Dirty Work

by Anna Maxymiw

  No hesitation. No frittering. The line of gravel and concrete that’s supposed to deter us has been muddied by the rain, anyway. The downpour is strong: it has tibiae, a diamond-ringed gullet, bear claws. It gnaws at us, already dripping down our waistbands and our collars, despite our best efforts to swathe ourselves against it. It slashes sideways, washes our faces, wets our tongues. Rinses away the hot words we felt the urge to say throughout the day. We wedge in beside the boys, ass to ass and elbow to elbow, and I smile because the platform is so high off the ground that our feet dangle.

  From behind, we might all look the same—brightly coloured lumps subtly bobbing up and down on the spot as a result of our legs swinging back and forth from the height of the platform; that’s how excited we are. Our hoods are cinched tight around our eyes. There are no big or little motions, no breasts or stubble that would delineate us from one another. We’re hideous and bulky, strong, damp, squished body against body, instinctively huddling each time the thunder bays and barks. It’s dangerous, sitting here and tracking the lightning as it vaults across the water. We’re too close to the action. The sky is so rimed with clouds that we swear, later, that we could actually see the thunder. The lightning turns red across the bay—a phenomenon I’ve never seen—and around us, forest fires start from the top down; for the rest of the summer we will remain on smoke watch, wondering if we’ll ever be engulfed.

  We taste the static on the air, like cling wrap and lime juice. We smell the fish scales in the wild wind, all of the things brought up from the bottom of the lake, like old fish bones, Silver Minnow lures rusted with lust and patience. We’re reduced only to our senses. What we see, smell, want. What we feel from one another’s bodies. What we feel in our spines every time the sky rolls.

  We’re tiny. We’re at our most febrile, heat folding away into the snap of the storm like egg whites into batter, the weather perched on the cusp of the sunset that is blithely proceeding somewhere unseen behind the gale. We’re awake, feverish. It’s arousal, though not yet for male or female, because in the face of the greatest storm we’ve ever seen, we can’t spare a thought for that kind of longing. Instead, we howl up to the sky and grab one another’s shoulders and stomachs and calves. I’m soaked to my bones, my quiet frustration leaking out of me like it’s being pulled back to the place where all emotion comes from.

  * * *

  When I return to my cabin, breathless, my hair plastered to my neck and shoulders, I discover that there’s a hole in the roof right above my bunk, and my mattress is damp, so Syd mixes an unused tampon with old jute pried out of the walls and shoves it in the hole, slapping some duct tape overtop. My heart swells at this action, at this clever, take-no-shit girl and her helping me, and our cabin inches closer to becoming friends.

  That night, I think we’ll never be able to fall asleep, but all of us close our eyes at the same time, some of us folding damp hands under pillows, and when we wake up the next morning, we’ve dreamt of nothing and slept without rupture. We’re tall and green and loose-limbed from the depletion of electricity in the air. Our rain gear will dry, and the housekeepers will never again get to sit on the shipping platform without reproach, but it doesn’t matter. Because we all yipped, swung our legs off the edge, wet our necks and mouths with rain. For that reckless moment, we were the same.

  THE FLOCK

  I watch as Pea makes homemade buoys out of bleach jugs. It’s a quiet day on shore. Nice weather means all of the guests are out on the lake, and will stay out until it’s late. On bad-weather days, a number of guests stay on dry land, and the housekeepers are expected to be friendly faces around to help. We forgo breaks and serve lunch instead of taking much-needed afternoon naps. Everyone hopes for good-weather days—the guides make money out on the water, the housekeepers get to sit and write letters home, and the dockhands get to complete the never-ending chores Henry’s asked of them.

  Pea’s hands are dexterous as he threads a yellow nylon cord through the jug handles. We’re tucked back in the clearing, a messy gap in the trees where the lodge’s generator and a woodpile and the dockhand shed are kept away from the guests’ eyes. Pea is one of the lodge’s mysteries. Everyone keeps telling me his nickname is Sweetpea because he’s so kind, so obliging, but nothing I’ve seen so far has confirmed this for me. In fact, he seems brusquer than most of the other male staff. I wonder if it’s because I haven’t proved myself—I’m always aware of my privilege, switching allegiances from guest last year to worker this year—so I try to show him that I’m willing to work hard, willing to learn, willing to listen when he’s willing to impart some of the knowledge he’s accrued working here over many years. Please just be nice to me, I want to say. All I want to do is work hard and not be an asshole. I know I don’t belong in this world. I know everyone thinks that, too.

  “You know they’re scavengers, right?” His voice is quiet, distracted.

  “Huh?”

  “The eagles,” Pea says, knotting the cord and throwing the new buoy onto the ground.

  He’s referring to the last boat of the morning, full of Texans, who had jetted across the lake in a babble about finding eagle feathers. It’s a given that guests are particularly enamoured with the eagles, both bald and golden; the men love to come in off the lake and tell me stories about these birds, which I don’t get to see. For the most part, the eagles stay far away from the shore. They have little use for loud, rude humans, and spend their days mainly on the lake, hunting for fish, the primary staple of their diet. Because the dockhands and housekeepers are just focused on staying upright on a daily basis, we don’t think much about the eagles. They don’t bother us; we don’t bother them.

  “They follow the boats and try to steal the fish off of guests’ lines.”

  I stare at him for a moment, and start to laugh.

  “What?” He can’t figure out if I’m laughing at him, or if I’m starting to lose it. But I can’t help it. The idea of fearsome predators stooping to scavenge—that the image I had of the eagle is completely different from reality, that my romantic notions about the North are probably mostly wrong—is so very like the lodge. Because in this place, all energy goes toward staying alive. All avenues are acceptable.

  “Never mind,” I say. It would be too much to explain my thought process. “Do you need help carrying these?” I gesture to the buoys, and Pea nods, smiling a little, and piles some into my arms.

  The scavenging notwithstanding, the image of bald eagles waiting in the treetops for an unassuming fisherman to tootle by in his boat, with fat fish ripe for the taking, there’s something about those birds. There’s a reason they’re so vaunted, why they evoke such a visceral reaction in so many people, why the guests do circles in their boats, hoping for a dropped feather they can take home as a keepsake. Despite their opportunistic nature (or perhaps even because of it), the eagles are intimidating, enigmatic. They are sentinels. The guests tell me that on a quiet day on the lake, you can actually hear the deep ka-thwip ka-thwip of their wings when they fly close to the canoes. These giant birds represent a world we do not belong to, a world we know we’re only visitors in.

  You only have to look at the many forms of divination that are related to birds to see what effect they’ve had on humans throughout the ages: augury, the general fortune-telling that comes from observing the flights of birds; ornithoscopy and ornithomancy, the study of omens associated with birds; alectryomancy, the form of divination where someone observes a bird pecking at grain on the ground; oomancy and ovomancy, where eggs are interpreted. From eagles to waxwings to cormorants, mergansers to whiskey jacks, we have all sorts of omens above us at Kesagami: though we mostly ignore them, focused as we are on tasks on the ground, the birds could very well be some kind of magic.

  I’ve been up close and personal with a bald eagle before. Once, in Vancouver, as my mother and I were walking down the stairs to Wreck Beach on a bleak fall day, a huge rustle of feathers made us both snap our faces up at the same time.
We stopped, frozen; a bald eagle, with a fish in its talons, had flown above us, across the path, and was sitting in a tree, ready to eat. I had just moved to the city, so we thought it was a sign, some portent of how good life in Vancouver was going to be. Little did I know that it was probably the hapless fish that was the message. I didn’t know what was ahead, that I would have to work harder than I had ever before, that I was going to have to learn to slog through depression and darkness so thick and webbed that, on some days, waking up would feel like tearing through a membrane, like a chick gnawing its way out of an egg, just to function at a basic level. But in that moment, the eagle felt like a guardian—or, at the very least, a sign that this odd, slick city, so obsessed with its own image and building itself up, hadn’t destroyed all of the things it was actually built on. It was reassuring that the eagles and the people could somehow coexist.

  * * *

  “See that?”

  I follow Alisa’s finger. Farther away, over the tops of the pines, a big old crow is circling. As we drift down the shoreline, I imagine that he’s following us, too, keeping an eye on us like we’re keeping an eye on him.

  I make a sound of assent. Alisa paddles lazily, leaned back into the canoe seat. Somehow, we’ve managed to get the boat backward. Despite sitting at what I thought was the front, I’m paddling the rear. It means she has more room, and she spreads out, closes her eyes to the sun and absorbs it like a cat.

  “A crow means that there’s a bear nearby.” Her eyes are still closed.

  “How?”

  “They’re so smart they follow the black bears. Bears find garbage, I guess. So the crows follow and eat when the bears aren’t looking.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, I’m not kidding,” she says with a smile. “It’s insane how smart they are.”

  Toronto has some crows, but Vancouver has flocks of them, murders of them. That was the main thing that struck me on moving to the West Coast: the crows, on every mailbox, every telephone pole, every street corner. They’re everywhere, cheeky and bobbling and mouthy. My apartment window looks out at the building’s fire escape; if I lean a little farther than I should, I can touch the rusted metal railing. I started putting cubes of cheese there, to see if the crows that I heard in the nearby trees in the mornings would notice, deign to come near.

  It surprised me that it took a few months for them to get completely comfortable with me. From the brash braying, I assumed that crows would be fearless little fuckers, but in reality they were slow to warm, skittish. I’d put food out—cut-up cherries, pieces of cheddar, bits of popcorn—and sit at my desk with my windows open, to see if they’d land and watch me as I was watching them. At first they’d swoop down, pick up the treats, and fly off as fast as they could. But as the weeks passed, they would sit and stare back. Eventually, all I had to do was open my windows and they would hover down and keep me company. And I looked forward to it, because I was lonely. Because writing is lonesome and dire, no matter how amazing it feels in the end. Writers are incredibly lucky: we’re a privileged bunch, to be paid to do what we love, but we also hate what we do because we’re alone. I liked being alone, but loneliness was a different story. And when I had the birds on my fire escape, I didn’t feel that lonely.

  At Kesagami, the corvids (the smart family of birds that includes crows, ravens, and grey jays, among others) are mostly blaring bullies, so like my crows at home in their fierce and skittish nature, and yet so unlike them at the same time. Kesagami crows caw at full volume in between rolling clicks and grunts. They’re rude and pushy and loud, which makes them my favourites. Of all the birds we see, the crows are the most similar to our own cabal of squawking, squealing young people, loud and lusty and willing to shout to get a point across, yet cunning and quiet when need be.

  The forest is never quiet when the corvids are talking in couplets, and the rich mythology that surrounds this family of birds is neither easy nor straightforward. Throughout history, and across the world, the raven (and, often, the crow by association, since they look and act so similar) has been portrayed as many things, from a trickster to a creator god, a warrior to a harbinger of death and doom. In ancient Greece, ravens were associated with Apollo, god of prophecy, and were considered good luck. In Viking mythology, the ravens Hugin (thought) and Munin (memory) were Odin’s eyes and ears, bringing the god news from around the world. In Irish lore, the crow is associated with the Morrigan, the “phantom queen” of war and sovereignty. Morrigan and her sisters, Macha and Badb, became a trio of battle goddesses known as the great queens. In the far east of Russia, the Koryak people worship the shamanistic trickster and fertility figure of Big Raven, who is also known as Quikil, Kutkh, or Kytx. At the Tower of London, at least six ravens are kept on the grounds at all times; legend says that if the ravens ever leave, the Tower and the kingdom will fall. All this mythology lends to the corvids’ complicated status as birdbrain and genius, a benevolent god and a chaotic prankster, good and evil.

  * * *

  Alisa dips her paddle and splashes me a little, startling me, and I laugh. She grins back, shading her face with one small hand. The two of us sit there, smiling like idiots. I’ve started to really enjoy her company. There’s something incredibly pure about her, which is a difficult quality to maintain up here. If something bad happens, Alisa sheds it with her perfect, bell-like giggle, and the rest of us can’t help but also laugh. She’s full of a joy that is rarely diminished, and she takes the shitty things alongside the good things with a shrug. Since we served breakfast together this morning, I’m lucky to have an afternoon off with her.

  Suddenly, there’s a holler. Tiff and Alex motion to us from shore, where they’ve been sitting under a tree reading old issues of Cosmo and Seventeen. Jack stands behind them, his face obscured by the tree’s shadow. All three of them watch as I prod Alisa with a paddle.

  She twists in her seat. “Oh, they want us to bring the canoe in.”

  As we get closer to shore, Jack steps out of the shade and starts to undo his jeans. This is, surprisingly, a common occurrence; I think he’s going to moon us. When he takes off his shoes, I sit up straighter. Alisa, facing me and coming into shore backward, can’t see what’s happening on the beach, but she can see my face. My eyes bug as Jack whips his hat off. When he starts sprinting, I scream at the top of my lungs. Alisa thrashes and cranes her head as Jack blasts toward us at full speed, his knees raised as he high-steps across the rocks and silt, the water spraying like wings. The two of us paddle away as hard as we can, but Jack reaches the canoe before we can escape. He grabs our flailing wrists and yanks simultaneously on our bodies and the lip of the boat, sending us ass over teakettle into the shallows, our legs straight up in the air, his trickster laughter blaring inside the husk of the canoe. On shore, the girls laugh. The crows laugh. Underwater, even we laugh. When we come up, our hair streams around our faces and feathers down our backs.

  * * *

  Not even a few weeks into the summer and I miss both of my cities. It’s an odd thing, splitting your heart between two places. Because it’s where I grew up, I think about Toronto the most; it’s the place I feel most comfortable, even if I don’t always feel totally comfortable there. Toronto is hard and wry; it’s unforgiving and fast and contains flashes of beauty in between its expanses of grey—its colourless slush, its chipped curbs, its mottled subway cars and dusty buses. But if you’re adept, you can find enough of Toronto’s glowing jewels to keep yourself fed for the rest of your life, because the city never stops moving, growing, changing, and it drags all of its inhabitants along with it, never letting us become complacent or have time to rest and replenish.

  If Toronto is relentless and has a streak of meanness, Vancouver is softer and seems, to the outsider’s eye, all-over beautiful. I’m still an outsider in Vancouver, and might be forever, even if I lived the rest of my life there, which I already know won’t happen. Vancouver’s beauty is completely unfolded, spread out luxuriously for the eye as
soon as you step off the plane, the SkyTrain, out of your apartment into the constant, heavy fabric of rain. But Vancouver has jags of hideousness hidden in between the folds of its allure. It has a smile that’s wide and white-toothed, but in the back of its mouth there’s decay. Vancouver isn’t mad like Toronto: it’s sad, sagging at the seams, carrying a giant, damp yoke. And Vancouver keeps me on edge in a way Toronto never has: I’m disconcerted that people who live there rarely seem to acknowledge its most serious problems. Still, there are things about living there that I love—strong drinks on gay-bingo nights, trees on the university campus, long nights of pints with the writers I love, classmates who are sharp and kind and talented and who cheer me on in my writing as much as I try to cheer them on in their own.

  The cities beckon, even now. But if I were back in the city, working some familiar, mindless job and ensconced in a metal haze, in the dust-tasting and sludge-smelling grid of metropolis, I wouldn’t be able to do this: sit on the shore on my nights off and see things. The impending gloaming purpling its way to camp, pleating in from the tops of the trees and the lake’s horizon. The private smiles of fishermen who stagger out of the boats after a long day on the water and hundreds of fish caught. The tense sensuality of boat pull. The boys dipping their heads, joking and waiting for the last guests to come in for the night. The boys cuffing one another on the shoulders and the backs of heads, murmuring about the girls, flicking one another’s body parts. The boys calling geese.