THE DIRT CHRONICLES
Copyright © 2011 by Kristyn Dunnion
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a licence from Access Copyright.
ARSENAL PULP PRESS
#101-211 East Georgia St.
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6A 1Z6
arsenalpulp.com
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for its publishing program, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit Program for its publishing activities.
Efforts have been made to locate copyright holders of source material wherever possible. The publisher welcomes hearing from any copyright holders of material used in this book who have not been contacted.
Lyrics reprinted with permission.
“Black Iron Heart” written and composed by A Storm of Light. “Object, Refuse, Reject Abuse” and “Deaf, Dumb and Male” written and composed by DIRT.
“In The Air Tonight,” Words & Music by Phil Collins, © Copyright 1981 Philip Collins Limited. Imagem Music. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by permission of Music Sales Limited.
An earlier draft of “Stargazing at Eddie’s” was published by Fab 310, December 2006.
An excerpt from “Ferret Hunt” was published in Winterplay! Pinkplaymags, December 2009.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to persons either living or deceased is purely coincidental.
Book design by Shyla Seller
Author photograph by Jamie Carlisle
Cover photography by Lachlan Black, www.flickr.com/photos/thebadseed/
Printed and bound in Canada
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication:
Dunnion, Kristyn, 1969-
The dirt chronicles [electronic resource] / Kristyn Dunnion.
Electronic monograph in PDF format.
Issued also in print format.
ISBN 978-1-55152-431-3
I. Title.
PS8557.U552D57 2011a C813′.6 C2011-903324-0
Acknowledgments
This book is dedicated to the kids.
In loving memory of Will Munro (1975–2010), pied punk piper who brought us all together, and Elizabeth “Luscious” Baxter (1978–2010), who fed us her generous, incomparable love.
Thank you to Carolyn Beck, Anne Laurel Carter, Anna Kerz, Shannon Quinn, and Cheryl Rainfield, who gave tremendous encouragement and critiqued earlier drafts. Thank you to Greg Hawkes, Annie Ouellette, and Annetta and Patrick Dunnion for consultation on vital matters. To Cherish Violet Blood and Tammy Manitowabe who first brought me to Wiky on the Red Pepper Arts Spectacle bus. To John MacDonald, for keeping it real.
The author gratefully acknowledges the Toronto Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Council for financial support.
Contents
Migrant
Two Ton: An Opera in Three Acts
Stargazing at Eddie’s
Seven-Dollar Blow
Happy House
Toddlers and Tiaras
Pig House Party
Shaker Baker
Big House
Piggy Goes to Market
Ferret Hunt: A Three-Act Play
Ledge
Bush
About the Author
Migrant
(for Patrick)
You can blame me for coming up with the plan. But it wasn’t so much forcible confinement or abduction like the papers said. Hell, I rescued this kid from a life of hard labour and petty disappointment. He was born in the wrong place at the wrong time and, frankly, I consider it an act of man-love solidarity, like assisted suicide.
I’d nursed a wicked hangover all day and was finally heading home in the Coupe, sipping a premixed Caesar I kept tucked between my legs. Folks out to see the lake on a Sunday drive, maybe get an ice cream down at the docks, they’d seen my hand-painted sign: Larry’s Putt Putt Minigolf come to slap down their money, have a game with the kids. Sadists, if they knew how little I wanted their business that day with my headache, my dry mouth and withered ego. They were flies buzzing. Their shrieking kids fought over the clubs. Worn out, sweaty and bickering, they were now going home, just like me, east or west on the two-lane highway that followed the Lake Erie shoreline, County Road 20. The sun burned its way to the horizon, overheating the car. Heading west, I had to squint behind the steering wheel, having lost my sunglasses during last night’s debauchery. The windows were all the way down, but driving sixty clicks was not making much breeze.
I cranked the radio—“101 FM, the home of rock and roll, baby!” The steady drum intro, the opening discord, the distorted voice: “Iron Man,” off Black Sabbath’s genius second album. I air-drummed on the wheel, banged my soon-to-be-long-again hair to the beat. I croaked along with Ozzy. The bass line thumped through my dashboard; it jangled the keys that hung by my knee. I wanted to gun it, travel at light speed, and sail in time with the music.
But right ahead of me about a dozen men rode their bicycles in a line at the very edge of the asphalt. A dozen buttoned-up, long-sleeved, cotton-polyester white shirts, all in a row. They wore deep-billed baseball caps—ones with John Deere or Del Monte logos—low over their shining jet hair, shade for the setting sun. They were going home too, back to the shacks they lived in during the months they worked in Ontario. There wasn’t enough room to really pass them safely, and the east-bound cars were not budging. Bikes often got bullied into the gravel shoulder on this stretch of road, even beyond it, sometimes landing in the deep ditches that collect run-off rain water from the fields. Probably because of that, no one other than migrant workers ever rode along here. Christ, they had no other way to get around. I may be a First Class Ass, as Sharon liked to say, but I’m not a road hog.
I was at the tail end of their parade, debating whether or not to pass them all. That’s when I first noticed the kid, one dark rebel in the line of white-and-beige clothes. I thought I was hallucinating. I leaned into the glare. I took my foot off the gunner, let the engine purr down. No. It just so happened he was wearing a Sabbath 1978 World Tour T-shirt, faded black. I used to have the same one. His black hat was swivelled sideways and his red bandanna was tied around his face like a bank robber’s, I guess to keep out field dust, whipped up by the cars.
I kept pace with the kid and watched out the side window. He immediately turned toward the music. He tugged the bandanna down and grinned, his dazzling smile a lightning bolt that split his handsome brown face almost in two. A balloon expanded inside my chest, making it tight and hot in there. Devil horns up, the kid shook his hand at me. I shook mine back. The kid belted out the chorus and I joined in. We were heavy metal brothers, separated at birth.
Behind me some jackass honked. I gave the one-finger salute out my window. Can’t even have a quality rock-and-roll moment with a stranger, for Chrissakes. The driver shook his hands from behind the wheel of his Honda Civic. Times have changed when you can drive foreign around here and not be worried about a slit tire or a fist fight. Mostly we got Chryslers and GM trucks, even though the auto industry pretty much laid off every other uncle. Someone else honked farther back in the line of cars forming behind me, our procession dragging into the sunset ahead. Honda Civic jackass behind me edged into the oncoming lane. He wanted to pass on a solid with hardly a breath before the oncoming car. I rode the line to block him, tell him what’s what.
>
Sharon always called me a stubborn man. Maybe. But the hell I was heaving off for some ’tard in an import. I drained my Caesar and lobbed the empty bottle into the back seat. I was beginning to consider myself the kid’s bodyguard, a dark green 1969 Impala patrolling beside his bike, like we were in a gang. I waited for the instrumental part of the song, where the drums go crazy and your blood runs faster. I revved my engine. Giving the cyclists a wide berth, I gunned it, scaring the east-bound cars. I peeled away, the kid still rocking it old-school, thumbs up. I laid some fast tracks. About a quarter mile up, I cut a sharp right onto a side road, fishtailing into the dirt, sending a spray of small stones and dust onto that twat Honda that was trying to keep up with me.
Ah, did that kid ever make my day.
But seriously, you got to know those shirts aren’t easy to come by. Not even here in Ass Crack, Ontario, where the mullet never left and acid-wash jeans are still raring to go. Later that night, I decimated the neighbours with The Number of the Beast, my nearly forgotten Iron Maiden record. I downed a quart of rye and ginger ale. I dug through my drawers, the hall closet, the now empty second bedroom (Sharon’s World), and even the mildewy boxes in the garage. I was searching for lost treasure—ripped posters I once worshipped on my bedroom walls, concert shirts I’d long since outgrown, my vinyl collection, my most sacred teenaged belongings. Underneath a box of Star Wars action figures was the dispossessed electric guitar and amp of my youth. I’d forgotten all about it. Poor baby. I opened the dusty case. The sunburst Fender glared. I lifted it. “Shh, shh,” I slurred. I dragged the amp into the living room and cleared out a corner.
After Sharon moved in, I’d packed my crap up, bit by bit. She complained she had no space for her shit. Sharon. What the hell had I been thinking? Clearly I would’ve been a famous musician by now, if I hadn’t let that woman run my life. I left my rediscovered things strewn about the bungalow and in piles on the lawn. The mess announced my triumphant return to bachelorhood. Maybe I’d even get a roommate, a partner in crime! Still, no matter how many cupboards I rifled through, how much crap I dumped on the floor, I couldn’t find that one missing box. Where was the damn shirt?
I stumbled through the living room, tripped on an open suitcase and landed on the worn out couch. I decided to stay there. I was hammered again. My last thought, before passing out, was highly unoriginal and not worth repeating.
I woke with a pain between my eyes. My mossy tongue rotted in my foul mouth. Sunlight from the living room window burned a thin strip across the couch, across my face. My pits reeked. My skin was clammy. No surprise, really. In Ass Crack, summers are hot, humid. By mid-morning your clothes stick to you, your hair goes frizzy and awful. Noon, it’s unbearable. You wouldn’t know that unless you’re from here or you been here.
I thought about the hot drive to work. About sitting in that stifling shack where I rented out the clubs. Who would choose to do this today? I was my own boss. Then I thought about my Visa bill, cable, alimony—to make any money, I’d have to deal with people. I’d have to sit there and smile and try not to let my ghastly beer farts scare them off. Groan. I rolled over, blocking the hot sun strip with my shoulder. I faced the back of the ratty couch. It was the Summer of Suck.
When you’re a kid, you live for it. No school, no job. You bust out in all your heated glory like a feral Tom running the neighbourhood, all day long and half the night, too. When you get sick of the heat or if you have cousins visiting, you go down to Lake Erie. There’s always someone there. You go west to Cedar Beach; there’s the broken pier you dive off, the best spot being right by the warning sign about rocks. Or off the bridge, where you find one or two old men trolling for catfish. There’s Ken’s Variety and Bait Shoppe, where you get candy and ice cream and worms for your line. The actual beach has usually got dead fish on the sand, clumps of stinking seaweed, tampon applicators, and broken glass. But the water is not too deep and the waves are nice and big.
When you’re a teenager, you get the beach bonfires going at night. You steal booze from your parents’ stash or you pay that old wino in town an extra dollar to buy a bottle at the liquor store. You get kids to bring their teenaged cousins so you can all check each other out. You roast marshmallows, you try to make out. Someone always drinks too much and then they puke.
When you’re an adult, though, you mostly just stay in town or out on the concession roads, wherever you live, and suffer the heat. You get up and go to work and earn your shit pay. You come home, eat too much, and sweat in front of the television. You drink yourself to sleep. You dream of an air conditioner on sale at the Walmart.
Yes, sir. Ass Crack is hot and flat and the fields run for miles, except where the roads cut through. Nowadays the fields are almost all covered by aluminum-framed plastic greenhouses, hundreds of them everywhere, unending. Fields or greenhouses, you still need hard workers to turn and plant and tend and pick food from dirt. To lug those heavy tomato crates, those fruit baskets, those apples and cherries, peppers and squash. I did it myself for a few years: detassling corn with the other pot-smoking burn-outs when I was sixteen, finally tall enough. Nearly broke my back picking beans and strawberries, too. Nowadays, kids don’t do that. They got machines for the corn, and foreigners for the picking.
“Seems to me our only real shortage is hard-working Canadians.” I drained more of my beer and belched. “’Spite of all those layoffs.” I looked around the pub for a response. A circle of large, balding men glared. One particularly neckless dude wearing a Windsor Spitfires jersey growled.
“You’re too good for fieldwork?” I said. “You got something better to do?”
The beer-bellied dude at the next barstool told me to shut up. He was solid, like a Kenmore fridge. His nostrils flared.
The bartender slapped my bill on the bar. “I’d pay that before Donny here kicks your teeth in,” he said.
“My point,” I continued, “is nobody here wants to break their back in the heat for shit money. Cushy union brats.”
Donny stood up. “Get your ass out of here, goof.” He pushed me hard in the chest.
No one had touched me in a long time.
The bartender tapped the circled total on my bill. I pulled out my wallet.
“Used to be Frenchies, come pick the fruit,” I mumbled. “Then Haitians. Now it’s Mexicans. Salvadorans.” My chest glowed where Donny’s meaty hand had been. In my confused state, it felt a bit like love.
The bartender did not give me my change.
“Ah, fuck it,” I said. I walked towards the door. “You’d think there’d be open minds in a big city like Windsor. Can’t even talk to some people.”
I left, but not before urinating on the front stoop.
Take that, assholes.
The other thing about Windsor, any city really, is you can’t see a thing in the night sky, all those buildings, that electric light. But out in the country, now that’s darkness. Sky so black you can taste it. And the stars—it’s like God puked up a glow stick. Barns as large as ships: invisible in the night, unless they’re splattered with oncoming headlights. The horses, the pigs are all tucked into their stalls. Hens curled up quiet as cats around the yard. No cows here, no rolling hills for grazing, nothing like that. It’s dead flat.
Cops just sit out at the Fifth Concession, that notorious country road, and turn out their lights. They see everyone coming down from the bypass, coming back from Windsor like me, or from the bush parties or whatnot, and they clock you without batting a lash. Unless you’re in the habit of driving blind, like I am, when you outsmart those fucks at their own game and shut off your headlights. Which reminded me to roll up the window—didn’t need to tip them off with my favourite station filling the air with power chords: Steppenwolf, Rush, April Wine. Driving blind, I didn’t even need to stop at the signs. I’d just plow straight home fast as I liked, tight as I was. I could always see some joker coming at me, right, cuz he’d have his lights on. I sang out loud when they cued up Led Zeppe
lin: “Been a long lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time.”
I was thumping the steering wheel, keeping the beat. I’d already forgotten those knobs at the bar. I was remembering being sixteen, getting my licence, shitting myself, and driving for the first time on this very road in broad daylight. I had reached over to change the radio station and ended up in a twelve-foot ditch—true story. Right about here. Driving just ain’t right without music. Around here, folks got a healthy respect for country classics, a mild curiosity about the blues—what started it all—but mostly, a god-sworn allegiance to classic rock.
That got me thinking. A guy doesn’t just give away his concert shirts. No, sir. That’s unheard of. I was wondering about that rebel Mexican, working the fields and wearing the Sabbath. How the hell did he get a hold of that shirt? Maybe that makes me a jerk, but honestly. And why couldn’t I find mine? I used to wear it every day of the week. Obviously, I was not at that show; it was given to me on my thirteenth birthday by a favourite uncle when he found out I loved metal. He’d been there, in person. It was a rite of passage, getting that holy relic. I’d give my left nut to teleport back in time and tailgate party my way around, worshipping at the band’s platform heels.
Who am I kidding? I’d give them both.
I woke with a start. It was this side of dawn; I could tell by the strange light that stole through the window where my bedroom curtains did not quite meet in the middle. I looked out of habit but, of course, Sharon wasn’t on her side. I blinked.
It was obvious. Some dude, possibly even a buddy of mine I hadn’t seen in years, probably keeled over and died. His mother or worse, his wife or live-in girlfriend, probably packed up those hallowed shirts and dropped them down at the charity Goodwill. The nerve. That Mexican kid might have scored an entire lifetime supply of rock and metal paraphernalia for a few bucks.
And why shouldn’t he?
That was Sharon’s voice haunting me from beyond divorce court.
Is he less deserving than you and your fat, balding friends?
The Dirt Chronicles Page 1
