrying lunch cans, the cylindrical ones he’s seen at the miner’s museum.
“Arvel! Arvel!” he shouts at the old man.
His grandfather looks at him, puzzled, says something in dream Ukrainian. As they round the turn, the ominous towers of the Allan Shaft come into view.
“Arvel,” he says to his grandfather, he grabs the old man at the shoulders and shakes him. “Arvel, it is you! Arvel …!”
The old man becomes angry, shoves Ziv away, and begins running, awkwardly in heavy pit boots, in the direction of the mine.
When Ziv awakes in the darkness, his brother’s name still on his lips, he realizes he’s been shouting in his sleep. He waits a moment in the night silence, listens.
“Ziv,” his father’s voice is just beyond the folding door. Ziv pretends not to hear.
He opens his eyes and becomes aware that he has now crossed a boundary. It is more morning now than night. He is more hungover now than drunk. He notices a crack of light at the base of the bedroom door. He moans his way to a sitting position and swings his legs over the side of the bed. A knock sounds, his father tapping on the door frame from the hall.
The knock comes again and he stands unsteadily, kicks his discarded clothing away from his feet, and slides back the folding door in just his Jockey shorts. The face before him is
familiar but distorted. Backlighting gives it a disembodied appearance. The eyes are clear in their sockets, but the features appear to have been dismantled, then put back together in approximately the position they belonged, nothing quite fitting.
“What the hell happened to you?” his father says, shaking his head in disgust. “Have you been to a doctor? You’ve got a fractured skull this time, you mark my words. I’d better drive you to the hospital. What’s the matter with your arm, the way you’re holding it?”
Ziv slides the door back across until the latch clicks, then limps back into bed and covers himself with blankets.
When he opens his eyes again, it is nine o’clock. He’s not on until the four-to-ten shift tonight. He hauls himself straight on the mattress and lowers his feet to the floor. His head aches. His whole body, from the soles of his feet right up through his shoulders and neck and into the base of his skull, feels bruised and ready to snap. He looks down at his hands and opens and closes them. They are tight and achy. They feel as though they need to be soaked in hot water until they loosen. He puts the tips of his fingers gently against his injured eye. The swelling has already come down from last night. The eye is open enough that he can see out of it.
He goes downstairs and stops at the doorway to the front room. His mother sits like some Buddhist monk with her eyes closed in the middle of the empty room she’d had him paint white after the explosion.
“Good morning,” he says it anyway, though he knows she won’t answer. He has tried not speaking to her when she is in this state, but that is worse: too much silence. She’ll talk, but she’ll do it later, when she emerges from whatever reverie she is in.
The downstairs is bare and white since his mother threw almost everything they owned into the trash. The house looks so unfamiliar. He sometimes feels out of place here, alien, as though he’s barged into someone else’s place uninvited, but he likes the house empty. It has a refreshing feeling of possibility. On the kitchen table, the newspaper is separated into sections and folded. His father has read it already. On the front page must have been more news about the public inquiry. There are two big squares where articles used to be, a clear view to page 3, where his father clipped what he wanted from the front page. They are testifying now in one of the conference rooms at the new Miner’s Museum in Albion Mines. In the remnants of one article, a little half-paragraph continuation on page 2, there is a list of the names of those who have already testified, along with who is about to. Ziv’s eyes stop at Gavin Fraser’s name. According to the article, he’s on for late morning or early afternoon. Ennis never bothers cutting out pictures, and the photo of Gavin shows him clean-shaven with short hair, neatly parted in the middle. Gavin is a savvy customer, Ziv thinks. For four or five years he’s shaved infrequently and worn his hair long. But he knows he’ll be on national television, and that people are more apt to listen to someone who is clean-cut. According to the miners Ziv’s talked to, Gavin is the star of the inquiry. He is smart enough to explain his points well. He has plenty of mining experience. But, mostly, it is that he quit, and he quit over safety concerns, which makes him a strong witness to the dangerous condition of the mine before the explosion.
