The City Still Breathing

by Matthew Heiti

  He sips the mud at the bottom of his coffee and rolls tongue over lips. Tiger tail. He thinks now about all the cheering and smiling and backpatting of that day. Hell, he pressed his own shirt and wore a tie – almost forgot about things lost underground. All that useless preening, speeches about safer this and better that, just before they brought the machines in.

  Somebody should wipe King George right off there. Wipe him off and put up a picture of somebody else. Like Normando, for thirty-five years spent underground, for his cheap company ring and his cheap little pension, or Bill Aho who got his skull cracked by company men, or Pez who lost his leg in a cave-in, or Xavier who went batshit crazy, or Gully with his ringing ears, or Scagnetti who went blind, or Lee with the shakes – or anybody, even Ristimaki with his two black lungs and his broken nose. Normando laughs at this. Ristimaki with his big ugly nose on that big damn coin.

  Anything would look better than that perfectly wavy hair, that little smirk, all that damned dignity. Anybody. The boy, smiling, in a miner’s helmet. How about the teenager he was when he went down and came back up again dragged by his boots. Put him up there. Celebrate that – have a parade. Take pictures with him behind, looking down on all this with a little bit of honesty.

  Normando’s been whispering out the window and he catches himself. Been whispering a story up at that coin, seeing the boy’s face up there. Whispering about how he counted two short that one time – those damn Italians, always off poking at things they shouldn’t be. Those rocks – this big. They sure talked about that after. For a while anyway. But Normando stops whispering. King George isn’t listening. No one is.

  Normando’s crushed the cup. He opens his hand to the sound of styrofoam groaning. He staggers out of the cab, around to the back, and lowers the tailgate. He grabs a duffel bag and limps up to the monument. Standing at the base, staring up thirty feet into the night sky. Kids come out here and crowbar pieces off – he doesn’t know that but it’s what he’s heard. Taking some kind of souvenir or trophy, some little chunk of glory. He leans against one of the columns, stretching up, but he can’t reach the coin. Damned big thing. Planted here on the hill like some kind of meat thermometer, sucking the juice right out of the houses, the mines, him. Even from those two teenagers who were up here just yesterday – right here in the shadow of this thing, so real and alive. So much more alive than him.

  His town is dying. Something else taking its place. Something spreading out, like that thing spreading through his insides.

  He thinks about the long ride home. He thinks about turning the knob on his front door, swinging open, and what’s left inside. Waking Pat up to tell her. A few months, a year tops. And damn all this silence. This damn respect. Let’s talk about the boy. The dead gotta be talked about. Things’ve gotta be real and remembered.

  Those kids yesterday almost gave him hope. That’s what makes him so sick. They have to leave like all the young ones do, or stay to have the life sucked out of them.

  He turns to look back at the lights of the city meeting the lights of the stars, all of it burning in the last of the night like somebody set a slag field on fire. This is the town. The city. Home. A place gets in the veins. Or you’re born with it already in there. And it can’t be dug out like they do in the mines. Maybe it takes putting the boy, his boy, in the ground. Maybe it’ll take Normando’s blood, too, before this big crater – honeycombed with the dead and dying underground, the stunted trees, black rock and sick lakes above – before it all caves in for good.

  But in the quiet up here, Normando can see the whole town shiver like a bellows. That smelter sputtering smoke like a deathbed cigarette. Staggering on. Making it to another morning. The city breathes them in, and it lets them out.

  Maybe they’ll come back. Once they’re done with their adventures. The slag cooled. When they have no place left to go, the city will breathe them back in. They can build on top of the dead. And make some kind of life in this awful and beautiful damned mess. He won’t be around to see it.

  Normando turns back to the big coin. He thinks about Joel McCrea on horseback looking off into the great blue yonder.

  ‘All I want is … ’

  He pulls the zipper on the duffel, all kinds of metal winking in the moon’s light. He takes out a hacksaw, laying teeth against the column, and starts to cut this big damned thing down.

  17

  Francie’s got a seat all to herself, her legs wedged up against the one in front. Headphones on and the Walkman blaring and Bernard singing to her, But for these last few days leave me alone. And right now there’s no grey blue loneliness in it. There’s no colour at all. It’s like the road – a dark secret, but rolling forward, and her riding the wave.

  She’ll stop in at her sister’s to clean up. Then she’ll go to that Mexican place, she’ll walk the lights of Yonge, she’ll ride those elevators up the high-rises right into the clouds. She’ll do it all. Maybe she’ll never come back. Maybe she will.

  The song fading and out the bus window she sees the first glow of dawn, all kinds of colour bubbling up and breaking over her. Everyone else drifting in sleep.

  18

  Slim takes the long way out of town, the road winding through the slag heaps rising over him on either side. The white disappearing across the tops, the first snow already melting.

  As he breaks for the highway, he looks for the big coin over his left shoulder, to let him know he’s on his way. He looks everywhere but he can’t see the thing. Must’ve missed it.

  Onto 69, heading south. Somewhere down the road he spots the red glow of lights, the tail of a bus. He latches on, letting this be his guide, not sure how to let go. Not sure how far you can go on a spare. How far before he turns back.

  On the seat next to him, the photo of her asleep in their shack next to the photo of her in profile staring out at the lake. Then the strip he found in his pocket, from the photo booth. Four little squares of Francie. The first one so clear and then she gradually fades out to ghost white by the last frame. A history of distance.

  He knows they’re dying. All of them. He just doesn’t know what to do.

  Acknowledgements

  This book began in a Fredericton winter and ended in a Sudbury attic. Earlier versions of some chapters appeared in these fine journals: Riddle Fence, Grain and Freefall.

  The work on this manuscript could not have been completed without the support of the Ontario Arts Council (Northern Arts Grant).

  Thank you and much love to my brother, Warren, who took me on a lifetime of adventures, and to my parents, Stephen and Sara, for letting us play.

  Thank you to Mark Jarman, John K. Samson, Jeremy Whiston, Bob Simpson, Sylvie Gravelle and Cristina Greco for reading.

  Thank you to many other people for sharing stories and conversations: The Great Normando (Norm Jaques), Dan Bedard, Francie Morgan, Lara Bradley and Kristina Donato (Sudbury Flaneurs), Miriam Cusson (for L’homme invisible), Marc Donato, Mario Greco, Sadie and Nala.

  Thank you for the soundtrack of this book: New Order, Kevin Quain, Van Morrison, Tom Waits, Men Without Hats, Rick Wakeman, Snailhouse, Greg Brown and the Weakerthans.

  Finally, I give my most heartfelt gratitude to my editor, Alana Wilcox, as well as Evan Munday, Stuart Ross and the other truly great folks at Coach House Books.

  About the Author

  Matthew Heiti holds an MA from the University of New Brunswick. His fiction has appeared in many periodicals and journals, his plays have been workshopped and produced across the country, and he’s a Genie-nominated screenwriter. He lives in a big old house in Sudbury with a little grey terror named Aino.

  Typeset in Aragon.

  Printed at the old Coach House on bpNichol Lane in Toronto, Ontario, on Zephyr Antique Laid paper, which was manufactured, acid-free, in Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, from second-growth forests. This book was printed with vegetable-based ink on a 1965 Heidelberg KORD offset litho press. Its pages were folded on a Baumfolder, gathered by hand, boun
d on a Sulby Auto-Minabinda and trimmed on a Polar single-knife cutter.

  Digital version also designed at the old Coach House on bpNichol Lane.

  Edited and designed by Alana Wilcox

  Cover art and design by Evan Munday

  Map by Evan Munday

  Coach House Books

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