Who by Fire (12 page)

“What about?”

“Something about Waddens Village. Do you have his number?”

“I have enough Dion Elliott cards to build a house. Why does a PR man need me? Do I look like the public to you?”

Bill asked Henry to close the door on his way out. He did not like to admit how much he wished Dion Elliott would be lured away by some other company. Dion was reed-thin with a pale dandelion coif, but the most disturbing part of him was his mouth: a tiny whipping machine that left simple concepts blurred with froth. He could say things like “inclusive,” “stakeholder,” and “we must learn from these people” with an entirely still gorge.

What Dion belonged to was the Community Relations Group,
a title he loved. For him, the new moniker was much more than hiding the old bean under a new thimble. It was something they could all shelter under, collectively and inclusively.

Calling Dion a public relations man was mischief on Bill’s part, also a strategy by which he hoped to convey that he was not to be trusted with the community, that he was the kind of amber fossil who might call a female operator “honey” or refer to “our Indians” at an open house. This had worked perfectly until two months ago, when Dion came to Bill’s office and asked a favour. Before Bill fully understood what was going on, the two of them were across the lake in Waddens Village, parading through the homes of the Natives who lived there. After asking endlessly about everyone’s family, Dion issued a bunch of bald-faced pious half-truths about the upgrader, the environment, and the community. He kept turning to Bill to say, “Isn’t that so?”—to which Bill weakly nodded.

Bill stood up, did some low squats and circled his desk a few times. The phone glowed with the potential of Dion’s call. If Bill let it ring, it was only a matter of time until Dion arrived in person.

Waddens Village was a single crooked street of houses on a shallow rise above the lake. Half the homes were cabins that predated the modern oil sands era. The rest were recent. Marie Calfoux’s house was of the modern variety: a rancher on a full basement.

Bill pulled off the centre two-track and drove his grille into a pile of snow. He shut off his engine and sat. The only people he could see were a girl and boy climbing a snowbank that the grader had left in the parking lot of the community centre. Two grey dogs fought nearby.

Behind the kids and dogs, the community centre bestrode the town like a colossus. It had been a gift from New Aladdin and was Dion’s baby all the way. From his cultural sensitivity training, Dion
had learned that Indians liked circles more than squares, and so the centre was an octagon, the closest design he could find. Two spruce poles flanked the entrance, meeting in a point above—tipi poles.

Since its grand opening, the centre had reminded Bill of the Starship
Enterprise
, as if they’d scraped off the trees and an offspring of the mothership had descended and stayed. On the day Dion hauled him around town on the tea binge, Bill had asked an elder what she thought of it; did they use it much? She lowered her voice so Dion wouldn’t hear, said they tried to play cards there the first winter but it was too big, too hard to heat, and everything they said echoed. They’d gone back to taking turns in their houses.

Bill was still in his vehicle, hands on the steering wheel. The engine was off and the cold was stealing in. He watched the two children flying down the gravel-specked snow heap. The dogs were going for the ruffs on each other’s necks with wide-open jaws. For all Bill’s determination and preparation, Dion had won again.

An hour earlier, Bill had been in his office. He forgot not to answer his phone, and Dion was on the other end. In the middle of Bill’s rehearsed speech about why he should not do community work, Dion cut him off with a rudeness Bill did not know he possessed. Dion said he agreed completely; Bill was not someone he wanted doing communication work in the community.

“I tried you that one time because I felt an older person might have rapport with the mostly older population of the village. But you’re not suited. You’re not positive, and you don’t stay on message.”

“Then why this call, Dion? To tell me I’m not a team player?”

Dion paused, which was uncharacteristic. “The only reason is that a woman in the community asked to speak to you. Specifically. I believe you know Marie Calfoux.”

“I’ve met her.”

“Marie Calfoux does not want to talk to me. She asked to speak to you.”

Bill climbed out of his SUV and looked across the hood. Between Marie Calfoux’s house and the old cabin next door, he could see the frozen width of Waddens Lake. Across the ice and above the fringe of black spruce, the upgrader raised its hump. Bill reached back into his truck and pulled a sniffer out of the catch-all. He inserted a tube and did a test. A little sulphur dioxide. Woodsmoke was all his nose could detect.

Still, he did not go in. He clung to the still-warm hood. An image of his father rolling a smoke came to him, and he understood how comforting it would be at times like this; to put some distance, however artificial, between yourself and what you had to do. He was also thinking of how he had originally met Marie Calfoux, at a company information session. The upgrader was mostly built at the time, so the meeting was all pretense.
We want to hear what you have to say, but it won’t make any difference. A couple of you might get low-level jobs
.

The locals were divided about the plant. By the time Marie got up to speak, Bill had already noted how striking she was. He thought she must be younger than him but she referred to grandchildren—then to a recently arrived great-grandchild. It seemed impossible.

That night, Marie spoke for five or more minutes, more than anyone else from the community. Bill remembered two things she said: that she hoped Waddens Lake construction and upgrader jobs would lure her children back, and that the company was about to scour off the landscape that was her life story. The woods surrounding the lake, their creeks and bogs, were what she had grown up with, where she had gone as a child in the footsteps of her grandparents.

“When the place you grow up in is destroyed, something in you gets destroyed too.”

That line hit Bill between the shoulder blades. He was not sure where but he’d heard it before. A long time ago. Close to home.

During the tea-coffee-and-cookies that night, Bill had moseyed around Marie Calfoux. She showed stiff resistance at first, but as they talked, he felt her loosening. He had often replayed this because it was important to know what caused the shift. It was somewhere near the point where she’d asked him what he did at the plant, and he said he turned poisonous gas into sulphur. “A kind of magician, really.”

She replied, “But isn’t sulphur what they make explosives out of?”

“Only old-fashioned explosives” was his answer, and she laughed at that.

That must have been what improved things: the laughter. When people started leaving the open house, Marie said he should come to her house sometime for tea; see how the Indians lived. He said he would and meant it. What destroyed this good beginning was Dion’s using him as the token old person on visiting day. Marie’s house, the rancher before him now, was one of the places they had gone. After the dismal fakery of the occasion, he never got the courage to return.

Bill whacked the hood of his truck with both hands. The sudden violence caused one child and both dogs to stop playing and stare. He walked up the swept path. Marie had a horseshoe affixed to her door where city people put their peepholes. The shoe was nailed in the proper manner, open side up to catch the good luck.

When she let him in, the house smelled of meat simmering. Either his nose or his kitbag of Native stereotypes said moose stew. Marie sat him down at the table by the window, exactly where he’d been the last time with Dion. While she finished making the tea and piled muffins on a plate, he half expected her to tease him about waiting so long to come inside. That she didn’t reminded him they were not friends. He took his first bite of blueberry muffin, sipped
his tea, and admired her figure as she stood with her back to him at the counter.

When she picked up the teacups and pot, he shifted his eyes to the nearest wall, the one covered with family pictures. The photos were arranged by generation, something Dion had insisted she explain in detail.

“So that gentleman is a cousin?” Dion had asked her.

“That gentleman is an ex-husband.”

The only very old picture was in the middle: a group photo of Indian kids in uniforms, flanked by nuns, on the steps of a residential school. Marie had talked to Dion and Bill about the damage done to her family by that system. Bill could no longer remember which child was her mother.

Marie set down the cups and the teapot, pointed at a little girl seated on the ground in the front row. “That one. It’s the only picture I have of my mother’s childhood. I don’t have any pictures of her parents.”

“That’s too bad.”

She sat across from him, checked the tea, and poured both cups.

“Tell you the truth, I like it that there aren’t any pictures of the old ones. It shows that my grandparents weren’t part of a white world. People like Dion talk as if my neighbours and I grew up wearing deer hides. We pretend he’s right. But when you come from a time of no pictures”—she blew across her tea and drank a sip—“that’s not bullshit. That’s true.”

The table they sat at had a vintage look, something pulled from another home and time. Otherwise, the furniture, equipment, and decorations that he could see were new. Brushed-steel fridge and stove. Hefty German food processor. Coffee maker like a steel dolphin in the midst of a trick. There was an elaborate workstation on the far side of the living room. Bill recognized the computer suite as a
Mac and new. The printer was a multi-purpose affair, scanner and the rest.

“I get high-speed internet off the satellite. That’s how I keep up to date on what goes on around the oil sands.”

There. They had arrived.

“What were you wanting to talk about?” he asked.

“I have concerns I want somebody at your plant to hear. That doctor at Fort Chip who they’re trying to silence. My friends in that town tell me everything he says is true. Those rare bile duct cancers exist, but he was treated like he made it up. What do you say to that?”

“He got screwed, is my opinion, mainly by his fellow doctors.”

“Not by the oil industry?”

“The medical association’s report said he went public too soon, something like that. The companies picked out the most damning sentences and spread them around.”

She thumped the table with her finger. “I did an internet search on bile duct cancer. That duct is how toxins leave the liver. When it’s shown up in the U.S., it’s been in places with industrial pollution. Down there, industry uses lawyers to muddy up the connection. You guys use the medical association.” She sat back and folded her arms.

“I didn’t know that. The part about the bile duct.”

“Since there are health concerns downstream of the mines and plants, why is there only one water-monitoring site on the Athabasca River between the strip mines and the delta?”

“Is that so?”

“A scientist at the University of Alberta has been talking about it for years. He says there should be better sampling, but you guys and the province say your system is already adequate—pardon me, ‘world class.’ One sampling site.”

Bill nodded, stared at the remaining half of his muffin. He had no appetite.

“I’m making you uncomfortable,” she said.

“I don’t like being an information guy. It’s Dion’s job, his department.”

“And you make sulphur. So you told me. But you came. Why?”

“Dion said you asked for me.”

She refilled his cup.

“I understand that water doesn’t run uphill,” she said, “so Fort Chip’s problems won’t necessarily happen here. But we are on water, and all the water around your plant is connected to us through wetlands, creeks, and lakes. If you guys are putting the same kind of cancer shit in this water, it will come to us. What about that?”

“Our strip mine and plant design is supposed to contain its effluents.”

“You mean your tailings pond.”

“That’s part of the containment system. All the runoff is supposed to be caught so it doesn’t get in the groundwater.”

“If your tailings pond leaks, then it all comes here. Right here into this lake. Are you going to tell me tailings ponds never leak?”

“I’m not going to tell you that.”

“Because they do leak? I’ve heard plenty about them leaking.”

“I’m not aware that ours leaks. I won’t say it’s impossible.”

She sat back again and looked at him quizzically, as if he had played a sleight-of-hand trick she was trying to understand.

“That’s pretty good,” she said. Then she geared up again—straightening, becoming taller in her chair. “Something else I’ve researched is tumours in fish. One of my uncles makes his living fishing from Lake Athabasca. I’ve touched the lumps on those fish with my own hands. A different fisherman, also Native, took a bag of them down to the government office in Fort Mac. They wouldn’t even look at them. Let them rot on the steps. Somebody in your business said we’re mistaking spawned-out fish for ones with cancers. Do you have
any idea how many fish my uncle has handled in his life? Do you think he’d make that mistake?”

“No.”

“Then why are they saying that?”

“I don’t know.”

Marie sat for a time with her arms tightly folded. Then a laugh rolled out of her.

“What?”

“You’re not much of a defender of your industry.”

“No.”

“Then why do you work for them?”

“I take a sour gas stream. I remove sulphur from it. I’ve done something like that all my working life.”

“But if your industry kills lakes and rivers, and people, that doesn’t affect you?”

“I think the plants up here are good plants, the ones I know anyway. But the government allowed too many projects, and the companies are building them too fast. Whether they’re good plants starts not to matter. Put too many together, on one river, it adds up to pollution. Even if the government made the rules tougher, and we met those rules, there would still be pollution.”