Anticipated Results

by Dennis E. Bolen

  “Well, it’s a long sad story …”

  •

  When we got to my place, Sally asked why she could smell gasoline again.

  “Because there’s a refinery in the hills back of here and when the wind is right—or wrong—it sends a lot of vapour our way.”

  “It’s pretty bad.”

  “You get used to it after a while.”

  “I don’t know if I could.”

  “I didn’t know either, at first. Then I did some reading up on it.”

  “You did?” Sally smiled in her sweetest way. We were sitting on the couch, drinking wine. “What did you learn?”

  “It’s technical as hell, and I’m not sure I took it all in. But it has to do with different hydrocarbons and things like that. Mostly, I wanted to understand what those ugly metal pipe-towers are for.”

  “What are they for?”

  “Distillation. They call them fractionating towers. They heat up the crude. Which is dense and lumpy and full of dirt a lot of the time. And feed it into the lower part of the system. The various molecules rise and condense at various levels. Or something like that. There’s a bunch of physics and chemistry involved. To make gasoline they have to add hydrogen and some other stuff. Sometimes—based on the raw materials they’re working with, where they’re from, what’s the grade and so on—they don’t exactly know what end products will turn up and in what quantities. Often natural gas. Occasionally heavy oil. Whatever it is, it’s always smelly if the wind is in our direction. But that’s always kind of made it okay for me, you know? The idea they’re working away over there making what they make but they never know for sure how it’ll turn out. But once you get to know roughly what’s going on you tend to tolerate it more. In my case, anyway.”

  Soon after that, Sally and I went to bed.

  •

  Driving back next morning we ran out of gas on the freeway.

  “Didn’t you fill up last night?”

  “Yeah, well. As I said, that’s the long and sad story. There’s a problem with the fuelling.”

  “Why didn’t you say so? We could have gone to my place.”

  “It doesn’t matter. But I’m glad to hear you say that.”

  “I’m going to be late for work.”

  I got a ride to a gas station and then another ride back. It only took forty minutes. I was surprised it didn’t take longer. Sally waited in the car. I poured the gas in carefully and put the can in the trunk, then slumped back into the driver’s seat.

  Sally didn’t seem overly angry but sniffed the air. “I smell gas again.”

  “Jeez, really? I was good and careful.”

  “You got some on your pant leg.”

  She was right.

  “Be careful, okay?”

  “I will.”

  “Don’t go near any open flame.”

  “I’ll be particularly circumspect about that.”

  Sally sighed. “This kind of weirds me out …”

  “Oh?” I was driving and dreading. “Aside from all the petro pollution that lingers as if we were aboard a beached tanker, how so?”

  “All this bad smell in your car and at your house …” She hadn’t laughed at my humour attempt, not even a smile. “But we had a nice time and you’re such a nice guy.”

  “Glad you think so.”

  “I mean … Last night was cool and everything.”

  “It certainly was. I liked it a lot.” We were silent a full minute. “But …” I spoke with my eyes on the road trying to think clearly, hoping the fuel supply would hold out, desiring with great urgency that Sally be delivered to work without further damage to her mood.

  She was staring at me. “Should we have a relationship or not?”

  “I don’t know. Uh. It’s not a question I’d ask myself.”

  “No.” She turned away. “I guess I wouldn’t either.”

  “I mean. There’s you and me, basic components. How about we just see how things go?”

  She smiled. “That sounds right.”

  •

  “Gas again.” Rodney came sniffing into my office. “I half-expect to find dead birds in here.”

  I was through with the telephone book and had the computer going full blast, trying to find a parts warehouse.

  “You get with Sally last night?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Good man!”

  Without even looking at him I didn’t like his smile.

  “Forget about me …” I turned from the screen. “What are you gonna do?”

  Rod swung himself into a chair.

  •

  Later on I stood watching the mechanics puzzle. They scratched their heads, trying to fill my gas tank. The new part didn’t make any difference at all. The gas poured out like it didn’t care.

  The sight did not bother me. I realized that I was feeling different. There was a detachment, something oddly new, indefinable but well-feeling. Ultimately it came down to the fact that I don’t mind the smell of gas.

  Wood Mountain

  On a dusty afternoon in Wood Mountain, Saskatchewan, summer of 1966, there was no reason for my cousin Edie to rear up and kick me.

  But that’s what she did. Just lunged out from a family huddle and shoved a foot into my mid-section—kick-boxer style—in plain view of Uncle David and Aunt Juliet, the cousins, my folks, brother and sister, everybody. We had been visiting their farm. I can’t remember doing anything offensive. We were just kids.

  Throughout the sixties, Dad took us on summer trips to the prairies. Nearly all our relatives were there. Most of them still lived out on the land, either in wind-wracked farmhouses or mean little paint-blistered bungalows within the thistle-garlanded towns. It was and still is a good three-day road trip from the coast of British Columbia to the flatlands of southern Saskatchewan in a family car loaded with children and supplies, but Dad loved to drive. He always owned some kind of stolid American sedan to get us across the three provinces in torrid late-July and deliver us back in time to play on the beach the last few weeks before school. Although the cars did their jobs, invariably by mid-trip they would require something retuned, rebuilt, remounted, or replaced. The relatives always had a garage with hoists, grease guns, welder, ratchet wrenches, plugs, points, coils and condensers, and spare parts either on hand or readily available. Mechanicing was a form of hospitality in our family. At some point during a visit it was a sure thing work would be done on the cars, whether they needed it or not.

  Several of my uncles served in World War II, which was ironic because aside from the fact they were Saskatchewan farm boys, by heritage, temperament, language and culture down to their cabbage roll cuisine they were as Teutonic as the Kaiser (which, incidentally, was the name of one branch of the family). Uncle David was a motor pool sergeant with the 1st Armoured Brigade. He fought with a wrench in his hand across the Strait of Messina and up the boot past Naples to the street fighting in Ortona. Then on past Rome and Florence and clear up to Turin, almost as far as Austria—where he could have looked up relatives if it hadn’t have been for, as he terms it, “da stupid war”—then looped back over the water to Holland and into Germany and nearly all the way to Berlin. Having endured years of danger and privation Uncle David—nobody ever called him Dave—survived to slide many times under Dad’s ’62 Acadian or ’64 Comet or ’67 Beaumont and declare, “Looks like your oil pan is buggert,” or “You needa lube on dose ball joints,” or “When’d you last flush da rad?”

  But the point is that my cousin Edie, who was a kid of maybe seven at the time, just rose up and assaulted me as we were standing by the car saying goodbye. She led with her right sandal. I barely saw it coming. I stumbled backward, shocked but not hurt. Edie stepped deftly back into her family fold, nostrils flaring like a riled pit bull, her eyes coldly luminescent. She displayed neither fear nor hysteria, only blatant personal offence.

  Though at age thirteen I’d had enough schoolyard tussles to understand what it was to get su
cker-punched, it was still the most spontaneous, frightening, and unintelligible attack I’d ever suffered. No one missed the quickness of it, the frozen efficiency of its execution, or its disturbing manifestation of physical non sequitur. The gathering plummeted silent as if nerve-gassed.

  And all this after a quality two-day visit loaded with the traditional warm offerings: sit-down meals, countryside drives, pasture picnics. We shared quality child-adventure on the austere hillsides outside town: herding cows, chasing gophers, and firing bullets from a rusty .22 into the slough, the impacts bringing curling rock-sized moils of brown and green murk rolling to the surface. Edie was quietly with us through the whole familial-bonding experience. But she stung me good anyway. In the car as we were leaving my mother was quiet. Dad too. The other kids snickered. Nobody asked what I thought.

  •

  Two-and-a-half decades years later my telephone rang too early one morning and the voice on the line said: “It’s your Aunt Juliet in Regina.”

  “Well hi. This is a surprise. How are you doing?”

  “Pretty bad, but that’s not why I called. Your cousin Edie just moved out to Vancouver. I want you to keep an eye on her.”

  “Good grief. Edie from Wood Mountain?”

  “Nobody’s lived at Wood Mountain for years. She was last at Calgary but some business with a man drove her out.”

  It developed that Aunt Juliet did not have trust in her daughter’s ability to fend for herself outside the protective social structure of a prairie community. Maybe not even then. Since I was the only one of the clan living in the coastal metropolis other than, now, Edie herself, it came shortly to pass that I dialed a number at an advertising and promotions company and left a message for her to call me.

  Two weeks later my phone again rang too early in the morning.

  “This is Edie Wallenco.” The voice was duskier but I recognized clipped syllables from a long-ago distance. “Did you leave a message?”

  “Uh, yeah.” I rued, in my head-dullness, not having a better opener. “Weeks ago.”

  “That’s unfortunate. To be honest with you, I did not know who you might be. I miscalculated that there might be family here.”

  “Gee, that’s an odd way of putting it, but … Didn’t you recognize the family name?”

  “There are more than a dozen Wallenco’s in the phone book. Do you think we are related to all of them?”

  “Uh. No … I don’t know.”

  “Of course not.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I ran a search. It took some time.”

  “Whoo-ee.”

  “You never can be too careful.”

  “I guess not. Anyway, gosh. It’s been a thousand years.”

  “Actually it’s been exactly twenty-six years, ten months, and a few weeks.”

  “Oh. You keep careful records.”

  “How did you find my workplace?”

  “Aunt Juliet … your mom called. She wants me to spy on you.”

  “Oh …” Her sigh hissed like steam over the phone. “She’s become quite a pest.”

  “I didn’t know. Sorry.”

  •

  We met for lunch downtown. She was wearing a hat. A great big floppy thing. During this particular year not one other person in all of North America—male or female—was wearing a hat. Her look was as bizarre as if she had been swinging a hoop skirt and waving a lace parasol.

  “I’m trying to lose weight.” She sat after shaking hands without otherwise introducing herself. “I’ll only have salad and a little wine.”

  I was single in those days. Off and on. Dating like crazy; having lots of short, sharp, sometimes nasty entanglements. Through it all I’d become a seasoned luncher and from the first moment with Edie it was uncomfortably manifest between us that this was far too much like a date for comfort. I felt it and was sure she did by her nervous chatter. Then, in twenty minutes, she drank three glasses of Pinot blanc. Redness came across her face.

  “I should tell you I left Calgary befcause Kenneth was cheating on me.”

  “Kenneth?”

  “My boyfriend.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “He was a jerk …” She let the sentence hang, fingering her wineglass, salad untouched.

  I debated what to do. That morning while planning what to talk about I had considered inviting her to Paul’s place for the usual collected caballero weekend fete.

  She stared at me as if I should have known about Kenneth.

  “So. How long did you live in Calgary?”

  “One guy.” She spoke as if not having heard me. “All those years.”

  “A lot of years?”

  “Many many.”

  “And now you’re out here.”

  “The company offered me a lateral.”

  “What is it you do, exactly?”

  “Everything.”

  “You work at an ad agency?”

  “We do everything. Yeah.”

  “Did you go to school anywhere?”

  “I did a couple of years at SAIT.”

  “SAIT?”

  “Southern Alberta Institute of Technology. I had to leave.” She took a drink. “It was … yech.”

  “Yech?”

  “Uh-huh.” She finished her wine. “You know.”

  “Well, I …”

  “Are you going to drink that?” Edie pointed to my half-glass.

  “Absolutely.” I took it up and drank.

  She stared at me seriously.

  I smacked my lips as a comic gesture. “Isn’t it absurd about Aunt Juliet?”

  Edie darkened. “How do you mean?”

  “Her instructions to me. To keep an eye on you.”

  “That’s not absurd.”

  I did not have a comeback. “Oh.” I drank the rest of my wine. “Okay.”

  “I take it you have no family responsibilities.”

  “Um … In what sense?”

  “Over the years I’ve heard about it. Big city lifestyle. Some kind of adventure-ish job involving insurance fraud. Left your wife and child. Lots of girlfriends. Trips all over the place. You don’t look after your brothers and sister. You seldom see your parents.”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “What would you say?”

  “I …” The loadedness of her challenge weighed on me and hardened something inside. “Look. There’s a reason we haven’t seen each other since 1966.”

  Edie’s eyes narrowed. “Do tell.”

  “I turned fourteen the next year and worked the summer on a farm outside Swift Current so didn’t go on vacation with the family. I helped pull down an old barn and learned to drive and helped out with the barley harvest. The next year I was working in a department store and the year after that I was marching around a parade square at Camp Borden. After that I was old enough to go my own way so you never saw me again until now. Do you remember kicking me in the gut that time we were saying goodbye in Wood Mountain?”

  Edie stared blankly. As I waited for her to say something it occurred to me that aside from the wine she might have been on some kind of mind-altering medication. We sat silent for a full minute. Her gaze was directed to the outside. She seemed to be daydreaming, and never answered my question.

  I offered to pick up the cheque. Edie did not oppose. On the way out I helped her on with her coat. At the door, standing aside for others to enter, she leaned unnecessarily against me. I could not tell what this was.

  •

  After discussion with Paul—wherein I assured him that if she wasn’t the most socially skilled person he’d ever meet then at least she was another female person he could add to his scant “possibles” list—Edie was issued and accepted an invitation. Due to my impressions of her over lunch we were careful to co-invite only our least confrontational friends, opting to sacrifice spontaneous humour and provocative subject matter in favour of placid conviality.

  Edie arrived slightly after the appointed time and ref
used to take off her coat. It was a heavy, garishly mauve woollen thing that looked like an animal hide dyed horribly wrong. She did, however, let me take her hat.

  Nor would she sit completely down. When offered a seat, she chose instead to perch on an arm of the couch, well away from anyone else. Eventually her hunched presence seemed to fill everyone—we’d procured a few of our A-list cohorts: Graham, a gay man working in the film industry; and Ian and Janet, who lived on a boat—with an odd anticipation.

  She initially refused a drink.

  “Can I get you something else?” Paul stood by and spoke softly to her. “A Coke? Mineral water?”

  “Oh …” Edie leaned and looked directly down into Paul’s glass. “What have you got there?”

  “Wine. Chardonnay something or other.”

  “I wasn’t going to, but …”

  “Can I get you a small glass?”

  “Small as can be, please.”

  For the rest of the evening we did not see her small glass go empty. If it wasn’t Paul seeing to everybody, it was Graham sportingly topping her up from his own bottle, or me seeing that she was having a good time, or herself leaning over and gripping whatever might be in the ice bucket to help herself.

  We talked and ate and drank. Edie seemed especially enamoured of Graham, who regaled us with stories of celebrities and their idiosyncratic commonplaces. At one point I noted the permanence of her hand on his arm and could not miss the mild pain showing on his face.

  It was well along but not too late when Ian and Janet began to take their leave and Graham jumped up along with them, claiming an early call. Edie lolled on the couch while Paul and I said our goodbyes. When we turned back to her she was in the giddy act of flinging off her shoes. One of them hit Paul’s favourite Wyeth print and left a mark on the open field scene just below the lonely house. I could tell by his lack of panic that he was attracted to her.

  Taking the cue, I left the room and started on the dishes. After twenty minutes, with all but the pot scrubbing done, I checked on them. They were huddled on the floor by the fire. Paul had put on some Pat Metheny.

  “You guys need a drink?” I spoke before noticing Paul’s hand at Edie’s face, the gentle way he was brushing hair from her eyes. I backed away and made for the Brillo pad.