The Insatiable Maw

by Mick Lowe

  Their party had been led into the election campaign by their new leader, who had become interim Prime Minister, succeeding Lester Pearson, the moment he was elected Party leader just three months earlier, a young, charismatic and largely unknown newcomer named Pierre Elliott Trudeau. As luck would have it Election Day had been set for June 25, the day after Quebec’s National Holiday, St. Jean Baptiste Day. A proud Quebecker himself, Trudeau had elected to wind up the long campaign—which had been dominated by his magnetic charm and mass appeal, a phenomenon labeled “Trudeaumania” by the media—by attending the annual St. Jean Baptiste parade in his hometown, Montreal. The celebration was traditionally part celebration of Quebec élan, part rite of spring, part Bacchanal, and often the commingled high spirits had a way of bubbling out of control and into full-blown street riots. That year, much of the indépendantiste fervour was directed at the youthful Trudeau, who was regarded as a traitor to the Quebec cause for his decision to lead a federalist, national Canadian party. The mood turned ugly as the crowd began to vent its anger at the Liberal leader, first in the form of jeers and catcalls, then in the form of stones and bottles thrown at his front row seat in the reviewing stand. Trudeau’s aides and the other dignitaries seated around him did what any sensible person would do—ducked and ran for cover, which was precisely what the interim Prime Minister’s security detail urged him to do. But Trudeau would have none of it. Instead, he merely sat forward in his seat as if to gain a better view of the vitriolic attack upon him, a cool, smugly arrogant smile playing across his lips. It was a Cheshire cat-like expression Canadians would come to know all too well in the coming decades, but on that night, in the full glare of the media spotlight, with the Montreal Riot Squad charging and their billy clubs flailing, the man’s steely determination electrified the nation, and buoyed the spirits of frontline campaign workers like Jerry McNally and Jo Ann White, who, as Gilpin could see, were clearly ecstatic at the prospects for their party when the polls closed in a few short hours.

  In a way, Gilpin hated to burst their bubble, but he had other fish to fry. Once the salad had been passed around and everyone had had the chance to settle in, the reporter looked at his friend Jake. “Met a friend of yours today.”

  “Oh yeah? Who?”

  “Robert d’Aguire.”

  “Oh! Haywire? Where’d you meet him?”

  Gilpin shrugged. “Union Hall. Safety and Health Committee room.” Then he eyed Jake quizzically. “Haywire?”

  Jake shrugged in return, and smiled broadly. “Yeah, sure. Haywire’s how he’s known at work. Name suits him pretty well there. . .”

  “Really! Is he that big a shit disturber?”

  Jake nodded. “On the job he is, especially when it comes to health and safety. Why do you ask?”

  “Because I just asked him to smuggle me into the smelter.”

  A forkful of lettuce headed for Jake’s mouth stopped abruptly in mid-air. “You asked what?”

  “I need to see inside that smelter, Jake.”

  “But Foley, why? It’s dirty as all hell, very noisy, and very dangerous, especially for someone who doesn’t belong there. I’ve told you a million times what it’s like inside that beast. Isn’t that good enough?”

  Foley also put down his fork, and paused for a long moment before responding. “No, Jake, no it’s not. I have to see what it is I’m writing about, have to be able to see it for myself. Feel it and smell it and taste it for myself.”

  Jake glowered at him across the table. “So you don’t believe what I’m telling you about conditions in there, is that it? You think maybe I’m making it all up or exaggerating somehow? What’d he say?”

  “He who?” Gilpin was momentarily distracted by his hot-headed young friend’s belligerent tone. “Oh, Haywire. Well, he didn’t say no, only that it was risky, especially if I got caught by company security.”

  Jake nodded. “Yeah, there is that.” Jake’s tone softened, and clenched fists gave way to clear-cut concern for his friend’s well-being. Tensions around the table, which had risen suddenly to the boiling point, now dissipated as quickly as they had appeared.

  “I just don’t want you to get in trouble, Foley. Or to get hurt in any way.”

  “Yeah, I know, kid, I know. And I do appreciate that.” Foley bit off the “but” that was on the tip of his tongue, thought better of it, and abruptly changed the subject.

  Jo Ann whirled around and came at him the moment their bedroom door was closed. “Jacob McCool, how could you?” she hissed. “Sometimes I can’t believe what a bonehead you are! Foley only wants to help, can’t you see that? Why won’t you help him get into the smelter?”

  “Aw, Jo, come on now,” Jake, taken aback, began defensively. “He doesn’t belong in there. He has no business being in that place. It’s no place for a— “ Jake struggled to find just the right word—“a scribbler!”

  Jo Ann’s eyes widened in disbelief. “A scribbler! That’s what you think the man is? Jesus, Jake McCool you mental midget! I buy you books and buy you books and all you do is look at the pictures! Foley Gilpin is our friend. When you wanted out of your parents’ he took you in, and then me, too. Where would we be right now if it weren’t for Foley Gilpin?”

  She snorted at Jake. “Besides which, this ‘scribbler’ just happens to have access to the most influential newspaper in all of Canada. You say you want to clean up that smelter, but there’s ways to kill this cat besides drowning him in Crown Royal, Jake!”

  “What? Where did that come from?” Jake realized he was grinning now, despite himself. God, she turned him on, even when she was angry. And she always could make him laugh, even in moments like these.

  Sensing Jake’s hesitation, Jo Ann rushed into the pause to finish her argument. “Jake, with you guys it’s always about bull, bull. You always think you can have your way by just smashing through things, by just punching people out. Look at Rafferty’s gang during the Raids, going around beating people up because they were on the other side! So tell me: how did that work out for ya?” She hurled the defiant question at him, standing before him, green eyes flashing with anger, her hands at her side, balled into fists.

  Jake swallowed. Her words hurt. The defeat of the Mine Mill was still a raw wound for Jake, as it was for many in Sudbury.

  “Well, well,” he stammered, groping for a response, “Foley was there for that, he was on our side, and I didn’t see that as making much of a difference . . .”

  She didn’t miss a beat. “Yeah, but this is different Jake. You’re not gonna win this battle out there in Copper Cliff! Toronto is where it’ll be won or lost, because that’s where all the power is, and I don’t mean just the power at Inco. Look, didn’t you tell me once that the province was pressured way back in the days of the open-bed roasters into building the smelter in the first place?”

  “Yeah, sure, but that was way back in the Thirties and I don’t see—”

  Jo Ann cut him off with a wave of her hand. “What? You don’t think history can repeat itself? But don’t you see? See where Foley might just have some power now, in this new thing?

  They don’t call it the Toronto Globe and Mail for nothing, ya know, Jakey boy.”

  He stared, hard, into the green eyes he knew so well. This time he saw no mischief there, no longer any flash of anger. He saw only triumph.

  8

  The Lunch Bucket

  It was there, at Foley’s place, the next night at supper: a plain Sudbury nickel workers’ lunch bucket, clearly used, plastered with stickers. When it was new, it had been an object of both utility and simple elemental charm, a lunch pail, yes, but one invented and manufactured entirely in Sudbury, designed and built to withstand the rigours of the underground environment. Gilpin eyed the object quizzically, its brushed aluminum surface now scuffed from countless scrapes and nicks and now almost totally obscured by stickers related to union politics. A little thicker than a cigar box standing on edge but not much larger, a well-worn stainless steel han
dle rested on its bevelled top. Foley reached out for the handle—the invitation was too obviously irresistible—and hefted the lunch box. It was perfectly balanced. Empty, it was light as a feather in his hand. But the lack of heft, Foley knew, belied the sturdiness of the thing, which had a million uses. If Sudbury could be said to have its own icon, this lunch box was it. Besides protecting a man’s chow from the damp and dust underground or the dust and gas on surface, the lunch bucket also served as an impromptu stool, easily supporting a man’s weight as he waited on the street corner for his ride to work. Knots of Inco workers could be seen on any major street corner at shift change time in those days, perched atop their lunch pails, patiently awaiting the arrival of their car pool to take them to Copper Cliff or Levack or Creighton or out to Frood. Even the heaviest man could position his lunch bucket on the edge of the curb, resting his boots in the gutter, and sit down on his lunch pail, his knees drawn up nearly to his chin. There was no question what the lunch pail, light as it was, would bear his weight. The thing was indestructible, and guaranteed for life. With growing curiosity, Gilpin unsnapped the tight clasp that sealed the contents of the lunch box off from the random rigours of Sudbury’s workaday world. He opened the hinged lid—clearly the lid, angled like a mansard roof, was designed to accommodate a thermos or bottle of water—and peered inside. Here the dull aluminum finish was still unblemished and smooth. The thing was empty and spotlessly clean. Gilpin noticed Jake grinning across the table at his close inspection of the lunch bucket.

  “Smelterman’s gotta have his lunch with him, right Foley? Get a good night’s rest, my friend. Day shift starts at seven, we leave the house at six.”

  9

  Busted

  The newly risen sun cast long slanting shadows across downtown Sudbury as the two men left the house the next morning. The air was fresh with the promise of a new day, and there was already a hint of the heat that would come later in the day. And it was a new day: the country had a new Prime Minister—Pierre Trudeau’s incumbent Liberals had easily defeated their Tory opponents, led by an MP whose family owned a well-known Maritime-based underwear manufacturing company. Like a wave breaking against a stout seawall, the hapless Tory leader would hurl himself against Trudeau again and again, finally becoming known in Canadian political history as “the greatest Prime Minister the country never had.”

  Jake and Foley sat on the corner on their respective lunch pails, wrapped in a thoughtful silence that masked their apprehensions about the day to come. The silence continued on their ride out to Copper Cliff.

  Roughly a thousand workers were needed to keep the insatiable maw roaring around the clock, its great furnace fires banked, its rivers of molten metal flowing. Not all of those workers were ever on site at any one time, of course, but day shift change was definitely highest traffic time at the Number One Gate, with hundreds of workers streaming in and out past the guardhouse at the gate.

  And so it was that a non-descript middle-aged figure toting his lunch pail, his spectacles concealed beneath mandatory safety glasses, his slight potbelly likewise hidden beneath the same work coveralls worn by hundreds of his fellow workers, walked unremarked past the uniformed security guards in the guardhouse.

  Foley Gilpin, sweating heavily inside the unaccustomed warmth of both his street clothes and a set of Jake McCool’s borrowed coveralls—thoughtfully left unlaundered just for the occasion, and several sizes too large—carefully followed the directions he’d been given to the Number Three Dry.

  Once inside what he quickly recognized as little more than a cavernous locker room Gilpin was greeted by a knot of quietly intense men. D’Aguire he recognized, but the rest were all strangers. Jake completed a round of introductions. Left unsaid was the fact that Gilpin was present on sufferance—many of the safety and health reps were cool about the idea of Gilpin’s presence in the first place—but they had been won over by Jake’s unstinting vouching for the reporter. Each of the strangers peppered Foley with questions—more like observations, really—reciting what seemed to Gilpin to be more like anecdotal evidence about how truly awful his own individual workplace was, urging the newsman to visit the converter aisle, the furnaces, Matte Processing, no, wait! The sintering plant!

  The apprehensive Gilpin, who had been offered, and had accepted, a seat on a long wooden bench, glanced around the big room. He was relieved to see that it had cleared of other workers, who had doubtless gone off to begin dayshift at their appointed stations. This sudden flood of information was all very well, but it was evidence—hard, solid, factual evidence—Gilpin needed. He knew his sceptical editors in Toronto would demand nothing less.

  Perhaps sensing his perplexity, d’Aguire suddenly raised his hand, in a mute signal for silence. To Gilpin’s surprise and immense gratitude, the manoeuvre worked, and a hush suddenly descended over the unruly little band. “Now see here, you jokers,” d’Aguire rasped, “s’pose we let this man tell us what it is he needs to see. . .”

  Gilpin struggled to answer the question. The truth was, he didn’t know what he didn’t know. “Well uh, I want to see the conditions inside the smelter on a typical working day, I suppose.”

  With that the reporter pulled out his notebook and began to scribble a few preliminary notes. His anxious onlookers, drawn in a tight circle around him, fell into a respectful silence at the gesture, peering down at him as if they were witnessing a momentous signal. Soon enough d’Aguire had taken the impromptu meeting in hand, and an itinerary for Gilpin’s informal—and illegal—smelter tour was formulated: the diminutive reporter would be passed from rep to rep, and department to department, in a prearranged sequence. Each rep would provide Gilpin the directions to the next shop floor as he needed them.

  Ad hoc as it was, Gilpin’s tour was unfolding pretty much as planned until somewhere between the converter aisle and Matte Processing he got turned around. It scarcely mattered; he was done. This place was all that Jake had told him, and more. Conditions in the converters beggared description, and that was a problem: how to describe what he’d found to the paper’s ever-sceptical editors, much less its readers? As for concrete, objective measurements, Gilpin vaguely recalled his friend Jake saying that the union had begun taking its own measurements. Maybe he could publish those numbers, and compare them with scientifically-approved threshold values. . . Gilpin was fretting over all this when he was spotted by Neil Rumford. The security guard was ruminating contentedly over his second stick of Juicy Fruit of the morning when his eye was drawn to a stranger who seemed to be wandering a bit aimlessly.

  Rumford squinted at the odd figure, whom he did not recognize. There was just something a little strange about him, something that didn’t quite fit. No one would ever mistake Neil Rumford for Dick Tracy, that was for sure. A product of the Law and Security program at the local community college, Rumford had always dreamed of becoming a cop, but when both the provincial and municipal forces had rejected his applications Rumford settled for the far less prestigious post of security guard at Inco.

  Gilpin spotted Rumford, too, and was unnerved at the sight of his hulking figure, his barrel chest and big belly seemingly held in place by the Sam Brown belt he wore over his starched, freshly-pressed uniform. In another time and place Gilpin would have dismissed him as a faintly ridiculous character escaped from a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. But not here. The newspaperman could sense Rumford’s scrutinizing gaze, and it made him nervous. He wheeled around, and began to walk briskly toward an as yet uncertain destination. As rapidly as he dared, Gilpin darted around the corner of a towering brick building, hoping to put some distance between himself and the security guard, but even as he did so Gilpin could hear the tell-tale crackle of a walkie-talkie.

  Foley never did quite break into a run, but he double-timed it around first one corner, then another, before slowing his pace so he could begin to catch his breath. He was really sweating now, but at least it appeared that he’d eluded his pursuer, and now Gilpin was able to turn h
is mind to his original problem: his headlong flight away from the big security guard had taken him even deeper into the heart of the smelter complex; but where the heck was he? He resolved to ask directions from the first rank-and-file-seeming worker he came across. But he was in the yard, as opposed to inside the smelter buildings proper, and it was still mid-morning of day shift, and there was not a likely candidate to be seen.

  Gilpin had sidled his way around yet another corner seeking an entrance back into the smelter buildings when he was confronted by a pair of grim-faced security guards. Within an instant he felt a hand on his shoulder. It squeezed in a not-altogether friendly manner and did not let go. The newspaperman could tell by the weight of the hand and the sound of heavy breathing behind him that his pursuer had now become his captor. Still, it was one of the security guards in front of him who did the talking. “Excuse us, sir, but what is your business here?” Gilpin, speechless and still a trifle winded, could only shrug. His face, still flushed from exertion, reddened further.

  “Yes, I see. Would you kindly come with us?” The hand on his shoulder tightened its grip.

  The little foursome made its way indoors and through a series of cavernous chambers remarkable to Gilpin only for the roar of massive, mysterious machinery, and the dystopian fog of sulphur gas in such strong concentrations it made his eyes water. Eventually they passed through several glass-windowed industrial doors and the noise and gas of production grew faint. They were now traversing a rabbit warren of offices, the two security guards leading the little procession with Gilpin in the middle, and Rumford, still gripping Foley’s shoulder, bringing up the rear.

  He was ushered into a small, nondescript office where the main feature was a burly figure, attired in a rumpled brown suit, sitting behind a gray metal desk. Clearly this new figure had been expecting Gilpin, which the newsman accounted to the walkie-talkies each of his captors now had holstered in their heavy leather belts. The suited figure had the impassive, world-weary air of a man who has seen everything once. His most impressive facial feature was a bristling brown moustache below dark brown eyes that scanned Gilpin with alert interest. He nodded at the three uniformed guards who stood at attention around Gilpin, and they quietly left the room. Then the man behind the desk, who Gilpin took for an ex-cop, turned his full attention on Foley. By way of introduction he handed a business card across the desk. It read “Michael O’Hanlon, Director, Plant Security, Smelting and Refining Section, Ontario Division, International Nickel Company of Canada Ltd.” Finally he addressed Gilpin. “And you are. . .?”