Bittersweet Sands

by Rick Ranson

  “Too.”

  “Not.”

  “Rance!”

  “Aw. Why don’t you get Bob? He’s never led the stretches.”

  “Because I told you.”

  “Yeah, sure. You don’t get Bob to lead the stretches because he’s connected. President of just one bike gang and you get a free ride.”

  “Lead the stretches.”

  “Okay, okay. I’ll lead the stretches.”

  “Listen up! Today, Ricky is going to lead the stretches.”

  “Okay, everybody!... Gee, thanks, I’m underwhelmed by your enthusiasm. And don’t call me Ricky. Anyway. Everybody watch me!

  “Put your left hand in!

  “Put your left hand out!

  “Put your left hand in!

  “And shake it all ab—”

  “Next! Bob! You lead the stretches. Ranson! I got a job just for you.”

  ( Terminated )

  “You must be joking.” Jason glared at the typed paper that Acastus slapped on his desk.

  “Safety is no joke,” the Safety Nazi growled.

  “If she goes, her husband will too.”

  Acastus shrugged.

  “I’ve already lost Lobotomy. With both her and him gone, that...” He pointed at the typed paper. “...shuts me down.”

  Acastus shrugged again.

  “That’s my welders, all except Pops! I won’t be able to finish....”

  “That’s your problem,” Acastus replied coldly. “She’s terminated.”

  “For this bullshit charge?” Jason threw the paper toward the wastepaper basket. The single-spaced typed paper teetered on the edge of his desk. The Safety Nazi glowered at this show of open disrespect.

  “I warned her.”

  Jason glared at Acastus. The foreman’s worn and battered hardhat was covered in years of company logos, union stickers, and gouges, all acquired from dozens of projects across all of Canada and a couple of American states. He had two more just like it tumbling around in the back of his truck. The Safety Nazi’s hardhat gleamed white, virginal.

  Jason stood and looked down at Acastus. Sitting at her desk with her back to the foreman’s door, Gwen tensed.

  “No. I’m not going to do it,” Jason said. “Wearing her goggles incorrectly is a bullshit charge that will stop this job cold. No. No fucking way.”

  The Safety Nazi’s eyes gleamed. “Put that in writing.”

  “Look. You watch the guys come out of the coker. They’re all wearing these goggles at the end of their noses. Either that or they’re hooking them onto their hardhats, or they’re ripping the rubber out to let air in. These things fog up! You can’t see out of them. They’re dangerous!”

  Jason threw his goggles on the report. The mono-goggles and Acastus’s report teetered on the edge of the desk. They fell onto the floor, together.

  “It’s a fact that they reduce eye injuries.”

  “It’s a fact that if you report an eye injury, you are in deep shit! So nobody reports it!”

  “Well, I’m reporting this. I didn’t make the rules.”

  “You stand at the end of the shift and you look at the guys’ faces. Everybody’s cheeks are covered in dirt and you know why?”

  Acastus blinked.

  “Because they’re taking their glasses off and on all day with dirty gloves!”

  Acastus shrugged and turned to leave.

  “Somebody’s got their career tied up with these glasses and they won’t admit they screwed up!”

  Acastus continued to retreat. When he reached the safety of the open door, he spun towards the larger man. “She’s terminated, with or without you!”

  The trailer reverberated in silence after the door slammed.

  Gwen stood in the office door, the winter sun glowing behind her, making her neck and shoulders all fuzzy. Jason was surprised at how delicate she appeared.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “The most I’m going to do is to give the entire crew a verbal. That’ll be the end of it.”

  Neither of them believed him.

  Suddenly, there was a noise like a shotgun blast at close range as someone kicked in the trailer door, followed by the sound of a chair hitting a wall followed by the sound of a newly castrated bull. Scotch had arrived.

  “Fired! Fired! You fired her?”

  Several of the crew tumbled in after the large man.

  “No,” Jason said. “I didn’t fire her!”

  “Well, you’re gonna!”

  “No, I won’t.”

  “That’s not what Safety said!”

  “The Nazi’s an idiot....”

  Scotch bolted around his desk at his foreman. He was blocked by several hands. The noise level increased as desks were scrapped, chairs overturned, and men shouted as Scotch and Jason tried to get at each other. Several more crew members joined in. Soon they couldn’t even move, let alone fight.

  An airhorn blasted within six inches of the struggling men’s ears. Everyone winced and froze. Gwen Medea, all ninety pounds of her, stood amongst the fighting mob with her tiny hand holding a smoking airhorn.

  “Sit down,” Gwen told the children.

  The men looked at her.

  “Please.”

  One after another, the struggling mass slowly disentangled themselves and sat with their hands between their knees like a chastened Grade Three class. Finally, Gwen Medea was the only one standing.

  “Jason, the Project Manager is on line one, the Safety Coordinator is on line two, and the union is on line three. I sent for the Job Steward.” With a dismissive sniff to the seated men, the tiny woman returned to her computer. Every man in the room stared at the empty door.

  The crew leaned in and listened to Jason’s side of each telephone conversation. Scotch’s face softened a tiny degree when he heard Jason speak into the phone.

  “He continually crosses the Safety Silly Line! He’s the one getting in the way of safety. He’s the enemy. He even comes close to walking through the site and everybody stops working. They just stare at him. She was wearing them! Just not the way he wanted.”

  Pops arrived and glared around the room. Several crew members got up and left. Double Scotch, eyes red, arrived and took a seat close to her husband. He squeezed her tiny hand. At her appearance, Scotch’s eyes turned murderous. Pops noticed a pink scar across Scotch’s nose that he’d never seen before.

  “Where’s the little weasel... right now?” Scotch asked the room. Double Scotch’s hands reached out at his words, grabbing her husband’s arm.

  “Off-site,” Pops lied. The men nodded.

  At one point, Jason covered the speaker and addressed the room. “What’s the crew doing?”

  “Working,” Pops lied. This time nobody believed him.

  Right then, the crew were standing in small groups, or leaning on scaffolding rails, or bunched over the counter of the tool crib, all discussing the same thing. If the loss of production dollars in salaries, stalled cranes, idle loaders, forklift rentals, trailer leases could be magically calculated, the Safety Nazi’s display of bullying a tiny woman was costing the company thousands and thousands of dollars every minute.

  The job froze, waiting.

  Jason wiped sweat from his hand and telephone receiver. The telephone conversations with several layers of bureaucracy dragged on. All the conversations started to sound the same. One by one, the crew got up, stretched, and left the office to the familiarity of the coker. As the afternoon sun set through the silver towers of the refinery, only four people remained in the office: Scotch, Double Scotch, Pops the job steward, and Jason the foreman.

  The final phone call over, Jason leaned back in his chair. In a tired voice, he spoke to Double Scotch,

  “This is a bullshit charge, but consider yourself verbally warned.”

  Double Scotch, forty, with welding experience all over the industrialized world, looked like a little girl spanked. Scotch bristled. Jason held up his hand.

 
; “I know, I know.”

  “Well?” Scotch asked.

  “Go back to work,” Jason said, his voice hoarse.

  Pops looked meaningfully at his watch. Taking the clue, Jason said, “Get on the bus. Let’s call it a day.”

  Jason watched her hand as Double Scotch put it on her husband’s arm. Before Pops ushered them out, Jason said, more to himself than anyone lese, “Safety’s got the company convinced that they got God on their side. Big fucking oil company, scared shitless of safety.”

  “Gott mit uns,” Pops said.

  Jason nodded.

  Pops turned to Double Scotch. “It means ‘God is with us.’ It’s what the Nazi SS had on their belt buckles.”

  An hour later, when Gwen went to turn out the lights in the foreman’s office, she found Jason Navotnick staring across the office at the blank white wall.

  Jason turned to Gwen. “It’s one thing to fire somebody,” he said. “It’s another to like doing it.”

  Day Twenty-One

  ( Too Tall Won’t Be With Us Anymore )

  “Too Tall won’t be with us anymore.”

  “What happened?”

  “He and his millwright buddies went into McMurray last night and must have really got drunk. After the bar and a fight, they stopped at a gas station. While the attendant was busy, Too Tall and his friends stole the gas station’s flag. They got them on tape doing it.”

  “That’s a pretty big flag.”

  “Yeah. I guess all three of them had to sit in the front seat of Too Tall’s Honda because the flag took up the entire back seat. So after they stole the flag, they tried to hide it in the millwright’s apartment. It took all three guys to drag the flag up the three flights of stairs. Woke everybody up in the apartment block with all the bumping and giggling. The flag was so big that even all balled up it still took up half the guy’s bedroom.

  “And filthy. Aw gawd, everything the flag touched is covered in oily dirt, the car, the apartment block’s hallways, the apartment, them, everything. Finally they got pissed off and threw the flag off the balcony. When the cops finally showed up, you didn’t have to be no Sherlock Holmes to figure out who stole the flag.

  “Too Tall won’t be with us anymore.”

  Day Twenty-Two

  ( “Got Ten Bucks?” )

  “Got ten bucks?”

  Dougdoug looked at Stash’s outstretched hand.

  “Ten bucks,” Stash repeated, flicking his fingers. “Cheque pool.”

  “Gambling?”

  “No shit, Sherlock! Gimme ten bucks.”

  “You don’t have to, Dougdoug,” I interjected. “Stash is just a frustrated encyclopedia salesman.”

  “Well, how much can I win?”

  “So far,” Stash said, “eight hundred and change. But I haven’t hit the electricians. Could get to be over a grand.”

  Dougdoug, juggling his coffee cup, reached into his pocket and pulled out a ten-dollar bill.

  Pocketing the ten, Stash fanned a deck of poker cards in front of the young man. “Pick one, Slick,” he said. “Write your name on one half. Then rip the card in two and give it back to me. No! No! The half with your name on it. Sheesh... newbie.”

  Stash crabbed off down the construction site trailer, eyes flicking left and right, searching men hunched over their meals.

  “Every time I see Stash in action, I hear rattlesnakes,” I said. “He feels like if he beats you out of some money, he beats the system. It’s nothing personal—you’re just standing between Stash and his money.”

  The young man leaned towards me as I continued.

  “Keep the other side of the card. It’s your receipt. It’s always good to have proof that you actually did pay for the card. Besides, Stash is running the cheque pool.”

  “Oh?” Dougdoug flipped the half-card over, studying it.

  “Yeah. Normally the guy running the pool keeps ten percent. But nobody ever knows for sure.” I shrugged my shoulders. “Every time Stash has a scheme or a project, somebody gets hurt. Nobody’s ever called him on it, nobody.”

  “I wonder if I can get my ten back.” Dougdoug fanned the card.

  “You’re better off with the bigger cheque pools for being on the up and up. The ones the stewards sell. You can tell which ones they are because they got the cards already made up. Not this Mickey Mouse playing card shit.”

  “Gee, maybe I really should ask for my money back.”

  “Forget it. Who knows, you just might win. But the big ones are the official cheque pools.”

  “How big?”

  “Last big one was a hundred thirty thousand.”

  “Wow. Every payday?”

  “No, not usually, but on the long weekends or holidays, yeah, a hundred and thirty thousand isn’t out of the question. Back in the day, they would make the draw for the big one, and then hand the winner two garbage bags full of tens and twenties. Then the poor bastard would have to run a gauntlet of these whack-jobs to his car, drive back down the highway to Edmonton with all that cash in his trunk, and then try to put fifty grand in small bills into the bank without attracting any attention. The cops caught on real fast.

  “Now when you win, about four of the largest sonsabitches you ever seen in your life walk up to you. They hand you a cheque. After they slap you on your back, they escort you to your room at the camp, watch you pack your bags, walk you and your gear out to your truck, and if need be, they’ll stay with you all the way to your bank in McMurray. And they stand there and watch you deposit the cheque in the ATM.”

  “Wow.”

  “The big ones pay all the taxes and donate a portion of the money collected to charity.”

  “A hundred thousand. Holy smoke.”

  “Well,” I said.

  “Well what?”

  “Usually after about $60,000, they start dividing the pot in two. Last September long, a double pot was won by some guy in the office, but the second pot was won by a university kid who had just quit and was packing up to go home. The stewards caught up to him in the camp parking lot. Can you imagine? You’re all packed up, going home to university in your truck, in the parking lot, and four of the biggest bastards you ever seen are running after you trying to flag you down. And all of them are smiling.

  “We all felt good about that.”

  “What about poker?” Dougdoug said.

  “They ain’t games of chance. Not around McMurray. Those games don’t have a damned thing to do with luck. I’ve seen a poker game that had so much money in the pot, you couldn’t see the table. A guy lost everything in that game. We didn’t see him for three days, just lay in his bunk, staring at the ceiling.”

  “How much?”

  “They say he worked that year for free.”

  “I’m pretty good at cards.”

  “I thought I was pretty good too. One time, me and a couple of guys played this shark. We didn’t have fifty cents between us, but we wanted to play this... this barracuda, just to say we did. We were joking and laughing, but halfway through the game, I realized that each time the pot was won, the next hand went to the guy on the right. To this day, I don’t know how he did it, but he controlled the game so well, every hand he’d move the pot one place to the right. That son of a bitch moved the pot wherever he wanted to. That sobered me right up. Those games don’t have a thing to do with luck.”

  “Well...”

  “And you don’t know who you’re playing against. Back in the day, one of the camps started stinking. They thought it was a dead raccoon that had crawled under the camp and died. So they dug around in the snow, and found it was some guy wrapped up in plastic garbage bags shoved under the trailer. With the number of men coming and going through here, there’s not a hope in hell of his killer ever being caught.”

  “No leads? Nothing?”

  “Never heard. So do yourself a favour. If you are going to play, go down to the casino in McMurray or leave the poker playing at home with Granny.”

  Dougdoug flipped
the half-card in his hand, studying it.

  Men were stretching and moving in their seats in anticipation of going back out into the cold.

  “Once in a while, the guys try to change the game,” I continued. “So, just before the cheques are handed out, they all put their money in a hat. Once the cheques are handed out, the guys gather together and they read the last four serial numbers on the cheque, and then the cents column in the amount. Those six numbers gets you a poker hand. Best poker hand wins.”

  “Seems complicated,” Dougdoug said.

  “And the game’s not foolproof. The person making up the cheques can control the game.”

  “They wouldn’t.”

  “Never say never. When there’s thousands of dollars on the line, never say never.”

  “Maybe I’ll keep my money in my pocket.”

  “Too late, you’ve already bought in.”

  “I have not!”

  “You’re here, aren’t you? Stash, or someone like Stash, will be back again and again. And you know what? They’re like alcoholics. They get mad if you don’t drink with them, or gamble with them.”

  “G.A.?”

  “Gamblers Anonymous. Stay in the trade long enough and you’ll have more than a passing acquaintance with either A.A. or G.A.”

  “Is everybody around here nuts?” Dougdoug said. “I think I’m the only sane one in this whole crew.”

  “You cut me deep, kid.”

  “Okay maybe you’re goofy, but in a nice way.” Dougdoug smiled.

  The new apprentice fingered the card. The quiet was broken by a great shuffling of feet. The crew had stayed in the lunch trailer far enough past the end of the noon break to show the bosses they were independent, but not long enough to get yelled at.

  I looked at Dougdoug. “I been around a long time and I do know this: if there’s going to be a fight, it’ll be because of money, booze, or women.”

  “So?” Dougdoug asked.

  “The only two women we got on this crew scare the crap out of everybody. We’re in camp now, so booze is out. That just leaves one thing: money.”

  I looked at Dougdoug.

  Dougdoug looked at the card, and said:

  “Wanna buy a card, Rance?”