What They Wanted (29 page)

“Knew you wouldn’t like it, told you not to come—”

“Oh, stop it.”

“No, you stop it, you just shush it,” he exclaimed with a flash of temper. “Bloody la la land.”

“Shush yourself.” I pursed my mouth as the door popped open and in walked Ben, wearing yesterday’s T-shirt and jeans, a yawn baring a full mouth of teeth, minus a molar.

“Just like back home,” said Ben in hushed tones, “everything but grub cooking in the kitchen.”

“She’s picking on me, Ben.”

“Feels sorry for you, bud.”

I turned from them, staring at the package of bacon Cook had laid on the sink to thaw, torn between throwing it in the frying pan and throwing my knapsack aboard the back of Ben’s truck.

“For the day at least, you’re going nowhere,” said Ben. “Can’t leave the boys stuck.”

I cut open the bacon, tossing it in the pan, cringing at the loud thump from Cook’s room, followed by a rack of wet coughs.

“Her heart’s big,” said Ben.

I ignored him and set to making a pot of coffee, sliding bread into the toaster and fixing mugs none too gently before the boys. Cook’s room door opened and she trod into the kitchen on little slippered feet. She tottered before Chris, then looked at me, her small eyes blinking with bafflement as though she didn’t recognize us. At Ben’s cheery good morning, her eyes cleared.

“You’re an early rise,” she said to my apology for waking her, and with a pleased look, she shuffled inside the bathroom.

The sound of the shower followed, and a few minutes later Cook reappeared, hair slicked wetly beneath a hairnet and underarms jiggling as she started whisking eggs for pancakes.

Some of my foreboding lifted as I spent the morning replenishing the men’s coffee, serving them food in the same stealthy way I’d served the crowd in the bar. They were certainly a sullen-looking crew, aside from the big-boned, big-framed engineer, Frederick, who most certainly evoked the halls of academia with his black-framed glasses and cleanly pressed khakis.

He was a kinda likable guy, with a wide smile and a hearty voice that sounded loudly through the cookhouse as he boomed out good morning to Cook and me. No doubt he felt equally as big within himself as he took a seat, spreading out his elbows and taking up half the side of the table, and through long dips of coffee, engaged himself with an ongoing commentary about the weather, the muddied roads, and the latest
Rocky
movie crowding the theatres.

Hunched over a bowl of bran and cold milk was the geologist fellow, who kept looking around the table with the squinty eyes of one peering too long and too hard at something up close, and trying to determine what the thing was. Beside the geologist sat Dirty Dan the derrickman, a short, wiry fellow with a handsome face who seldom spoke. A couple of look-alike brothers sat next to him, thin and tense, small bright eyes zapping around the cookhouse as they gulped back coffee. Chris sat amongst them, chancing a few questions about the weather and the time. Aside from Frederick, who responded pleasantly enough, he was brushed aside by the others like a fly hovering around their necks.

Push blew in through the door, his thick, broad frame appearing to fill the cookhouse. Immediately his sights fell on me. A curt nod and he raised a hand of greeting to Chris.

“Which sandbox did you fall out of?” he asked roughly but with a hint of humour.

“Call me Rousty,” said Chris.

“Rousty, is it?”

“Will that be coffee or tea?” I asked Push. Swiping off a place at the table with a rag, I pulled back a chair.

“Not before his whisky,” said Frederick. He met Push’s eyes with a deep, rumbling chuckle and went back to forking pancake into his mouth, still chuckling.

Push shot him a contemptuous look, his pale grey eyes glimmering like metal.

“Hang out in the doghouse till you’re told otherwise,” he instructed Chris and went to the refrigerator, one massive hand swinging open the door, the other scooping up a chunk of cheese and package of liver pâté. Frederick’s chuckle switched to the heh heh heh-ing of a bemused parent as Push tucked a baguette beneath his free arm and marched out of the cookhouse.

Lifting aside a scrap of gauze filming one of the windows, I looked through the morning light at Push’s bull neck as he strode towards a black pickup, one beefy hand fisting the cheese and liver to his chest, the other clutching the baguette to his side like a machete. He jerked sideways, then stood at ease before a crewman who was leaning against his pickup, hawking and spitting. I near busted my face through the window scrutinizing the crewman. With his flat face and silvery eyes he stood as a replica of Push, only skinny and gaunt, as though the air had been punctured out of him.

Ben had since returned to the cookhouse, wearing a faded, baggy sweatshirt that smelled like diesel and a hard hat clamped to his head. “Push’s dumb-ass twin, Skin,” he said, looking through the window beside me. “Starved in the womb. Push gluttoned all the grub. Oh, here we go.” Ben let out a wearied sigh, leaning closer to the window, the cold plastic of his hard hat touching my cheek. Trapp, a brown sweatshirt tied around his neck like a fur collar, his lips baring small white teeth, was creeping furtively from his bunkhouse up behind Push.

Push twisted around, holding up his chunk of cheese like a live grenade. So quick were his movements that Trapp snatched back his step in surprise. Recovering, he held up his hands in mock surrender, rattling out his flat ha ha ha laugh.

Mouth twisting into a snarl, Push swung inside his truck. He raced the motor, jammed his foot to the accelerator, and burned towards the rig, the knobby cleats of his tires flinging back chunks of mud that splattered against the side of the cookhouse like turds of dogshit.

Trapp was silent now, his body stiffer than a week-old corpse as he watched after Push. A shudder went through him, and a smile of such eeriness that it felt its way through the cookhouse window to me. Ben watched, tighter than a strung bow, as Skin horked a big one in Trapp’s direction and then hopped up the cookhouse steps.

“Just boys,” Ben said, “got to have their playtime.”

He went outside to have a word with Trapp, ignoring Skin, who was stepping in through the kitchen door. Draping a lanky arm around Cook’s portly waist, Skin laughed at her chiding and waltzed her, with her platter of pancakes, to the table, whistling “Waltzing Matilda.”With a thick lock of hair falling over his forehead, he fell upon the pancakes like the half-starved creature Ben had made him out to be.

And now Trapp walked in, his sharp features looking frail, his skin pallid with his shorn haircut. Without the sideburns and chin hair, his small, pinkish mouth quivered as though exposed to a sudden cold.

“Long way from home, ain’t it?” he said to me in a distrustful tone.

“How you doing?” I asked politely, but his greeny eyes were already shifting past me. Chris, his cheeks stuffed with pancakes, his mouth shiny with syrup, raised a fork in greeting and slid his chair over as Trapp, touching a hand to his shoulder, sat down beside him. He mumbled a greeting to Frederick then set his eyes on Skin, who was ravishing the bacon and staring back at him through his overhanging lock. The rest of the crew carried on drinking their coffee and finishing off their pancakes, their bodies instinctively drawing away from Trapp as though he still carried the foul stench of the sump hole.

But Frederick spoke quite amiably to him, chatting up another film he’d recently seen and listening closely to the few sparse comments Trapp sent his way.

“Yeah, Trapp and Frederick—they like ganging up on Push,” Ben would tell me later. “Plus Trapp’s a sponge for learning the rig, and Frederick loves having someone listen to his spews.”

Within ten minutes of Trapp’s sitting down, all hands had cleared out and I was back to the window again, watching as Chris climbed into Ben’s truck.

“He’ll be fine,” said Cook, clearing off a spot at the table. She sat, lighting a smoke, her lungs mewling like kittens. “Take them lunch. See for yourself.”

I looked to her questioningly. “I thought we weren’t allowed on the rig.”

“I take it anyway—their lunch. Long as you leave again. Night crew make their own lunch.”

The night crew were now pulling up outside. Getting tiredly out of their trucks, they headed to the bunkhouses—to shower before breakfast, said Cook. “Mix some batter, Suzie— Sylvie, is it—while I finish my smoke.”She patted her chest. “I always take them lunch—can’t this past while—no wind. Can’t make the walk.”

Turning up the heat beneath the bacon and mixing up batter, I listened attentively as she carried on talking about Ben and the boys going to town after work, drinking too much and gone all night—scarcely getting back in time for their morning shift.

“So I take them a big lunch. I’m their pal then—they like it when I take them a big lunch.” She rattled out a laugh, her little green eyes dawdling over my face. “They don’t want pretty girls then—they got Cook bringing them sandwiches.” She stubbed out her butt. “So now you take it. Don’t go out on the floor, go straight to the doghouse. See the red shed on the rig—by them stairs? That’s the doghouse. Walk up them stairs, turn in the door. Put it on the table and come straight back. That’s what you do. Put it on the table and come straight back. He won’t say nothing he catches you— Pushie won’t. Just come straight back—”

“Pushie. Don’t quite suit him, somehow,” I said, hoping for a bit of insight.

“Always takes care of me. Poor Mare. Been gone twenty years. Pushie never forgets I’m Mare’s sister.” Cook wiped at her nose with a bit of balled-up tissue. “Yes sir, always takes care of me. Batter started yet?—second shift’s coming.”

It was warmish and sunny when I struck across the clearing come noon with a hefty basket of fruit and sandwiches dangling from my arm. I was about thirty feet from the cookhouse when I started sinking in mud—thick, heavy mud that lay like wet cement beneath a scanty covering of grass and weed. Damn, not for the first time my feet were becoming entombed in Alberta mud. I backtracked to drier ground, feeling the wet seep through my sneakers.

The cookhouse door opened and Cook heaved out a pair of rubbers. “Won’t get far that way,” she called out. “They lost tractors in that.”

Kicking aside my ruined sneakers, I donned Cook’s boots and started out again, this time keeping closer to the tire tracks arcing around the clearing. The roaring steel mammoth both drew and repulsed me as I neared it. I stepped gingerly up the muddied, red-painted steps and then crept anxiously into its innards, the floors shaking and rumbling beneath my feet. The doghouse wasn’t much bigger than a porch. Laying the food on a table as Cook had instructed, I huddled before its glass front, peering out at the men.

I saw how, as Ben said, the unrelenting roar of the wenches, the pumps, the screaming jimmies created a sphere of isolation around each man, keeping them from sharing a joke, a thought, or a comment, setting each man off to himself, prowling restlessly about his small corner. I could see how silly encounters or exchanges from the day before would get too much gnawing time, throwing faces into scorn whether the bone was with or without marrow. I watched them cringe before Push as he thrashed about, out-yelling the jimmies in his constant calls for their diligence in the working of his rig. All this for twelve hours straight, twelve days straight, being hailed, broiled, or rained upon beneath merciless skies, constantly dodging moving hunks of metal and iron and chain—I started understanding the men’s glum faces and frayed nerves.

Standing centre in their misery, drawing their attention as a metal rod draws lightning, was the ill-concealed tension between Trapp and Push. Through the following days I watched as they held silent vigils, staring at each other across the screaming, shaking rig floor; across the short span of the cookhouse; across the steering wheels of their trucks as they passed each other to and from the bunkhouse. They pricked at each other like needles into a wound. And ensuring the daily flow of bad blood was Skin and his ceaseless scratchy snickers, pinching his nose behind Trapp’s back each time he walked past, letting no man there forget his bath in the piss and shit of the sump hole.

Thankfully, Push never took supper with the boys—always waits till last, said Cook. Still, the tension he created through his frenzied, driven movements on the rig tracked the men back to the cookhouse during the evenings as they sat heavily around the table, their heads hung over their plates, too cross and wearied to talk. Trapp fed its presence with sharp glances that cut through the thoughts of each man present. He stalked each movement of their forks, their knives, from their plates to their mouths. He watched like someone hungry for some word or sign of ridicule. Even the chatty Frederick was looking a mite strained towards Trapp. Mostly, the only one talking was Ben.

“Long day, long day,” he’d moan through absurdly long stretches and yawns, filling dead air with chatter:“How’s your gravy, Pabs, gonna rain tomorrow, think it’s gonna rain tomorrow, gawd-damned rain, how far down the hole are we, Frederick—hey bud, pass the gravy, man, pass the gravy, anything left in it—more gravy, Cook—damn, these are good spuds, anybody want the last of these spuds?”

Like a fisherman, I often thought, casting out chatter like a net, hoping to haul attention off Trapp and onto himself.
Always
that protectiveness towards Trapp. With his infectious smile and abrupt chuckles, he made a good diversion from the intense, silent Trapp, and oftentimes the despondent crew responded to his chatter with murmurs and nods, sometimes showing the whites of their teeth in a laugh over the rims of their bowls.

I too received a fair bit of attention from Ben—and Chris— during those first days. They’d keep glancing my way through the interminably long supper hours, tallying my smirks and grins, a little apprehensive, I often thought, that I might toss down my cloth at any second and beg a ride back to town. I wondered, too, whether or not I’d stay, given my persistent moodiness. It was enhanced by the constant strain of the crew, no doubt, but also by interrupted sleep—what with the distant roar of the rig, the trucks motoring back and forth from the rig to the camp, doors slamming, voices calling, thumps resounding in the kitchen from the night crew making sandwiches and sometimes pots of soup.