Best Canadian Stories 2018

by Russel Smith

  When the guy finished and sat sipping coffee, Arnie wandered over. Arnie was both the biggest and the oldest here, forty-five to their twenty-five, which is maybe why he did the Walmart greeter thing. Or maybe he still wanted to think loneliness was a simple fix. The newbie’s hair was oily and he looked tired. He was on the frail side for general labour, resembling more the pencil-neck university type who dipped test tubes in the pens or syringed juice from a salmon. But he was dressed in shit so general labour he must be. Arnie could swear guys wore the dirtiest crap on purpose, as if to show how hard they worked. If these camp guys paused at a downtown corner, people would drop change at their feet.

  He shook Arnie’s hand limply, but Arnie knew that meant nothing. When he said his odd name it brought to mind another guy here, a First Nations fellow who introduced himself as “B. Paul,” leading to confusion he never cared to correct:

  “Bee Pall?”

  “Pleased to meet you.”

  “That’s an odd name.”

  “No it’s not.”

  Quizzical looks gained nothing and only later would you learn his name was Bob. Arnie didn’t know if Bob found dignity using an initial or if he was just pissing off another white guy. He’d always been alert to names, because growing up a Bacon wasn’t fun. He always wanted people to think of the actor Kevin, or even Sir Francis, who might have been Shakespeare, but everyone just thought of bacon, and in his school years he answered to Pig. When by some huge fluke he was the first in his crowd to get laid, for a while he was happy being called Makin’.

  Introducing himself, the new guy had a faint accent, maybe German. Arnie predicted correctly to himself the jokes that would be made about him being a Norwegian spy. Every operation along the coast was Norwegian owned, so all new guys were of course Norwegian company spies.

  The spy said his name was ‘Sint.’ Arnie saw that he wasn’t drinking coffee. The tea bag was red, and you could smell its herbal sourness.

  “‘Sint?’”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.” Now he looked up. “Like Madonna.”

  Arnie asked him to spell it and he did.

  “No way. A ‘K?’”

  “That’s right.” He was falsely smiling now.

  “But can a K be, you know, an S?”

  “The two ‘I’s do it.” He held Arnie’s gaze. His eyes were the light blue that feels too active. He was barely willing to be liked. “That kind of hard,” Kiint said, “can’t take that much soft.”

  Arnie waited a bit, but that was that and it was his turn. He got Kiint to smile for real at “Arnold Bacon.” He said his folks were from the old country and couldn’t have known what names might be hilarious in a new one.

  Kiint asked, “Do you think you ended up here because of your hilarious name?”

  Out here meant two grey buildings in a clearing hacked into the trees thirty-nine miles by boat from a wifi signal, flush toilet, or woman. For basically minimum wage. It was a job any guy could get. Arnie snorted at the question but wondered if it was five-percent true. It didn’t bug him that Kiint might be right. It bugged him that this newbie thought he could know, in one minute, something about him that he didn’t know himself. He was about to say, You probably chose your Eurofag name so fuck off and die—but he took a breath instead, an infantile temper being one of the actual reasons he was here.

  A finger tapped his shoulder. It was Clarke, the super.

  “Arnie? Since you’re already sort of doing it, show him around.”

  It was a bit of a rebuke since he should have been outside brushing down E- pen ten minutes ago. Clarke told Kiint to come by his office when they were done. The office was a closet where timesheets were kept, but Clarke liked saying “my office.” It wasn’t easy being bossed by a guy twenty years younger than you.

  In the mudroom they donned rain gear. Kiint shrugged off the offer of a spare floppy hat in favour of his own weird little cap, and as they walked past the land tanks and out the ramp to the first floating pen the wind hit and Arnie could see him pretend not to feel the cold drips down his back. The rain came so hard Arnie had to shout the age and size of the stock. Shouting that there were females topping a hundred pounds over there in D-pen, he was surprised to feel his pride. Shoulders up and stiffly listening, Kiint had no reaction to any of it.

  Then they stood in the nice quiet of the feedhouse with the various pellet bins along all four walls. It smelled like ripe pet food and gave off a red dust that was hard to breathe. Centering the room was a computer station covered with plastic sheeting, which Arnie grabbed up to flap like a bedsheet and get the dust off. He’d heard it was red dye to turn their flesh salmon colored, which made sense. He watched Kiint take it all in.

  Arnie took him through all the programs. He was mostly just avoiding work, but guys liked to hear about stuff. It was impressive gear. They had the new compressed air system where a computer key chose what food to blow down what pipe to what pen, where a carousel sprayer, like a robot spinning to feed a thousand pigeons at once, showered the water with pellets until the fish lost interest. Too much feed would sink through the fish and out the pen and be lost, like dimes through your fingers. Kiint stood patiently while Arnie scrolled through the codes that troubleshot clogs and spills. Arnie joked about salmon gluttons that fought their way up the dry pipes to gorge here in the bins, and Kiint either wasn’t listening or didn’t find it funny.

  “Wanna see the morts?” You could smell the mort bins from anywhere. Morts were dead salmon and they were knee deep in them even here at a brood farm. At the market farms it was way more. Guys pretended the deformities were entertaining—fish with shoulders, or plaguey bumps, “buboes” was the word, which B. Paul called boobs. Some fish were skinny, little more than swimming spines that somehow stayed sort of alive. You didn’t go out of your way to look at them. And it was nice to know they were working on that stuff, looking for answers. Fish farms really could maybe someday feed the world.

  Before Kiint could answer, they jumped to the roar of a shotgun, not twenty feet from the door. Scare the newbie. Ha ha.

  “That would be MacLeod,” Arnie said. “He just fed a crow to the crabs.” His heart was still going. “A headless crow.” He looked out the window, but couldn’t see MacLeod. “Or crowless head.”

  “Scared me,” Kiint admitted. Rocking faintly, he gazed into neutral territory.

  The fact was, guys killed birds. Next to video games it was the main fun. But only the noisy ones, the crows and gulls. A shotgun got used rarely because it made gulls disappear and not dribble back for a week. Guys got expert at slingshots. He once saw guys have a go with a paintball gun, hitting only the odd bird but screaming like little kids when they did, the gull flopping there, splotched yellow or blue. He saw guys invent DaVinci-like machines, and even for a non-birdkiller it was cool to watch an innocent-looking net fly down as hidden weights released, taking to the sea floor twenty gulls stupid enough to swarm a pile of morts magically served up to them.

  Kiint didn’t want to see the mort bins. He put his cap back on like they were done here, and fair enough, they pretty much were. Arnie reset the computer and yanked the plastic sheet back over.

  “You have any questions about anything?”

  Kiint looked around as if for a piece of gear he hadn’t understood. “No.”

  It was strange that Kiint didn’t ask a single question about the place. Not one. Newbies loved hearing about stuff. The predator cage, steel mesh that kept seals, whales, otters and sharks away from the soft-mesh pens, and how some, seals mostly, got stuck and drowned trying to get through. Or the bubble curtain that kept toxic plankton out. Or how algae and fish shit clogged the mesh so fast that each pen needed oxygen diffusers bubbling away down there at all times or the fish would suffocate. A fish farm was like a giant dirty aquarium.

 
“So this your first farm, or—?”

  “Bella Bella.”

  “Didn’t that one shut down because of the—?”

  “They cleaned it up, they said. Now it’s expanding.”

  “Really.” The politics of aquaculture were beyond him.

  Before leaving, Arnie opened the antibiotics closet to show him the arsenal and Kiint didn’t even look—in fact he thought he saw him shudder. Arnie understood how, for some people, even fish disease might feel like their own.

  Back in the rain, slogging up to the bunkhouse, Arnie was moved to shout a last fact, one Kiint probably knew.

  “So this is one of five brood sites on the west coast of North America. All the salmon, for all other farms, for restaurants, groceries, everything—it starts right here.”

  Kiint said, “Cool.”

  Arnie wanted to yell that here was better than the market sites. All that butchering, all those morts. Humping all that bad meat to the bins, to be barged away under a spiky bonnet of screaming birds and dumped who knows where. Here there was less of that. Here it was all eggs and milt and helping a million silver darters grow.

  Arnie did yell, “It’s okay here.”

  At the bunkhouse door they smelled weed. Arnie turned.

  “You know it’s a dry camp, right?” He tried to say it in a non-revealing way. When the time was right Arnie might tell him he sought out dry camps for a reason.

  “Yes.”

  “So everyone compensates by being high all the time. Everyone except me.” He added, “Especially weekends.” It was hilarious that even out here and in a job with no weekends they still used weekends as an excuse. They had a giant carved octopus hookah they called Mr Saturday Night.

  He showed Kiint the showers and DVD players and whatnot, and now Kiint was smiling sideways at him because, sure, anyone with a brain could figure out this stuff for themselves and, sure, he was taking work avoidance too far. But he still found it strange that Kiint didn’t have a single question about the place. Simple ones, like, Does it always rain like this here? Or, How do you claim fridge territory or dib the stove? Or, especially, This is grizz country, right?

  Kiint did pause to scan the books stacked in three towers beside Arnie’s bed. Except for Bob Paul, who tackled an occasional thriller, he was the only one who read. And he was proud of it, though no one gave him reason to be. If anything they found it uppity. Kiint’s eyes caught on several titles but Arnie couldn’t tell which. His taste was eclectic and his aim was to educate himself. He saw he’d left in plain view his notebook for jotting his new words, and if Kiint bent to touch it he would get his hand stomped.

  But Kiint wasn’t curious and still had no questions. Now Clarke was in Arnie’s face and hooked his thumb at the general outdoors, wordlessly ordering him back to work, wise enough to smile as he did so.

  Kiint said an obligatory thank you and met Arnie’s eyes for the second time that day. It felt like an icy insult. Kiint didn’t exactly look through him. He saw him as part of the problem.

  Arnie had no real suspicions until Labour Day itself, when Kiint went into action. Maybe he did have suspicions, but they were of the vaguest kind. One was Kiint’s early request to stay onsite and work the Labour Day weekend, which besides Christmas was the one time the place all but shut down, only a barest skeleton crew staying on to make sure the stock got fed. When Arnie heard of Kiint’s request, his eyebrows went up; it was the kind of request he made himself. Some people like to avoid holidays and go into hiding. In any case, it would be just him and Kiint working Labour Day.

  There was also the way Kiint wouldn’t talk about fish farms. He just wouldn’t. Later it was funny for Arnie to recall telling Kiint the nasty secret that their salmon might be iffy, and that in fact one grocery chain was going to stop selling it, and Kiint, eyebrows up, saying, “Really?” And the time Kiint said “Yikes” when Arnie told him he’d read somewhere about mercury in the feed.

  There were other small clues. As when Kiint came back from his first days off with a wet suit, and the next time a scuba tank, but then never used any of it. Also the lack of an air compressor was stupid, because it would limit Kiint to a single dive. But Arnie figured Kiint wasn’t getting around to it in the same way the rest of them weren’t getting around to trap prawns or invent bird machines and ended up smoking weed and playing vids instead. Arnie would glance up from his book and watch them slumped there, bodies rigid only in the arms, faces an ugly blend of tense and dead, stabbing and jerking their controllers like what was left of their zombie lives depended on it. It made him think of, “Boredom is rage spread thin,” from one of his quotation books. Sometimes they did go on hikes, but only after lots of “cajoling,” and only in groups, shouting and singing to warn bears of their approach.

  Kiint hiked by himself. He had been onsite a month when Arnie followed him. Not followed, exactly. The mountainside was impassable with underbrush and there was only one path, so he couldn’t help it. Ten minutes out of camp he emerged from the dark tunnel of forest onto a mossy rock knoll and stumbled on Kiint just sitting there, cross-legged, some sort of yoga thing. Kiint looked irked to see him. Arnie said sorry and spun and turned back, which of course made it worse, and he thought he heard Kiint sigh. He felt like some sort of creeper, which is probably what he looked like. After a minute he heard, “Bacon.” He stopped and turned and Kiint trotted up.

  “Starting to rain,” he said, short of breath, explaining himself.

  “It is.”

  “You ever see Spirit Bears up here?” he asked.

  “They aren’t in Toba. They start next inlet up.” Arnie waited. “There’s grizzlies here, though.”

  Kiint shook his head. “No no no, they’re here. I was just wondering if you’ve seen any.” He glanced at Arnie, the brief ice of those eyes.

  “Nope.”

  “The grizz will show up in about a month, right? At the river mouths? For the salmon?” Kiint snorted quietly. He might as well have said “for the real ones,” this sort of sarcasm the closest he ever got to humour.

  They walked. Arnie was angry-quiet because Kiint was walking with him like he was doing some loser a favour. Arnie had his own brand of humour and he asked Kiint if he was Norwegian. Kiint smiled but probably just thought this Canadian was stupid about accents. He said he was from Holland but he had lived all over, most recently New Zealand.

  And so they became friends. Or “friends.” Arnie knew it was more a case of two soloists falling warily into each other’s orbit.

  It wasn’t like they didn’t know there was something wrong with this business they were in, and days off be accosted in some bar by a health-foodie or commercial fisherman accusing them of sins against the world. Arnie used to live in these bars, he knew what yelled beer-spit looked like when it flew out a mouth a foot from your face. You know your farm spreads disease and kills wild runs? What idiot works for minimum and the profits go to Norway? Why you raising Atlantic salmon in the Pacific? Don’t you know they’re escaping, they’re spawning wild, they’re taking over?

  This last one was definitely wrong and the guys knew it. If one of their fish blundered out a hole it wouldn’t have a chance in the real ocean, let alone muscle miles upstream, get laid in the gravel and reproduce itself. The slobs in their pens were barely fish. If you had any doubts, troll up a fall coho and battle a twelve-pound silver bullet hard as a sprinter’s thigh.

  But so what? Arnie had imaginary arguments with Kiint even now. He considered writing him in jail. Fish farms might still feed the world. There were way worse jobs and way bigger sins. It was a job. Teachers keep teaching even though most kids don’t learn a thing. The landfill is overflowing but garbagemen do their rounds. Are the workers part of the problem? It’s a debate worth having, Kiint. Not that he ever said an accusing word. But Arnie had seen that look, more than once, saying he should know better.

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nbsp; When Arnie first got there he actually thought he was doing something good. And he hadn’t done much of that, historically. Proof of this lay mostly in what wasn’t: No friends, no family. No skills he could bank on. No credit rating. He wasn’t even allowed a passport. He had told Kiint enough of this to imply that he was in Toba Inlet not just because his name was Arnold Bacon.

  Anyway, after, the more he thought about it, the more he thought that Kiint had been only obvious. It was strange that more guys didn’t suspect him. Or maybe they did, and just didn’t care. Or forgot. Or were pleasantly puzzled by whatever unfolded. Weed could do all that.

  Everyone worked ten days then waited for the aluminum taxi to come and roar them through waves and rain to five days of real life in Campbell River. The boat’s arrival back was a spectator sport because guys climbing out told a story. Knowing he was watched from the bunkhouse, a guy might grab his crotch and hunch, feigning the rawness from epic screwing. Or mime a fatal headache, the epic drinking. Arnie saw guys wave bulbous bags of weed, hump the new porno vids in their backpack, wield a Canucks-signed hockey stick and fake slap-shots out to sea, or wave a chub of venison pepperoni they intended to auction. Mostly it was that: meat. They’d hoist heavy coolers onto the dock, give a thumbs up to say they filled the orders for chops and steaks and burger.

  Except for Kiint. Unloading his cloth bags of salad and quinoa and whatever, he might flash a salute to their equally ironic hoots. He wasn’t liked. Which was fine by him. They ignored him and he ignored them back. The point is, he was a card-carrying vegetarian. More than that, he was vegan—what sort of vegan worked for minimum at a meat farm? A tainted meat farm?

  His oddities seem glaring now. He just didn’t belong. He was a visitor from a wider world. He knew things no one else did. Things about this place. Things about them.

  On one of their hikes together Arnie learned something about what Kiint knew. From the start they had wordlessly agreed to walk in silence, with only functional talking—Was that a marten? You sure that’s a morel? This walk had begun in sunshine, now it began to pour, and Arnie had had enough.