The Hour of Bad Decisions

by Russell Wangersky

  I’m doing well, though. Haven’t slept yet. No dreams to speak of. Sometimes the shapes of stuff on the side of the road turn out to be something else once I get closer, but that’s only sort of like dreaming.

  Wind up at a highway motel in Washington State. I rent a room and abandon the rental car out among a forest of semi-trucks, some of them with engines grumbling, lights still on. It’s a motel built around a big gas station, bright and all lit up like a spaceship landed here on the highway, and it’s sucking people in like some kind of big ant-trap, baited with huge clean bathrooms and fresh coffee. There are shower stalls and even bunks and there are truckers everywhere, wolfing down bacon and eggs at three o’clock in the morning, snoring, shaving in the sinks. It’s like they live on a different clock, but so do I. I have my own clock; it’s just hard to read the numbers.

  I have a room near the reefer trucks, the noise of their refrigeration units a drone like big sleepy bees, a noise that swallows up other noises and leaves the night empty.

  The mini-fridge has four kinds of beer – I make coffee.

  I must have left the door unlocked, and there’s someone using my bathroom. I thought it was locked, but I’m drifting in and out. The person comes out of my bathroom, and sits across from me in chair, just like that, as comfortably and easily as if she belongs there.

  It’s a woman – a small, thin woman, but pretty in a fragile kind of way, dark hair cut close to her face. Addict-pretty: high thin cheekbones cut her face the way rocks sheer, abrupt and all along one clear fault line. She says her name is Lisa.

  “They call us lot lizards,” Lisa says, and I don’t know what that means. It must show in my face.

  “I turn tricks with truckers. For money, for drugs. For a room for the night.”

  And she sits down on the bed next to me. Her sequins shine red in the light that comes through the blinds – sequined tube-top over small, high breasts – and I think of hummingbirds, especially ruby throats. I tell her that I am dangerous, that I don’t know what will happen.

  And she laughs. Peals of laughter: laughing the way that gives you hiccups or makes you want to throw up.

  “I know dangerous,” she says finally, “and you’re just not it.”

  We agree that she can sleep in the bathtub with all the spare pillows and the blanket from the closet. She’s a tiny thing, shorter than the tub, and she says she’s used to a lot worse that that.

  “Just pull the shower curtain if you have to have a piss,” she says.

  “Yeah, I wouldn’t want to embarrass you…”

  She laughs again. “It wouldn’t be me that was embarrassed,” she says. “You haven’t got anything I haven’t seen.”

  Disarming how someone so small can take such quick control. She has sharp white teeth and a pronounced underbite – pretty, but she also looks somehow feral.

  I tell her about the dreams and her eyes are wide for a moment, and then she nods, like she’s hearing about a particularly familiar disease.

  “I dream about slitting throats,” she says. “About giving some trucker head and then cutting off his dick with a straight razor while he’s still hard, saying to him, ‘How’s that, then?

  “But I haven’t done it yet.” She smiles. Pretty girl.

  “Dreamt about lots worse than that,” she says, shrugging. “But they go away. Just dreams.” Sometimes her face looks much older – as if she’s focusing on something just ahead of her eyes that I can’t see. I’ve run out of wakeups – threw the last empty box out when I rented the room. And suddenly it’s like my head is full of molasses. There are still thoughts in there, but each part of them has to pull out of the soft ground in my head, making a sucking sound like boots in wet soil. My vision goes flat, into two dimensions, so that Lisa’s face is like a panel in a comic strip. My eyes are crossing.

  We’re sitting on the bed then, and she pushes me backwards towards the pillow with both hands, so hard that I feel the imprint of her hands long after she’s taken them away.

  There’s someone I should really call, I think, my head filling with black. Someone I should call, so they know I’m all right, so they know where I am.

  “You’ll sleep,” she says, her voice close to my ear and urgent, and my eyes close hopefully, almost a reflex, believing she’s right. And I do slip away, faster after the pinprick inside my arm.

  Just before drifting off, I try to tell her about Anne and the kids, about what I am trying to do, but my tongue feels so thick, pressed against my teeth and refusing to form any words at all. No one is really listening, because I’m not really talking, it’s just that my brain is making shapes like words that don’t go anywhere, they just run around the inside of my head, thudding into the surrounding skull and then sliding down into a pool somewhere near my neck. She’s holding my left hand, sliding off my watch, my wedding ring. But my arms are like dead weights, and I can’t imagine she can hold even one up for very long.

  I wake up again later, and she is filling a syringe with liquid from a saucer on the table – “We’ll share,” she says – and then I sleep again.

  Musical Chairs

  HE LOST THE FIRST TWO FINGERS RIGHT AT the knuckle – the index and middle fingers on his right hand – in the chattering chain drive that carried half-made, tapping hardwood chairs around the plant.

  Another one, he lost later.

  He was holding the chain, putting a chair on its hook after attaching the legs to the seat, when his fingers caught.

  And he probably would have kept both fingers if he hadn’t lost his balance at the same time in the loose shavings, slipping the clutch and popping the chain back into gear. Lying on his side on the floor as the bright blood sprayed over the loose curls of maple and birch, he half-saw the fingers as they juddered away, bunched together in the greased chain. He lost sight of them forever when the chain rolled over the first spindle, although he saw that last chair travel all the way to the varnishing station.

  A handful of brand-new chairs there, lined up as if ready for a children’s game, but sticky with varnish so no one could sit on them.

  The chair plant was almost a hundred years old, a long, leaning one-storey structure held up by rough-hewn timbers inside and covered with greyed shingles outside. It was bunkered between huge piles of sawdust and shavings that the company burned in the boiler in winter for heat, but the shavings piles always grew, supply outstripping demand, and occasionally the plant workers would be treated to hot, smoky fires in the yards that huffed like giant’s breath and were started by spontaneous combustion deep within the heaps.

  Then the loaders would turn the shavings and dust as if tending God’s compost, and the company would pump hundreds of gallons of water up from the slowly-curling river to put the smouldering blazes out.

  The same loaders brought the dry maple and birch logs to the front of the plant, where they were cut and planed and spun on lathes, getting ready for the chair assembly.

  At the end of the chain line, near the loading dock, the company’s name, Black Rock Furniture, was branded into the bottoms of the chairs, and the smoke rushed fast and dangerous from the hot iron and the charring wood. Fine sawdust covered all the equipment like flour, sifting down into the cracks on the floor and crusting up his nostrils, and the workers, mindful of the risk of more dangerous, explosive fires, had to have their smoke breaks outside where the gravel road widened to let the 18-wheelers turn around and back into the loading dock.

  They smoked looking across the Gaspereaux River, a low, flat, rocky river whose flow was determined by the distant hydro dam that provided power for the chair plant.

  In summer, the air hung low and still, and the cows moved slowly up and down the sloping pasture on both sides of the river. Higher up the hills were the hardwood stands, silver-sided and grey maple and paper birch, and the stands ran back across North Mountain, past the single-wide house trailers at the ends of the woods roads, past forgotten, hard-scrabble orchards doomed to fail, past the
grey-sided woods camps bleached by the sun.

  Finally it was just solid hardwood and the curious white-tailed deer, easily-startled grouse and hares, and paths that led nowhere.

  When David Hennessey came back to work, the two blind knuckles made him something of a celebrity, even though, when he was among people he didn’t know – like when the labour inspectors came to ask him about the accident – he would hold his hand in a fist out of sight behind his leg or pushed deep in his trouser pocket.

  And that celebrity was an unexpected surprise.

  Small incidents from the past had always made Hennessey feel like an outsider, like the way that, on the loading dock, the two guys who worked without shirts in the summer – Bill Roundtree and the always-spitting Lorne Boutellier – pushed by him roughly when he stood in the open doorway on his break looking at the water. Pushed by, and looked at him hard from the corners of their eyes, as if daring him to start something they would love to finish, just for the novelty. Boutellier had broken someone’s nose for the first time when he was in grade nine: that was also the last year he had gone to school in nearby Gaspereaux.

  Or at the Christmas social, where Hennessey sat alone and drank his way through the nine red cardboard free drink tickets the company handed out in a row, all beer except for one too-sweet glass of white wine for the Christmas toast. And the women from the line all turned down his requests for a dance – Elaine Boutellier, Lorne’s sister, in tight, tight jeans and a western shirt, three snaps unsnapped down to right between her jutting breasts, said “Come on, Dave,” dismissively when he asked, as if he were telling her an old, familiar and not-very-funny joke. Peg Godden and the DeVries sisters, all three of the women from the sanding station, had said no without even looking at him, watching other men on the dance floor and then laughing among themselves about something as Hennessey walked away.

  The only thing he took away at the end of the evening was a door prize, once, a set of barbecue tools and a joke apron that read “Here’s the Beef ” and had a bright red arrow pointing straight down the front.

  He put it in the second drawer, one down from the forks and knives, the drawer with the glue and unplanted carrot seeds, with the barrel-fuses for the oven and the replacement Christmas light bulbs he never took out of the package.

  But when Hennessey came back to work after the accident, something had clearly changed.

  “Did it hurt a lot?” That from Bette Godden, a gluer, one of the small, angry-looking women who spun like tops around the gluing station where the spindles went into the chair backs and were fastened tight. She had never even spoken to him before, but now she stood close enough that he thought he could feel the heat of her, like a quick and burning furnace, against one side of his face.

  “Not much,” he said, although it wasn’t even close to being true.

  His knuckles were purple and angry-looking then, and in some half-remembered, incomplete way, the pain still swam in front of his eyes like a red film when he thought about it.

  For a while everyone talked about it, about how the crew had taken three quarters of an hour to find and fully disentangle the pulped fingers, and one of the workers had thrown up after seeing the mangled digits. About how, as the ambulance was leaving, everyone else had sat on a row of finished chairs in the loading dock, watching. Whenever they all sat outside, there were always too few chairs for the number of workers, leaving one or more standing.

  They sat looking at the white, tissue-thin apple blossoms and waiting for health and safety to come and inspect the equipment, and someone turned the radio on, country music tinkling out of the small, tinny speaker, and the workers who weren’t sitting fidgeted and walked around.

  They lost a full day on the line, and some of the glue had hardened in the abandoned glue-gun nozzles, and a whole set of the nozzles had to be thrown away. They had tossed cigarette butts into the river waiting, and sent the office assistant into Black Rock for more smokes. And Lorne Boutellier from the loading dock had killed a young, brown-speckled gull with an artfully-thrown stone the size of his fist.

  Later, Hennessey started smoking, too, holding his cigarette between his ring finger and his pinkie, and the scar tissue stood out hard and waxy-white where it pulled taut across the bony sockets.

  Somehow, the scars became an introduction to the others, to the loose semi-circle of smokers who kicked around small talk about weather and sports, family and enemies.

  Dave, who had always taken his breaks standing off to one side, found himself more and more often sitting in one of the finished chairs they drew up to the very edge of the dock. He liked listening to the stories, especially after the weekend, like the time Viv Morris had gotten wildly drunk on vodka-and-seven at a barbecue at the Goddens and had tried and failed to strip off her own pants, her fingers hopelessly confused by the button-fly of her new jeans. Or about a dust-up at the Anvil tavern in Wolfville, where Lorne Boutellier ran into yet another university kid who hadn’t heard of his reputation, so became unwilling victim number nine in Boutellier’s collection of mashed and broken noses. And one summer day, the sun high and everything wilting under its heavy hand, Dave even thought for a moment it might be nice to own his own barbecue, thought that he might have some people from work up to sit outside his North Mountain trailer, that they could sit and laugh and pitch empty beer bottles far back into the woods.

  It lasted through summer, while the apples fattened and bowed the branches in the orchards, and Hennessey began to be able to flip names into his conversation – “Lorne” and “Kym” and “Viv” – and sometimes he forgot what it had been like before, and was almost able to relax.

  The plant was running flat-out by then, boards being clamped and glued and shaped into seats, the legs and crossbraces and spindles turned on lathes and then set into drilled holes by the gluers, and the strange and damp mystery of the bowed backs made of long, thin strips of birch soaked wet and then bent on hot presses. The steamers sweated like longshoremen in the vicious wet heat, considered themselves craftsmen, and wouldn’t sit with anyone else. Finished and half-finished chairs travelled along their chain-driven journeys, and their legs clattered together with hollow, singular notes, notes that all combined like a particularly forceful army of wooden wind chimes.

  Then, just as summer was ending, a lathe operator named Morgan from further up the line dropped a smoke in his own lap on a tight, rural-road curve and rolled his red Chevrolet pickup into the tops of a row of midnight spruce trees near the South Mountain. And when the truck rolled, a case of twenty-four James Ready long-neck beer in the front seat flew through the air, all of the bottles breaking, turning the inside of the cab of the truck into a kaleidoscope of broken brown glass, foam and blood.

  The truck hung upside down for an hour, swinging gently back and forth in the wind and dark, while the firefighters tried to figure out a way to get it down without doing more damage to its nearly-senseless driver, who mumbled swear words and bled slowly but ceaselessly from a zig-zagged collection of mostly minor cuts.

  Morgan hung in his seat belt with a spectacular but inverted night view of the Gasperaux Valley and the North Mountain. And if he had cared to look, or had even known it existed, he might have seen the two yellow windows of Hennessey’s trailer shining well up on the hill, back underneath the maples.

  When he got back to work, Morgan’s face was marred with rows of black nylon caterpillars where the doctor had picked out the brown glass slivers, the rows of stitches marching across his face like monotone cross-stitch. He lisped because he had bitten through his tongue, and the first thing Hennessey heard Bette Godden ask him was “Did it hurt a lot?”

  “Not really,” Morgan answered, the nylon caterpillars writhing with the words.

  Hennessey flicked a cigarette butt out towards the river, but it fell short.

  The next day, Friday, he was late coming out on lunch break, and, wouldn’t you know, there were no empty chairs left on the loading dock. Unwrapping a ha
m sandwich, Lorne Boutellier swore at the music warbling out of the small radio, stretched as far as he could while still sitting and slapped the radio off its perch on a packing crate, silencing its thin song permanently.

  Everyone was teasing Morgan, telling him jokes, trying to make him laugh, because every time he laughed, he’d wince and moan “ouch, ouch” as the unforgiving stitches bit into the edges of his raw cuts. Morgan was almost encircled by the group, and Hennessey could see that every single person was looking at the lathe operator.

  The trees that might become chairs moaned around Hennessey’s trailer on windy nights, and when they did, he could not sleep.

  Three and a half weeks after Morgan crashed his truck, the wind woke Hennessey near two am, the hour of bad decisions, as a fall storm danced lightning along the Gasperaux. He got out of bed, dressed in underwear and a t-shirt, the lights browning and brightening again as the lightning plucked absently along the power lines, and the rain outside sounded like gravel on the windows.

  The drawers near the sink were made of thin plywood, painted glossy white, and the top drawer with the knives always stuck.

  He stood next to the small kitchen table, his mangled hand flat, two fingers and a thumb spread on the red and white plastic tablecloth. The taut skin over his knuckles hurt, the bones in his hand throbbing with the weather-ache.

  He held the narrow filleting knife for a long time, the long, thin blade winking in the irregular light. The table had one short leg, and it tapped the floor lightly when he pressed his full weight down on the tabletop.