When Is a Man

by Aaron Shepard

  Most men recall the construction with grudging admiration, the difficulty the crews faced fording the heavy machinery, the excavators and cranes, across the narrows. How they used barges on the upstream side to dump five hundred tonnes of fill. They compare that work with the modern hydroelectric projects in Quebec and Ontario, where engineers drill mile-long underground tunnels to divert water and the tunnelling is done so quietly it can’t be heard or felt above ground. The men have made themselves knowledgeable about dams. Whatever else they feel about the past, they are unabashedly fascinated by the engineering, the sheer scale of these projects.

  On the surface, my ethnography is a study of displacement and adaptation. The true project, though, is a mapping of the hidden continuity of emotions, the invisible but animate circuits that come together to affect the everyday. Time heals all wounds—wrestling with that old cliché. Generations of the displaced happily drive their motorboats over the submerged foundations of their own history. This doesn’t mean anger or resentment can’t still surface, the mind being less solid than earth, less solid than water.

  In the winter cold I feel my surgery scars, a hollow clenching that could be all in my mind. The air around the dam is moist, an icy mist. Sheets of ice hang from the rocks above the stilling basin. Along the wall of the dam, weepholes weep icicles.

  Talked to a very old man in a red Chevy at the viewpoint. This is what he chooses to do with his last years as a driver, what his truck means to him: he comes out here alone to watch the morning sun hit the top of the hills opposite the reservoir, or look at the colours of light on the water or migrating flocks of ducks. He remembers this view from a different, lower angle, when his hobby farm sat at the water’s edge. When he’s forced to give up his licence, he’ll lose these mornings. It might just be the end of him.

  On the morning of Christmas Eve, Paul prepared to embrace his first Christmas alone, without family, lover, or friends. He invested in decorations and ornaments, hung strings of lights on the back porch and along the kitchen window. Most of the town’s Christmas trees had been harvested from beneath the dam’s transmission line right-of-ways, sold outside the grocery store to raise money for the local junior hockey team or the Salvation Army. The young spruce he’d picked up for twenty dollars drooped under the weight of blinking lights and dime-store baubles—a Charlie Brown Christmas. He’d bought himself a single bottle of red wine, a small roasting chicken, some yams and frozen vegetables, and magazines to spend a day with on the couch.

  Jory and Sonya dropped by in the early afternoon before driving to Jory’s parents’ house in Christina Lake, and when they left, he felt lonely. His parents, knowing Paul wouldn’t make the journey home on winter roads, had flown out yesterday to an all-inclusive south of Puerto Vallarta. Snow either drew people together and enclosed them or else offered an excuse to stay apart. It was strange not to mind being alone while most people his age were all about family, or at least the idea of it. They’d procreated and made their parents into grandparents, or filled their apartments with pets or other things, and felt like their lives had come full circle.

  He came across an article about run-of-river dams in one of his magazines. There was a picture of a small powerhouse beside a placid autumn river in New York State, a nineteenth-century milldam resurrected and modernized to supply hydroelectricity to the adjacent neighbourhood. The image was quaint: the preserved character of the antique brick-and-mortar powerhouse perched above the old millpond, the river continuing unabated. Of course, the reality was more complex—the article wouldn’t have been written otherwise—but beyond the pros and cons of small hydro, what was fascinating about that particular dam was how it bridged and preserved both the past and present.

  He had copies of photos of Lambert in the wintertime, Christmas in the valley. Black-and-white pastorals: snow stained by dung and scattered hay; roads and driveways plowed by a helpful neighbour; cattle, horse, and sheep pressed up against fences, browsing for winter grasses. Bleakness and desolation pressing at the fringes of each image. The photos were one way of tracking the physical losses directly caused by the dam—the homesteads and farmland, the milder climate and shelter of the valley bottom. But wasn’t the lost intimacy of their community—the growing alienation between neighbours, between people and the landscape—the inevitable course of progress, regardless of the flood? Maybe Joseph Kruse was right, and the dam had only hastened the inevitable. To simply vilify Monashee Power would be to judge the actions of a man’s limb separately from the man himself. He wondered what a contemporary Immitoin Valley would look like without the reservoir. Lambert had been a place desperately wanting to remain in the past.

  He heard an engine, the sound of tires crunching snow against the curb. A few moments later, someone knocked. He walked through the kitchen and opened the front door. Gina and Shane. She gave Paul her usual grin, as though she’d only vanished for a day or two and not the better part of a month. Her chapped bottom lip was split and showed red. Everything about her looked parched and washed out, her hair dry and frizzy, a dusting of dried skin on her forehead and cheeks. He honestly couldn’t tell whether she’d been beaten or was just on the tail end of a bender. Behind her, the back seat of the truck was packed to the top of the windows with boxes and bags. Shane looked as if he’d been crying, but now he squirmed from beneath her hand, happy enough to be somewhere he could set down his armful of toys.

  She said, “I’d understand if you didn’t . . .”

  “Come in,” he said.

  Shane kicked off his boots mid-march through the kitchen, then tossed plastic railroad ties onto the living room carpet. The boy flashed him a quick, shy glance, and when Paul gave him a solemn thumbs-up sign, he sat and played, his chin tucked against his chest.

  “Tea?” Paul asked. She nodded, and he walked past her and put the kettle on. “I left messages,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “You’ve been staying at Billy’s.”

  “Sometimes he stays with us. He comes around the apartment at all hours. He gets like that.”

  “Must be confusing for your son.”

  “He doesn’t really say how he feels.”

  “Probably doesn’t know what to feel. Do you think spending Christmas with Billy would have made things simpler for him?”

  “Billy’s not much fun during the holidays.”

  Paul chuckled without humour. “I’ll bet Grandpa Cyril’s no barrel of laughs, either.” He leaned against the counter and crossed his arms. Warmth from the stovetop crept up his back. She sank into a chair, her elbow on the table and her hand propping up her head. Shane had edged closer to the tree and tucked himself under the lowest branches, involved in a silent game, tracing invisible things on the carpet.

  Paul said, “If it’s because I can’t . . .”

  “Don’t be stupid. I don’t care about that.”

  “You don’t have to care about anything. We don’t owe each other anything, I know.”

  “I could have gone to my mother’s place.” She scratched at her forehead and then studied her fingernail. “I didn’t want the I-told-you-so speech from her today.”

  “Or from me either, I guess.” He smiled sourly. “Speaking of your mother.” He told her about the pamphlets, how her group had used his work to further their agenda.

  “I hope you don’t think—I didn’t have a clue. Good Lord, Mother.” She laughed weakly.

  The kettle hit full whistle, and he moved it off the burner, then laid out boxes of green, black, and herbal teas on the counter. “I knew, this whole time,” he said. “I was worried. I still am.”

  “I’ll try that hibiscus one.”

  “That’s why I left those messages.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  He poured water in their cups and watched the deep scarlet flowering from the tea bags in upward-reaching spirals.

  “So can we stay?” She’d sat up straight, slightly turned toward the door. In the living room, S
hane was still crouched under the empty Christmas tree, surrounding himself with toy trains. He’d turned Paul’s magazine into a floppy sort of tunnel.

  “All right,” Paul said.

  He sat on the carpet with Shane, surrounded by train tracks and scattered engines and freight cars. Gina stayed in the kitchen. He smelled chicken stock with arborio and wild rice mixed in and heard the warm sound of a wooden spoon rubbing along the inside edge of a pot.

  “How can I help?” he asked the boy.

  Shane slid him a section of track without making eye contact. “Put that over there.” With short, not unfriendly commands he directed the layout of the tracks, and Paul contented himself with being his lackey.

  If you sat on the floor beside a kid long enough, you could almost regain a child’s perspective. The plastic and metal trains became lifelike against the carpet’s pattern, the leg of a chair a transmission tower or grain silo, or whatever you wanted it to be. For most of his life, Paul had never understood the hobbyist’s fascination with scale. Any serious model—ship, car, plane, glider, or trains—had to be made according to perfect ratio. Why couldn’t it just look like a boat? Then three summers ago, when he’d been in Victoria for a conference, he’d taken a walk on Dallas Road in the evening, on a paved path above an embankment that overlooked the ocean. A popular spot, full of cruise ship tourists, joggers, and dog owners. On the path above a small, protected beach, a man stood with a remote control device in his hands. He looked out over the bay, oblivious to the terriers and boxers that sniffed at his ankles before dashing back to their masters. At first, the man simply looked lost. There was no whining buzz of a model engine, nothing in the air. Then Paul realized that what he had mistaken for a gull hovering silently was a white model glider. The man would send it out over the ocean, cut the engine, and let the air currents bring it toward land. Left on its own, the glider performed loops and turns, but before it could spin completely out of control the man would fire the propeller and correct its path. Then he would cut the motor again. There was something elegant about his timing.

  Paul had walked farther down the line of shrubs until he could no longer see the man, only the model as it circled above him. Long minutes passed before he realized he was doing a childlike thing: he was accepting the illusion, seeing the model as life-sized, the landscape transformed—the scotch broom and roses a forest canopy, the banks heightened into majestic cliffs. He became diminished, vanishing into the scene. It had felt strangely liberating.

  As Shane fit together pieces of the track, Paul bunched up part of a blanket that lay on the floor and nudged an empty shoebox near the tracks. “What are you going to use for the river?”

  “The river?” Shane looked around.

  “The one that connects the two lakes.”

  “That’ll be over there.” Shane dug through a duffle bag and pulled out a pair of blue underwear. He flattened them on the carpet near the tracks. Then he gathered up all his socks and lined them up across the living room floor.

  “Should we make the tracks in a loop?” asked Paul.

  “No,” the boy decided. “Because one town’s over there.” He pointed at the wall. “On the other side.”

  By the time Gina finished the risotto, the two of them had built a pretty good replica of the Immitoin Valley, circa 1940s by Paul’s reckoning. They’d piled up blankets for the mountain ranges and used the shoebox for the Shellycoat mill.

  “There’s your grandma’s old house,” said Paul. “And that’s Lambert. The box of crayons will be their fruit-packing shed.”

  “None of it’s there anymore,” said Gina. She wore a blue sweater that brightened her eyes, and her cheeks were flushed from the heat and steam from the risotto.

  “You look nice,” he said.

  “I feel better. I think I was little dehydrated before.”

  “For a single serving of beautiful woman, just add water.”

  “Sounds about right.” She pointed at the television remote on the floor. “What’s that?”

  “Steamboat,” said Shane.

  “The SS Westminster,” said Paul. “That doesn’t exist anymore either.”

  “Just keep my underwear out of this,” she said. She returned to the kitchen but didn’t look unhappy.

  They’d washed most of the dishes, but the smells of roasted meat and onions still hung in the air. On the kitchen table stood a half-empty bottle of wine, wooden salad tongs set out to dry, and three bowls with melted candy cane ice cream at the bottom. Gina had shoved their suitcases into a corner of the living room and stashed cardboard boxes of cooking supplies and food under the kitchen table. “Just for now?” she asked. He nodded. Wrapped presents lay under the tree, most marked for Shane. The boy had fallen asleep on the living room carpet halfway through the original cartoon version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and Gina had carried him to Paul’s room.

  They watched television. Paul asked if it was too loud, but she shook her head. They suffered patiently through an inordinate number of commercials. This one was for a seafood restaurant. There was something obscene about the way the unseen woman in the commercial said, “Lobster.” The “L” guttering up from the back of the throat, and then thrown over her tongue in the shape of the “OB,” and then hissed out between her lips, “STER.” It was like vomiting, like a form of reverse penetration, something retracted from her mouth in an oily, sexual way. She must have repeated the word ten times within the thirty-second ad. The word lob was onomatopoeic, it enacted its own meaning through the mouth. All words arose in the body, it occurred to him, passed through it like a type of test. Words were motion, and motion needed a body, and the thought of sex made his head spin.

  His head was on Gina’s shoulder. She touched the curls above his left ear, and the sensation dazed him. He stroked her arm with delicate attention, afraid his hand might clasp too desperately.

  They lay stretched out on the couch, legs intertwined. They were still clothed, though her bra was balled up into a lump under her sweater and shirt. His lips were chapped and torn at. His hand rested against her belly. Her palm lay flat against the fly of his jeans. They were both breathing hard. Paul directed each breath toward the ceiling.

  “It’s not possible,” he said. “I told you.”

  They came up with a new sleeping arrangement. Shane on a makeshift mattress in the living room, Paul and Gina in the bedroom. There would be some nights when Shane would be with his father—there was no choice in this, she said, unless she wanted things to get really unpleasant. It was important, too, that she and her son stay at their own apartment sometimes, with his own bed, his toys and familiar things. Being home, however, meant Billy could phone, cajole, and, as she put it, manipulate. When she said this, Paul heard the underlying anxiety.

  Lying naked beside her was a nerve-wracking act of faith in the gods of fortune. How could it not be, when his doctor at the Prostate Centre had warned that sexual anticipation, or nearly anything else for that matter, might make him “leak a little”? To divert attention from his own body, he made a show of studying hers. Her skin’s olive tone had not been a trick of the dim sauna light. “I think you have First Nations in you,” he said. “Maybe from the valley?”

  “No. Mom would have said something,” Gina said with a wry grin. “Being part Sinixt would carry a lot of weight in her environmental groups.”

  Some of his participants, old fruit farmers, had mentioned a possible burial site and pithouses. Some farmers had left patches of brush and trees around the kekulis they found, or had been careful not to disturb the petroglyphs on the cliffs along the river. Two sets of petroglyphs had been salvaged by Monashee Power and placed in a museum on the coast, but the reservoir now hid or destroyed the last remaining evidence of stolen land. “At any rate,” she said. “Think I’m just lucky.”

  “Lucky?”

  “To have nice skin.” She rolled nimbly on top of him and pinned his arms. When she forgot about Billy, she came alive.
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br />   Despite his attempts at distraction or anxious protests, she would fondle him, unresponsive as his body was, even take his limp member in her mouth, an act both overwhelmingly tender and humiliating. “I just like the feel of it,” she said. He would blink away tears of shame and stifle the urge to shove her away. Once or twice he thought he felt a physical stirring, a rising surge at his core, but that was only the basic, skin-deep pleasure of being touched, no different than having his finger sucked. Phantom twitches. “Don’t,” she said whenever he’d apologize. “You take pretty good care of me. I’m not missing out on anything.”

  It was true there were things he could do for her, and he enjoyed doing them. He’d missed the pure, tactile delight, a woman’s response, even after a year of convincing himself other­wise. His life had lacked the pleasure he could give to someone else, even if he didn’t entirely believe that altruism, on either of their parts, belonged in the bedroom.

  Some nights, though, a claustrophobic panic would overtake him, and he’d refuse to take off his boxers, could hardly stand being touched. They would grapple restlessly without any satisfying conclusion and he would lie awake afterwards, his body raw, wired, and uncertain, his thoughts a hot mud. Or, even if things went relatively well, Gina might turn away, curl into herself, and cry. She was afraid of staying at her apartment and afraid of starting over again, she owned almost nothing worth having except a few good pots and pans, and her son was sleeping on her lover’s couch. He promised himself he’d buy a bed of some kind for Shane, maybe partition part of the living room.