Lew’s throat is tight. The veteran passing on his wealth of battle knowledge to the greenhorn. He manages to croak, “Yeah, I can’t believe how much trouble he had even using the shovel. He barely had the stamina to last through his first shift. The things some people won’t do for money.”
Ted tilted his head toward the table. He shrugged and said, “Yeah.”
Lew felt his face flush even hotter. His attempted Ashley-bash and feeble joke were a complete fail. He quickly said, “So, you have a daughter. Do you have any other kids?”
“Nope,” Ted replied. “Lourdes is the only child of two only children. Took her on the service lift once when she was way small. She freaked, poor little thing. I felt so bad for her.”
“I’m an only child too. Do you carry a photograph of her?”
Ted patted his overall pockets and said, “No photo, but she draws me some pretty good pictures.” He pulled a piece of pink construction paper from his overall’s inside pocket.
The pencil crayon rendering of a large man and small girl was well proportioned and not the usual childish stick figures. Two people, both with flaming orange hair, stood holding hands on an obvious shore.
“Not bad,” Lew said, but he was more intrigued by the couplet written in gel pen under the drawing: If only you and me/could dwell beside the sea.
“‘Dwell?’” Lew said. “Pretty adult word. How old is she?”
Taking the drawing back, Ted stared at it a moment. “Eleven. Reads, writes, and draws all the time. She leaves these notes under my pillow. Poor little thing — with all these double shifts and busy weekends I hardly get to see her. Once the new contract quotas are filled though, I’m going to change my ways and I’ll spend a lot more time with her.”
Goddammit is right. Lew’s throat is again tight as he bikes into the gravel parking lot of the Motel 6. The older the rock the deeper underground you go. Yes, that old rock is constant like the bonds between veteran and raw recruit, journeyman and apprentice. I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve a mentor like Ted, but I’d definitely watch Schindler’s List with him, anytime. And cherish the moment.
Unlocking the door to his room, he turns on the light and strides to the telephone. Listening to the ring indicator, he prays Ang is back from her Manitoba trip and that she won’t be too mad at him for calling her past midnight.
Lost in his own thoughts, Lew pays little attention to the memorial service that is nearing its conclusion. Ang is his lifeline. He clings desperately to her.
At the start of his bus trip to Saskatoon after his last afternoon shift, he’d stared vacantly out of the window at the rolling, brushy, prairie landscape and the last of the dispersing plume from the mine. He’d felt as if the service shaft’s tubing had ruptured and the water-bearing strata between the surface and underground mine site was inundating him; drowning him.
Ted had intended to work overtime straight through, with maybe one day off between the switch from afternoon to midnight shifts. Even though he had wanted to stay with Ted and Hal and work the overtime with them, he needed the four-day break. That last rotation on afternoon shift had been a stupidly long eight-day stretch and he hadn’t seen Ang for more than two weeks. But all during the bus ride and even from the moment Ang picked him up at the bus depot, he was distracted, thinking about Ted. His distraction even resulted in them falling asleep in each other’s arms that first night.
Next day, when they heard on the CBC news that there had been an accident at the mine, a fatality, he immediately thought of Ted.
Ang called both of her part-time jobs and said she wasn’t coming to work due to a family emergency and drove them both back to Liverwood.
A swirl of activity followed. He remembers Hal’s grey-blue eyes, vacant and moist. Hal said that Ted had collapsed and tumbled over the railing of the centrifuge platform. He had hit his head on one of the conveyors and then was taken by ambulance to Yorkton. “We did everything we could. But the ambulance was too slow.”
Ted’s ashes are carried out of the chapel by the funeral director. The tiny woman shuffles beside him and the tall, bald man and the woman in her old-fashioned long black dress, again holding the hands of that little girl with the flaming red hair, follow.
Then mourners, row by row.
Lew leans against Ang, his arm around her waist, as they make their way outside.
Aware only of the sunshine and the mine’s plume reflecting bright white overhead, he sees Hal standing alone in the crowd, his eyes glistening like a hopelessly lost child; perhaps in a pit deep underground.
They approach Hal and he says in a humourless monotone, “You staying on at the mine? There’s an opening now.”
He replies, also humourlessly, “Of course. How could I possibly give up the name Lulubelle?”
They stand in silence until Hal starts to shake. He drops his head and grasps his forehead with both hands. “He was so tired from all those extra shifts, trying to get out of the red. I told him not to take off his hardhat. I told him, Lulubelle, but he didn’t hear me . . . ”
Lew can’t speak. He simply opens his arms and Hal looks up and they embrace. He feels all of Hal’s muscle and sinew collapse into saggy tailings.
Lew is upright, steadfast, while the miners hold onto one another tightly for a wordless minute.
Leaving With Lena
DILLON POKED AT THE SCUM floating on his coffee with a stir stick. He then leaned back in his chair, an ergonomically correct, high-backed tilter that did not match the hideous beige of his 48” cubicle panels. The two guest chairs, intended for visiting external sales people, also a vague and worn beige, sat in front of his dark brown, teak-laminate desk.
Rubbing his eyes, he signed into the Procurement Request system on his computer. His first requisition was for drills and drill bit sets for the general maintenance department at the mine site. He sat back again and wondered if Lena was already at her battered secretarial desk across the office, out of his line of sight. Maybe he should clean the coffee maker instead of filling orders. “Or not,” he said out loud. “Not in my job specs.”
“What’s that you’re muttering there, Dial-on?” said Buck, a co-worker in internal supply and distribution and sometime drinking buddy. He plopped down in one of the guest chairs. His convenience-store thermal cup, with the vendor’s name worn off, was so full, coffee slopped out of the holes in the lid.
“Exactly. Just muttering, Puck,” replied Dillon.
“Geez, sitting around talking to yourself, pally? You really need to get laid. Anyway, have we got a story to tell you. You know Johnathon the summer student?”
“Never heard of him. The only summer student I know around here is Lena, doing some sort of Religious Studies master’s degree. I do know a Johnathon who’s a co-op Admin student slotted as a junior buyer for his work term.”
Buck took a noisy and exaggerated slurp of his coffee. “Dick-less, Dial-on. How could I forget that rhetoric is not in your repertoire. Mr. Liter-alley himself.”
“Well, at least I have a marginal command of the English language, unlike some Bumbling-Bucks I could name. Do you even know what rhetoric means?”
“Doesn’t matter. I came to tell you that we all went for beers last night and got kinda goofing around and got into the dare thing. So, we dared Johnathon to smell Lena’s chair seat and he did it.”
“Lame. You’re losing what little talent you never had.” Dillon took a swallow of his own coffee. “Try harder.”
“It’s no joke. It’s totally true. And totally weird. Like, I mean, he got down on his knees and really took a whiff. A normal guy would just jerk around and then pretend to sniff and come up laughing when everybody groans. But he stayed there. And when he came up, he kinda had this look on his face.”
“What look?”
“A weird look — on his face. He wasn’t laughing. He just kinda smirked. The guy’s on something or he’s a total jerk-meister.”
“And you’re not all of the abov
e? How many beers did it take you idiots to come up with this?”
“No, you moron. I’m serious. Give Elmo or Billy a blast. They’ll confirm.”
“Oh, sure, let me confirm with Mr. Buck Van-Pretense’s not-so-stealthy stooges. I’m supposed to call your co-conspirators to lend credibility to the fables of Aesop sitting across from me here? Good luck.”
“Shit, Dillon. You’re such a boner since you and Tiffany hit the skids.”
Tiffany and Dillon had been an item for over three years. They met when Tiffany was a sales rep for a stationary company selling office supplies to Liverwood Mines. When she started working for an insurance agency and any perception of corporate impropriety was eliminated, Dillon asked her on a date. Six months after that, he moved into her condominium, hoped he could calm her down, steer her away from her self-destructive binges; for example: spontaneous bar-top stripteases down to her underclothes. He’d wanted to get her away from the Buck-like slouches who leered and slobbered over her runway body and exotic, shoulder-length black hair. In return, she came up with venomous and unjustified accusations when he even looked at another girl. This cycle only ended with him learning to match her drink for drink. They both spiralled downward, with booze-saturated puke on the bathroom floor or in the kitchen sink, and one or the other sleeping on the couch, and after a 500 ml container of margarine splattered on the wall inches from his head and his fist flew past Tiffany’s face and punched a hole in the drywall, he moved to his own place. That was a couple months ago.
Buck swirled the coffee in his cup. “You’re better off without her, you know.”
“That much I’ve figured out. Haven’t you got work to do?”
Buck stood up. “I don’t know why I bother with you. My advice still stands.”
“What advice?”
“Get laid. I saw Deirdre on my way in. She’s wearing that sweet, lowcut top.”
“Duly noted, pally. And hey,” Dillon waited until Buck turned back, “come up with a better story.”
Buck shook his head and said, “You’re boring. I gotta check out what Lena’s got on today.”
Lena had been at her desk when Dillon met her on her first day. She gave him a friendly and welcoming good morning and a warm smile. He stood still and took in this thin, but well proportioned, plain-faced girl with freckles on her upper cheeks, and strawberry-blonde hair that hung in a curled mess down to her shoulders; her petite nose wrinkled slightly with that smile.
He introduced himself and immediately retreated to the break room for a desperately needed cup of coffee. He was in shock and awe; Lena, he perceived, was some sort of angelic antithesis to Tiffany.
Back at his desk, he decided that Lena’s friendliness was the total opposite of the overt hostility underlying the whole department. He wondered if she actually was an angel.
That afternoon break, he went to find Buck and the others. The three of them were swarming around her desk like wasps at an open pop can.
“Come on chumm . . . ps,” he said, attempting to deflect attention away from her. “Break time. Let’s go.”
“Hey Dillon,” replied Buck, putting his hand on Lena’s shoulder, “Have you met our new acquisition?”
“Come on.” Dillon marched toward the exit but the others didn’t budge. Lena kept typing, her shoulders taut, expression neutral.
He turned back to grab Buck by his shirt collar but Johnathon appeared. He yelled, “Hey, Lena. You know stuff about spreadsheets.” He elbowed his way between Lena and Buck. “Can you open file manager and go to the budget shared drive? I think I screwed up a range of cells in one of the files.” He leaned over her shoulder and directed her to the appropriate network drive.
Lena’s shoulders visibly relaxed. After a minute, the wasps leisurely drifted off to join Dillon for coffee break. He never saw that angelic smile again.
He shook his head to clear thoughts of Lena and drained his cup. He proceeded to work through requisitions for hand tools, bearings for roller assemblies, and a portable 6.5 HP generator. He called different vendors and checked online prices and got delivery costs to the mine site.
He soon found himself thinking about Johnathon. The guy was in his early thirties, the same age as him and Buck and their office cohorts. But unlike he and the others, who all had gone right from high school to Admin degrees and turned into some sort of office-drones — which is what he felt he presently was — Johnathon had spent ten years working fast food kitchens and nighttime security jobs, including a year-long stint as a “swabbie” on a container ship. It was only after his time at sea that Johnathon signed up for his Co-op Admin Degree. He was therefore a mystery. He occasionally tagged along for after-work drinks but only when cajoled.
Dillon wondered why they’d all gone for drinks without him last night.
He scanned the break room. Johnathon was by himself, tapping on his Android tablet, a half-empty orange juice bottle on the table beside him. Dillon poured himself a cup of coffee and approached the table.
Johnathon looked up, nodded. “Solo today?” he said. “Where’s Buck and buddies?”
“Who cares. What’s this I hear about you going for brewskies with those clowns?”
“We went over to The Cavern for a few drinks and a bite to eat, yes.” Johnathon hesitated. “I expected you to show up.”
“I was on suicide watch last night.”
“Your ex still?”
“Tiffany seems to think I owe her money for unequal contributions to living expenses over the years.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Not your problem. So, Buck told me about the chair. What’s the scoop?”
Johnathon turned off his tablet and set it down. “That’s straight to the point. I did not smell her chair when they dared me.”
“And?”
“And nothing. I am so tired of their stupid jokes. Why don’t they just shut up about Lena and leave her alone?”
Dillon pushed thoughts of Lena from his mind and studied Johnathon. He had a mass of dirty blond hair, always in disarray, and his slightly bulging eyes had an open innocence about them. He stood six-foot-two, with huge hands and shoulders, just as broad as Buck’s, but he had a spongy body. “You really expected me to show up last night?”
“Why wouldn’t I? Buck said you were coming. And I’ve been wanting to talk to you about a couple of things.”
“Oh?”
“One, I’ve been meaning to thank you.”
“For what?”
“For not indulging in the constant dirty tricks they play on me. It’s nice you and I can have a half-assed, decent conversation about something other than the latest sporting event or the contours of some woman’s breasts.”
“Uh huh.” Dillon drank some coffee. “And two, you were going to admit you have a thing going with Lena.”
Johnathon cheeks reddened and he smiled. “Not exactly.” He took a drink from his juice bottle.
“Whaddya mean, ‘not exactly’? You hang around her desk all the time, like some sort of sentry. You almost rest your chin on her shoulder when you look at her screen.” He poked at the scum on his coffee with his finger.
Johnathon stared at his bottle. “They hit on her all the time.” He paused a moment. “What would stop them anyway?
Dillon shook his head. “Those guys will fish off of any dock, including the company one.”
“And they’re all married or attached too, aren’t they?”
“Just Buck. Billy’s single. He is too stoned to stay with any one girl for more than a night. Elmo just split with his wife.”
“He doesn’t seem bothered by it.”
“Not like it bothers me, you mean?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Yeah, sure.” Dillon stood up and turned to leave. “I’m done here.”
“Drinks tonight?” Johnathon said.
Dillon was at a table in The Coffee Cavern bar finishing his chicken burger. He took a swallow from his pint
just as Johnathon appeared at the entrance. He waved his glass.
“Hey, Dillon,” Johnathon said and sat down. “Thanks for meeting me. That’s mine?” he pointed at the sweating glass of tonic water with lime.
“Hope it’s not too warm,” Dillon replied. “Anyway, now I don’t have to drink alone. You know what they say about that.”
“I do,” replied Johnathon. “Are the guys going to show up?”
“The clowns are off to an NHL pool draft. It’s never too early for an NHL pool draft, yeah?”
“I guess.” Johnathon took a long drink.
Dillon said, “Where’s Lena?”
“Choir practice.”
“So, tell me, how long have you two been an item?”
Setting his glass down, Johnathon thought a moment. “Quite a while, actually. She was the lab instructor in a Psych class I took as an elective last year. We were coffee-buddies on campus and hung out together. You know, the usual stuff. She was doing directed reading last semester, so we didn’t see each other much. Quite the shocker when she got a job at Liverwood. It got serious a couple of weeks after that.”
Johnathon wiped his lips with his fingers.
Dillon finished his pint and caught the attention of the server. “Lena’s a Christian, yeah?”
Johnathon’s entire face flushed. “She’s not that radical. She’s a caring, giving person who happens to have strong beliefs. She also acknowledges, you know, physical needs.”
“Well, good for you two. Tell me though, isn’t she going to Niger or Timbuktu or someplace when her summer job’s done?”
“Ethiopia. She’s going to do some mission work.”
Dillon smirked. “Gee, that’s only three weeks from now. You’d better get what you can in the meantime.”
“We’re not splitting up.”
“Right. Good luck with that. Let me tell you about distance relationships. They don’t work.”
“I’m going with her.”
Dillon stared at Johnathon, mouth wide open. A religious studies person taking off for mission work was one thing. But an admin student-cum-office-drone? When he could finally speak, he said, “What the hell would you do that for? You’ve only got two semesters left for your degree.”
Thorn-Field Page 12
