by W. D. Wilson
WE GOT TO THE summit when the sun tucked under the Rockies and everything went grey and dead-looking as the forest. Walla showed us a firepit ringed by skeleton trees where he’d piled some chopped wood. Animal collapsed near the pit to work a blaze. He waved Vic off when she offered to help, so she dug a mickey of Canadian Club from the cooler. Fifty feet off, a cliff dropped to the highway below, where the Ferris wheel keeled and the goddamn clown face smirked.
—Thanks for helping us, Vic said. She sat down on an upturned log, whiskey on her knee.
—My dad tells me if you’re cooking stew, and you don’t put meat in it, you can’t bitch when yer eating it, Walla said, and he grinned to show his pearly teeth, and Vic laughed and so did I, though I didn’t know what the hell he meant. Then he said: —Now I need a lift down to the station.
Vic froze in the middle of sipping her whiskey and Animal looked up from his smouldering fire. —What’dya mean.
—I told you, I’m shittered, and the pigs have it out for me.
—I’m buildin the fire, Animal said, but Walla had his eyes on Vic, anyway. Vic glanced from Walla to me and I knew she wouldn’t ask me to step in, because she won’t do that, ever. One time she figured out how to fix a circuit fault on her Ranger all on her own, because she didn’t want to ask her old man how.
—I’ll do it, I said to Walla, and then I dumped my half-empty beer over Animal’s wimpy fire and he threatened to beat me to death with the kindling.
Walla flicked me his keys and I palmed them from the air and got in the driver seat, and he swung into passenger like a buddy. Not thirty seconds into the drive his stench soured up the cab, but at least he smelled like a working man, like he just forgot to shower, and not like some hobo. On the way down, the poly over the rear panel smacked about and more than once he leaned sideways to inspect the tape. He spread one leg across the seat, draped his arm clear out the window, and I wondered if his knuckles bobbed along the gravel. In the distance, the horizon glowed from the park lights and the treetops resembled hundreds of heated needles. I kept the highbeams on and scanned for marble eyes, since twilight is the worst time for hitting deer, but Walla told me that all the deer fled north with the beetles. —Nothin here but us and the flies, he said. —A thousand dead acres.
—The dead roads, or something.
—I don’t mind that, Walla said. Then: —They’re an odd couple, eh?
—Who.
—The girl and him, Animal.
—They’re not a couple.
—The way he looks at her? Sure they are. Or gonna be, he said, and punched me on the arm like we were friends.
—He looks at all girls like that.
Walla smiled like a Mason jar. He had fillings in his teeth. —Her, too. She was lookin at him too.
The station and the clown face swept into view, and as I geared down my fist touched Walla’s knee. Vic had about zero reason to go for a guy like Animal, so I don’t know. But then I imagined the two of them bent together at that shitty fire, red marks scraped over Vic’s neck and collarbones from Animal’s barbed-wire stubble.
—You got a thing for her, eh, Walla said.
—No.
—Might be you need to take him down a notch.
—We’re buds, I said, and parked the truck.
Walla extracted himself from the passenger seat. —Nah man, he said across the hood. —We’re buds.
Whatever the hell he meant I’ll never know, since I ditched him and started back along the road, toward the summit. The whole way I thought about Animal and Vic and I tried not think about them at the same time. I’d known them so long – my two best friends, really. The outside smelled more like driftwood than a forest. Wind kicked dirt at my face and though it breezed around the treetops they just creaked like power poles. I wouldn’t have been surprised if a goddamn wolfman came pounding out of the dark. A few times headlights tear-assed up the road and a few times I almost barrelled sideways and I just got madder even thinking of it.
Then the slope evened out, which meant I neared the summit, and then the trees flickered campfire-orange. The road looped our campsite so I cut through the forest. Never been so scared in my life, those last steps. Animal atop Vic, grinding away, probably still in his stupid commie hat and his Converses – no sight in the world could be worse. I’d rather get shot. Walla was right – Animal’d been gunning for her the whole trip. Right from the start when he kicked me to the backseat, some big plan – some big, selfish plan.
I got close enough to see the flames. Vic sat under her sleeping bag, off near the cliff edge, but I could only make out her outline in the orange light. Animal was MIA. They might have already finished, how could I know. I crept along the tree line, scanned for him. Not sure what I hoped to accomplish. It’s not like he kept a dark secret.
I found him outside the campsite with his back to the slope and his cock in his hand and a stream of piss splattering on a tree. It was dark enough that I didn’t get the whole picture, thank God for that. He’d crossed the road to make use of a big pine that might have been a little bit alive – for some reason Animal really didn’t like those dead trees. I had some things to say to him. Vic’s old man once told me a guy needs to know when to pick his battles, and as I watched Animal, pissing as if nothing mattered, I figured it out: a guy needs to know what he cares about most, and Animal, well, he didn’t care about stuff. But he had to know I did. Christ, everybody in the valley knew I did. It’d be like if I tried to steal his car for a joyride. I’m his friend, for fucker’s sake.
Then a truck hauled ass up the road, kicking gravel in a spray. It had a good clip and its rear end fishtailed, out of control or so the passengers could get a laugh. Its headlamps swung around, but on that switchback the dead trees scattered the light – no way the driver would see Animal, not before clobbering him. Animal turned as if to check what the commotion was about. Either he couldn’t see or he was too stupid to dive for cover or he figured no truck would dare to run him down. I saw the trajectory, though, loud and clear: the pickup’s rear end would swing into him, knock him ass-over-teakettle into the woods, and that’d be that for Animal Brooks. But I didn’t yell out. I didn’t make a sound. Because all I could think of was his hand on Vic’s thigh, over and over the whole trip, his wild grin in the rearview and all the stuff he’d pulled to be alone with her. So nope, I didn’t yell out, and the truck fishtailed right toward him and he yowled like a dog and I lost track of where he went.
Vic bolted from the tree line, almost right into me, and I scrambled after her. She gave me a look, as if surprised, but I just nodded like I ought to be there. Animal had already clambered to his feet. Moss and dead twigs stuck to his face, and his commie hat had been biffed away and the forest floor was beat up where he’d rolled across it. He pulled a pinecone from his hair and stared at it in wonder.
—Animal, Vic barked. —You okay?
He flicked the pinecone aside, seemed to notice us. —Why the hell didn’t ya say sompthen, he said, staring at me.
—What?
—Yuh were across the road. Why didn’t ya yell out or sompthen. Fucken truck nearly killed me.
—I just got here, I told him.
—Ya just got here, eh.
—Yeah, got back right now.
Animal swiped his commie hat from the ground. He banged it against his thigh to dust it off. —Just en time to see my kung fu reflexes, he said, and grinned.
—So you’re okay? Vic said.
—Shaken up, yeah.
Vic grabbed Animal’s chin and turned his head sideways. His cheek was scraped and dirty and Vic licked her thumb to rub it clean. —Mighta pulled a groin muscle, too, he said when she stepped back, and Vic lasted a full two seconds of his leer before she punched him in the chest hard enough to make him wheeze.
AFTERWARD, BY THE FIRE, Animal shook out his adrenalin. —Woulda sucked to run that truck over, he said, and laughed, a deep, throaty laugh like a guy does when he’s survived an eve
nt that should have killed him. Then he dug into the cooler and started skulling beers to drown his jitters.
Vic and me shared the mickey of Canadian Club, away from the campfire so we could look over the cliffside at this bizarre piece of land. She took a big chug from the bottle and handed it over. Vic can drink like a tradesman when times come. The moonlight made her cheeks silver and that lazy eye of hers acted out. She spread her sleeping bag across her legs and I inched my way under it and the nylon clung to my shins. Vic smelled like a campfire. Vic smelled like citrus shampoo or something. Vic smelled like Vic.
—This an alright place to sleep, she said and wiggled in the dirt and the dried bloodweed and made a little nest.
—I’m not picky, I said.
—You smell like a dog.
—Sorry, Vic.
She belted me on the shoulder and I leaned into her. Below us a couple semis zoomed north and the Ferris wheel spun and I thought I could hear Walla chopping lumber. Christ, a weirder place. By the fire, Animal sounded out words from his book, finger under each sentence. Then Vic unbuttoned her flannel coat. She always wore it or if not the coat then a flannel shirt. Sexiest thing, swear to God. I remember how she took it off, first time we ever boned, all awkward and struggling so I had to help her with the sleeves. A different kind of time back then. A different way of going about things, even. Sometimes I wish I was smarter so I could’ve gone to university with Vic.
Vic put her hand under my chin and jacked my head to eye level. I guess I was looking at her breasts. She leaned in and kissed me and she tasted like dope, and softness, and her smooth chin ground on my middle-of-the-night stubble. But I couldn’t kiss her right then. I don’t know why. She slicked her tongue over my lips and I couldn’t get my head around the whole thing, the Ferris wheel and what Walla said and how I almost got Animal killed, and Vic, you know, and the whole goddamn thing.
—Don’t fuck around, she said, but the words were all breath.
—Just thinkin is all.
She bit down on my lip. —Well, stop it.
—I like you a lot, Vic.
For a second she stopped and turned her head and her neon hair grazed my nose and I’d have given anything to know what was going on in her head right then. She had her lips squished shut and her forehead a little scrunched as if figuring something out – same look as the day she left for university. That’d have been in ’99, and her and her old man and me stayed at a hotel in Calgary so she could catch her West Coast flight in the wee hours, and while she showered, her old man told me not to let her get away. —It’ll happen, Duncan, he said, his face drawn in and lined around his eyes, as if he knew what the hell he was talking about. —I swear to God you’ll lose her if you don’t take action soon. And I nodded and tried not to grin, because I understood exactly what he meant.
On the mountaintop, Vic hooked hair behind her ear. —You’re my guy, Dunc, she said as though it were true.
—I know, Vic. But sometimes I don’t know. You know?
Then she cuffed me, all playful, and pulled me into her.
But that’s Vic for you. Afterward, when we were done and Animal’s moans were snores and the fire glowed down to embers, Vic sat up and stretched. Her ribs made bumps under her skin and the muscles along her spine tensed and eased and it felt alright right then. That’s Vic for you, that’s how she can make you feel, that easy. Never liked a girl so much. Nothing else to it. I just cared about her more than the university guy did or Animal did or maybe her old man did. I should’ve told her so, or how I wished she didn’t have to go west, or how I’d had a ring for her for years but lacked the balls to do anything with it. Even then, the mountaintop seemed like a last chance or something.
She sucked the rest of the whiskey and pointed at the sky where a trail of turquoise streaked across the horizon – the northern lights, earlier than I’d ever known them. She just stood there for a second with her back to me and those lights around her. Christ, she was so pretty. Then she whipped the empty bottle off the summit, and I stared at her and thought about her and waited for the sound of the bottle breaking way, way below us.
THE MILLWORKER
Mitch parked his old Ranger in front of the garage door and shifted the clutch to first, killed the ignition. His e-brake had gone slack and this worried him: a couple months ago his son’s Taurus rolled down the driveway and butted up to a tree across the road. It could have been a mess but Mitch was awake in the bleeding hours – first guy out of bed on the whole street, on his way to the mill – to wake Luke before anything went south.
Nobody had left any lights on for him but he’d grown used to this kind of inconsideration. He eased himself from the Ranger, imagined his muscles unfolding like big ropes. Everything was the colour of ink. The sun teased behind the Rockies, gave tungsten outlines to their silhouettes. Invermere’s streets were quiet save a herd of deer plucking crabapples from a neighbour’s tree. Mitch knew guys who’d rather blare a hollowpoint into a deer than let it eat their fruit, and why those guys lived in the Kootenay Valley he couldn’t say. They might as well head east, leave B.C. There was plenty of room in the tar sands.
Inside, Mitch tugged off his heavy, grease-grimed boots, and they left his fingers gummy when he knelt to unknot the laces. About the only thing he wanted was a beer and a nap, but not a dozen steps out of the entryway the kitchen fixture wouldn’t turn on, and it was probably something Andie already told him about, something he should’ve fixed days or weeks ago, so he grabbed a chair and wiggled the curly fluorescent bulb and it flared to bright, and he blinked turquoise spots from his eyes. The kitchen smelled like cinnamon and his wife. Overhead, wallpaper banded the ceiling, patterned with chickens and leopards and zebras and giraffes. The guys at the mill would give him hell for that, but it kept Andie happy.
Mitch bent backward at the hip until his spine popped and the tension lessened. It’d been an extra eight hours shoving lumber and he was gamy with the smell of sawdust and that metallic thing tools do to your hands. Everything ached. Invermere’s was about the only mill in all B.C. that hadn’t gone fully auto – valley stubbornness, valley fascination with relics. He shrugged his coat over the back of a kitchen chair. It used to be his dad’s, that coat, and over the years Mitch had sewn its holes and fixed its tears and patched it with reflectors so the late-shifters wouldn’t knock him blindly into a presser. Whenever he caught flak from the young bucks who strutted around invincible, Mitch reminded them of the kid whose legs got crushed so bad that bone fragments ravaged his blood-stream like grains of mortared glass.
He dug his gloves from the coat’s gut pocket and tossed them in the laundry sink. Splinters jutted from the palms, not deep enough to gouge his skin. He’d thank God for that, if it mattered – little in the world disgusted him more than slivers. Once, during a dry summer in his childhood when he romped through the wilderness like a kid ought to, a buddy of his snagged a wood shard in his palm, fat as a pencil, and the hand swelled up like a boxing glove. It had something to do with wood pulp, something to do with allergies, but that ballooning hand stayed radiant in Mitch’s memory.
He collapsed on the couch in his dirty overalls knowing Andie would give him hell, and, as if sensing him through the ether, upstairs a light flicked on. Andie descended, hand trailing on the banister. She wore a forest-green bathrobe that, when pulled closed, would display a logo of a windmill with a great, proud S in its centre. Mitch bought it for her three years ago to celebrate the rebranding of the Calgary Flames into the Saskatchewan Windfarmers – her homeland’s first NHL team since its failed bid for the Saskatoon Blues almost five decades earlier, in the eighties.
Andie’s brown hair hung to her shoulders and Mitch stared at her like always. He’d never known anyone who could be so beautiful first thing in the morning. Her nose bent a little sideways – she broke it, years and years ago, with her own knee – but she had the creamy skin of a movie star. She put her shoulder against the wall. Her bathrobe swayed open b
ut she cinched it shut. The small lines around her eyes and at the corners of her lips made her look older than she was. He probably had something to do with that.
—It’s cold, she said.
Mitch leaned forward on his thighs. —I can turn up the heat, he said.
—You alright?
—Tired.
—Come to bed.
He shrugged as best he could. Her shoulders slumped as she looked at him, dirty, on her couch. Maybe she was thinking of those nights he didn’t come home, if he sat, filthy, on another woman’s furniture. Maybe she remembered the way he smelled afterward, as though some of the mill had rubbed off on those foreign sheets, or those sheets onto him. He could wash and wash but there was always a residue Andie could detect and he’d see it in her eyes.
—I gotta work in a few hours anyway, he said.
—It’s stupid. You working like this.
She picked her way to the kitchen. Her bathrobe caught a kernel of stray cat food and it rolled on the laminate, over and over, ticking like a moth. She brewed coffee – organic, shade-grown, fair-trade roast that cost him three dollars more per pound than it would’ve ten years earlier. You couldn’t even get non-organic coffee anymore, unless you went instant, and Andie refused to drink instant. So Mitch forked out, to keep her happy, even though the guys at the mill gave him hell for it same as they had been for however many years. The world changed, Mitch figured, but people more or less stayed the same.
—There’s oil on the gloves in the sink, he said.
—I’ll wash them.
—You don’t have to.
—I don’t mind, Mitch.
He joined her in the kitchen and she brought him a ceramic coffee cup and the heat stung his fingers as he took it. The mug had a picture of an old friend, Will Crease, being punched in the gut by his dad. Its caption read: You’re not in Mayberry anymore! Mitch had snapped the photo for that mug, at a family dinner after Will’s dad came back from Kosovo. Those were better times, maybe. Andie folded into the chair nearest him and nudged her bathrobe closed around the lapel, but not before Mitch glimpsed skin.