Order of Good Cheer

by Bill Gaston

  Three in the afternoon and the light had already fallen — but odd how snow on the ground lent an able brightness from below.

  Christmas in two days. Laura two days after that.

  Before jumping in his car he went back and stood for a minute on the lip of his backyard, with its bonus view, as he was calling it. So far, no more land lost to acts of God. (He’d made a call to the insurance company and the agent, Brian Glenn — Andy had been in the same grade with his brother Pat — had said that land itself wasn’t technically insurable, “especially in one of these standard ‘act of God’ things but, hey, nature takes a bite out of your house we’ll be all over it. Unless it’s an earthquake. Which is more, you know, ‘God.’ Unless you have actual earthquake insurance. Which, let’s see, you don’t. Would you like some?”) Cliff-edge, Andy risked toeing a workboot, out into space, hanging five. Things felt solid enough. God, for the moment, had ceased acting up. Or acting out. But staring off into the approaching wall of fog, unable to see much of anything at all, he could too easily feel the melting glaciers, big rains, rogue waves, and the coming rise, and this ground falling from under his feet faster than he could backpedal. It actually made him take a backward step. This good an imagination was a potent and tricky thing. But he remembered now what was lost with that corner patch of ground. That was where Buck used to stand during windstorms. Head up, almost noble-looking. Her stance wasn’t one of guarding the place, but more of trying to see what was causing that fuss beyond the trees. Maybe it was her version of sticking a head out the car window. In that rough wet weather her fur would curl into lush ringlets, revealing blonde highlights, and she’d look almost beautiful.

  AFTER SNEAKING DOWN to Vancouver to catch Laura dance that one spring so long ago, Andy mailed some forms to enrol in UBC and returned that same fall. He wasn’t sure why. Mostly, you were supposed to leave Prince Rupert. In his mind he thanked Laura for helping him. She was back in Toronto, but her presence on stage had warmed up the city for him.

  He arrived the day classes started and there was nothing to rent near the university. Andy found a hotel downtown that rented by the month and had odd burnt-electric smells instead of cooking smells. Those first days, out his window the sirens and honks were interesting, exotic like a pushy foreign language. It was his first time living away from Beachview Drive and his first time alone, and he knew this is what adventure felt like. He could distinguish true change from one of life’s non sequiturs and this was the former. He was ready for anything.

  But not his constant state of want. On the floor of vast, amphitheatre classes, profs rarely said anything compelling. He could not sit still. In Biology 100 the prof showed slides of cells, using his most dramatic drone to joke that the nucleus was a cell’s ego, and Andy fought to keep his eyes focused.

  Andy slept all right, the traffic sounding enough like waves on gravel, but still he couldn’t settle. Philosophy was another disaster, this time because of the in-class reading, something by Locke, wherein sentences tended to go for a half-page before a period. He had to ask himself honestly if it mattered to him. He stayed until the class let out because there were only a dozen in this room and it was hard for a man his height to slink. He had to admit that the only interesting thing about Philosophy 115 was that no other tall people were taking it, a question that maybe tomorrow’s Psychology 104 could answer. Leaving the class it wasn’t hard for Andy to accept that he would never be a great and labyrinthine thinker.

  He held out most hope for English. Early to the classroom, he sat there alert as it gradually filled with women. The middle-aged professor, who identified himself as a Wordsworthian and who was handsomely square-jawed and aware of it, talked for five minutes about how hard it was to stand here and teach and not be allowed to smoke. Apparently smoking was now banned in classrooms. Andy tried to sympathize, until the prof compared himself to an English explorer returning from the dangers of the New World, who now had “to worry about having my smoker’s fucking nose cut off in London.” Andy watched for signs of humour, but the guy was serious. He scanned the reading list hungrily. One-third he’d already read at work, for pleasure. The other two-thirds he hadn’t, because he hadn’t wanted to. Now he was being forced, but not at work where he would’ve been paid, and the logic bothered him. Plus his appreciation would be judged by the noseless professor.

  The prof ended the class telling them to march to the bookstore and buy the books. Andy joined the women in their meander through connected buildings, trying to stay interested by studying their jeans from behind, but he couldn’t rise above his discontent. And then he encountered the last straw. Walking past the open doors of another amphitheatre, Andy heard an eerie, disembodied voice declare, “the subject, not the object of our study. Not the object, but the subject.” Andy poked his head in, and down on the floor a thin, near-elderly woman popped the board with a wooden poker. The lone words on the board were these:

  Pseudo Code Bucketsort

  Running Time Bucketsort

  Andy could feel his smile. His mute guffaw. No one noticed him. No women from his English class knew he was no longer following their jeans to the bookstore.

  Flying over Queen Charlotte Sound, halfway home, Andy wasn’t troubled by the way things had worked out. He promised himself that he would never entertain the possibility that he was a failure. One thing his buddy Leonard often said about “the Aboriginal mind” was that Natives “are really good at not doing what they don’t want to do.” What could be more brilliant? Why do something you don’t want to do? Why read something you don’t want to read? Especially when you’re not getting paid union scale to read it.

  Another funny thing: his name hadn’t appeared on any of the class lists when they were read out, so probably he’d done something wrong and wasn’t registered at the university at all. Officially he’d never been there. He’d paid fees, and could probably get them back, but didn’t try. He’d work a bunch of overtime. He’d phoned before flying and was told that he’d lost seniority but his old job was there for him.

  Years later, Andy had nothing left of his brief university education save for the waft of embarrassment when he thought of it, which wasn’t often. He did wonder if higher education had failed him or he had failed higher education, and if the academic path would’ve led to a happier Andy Winslow. He also wondered what Laura’s thoughts were upon hearing — because she would have heard — that Andy Winslow had left Prince Rupert but had lasted exactly a week.

  The other remnant of Vancouver was Buck. Drew had a sense of occasion, and days after Andy returned from his abandoned future Drew brought him a dog. Rescued from the Terrace pound, the year-old female mutt’s main feature was wildly untrusting eyes. At first Andy didn’t want a dog muddying his house, but he couldn’t return it to certain death in the pound. So he named her Running Time Pseudo Code Bucketsort, or Buck for short, and came to love her as much as one can a dog that bent by harm, until Buck died under the wheels of the mail truck seven years later. Andy cried as he drove Buck’s blanket-wrapped body to the vet, surprising himself.

  But with Buck’s death, that was it for higher education and, for that matter, ever moving away from Prince Rupert, probably.

  AT THE TERMINAL, under the looming bank of connected silos, he parked and locked his car, then unlocked it and left it unlocked. No one he didn’t know would come by here and he wanted to keep alive at least this vestige of the old days. Maybe he’d start not locking his house again — but this thought brought to mind an image of Tsimshian gangstas lurking in bushes beyond his yard.

  He walked the footbridge to the main building and saw it through her eyes, because in mere days he would bring her here. Not to justify his life but to communicate it. He liked this footbridge. Its thirty-foot drop, so visible through the wire grid you walked on, unnerved him just enough that he still regarded it as morning coffee for the way it woke him up. The narrow bridge was built solely to get a man across train tracks, arcing over six set
s of them and the boxcars waiting to release a load from their bellies. Even if you were used to it, even if you talked about the latest YouTube madness with a hungover German named Veit (pronounced fight), something in your body was aware it walked on space and that was deeply wrong. No matter how dopey getting out of his car, he was awake when he punched his card.

  He paused at the peak and grabbed the rail but released it, the iron hurting-cold without gloves. Below, beside a track, two ravens shared a pigeon. One stepped in, poked a few times, dragged out some gut, tossed its head forward to get the morsel to the back of its throat. The second raven hopped up to the feathered trough to stab as well. As it pulled, the pigeon followed, so the first raven put its foot on the body, holding it. Was this co-operation? They looked unhurried, unlike the riots of gulls, or even crows. Andy had seen crows kill and eat wounded pigeons and it was a savage thing to see, the stabs, flapping, ripping. Birdies. It was unclear if these ravens had killed the pigeon. Because ravens were his favourite bird, Andy liked to think they found it dead and were cleaning up the yard. Ravens were maybe even his favourite animal. The killer whale was their main competition in this, but since you almost never saw a whale’s eyes, it was hard to know them.

  At the door, from his workbag Andy dragged his orange safety vest out from under four or five books. Some foremen still gave you shit for not wearing it on site. About six months after 9/11, the orange vest was one of two antiterrorism measures worked out with U.S. Homeland Security. All “front-line port workers” wore them now, apparently. The other measure was a half-million-dollar, ten-foot-tall chain-link fence that ran along the rocky beach for a few hundred yards but simply ended and could be stepped around, forcing terrorists —after they’d purchased their orange vests at Harbour Rod & Gun for nine bucks — to hike a bit farther than they had to in the past. (Andy reminded himself to tell Laura he’d seen his favourite graffiti ever, pencilled on a scrap of cardboard secured to the new fence: Heaven Attacked by the Afraid. Funny thing is, he didn’t know if it referred to terrorists or the fence.)

  He punched in, nodding to a couple guys. Walking past the open lunchroom door he saw Drew, who looked up from his newspaper and called, “Little bastard came home for Christmas.” Drew wore his vest inside out, showing only grey, a style favoured by him and a few other rebels.

  Andy leaned into the lunchroom. “Chris is back?” Drew couldn’t keep his smile down. “Now I have to go buy a bunch of bribe presents to keep him here.”

  “Chris? That’s so great.” Despite the levity of the moment, Andy couldn’t help eyeing the stained and ripped plastic Santa head some cynic had nailed to the lunchroom wall and that looked, from where Andy stood, like a second head growing up out of Drew’s.

  “I was actually thinking of buying him a car for Christmas.”

  “A car?”

  “Reverse psychology.” Drew’s mood had actually made his face redder. “As in, ‘I don’t want you to leave town again, so I’m buying you transportation.’”

  “Seriously?” Andy was sad that he could read how his friend’s happiness was already undermined by new cares. Instead of a general worry of Chris up to no good in Calgary, now Drew would know whenever he was out, and he’d wonder who with. Drew was probably wondering that now.

  “An oldie. Five hundred bucks. Something he can cut holes in for speakers and whatnot. A big old pig. Paint ‘anarchy’ signs on the doors.”

  “You don’t think he’ll see it’s a bribe?”

  “I’m going to tell him it’s a bribe.”

  Andy wasn’t certain, but Chris seemed the type of young, dialed-in guy who’d use the phrase carbon footprint without irony, who wouldn’t want a big pig, and it was the shits that Drew maybe wasn’t seeing this.

  “You know what his nickname is now?”

  Andy told him no, and Drew pivoted around to get a few more guys listening.

  “Pone Bus.”

  “Pone Bus?”

  “It’s like, you know how you own someone when you beat them at something, well the slang for that is pown, and bus is like he beats lots of people at once. Pone Bus.”

  “That’s great. It’s sort of like Cockney rhyming slang.”

  Drew said he’d never been able to figure that stuff out.

  “But, decent name,” Andy said, tapping his wrist where a watch would be. Drew had always been in love with his son’s slang. He’d loved it, for instance, when at twelve Chris said he was going to make tennis his bitch, and when he started calling high school “the taint.”

  HE TOOK THE EAST lift to the bin tops, choosing this clanky, open-sided, and unnerving elevator because he pictured taking Laura up here too, when a slacker supervisor was on. From this lift — a rusty cage open on two sides, a red bar your only barrier to freefall — you rose through a good view of the terminal’s dank and rusty guts, all dark and hissing and banging, a chaos of heavy-duty, of industrial revolution, nothing prettied up for public viewing, no soft giant turning cogs Charlie Chaplin could ride on without getting crushed. The shape of all metal was designed for function; enough bare light bulbs dangled so eyes could just see; red paint indicated what would kill you; a lift that said Max 5 Person probably meant it. If you stood in one spot for a minute you might see a spectacularly plump rat trot by. Grain dust went in and out your lungs, always. And it smelled stronger than a cheap apartment block at dinnertime. Andy could hardly smell it any more but visitors said the place smelled overwhelmingly like dry pet food fermenting.

  Yet not even counting the paid reading time, it wasn’t bad here. He’d tell Laura that despite the American takeover the paycheques were still robust, at least for those kept on full-time. And, Laura, there have been entertaining things. In the early days up on the gallery, guys drove countless golf balls over the road as far as the blue Pacific, much laughter and money changing hands, and it went bad only when cars became targets, the poor coal-terminal bastards speeding home after their shift. Not another golf ball was hit up there after Bert Stempniak’s windshield got nailed and he went into the ditch and his airbag broke his collarbone and glasses. And there was rat-plinking: guys bringing pellet guns and on their own time having contests, the laughing rationale to supers being, “For less rat part in Chinese dumpling!” There was the summer Galloway, nicknamed “Newman” after the Seinfeld fatty, busted a bathroom sink right off the wall while having day-shift sex with a still-unidentified woman. No one wanted to picture it and said so. There was that summer of the seven pot plants growing up on the annex against the sunny side of his tin shed, Andy swearing to a supervisor not only that they weren’t his but that he didn’t know whose they were, though he did. Grain dust was purportedly the best medium for growing absolutely anything, but PR apparently wasn’t tropical enough and the spindly plants never got more than two feet tall, and the supervisor merely pointed at them and laughed and walked away mumbling about Charlie Brown Christmas trees.

  The lift banged to a stop. With no need to please the public, the braking mechanism involved no rubber or springs and for one instant you were a hundred pounds lighter. He imagined Laura beside him, both of them leaning over the red rail to take in the two-hundred-foot drop to the dim concrete far below, feeling this same big flip in the belly.

  Andy was glad he was five minutes early because he relieved Dean, one of his brasher coworkers. (Dean typically carried his coat and wore only a beater underneath, to better showcase his several heavy-metal tattoos.) This afternoon Dean brushed by him with a flat “Yahoo,” where often he had a joking complaint about Andy’s bookshelf lacking porn, or why weren’t the rest of them allowed a tv. Dean might mock himself to Andy with a purposely mispronounced, “What do I know, ain’t been to a libary in my life,” a sort of compliment, but like being licked by a dog that hated you. (One time Dean had more or less called Andy a liar. A group of guys, some of them rec hockey players, were recalling funniest-ever team names they’d heard, and Andy blurted one he’d read about, “The Swastikas,” and
Dean had said simply, “Bullshit.” Andy had to explain that it was a women’s team, from Edmonton, from the ‘20s, before Hitler, and while some of the guys looked dubious, or impatient, possibly because he’d bothered including a women’s team, he had to mumble further that swastikas were actually a religious symbol, not just in Hinduism, and . . . sometimes it was just too complicated to open your mouth at all.) But Dean did seem impressed once at lunch when, after marvelling over how long a glue-strip-stuck rat in B Annex had stayed alive — fucking days — Andy let slip that rats were the one animal that could go without water longer than camels.

  He stowed his lunch, checked the screen, saw that the ship currently tied up was on a long canola fill, which would last the night. Aside from two scheduled shutdowns to let deckhands on board change holds, Andy could put his feet up and finish Lescarbot’s story about the Order, an account far more complete than Champlain’s, with descriptions of songs and skits performed. Lescarbot seemed to be taking most of the credit for the idea.

  First Andy stepped out to stretch a bit and breathe the evening air. Laura, this wasn’t too bad a job. Noisy, but the noises were expected, machines doing the hard labour, doing what your computer screen said they were. Smelly, but a body got used to anything. Like his nose, his ears had also adapted. According to his latest on-site medical, the decibels had been killing cilia — the little hairs — in his inner ear. He could see this in two ways: he had suffered a twenty percent hearing loss, or he had adapted to the noise and was now more comfortable.

  Some hundred metres distant, there floated Highlander, a mid-sized freighter typical for its Panamanian registry and Filipino crew, and probably owned by some Russian potentate who lived in nouveau riche New Jersey. The ghost-orange halogens were already on and the vast expanse of decks was lit up so as to suggest empty midnight basketball courts in an oddly deserted city. He could see a few deckhands leaning half over the rail, literally hanging around, bored senseless, noodle-arms dangling like they wouldn’t care if they just fell and got it over with. Ship duty no doubt drove these poor souls mad — less than ten miles away from a downtown with lights and bars and women. Filipino sailors generally had less pocket money than even the Chinese, but it would still be fun to walk up and down some strange streets. There on the other, seaward side of the ship, it looked like a clutch of them, at least, were fishing.