Stinking Rich

by Rob Brunet

  He listened for voices: nothing. Okay, so maybe there was only one guy. Big fucking difference, he thought. I’m not supposed to be here.

  He looked out the window at the side yard. No car. No motorcycle. Nobody outside. He listened again. Someone heavy tramped up the stairs. No weapon in the room. The TV/VCR/DVD unit was too big to throw. Eyes bugging out his skull, he grabbed a half-empty glass of orange juice and whipped it at the door just as it swung open. He missed. The glass smashed into the wall beside the hulk of a man who filled the doorframe.

  Danny choked. “Skeritt!”

  “That’s one hell of a welcome, Young Mr. Grant.”

  “Oh, fuck am I glad it’s you.”

  “Really. And how exactly would you greet me if you weren’t so bloody glad?”

  “Sorry, man. I just...I didn’t...hey, do you know what day it is?”

  The man scratched his matted grey-brown beard with a bear-paw of a hand and said, “Now, there’s an interesting question. Are you going to offer me a cup of tea? Or do you expect me to lick that there—what is it, cat piss?—off the floor?”

  Ten minutes later, the two men sat at the kitchen table downstairs. Skeritt’s bush-ready attire was the same year-round: heavy plaid hunting jacket with upper and lower pockets and a fleece-lined collar, and grimy green pants with even more pockets, most of them bulging. As a young boy, Danny had often marveled at the things he could find in Skeritt’s pockets whenever the crusty old loner wandered in from the woods for a little home cooking. A quick search could be rewarded with anything from spotted mushroom caps to a bulky Swiss Army knife with enough tools to fascinate him for hours.

  Sitting in the grow op kitchen, Danny wasn’t all that curious what surprises Skeritt’s pants might hold until one of his pockets moved. The old man reached a gnarled fist down his thigh, dragged out a chipmunk by its tail, and tossed it to the floor. “So that’s where you got to,” he said.

  Danny asked, “How the hell did you find me?”

  “You didn’t exactly make it difficult. Folks are saying that barn out back glows in the dark. You may think the farmers around here are stupid just because they don’t talk much. Me, I’ve never been convinced talk was a good indicator of brains.”

  “People know what’s going on here? Shit. How long can it be until the cops find out?”

  “I’ll tell you this much: when the cops do find out, it won’t be from a farmer. The police are ‘government,’ which pretty much makes them the enemy. Besides, a crop is a crop. Most of your neighbors are probably envious, even if they’d never take the kind of risk you and your buddies are taking.”

  Danny watched the old man pour honey in his tea until the cup nearly overflowed. He said, “I don’t get why you came looking for me.”

  “I wasn’t. Not ’til a big fucking Indian told me you were waving a wad around the casino. Thought maybe I should look in on you.”

  “You mean the tree-sized bastard who threw me out a few nights ago?” Danny started to sweat. Iggy had been right about how many people had seen him and Lester together.

  “That’s right. Big Fucker’s a friend of mine. Let’s me play a little blackjack when I get the itch.”

  Danny asked, “You gonna tell Mom about this?”

  Skeritt snorted and sipped his tea.

  Danny’s mom had always done her best to provide, moving from town to country and back again. Her one-time lover had split for a job out west before she even knew she was pregnant.

  “You look a little like him. Same bones,” she had told Danny more than once. “I wish I could tell you more but we were like two sheets to the wind, passing in the night, as the saying goes. I mean, he was a good-looking guy and I’m sure we could’ve got along well enough if we’d tried, but I wasn’t thinking that way then. A party was a party, and I was just a party girl. You came along, gave my life meaning, some purpose, a reason to be home on the weekends, and all that was terrific, but I never really felt the need to have a man around—besides you.”

  Danny couldn’t feel abandoned by a father who never knew he existed. Besides, his mother did all the good things a father was supposed to do, and none of the bad. She signed Danny up for hockey and never missed a game while he played three whole seasons in second hand skates before deciding team sports were not his thing. She taught him how to wield an axe to chop a little wood and made sure to take him camping at least twice a year.

  “Car camping is for city folk, Danny,” she told him. “If I want to sit on a lawn chair under the stars and listen to the radio by an open fire, I’ll do it in the back yard. Not in some compound crammed full of people afraid of the dark.”

  Their favorite place to camp was an island in the middle of Pike Lake. Danny’s mom said it used to be Indian land. “But then this was all Indian land once upon a time, wasn’t it?” It was close to twenty acres in size, well-treed, and had a commanding view of the lake from a couple of granite-faced cliffs. The First Nations crew harbored fishing boats, canoes, and barges in its natural deepwater cove whenever they converged on the island for “spiritual festivities.”

  Around the campfire at night, often accompanied by Skeritt or one or two other close friends, they could easily feel they were in deep bush. Apart from an occasional satellite or airplane that marred the night sky, the only proof civilization existed was a white haze that clung to the southwestern sky where Toronto lay a hundred miles away.

  Those were the best nights of Danny’s life. Sharing hot chocolate and ghost stories, watching the bottle of brandy get passed back and forth, and crawling into a tent to fall asleep to the sound of crickets and the rustling of small animals in the underbrush.

  Even when things were bad, even when he messed up big time as boys sometimes will, those nights and weekends on the island were a safe haven for Danny. More often than not, it was Skeritt who would take him aside and share a little adult philosophy, which often amounted to something like: “It won’t matter twenty years from now, Danny. Just buckle down and get past it.” Whether it was failing math again, or getting caught stealing a few beers from behind the counter at a local diner.

  Through it all, Skeritt had been the strongest male presence in his life. And here he was again, drinking tea in the farmhouse kitchen, looking at Danny with clear blue eyes that made him feel small and transparent.

  “Listen, Danny,” the old man was saying, “I promised your mother to look out for you and I always will, but what you actually do while I am looking out for you is your own damn business. This particular business is a stupid one that can only end in trouble.”

  It was like a lot of conversations they had had before. Skeritt claimed to be nonjudgmental, yet he had pretty strong views about almost everything. And he could always be trusted to share them.

  “Just what the hell do you think these guys are going to do with you when you’re done here, Danny?”

  “I haven’t really thought about it.”

  “Maybe you should. Way I figure, they’ll pretty much have to get rid of you, won’t they. You know too much.”

  “What do I know? Some guy in a bar gave me this address to show up at. Since then, all I get is notes on the kitchen table and some fucked-up voice on the phone.”

  “Good luck explaining that to the cops.”

  “So what are you saying? I should leave? Run and hide...is that it?”

  “How should I know? All I’ve got is an opinion. And opinions are interesting, but they’re ultimately irrelevant, don’t you think?” Skeritt pulled a match stick from his pocket, split it lengthwise with his thumbnail, and began to pick his teeth. Danny stared at him and thought: At least the damn iguana says what’s on its mind.

  “Listen, kid,” Skeritt went on after a few moments, “the way I see it, you’ve got a good gig right now. Like most good gigs, it’s going to have to end sooner or later. What you’re doing is illegal. The cops may not the brightest lights in these parts. But they’re going to find out about this here plantation o
ne way or another. You don’t want to be here when that happens. You also don’t want to be here when whoever is in charge shows up to collect his dope, or his dough, or however the hell it works. The boss man of this kind of setup is not cute and cuddly, I can tell you that. But take off and hide? I don’t know, Danny, it ain’t as easy as it sounds. And I’m speaking from experience.” Skeritt examined the matchstick which had become frayed in his mouth. He spat out a few splinters of wood, threw the matchstick to the floor and pulled out a fresh one. “Got any food?”

  “I think there’s some peanut butter in the cupboard.”

  “Perfect.”

  Danny prepared a sandwich, slathering it extra thick the way he knew Skeritt liked.

  “You’ve got to have a plan,” Skeritt said, “a safe place to go. An out. You can’t just start running and hope to find safety. It doesn’t work that way.”

  “I guess I’d just hole up at my mom’s.”

  Skeritt munched the peanut butter sandwich. When he finally spoke, his voice had gravel in it. “You really do think right out loud, don’t you? I mean, the stuff that comes out of your mouth hasn’t been pre-processed, has it? It just sort of runs out over your tongue into the air and then you hear it for the first time, just like whoever it is you are talking to.”

  “Uh, yeah, I guess so...”

  “Well, if that particular idea had ever suffered the benefit of thought, it might have occurred to you that your mother’s is the first place people will look for you. And if it’s the cops, it’ll be immediate, and if it’s some gangbangers, it’ll be ugly.”

  “Oh.”

  “Any other questions before you shut up and listen?”

  “Just one. Are you ever going to tell me why you give a shit, Skeritt?”

  “Are you ever going to ask?”

  “I think I just did.”

  Skeritt looked at Danny like he had appeared out of thin air. He wrinkled his forehead and nodded silently.

  “Okay. Fair is fair,” he said. “If I’m dogging you, you might as well know why. Nothing much can be done about things that happened terribly long ago, anyway.” He chewed the last of the sandwich and washed it down with a gulp of tea. “You already know I worked with your mother at The Boathouse.”

  “She’s been picking up a few shifts there again. She’s always telling me what a happening place it used to be—nothing like the dive it is now.”

  “Right. Well, that wasn’t the first place we worked together. In fact, I was only ever at The Boathouse for a few months. The place where we first met each other was Patterson’s. Before you were even born.”

  “Patterson’s? What’s that? Some other bar?”

  “No. Patterson had a sawmill operation, started by his grandfather actually. I have no idea what the elder Patterson was like, but Menlo Patterson was better known as Patterson the Prick.”

  “Tough boss?”

  “‘Tough’ is not the word, and tough alone would not have been a problem. Those were rough days for forestry. Interest rates were through the roof and crews were getting laid off all over the place. In the early eighties, steel and wood in Canada were pretty much wiped out. Anyone who could keep a sawmill in operation had to be tough as nails, and Menlo Patterson was no exception. In his case, however, he was also a capital ‘P’ prick.”

  While Skeritt talked, Danny had rolled a joint and he offered it to the old man to light. He paused his story to put the joint into his mouth and wet the paper. He did it with ceremony, almost reverence. His tongue pushed out of his mouth more than an inch and he allowed the joint to kind of loll about on it before closing his upper lip and pulling it out uniformly damp. His grizzled face seemed to settle, his cheeks sagging a bit as he turned the joint around and lit it with another safety match from his pocket.

  Not for the first time, Danny felt embarrassed, shallow, and more than a little foolish faced with the raw independence of this mountain of a man. He’d outlived thousands of his peers fighting a tropical war he didn’t believe in before running north to Canada rather than risk a second tour in Vietnam. He’d traded the jungle for a forest—one with fewer people and less hospitable weather patterns.

  “You see,” Skeritt said, expelling a thick lungful of smoke, “they laid more than a dozen safety infraction notices on the Prick’s sawmill. At least three different inspectors from the Ministry of Labor. Even thirty years ago, you couldn’t buy those inspectors off with a case of scotch. The Prick ran a real slipshod operation—guys losing a finger here, an earlobe there, all kinds of cuts, crushes, fractures—by rights, Patterson’s ought to have been shut down. But he was a good ole boy. Pals with three longtime local small-town mayors, all of whom wanted the jobs to stay put.

  “No one could ever pin anything on him. If someone dared complain out loud, they always seemed to get in a big fight with some crazy out-of-towner drifting through the local watering hole.”

  “What do you mean?” Danny asked, handing the joint back to Skeritt. “He’d have people beat up?”

  “Beat up. Run out of town. Have their houses broken into so many times they couldn’t get insurance. Nobody could ever prove it was The Prick causing their troubles, but everyone knew. The smart thing to do was keep your mouth shut if you needed your job. And around these parts thirty-odd years ago, unless you were a farmer growing your own food, there was no guarantee you and your family wouldn’t go hungry from one season to the next.”

  “What does any of this have to do with my mother?”

  “I’m getting to that. Roll another joint would you?” Skeritt coughed, spat on the kitchen floor, and said, “Oh, sorry, I forgot we’re indoors.” He wiped up the spit with the bottom of his shin-high moccasin. “Got these booties from a Nishnabe fellow last week. Not bad, eh?

  “Now, where was I? Oh yeah, so Prick Patterson’s been paying off the local politicos or kissing whoever’s ass it takes to keep this sawmill from the nineteen-forties running full steam into 1983. I’m working there. So’s your mom and a bunch of other hippies. Plus a handful of Indians from the Reserve. Not one of us knew our asses from our elbows when it comes to safety. June thirtieth, a fire started on Number Three Saw. It was six o’clock and no one should have been working at all, what with it being Canada Day the next day. Folks had already shut down just after five, but the Prick sent a crew back in and wouldn’t let anyone leave until they completed a last minute order he’d received.

  “Probably somebody threw a cigarette on the floor and didn’t stamp it out. No one ever enforced the no-smoking rules and the sawdust was never cleaned up right.

  “Someone pulled out the fire hose and opened the valve, but the water pump had been broken for months. I was in the front office where your mother worked. She dialed the fire department, but the Prick storms out of his office and tells her to hang up. Says they’ll just lay another fine on us. Tells us to put it out ourselves.

  “I couldn’t believe my ears, but my training in ’Nam wouldn’t let me stand still and watch, so I ran across the yard and did what I could. We all did. Someone got a bucket brigade going and they dragged another hose across from the garage. The mill was thick with smoke and people from inside were stumbling out coughing up their guts. Only some of them weren’t coming out at all. I wet my T-shirt and put it over my face. Went in myself. I pulled one guy out and went back in for another. That’s when the whole place just blew. Sawdust is like gunpowder when it is dry. It was like a fuel-air bomb went off in there. This guy comes running toward me, holding his face in his hands. Knocked me over. Screaming. ‘I CAN’T SEE!’”

  Skeritt’s shout blew Danny to the floor, kicked back as he was on two legs of the kitchen chair. Ignoring his backwards tumble, the older man went on with his story, his voice more somber now. “I carried the bugger out on my back—all two hundred twenty pounds of him—and we collapsed together outside in the yard. There was no more going back in. The mill was an inferno.” He paused to take a sip of tea. “Seven people burned alive t
hat day. We stood there listening to their screams. Much as we could hear over the fire.”

  Danny swallowed dry.

  Skeritt said, “And the Prick? He fucked off pronto. Later on, he collected the insurance money, blew one helluva wad on one helluva party all winter down in Florida.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Danny. “Why wouldn’t my mother have told me about this?”

  “She was made to shut up about it. We all were. We were just a bunch of dumbfuck workers who’d caused a fire that killed seven of our friends. The Prick paid for a plaque at city hall commemorating their heroism. He only misspelled two of their names. After a while, most people drifted away to jobs in other places, got on with their lives. The guy I carried out was Ernie McCann. He ended up pretty much blind, as you know. Even then, we had a hell of a time getting any kind of compensation for him. The Prick figured he could just wait him out and he would disappear into the woodwork. I nearly gave up the fight myself, especially when Patterson tried to pin the explosion on me, saying it was some kind of protest. Said I had become all anti-establishment after being carted off to fight in Vietnam and all that. If it wasn’t for your mother’s help, pointing the way to some of the safety violations we could actually prove, there’s no way Ernie or the families of any of the dead and injured workers would have got a damn thing.

  “Far as your mother, she was told she’d never get another office job in town. That’s how she wound up waitressing. Patterson paid out maybe a hundred grand in a settlement which meant most people got about zero but at least we could feel we sort of won somehow.

  “I gave up on the whole damn shooting match. I drifted a bit from job to job and moved further and further out of town until finally I was living out in the bush. I’ve been there deep nearly twenty years now. Apart from Ernie, your mom, and a handful of folk who give me a meal when I drift by and shoot the shit, no one knows or cares whether I exist and, for me, that’s just about perfect.”

  The two men sat quietly for a few moments. It was Danny who broke the silence. “My mom told me Ernie lost his eyesight in an industrial accident, that he didn’t like to speak about it. I never thought about it much.”