Debris (14 page)

I went over and picked my phone up from the deck. Called Ben and let it ring long until he picked up.

“What is it?” he said.

“Come out here and get me. I'm way the fuck off the map.”

“It's only eight o'clock.”

“I could give a fuck what time it is. You're comin'. Now hold on a sec while I figure out where the fuck I'm at.”

 

 

A month later we were at the
opposite end of the province. All the way up in Fort McMurray. Bitter cold. Fields and forests thick with snow. We were on the third week of a three-week trip. Ben had lost nearly all of the crew and there were only five of us up there. Matt had come on the road but he hadn't worked more than a few days on the whole trip. We'd taken on another guy, Charles, who had worked for the company before and quit to sell dope for his cousin, a low-rung Vietnamese gangster. The cousin had got himself pinched a few weeks before and Charles was back knocking doors.

They put me with Charles for the third week and we worked terraces on the west end of town. One day there was a thaw and the cold broke. Sun on the runnels of meltwater trailing down driveways and sidewalks. The next night the temperature dropped thirty degrees and froze the roads to sheer ice. The sun stayed out but shone down grim where eight-foot icicles hung from roof ledges. Trucks spun out and went sideways down neighbourhood streets. Charles had dressed badly for the trip and he was griping the whole time. I gave him my toque and gloves to keep him quiet. We were sliding all over on the way to the front doors of the townies, houses with stained wood panelling and tall firs in the yards.

“I'm gonna wipe out and I fuckin' know it,” he said.

“Just don't fuckin' panic when you hit a patch. And slow down.”

“I'm freezin' my balls right off. I gotta keep movin'.”

I got into a house across the road with a middle-aged fellow from Newfoundland, took a beer from the man and sat with him at his kitchen table. He told me he'd come west to the prairies ten years back and wanted to go home nine years and eleven months ago. But the money was too good. He had two kids born and raised up in McMurray but his wife was an east-coaster, just as homesick as he was. He told me he didn't know if he should sign up and I told him not to worry about it. I drank the beer and sat a few minutes more and then I went out. I felt bad to have even knocked on his door.

When I got back across the road Charles was talking to a chubby kid that looked about thirteen. Jacked pickup in the drive with forty-inch roughtread tires, windows tinted black. Charles asked the kid if his parents were home.

“This is my place, bud,” he said.

“Really? How old are you, dude?”

“Turn seventeen in a week.”

“Jesus Christ,” Charles said.

The kid signed up with Charles and went back inside. Charles came down the drive shaking his head. He slipped once and skittered around the walkway. Got his feet back under him.

“You hear that shit?” he said.

“Yep.”

We walked down the sloping neighbourhood road, Charles counting his deals. I didn't have to. I had four and that was enough to coast on. Charles had six. A busted tavern sat about a hundred yards away, across the bordering street and beyond a frostbitten field. Ravens alit on the bar's roof and some strutted the snow atop the fieldgrass. Pecked hard through the icepack. They were nearly two feet from beakpoint to tailfeather.

“What time is it?” Charles said.

I just smiled.

“You think we could get four hours outta that bar?

“I think so, Chuck.”

“Don't call me that. Let's go.”

Charles had skateboard shoes with worthless treads and he went slow down the grade. He grabbed at my coat arm. I was a good eighty pounds heavier than he and I righted him. Held him up. He let go and went on. Not two steps later he lost it and he was in the air, arms all over.

“FUCKIN' WHORES.”

His binder flew maybe fifteen feet and hit the deck long after he was flat on the ice and sliding starfished down the hill. I got to his binders as the papers were slipping out the side. I stuffed them back into the plastic sleeves and took the binder up, skated down the hill backwards with my shoetoes and palms against the ice. At the bottom I helped Charles back up and batted the snow and grit off his ass and back with his binder. Handed the thing back to him. We got over to the side of the road and he stood there cursing the universe. As we found our bearings the monstertruck rolled down slow over the grade and skidded short to a stop at the end of the road. The sixteen-year-old kid was at the wheel. He waved at us and then gunned the engine, fishtailed out into the cross street and drove on.

 

 

The next day we were out at the
northern edge of town, knocking doors of a subdivision that was half prefab houses and half luxury trailers. All riggers, pipeline workers, transients with nonsensical hours of work. Off in the distance there were gasfires burning from the skyward exhaust pipes of a gargantuan refinery. Black plumes of smoke gone heavenward. Pale blue high above and a yellow sun that arced but three-quarters of the way up into the sky before starting back down. Charles had bought real winter boots now and had a goosedown coat over layers and layers. He had outfitted himself entire with ski-gloves, a toque, sunglasses, and an aerated facemask.

“What are you, fuckin' ski-ninja?” I said.

“Well, I don't got all the beer insulation you do, you goddamn walrus. And I can't grow a fuckin' beard to save my life. Too Asian for this shit.”

We took sides of the road and knocked for a few hours. Either nobody was home or we were waking them up. Charles signed one young wife and while he was inside I went on knocking. I got to the end of the road soon enough and looked back for Charles. He had stopped for a smoke and I saw him going up the driveway of a new house in a set of three, all of them unfinished with plastic on the windows and huge coverflaps of carpet fastened to hang down over the doorless garages. Charles went through the flap and held it back so I could see a propane torpedo heater firing in the middle of the laid concrete, like a miniature jet engine that they ran to let fresh-laid concrete cure and to keep the foundations from cracking in the bitter cold. He gave me the finger and let the flap down. I went to the last house in my row.

When the door opened I was looking at a young guy in a wheelchair. About my age. He had a cupholder fixed to the right arm of his chair. Tallboy in the holder. He wore a hoodie and cargo pants, a huge brace and bracket over the whole of his left pantleg. That foot was up on a stirrup fixed to the chair and the other one was shoed and flat on the carpet. He was tall and broad-shouldered and looked like he'd probably been a pretty athletic guy at some point.

“Well, come in and shut the door, bud,” he said. “It's near goddamn forty below out there.”

I did go in. Followed him through the small house. Clutter of old pizza boxes, beer cans, piles of clothes on the floor and none seemed dirty. He had a huge flatscreen and he'd been playing video games on it. He told me to grab a seat and I sat down on the end of his couch. The young man wheeled into the kitchen and disappeared behind the partition there. I saw his hand go up to the fridge door and pull the handle. Rattling. The sharp thud of things being knocked over to the glass shelving inside. The door shut and the man came back with two tallboys.

“Will you have a brew?”

“Probably I shouldn't. I gotta work awhile more today.”

“I don't trust a man who won't take a drink.”

“Me neither,” I said. He smiled and pitched the can over. I caught it.

I gave him the spiel and he stopped me partway. Beckoned with his fingers for the forms.

“My wife always turns you guys down,” he said. “But anything to save some dough sounds good to me.”

“She gonna give you shit for signin' up? I don't want to get you in any trouble, man.”

He shook his head. Kept filling out the forms.

“She's at her sister's awhile. Out in Golden.”

He gave me back the forms and I called it in. The young man went back into the kitchen and could be heard bashing around in there. I looked at the pictures on the living room mantle. The man in his hockey gear with a team. The man with his blonde wife, dimpled cheeks, very young. The man in his coveralls, welding mask in his hand, standing high up on the crossbeams of a massive rigtower. Before I got the confirmation code from the call centre I pressed the talk button with my thumb and the phone went dead. I kept talking. Wrote nonsense on the forms. The man rolled back into the living room with another two cans.

“You're all set,” I said.

“Sweet.”

“If you don't mind me askin,' man, what's the story on the leg? How long you laid up with it?”

“It ain't the leg,” he said, and knocked on the knee joint of the bracing. “Well, it is, but that ain't the problem.”

“How d'you mean?”

“My back's broke.”

I just stared at him. Nodded slow. Tried to be cool.

“Ain't nothin' to be done,” he said. “But the fuckin' company's tryin' to stop me gettin' paid for it. Didn't have the right insurance they say. That's why things are tight 'round here.”

“They'll pay up soon enough,” I said.

He frowned. Took a big pull from the can. Wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. I drank the can he gave me in gulps. Shook his hand and said so long.

 

 

When I came out of the house I saw
Charles way up the street. He was fiddling with the latch of a metal fencegate in the front yard of a new red and white double-wide. Then I saw him leap the locked gate, hustle up the porchstairs and knock at the door. Cold air froze my nostril snot as I walked up to the road. My eyeballs felt funny. I left my gloves off long enough to pull out the last contract I signed and ball it up in my hand. I stuck the crumpled deal in my pocket and put the gloves on. When I looked up again Charles wasn't at the door and he wasn't in the yard.

I heard him before I saw him. Cussing and growling. The sound of held breath that came out all at once. I passed his binder, splayed face-down in the road, and went on. There he rollicked on the sidewalk near to the fencegate, clutching at his ass and upper hamstring. There were streaks of red in the white where he'd gone and now blood pooled small in the packed-down snow underneath him and started to freeze there.

“What'd you do?”

“Fuckin' slipped trying to jump the fence. Fuck.”

“Who d'you think you are? Jackie Joyner-Kersee?”

“I will fucking kill everyone.”

I turned him over and he tried to fight me off. Reeled off all the colourful language he knew through gritted teeth.

“Let me look at it, you dummy,” I said.

There was a lot less blood than I thought there'd be but still more that you'd ever want coming out of a hole in your asscheek. There were crystallized gobs of frozen red on his torn-up pants and upper leg. Furrow dug deep into the meat, welling slow.

“You'll get a bunch of fuckin' stitches but otherwise you ain't got that much to worry about,” I said. “I'll get on the horn with Ben. Just keep pressure on that goddamned thing.”

Charles scooped a handful of clean snow with his glove and pressed it onto the wound. He lay there on the ground with his face in the crook of his arm, shaking his head, breathing hard. I stood and waited for Ben to pick up, studied the aluminum teeth that gabled the fencetop. A long strip of black pantcloth from the kid's outers trailed from one point, tendril of pale skin pasted near bloodless to the lining.

they took charles to the hospital
and left me out there in the late afternoon dusk. I had five hours of work left is what I was told. I sat down on a piece of plywood in a new buildsite, watched the sky go to black around the refineries to the north. Labyrinthine pipework. Those exhaust pillars with their gasfire tongues. Brighter now against the black. I was very fucking cold. Everything in the world was evil. All the dogs were trying to kill us. I got up.

In I went through the carpetflap that covered the garage. The torpedo heater roared. I sat on the warm patch of cured concrete beside it and sniffed hard at the fumes. I played games on my phone until I was afraid it would die and Ben wouldn't know where to get me. I pulled out the flask and set it on the ground to let the chill metal warm up. When it did I drank at the whiskey. The garage covers did not move at all. Not one gust of wind. Sound of a critter passing in the snowpack outside. Raven cries somewhere in the night. I drank on and shaped shadows on the rawtimber wall.

 

 

On the last night of the trip
I worked alone in a trailer park beside the highway, right before you come into the town proper. They dropped me off in the area late and as soon as they were gone I walked through half-frozen bogland to get to a nearby gas station, ate a hot dog and bought a bunch of junk food. I shot the shit with the attendant for a while and then headed back to the
TP
. There had been another thaw and I read a temperature of minus four on a filthy thermometer that hung on the bashed-in metal siding of the first trailer I knocked.