Pavel walks down the street, on the other side. He stops at the intersection, looks around, sees me leaning on the street light. He walks diagonally across the street.
Just waiting around in the cold, eh, kid?
I guess so, I say.
Hold on a second, he says. He goes into the convenience store. Comes back out a minute later with a Styrofoam cup of coffee.
Can’t you make coffee at home?
Pavel’s eye looks up to the Greyhound sign in the Red Rooster window and the bus schedule up above the bench. Pavel’s other eye, the not-real one, always looks a little past you, up and to the left. Almost the same colour of brown as his real eye, almost. A little shinier. I like the Red Rooster coffee, he says. The Styrofoam makes it taste right. And the walk.
Across the street the Mormons finish their juice, and someone gathers up all the plastic cups, stacks them one inside the other. They hold open the door and the sound of laughing kids comes out of the yellow hot light into the street.
Heading out someplace?
He won’t sell me a bus ticket, I say.
Kid, why do you need a bus ticket?
Yeah, well. Sometimes you just need to get out.
Pavel nods. Sips some coffee. You know what’ll cheer you up, kid? asks Pavel. Kreshick’s going to lose.
I jump up off the bench. I stamp my feet. Tonight’s the checkers? Pavel, you have to take me to see the checkers. Please take me to see the checkers, please, I promise I won’t make any noise and I’ll sit still and won’t bother anybody and I won’t tell anybody tomorrow or any other time.
You don’t want to watch a bunch of old men cough and fill ashtrays. Go home. Read a book. When I was your age, I was always watching cartoons. You know, Winnie Pooh, he says. He pronounces it Vinny Poo-ehh.
Please take me to see the checkers, please. Is Vaslav going?
Vaslav’s home, going over cover samples. He says none of the illustrators can do a bodice right.
I tug on his arm. Please please please. Pavel walks down the street, sips his Styrofoam cup. I tell you, kid, it’s the opposite of exciting. Bad for the health, the habits of old men.
But Kreshick’s going to lose tonight. Kreshick never loses. That’s pretty exciting.
Pavel stops. Sips his coffee and looks up and down the dark street. Then he looks down at me and grins. Yes, it is. He grins and his eye looks out way to the right. He slaps me on the shoulder and we walk up the street.
All the lights are out in McClaghan’s big windows. Just the red glow from the exit sign on the edges of the wheelbar-rows and table saws. Red on the TV screen in the corner. But the shuttered windows on the second floor are all lit up, yellow and open, you can hear talking and laughing inside. Sometimes a hand reaches out the window to ash a cigarette. The ash floats along with the snow.
Pavel rings a doorbell beside a dark door, left of the hardware store door. I stand on my tiptoes but don’t hear any bell. Pavel pulls the heavy hat off his head, holds it against his chest, puts it back on his head. Tugs it down his forehead almost over his eye. We puff under the white light bulb.
The door rattles, locks unlocking, one, two, three locks. We stand back and the door opens and McClaghan pokes his head out.
Come for the fleecing?
Brought the shears, says Pavel.
McClaghan looks at Pavel, looks down at me. What is this, a daycare? Get him out of here.
Pavel pats the top of my head. I have to take him home later. He isn’t going to make any noise, right, kid? I lean back on my heels. I’ll be real quiet. Won’t say a word.
McClaghan coughs. Can’t have kids. Ruins the whatsit, the camaraderie.
Pavel takes his wallet out of his pocket. Holds it open under McClaghan’s face. I could always take the shears home, says Pavel. McClaghan’s eyes get big. He holds the door open. Teach the virtues of patience, I suppose, he says, looking down at me. Scowls. Not a word. I shake my head. They look at each other and laugh.
We climb a narrow staircase, lights in brass fixtures stuck in the sides of the walls, not the ceiling. McClaghan coughs while he walks and Pavel takes off his hat, shakes out the snow. At the top is a hallway, plaster, wallpaper yellow at the edges along the rim of the ceiling. McClaghan opens a door and there’s light and smoke and noise. Lou Ellis, and Morley Fleer, and a lot of other old men. They drink cans of beer and smoke cigarettes and laugh, on stools and in chairs, around a big, heavy table. A red-and-black checkerboard the only thing on the table, aside from some dirty ashtrays. At the end of the table sits Kreshick, not talking or laughing, drinking a heavy glass of whisky in little sips.
Kreshick is the oldest guy in town. He makes the best ice for curling and he always wins at checkers. He’s thin, like Mullen’s dad, like Solzhenitsyn, with thick brown spots on his cheeks, his neck and hands. An old bolo tie loose around his skinny neck. He drinks his whisky and sees me and whistles.
What is this, a hostage-taking? How much are you worth, kid?
All the old men laugh. Pavel pulls a seat up to the table, and McClaghan shuts the door. I lean up against the wall. McClaghan stamps his feet and waves his arms. Shut up, shut up, he shouts. No more stragglers, let’s get started. Judd Fischer isn’t here, somebody says. Bad night to be Judd Fischer, says McClaghan. Everybody laughs and he waves his arms again. He stands behind a heavy man in a checked shirt, bald on top, with a moustache. Claps him on the shoulders.
This is Gord Miggins, Lethbridge checker champion. Won the big checker games far south as Salt Lake City. Those big Latter-day Saints checkers, right?
Everyone takes out their wallets, pulls out thick bundles of ten- and twenty-dollar bills. McClaghan gathers everyone’s money around the room. Lou Ellis makes ticks on a chalk-board. He makes a scrawl of two-letter initials down the left side. Across the top it’s EK/GM. McClaghan brings him the money, held in separate clumps between his fingers, and points around the room, while Lou takes the bunches of bills and makes ticks beside the rows of initials.
No, says Pavel, I’m for Lethbridge here. He takes out one, two, three, five, ten twenty-dollar bills. People whistle, take off their glasses and shine them on their sleeves. When all the money is counted up on the chalkboard, everybody gets real quiet and leans forward around the table.
You flip a coin round here? asks Miggins.
Allowing the foreigner rights to start, that’s the custom, says Kreshick, every word slow and brittle.
Miggins moves a checker, pushes it with a finger. His head leaned a little back. Kreshick flicks his tongue against the inside of his mouth.
They push checkers, real slow and careful-like. All the men in the room sit as still as they can, crane their necks for a better view of Miggins and Kreshick frowning and pushing checkers. As the checkers get closer and closer together, they take longer and longer to move them.
McClaghan sits with his legs wide apart and one big fist around his jar, rested on his knee. Spits in it from time to time. Thick pasty spit. He rocks it back and forth and none of the bottom bands move at all, settled in the bottom like layers of glue.
Who do you like in the Okotoks bonspiel? someone asks. Kreshick snorts. They don’t keep the ice for shit in Okotoks. That’s where all you pick up such bad habits. Their filthy ice and your filthy knees. All you fat men who put your knees down on the ice beside the hack when you clean off the bottoms of your rocks. Do you know how long it takes to fix the holes you melt in the ice with your fat knees? I can recognize the filthy kneeprint of every fat curler in the district. He glares at Pavel. That fat Russian is the worst, your friend with the beard. I have to melt all the ice around the hack with a blowtorch. The filth works its way down into the ice, see, in sediments. I can date the ice to the weekend, depending on the knee.
No snoozing, kid, McClaghan says to me. Snoring is bad for the competitive atmosphere.
I’m not tired, I say. Miggins frowns at the checkerboard. How’s Howitz’s big dig coming along? McClaghan asks me. Everybody
has a big laugh. Let’s hope he called the municipality first, says Lou Ellis, asked for the right excavation information. I’d hate for him to dig into a gas line.
Or a water main, says McClaghan. It’d be awful if he flooded himself out before he gets the chance to do his flooding out. Everybody has a big laugh.
So he’s doing a bit of digging, I say. Don’t see why every-body’s so bent out of shape over a bit of digging.
Kreshick gives me a funny look. Then he grins with all his crooked teeth. Course not, kid. Intrusion into the ground is the abiding concern around here. All over the foothills. Whole region’s prosperity is dependent on what men have dug up out from the earth.
And when that prosperity’s through, you can always dig yourself back under the earth, says Lou Ellis. Everybody has a laugh.
See, Kreshick says to me, your friend there is just keeping up with what we’ve always done around here. Escaping downward, as opposed to laterally.
Take Dobb Jensen, says McClaghan. You remember Dobb Jensen, Kreshick?
Sure. A big geology aficionado. Always looking at the ground for what do you call them, ore veins and trilobites.
Right. So Dobb decides he needs the mechanical advantage if he’s going to get a good look at the real live geology. Starts heading to Calgary on weekends to buy up decommissioned steamship parts. All those big boats from the Kootenay Lakes. He buys up the drive screws and steam boilers, and he builds himself his very own steam excavator.
I remember it clearly, says Kreshick, Dobb there, bowler hat, bowtie. Sitting up on top of this big drill, hands on the levers, grinning. Like a giant post-hole digger. He even had a gas mask, with a hose. To feed him his air as he went drilling down into the ground.
Way my dad told the story, you could hear the explosion several towns over, says McClaghan.
It’s true, says Kreshick. It rained wingnuts, rubber fan-belt scraps, fingers and kneecaps far away as Nanton.
Everybody’s quiet. Gord Miggins holds a finger overtop of a checker.
You two are completely full of shit, says Morley Fleer.
McClaghan and Kreshick bust out laughing, like kids. Kreshick tries to move a checker and has to stop, wait until his chest stops shaking. He takes a deep breath. Gives me a look. Of course, he says, if we’re going to talk about famous Marvin geologists, we certainly couldn’t ignore your best friend’s illustrious father.
Everybody gets a little funny. Morley Fleer and Lou Ellis both finish their beers and set them down loudly. Fleer opens two cans of beer at once.
Let’s play checkers, says Pavel. His voice is a little high.
Yeah, I say, Mullen’s dad is a geologist. He used to find oil, back before he moved out here to work at the meat-packing plant.
Everybody stares at me. Lou Ellis chokes a bit on his beer.
Kreshick wipes his mouth with his sleeve. In 1981 –
Don’t tell him this story, says Pavel.
Kreshick rolls a little in his chair, sour and gleaming. In 1981 Marc Lalonde declared the National Energy Program and looted all the money out of Alberta. In Calgary the streets were empty and all the windows boarded up and office towers leaned and fell over like those old grain elevators. No one cared.
Don’t, says Pavel.
Gord Miggins, Lethbridge checker champion, puts two fingers on a red checker and pushes it across a square. Kreshick taps a yellow fingernail on a black checker.
So this big-shot geologist from Manitoba shows up in Turner Valley. Bad time all over those towns, not like growing grain was doing anybody any good, then the oil industry collapses. The whole southern foothills were drunk for a few years. This Winnipegger pulls into town with a black portfolio and a station wagon full of surverying equipment. Makes himself real obvious, out on the side of the road, photographing and looking through the, what, the theodolite. Writing in his little notebook. Turns up at the municipal hall one day and gets himself a meeting with the resource department. Hours and hours. Now, people have been talking for days: is it natural gas? Some kind of petro-tar? What’s he found? What’s he found?
Kreshick pushes a black checker. Coughs.
Comes out of that meeting with a licence to excavate ten miles out of Turner Valley for coal. Coal. Says he’s found the biggest stake of coal in Alberta since goddamn Turtle Mountain.
Kreshick hops a red checker at the left front, pulls it off. Shows his teeth. Hey, anybody from Turner Valley in here tonight? He looks around the room. Where’s Sigmann? You’re from Turner Valley, aren’t you?
A man in the back with a big red beard coughs. Turner Valley all right.
You invest in that Winnipegger’s coal mine?
Sigmann just glares. Everybody with a beer has a long drink.
Even I can see the path Kreshick has left for Miggins. One, two, three black checkers, in a neat zig-zag, all ready to jump. Miggins narrows his eyes. Tries not to stare at the route. Looks from face to face. Kreshick’s lips pull further back, black lines above his teeth, black veins and yellow cracks.
Lethbridge checker champ, he says.
Nobody says anything. Miggins jumps the first, the second, the third. Stacks the three black checkers and pulls them off the board. His front red checker now deep on Kreshick’s side, nothing behind it, a sitting duck. Kreshick doesn’t jump it, though. Moves a black from the side into the middle of the board.
A lot of people wondered how a geologist from Winnipeg would know the first thing about coal in Turner Valley. They’ve had geologists in Turner Valley for seventy-odd years now. You’d think they’d have come across a seam as big as this son of a bitch was talking about. Most people in town just figured he’d taken them for suckers and cooked the whole thing up. That’s most people, mind. Sorry, Sigmann.
Yeah, well. That’s how it is sometimes.
Miggins has been staring at the board. Suddenly, anywhere he might move, there’s a black checker in front and a gap behind. His front red trapped against Kreshick’s back row, to be jumped any time.
Kreshick stares at me. Fingers wrapped around his glass. McClaghan stares at me, leaned back in his chair, his hands rested on his belly. Gord Miggins takes his eyes off the checker game he’s about to lose to stare at me.
Did he find any coal? I ask.
Kreshick laughs. A big gut full of ghua-gha-gha-HA-ha. He coughs and sputters and laughs and drinks whisky and chokes and spits it out on the checkerboard and laughs. McClaghan throws his hat on the ground and laughs. Stands up and wipes his eyes and sits down and thumps his hand on the table. Lou Ellis and Morley Fleer clap each other on the shoulders, hug each other tight and laugh.
Did he find any coal!
They laugh and laugh. Kreshick takes all of Gord Miggins’s checkers in a few turns and Pavel throws up his arms. Lethbridge checker champ, he mutters. He pushes out of his stool, kicks the table leg. Lou Ellis’s stack of bills knocks over onto the floor. Everybody still laughing too hard to even pick up the money. Did he find any coal! Kreshick has to struggle for breath.
On Fridays they open up the Snack Shack at lunch. Kids line up in front of the little counter at the far end of the gym to buy little bags of potato chips, spicy beef-jerky sticks, chocolate milk. Kids line up right down the hall. Everybody wants them to open the Snack Shack every day, but the teachers say that eating junk food every day is bad for you. They’re always going on about junk food and the Canada Food Guide and the Nutrition Pyramid.
We open up our lunch boxes, standing in the long line for the Snack Shack. Dwayne Klatz’s mom made egg salad. Egg salad is usually pretty gross, but not when Dwayne Klatz’s mom makes it. Dwayne’s gotten pretty good now at getting the wrapper off my pizza sub. Hey, Dwayne, says another kid, You want to trade that pizza sub for my Hershey bar? Dwayne snorts. You’ve got to be kidding, he says. Do you know how good these things are?
Mullen rubs his quarters together. I wish they sold pop, he says. I wish they sold root beer. I can drink more root beer than anybody.
Drinking root beer is easy, says Dwayne Klatz. Drinking any kind of pop is easy, half of it’s gas. What’s hard about that?
I can drink more root beer than you can, says Mullen.
I can drink more milk than anybody, says Dwayne.
Milk? says Mullen.
Drinking milk is hard. If you drink too much milk you throw up. Milk hasn’t got any gas in it at all.
We get to the front of the line. Dwayne and Mullen spread out all their change on the countertop. The Snack Shack lady leans down and listens to them. Shrugs and picks up all the quarters. She brings out four half-litre cartons of milk.
That’s not so much milk, says Mullen. I bet I could drink that much milk.
Dwayne and Mullen each drink a half-litre of milk, a glug at a time, staring at each other overtop of the cartons. Keep glugging away, raise the cartons higher and higher until they’re both empty. Klatz wipes milk off the top of his lip with the back of his hand. Other kids stand around and watch, munching on their potato chips.
Man, says Dwayne Klatz, I could just drink milk all day. They open the second cartons, they drink milk, smack their lips, drink milk. Mullen sticks out his tongue and lets the last drops drip from the carton mouth.
We all get back in the Snack Shack line.
Sorry, says the Snack Shack lady, I haven’t got any more milk. We all stand at the counter and look at each other.
What do you mean? asks Klatz.
I haven’t got any more milk, she says, that’s what I mean. Those were the last four cartons.
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