by Russel Smith
He stomped and shouted in rhythm with his feet, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, rain.”
“No!” Kiint said. He stopped and he grabbed Arnie’s shoulder. Eyes crinkled up in pleasure, Kiint yelled, “It’s rainforest!” He laughed shaking his head, like they were in the arctic and Arnie had just complained about the snow.
“I guess.”
“No! It’s a treasure!” He put his head back, arms out like Jesus on the cross, and let the rain fall into his eyes.
As they walked on, Kiint described where it was they were. He was “sanctimonious” but Arnie let him vent. Pointing at the mud on the path he said they were at the southernmost edge of the largest temperate rainforest left on the planet. Almost chanting, he detailed how much it rained, why it rained, how that tied in with ocean currents, how it all might change and how the change might be gradual or “silent-spring sudden.” There was still hope if governments were made to work together. It all came flying out as if under pressure. He described how the rain—this rain, he said, and he rolled his face under it to make sure every inch was anointed—created the icepack, which fed the rivers, which bore the tiny salmon out to sea. He spoke of a tightly knit drama. At one point he shrieked a single note of incredulous joy, describing something Arnie thought he’d heard before, which was that the sheer quantity of salmon dragged off by bears and eagles and wolves had over millennia fertilized the trees hundreds of meters up either side of the riverbanks, and today salmon was in the trees’ DNA.
A minute after he’d finished talking and Arnie had said nothing to fill the gap, Kiint said, “I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay.” He was stunned to hear a silent man talk in paragraphs.
“I love this place,” Kiint added, unnecessarily.
This love might have been enough reason for this guy to be here, but Arnie sensed there was more.
In the bunkhouse, keeping mum, Kiint had managed to become a piece of furniture. He’d been onsite two months and it was another month till Labour Day. One evening a young guy, Kenny, was frying up some salmon he’d scooped from B-pen. It was verboten to steal stock, but if guys were too spaced out to get their meat order together, there it was swimming right outside the door. Clarke wouldn’t do anything, since one salmon was so much less than a drop in the bucket.
As it sizzled, poking and worrying it non-stop with the spatula, Kenny asked no one in particular, “So when’s this shit safe?”
He meant when were the antibiotics flushed out. The medfeed had ceased in B-pen months ago, and a few guys mumbled that it was okay. Bobby Paul joked that Kenny should go ahead and eat it and cure the gonorrhea he probably had.
This kind of talk was always floating around. So who knows why, but that night Kiint, quietly munching on his bowl of roots and fronds, lost it. He dropped his fork on the table. His hand hovered over it, his eyes closed.
“It’s never okay.”
No one said anything. Kiint didn’t deserve a response. They were going to let it pass but Kiint wasn’t. He actually smacked the table with his palm. You could hear the spice of his accent climb into the rest of what he said.
“The antibiotics are gone, Kenny.” He waved his arm in the direction of the water. “The antibiotics are now in the crabs and shrimp and sea urchins. What’s still in your piece of shit is mercury, lead, and dioxins. The Ruhr Valley is in your piece of shit.” Shaking his head, he grabbed his fork and stabbed his greens. “Enjoy, Kenny.”
It was Clarke who laughed, and then sang, “Whaaaat?”
Others were laughing too and Bobby Paul asked Kenny if he knew there was a valley in his dinner. Kiint ate quicker, wanting to get out of there. Clarke waved an arm at the same water and in the same way Kiint had, mocking him, and proclaimed there was no way any of that crap was in the air up here in Toba Inlet.
Kiint put down his fork down gently. “Where does the feed come from?” he asked.
“The big blue barge?” said Bobby Paul, who hadn’t stopped grinning.
Kiint said it came from Norway. AquaCo bought it from themselves so they didn’t have to pay taxes on it, but our country being stupid was beside the point, the point was that the feed was from North Sea plankton and fish waste that had absorbed “the air-borne hell of industrial Europe.” In a gesture as theatrical as it was bizarre, Kiint pointed at Kenny’s sizzling fish and listed off Mercedes Benz, IKEA, Volkswagon (saying the W like a V) and ten other companies no one had heard of. A guy playing video games yelled at Kiint to go back to fucking Norway if he didn’t like it here, and Clarke shouted back that it was Norway Kiint appeared to be mad at.
Clarke added, “Well what the fuck.” He seemed to think that, as boss, it was his job to win this argument, if that’s what this was.
“No one’s making you work here, right?”
Kiint appeared to come to his senses. “No,” he said quickly. “I’m sorry.” Then, “Eat your fish. It’s good fish.”
Emboldened, pulling on his coat, Clarke added, “Keep it to yourself for fuck sake. This place is bad enough without your shit in the air.” He made a show of almost slamming the door. Being the boss, he pretended he didn’t smoke weed by always going outside to smoke it.
Kiint wolfed his bowl. He looked angry, but Arnie wondered if he didn’t also look afraid. Arnie was waiting but Kiint didn’t look his way. If he had, he might have seen that Arnie knew something was up. There was just no way a guy like him was here by accident.
In the remaining weeks leading up to Labour Day Kiint kept his distance from Arnie, other than a few silent walks, and even then it seemed he was being careful not to show how much he loved the inlet, or the rainforest. When he returned the two Farley Mowatt books he’d borrowed he wouldn’t even say if he liked them or not when Arnie asked. Arnie had to admit that he was a little hurt to be lumped in with the rest of them. It was difficult to admit to wisdom in a man so much younger, but Arnie did. Kiint hinted at a vaster, more intelligent world, one that Arnie had apparently let slip by. Something he saw in Kiint made him regret the puniness of what he’d chosen for himself. So it hurt to be shut out like that.
On what turned out to be their last walk, a week before Labour Day, when they stopped at the apex of Bald Head Rock and finished catching their breath and taking in the vista, Arnie was angry at the silence, angry at being shut out. One thing about fish-farm life was that he didn’t get angry much, so when he did, it was easy to see it. And now he was angry that he was angry.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked. It sounded corny, like something a lover would say, so he hated himself now too and was about to stomp back down the trail.
Kiint turned to face him. Arnie sensed he was being read. But Kiint must have read him wrong because he answered a different question than the one Arnie asked.
“It’s just a job. Right, Bacon?”
“Right,” Arnie said, not knowing what he was agreeing to.
The Friday of Labour Day weekend, at low tide Arnie trudged the rocks to his Robinson Crusoe spot. It had been a year since he’d bothered coming out here. He stood and breathed. He held his breath and tried to hear his heart. Then didn’t care if he heard his heart or not. He was surprised by his restlessness. He couldn’t settle. Maybe it was the looming fall. Fall was when you started school again, and hockey. It was the time to stop screwing around, stop partying, time to get in shape, start projects. Arnie could feel the outside world beyond these mountains—big and busy, rumbling, buzzing, working, and though he hadn’t forgotten that it was mostly bullshit, there was something out there he was missing. His life was easily half over and he had to admit he’d blown this half, first with trouble and then with hiding. He wasn’t sure how but it was Kiint who had prodded him, who had lit this fire. Kiint who had checked him out and decided he wasn’t worthy, lying here reading stupid books.
He scanned Toba Inlet. Its water, mountains and muffled sky were so familiar
that he could be standing anywhere. He unzipped and pissed into the calm water at his feet. A slow and ignorant current moved the foam to the left. A crab the size of his thumbnail crawled back under its rock. Arnie laughed at himself, more sad than angry. No good book was pulling him back to the bunkhouse. For whatever reason, he didn’t like fiction anymore. And he understood he’d been restless for years.
And that afternoon, not a minute after the water taxi picked up the crew and disappeared around the point, Kiint destroyed the camp radio with a hammer. This was so nobody—that is, Arnie—could call for help, or whoever it was you called when the guy you were stuck with in camp methodically began smashing the equipment to pieces and burning everything else to the ground. Arnie liked to think Kiint did the radio first not because he thought Arnie would call, but because he knew Arnie would get into trouble for not calling. Arnie still wasn’t sure if he would have called or not.
The following week, in whatever newspapers he could buy in Campbell River, Arnie read all he could about it and he learned Kiint’s real name. All five brood sites on the Pacific coast were attacked that Labour Day Friday. One of the five “eco-terrorists,” Andres Vandover, hailed from Amsterdam, so that had to be him. One was a New Zealander and another an actual Norwegian, which Arnie found funny because that made him a kind of double agent, and you could only imagine the weird ironies he’d endured, the bunkhouse jokes about Norwegian spies. The other two were women, a Canadian and a Brazilian, and how they got hired on he could only guess. They were at the sites further north and maybe they were more progressive up there.
There was mention of a “manifesto” that authorities weren’t making public, in the spirit of not dealing with terrorists. Nor did the authorities reveal much else, since court cases were pending, and the news stories were littered with the word “alleged.” The attacks were coordinated, but why terrorists would target fish farms was still a mystery. So ignorant and unclear were the stories that Arnie wanted to call and tell them that the only reason to attack just brood sites was to destroy how the salmon farm industry replenished itself. There was no other reason—it was appalling that they couldn’t decide on even that much. Also, they said his site was located in Toba Strait, there being no such place. There were comma errors too, and more than one wrong “it’s.” Journalism had really gone downhill, and it was all the more obvious when you knew some of the truth of things yourself.
The reports said damage to the Toba Inlet site was the most severe. So Kiint had done the best job. The New Zealander had managed only some computer system damage, “fish mortality was minimal,” and he got badly beaten up by the skeleton crew. (Arnie tried to picture the guys jumping on Kiint, and it was easy.) The other three sites were badly damaged but would “in all likelihood be made operational again.” Toba could not.
In the manner of today’s media they were dubbed the Fish Farm Five, another piss off, because somehow it cheapened what they did, and tried to cheapen the regard Arnie had for Kiint, for Andres Vandover, though Arnie wouldn’t let it.
It had been truly amazing to watch this young guy work so hard, and nothing selfish about it. Because whatever Kiint believed—was he protecting the environment? Protecting the world from bad food? Chipping away at capitalism?—it was for others that he did it. This is what Arnie couldn’t get over. In the outside world there were people like this. Sometimes they found their way up Toba Inlet.
Watching Kiint hustling to finish the job before they came and put a boot on his neck and took him away, Arnie wondered what Kiint’s damn hurry was, he had all weekend. But unlike Kiint he didn’t know about the other four attacks underway or that Kiint knew they would be putting two and two together soon and sending in the troops. As it turned out the cop boat didn’t arrive up Toba until dawn. Followed by the coast guard—Arnie was surprised those guys were allowed to carry guns—and then, he couldn’t believe his eyes at the overkill, a hovercraft. It was when they were putting the cuffs on Kiint that Arnie rethought the selflessness business. He was standing well away, in the first line of trees, pretending to be afraid, going with Kiint’s advice to avoid resembling a friend. But the look in Kiint’s eyes, amazing. He didn’t know what to call it. It wasn’t selfless. Kiint was just absolutely proud and loving everything he’d done, he was loving the cuffs, he loved that cop’s shove, and he was loving it all so much that it had to, it just had to be selfish. It was a feeling Arnie recognized and wanted. He had no word for it yet.
He had run to the noise of Kiint smashing the radio, and hammer in hand Kiint came striding out the bunkhouse door, saw Arnie coming, and flashed a palm.
“Bacon, stay out of my way.”
Kiint broke into a trot up the path to the generator hut, bouncing the hammer, testing its weight for a job bigger than the radio.
Arnie stayed out of his way. But he was thrilled and he had to move so he got himself away from there, and once up the trail and into the trees he couldn’t hear anything from camp. It took only a half hour to get up to Bald Head Rock and when he reached the clearing, breathing so hard he brought his hand to his heart, he stood agape at the mushroom of black and brown smoke tumbling up from where he’d come. In this vista of giant things—mountains, ocean, sky—the smoke was a new creature that held its own. Arnie stayed up there as long as he could stand it. He wasn’t scared of Kiint at all. Something spectacular was going on and he was missing it. He set off back, finding it hard not to run, enjoying the luxury and speed of the downhill stride. He did wonder if there’d be anywhere to sleep tonight.
He didn’t know why he chose “Waltzing Matilda” but he broke into song when he emerged from the woods, not wanting to surprise him. But Kiint wasn’t there and Arnie felt foolish and hoped he wasn’t being watched from the woods. The feedhouse and generator shack were off the peak of their flames and were two collapsed heaps of hissing orange embers and metal, heat mirage throbbing over them. A grand old cedar next to the feedhouse was scorched halfway up its length. The feed bins were still releasing an odd smoke, the hint of black suggesting the gasoline poured in to help things out.
Arnie yelled, “Hey Kiint. What’s up?”
Nobody answered, and Arnie could hear that silence behind the embers’ hissing. It was that intense calm of aftermath, that stillness of a morning house that had been violated in the night. Kiint’s absence was a presence.
He would tell Kiint to get over it, he was going to help. Or watch. Arnie didn’t know what he wanted. But he was a lot bigger than Kiint, if it came to that. Arnie was still happy with this most basic of laws.
The sun was behind the mountain now and in the blue dim he walked past the dryland pens and, in their thousands, all the tiny fish were belly up. The pump was dead but they wouldn’t have suffocated this quickly—he must have thrown some kind of poison in. Who knows what else Kiint packed in those bags of salad? The odd light helped make it stranger still, the tiny luminous pearl bellies forming an unbroken floating layer, a carpet of identical glowing shapes. “Tessellated.”
He ventured out on the ramp to the pens, flanked on either side by still, deep water. Maybe Kiint had made a run for it. Maybe he’d stashed a kayak and supplies somewhere, though how he’d done that in this fishbowl was anybody’s guess.
He walked the ramp to its limit, to D-pen, where the big ones were. With the bubble curtain off it was more quiet than ever, so quiet he stood still and tried to hear his heart. He couldn’t. He thought he could feel the monsters under his feet, down deep, the hundred-plus pounders. On the east coast they used to grow that big in the wild and he’d seen grainy black-and-whites of rich Americans on guided trips standing beside their tail-hung trophies. As big as the ones below his feet. He stood over the black water, feeling the unseen gliding shapes, swollen with eggs and milt, bursting with so much future life. It was almost fall and they were ripening with the one thing they existed for.
Certain he could feel the immense pa
rents gliding beneath him, something felt off. He could feel it. They felt badly alive. It tipped his guts. It was like seeing a turd on your mother’s head. It was like a warm worm turning in your ear. Dumb giants bumping into each other down there. The giants had been brought here, from a foreign ocean, so we could grow and eat their sick babies.
The bubble curtain was off but he could hear a faint bubbling. Then he saw it, a green light, deep underwater, moving slowly. There was a moment when it might have been a sea monster, a demon, and then he knew it was an underwater lamp he hadn’t seen Kiint unload. And there, scuba bubbles breaking the surface out along the rim of D-pen, slowly burbling his way.
He laughed, he hooted, he stomped his boot then caught himself. Kiint must be down there taking care of the oxygenators, so they couldn’t be repaired. He had really thought things through.
That light, that little green light far below. It was like a quiet, tiny invasion from another planet, it was brilliant unlike anything else around here.
The bunkhouse had been left intact. Arnie went in and stood in the middle of it, in the coolness in front of the blank TV, and it all felt new and different. He couldn’t stand still. There was no longer electricity but he knew of a propane campstove out back. It was unlikely that any of the guys would be returning now but he felt the thrill of theft as he helped himself to their food. He unwrapped the rest of Clarke’s venison jerky and gnawed on it as he worked. He primed the campstove, lit it and fried up two burger patties, one of them Kiint’s nutblend kind, which didn’t smell half-bad as it cooked, and he built up two Mexiburgers, being mindful of melting no cheese on Kiint’s. He toasted the buns on the blue propane flame, then plated them up surrounded by a decent salad. His he deposited on the table.
Arnie draped a white towel over his forearm to lighten the mood and walked Kiint’s down to him, but stood off a ways to let him finish hacksawing the metal feed pipe. He was barefoot and had his wetsuit top off, but still wore the black pants. He grabbed a sledge to mangle the freed piece so it couldn’t just be welded back on.