Who by Fire (27 page)

“What, then?”

“I told you. Her interest in me is she wants plant information. It’s not going anywhere.”

“What if you’re wrong?”

Bill picked up the coaster again. Donna swiped it out of his hand.

“Is it not possible?” She paused, considered. “Is it not possible that a woman could like a man and see him as a source of information too? I can imagine that.”

“So can I.”

“So you did pick the company over her!”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then answer the woman’s calls.”

“Ah, Donna. It’s lots of things. I’m not good at relationships. Baggage. Bad habits.”

“So wash more. Quit the nose picking.”

Bill laughed. He reached for his cell phone. Donna lifted off the bench to stop his hand.

“I want to be serious for one minute. Then you can phone Mr. Farouk.” She composed herself. “I’m addressing you as your big sister. You’re too young to give up on the romantic side of life, since that’s pretty much like giving up on life itself.”

Her face drew down. Her eyes filled.

“I would be so happy if someone I liked phoned and left a message. And don’t—please—for the love of Mary—now or ever—say one consoling word.”

In the condo, Bill turned up the heat. He got the space heater from his office and pointed it at Donna’s feet. She was sitting on the couch in her parka, shivering. In the billows of her down lap was the binder. She had asked Mr. Khalid to stop at Bill’s truck so she could get her extra pair of mitts. She’d found the binder on the back seat.

“I’m making a comeback,” she said to Bill. “Let’s have another bottle of wine. Nothing good, just some routine plonk that we can drink or not.”

Bill got a bottle out of the wine fridge.

Donna patted the binder. “I’m going to open it.”

“Donna, don’t. Please.”

“Why not? Did you already?”

“I’m not interested in it.”

“But you remember it.”

“Of course I remember. It’s the stuff from Dad’s lawsuit.”

“Right. The suit that wouldn’t float.”

“It’ll only be depressing.”

“You’ve had decades to get over it.”

“I’ll go to bed. You can look at it to your heart’s content.”

“I promise—if it’s depressing us, I’ll close it again.” She jerked the zipper and the rusted fob came off.

“Nice one.”

“Shut up.” She pushed the zipper down with her fingernail.

The stuffed binder flipped open. Envelopes fell. On top were a few loose sheets. She held up the top one and shook it. “Billy! The Stink Diary!” She dug in her purse for reading glasses.

“ ‘April 10. Serious air … pollution for five days. Lost six pigs from a …’ ”

“Litter.”

“ ‘Litter of twelve.’ Thought you hadn’t read it?”

“What else do you lose six pigs from?”

“ ‘Balance of litter did not do well. When shipped they were con … condemned as arthritic. April 19.’ Now it’s Mom’s writing. ‘Trim paint on buildings damaged by gas fumes.’ Back to Dad. ‘May 23. Air pollution very bad. Wife and children quite ill. Hired man left. Unable to stand odour. Hired another man. Worked one day. Quit same reason. July 10. Lost eight pigs from litter of thirteen. Gas very bad at this time. Pigs appeared to smother.’ ”

“You said if it was depressing you’d stop. It’s depressing.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes.”

“It’s our life story, kiddo. It’s interesting.”

“I shouldn’t have to justify what I find depressing.”

“Okay.” She looked at the mess around her. “I’ll never get all this back in.” She folded the binder over its contents, pushed it away from her. “More wine, please.”

Bill poured some, left his own glass empty.

“You
are
depressed,” she said.

“I’ll get over it, like you say.”

“Maybe you should talk about it if it bothers you so much.”

“You missed your calling. The world of psychiatry lost a genius.”

“None of this makes sense. For entertainment, you pull out old albums and drunkenly pore over them. Then when I want to look in the binder—”

“Don’t tell me what to do with my time. Don’t tell me what to get over and what not to get over.”

“Whoa.”

“I asked you not to open the frigging thing.”

“You can cap up the wine, brother. Off to bed I go.”

They stood in a funnel of light from an overhead lamp. Donna’s car engine was beating itself to life, as Bill scraped hard frost off the windows.

“You should get in your car,” he told her.

“It’s got seat warmers. I’m waiting for a warm seat.”

She signalled him to stop scraping and give back the brush. She opened her arms and they hugged.

“What’s her name again?”

“Marie.”

“Phone Marie.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Don’t think. Phone.”

“I’m sorry about last night.”

As she sat down into her car, the parka puffed upward. She was rummaging for something in her pocket.

“You look like your airbag’s deployed.”

“Shut up. I found this on the floor in the spare bedroom.” She handed a piece of paper through the window. A VLT ticket. A winner. “I don’t know the local customs, but where I come from, we cash these.”

Dry Fork, 1967

TOM AND BILLY
were in the pickup, going south, parting the summer hills. The destination was Dry Fork. John Darby had invited Tom to meet their lawyer. It was five years since his first trip to meet the Darbys, and he had gone down about once a year since then.

Billy was twelve, and there was not much conversation in the cab. Tom assumed the boy would rather have spent the day in town with his friends. A swimming pool had just opened, a present from the oil companies in the region. Or maybe Billy would have gone somewhere with Donna, who had been his pal since Jeannie left for B.C. The only reason Tom had asked his son along was that Ella had urged him to.

After miles of farms, they crossed a long ridge that had never known a plough. Tom nudged Billy, pointed at two mule deer in the scrub higher up.

It was a summer like any other except that their family was smaller. Jeannie had phoned to say she wouldn’t be returning to the farm this summer. She had been teaching for a couple of years and had a new beau. She planned to live in the West Kootenay town where he and his parents lived.

More unexpected was Donna’s plan to quit school. A couple of weeks back, at the end of grade eleven, she had announced she wasn’t
going to bother with grade twelve. She was moving to Calgary to work for a travel agency.

Ella and Tom had taken turns arguing with her, pushing her to stay and complete high school. “After that, you can head for the city and train for whatever you want.”

Donna’s answer was that she had been training for years. All those books she had read from the Department of Extension, about countries all over the world. She had written to travel agencies in Calgary, and two had invited her to come and talk.

Tom looked across at Billy, who was staring out the side window. He did not look resentful so much as blank, a look he had perfected recently. Tom thought of himself at Billy’s age. By that standard, the boy should be thinking of girls, baseball, fighting, horses, or scrambling up mountains. At Billy’s age, Tom’s father had told him how to figure out what sex a gopher was. All the ones you see running across roads, or flattened on roads, were males, in search of females in other colonies. It was almost time for Billy to be off and running.

“What do you think about Donna quitting school?”

Billy turned his head a bit. “She’s got a plan, I guess,” he said.

“That’s a plan? To quit high school?”

“She’ll finish. She says there’s night schools in the city.”

“That sounds like something somebody would say but not do.”

Billy shrugged.

“What about the meeting we’re going to?” Tom asked.

“Don’t know anything about it.”

“We’ll meet the lawyer the Dry Fork farmers hired, to bring a lawsuit against their oil company.”

“Oh yeah.”

“You’ve never met a lawyer, have you?”

“Nope.” The boy glazed over. Made himself into wax.

As they got closer to Dry Fork, Tom was wondering why Ella had wanted Billy to go with him. It was not the first time she had pushed the boy in his direction lately. Other suggestions were fishing, camping, and shooting gophers.

This was against Ella’s own best interests, for she loved having Billy around. They always had things to say, when they worked in the garden or drove around. They made each other laugh. They even milked cows together. Ella had taught him, and he was almost as good as she was.

Whatever the answer, it probably had more to do with Tom and Ella than with Billy. That Ella wanted Tom to be closer to their son had a whiff of sacrifice. Maybe it had to do with Donna having worked with him and then not. Or it could be the other thing, the engineer.

Whichever, it was probably a bid for peace, not love. Tom had long ago accepted that things for them wouldn’t ever be the way they had been early on. That was long ago and gone.

On the phone, Joan Darby had said the meeting would be just Darbys, Arsenaults, a bachelor rancher named Larry Erickson, and the lawyer. Once there, Tom introduced Billy around, and a fuss was made over the boy—except by Erickson, who stuck his chin at them and said, “I told the others I don’t think it’s a good idea you and your boy being here today. I don’t beat around the bush. I don’t think Geoff will like it.”

John Darby jumped in. “Hell, Larry, Tom just wants to get his lawsuit going. He needs to meet Geoff.”

Erickson folded his arms and stared at the wall.

Geoff Purcell drove into the yard in a small foreign car. Joan went to fetch him in, and when the lawyer entered, Tom was surprised at how tall he was and how young he looked. His hair was
longer than farmers wore theirs. He had an innocence that was at odds with how forcefully he took charge.

“I see we have a newcomer,” he said, rubbing his hands together as he came near Tom. The look he gave was not unfriendly but had a question in it.

Tom introduced himself and Billy. He found himself awkward in explaining why they were present. John Darby took over.

“Tom lives downwind of the Hatfield plant. I invited him because he’s interested in starting a suit.”

Joan asked Geoff if he would like tea or coffee. He asked for a pop or a juice, and Joan apologized that she had neither. They were childless, and adults didn’t drink pop here unless they were Mormon. Tom wondered if Purcell was of that religion.

“Water’s fine,” he said.

The lawyer turned to Tom and shook his hand. He reached and shook Billy’s too. Billy was leaning against the wall.

“I’m glad to meet you both, but I should explain that confidentiality is an issue for us. The company must never know what we know or don’t know. As we build our case, we’ll acquire more evidence. Meanwhile, we’re like the animal in the forest that puffs up to look bigger than he is.”

“I get that,” said Tom.

Geoff asked if the others had the diaries he had asked for, meaning the ones that kept track of bad odour days, sickness, and livestock problems. Geoff had asked them to make copies, and Kelly Arsenault brought a stack of paper to the table.

“Wonderful!” said Geoff, thumping the pile with his open hand. “I’ve got my office assistant collecting everything available about sour gas, while I research other pollution lawsuits.”

Geoff started talking about the smelter at Trail, B.C. Tom knew of it but was surprised to hear it had been there since the nineteenth century. The sulphurous smoke had killed the nearby forests and
farmers’ crops. There were legal proceedings and settlements way back in the 1920s.

“In my opinion things might have stopped right there, except it was an international problem. Smoke from Trail poured into the United States and did damage there too. The smelting company built a four-hundred-foot stack, and that actually made things worse. The smoke went all the way to the Columbia Valley. Scientists tried to get the company’s sulphur emissions down, and money was paid to farmers again in the 1930s.