Copyright ©2016 Hal Niedzviecki
ARP Books (Arbeiter Ring Publishing)
201E-121 Osborne Street
Winnipeg, Manitoba
Canada R3L 1Y4
arpbooks.org
Cover by Mike Carroll
Typeset by Relish New Brand Experience Inc.
Printed in Canada by Friesens on paper made from 100% recycled post-consumer waste.
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
This book is fully protected under the copyright laws of Canada and all other countries of the Copyright Union and is subject to royalty.
ARP Books acknowledges the generous support of the Manitoba Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Province of Manitoba through the Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Book Publisher Marketing Assistance Program of Manitoba Culture, Heritage, and Tourism.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Niedzviecki, Hal, 1971-, author
The archaeologists / Hal Niedzviecki.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-894037-79-2 (paperback).--ISBN 978-1-894037-81-5 (pdf)
I. Title.
PS8577.13635A74 2016C813’.54C2016-903639-1
C2016-903640-5
Woe! Woe!
Hearken ye!
We are diminished!
Woe! Woe!
The cleared land has become a thicket.
Woe! Woe!
The clear places are deserted.
Woe!
They are in their graves—
They who established it—
Woe!
Contents
Part One
Tim: Thursday, April 10
Hal: Thursday, April 10
Charlie: Thursday, April 10
June: Thursday, April 10
Tim: Thursday, April 10
Part Two
June: Friday, April 11
Tim and Charlie: Friday, April 11
Susan: Friday, April 11
Tim: Friday, April 11
Hal and Scott: Saturday, April 12
June: Saturday, April 12
Part Three
Hal and Rose: Monday, April 14
June: Monday, April 14
Tim and Charlie: Monday, April 14
Susan: Tuesday, April 15
June: Tuesday, April 15
Rose: Tuesday, April 15
Part Four
June: Thursday, April 17
Susan: Thursday, April 17
Tim and Charlie: Thursday, April 17
June: Thursday, April 17–Friday, April 18
Hal: Thursday, April 17–Friday, April 18
Rose: Friday, April 18
Part Five
June: Saturday, April 19
Tim and Charlie: Saturday April 19
Hal: Monday, April 21
Susan: Monday, April 21
June: Monday, April 21–Tuesday, April 22
Tim: Tuesday, April 22
Part Six
June: Thursday, June 26
Tim: Thursday, June 26
Hal: Thursday, June 26
Charlie: Friday, June 27
June and Susan: Tuesday, July 22
Acknowledgements
PART ONE
TIM
Thursday, April 10
TIM STANDS LEGS APART, ARMS AKIMBO, on the steep muddy embankment. The grass beneath his boots is long and stringy. It sticks to the seeping earth. His neck cranes up and back as he reconsiders his decision to climb down the hill into the river valley. He can just see the battered car at rest in the clearing above. He shifts his gaze to the dark basin below him. This causes his body to tense, his muscles to realign. He feels the worn bottom of his right boot beginning to slip. His gangly legs slowly spread. Tim tries to adjust his stance, but instead he loses balance altogether. He falls backward and finds himself half scrabbling half sliding down the hill. He picks up speed, bouncing over all manner of sharp, foreign objects, detritus from the make-out spot above: crushed cans, burger boxes, wet toilet paper wads, a cell phone with its circuit board guts exposed. Tim’s boot heels dig in. Mud furrows. He grabs at bush ends and wet branches. Finally, he arrives, not quite tumbling, at the soft bottom of the ravine.
He climbs to his feet. He brushes himself off. Wet mud cakes the rear of his pants. Uncool. Who’s gonna see me down here? Still…Tim scans the crest of the hill. There’s nobody around, but he feels like he’s being watched. Uncool. Reflexively, Tim pats down his pockets. Lighter. Check. Car keys. Check. Wallet. Check. The letter—
Shit. Where’s the letter? Carly says he’s always losing things. She says he needs to be more organized. Yeah, he admits sheepishly, I’m working on it.
Tim rams his hand into his army jacket pocket. He feels it—folded paper gone soft and greasy. He thinks about pulling it out, scanning those words again, as if there might be something else in the barely legible pen scrawl, something he missed the first forty times he read it. The letter arrived more than a month ago. Tim hasn’t shown it to Carly. He knows what she would say: that he should forgive him, go see him, hug him, help him. Carly’s parents, almost but not quite retirees, live in a bungalow in the northern part of the city. They call and visit and ask questions. They hover over her. She’s their only child. Their special little girl. It’s easy for Carly to envision him forgiving, even forgetting. Tim sees it too—like a movie, actors filling in the cracks that real life just seems to widen. The letter uses words he could never imagine his father saying out loud: regret, forgive, sorry. Sorry? Sure you are, Dad. But let’s get to the heart of the thing. Tim feels it, a sucking hunger in his chest. The soft, wet, oh so deep empty heart of the thing. Sorry about what?
Tim walks. The gully of the ravine isn’t as impenetrable as it looked from the clearing above. It’s the opposite, in fact: branches point to suggestive clearings and last summer’s leaves carpet accidental footpaths. Tim plows through scraggly shrubs and bare-limbed trees. The ravine feels entombed, dead to the world. This is just a quick pit stop, Tim reminds himself, a quick look at his old hideout. He’ll smoke a joint and calm the nerves. Then he’ll go and see for himself if it’s not too late, if he can put the past behind him. He hasn’t seen his father in almost twelve years. He doesn’t want anything from him. He’s worked in bars for almost as long as he lived in what he once stupidly thought of as home. He’s a high school dropout. He’s a bit of a stoner. He has a girlfriend.
—Carly.
He’ll call her after. He’ll tell her the whole story: the way the letter arrived out of nowhere; the way he kept reading and re-reading it, words circling restlessly round and round his skull like old Evil Knievel getting ready, one more stunt, nothing left to lose. I’m dying. Cancer. I’m sorry. Tim’s sorry too. Sorry he didn’t call or text or at least leave a note. Instead, he carefully folded up the letter and stowed it in his back pocket, searched for her car keys and his wallet from the coffee table clutter, slowly pulled on his boots, and marched out of the apartment, a man with a plan. Tim stops walking. The river gurgles. He can’t see it through the rustling underbrush. There are birds and squirrels. He notices, for the first time, how loud it is. He hears heavy breathing—his own—and the sound of sweat dropping off his nose and splashing onto moss, roots, dirt, whatever else is mouldering away underneath the trees, the names of which Tim doesn’t know. It’s better that way; knowing would just make the whole thing louder. All those elms, pines, alders, firs and maples demanding they be paid attention to.
He thought it would be quiet in the forest. His ears are still buzzed from the drive, from the rattle of Carly’s twelve-
year-old Pontiac, rusted orange hand-me-down from her mom lurching past the speed limit, past the outer suburbs, past the short ribbon of yellow farmlands squeezed between an ever-expanding grey zone of housing developments and accompanying mini-malls. Tim’s dad always drove big black sedans, a new one every six months. Carly’s car sports a tinny cassette radio. Tim had turned it up as loud as it would go, Bob Marley blasting…don’t worry…Tim lit a joint, veered slightly to the left, responded to an indignant honk with an equally indignant middle finger. Then he toked. The interior of the Sunfire filled with smoke. Tim cranked down his window and highway air poured in. Carly did not like him lighting up in the car. The car rides he used to take with his father had been still, sepulchral, the air thick with cigar and cologne. His dad’s Cadillacs moved smoothly ahead as if they were drifting just above the pavement; and no matter how fast the scenery outside sped by, his little boy self stayed lost, enveloped by a succession of slick, cavernous, black back seats.
He’s a big boy now. A grown-up. Sort of. He urges himself forward. He feels his heart pumping against his ribs. When was the last Tim walked farther than the corner store? He’s a cab man. Tim struggles on through the spring mush. He follows the river, keeps the river in sight. This much he knows for sure: the spot he’s looking for—his spot—is near but not right on the bank of the river. Which he can see now, flowing slowly by like a giant contiguous wad of chewing tobacco effluvium. Smells like it too, he thinks.
Tim tilts his head, looks up. Through the branches he sees tiny patches of grey-smudged sky. The sky seems close and also far away. He can just make out the upper floors of the houses on the ridge. He’s trapped down here. Tim breathes deep into his abdomen. It’s cool. He’s cool. Once upon a time, he lived in one of those houses. Almost there, he thinks. He’s just going to find his old spot. No biggie. He’s not trapped. He can leave anytime. Just turn around and go. Carly says he has problems finishing things. Carly says he has to finish what he starts. So: Plan’s a plan—right Carly? That’s the way his father used to talk: Plan’s a Plan. Use It or Lose It. Smoke ’Em If Ya Got ’Em. Tim hears his father’s voice, contemptuous and impatient: What plan ya idiot? You call this a goddam plan?
Tim closes his eyes. He’s trying to visualize, to see how this is going to go. How it’s all going to work out.
Relax. Close your eyes.
That’s one of Carly’s things. Inner peace. Or something.
Behind his eyelids, Tim sees naked trees, possible paths, scrubby bushes, everything the same brown-on-grey camouflage.
Tim opens his eyes. He feels calmer, not calm, exactly, but less like he’s trying to breathe hot sticky molasses. His slack calves itch. His forehead pulses. The worst are his long skinny legs, knees wobbling from all that humping over fallen forest, thighs burning from the sheer effort of self-propulsion. Still, he wills himself forward. The sun comes out, late afternoon dappling of faint warmth through the interlocking overhang of branches, like hugging Carly in her thick winter sweater. Skin underneath. Tim’s on the final bend of the river’s S curve, feeling dizzy from the constancy of rounding motion.
He stumbles past and doesn’t notice.
But he stops anyway.
He’s ten feet from the riverbank. Between him and the escarpment sits a large rock, almost a boulder, jutting out of the earth. There’s a cluster of weedy birch trees so tall and thin they actually manage to sway in the breeze. There’s a hole in the ground, more like an indentation, the earth slightly darker, scarred—
The fire pit! How could he forget the fire pit?
It’s all in the details: the fire pit, the birch grove. He forgot about those. It comes back to him now, not in one mad dash for the mimetic finish line but in starts and stutters. Synapses slowed by time or, perhaps, by a certain degree of overindulgence in what his dealer Clay always calls—with just a hint of proprietorial pride—the product. And then there’s the tree, the giant oak that forms a triangle with the boulder and the birch grove, the fire pit sitting in the middle of Tim’s boyhood territory. The tree. Not, as might be reasonable to assume, smaller than Tim remembers it, but actually much bigger. He staggers over, puts a hand on the tree’s cool craggy exterior. Immediately he feels ridiculous.
Tim wipes his nose on the shoulder of his army jacket. He squats on his haunches and puts a finger in what remains of some crude hacks in the bark. He used to carve words into the tree, stream-of-conscious fragments from his addled teenage mind. His finger traces the outlines of a letter F. FUCKFACE, Tim says out loud. FUCKASS. FUCKWAD. Tim laughs. A heat in the pit of his stomach. Here it is. Proof. Proof of what? He’ll bring Carly here one day. He’ll show her the big rock and the even bigger tree, the scar in the forest floor where the fire pit used to be. They’ll stand there and neither of them will have to say anything. She’ll just get it.
He gazes up the long craggy spine of the tree. The steps are still there. Well, sort of. Some are rotting, some just barely dangling from ancient rusty nails. But at least half of the ten or so stairs leading up to the tree’s lower branches appear sturdy enough, orange nail-heads still visible buried in the dry dead planks.
The view from up there. That’s why he’s here. To see that view just one more time.
Tim leans back and stares at the dizzying vision of the treetop breaking out of the wooded ravine like a god looming over puny worshippers. Tree must be old. He’s never thought about it that way before—trees having an age. Tim can feel sweat cooling on his forehead. He shivers. It’s suddenly cold. Just get it over with, he thinks to himself. Or forget about it. He could leave, hike back up the muddy hill, slide into the frayed bucket seat of the Sunfire, light up a spliff and close his eyes. He doesn’t owe his father anything. He doesn’t owe anyone anything. Well, okay, he owes Clay around two grand and Carly eight hundred or so. But that’s a whole other issue. He pats down his pockets again. Car keys. Check. Pre-rolled joints. Yup. Che Guevara lighter. Present. And the letter. Tim fingers the ragged edge where the paper was ripped off a pad. I know you blame me for what happened.
HAL
Thursday, April 10
HAL DOODLES ON HIS REPORTER’S PAD.
Okay what else do we have for this week? the Boss asks.
A sewer being expanded. The mayor promising a new school and more funding to deal with the rapid expansion of housing developments in the West End. A local pet store joining forces with the Wississauga fire department to lead a campaign about cat and dog safety in the event of a home or apartment fire.
What else team? The Boss scans the three people in the shabby meeting room, the entirety of the Wississauga Cable TV Community News Channel 47 team.
Hal keeps his head down.
Hal? she finally says.
Hal’s pen freezes over the shading in of some abstract collection of twisted triangles.
Hal, isn’t it time to catch up with Wississauga’s oldest citizen?
It’s Hal’s time of the month! cackles Trevor.
Sarah, sitting next to Hal, titters.
Let’s send Sarah this time, Hal offers.
Sarah digs an elbow into his ribs. She does weather, lifestyle, and local sports. Hal does news, mostly, plus the occasional in-depth interview. Once a month, he’s tasked with interviewing 104-year-old Rose McCallion, known not only for officially being Wississauga’s oldest living resident, but also, unofficially, for being the closest the scattered edge city has to a bonafide, genuine homegrown celebrity. Hal’s monthly sit-downs with Rose are one of Wississauga Cable’s most popular features, much to the delight of Hal’s co-workers.
Sarah, laughing again, puts an arm around Hal’s neck. He can smell her perfume. You’re the one she wants, Hal.
Hal groans.
You’ll get it done, right Hal? the Boss asks.
Yeah. I’m on it. He crosses out his heap of shapes.
Okay, the Boss says, come on guys. Let’s focus. What else do we have?
They go around the room again. New 7-11
opening up, will anchor the mini-mall at the corner of Hurontarion North and Elm. The store’s handing out half-price cups of Super Fusion All Energy Organic Slushie infused with Ginseng and Jicama during the first week of operation. A local ten-year-old has created his own comic, “Amazing Fatso Man,” selling over 200 copies and closing in on raising the $750 necessary to buy a water buffalo for a needy family in Pakistan. A 43-year-old hit by a car after parking illegally on the shoulder of the 472 and attempting to cross eight lanes of traffic to take advantage of Free “Arabian Roast” Coffee Wednesday at McDonald’s new McCafé is going to make a full recovery. Police have decided not to press charges. McDonald’s has sent over a get well card signed by the manager and staff, and issued a statement reminding customers to obey traffic laws.
And it’s going to get cold again, Sarah says happily. Forget spring! Winter’s back.
That’s always a good story, the Boss says.
I’ve got some clips from Groundhog Day we can use, Mitch pitches in. We can do a whole thing on how much longer winter will go, compare it to previous decades, multi-year trends, get someone from the national weather service, work the climate change angle.
Good, good, you two get on that. What else?
Um. Hal clears his throat importantly. He starts off tentatively, like he hasn’t been waiting the entire story meeting to bring it up. There’s the community meeting at the school about the riverfront expressway.
Right, the Boss says. Right. She waits for Hal to say more.
It’s likely to be very contentious. There are a lot of rumours swirling around, a lot of anger about the idea. Also there are accusations that the planning committee is pushing this through at the last minute and not really interested in public consultation.
One angle, Mitch jumps in, might be to interview an environmentalist at the university. I’ve got a lead on—
We’ve already got the climate change angle on that weather thing, Hal says, pretending he’s thinking aloud.
Right, the Boss says, let’s just stick to the government-consults-local-community angle. No need to do two environment stories. Hal, I want you on this all next week. Preview it, report it as it happens, and follow up. Community reaction, comment from government, local opposition, the whole bit.
The Archaeologists Page 1