by Bill Gaston
A shopping spree was in order, and to someplace other than Work Wearhouse. Andy felt a bit shaky imagining himself fingering fabrics and lapels. The quest was for “casual elegance” probably, but it was possible to buy something ten years out of style. On top of this was a new notion that at thirty-nine he was maybe no longer socially allowed to wear certain fashions, for instance whatever kind of strategic grubbiness the twenty-year-olds were wearing these days.
Andy wondered how weird it would be, and how much torture would be forthcoming from Drew, if he were to borrow Pauline to take as a guide on his shopping trip. Probably not weird at all, Andy’s hopelessness with clothes being no secret. Didn’t own an ironing board, smiled incomprehension at any talk of twill or raw silk. Compared to him, even Drew was a metrosexual. He’d understand.
Drew hadn’t visited him up on the annex this morning, nor was he in the lunchroom, and when Andy checked the duty board he saw Drew hadn’t made it in to work. He wondered if maybe he’d gone home last night and washed down those ribs with a few more. It was a problem. It actually was.
He wouldn’t call over there just yet. If Drew was hungover it meant Pauline was icy and neither one a joy to talk to. Not even Andy proposing a guided shopping spree — Pauline as Sherpa for his handicapped attempt at the summit of middle-aged fashion — would raise a smile in that house.
DESPITE THE RAIN, Andy chose to walk the mile across town to his mother’s. He strode quickly, intending violence to the pizza he’d just wolfed. Feeling his thighs clench with each stride he thought of Nijinsky’s withering last years. To his left, though he couldn’t see it, was Mount Hays, its top dusted with November snow. To his right, beyond the houses and streetlights, the dark harbour. On the breeze he could smell the ebbing tide mixed, he thought, with those fish. From several streets over, some music boomed faintly, you could tell it was all muddy on cheap speakers, and it took Andy a moment to recognize it as opera and that, since this wasn’t what you’d crank at a party, something must be out of control, some loner on a binge.
On 2nd Street he passed Drew’s father’s pretentious place, with its fake portico supported by fake half-pillars, bought in a fit of self-congratulation during the real estate spike a decade ago. Andy never did like the similarity he shared with Mr. Madden, that of a single man occupying an entire house. In Mr. Madden’s case, a near-mansion. Where next week’s dinner — “banquet,” Mr. Madden’s word — was taking place.
Andy realized that this dinner might have been where Drew got his “out-of-town convention” last night during the rib charade. There would be maybe thirty people coming, with the mayors of Prince Rupert and Kitimat, and assorted business leaders, including the director of the grain terminal, so stratospheric a boss that Andy had never met him. In other words, all the town mucky-mucks, and all for the purpose of wooing the Chinese Wheat People. Nobody seemed to know who they were. They were representatives of government or of free enterprise. They were in town to scout, or negotiate, or finalize millions, billions, or trillions worth of grain and possibly even coal trade. The Chinese Wheat People had arrived last week and were lodged in modest rooms at The Crest. Adding to the mystery, erasing some rumours while creating others, the Chinese Wheat People turned out to be two women. (Drew had said of this, “How Soviet of them.” He predicted that one would be carrying “an old carbine” and the other a hoe, and both would have shirt sleeves rolled up to reveal “state biceps.”) Mr. Madden, who went with others on the Chamber of Commerce to greet them at the airport, claimed that these two women looked no more than twenty years old. He’d been announcing this outrageous fact non-stop, always followed innocently by, “But, you know, you can’t really tell.”
Mr. Madden had invited Andy via Drew, who said, “He says you have to come.”
“Why?”
“They need a token worker. Communists expect that.”
“You’re a worker.”
“No, I’m not.” This meant that he was the host’s son and didn’t count. It also meant, without him saying it, that his father was still getting Drew, as much as he was able, to attend advantageous events in the hope that he would someday choose something other than the grain terminal.
“He wants me to come?” Andy asked. Though he knew. And over the past weeks, it seemed almost subconsciously, he’d picked up books on both the historical and the current Great Leap Forward, as well as one on Cantonese cuisine. It had glossy colour plates, and he’d been surprised by how many dishes looked like what you’d get at several of the Chinese joints in Prince Rupert.
In any case, he knew why he was being invited.
Especially at work, Andy Winslow was regarded as a polymath. He was enough of a polymath to know he wasn’t one. More exactly, he was a reader and a repository of information.
At work he had become used to intercom calls whose only purpose was a question such as, “There’s five kinds of Pacific salmon, right? And dog’s another word for chum?” or “How much did they pay Russia for Alaska?” or “Pakistan doesn’t have nukes, do they?” Maybe his answers won an argument for someone, or oiled a stuck conversation. Sometimes he’d field a question he took more pride in, for instance from a recently hired supervisor, “On those old belts, how long before a fray is a break?” A few years back, on graveyard shift, there’d been a game when packs of guys called and tested him. He heard money had changed hands.
In any case, twenty years ago, sitting his first-ever shift, alone in the tin shack atop eight massive cylindrical bins, Andy’s single responsibility was to listen for the phone to ring, then punch several buttons in the right sequence, which tripped one conveyor belt over to another, flax to canola, barley to one-red-thirteen. This might happen four times over the eight hours, sometimes never. With so much downtime, he could listen to the radio, pace, or go crazy. Officially, on downtime everyone was supposed to sweep grain dust, which was ultra-flammable and everywhere. But grain dust was so fine that it was like a layer of vaguely heavy air, it merely floated up to hang awhile when a broom moved near it, and foremen seemed content if you kept your push broom propped on a wall, looking recently used.
Or he could read. Andy had always read, but he started to read. It ate up the time, and then it became more than that. Here he was getting paid top wage — the union was strong in those days — to just sit there. All that wasted time left him feeling not only restless, but hollow. Added up, all those empty hours were a wasted life. Magazines and crossword puzzles didn’t assuage the guilt or fill the void, but books did. And so, not many weeks into his long career as casual labour in the Prince Rupert Grain Terminal, Andy decided he was getting paid to learn.
At first he didn’t like getting caught reading. For some odd reason it had to do with being tall. Tall men didn’t read, tall men with a book looked somehow desperate. Or hunched, or humbled, or stooped. You thought of Ichabod Crane clutching his book and striding awkwardly through a field. Six-feet-even would have been fine.
But Andy got over that and the librarians came to know him as the guy who twice weekly clomped in in workboots, late for afternoon shift and hunting books. His selections, odd for a man in this town, became somewhat known — first the Jane Austen binge, then Dickens, then the Russians, and then on into some contemporaries. Fiction fell off, and next the librarians could track his forays into geography, and biology, and psychology (clinical, pseudo, and New Age, in turn). Travel books Andy sprinkled in like vacations. He came to love extreme travel, he a vicarious voyeur of a distant culture’s freakish ways.
Then the librarians stopped seeing him. The break was clean (and so abrupt that he heard of their concern for his health) and marked when, mere months after they’d begun dating, Andy convinced Regional College English instructor Rachel Hedley to give him a copy of her inter-university library card, a privilege he maintained, along with her friendship, to this day.
Lately, sitting in his hard-backed wooden chair, perched two hundred feet up, forested mountains behind him and an
ocean in front, it was history that grabbed him most. History seemed an extension of extreme travel. He’d read and reread O’Hanlon stumbling in the Amazon, Matthiessen aware in the Himalayas, Goering and Coffey paddling the Ganges — there were dozens of gems. But there was no travel writing so extreme as the old stuff, those explorers who stepped on an unknown beach either to take an arrow in the neck or taste the raw, dripping chunk of some creature held out by a sincerely proud elder. Two a.m. on a winter night, rain thrumming the tin shack, nothing was more savoury than the righteous mutiny, the speared turquoise fish, the tumble with a bare-breasted maiden, all under the dangerously coded approval of villagers who thought in shapes and colours their invaders could only guess at.
History was almost by definition badly written, but even a bare-bones narrative his imagination could fill in. He would read it was three hundred rifles against three thousand Zulu spears, feel the bureaucracy in this statement and try to attach flesh and blood to both rifles and spears, and know that some on both sides were insanely brave and others cowardly and others uncertain dreamers, like him. He knew what they dreamed about — women, home, land — and imagined what woman, what piece of land. He’d Google a picture of copra. He’d investigate food and imagine the smells, the tastes, and decide that hyena tasted like a cross between cat and dog, plus the sourness of a scavenger. He would read about tropical heat and imagine the weight and feel of cloth on the skin. Hearing wind on the tin, seeing that white ice had sprung an instant pattern on the glass, he would imagine what life was like when you were always shirtless and eagerly perspiring.
Up there on the annex, where he’d smuggled a good floor lamp so he could shut off the loud overhead fluorescence, he had all-night business with the histories of Asia, and of course the Hellenistic era, and the Roman, and Spanish Latin American, and Danish, and the weirdly opaque Finnish. He wouldn’t so much choose a country as he would find himself led off by a Portuguese explorer or travel the Silk Route and find himself somewhere new. He had a brief and intense time in Australia, turning to it not because of England’s entertaining dump of misfits but rather because he read that the Aborigines had just been genetically traced to a region — a village, actually — in India. Prehistory was an almost guilty pleasure, since so much came off like hopeful declarations from the murk. You couldn’t help but love it that a legitimate branch of Neanderthal studies had proposed partly from jaw structure that, since speech looked unlikely, they may well have communed with a crude telepathy, using an enlarged peneal under that famous big brow of theirs.
More recently, meandering his way closer to home, he turned to England and France and, only now, Canada. He read the main stuff (some of it vaguely familiar from high school) and then a coast-to-coast roll of greatest historical hits, based not on chronology but more on regional spectacle, moving from the Newfoundland Beothuks to the Halifax Explosion, to Confederation in P.E.I., to Wolfe and Montcalm duking it out in Quebec, to the War of 1812 (really just an Ontario thing but much touted in these anti-American days), to Louis Riel, to the tunnels of Moose Jaw, to various Hudson’s Bay Company shenanigans, to way out west and Sir Alexander Mackenzie (who on the race overland beat by several years the more celebrated and secretly homosexual Lewis and Clark), to the Last Spike, the spate of gold rushes, and an island lighthouse not far from here that was shelled by a sub in the Second World War.
In any case Andy’s work was reading, and reading was his work. Up in the shack he’d bolted a bookshelf into the tin, permanent and in full view of foremen. His workbag often sagged heavy with books. Only new guys might joke about him. To the rest he was just Andy Winslow, which meant books, just like Ralph Palmateer meant seven kids, Larry Simon meant vintage cars, and Patti in accounting meant a prosthetic right leg no one had any clue about.
Still, to be as regular a guy as possible, Andy had had to watch himself. Being asked a question and knowing the answer was one thing. Being the butt of a let’s-test-Winslow joke was okay too. But socially there was a fine line between being their pet polymath and a shunned know-it-all, and the only way to avoid being the latter was to know when to put a cork in it. For instance, if the boys were onto politics, if they were huddled outside in a circle and talk turned to, Why the fuck doesn’t Quebec just separate and au revoir, assholes? he had to learn that, even though now was precisely the time to mention various acts signed in 1756 that guaranteed the French certain rights, it was also very much not the time. Given the mood, given that none of them remembered more than ten words of high-school French, given that they were standing outside in pitch-black drizzle at 2:30 a.m., 213 feet in the air on a silo top with no safety rail, gazing way, way east, bitter with taxes, Ottawa, and layoffs — it was clear that the purpose here was camaraderie. Not knowledge, not truth. The last thing the boys wanted was some know-it-all setting them straight. Standing in a ring of guys, hunched slightly to be more their height, Andy had quickly learned not to correct someone who’d just put out there that all sharks must keep swimming or die, or that more guys had died in Iraq than in Vietnam, or that Greenland was owned by Iceland. He learned that you don’t correct a machinist who’s just said that copper is the best conductor of electricity (actually it’s silver, but expensive to use). He knew you don’t inform parents about parenting (especially as to immunization, circumcision, or breastfeeding). Same with race, health food, the biology of addiction, or — especially — you never tell a guy anything about his car.
The idea here was to get through a shift and maybe even have an okay time, and Andy understood that. The goal wasn’t truth, it was wit, wit being the more important of the two and more true, in fact, than truth. Wit was here and now, vital and provable — the evidence was the laughter — while truth was none of those things. Especially when it was just more bad news. What was more sustaining, wit or truth, to a circle of guys standing in the cold, wondering when layoffs were coming, and would head office wait till after Christmas this year?
It was easy for Andy to keep a cork in it. He wasn’t proud of his knowledge. He knew that most was useless and a little was a dangerous thing. He also knew that, since he never learned a subject to its cutting edge, he was an expert in nothing. Except, maybe, the physical act of reading. Which he did to get through a shift. Which he did — he knew Laura would inform him before too long — to escape.
In any case Andy knew he’d been invited to Drew’s father’s banquet for the Chinese Wheat Women not to be a token worker but because he knew lots of stuff and could add to any conversation, if asked. Actually he had questions of his own for them. First, their take on the rehabilitation of Tibet. Then he wanted to hear whether, with all this new wealth in their present Great Leap Forward, they thought the Dancing Monkey might make a comeback.
ANDY CAME TO at his mother’s door, catching himself peering in the top of the door’s three teardrop-shaped windows. He could not remember walking the last five or six blocks.
He paused before knocking. There were the four of them at the game table, intent on what looked like Sorry. There was Mrs. Schultz, Laura’s mom, holding a game card close to her face, reading it with her one eye, still wearing the ugly flesh-coloured patch stuck on with adhesive. The three other women waited while she slowly mouthed the words, then just as slowly — passive-aggressively it looked like to Andy — moved her piece on the board.
He never knew whether to knock or ring the bell, wondering if it might affect how much they were startled. That sudden bustle and tizzy, four white-haired seniors in too much dither because someone was at their door. And it wasn’t like they didn’t know who, Wednesday being Andy’s night. They’d probably been talking about him for the last hour, everything from socks to haircut, and Andy would be their focus for as long as he stayed. There would be no talk of Laura’s coming, though. Neither his mother nor Laura’s cared for the subject. One knew he was too good for her and the other knew he wasn’t.
He rang the bell and watched three ladies check hair and scrape chairs.
Only his mother kept her dither hidden. She sat calmly. Here was her dutiful son. She looked proud, if not smug. She lifted what looked to be an empty teacup and, regal, not glancing up, she appeared to ask the air that her cup be filled. She was ignored.
Sprightly Doris ran on tiptoes to open the door for him.
“Oh, look who it is,” she exclaimed to the room.
“Who is it?” asked Mrs. Schultz, sincerely forgetful.
“Is that you, Andy?” asked Rita, still in her chair but trying painfully to turn all the way around.
“Hello, dear,” said his mother, not looking at him. Hanging his coat, Andy made his usual pre-emptive excuses for not staying long. He pulled up a chair to join in the game. The house smelled of onions, plus something worse, something turned. But not a dirty dish or misplaced pencil could be seen. On the counter the teapot in its cozy had been placed at perfect right angles to the cupboard. Holding nothing, the fridge door magnets — apple, orange, peach, and pineapple—were lined up on a nifty diagonal.
“The McGills,” said his mother, “phoned me and said the erosion was actually very noticeable. That actually it looked to them that you’d lost quite a bit of yard.” A faint aggression to her cheer suggested it had been somehow his fault, some failure of diligence to protect the family homestead. But surely he was imagining this.