The Dirt Chronicles

by Kristyn Dunnion

  I coughed. Had I really imposed my sweaty incompetent self into her private life? I was incredulous. I fiddled with the radio, leaving it between stations so static hissed in their ears and they could no longer sing their three-part harmony. The white noise also set me on edge. When will we get to the campsite? Might I stab these girls with a marshmallow roaster? Couldn’t I take some pills and just die?

  I tried to tune them out and watched the drama in the BMW ahead of us. Some alpha male was arguing with his wife, gesticulating wildly. I watched him ream out his better half, the kids, even the dog, all the way down Spadina Avenue. What a shitty way to start their weekend. Suddenly there was a crash. The next thing you know, his SUV was wrapped around the guardrail and our car was rammed up his bumpered ass. There were the stuttered thuds of all those other miserable carloads slamming into us. It was quiet. Doors opened and shut, faces got red. Mouths opened. There was yelling. Finger pointing. Cell phones popping open. Sirens started up in the distance, and cars honked loudly.

  We were all fine. Physically.

  “Wow,” I said after a long pause. I undid my seat belt. My ears were ringing. I found my crumpled glasses on the dashboard. I put them back on. Linda looked at me as though I was a stranger. Her blonde hair was lopsided, the derelict ponytail askew. “Are you all right?” I asked. She blinked. The other girls were just as silent. I peered into the back seat; Karen had lipstick smeared across her face. A broken chunk of it was mashed against her cheek. The girls were in shock, maybe. Brittany sniffled. I felt as though I should do something, anything, but I had no idea what that might be. I got out of the car. I closed the door. The three girls looked like those dogs at the pound, their big eyes welling up inside the smeary glass partition.

  What did they want from me? I hated this, the whole mess. People began to crowd around, their voices raised and their arms waving, pointing.

  Just then, who came chugging around the bend, no-handed on his gorgeous, custom-built bike, but Two Ton. His T-shirt was wrapped around his head like a turban, and his skin warmed to the open sky. His wide chest and abs were clearly defined. I felt a strangeness in my belly. Blood pumped through me. His heavy bike lock chain hung around his neck so that he looked like some Eastern European gangster. He guffawed at the wreck, at our bad luck, and at the joke of his self-powered thin metal frame coasting past us. He was an evolved creature pedalling away from this ecological disaster. We all stood silent, watching him glide past into a sleek future without us. He was so cheerful, so free, as he sped toward the next exit that led down to the waterfront trails.

  My bike was on the roof rack, heating in the sun. I didn’t think twice. I unfastened it, flipped it down to the hot asphalt, and opened the back seat door. My backpack was there, wedged in between the girls. I grabbed it, hopped on my bike, and raced to catch up. I left behind my percentage of the groceries, a prepaid gas card, and a wicked stash of premium weed, scored from my roommate at Linda’s request. It was wonderfully liberating, the best ride of my life. Those hundreds of metres along the highway, uninterrupted asphalt all my own: Two Ton a small blip on the road ahead of me, the girls, the cars, the chaos, and conflict left far behind. I beamed like some demented kid, catching fruit flies in my teeth. I choked them down when I laughed out loud. I hooted, tried standing on my pedals to really catch the wind. It billowed up my shirt and made the fabric flap with joy.

  Two Ton was down at the water skipping stones and drinking beer from a can when I caught up. I stood awkwardly, waiting. Again, I had nothing to say to him, nothing to offer. I spat out some mashed bugs. Not too far away seagulls shrieked and fought over a bag of potato chips. Two Ton looked at me carefully, not smiling.

  “Hi,” I said. I coughed and spat out another batch of bug saliva.

  He nodded, seemed to make a decision, and tossed me a beer from his pack. His hands hung long at his sides, swinging beside his ham-hock thighs that poured from ripped jean shorts. I sat down and opened the can. Beer foamed up over my fingers as I slurped it.

  “You’re the black tower guy,” he said.

  “Uh …” I wasn’t sure what he meant.

  “The photocopy dude.”

  I shrugged. “Mister Machine,” I said quietly and licked my foam moustache nervously.

  “Mister Machine, hmm?” He said it evenly. Not especially friendly. Not how he usually sounded at work. “You follow me around?”

  I started to think this was a terrible idea. “Uh …” I swallowed the beer. I wondered if he was going to beat the crap out of me and spoil all those Golden Boy fantasies I’d been having—the ones where we saved each others’ lives and hung out doing guy things, like playing squash and fishing off the end of some lonely pier.

  “You gay?” The way he said that word made it seem bolder and a bit uglier than I had recently come to think of it. It shocked me that he’d say the word aloud, that I’d be suspected of such a thing, that he’d reduced it all down to something so base, so pedestrian.

  “I have a girlfriend,” I said, in a warbling voice. It sounded phony, even to me.

  “I don’t,” he said. And that was it.

  In an instant, everything changed. My growing obsession with him, the dreams I’d had, the roiling heat in my belly, the fact that I’d deserted my girlfriend in a crisis to follow his godlike body to the beach. This clearly was something quite different from a regular fraternal overture. In that flash I realized how transparent my own undiagnosed longing must be. I blinked, stupidly.

  Gay.

  He turned away from me and tossed one more flat stone so that it skipped in a graceful curve leading away from us five, six times, before settling to the sandy bottom. He was just that kind of guy. I watched him differently now, up close, without the affable weekday veneer that I supposed was his armour in the corporate world. Then he turned suddenly, held a hand up to shade his eyes from the bright sun. He was looking right at me.

  “You coming?” he said. It wasn’t a question. Not really.

  He hopped on his bike and I followed. I don’t know how I managed to ride all the way across town to his warehouse loft. The traffic sounds merged with heavy construction machinery as we passed road crews and skeleton sites of future condos. Drills blasted through cement, trucks beeped in reverse and dumped their loads onto the dry ground. I couldn’t breathe—from the dust and physical exertions and from the strangeness of it all, the day, the turn of events, my good fortune. “Red-blooded woman!”

  At the warehouse, he hoisted his bike on his shoulder and took the stairs two at a time, up to the fourth floor. I was sweating, shaking with fatigue. My nose ran from the effort, and I was terrified that I might faint, might fall backwards and be crushed under the weight of my rusting bicycle. Somehow I willed myself up those same stairs. The hallway was deserted when I got there. I stood still, trying to catch my breath. I wondered if this still might end badly. He might leap out at me, for instance, and his courier friends could lynch me, or worse, mock my apparent desire.

  “Hello?” I called. “Two Ton?” And then the door ahead on my left swung open. Two Ton stood in the doorway wearing nothing but his chain lock draped across his perfect chest. I dropped my bike.

  He smiled lazily and leaned deeper into the wooden frame. He chugged from a new can of beer and watched me carefully. He was built, as they say, like a brick shit house. Like he hadn’t been born so much as unloaded from a refrigerator box, already assembled. Tall, yes, but with large, square shoulders that his massive arms dropped from. A nipple on one of his smooth pecs winked at me from behind the thick chain. Hints of his ribs framed his muscled belly. I looked to the hard flat area below his navel. He had those shelf-like muscles above his hips that male models and athletes get. His thighs, as I already knew, were perfectly formed. I stared at his overdeveloped calves, down to his bare feet. Two Ton cleared his throat loudly. I looked back up at his wide grin, his beaming face, but not before noting his ample and aroused genitals.

  “Coming?” H
e was enjoying my obvious distress. He raised his hands playfully, like he was under casual arrest, and turned slowly. His back was a wide muscled expanse, his buttocks perfectly toned. I had never seen such beauty, never in my life. What could he possibly want with me? Bubbles of feeling choked me. I thought I might weep, he was so perfect. Two Ton glanced over his shoulder and winked. “I promise I von’t hurt you,” he said. “Much.”

  I left my bike on the hallway floor and stepped forward.

  Act Three: Blackened Metal

  I spent Labour Day weekend in the strange kingdom of Two Ton’s loft. He talked easily and brought me out of my shell. He was naked most of the time, but I never tired of looking at him. He was comfortable in his body as he moved around the space, pointing out his various treasures. Two Ton didn’t have a television. There were books, a record player, some albums, little carvings he made with a knife, some cracked dishes. He had extension cords strung up, power bars taped to the walls, old lamps stuck haphazardly on tiny shelves he had nailed erratically to the wooden support beams. Whatever he possessed, he said proudly, he had mostly pulled from other people’s trash.

  “Hey, look,” he said. He waved a CD at me. Claude Debussy. “I listened after that time, you know. It reminds me of black metal. So intense.”

  I had no idea what he meant, but I was thrilled that he remembered our encounter in the men’s room. That he cared enough about that sonata to locate a copy, and that I had been the one to tell him the composer’s name.

  We drank endless beers from his old fridge and crushed the empty cans dramatically, then tossed them into a growing pile in the corner. There was a hot plate and a plug-in kettle, but we ate spaghetti cold, right out of the can. He juggled tennis balls. We pelted them against the bare wall until a neighbour pounded loudly and swore at us in French. We smoked joint after joint; time stopped altogether. He played Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Slayer. We sang with Rob Halford to “Living After Midnight,” Two Ton in his marvellous baritone, me an alto who attempted falsetto now and again, which brought us to fits of laughter. My life, whatever it had been, no longer existed. My name no longer mattered. He called me Mister or sometimes Machine, which made me smile. I was in that perfect moment, and though I could scarcely believe it, Two Ton seemed to like me.

  We worked our way through his music collection, a great deal of which included black metal bands, Norwegian and otherwise. The drumming was intense—long repetitive instrumental passages with shrieking, grunting vocals and fast tremolo picking on distorted guitars. Some songs were slower with atmospheric wailing and foreboding gloom. I’d never heard most of it before: Bathory, Venom, Darkthrone. Two Ton gave a lecture on the history of the first and second waves of black metal, talked about Swedish and Norwegian rivalry, and described the battles of various metal subcultures: death, doom, gothic, glam, industrial, sludge, speed, stoner—the list was endless. His detailed knowledge impressed me. He was an open encyclopedia to a world I knew nothing about. The music loosed a primitive urge in me that grew the more I drank and smoked. I collapsed on his torn couch and closed my eyes. I imagined wolves, priestesses, medieval weapons, revenge. “Feed on my black iron heart!”

  When I opened my eyes, Two Ton was kneeling on the floor in front of me. He placed his warm hands on my thighs and looked at me intently. I felt the stirrings almost immediately. It seemed to be what he was waiting for. Two Ton effortlessly peeled off my shirt. He undid my jeans, yanked them down around my ankles. He massaged my astonished flesh as I struggled to tug the pants over my large feet. I was naked. I tried to hide myself from him, kept my arms folded over my thin chest, but he pulled those back too, like they were just another layer of clothing. He stared into my nervous face and told me exactly what he would do, and then he did each purposeful thing. At some point we were on the floor rolling, kissing. Then we were half on his old futon mattress. He held me, sometimes stroked my face, talked quietly to me, and watched me closely, as though to gauge meaning from every surprised little sound I made. I didn’t know my own skin until he brought heat to it. I was as cherished as any bride, blank as any slate. I grew bold touching him, trying to learn what he liked, what I liked.

  In between exertions, we lay in tangled sheets on his bed. He slept soundly, curled into me, his even breath warming my neck. He was a boy then, perfect and passive, and that’s when I stared outright: his chiselled profile, the cleft chin, those pale lashes. I traced his smooth flesh with my fingers. I was perplexed by his beauty and bruised by his attentions. I felt profoundly alive, I realized. As though my whole life had been a series of bumbling missteps that had eventually lead right to this perfect moment in time.

  Two Ton would wake suddenly from these naps and begin speaking of his old life, the one he had before coming to Canada. He was from some country in the eastern end of Europe that nobody ever pronounced properly. “Anyvay,” he said, “my village changed names so much—every time some army march through it—even I don’t know vat to call it now.”

  “Plus,” he said to my undoubtedly uncomprehending face, “every time they march, they destroy more of the crops me and my father plant. Hard to be a farmer ven there’s nothing to farm.” Then he playfully decked me with a pillow.

  I threw myself and the pillow on top of him, tried to tackle him, but he crushed me in a suffocating embrace. He squeezed the air from my lungs. My eyes bulging, face reddening, he kissed me tenderly. It was gentle torture, but torture nonetheless. This time when we did it, he paired every sensual gesture with an uncomfortable one. He’d move his wet mouth along me slowly, but only while I was pinned in a half nelson. He’d tease my nipples, but choke me simultaneously. I hated and loved it. At first I struggled, but there was no point. He knew what he wanted. He knew what I wanted too, and that was the miracle. That he could see me for what I had always been when nobody else bothered to wonder. Not even me. “Black Metal ist Krieg!”

  Later he elaborated about that land of his. He said, “Those hungry soldiers take everything. The best food, even the good soil, goes avay vith them.” It got sucked into the soles of their battered army boots, leaving angry sand behind. Dirt, unable or unwilling to support the potatoes and sugar beets, cabbage and onions. Dirt that one year finally gave up, even on itself, and let the wind send it stinging into the drying river beds. While he spoke, I tugged on his fingers, thick like sausage and always slightly curled from use, from gripping handlebars and hoisting heavy bags. And before that, from lifting machinery, cleaning stalls, and roping calves.

  “But how did you end up here?” I asked again. I wanted to know exactly how fate had delivered this gift to me, what stars had aligned for this unexpected purpose. How could he come from some mud-entrenched village on the other side of the world and end up in Toronto, racing through the business district delivering packages for a pittance? Better yet, how had I ended up here, crushed in his embrace, sweated upon, kissed and cursed so equally?

  Two Ton lit a cigarette. He exhaled and, after a bit, passed it to me. He said, “My father, he vas old and sick. He had nothing. He couldn’t pay his loans for seed and equipment. He vould not even pay one cent to that bank. It humiliated him.”

  I passed the smoke back and he took hits off it, staring into space. Two Ton swigged the last of his beer, then dropped the end of the cigarette into the can. He swished it around, and I heard the faint hiss as it extinguished itself.

  “All the men in my family—father, grandfather, great-grandfather, uncles—ve have this same farm. Grow the same food every year. The village eats our food—some others, too, but mostly ours. This is vat ve do.” He told this part like it was a story from an old book, familiar and comforting.

  I thought of my own father then. I had no idea if he had such a legacy, if he was shouldering some masculine code handed down to him by his father, and so on. I scarcely remembered my grandfather. My father was a stooped, mild man of medium build, who quietly left for work each morning. He quietly returned around six o’clock each nigh
t and ate my mother’s meals while listening to her chatter, always seeming vaguely removed from it all. He’d relax in front of the television. He sometimes read a newspaper or a mystery novel, until he’d stand up and say goodnight to all present, then quietly go down the hallway to bed. Like clockwork. Who knew what the man actually thought about anything?

  Two Ton said that, to deepen the frown between his brows, all his father had to do was look up the road at dust blowing from the empty field, or out back at the dull brown land, or to the empty barn where the animals had once been, or at the flat-tired truck he’d driven to market twice every week since he was eleven years old. “This vent on for a long time,” he said. He leapt over to the fridge and grabbed another can of beer, opened it, and slurped at the foam. “Until von day.” Two Ton’s eyes glittered. “My father got out of his creaky chair; he make a pile of all the coins he finds in the house. He writes a letter to me. All his thoughts, you know?” He walked back and sat on the edge of the mattress with me.

  I leaned closer. I lay my warm hands on either side of his spine, flattened them against the places where his lungs would be. I could feel his heart pumping inside there, strong and regular.

  “He smokes. He cleans the ash. Then he picks up his coat, his hat, and his gun and valks in straight line past the fields, into the bush.” Two Ton turned and stared right through me. “He use his last bullet.”

  We were quiet for a while. I had no idea what to say, but my hands smoothed his skin, like he was one of the broken copiers at work. Two Ton seemed distant, aloof. He was perhaps tired of me being there. It had been two or three days and, after all, we were virtual strangers. I had never spent such a long uninterrupted period of time with anyone. I’d never heard anything so personal.