Who by Fire

by Fred Stenson

  “I’m an engineer, Mr. Fistric. We’re not known for our insights into human nature.”

  Fistric laughed. “It’s a compromise. If I could see you in the normal way, or think of someone to send you to, I would. What I’m suggesting is on my own time. Nobody else’s business.”

  To get to the appointment on time, Bill had gone straight from the highway to Fistric’s office. On the way to his condo afterwards, he remembered that Lance Evert’s letter would be waiting. He pulled to the curb and watched a go-cup bob in a melt lake beside him. The sign for the corresponding coffee shop leaned into the road ahead. He drove there and parked.

  He drank two cups of coffee, ate a doughnut, and finally considered the question of why Lance’s letter was scaring him so. Why, when faced with the prospect of reading it, was he catapulted into the condition he’d been in before he left for Donna’s?

  At his building, the mailbox was empty. When he got to his apartment, the door pushed against something that turned out to be a pile of envelopes and fliers. On top was a note from the caretaker: “When you don’t empty your mailbox, the mailman shoves it in. It goes all over my floor!”

  He nudged the pile apart with his foot. The envelope from Lance was there. He had printed CONFIDENTIAL on both sides.

  Bill made coffee and took the letter to the table. What he should be feeling about this letter was sorrow, but he felt mainly fear. The room was stuffy, and he got up to open the balcony door. The track was jammed, and he shook it hard until the ice broke. A burst of birdsong entered.

  He propped the letter against his salt and pepper shakers. He reached for a pen and a flier with a blank side. Wrote: “After the farm, I came back to Mac. I saw a psychologist. On the way home, I felt afraid. When I saw the letter from Lance, it got worse. I had my hopes up. I had started to feel better with my sisters. Then Marie said that we might try things again. But the letter set me back. When I go back, it’s never just a step. I go all the way. Maybe Donna’s right and I got wrecked when I was just a kid on the farm. Maybe that’s what I go back to.”

  They were in a restaurant, and Bill had given Joe Fistric the note he’d written.

  “So what did the letter say?” he asked.

  The place was Fistric’s favourite, called Peking Surprise. It was bugging the hell out of Bill. If they were in a bar, full of cranky addicted people, he might have a chance of telling this guy his story. In this chamber of lucky colours, with parents teaching their children how to use chopsticks, it was no go.

  “I really can’t talk here.”

  Fistric looked around in search of the problem. That he was unable to understand was not helping Bill’s confidence.

  “Could we go to a bar?”

  When they were standing outside, Joe Fistric suggested they look for a place without gambling machines.

  “We might as well go home, then.”

  Piggy’s, the cavernous sports bar Bill chose, had lots of gambling machines as well as parimutuel horse betting in a back parlour. But it was a dark night in the NHL and the place had more echoes than people. As they walked through, Bill counted three couples in the dining area, all bleary with drink. Through an arch, five elderly punters were hitting themselves with racing forms.

  Bill led Joe to the far side of the horseshoe bar. The fake plank was empty and gleaming. They mounted barstools.

  “That feels better,” Bill said.

  Joe frowned. “I find this place depressing.”

  The bartender swirled a damp rag over the clean bar, leaving greasy circles. Said what’ll it be. Fistric wanted beer but could not think of a brand. It was like he’d immigrated yesterday, from Tehran. Bill asked for an IPA, and Fistric said likewise.

  “Do you know what IPA means?” Bill asked when the bartender moved away.

  “No idea.”

  “You don’t come to places like this much.”

  “Too likely to see clients. Clients don’t like it if they see you where they drink. They want you to be above all that.”

  The beers arrived.

  “Where do you want to start?” Joe asked. “And cheers, by the way.”

  They clinked their pints. Bill tried to think of a starting point. The thoughts that came were mostly things he’d prefer not to talk about.

  “India Pale Ale,” he said.

  “How about we start with the letter?” Fistric suggested.

  “I don’t think we’ll get far with that.”

  “Why not?”

  “I haven’t read it.”

  “I’m confused then. At the restaurant, I asked how you were, and you said, ‘Not so hot.’ You gave me the note that you’d written referring to a setback caused by a letter from a friend.”

  “The man who wrote the letter is dead. I can’t face what it might say so I haven’t read it.”

  “Okay. You realize you’re going to have to tell me who this guy was. And why a letter he wrote before he died could make you feel so bad you can’t read it.”

  Bill took a deep drink, then said that Lance was the man who had trained him to be a gas plant engineer; that Bill had married Lance’s niece. He said a few other things.

  When he stopped, Fistric said, “I think you must’ve skipped the part that made you unable to open the letter. Unless that’s your response to grief over his death.”

  “That’s not it. What I left out is that I disappointed Lance in important ways. He was a great engineer and a great teacher. I tried to be as good as he was. Then some things happened, and afterwards I was content to be average. I also left his niece and our children.”

  “I guess you should tell me about the things that happened.”

  “Maybe it’s only one thing. My father died.”

  Fistric left a gap. He took a tiny sip of beer. Drummed his fingers on the bar.

  “We should talk about that,” he said. Then he looked alarmed. “You okay?”

  Bill did not want to think whether he was okay or not okay. The moment had raced up; he was suddenly there. He felt he had to say it quickly or he might lose courage and never get this close again.

  Everything collided on his tongue. When it started to come out, it did so in tangles, out of order. He couldn’t imagine he was making sense, but Joe Fistric listened steadily, intensely. His fingers had stopped drumming.

  “So, you’re talking about loyalty,” he said when Bill ran out. Fistric’s face had become gentle, thoughtful.

  “Betrayal,” said Bill.

  “But what’s betrayal? A failure of loyalty, I think. But there’s something I’m not getting. You said your father was okay with your going into the oil industry. With this Lance. So what made it a betrayal?”

  Something rose in Bill. He turned on the stool and hung forward. The feeling was big and swarming. When the force of it ebbed, he said, “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. This is all good. But you look pale. Why don’t you take a walk around the room, or go outside? After that, if you feel like stopping, we will. If you want to go on, we can do that too.”

  In the deserted bathroom, Bill washed his face over and over. He would wash it with cold water, dry it with a paper tower, then long for the cool water and start again. After drying off the last time, he stared at himself in the mirror. There was something in his expression he didn’t think he’d seen before. Exhaustion wasn’t the right word but in the ballpark. He was often told he looked young for his age. This was not a young face.

  He returned to his barstool and said he wanted to continue.

  “Do you want to talk about your father? Or about Lance?”

  “About Tom. My father.”

  “It upset you when I said your father was okay with your becoming an engineer. It wasn’t like that? He wasn’t okay?”

  “When I came home that spring, I was expecting to work on the farm, like I had every summer. When I got there, Tom said I should check for work at the plant. Lance gave me a job. The plant was a messed up sour gas plant, and my father had fought it fo
r as long as I could remember. Even after it was obvious he’d never get anywhere, he kept fighting. He was trying to launch a lawsuit against them. Then his only son goes to work for them, and he’s fine with it?

  “That summer I went to work for Lance, Tom was suddenly different. Really different. He didn’t talk about the lawsuit at all. I was willing to tell him everything he wanted to know about the plant, but he had no interest. He accepted things that used to make him crazy.”

  “Are you saying he had a temper?”

  “Legendary. Then, poof, it was gone.”

  “You sound disappointed that he changed.”

  “I thought it was fake. I even thought he was putting it on to make me feel bad.”

  “And it did make you feel bad?”

  “He was so mild it was making me sick. It was like he was saying, ‘If this is what everybody wants, I give up.’ He sold most of his cows that summer. I don’t know what to call that.”

  “Prostration?”

  “You’ve got it. He was prostrate.”

  “Did other people in your family see it that way?”

  “Ella, my mother, said I was making this stuff up because I felt guilty.”

  “Do you think your mother was right? In hindsight?”

  “I did feel guilty. But what I saw with Tom wasn’t something I’d invented. I had to be the cause of it, at least partly.”

  “Later on, when your father died, did you feel that again? That you’d caused it?”

  Bill felt bashed again. He stared at a scrunch of napkin. It floated above the black floor like a lily. He wanted to wash his face again. “He died young, I take it,” Fistric said.

  “He was the same age I am now.”

  “You know, don’t you, that a lot of people feel responsible when a parent dies, especially if the parent dies young?”

  “I know that. My sisters felt responsible too.”

  “How many sisters?”

  “Two. Both older.”

  “What do you think? Do you want to call it an evening, or do you want to talk about Lance? Why the letter is a problem.”

  Bill was about to say he wanted to go on but realized he could not.

  Later, in bed, he thought about Marie. He wanted badly to call her, but what could he say? I saw the therapist in a sports bar. We’re calling it a friendship. Gambling didn’t come up.

  “How about the letter? Are we going to get around to it tonight?”

  Fistric was sawing through a steak in Bill’s usual restaurant.

  “Guaranteed,” Bill replied.

  “Why so confident?”

  “I read it before I left home.”

  “And?”

  “Let’s finish eating.”

  “Okay, sure.”

  “You can talk if you want.”

  After suggesting he wanted these sessions to be mutual, Fistric had proven reluctant. He’d been divorced in the last year, and, if he tried to talk about it, he got tongue-tied and glum. He did so again for a minute or two now, then shrugged.

  “Let’s keep going with you. It’s more promising.”

  By the time they finished their meal, the adjacent lounge had emptied. They moved across and settled into a pair of chocolate armchairs. Bill pulled Lance’s letter out of his shirt pocket, shook out the folds. He had marked certain passages. He read the first one to Joe.

  “ ‘When I worked at Aladdin Hatfield, I found your mother very attractive. When I first saw her, she was with your father and you. You were a little boy. It was a meeting at Hatfield Corners hall. I don’t know what else to say but that I fell instantly in love with her. I also felt that Ella knew this right away. I was a nuisance around your home after that, dropping in for tea. I should mention I wasn’t in the habit of dreaming about older married women.’ ”

  Bill stopped reading.

  Fistric said, “Wow. And you never knew? That he was interested in your mother?”

  “My sisters said something recently, that Lance had a crush on Ella. I can’t say I ever saw it. This is the first I’ve heard about it from him. I worked with Lance for years. I kept in touch with him afterwards. The only thing that connects to this is that, whenever my mother came up, he’d say the same thing: ‘Ella was a fine woman.’ ”

  “Was he single, Lance?”

  “He was single when he worked at the plant the first time. He married Judy after the first summer I worked for him.”

  “Did he have any expressed opinion about your father?”

  “He said a few times that Tom was a lucky man. I always took that to mean he didn’t like Tom and felt he didn’t deserve Ella. Otherwise, why call it luck?”

  “Is there more?” asked Joe, pointing at the letter.

  “There’s not a lot here that I didn’t know before. When I worked for him he often talked about how he’d quit our plant the first time because he had a difference of opinion with his boss about how to run it. It came to a head when a worker was killed. Lance went to a better plant, learned how to do things properly, became a great engineer and all that. Now, here in the letter, he says his quitting had something to do with my family.”

  “About his being in love with your mother?”

  “The guy who got killed was his closest friend at the plant. He was gassed. After the death, Lance went to our place for fear we’d been gassed too. We were okay, but a litter of pigs had died, and Tom was angry. Here’s the interesting part.

  “ ‘Your father demanded an autopsy be done. What’s shameful to me, still to this day, is that I wouldn’t even agree that the plant had killed his pigs, which of course it had. As for his wanting an autopsy, I didn’t even reply. When I got back to the plant, I felt gutless. I started saying the things I should have said to Tom. That is, I said them to Alf Dietz, my boss. He said I was sympathizing with the community and should figure out which side I was on. It escalated and I claimed to Dietz that I was the one who wanted the autopsy done on the pigs, that I had already promised this to your father. Dietz said I had no right and implied that he’d fire me if I tried it. I drove to Calgary and they told me the same thing there. So I quit.’ ”

  Bill set the letter down. “Lance says this kept bothering him for years. He felt he’d betrayed Ella and our family. He wrote Ella a letter to tell her about the better plant he worked for after ours, and how they were developing systems that would improve the whole industry. She never wrote back. Finally, that was why he came back, why he took a job running our old plant. He thought if he modernized the plant, that would solve his conscience problem. Here, I’ll read that part.

  “ ‘When I came back to Aladdin Hatfield, I did so for your mother. In my mind, fixing your plant would be my gift to her, the only meaningful thing I could still give her. Judy was already in my life. We were engaged, and I never told her about Ella. I am about to die without telling her. I don’t have any problems with that. I loved Ella and I love Judy. That’s just the way it was.

  “ ‘Something else I don’t think you know is that your father came to the plant to see me, just after I moved back. I couldn’t imagine what he wanted. I thought he might know about my feelings for Ella and had come to let me have it.

  “ ‘What he asked was if there was summer work for you at the plant. I said there might be. At the end of our conversation, he asked me to keep the meeting secret, from you and Ella both. I’ve kept that promise until now. Once you were working for me, you became the focus of my trying to make things up to your family. I wanted to do what I could to make sure you were a really good engineer, and, in that, I succeeded.

  “ ‘Another failure of course was that I could not fix your plant. It would have taken a lot of money, and the company simply would not pay, given its age. But you know all that.’ ”

  Bill refolded the letter and put it in his shirt pocket.

  “Is that all?”

  “I want to keep the rest to myself. What I need to talk to you about now is gambling. I have to know if I can stop. If I can’t, th
ere’s a woman I love who I’m going to have to leave alone.”

  That’s pretty well it, Billy. I’m running out of gas, and there’s no more to buy. I hope you don’t mind that I had to write this to square things. My opinion is that you’ve looked up to me too much and to your father too little. I was a company man when I started my career. The little good I did early on was because I was in love with Ella. If I became a better engineer later, I owe some of that to Ella, and some to your father.

  As for repaying my debt to them through you, I know I went too far. It caused you problems when your father died so young. If not for me, your life might have been simpler and better. I also know it’s silly to think I know—just because I’m dying—what effects I’ve had on anyone.

  Lance

  Bill tried to phone Donna in Calgary. There was no answer. It was a weeknight, late, and the phone ringing in her house panicked him. He hung up on the answering machine and phoned Jeannie. Donna answered.

  “Billy! It’s you! We were just talking about you. We’re drinking.”

  “You’re still down there.”

  “Again, not still. I went home, Elmer died. I came back.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, no. It was good. Jeannie drove me back to Calgary, and that very night, he died. He died in his bed instead of at a vet’s office. So I brought him here to the farm, and we gave him the nicest burial. Do you remember where we buried King?”

  “Of course I remember. King was my dog.”

  “King was not your dog. But anyway, Elmer’s buried right beside him now. It was sweet. I made Jeannie sing ‘Comes a Time.’ We cried like babies. So tell me, how’s it with you? How’s the shrink? Are you in love? Are you heartbroken? Gambling like an idiot? Back at work?”

  “The psychologist is good. He and I go for dinner. We’re calling it a friendship.”

  “God! You’re not having sex with the man, are you?”

  “No sex. The dinner thing is the only way he can take on a non-suicidal client.”

  “Okay. Just a minute, Jeannie’s shrieking in my ear. She demands to know what’s going on with you and the woman.”