Who by Fire (5 page)

Bill had a country hall in his head. A beautiful girl stepping into his arms to dance.

“You got a few minutes? To drive me somewhere?” Bill asked.

The roll of tin Elmo was trying to handle got away on him and fell to the ground. He jumped from the ladder and landed crookedly. He threw his mitts down and hopped on one leg. “As you can see,” Johnny said, “we’re not really doing anything.”

He got out and ran up the ladder with one end of the fallen span of tin. Elmo limped up his ladder with the other end. They pushed it over the new batting and Johnny shot in some screws. He gestured for Elmo to finish on his own.

They drove with Bill giving directions until they were among the flare stacks. When the exhaust cloud cleared, Bill saw that the flame on his stack was normal. He counted to one hundred and twenty and it stayed that way.

“Okay. That’s all I need.”

“Tough job, Billy. You ever go up a ladder anymore?”

“If my eavestrough is plugged.”

“Do
you
have a minute?”

“Of course.”

Johnny drove them to the tailings pond, where the fouled water from the separation plant went and never returned. He drove the service road to the pond’s dyke.

“I want to climb up and look. You?”

“It’s frozen. Nothing to see.”

“I don’t believe the shit they put in there can freeze. I want to look.”

They scrambled up the gravel face. At the top, the wind was stronger and viciously cold. Johnny squinted at the slab of ice. The only wet was where the new tailings coughed out.

“So what interests you?” asked Bill.

“This isn’t the one where the sixteen hundred ducks died, is it?”

“Nope.”

“Would ducks die in this one?”

“If it was thawed out, yeah. See those things sticking up?” Bill gestured at armatures dressed in yellow rain jackets, one arm pointing skyward.

“Scarecrows?” Johnny said.

“We call them bitu-men.”

“Witty. They look like John Travolta on the old
Saturday Night Fever
poster.”

“When the ice goes and ducks come around, we’ll have cannons firing.”

“How big is this thing?”

“Four square kilometres. It’ll be bigger when the second phase kicks in.”

“You got to be some kind of spin doctor to call that a pond.”

Bill laughed.

“Walden Pond,” said Johnny.

Bill laughed harder. Long-dormant muscles in his face were paining.

When they were back inside the upgrader’s quadrangle, Elmo had finished his chore and the ladders and tools were lined out in good order beside the service road.

“You seem more serious now than you used to be, Billy.”

“Maybe life got less funny.”

“Black Hole,” Johnny said.

At the end of the workday and work week, Bill walked to his parking spot. Ice crystals floated down through the orange light. He pulled the block heater plug and battled the extension cord into roundish loops that he left hanging. The engine kicked off easily but he sat for a while in sympathy for the engine parts, beating in their taffy.

The big engine loosened and began to roar. There was nothing sporty about this sport utility vehicle. It had a truck chassis and weighed a ton, drank gas with abandon through six steel throats. He’d bought it to impress a woman and to give a sign to his daughter and son that their dad was solvent. The woman, the only one he’d dated in Fort McMurray, hated the stiff ride and eventually would not travel in it. His children could not believe their father had invested fifty thousand in something so literally square.

Bill joined the line to the gate. The vehicles ahead were mostly new pickups. Every driver had his foot on the gas, goosing away. Under the accumulated cloud of exhaust fog, some would be drinking, toking, snorting—and all would shortly be entering the river of oil sands traffic that rallied south to Fort Mac. The main drag through the oil sands, Highway 63, was Canada’s most dangerous
highway. It had many nicknames that sounded like heavy metal bands—Highway of Death, Suicide 63.

The lineup was mostly stopped. The drivers were on their horns. “What the fuck?” roared the guy ahead, hanging out his window.

In fact, Bill knew what the fuck. The folks running the gate had been told to check each vehicle for contraband. By that they did not mean booze and dope but stolen things like tools and copper. As the cause for the stoppage worked its way back, the horn chorus grew. It was possible upper management did not understand that workers accused of being thieves were more likely to steal; that, if there was stolen gear in these trucks, it would not be where a gatekeeper with a flashlight could find it.

The chaos made Bill think of his own crew. They were in this lineup somewhere and had invited him to come for beers at The Pit in town. The Pit was a bad bar, but Bill had been there many times without incurring blunt force trauma. He’d told them he would think about it.

A shift bus roared past the line. The gatekeeper swung the gate to let the bus through. Four trucks jumped out of line and tried to follow. The keeper ran the gate back and slammed in the post.

Among the odd things about Fort McMurray was how every day was part of someone’s weekend, and, by extension, every night was Friday or Saturday night. Though he felt a hermit’s sadness about entering this frolic, Bill had made up his mind to go to The Pit. The boys, and Marion if she’d been invited, thought of him as a humorous old elf, despite his occasional grumpiness. Going for drinks was a way of assuring them he was still their good boss, someone they could like.

Parting his way through the crowd, Bill met a chesty waitress with a small barbell through her lower lip. She had a tray of drinks
balanced on an upturned hand and still managed to throw a hip into him as he squeezed by. “Sit down, grandpa. Before you fall down.”

Bill plunked into a captain’s chair that Henry had swung out for him. Clayton was pouring him a beer from a pitcher. Henry’s mouth was moving but Bill couldn’t hear. Behind the bar, a guy with a face like an open wrench was yelling. A nearby table cheered, and a muscular joker jumped up, fought clear, and duck-walked to the front. He held his paycheque in front of his face, kissing it repeatedly.

This was the normal run of things at The Pit but it felt suddenly false, as if they were in a rehearsal for a Broadway musical.
Fort McMurray: The Early Years
.

“Where did you park?”

Henry’s voice got through this time. It seemed an irrelevant question, except that Henry never spoke without purpose. He could care less where Bill parked but wanted to know, early on, if he needed to worry about his boss driving home drunk.

“Two blocks east,” Bill told him, and it was a lie. He had taken his truck home and ridden down here in Mr. Khalid’s cab. He was lying to Henry to give himself an excuse for leaving early.

“Be even louder in here soon,” Clayton told Bill. “Band tonight.”

There was a band every night. Bill raised his pint. “Here’s to Friday.”

The golden mugs clashed, some beer fell.

Clayton said, “Sorry, chief, it’s Wednesday.”

“No such thing,” Bill said, and Henry laughed.

The talk turned to Dennis Whitcomb: a top-ten of his screw-ups of the week. Dennis had been hired during the last big boom, then laid off in the 2008–09 bust. Recently, when the oil economy was showing signs of revival, he had been rehired. No one could figure out why he was back, since they regarded him as too dumb to operate. Clayton tried to hang it on Bill.

“I don’t hire people, Clayton. Consultants hire people.”

“That’s fucked,” Clayton offered.

“Was Dion Elliott around this week?” Bill asked, pushing the topic elsewhere.

Everyone agreed they had not seen him.

“Then it
was
a good week,” Bill said.

Too late, he saw a look of grievance spreading across Huge Boschuk’s face.

“I like Dion,” Huge said. Boschuk always looked to Bill as though he was about to cry. His face was fleshy and immature—the face of a giant baby.

“Dion’s fine,” said Bill. “Just seems to signify trouble when he’s around.”

“You call him a PR man. He doesn’t like that.”

“I have trouble keeping track of current lingo.”

“The work he does in the community is important.”

The other two were staring at Huge, a seldom-talker. By Boschuk’s standards, this was more than rebellion; it was mutiny with bloodshed.

Bill looked into the sorrowful eyes. “I’m sorry, Huge. I tell you what. I’ll stop complaining about Dion if you—all of you—give Dennis a rest.”

After a couple of beers, Bill lost interest in what his crew was saying. He tuned in conversations from other tables. The talk was about money and the courses needed to make more money. “Ten grand clear, a guy told me.”

“Yeah, but that’s with your B Pressure.”

“First Aid,
H
₂
S, CPR.”

“To be a lease-hand?”

“PST, CSE …”

“Fuck’s that?”

“Confined Space Entry.”

From another table came a yarn about a guy who’d bought a ’70s hearse, brought it up to McMurray, and was now renting it to people as accommodation. Making two grand a week.

“I can’t believe those fucking tree-huggers. I’d like to see those assholes do my job.”

This came from closer at hand: from Clayton. He was drinking like a pig and had turned bright red. Already his eyelids were lined with tiny sandbags. No one seemed to agree or disagree with him. Henry was looking at something under the table.

“I’m telling you, if one of those pricks was here right now, I’d cold-cock the sucker. I heard a guy on radio saying Indians are getting screwed up here. They should go down to the casino and see those dumb fucks playing machines. Can’t piss it away fast enough. My fault, I suppose.”

Bill began to plan his escape.

Clayton continued to rail. “Fucking casino. Might as well take your money and burn it. I’m glad I wasn’t born stupid.”

Bill rested his eyes on Henry. While appearing to do nothing, Henry would be assessing the distance to each Native in the room. He would have also considered how the casino comments were going down with the people slugging money into VLTs beyond the bar.

But the one who got between Clayton and his rant this time was Huge. Without anyone’s noticing, Huge had acquired the bill. The waitress was pushing the chip end of his credit card into the machine.

“What doing, Huge?” said Henry.

“It’s done.”

“We’ll give you money.”

“Pay at the next place.”

“I’m not going on,” said Bill. “You better take mine now.”

“What’s the matter, Bill? You don’t like our company?”

“First rule, Clayton. Don’t run with the young bucks.”

“But what are you going to do, Bill?” Huge asked, from his sad concerned face.

“Tie a dry fly. Listen to some Pavarotti. Read an existential novel.”

On the street outside, the air was so cold it breathed like metal. They said their farewells and walked in opposite directions. The block was surrounded by trucks going nowhere. The frozen air was thick with exhaust. Out of sight of the others, Bill stopped.

Four hours later, Mr. Khalid’s cab pulled into the pool of street light outside the condo complex. Bill’s fingers shook when he tried to navigate his wallet. He was having trouble distinguishing the colours. Mr. Khalid showed no impatience, just stared through his prayer beads at the windshield.

When at last Bill had himself sorted, Mr. Khalid took the money with slim fingers, doubled it, and slid it inside his jacket. “Thank you,” he said with a nod. Bill nodded back. Old-timers in a town of wild kids, silent commiserators. It was also possible that Mr. Khalid found Bill disgusting, an older man who drank alcohol and stayed out half the night. Mr. Khalid was excellent at concealing his feelings, which was another reason for calling him.

The building’s entrance had two doors for weather and security. In the chamber between, Bill dug under his parka for keys. A cardboard box, swathed in tape, was pushed against the wall below the intercom. He got the door open, held it with his foot, and contorted himself until he could see the writing on the box. His name. His sister’s large, emphatic printing.

After more buttons, keys, and struggles, he was inside his condo and able to drop the box on the floor. What passed for silence ticked and hummed through the apartment. In the dark living room, the
message light on the phone was blinking red. He went to the light in fear. That he’d been out all night doing foolish things provoked a sense that something awful must have happened, to one of his children, to one of his sisters.

The first message was too garbled to understand. It sounded like Lance Evert’s voice, but was so broken up he could not tell for sure, though he rolled it back and listened several times. This bothered him because he almost never heard from Lance; also because Lance was extra precise, even for an engineer. Not the kind of guy to make a mess of leaving a message.

The only other message was from his sister Jeannie.

“I sent you something. The courier said it would be there today. It belonged to Dad and I think you should have it. Call me.”

He sat down at the kitchen table and tried to slow his breathing. He closed his eyes but it was worse in there: a robotic dance of things rolling and falling into place. He stood, and when he had his balance, went around flicking on the lights.

Something belonging to his father. Something he should have.

But why should he have it? And why would Lance, if he screwed up the first message, not call again?

He reached for the TV remote but paused and considered the time of night. Beast heads bursting from people’s chests. Serial killers in goalie masks. And creepier still: Texas Hold’em tournaments.

He had an urge to throw up, but understood that it had nothing to do with food or drink or illness. What he wanted to throw up was the experience of the last few hours. Before he knew it, he had been to the kitchen and returned with the butcher knife. He jerked the blinds closed and chopped at the endless tape Jeannie had wound around the box. Inside was a filling of newspaper balls into which he plunged his hands.