Best Canadian Stories 2020

by Paige Cooper

  Cells kick the current.

  But who really knows.

  I’m not in there.

  Neither are you.

  *

  One morning I pull up to the hotel and a crowd of people is on the sidewalk.

  I jump out, find Dom as fast as I can. “Fire?” The worst case scenario—the sleepers trapped, drugged by smoke as the papery old building wicks in a purple haze with a voiceover by a local anchor about another dark curiosity for the public collection.

  Dom shakes his head. “Gas leak. Nurse smelled it.”

  “Where?”

  “Fourth floor.”

  Residents I haven’t seen on their feet in weeks blink at the sky, birds waving their shining arms down at us. Our people mill around like a small sidewalk convention of serene monks, off-kilter with fragility and wonder.

  The gas safety people roar up in their van and charge inside.

  “How BOUT a SONG,” Hans bellows.

  There he is—standing on top of a newspaper box.

  He leads us in an arrhythmic version of “Kumbaya,” then “Country Roads,” then “This Little Light of Mine.”

  Dom joins in and a few minutes later is bellowing like a devout choirboy.

  Hans conducts, arms raised in the pure May light, his khaki coat lit from behind, drawing out notes and stomping flourishes on the newspaper box, which groans the emphasis of a subwoofer speaker.

  Paramedics carry out a few sleepers who couldn’t get up and lay them on the curb.

  The gas guys come back out of the building and roar off.

  They didn’t find any gas.

  We all go inside and the day goes on as if none of this happened.

  People crawl back onto their mats and leave the world.

  Later in the day, a nurse tells us that it was a durian. That huge stinky fruit. A sleeper had stored one in their room, forgotten about it. Smells just like gas.

  *

  When I catch Dom napping—once in a stairwell, curled up like a chubby cobra in his sweatpants and leather jacket; once on the floor under our shared desk, cap balanced on his face; once in a dead resident’s room, on their mat, when I thought he was cleaning up—I wake him gently, ask him how long he’s been out, give him a few blasts of the medicine, and walk him to the bathroom to splash water on his face, rinse the wrinkled towel on his brain. I need him. The nurse who ratted him out quit soon after that meeting and Dom and I toasted her departure with mason jars of rum and coke in the office. “Ding dong the bitch is dead!” we chanted, laughed. We were the survivors.

  After Dom rouses himself and slurps ginger ale he keeps in the minifridge in the office—goddamn the sleep is dehydrating, he laments—we sit together and say nothing for a long time. I won’t report Dom. Having someone is better than having no one.

  One day I get this weird feeling while I’m checking Twitter on my phone in the lobby and I run down the hall and he’s grey-lipped in the bathroom. I administer seven doses of medicine, my hands sweating and slipping on the glass. I pour cups and cups of water down his throat until he gargles and hacks and water sprays on my chest. I pour water on his shirt and back and hair and knock his head gently against the wall, make sure his airway is clear, and for the first time since my childhood, I pray. Wake up.

  His eyes open and he hisses, “You’re too young for this shit.”

  “I’m not quitting.”

  “Oh kid. Don’t stay for my sake. I’m the burnout phoenix.”

  I want to persuade him to apply to one of the treatment centres but I don’t because I know from my years at the hotel that’s not how it works, it’s not about what or me or nextness.

  “Figure it out, kid. You gotta figure it out.”

  “Let’s go to my car,” I say. I help him walk out through the back door, down the alley, and sit with him in the back seat of my car for an hour or so, and then we go back to work.

  *

  The day Hans goes to sleep for the last time, I’m running up the steps and a dice is sitting on the step at eye level with me and I capture it in my palm as I pass. I pocket it. I’m always finding little things like this all over the hotel and know I’m the only one who’ll pick them up.

  The ambulance comes for Hans’s body and leaves. I take the dice out and set it on the computer monitor. I pack my bag and go to Hans’s room. I put Ulysses on his leash and take him to my car. I tell him he’s mine now. Hans had told me how many times Ulysses had saved his life—no doctor can smell when the sleep’s too heavy but that dog can. As I turn the ignition and the car’s engine gives me its reliable vibrational bearhug, I squeeze my eyes tight shut. I hotbox the car with my tears. I spread fingers over my face and shutter myself into this place. “Fucking idiot,” I say over and over and over. The pain floats in jagged pieces in my sternum. Somewhere in this, I think, how perfect, how fucking appropriate, that I will die in this little pod of my car in this underground parkade just as the people in the hotel die in their pods, lined up one after the other. They’re just sitting ducks for the sleep. Oh, the spaces between the swells of pain are widening and sagging like rotting floorboards where there used to be ribs. It isn’t Hans—it’s all of them. All the dead ones I’ve known in the years since a chunk of the population started to slip into unending unexplained slumber—not enough people to interfere with the grind of life, but more than those lost to cancer, more than heart disease, more than car accidents. Many of the sleepers never die. They are subclinical.

  Hans had teased me—like trying to explain fucking to a virgin. I hadn’t known. My not knowing had changed me. My innocence had been a clear space for something else to grow. Like love for this world and also like horror against this world. The two doubled together within me, wrestling for control. I bend over and vomit, reach down to mop it up with my sleeve. I take off my shirt and toss it in a stinking ball into the back seat. I think, Hans is gone and everyone will go and then I feel scraped empty, and oddly weightless, my arms loose as they return to their original positions, the same and dislodged. I had worried about Hans’s judgement of me—he had seen I had no clue and let it slide—and now he was gone and what was the purpose of any care that I had put into our conversations, my management of his impressions of me, the story he told himself? Any expectations of me he’d had were irrelevant now. Not worthless, just stale-dated. I don’t believe in ghosts. That’s what I’ve learned from the sleep hotel. The body is the only real thing. The sugar in the blood, our only proof. The radio doesn’t play yesterday’s death toll twice. Somehow, I have fallen into this work with the continuously-dying and this is its nature: I am in competition with time. My car stinks of what’s inside me. I start the car and roll down the windows. I drink water and spit it out. I’m all acid and tendon, taut bone and fluttering nerves and names. I drive myself out of the carpark into the night.

  The Last Big Dance

  Conor Kerr

  We ran out of hooch at that last big barn dance. It was good timing because the mounties showed up right afterwards and busted up the party. They came roaring in, with their usual big fuss and grandeur, pretending they were real tough guys, and not just a bunch of hooligans looking for booze and drunk ladies. Granny hated when they showed up. She didn’t want anyone in a uniform drinking the hooch she made, and she didn’t want anyone interrupting her fiddle music, least of all the mounties. Granny hates mounties. She’s got good reason too, they’re always showing up at her place looking for the stills, taking all the canned meat and vegetables from the cold cellar, busting up the horses, and lighting the wood pile on fire. They tried to bust her up once too but she smacked the man’s chubby cheeks red with her spoon and threatened to let loose her wolves on them. She didn’t have any wolves, but the city boys from Ontario who were posted on their first tour to northern Alberta didn’t know that. So instead of busting up Granny, they settled for busting up the barn dances.
/>   *

  That same night Uncle Jim went through the ice on the Amisk River on our ride back home. He was right pickled and somehow managed to fall out of the back of the wagon, off the bridge, and went all the way up to his neck in the muck and water even though the river’s only about three feet deep in that spot and he’s six foot plus. He kept screaming bloody murder about the beavers dragging him under the ice. Said he’d be back to “light them toothy fuckers up.” My cousins and I threw him the rope, tied it off to the wagon. Granny got the horses going and we pulled him right out of his hole and over the ice to the bank. We got him out of his clothes and wrapped in a woolen blanket in the back of the straw-laden wagon. First thing he did was grab a bottle of hooch he must have stashed in the straw and took a big swig. Then he winked at me.

  “You and me girl, it’s just you and me,” he said with a moonshine slur before he passed out. My cousins and I killed time on the rest of the ride home by putting straw up his nose. We tried to see how many pieces we could get up there before he would swat them out in his drunken stupor.

  “Jim never could handle his hooch,” Granny said as we unhitched the horses and headed into her cabin.

  *

  I moved into Granny’s one-room shack shortly after my tenth birthday in 1942. Granny had just celebrated her birthday by shooting a two-year-old bull moose off her front porch right in between the eyes with her old lever-action rifle. All the family and neighbours came over to help butcher up the moose and celebrate Granny’s good aim. It was at that party that my parents told me I wasn’t coming back with them. My mother and father had just had their ninth child and there was no room in their own one bedroom cabin. It didn’t bother me none. I liked the idea of having my own bed and not sharing it with four of my brothers and sisters. Uncle Jim had recently left Granny’s to go and fight the Nazis over in Europe. My parents told me that Granny was going to need a hand around her cabin. I figured that meant chopping wood, getting water, and shooting the odd deer or bird, tasks I was well-suited to having done them for as long as I could remember. In reality it meant spending days doing all those tasks plus carrying the fifty-pound sacks of grain half a mile back into the woods to the old copper still. The trail to the still wasn’t defined like the one that led back to my parents’ house. It was rough, tough walking. You were continually dodging around the fallen birch and pine trees and old spruce boughs with all that grain or wheat or corn or barley or horse feed on your shoulders. Worst of it was covering your tracks on the way out. If even a little hint of a trail was showing, a footprint in the snow, a tree moved out of the way, even leaves crunched up, Granny would hammer on you with her wooden spoon.

  “You going to lead dem mounties right to it,” she’d yell. “Can’t cover a track, walking around out there like a goddamn mooniyah.”

  *

  At night, we’d sit around the wood-burning stove drinking spruce needle tea from the cast-iron pot permanently steeping on top of the stove. My night tasks were to make sure that pot was permanently full of water by melting snow in it and adding cups of spruce needles Granny had dried out during the summer. My other task was to place the beads on or thread Granny’s beading needle. In the last few years, her hands had taken to shaking and she couldn’t do either anymore. But once I got those on there for her, she’d be flying through the tanned moose hide creating elaborate flower designs. While she beaded, she’d tell stories of the land and all our relations that lived here with us. She told me about where mosquitoes come from, and why you should never trust a government official, a banker, or a mountie. She talked about long lean months in the winter when her, my mother and Uncle Jim wouldn’t have anything to eat except for the donations from some of the neighbour families who were also on the verge of starving. How she would have to do the hunting since there wasn’t a man around to go and get deer, birds, and moose. She talked about Jim, and how good of a shot he was with the rifle, how he learned to shoot animals in the head to ease their suffering and preserve more of the meat, how he had been doing that since he was six years old. Then she’d laugh and talk about how she pitied those Germans who got in the way of Jim’s rifle.

  *

  Sometimes one of Granny’s regular customers, usually one of the town folk from St. Lina or St. Paul, would make a special request for a fancy bottle. They’d show up with husked corn instead of the usual grain. Granny liked making corn moonshine. With the grain stuff, she would never bother checking it or caring what kind of proof it was. She would just bottle it up and send it off. With the corn mash moonshine, she would take extra time. She’d wait about a week after the mash first got cooking until the “dogs head” got going, watching for the large single bubbles coming up every twenty to thirty seconds. She’d slop it back, pouring it onto itself to kick out the cap. Then wait another three days until she really got shining. When she figured it was done, she’d fill half a jar from the still, take it in her right hand, and hit the wrinkled palm of her left hand with the jar three times. Not four times, not two times, but three times. She’d turn the jar onto the side and the shine would separate into three consistent pools if it had been done right.

  “Hundothree proof, looking good.” She’d take a little sip. She never drank the shine, would just sip a tablespoon’s worth to check the flavouring. “She’s good my boy, let’s get this bottled up and out of here.”

  *

  Granny and her husband were both little kids when the Canadian government dissolved the Papaschase First Nation. All the band members had been off hunting or at the Fort and they took advantage of that and declared the First Nation null and void. When they tried to go back to their home to get some supplies, the mounties were already there and the house was up in flames. They fled with their families to the bush north of St. Lina, Alberta. Eventually, they grew up and started having kids until Granny’s husband up and died one day. My mother told me he died from heartbreak from being forced off the land he had loved, Uncle Jim told me it was TB. Either way, Granny never talked about her husband. And she never talked about the Papaschase land she had grown up on. But she loved woodpeckers. Anytime a woodpecker would be hanging around the cabin she would spend all day rolling hand-made cigarettes, drinking tea, and watching the bird work its way around a white poplar tree.

  *

  Uncle Jim showed up back at Granny’s cabin a few days after I turned fifteen. He spent a year after the war “showing those Quebecois ladies how to really jig.” Then he ran out of money and hopped a train back out to Alberta. When he first arrived, we’d sit around Granny’s cabin night after night and listen to him tell stories about Europe and the war. Everyone who was anyone, plus a few others from the area, would be over at Granny’s drinking ’shine and listening to Jim describe how the underwear looked on this lady from Trois Rivieres.

  “You watch out she might be your cousin,” Granny would yell, smiling, with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth as she ladled out drinks for the listeners. That summer was a real party. We went through more ’shine than we had in a long time, partly because of the nightly story session, partly because Jim drank it all day every day.

  *

  Even if Uncle Jim drank the still dry the night before, he would be up for the sunrise. Didn’t matter if the sun was coming up at 8:30 in the winter or 4:30 in the summer, he would rise with it. I woke up every morning to the thwock of the axe splitting birch from the wood pile. The smell of tobacco trailed behind him as he walked past my bed carrying an armful of wood for the stove. I always tried to wait until the stove had the cabin roasting before I got out from underneath the wool blanket.

  *

  The morning after Jim fell through the ice on the Amisk River he was moving like a bear with an itch. After the stove got fired up, I could sense him standing right above me, but I refused to open my eyes, hoping he would get bored and wander off to check on the stills. He poked me in the gut with the barrel of the 30-30 lever action rifle we kept
by the door.

  “Hey girl, those beavers are probably dragging some kid under the ice right now.” He poked me again with the barrel of the gun. “Might even be one of your brothers or sisters.”

  “Get out of here, you reek like booze you old bum.” I turned over and pulled the woolen blanket over my head. “That thing better be unloaded.”

  “How would you feel about that?” Jim said.

  “Don’t really care.”

  He wasn’t going to leave me alone. The stove had taken the frost out of the air in the cabin. Jim sat on the chair across from my bed and started rolling a cigarette.

  “Roll me one of those and I’ll help you out,” I said.

  Jim finished rolling a smoke and passed it to me. Then he started rolling another one for himself.

  “I found the spot. Ain’t no more beavers going to be dragging poor unsuspecting folk under the water any longer.”

  *

  We saddled up the wagon horses. They both snorted and stomped their appreciation for going for just a little ride and not hauling the wagon around. Granny walked by us on her way down to the still. She nodded at us, the customary cigarette hanging out of her lips, unlit until she finished her walk. Granny never smoked while walking.

  “If you see a moose, take that instead of the beavers. We could use the meat,” she said.

  Jim gave a faux salute and we set off through the bush. It was a good dozen miles or so to the spot on the river where Jim had gone through the ice. I settled into the saddle and lit the cigarette Jim had rolled for me. The sun had a warmth to it that we hadn’t felt in months. All around us the land was waking up from its winter rest. Birds chirped and fought between the bare branches of the poplar and birch trees, squirrels chattered to announce our arrival as we passed underneath them on the trail, a couple coyotes howled in the distance. The worst of winter was behind us and everything in the bush was out in full celebration. Even Jim seemed to momentarily forget that he had a score to settle with some beavers.