Dirty Work

by Anna Maxymiw

  Suddenly there’s a blare of voices and expletives, and the girly chatter stops. While the words were strung together in an angry elision, and almost unintelligible, the tone was unmistakable: real rage. It’s the kind of tone that makes all conversation around it skid to a stop. I see the physical reactions in each of the housekeepers, the shoulders tensed, the eyes widened, the lips ajar. We all knew this was coming, the impending violence, and now we’re trapped and will have to weather it, all of us.

  I peek around Pea’s body, my chin hooked on his shoulder, my body almost pressed to his. I can feel his pulse abruptly quicken, and the way his back becomes tight against the softness of my skin. In the middle of the main room, Jack is standing in front of Gus. The fillet board and the bucket and the fish have been forgotten, and the two guests are silent and expressionless, standing near the door. Gus’s face is unreadable, but Jack is moving his jaw as if he’s chewing gum, and they’re both very, very angry.

  “You shouldn’t be filleting inside. That’s filthy,” Jack says. His voice is pure venom, a snake ready to strike.

  “Shut up, Jack,” Gus answers, a deep, dark rumble.

  All eyes are on the two men, and all noise has stopped. We’re frozen in a tableau, hands half-raised and mouths half-open. I’m pinned in place. I can’t look to see if the guests are watching this unfold, if they realize the trouble that’s been caused. All I can do is keep my sights on the rage that’s percolating between the two men in front of me.

  “This is a fucking disgrace, Gus. You don’t fucking fillet inside a cabin,” Jack says, staccato.

  “Don’t you talk to me that way in front of the guests,” Gus counters. “They’re your bosses now, you know.” It’s the wrong thing to say, and he knows it. We all know it, and there’s a low sound as a bunch of us exhale.

  Jack rotates his head on his neck; I recognize that motion as him being about to verbally lash out. Pea steps forward again, now almost out of the doorway. My heart gallops, trying to tear out of my chest. I flick my eyes over to Kev, in the corner of the room, half in shadow. His eyes are hard, and his hands are balled into fists at his sides. That’s when I get genuinely scared—if Pea and Kev, our two beautifully happy young men, are moving into attack formation, it’s possible that something terrible is going to happen. Gone are the jolly smiles, the gentle jokes and tough love and kindness, and in their place is hardened young masculinity, brashness in full bloom. Can Pea feel the way my blood is roaring through my body, the way my chest is starting to heave with barely suppressed panic? If he does, he shows no notice. Instead, I watch—feel—as his hands, which were in his pockets, slowly unsheathe themselves, curl at his sides to mirror Kev, two sentinels readying themselves for a battle that may or may not happen, depending on how the men in the eye of the storm handle themselves.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ.” Jack says the words like he’s spitting. My head snaps back to them. “All summer, you’ve been nothing but lazy. You keep bringing guests in so fucking late that the girls can’t even serve them properly.”

  Gus counters so quickly there’s no space to even take a breath. “You know what your problem is, Jack? You’re a rat. You rat people out to Henry. People can’t even fucking trust you, because you just go running to the boss. Running your mouth.”

  “Fuck off, Gus.” The words are said with such vehemence that, suddenly, it’s like we’re all pushed back against the walls, held in place by the virulence. Every single good thing we did this summer—every bridge we built between our different factions, every piece of affection we drew out of one another, every touch we branded onto one another’s bodies as a way to remember the work we did, the love we forged, the beauty we created—suddenly shatters. It rips like a fault line, leaving some of us on one side of the divide and some on the other. It hurts so much that I can feel it in my meat and bone, this tearing of the bonds, this cracking of the veneer, and I shake with it. I hear a sound like a gasp, a broken sob, and I realize that it came from me.

  In the maelstrom, between the two men, some unsaid line has been crossed. Gus steps up to Jack and the tension peaks to a shimmering point. I feel pure fear jag through me. For all we think we know about one another, I realize we really don’t know shit. I have no idea about Gus’s past, or what he’s capable of. His physical presence is suddenly overpowering. He’s gone from a trickster to an angry bear, and the unfolding interaction fills the room with flames.

  The two of them stand there, face to face, for a long moment. Gus is much bigger than Jack and stands over him by a head and shoulders, but Jack doesn’t bend away. They’re so angry that it hurts the back of my throat.

  Gus speaks.

  “In my younger days, Jack, I would’ve broken your jaw for the way you were speaking to me.” His voice is low and strange. I’ve never heard him talk like this. “Just be thankful I’m an older man now.”

  To his credit, Jack doesn’t flinch. I truly believe he isn’t scared. Maybe he thinks he’d be faster than Gus if he had to run. Maybe he’s cocky enough that the fear has no space to bloom. Jack doesn’t move, doesn’t blink. His eyes are fixed on Gus, while all of our eyes are fixed on them. I can feel Pea beside me, ready to spring into action if he has to. I can feel all the girls around me, huddled and confused and wondering how it all went to shit so quickly. I can feel the summer breaking apart.

  And then, just like that, Gus moves. He steps away from Jack, never taking his eyes off of him, and leaves the cabin. The guests follow silently.

  “Oh, God,” Pea murmurs, exhaling. “I knew Jack wouldn’t be able to take him by himself, so I was getting ready to step in. Gus could break legs, if he wanted to. I think he broke someone’s back, once.”

  I’m already halfway out of the guideshack, Pea’s voice trailing off behind me. I’ve thrown the door open into the swath of deep night, no hesitation, and I’m gone, I’m gone, I’m running away from this bullshit, this mess. I can hear the other girls behind me, also taking flight, but none of us has a flashlight, so we scatter, skittering down different paths on our different journeys tonight, and I just run, run, run, letting my feet pick the route, flashing by cabin after cabin, glowing windows snuffing out as guests bunk down, and then I’m standing on the staff beach, alone, panting. I crouch down, sitting on my haunches, and put both of my hands, palms down, in the water. It laps around my wrists, cool and familiar and frightening all at once. This is my goodbye. There will be no good night tonight; we’ve ruined it with our fire. We were all complicit in what just happened—why didn’t one of us step in? I’m young and female; it wouldn’t have killed me to slide between their two taut bodies to defuse the tension. I could have trickled in, water to the burn, to cool it. I dig my fingers down into the lake silt, pushing past the pebbles. I’m here, I think. I’m here. I don’t dare go any farther or stretch my fingers out. I don’t dare look to either side of me, not sure what else I’ll see on haunches, watching me. I wonder if tomorrow morning someone will find my footprints, or maybe prints of something else. Where are you?

  I bring my wet hands out and put them to my face, smelling that brackishness, that smell of fish scales and guts and glory. When I start to cry, I’m not sure if I’m actually crying, or if it’s the lake water, or if I’m just dissolving, leaving great pieces of myself on this shoreline, so comforting and threatening at the same time. And then I let loose just one sound—a howl steeped in loneliness and uncertainty; that vocalization to find others of its kind; the scream of are you there, it’s me, it’s me, I’m here, I’m here, I’m here—before I take one deep breath, push myself to my feet, wipe my hands on my pants, and turn from my last look at the great, glorious lake cloaked in nighttime.

  * * *

  The next morning, tensions are high. We stagger into staff breakfast wooden and without appetites. Gus and Connor aren’t at the table, and Henry tells us they won’t be around to help us pack up camp because they’re both heading back to Moose Factory with the Moose Cree officials.

&
nbsp; I look over at Jack. He’s expressionless. Pea just shakes his head, looks down at his plate. Everyone else chews robotically, tired and crease-faced from a bad night’s sleep. Maybe Henry assumes we’re all hungover, because he rolls his eyes at us and moves along, but we’re worse than that, unfeeling and feeling too much at once. I shove a forkful of eggs into my mouth, swallowing without tasting.

  “Gonna be a lot of fucking work without those two,” Jack says, throwing his spoon onto his plate with a terrible clatter. Around the table, everyone tries not to make eye contact, staring at the ceiling, their crossed cutlery, the smiling faces in the staff photos.

  Later that day, I say my goodbyes to Gus and Connor. We’re standing near bags of fishing gear and bad-weather clothing and rods and tackle boxes, and everybody is packing, getting onto planes, moving around us as I stare at them. There’s so much to be said—you jerks, you assholes, I’ll miss you, you scare me, you made me laugh so much this summer, I’ll miss you. I can’t even open my mouth. I’ll miss you.

  Instead of meaningless sentiment, Gus reaches out and squeezes me tight to his body, so much that I can’t breathe. “Take care of yourself,” he whispers, and I think he’s crying.

  WHAT WE LEAVE BEHIND

  The last few hours before we fly out of camp are the busiest of my entire life. There’s a giant list of chores to be checked off in way too little time to get anything done in any kind of organized way. The housekeepers and guides and dockhands run around in ragged, slipshod teams, throwing shore-lunch pans into lockboxes and scrubbing Thermoses with old toothbrushes and making sure the dump doesn’t have any live embers left in it and hammering damp pieces of old plywood over windows. At one point in the afternoon, Pea and I are standing on the roof of the lodge, him holding a sheet of wood over a pane of filthy glass and me clumsily wielding a power drill, and all I can think is Jesus, let this roof hold, please, Jesus. There’s nothing systematic about this process: it follows in the same vein of the summer—haphazard, half-assed, trimming corners whenever Henry’s back is turned. Mattresses are piled sloppily and shoved into corners; taps are slammed closed and stoppers thrown into place in sinks; floors are hastily swiped with a mop; food that hasn’t been eaten is hurled into the garbage; our silly little summer lives are shoved into our duffel bags. The rooms are closed up. The cabins are locked. Bedsheets get thrown over all the taxidermied animals in the lodge, and there’s a brief moment when I stand in the middle of the main building, and the windows are all boarded up so only a reddish-gold light filters through the decorative stained glass at the very peak of the roof, and the kitchen appliances are unplugged, and the covered animals look on like ghosts, and there’s only the sound of the dust held in the air like in a joke snow globe, and it’s quiet and I’m trying to say goodbye.

  * * *

  We stand on the shore and watch as the zippy little Otter plane carrying Henry and Sam and Pete gets smaller and smaller on the horizon. Part of me can’t believe that our manager isn’t staying around to oversee the last frantic throes, and part of me understands: this is the final test in a summer-long string of tasks in which we’ve been given too much responsibility with too little reward. This is what we’ve been building up to.

  We linger, staring until the Otter disappears. Jack and Pea have been left in charge, and I turn to them for guidance when Pea’s head snaps up from where he’s been fiddling with the lock on the dockhands’ shore box.

  “Oh shit.”

  “What?” Tiff looks at him.

  “The narrows.”

  “Goddamn,” Kevin hisses.

  “What?” I’m confused, looking at their panicked faces.

  “Gus was supposed to help us store the boats in the narrows,” Pea says with a sigh. “But we never got around to it because he kept coming off the lake so late.”

  “He’s the strongest of us,” Kev adds.

  “What do you mean, store the boats?” I ask.

  “The strait, it’s sheltered, remember—” Pea starts, sounding worried, and then I gasp, because I do remember what he’s talking about and a terrible feeling shivers down my whole body, pooling in my shoes. The narrows: that part of the lake where it’s more sheltered, where the boats are kept after everyone leaves the lodge. The thousand-pound boats.

  “So we—”

  “Yeah,” Jack says. “Motherfucker.”

  That’s how we find ourselves driving the final few fishing boats out to the narrows, where the two planes chartered to take us back to Cochrane are waiting, the pilots—Woody and Billy—sitting on the pontoons, dragging their fingers in the water and watching. Most of the boats have already been brought here over the past week, and they lie in a line along the shore, cradled by the thick white sand. With the new boats, there are twenty green freight canoes, waiting for us. To do what?

  “But where—?”

  Jack and Kev and Pea point to a few rickety-looking wooden racks higher up on the shore, camouflaged in that their weathered wood is the same colour as the tree trunks of the forest behind them.

  I whip my head around to look at the boys, who are grim-faced. “But those racks are—”

  “Yeah.”

  Those racks are at least fifteen feet up on the shore is what I wanted to say, but the situation is so dire that speaking in fragments is the best I can do. We’re down men, and are going to have to rely on the housekeepers—minus Syd and Aubrey, who were hurriedly shoved onto a Beaver an hour ago, to be flown into Cochrane to secure our motel rooms for the night before the train ride tomorrow morning.

  We split up into teams of two, line up on either side of each boat, and push, pull, push, pull, push—in painful increments, the fudgy sand hampering and slowing us every step of the way—until we get the boat up on shore, near the racks. Then we have to slowly, carefully, anxiously lift the boat to shoulder height, get it onto the rack, and then—finally, warily, so no one gets their hands caught under a thousand-pound freight canoe coming down like a guillotine—flip it so that it’s stored with its bottom to the sky and its innards to the ground.

  If I thought digging out the shoreline and filling the gabion baskets was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, I was wrong. I was so wrong. This is ten times harder, slower, more painful. The combination of wet sand and boat bottom is a treacherous one; these boats don’t haul like they do when they’re being pulled up slippery rails. Instead, each foot is a battle that seems to last an hour—and it doesn’t help that instead of an all-male hauling team, we have a motley crew: Jack, Pea, Kev, and Aidan, who are worn down and damp-collared; Robin, strong-armed but tired; Emma, wearing a wrist brace because of what we suspect is a hairline fracture that happened during rock haul; Alex, Tiff, and Alisa, panting; me, hopeless and staring at the endless line of canoes waiting for us to lay our hands on them and send them into the off-season with our sweaty palms.

  Without any tackle boxes or seat cushions or accoutrements, the boats are exoskeletons, carcasses of the precious, temperamental behemoths that were such crucial parts of our summer. Even the trails they’ve left in the sand look as though some great beast has pulled itself out of the water and into the forest and curled up, ready to hibernate and wake again when winter turns to spring. Every time we move on to a new boat, grab it by its gunwales, I imagine a heartbeat, an echo, coming from its hull, see its days out on the water, moments of glory. And then all fanciful images are wiped out of my head as soon as we start to push, and my muscles scream, ragged and sharp and angry, while all parts of me strain and stretch themselves taut as I reckon with this land one last time.

  There’s also more at stake than just the boats and making sure they’re stored properly. We’re racing against the clock, against the setting sun, because once it gets dark, we won’t be able to fly back and we’ll be stuck at an abandoned, locked-up lodge for another night or whenever the pilots can come back to get us. The late-afternoon sun taunts us, but it also signals the passing of the hours, the inexorable evening that will c
ome when we least expect it and open its treacherous fabric onto us. Will we make it? Will we have to stay? Or will we take off just as the sun decides to set, getting into the air by the skin of our teeth?

  The process with the boats is so slow and so torturous that Woody comes to shore from his plane and starts helping. Jack and Pea protest, knowing that he’s recently had heart problems, but he insists, shouldering his way into the fray, and this simple act of kindness makes me tear up. Billy, a different kind of man, sits in his plane, hollering at us through the window, urging us to work faster so he can get back to Cochrane. We push and pull and flip, and push and pull and flip, trying not to look at the sky or the movement of the sun, keeping our eyes on the sand and the gunwales—

  Until we’re done. The line of boats has turned into an empty beach, a stretch of pale sand gleaming in the late sun, and behind us, there are only giant snail trails, a reminder of work that will be washed away by the next rainfall. And this is how it ends—one final task that no one will know about come next season, one final burst of work so hard that my muscles will ache for days, the boats shelved and waiting to see us off like a colour guard. We stand opposite them, two rows of beasts lined up, staring each other down, our chests rising and falling in panicky rhythms and our palms aching as we look at our silent rivals.

  “Hey! We going or what?” Billy’s voice clatters across the water and breaks the moment, and we whip our heads around to check where the sun is in the sky as his plane prop starts and that familiar roar fills the air.