Who by Fire

by Fred Stenson

  The breeze rising up from the river was cold. Tom stood looking into the valley, letting Comstock shiver in his city overcoat. Then he said, “Right on this spot is where I got gassed last summer.”

  Ella had found out from people who lived in the river-bottom that a well test had been done that day, on the only well drilled into a valley bench. Tom studied Comstock’s face for signs of his knowing this. He spared no details about how it had been, how he had crawled and stumbled to his truck; the retching, the blackouts, the burnt-orange piss.

  Before they left the field, Tom described the course of his sickness, the fatigue that had kept him in bed for weeks. Two weeks of work lost in the heart of summer, and no hired man. “A neighbour had to come do my baling. Ella and the girls worked like navvies.”

  Close to their driveway, Tom stopped again. “Something else to show you.”

  “Tom, I do not have time.”

  “This is the last one.”

  He led Comstock across the ditch. At the fenceline, Tom grabbed the top wire and broke it with his hands.

  “You just broke your own wire. Is that a good business practice?”

  “I’m no Hercules. Wire I can break with my hands won’t hold a cow. You can’t even fix this corroded crap. Breaks if you stretch it.”

  “I was told we had given you replacement wire.”

  “What I was given replaced three hundred yards. Including cross fences, there’s three miles of ruined wire on this half section alone.”

  Inside the house, they sat at the table. The assistant was in Tom’s place, and Tom told him to move. Ella poured them tea.

  “So what do you offer us for our place?”

  Comstock laughed at him.

  “You have a curious way of dealing. You spend an hour running down the asset, then ask me to name a price.”

  “I’m guessing you came with a figure in mind. I want to hear it.”

  “I asked for two independent appraisals. Can I see them?”

  “We don’t do that here. I know what it’s worth.”

  “Then you tell me.”

  “The first time I talked to you, you said your company was willing to buy us out, like you bought out Bauers. You’ve since bought Courts. I think you know exactly what you mean to offer.”

  “I really don’t have time for this.”

  “Then hurry up and tell me, and we’ll both get back to work.”

  Comstock said a number.

  “That’s twenty dollars an acre less than what you paid Bauers,” Tom told him. “Being close together, their land and ours has to be comparable.”

  “The Bauer land was needed for our plant site,” Comstock replied. “We paid a premium for that. Your place doesn’t even have wells on it.”

  “I just showed you thousands of dollars of damage, and that’s only the beginning of what your plant has done to this farm and to us. There should be a premium for that too.”

  “Fine, then,” said Comstock. He upped the price ten dollars an acre. “You’ve got all my wiggle room. That’s it.”

  The amount was enough to buy a decent farm somewhere else. It would not be as nice a farm, but theirs was not as nice a farm as it used to be. He looked at Ella. She gave a shallow nod.

  Tom swallowed hard. He told Comstock he considered the price low but was going to accept it because it was important, for safety reasons, to get the family out of here before another winter.

  Comstock said, “You understand my offer is for this half section, the land closest to our plant. It’s not for the whole farm. We are not interested in that part by the river.”

  Tom’s face burned. “That’s not how you sell a farm, or buy one. We want out of this stink. I just told you I was gassed on the Lower Place. I was in bed two weeks.”

  “You can do what you want with that land. If you don’t want it, sell it. Our only interest is in buying the half section closest to the plant.”

  Tom knew he was red-faced. His first thought was that Comstock was punishing him for acting as though he could control the negotiation, for taking him on the tour. But likely that wasn’t true. The man probably came here to say exactly what he’d said.

  “I’d appreciate it if you told your company that my wife and I will accept an offer of seventy dollars per acre for the entire farm.”

  “I am the company, Mr. Ryder. I’m refusing that deal.”

  “My wife and I are this farm. You are not your company.”

  Dear Tom,

  I apologize for the delay. There were things I had to wait for, so as to have anything more than sympathy to offer you.

  In the first year of the Hatfield plant’s operation, there were many complaints from down your way. We told Aladdin Oil and Gas to get an independent report on how the plant was working. Mr. Onge, our health minister, suggested they get Dr. Hemmel. You know that part because one of his tests was in your yard.

  That report took a long time to get to us. We regarded some of what was in it as serious. The worst reading for sulphur dioxide was in your closest neighbour’s yard. The highest reading for hydrogen sulphide was downwind of your house and feedlot.

  After we got those results, we went back over things with Aladdin. They said they had fixed a lot of their early problems, and that the expansion plant was constructed differently to counter those problems. They also claimed there were mistakes in Dr. Hemmel’s testing that made it seem worse than it was. We’re not listening to that part.

  Our decision is that the company and our government should co-operate on a health study around the Aladdin Hatfield plant. This will happen over the next year. Mr. Comstock said a health study at your farm was not necessary because you were planning to sell. I bet it’s not easy for you and Ella to walk away. But maybe it’s for the best. I’ll regard this matter as settled unless I hear from you otherwise.

  Yours truly,

  Ormond Cardwell, MLA

  Dear Ormond,

  Clint Comstock and I could not agree to terms for our farm. I accepted their price per acre, but then he said he only wanted the home half. That kind of deal would leave us in a fix forever. If he thinks our troubles with this plant are restricted to the home half, he’s not listening. This summer, on my Lower Place (the part he doesn’t want to buy), I got gassed so bad I lost two weeks’ work. He knew that.

  As a farmer yourself, you’ll understand it makes no sense to sell a farm to get away from a problem you don’t get away from. You’ll understand too that if I sell half my farm, buyers will fleece me on the other half.

  If there’s a health study in the works, my family wants to be part of it. We need a proper study because people around here don’t believe what we say. People in Haultain, including the doctors, think we’re complainers. The store owners in town like the money that comes with the plant and don’t give a hoot about us anymore.

  Ella and I are tired of fighting this plant and would sell if they took the whole thing. Otherwise, there’s no deal. I appreciate your going to bat for us.

  Yours truly,

  Tom Ryder

  2

  Casino

  AFTER TWO DAYS in the casino, Bill stepped into a blast of light. He found his sunglasses in his coat pocket and put them on so he could see the ash-coloured flat surrounding him. Beyond the fenced lot, a file of painted horses walked away, their long tails dusting out their tracks in a thin coating of snow.

  When he stepped clear of the building, a hard wind cut his face. His truck stood alone under a light standard. He threw his suitcase in and was soon eastbound on the Trans-Canada.

  Half the cars and vans coming from the other direction had skis on top, and he felt a brief temptation to cross an overpass and join them. At one time, he had skied every resort from here to Vancouver, had been known as a good powder skier. For some reason, no reason, he had quit. When he added up the years, he was surprised to find that he hadn’t skied once in the last ten. There had been no popped ACL, no series of concussions. He did not even have ar
thritis except in the immediate locale of once-broken bones. If anyone asked, he’d say, “I used to ski a lot at one time.”

  He imagined saying that to Marie Calfoux. She would come back with something perceptive and pointy. “Sounds like you had a great life, at one time.”

  After half an hour on the four-lane, he turned north onto a secondary highway, a narrow strip of blacktop made dangerous by logging trucks. People with farms and ranches along the forest reserve were selling off whole quarters for clear-cutting: a one-shot approach to retirement and agricultural debt that left the country looking like a plucked chicken.

  He was trying not to think of the weekend’s gambling but it was there in his head anyway. He regretted an argument with an American guy at the next machine, who took issue with Bill’s refusal to celebrate jackpots.

  “You just won a thousand dollars, man! Whoop it up. Holler. Something, for fuck sakes.”

  Bill had pointed to another line of machines, to a couple sitting thigh to thigh before one screen. “Those two kiss every time they make five bucks. There’s a chair open beside them.”

  Which caused things to get heated. In a better mood, he would have made peace, offered the man a beer instead of insults. As for the issue of celebration, he could have explained.

  “It’s a drug. Self-medication. You don’t cheer when you take Valium. Most people don’t even cheer a line of cocaine.”

  If the American had been really patient, Bill could have told him the whole story, how he had started out on a machine in a rural saloon—not far from where he was driving right now. He had seen others poking away at the VLTs in the corner and found himself envying their intensity and absorption: how they never had to stare at the bearded buffalo on the wall or the rodeo saddles over the rafters while drinking alone.

  So he started betting a few bucks, playing blackjack because he knew the rules. He bet the lowest amount. When he saw that the other gamblers preferred the spinning-reel games, he switched to those and his wagers climbed. Soon he was betting five lines, like everyone else.

  Some days he broke even; most days he lost. Then, one day, he won three hundred dollars. There wasn’t a soul in the saloon at the time, except Mitch the bartender. When he cashed his ticket, he told Mitch it was the first time he’d won anything significant, to which the barman twitched up his moustache ends and said, “Trouble doesn’t start until you win.”

  At the time, Bill was working at a plant near the mountains and rented a single-wide trailer on a country acreage west of the saloon. He was in a relationship with a younger woman that was inching its way to an inevitable end. He soon discovered that the pain of the faltering romance stopped when he played. This only worked as long as you kept the twenties flowing, kept your mind busy with the spinning reels, but that could be hours if you chose to afford the losses.

  After the relationship was over, VLT gambling stayed with him. He was by then well addicted, but the habit left him able to remember the phone numbers of his children, and he still got to work on time. As far as Bill could tell, gambling did not show on him—no needle tracks, no splash of ruptured veins on the face. It was a vice unlikely to get him fired.

  The worst side effects were sleepless nights, disgust with himself, and half-serious considerations of suicide. That and the eyestrain he could stand. It seemed right that relief should have its cost.

  A truck stacked with chained logs passed Bill and wrapped him tight in a swirl of snow. When he could see again, he was a quarter-mile from the turnoff to the village he’d been thinking about. The saloon, Mitch; the VLTs he had trained on. Farther up that road was the acreage and the trailer.

  Like most things of the sort, the relationship with the young woman had started well. An adventure in the woods. She told him she liked to ride, so, as a surprise, he’d bought a pretty sorrel mare. The stuff about riding turned out to be mostly untrue. She had ridden twice, at stables, and had a theory she’d like riding if she did it more. The mare, who Bill named Dingbat, had a robust personality, not all positive. The girlfriend was afraid of her. In the end, it was Bill who rode Dingbat. If the girl felt anything for the horse it was jealousy.

  Another hour of driving and Bill entered a familiar town. He was passing its hospital when, seemingly without instruction, his vehicle bent to the curb and stopped. At once, he was imagining his way around inside the one-storey building. Its polished hallways. The sickly antiseptic smell of the rooms. The fluorescent brightness that vanquished all shadows.

  “Farm kid?” the doctor had asked him as the gurney approached the rubber doors of the surgery. Bill thought it was an odd thing to ask at this point but said yes.

  “Heavy lifting when young,” the doctor declared, as though denoting a sinful pastime. “Prolapsed hemorrhoids. In a farm community like this one, I could make my entire living off this one operation.”

  A few days later, when Bill was rousing from his daily morphine dream, he saw his sisters, like a pair of roosting angels at the foot of his bed. All it meant was that his girlfriend had picked up the ringing phone at the trailer. Poor woman was caught in the act of packing up to leave him, but she told Jeannie where he was and why.

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” were Jeannie’s first words. Before he could reply, Donna suggested he was embarrassed at the nature of his problem. She told him how stupid that was in a grown man. He agreed with her; it would be stupid if that was his reason for not calling. In fact, he had doubted they would be interested. He neglected people and expected them to neglect him back.

  When he was finally deprived of his morphine and evicted from the hospital, he had returned to the trailer, to its frightening, propane-smelling emptiness. He found he owned very little now that his girlfriend’s effects were removed, and he decided he would move too. He would leave his job at the sour gas plant by the mountains and look for something up north. There was a boom gathering in the Alberta oil sands, which some were calling the last mega-deposit of petroleum on earth. Bill decided to go there, to be one more luck-starved Klondiker.

  Dingbat got antsy when the first boxes appeared. Given Bill’s condition, riding her seemed out of the question. He lacked a horse trailer in which to move her, and the boreal forest was an unlikely place to find horse pasture. Dingbat would hate forty-below.

  He decided to give the mare to his landlady, or, really, to her horsey granddaughter, a strapping blonde who knew how to keep a horse civilized. The whole time Bill packed and loaded his truck, Dingbat leaned over the fence and gave him shit.

  “I used to ride quite a lot at one time.”

  By the halfway mark between Red Deer and Edmonton, Bill was sick of the trip and exceeding the speed limit. His wallet was so fat with profit it was giving him a sore back. He threw it on the dash. He had another roll of twenties inside a sock in his suitcase.

  The American was far from the first person to be affronted by Bill’s lack of enthusiasm in a casino. It made him unpopular with casino workers too. The bosses and staff wanted players to hoot and holler, kiss their partners and lovingly polish the machines with their sleeves—all crucial to making the gambling public run to the cash machines with their debit cards.

  Instead of feeling happy about the money, Bill’s body surged with unpleasant after-effects. His lungs seemed too large, felt as if they were crawling up his throat. He’d been yearning in the direction of every VLT lounge in every town he passed. In his trailer days, he’d played them all. The only way to stop feeling disgusted over the waste was to gamble more.

  His job was the only thing that could reliably stop a binge. In this way, work and gambling were essential to each other. The balance between them had to be maintained if he himself was not to crumble. Part of his legend in the oil sands was that he was the only unit boss who came back from holidays early, claiming to have had an intuition that something at his plant was going wrong.

  Covered in shame after a binge, Bill would send cash to his children. “Here’s for nothing,” he’d s
cribble on a note folded around the bills. He used to send money to ex-wives and girlfriends too, until he realized it insulted them and made them hate him even more.

  By the time Bill had passed Edmonton and was back on Suicide 63, his thoughts had shifted again, to his only serious attempt at curing himself. It happened in Mac in 2008, in the months before the Wall Street collapse. Still in the boom, dozens of companies were digging new mines and pumping steam into in-situ fields. New upgraders were a-building, and companies clambered over each other for machines and men. To keep him from jumping ship, Bill received a lavish pre-emptive raise. The next weekend, in less than two hours, he lost four thousand on his lucky VLT.

  The nausea that usually waited until next morning came at him like a tight pattern of darts. He was still in the casino, still at the losing machine and intent on losing more. That’s when he looked up at the “When It’s No Longer a Game” sign and memorized the helpline number. It felt so important that he broke his rule of silence and told the woman beside him what he was planning to do. She wanted to know how much he’d lost, and when he told her, she laughed at him. She said she’d lost three times that much in one day. She pointed at the sign Bill had been looking at.

  “I’ll tell you, my darling,” she said, “it’s never been a game for me. It’s damn hard work.”

  Like everything in the world, getting help hadn’t been as neat and simple as he’d imagined. He’d thought it would be like the emergency surgery on his hemorrhoids: the person at the help number would hear his problem, and he would soon be on a shrink’s couch. But after he had stated his predicament to the woman on the help-line, she offered a placement in a therapy group in Edmonton. He took down the information while knowing he would never go.

  Instead, Bill figured out where the McMurray psychologists were clustered. They were in the same building and shared a phone number. Their receptionist asked him a long list of questions, and, next thing, he had an appointment.