The Last of the Lumbermen Page 4

  “That’s nice,” Esther says. “At least he’s leaving the boy on the ice.”

  “He probably realizes it’s the only place the poor little bugger will be safe from that Zeppelin.”

  Except that the coach is mistaken. The boy isn’t safe. His mother waddles toward a spot near the bench, lifts one foot onto the top of the boards, and levers herself onto the glass so that nearly half her torso is looming over the ice. When her son picks up the puck behind the net and skates toward her along the boards, she leans over and takes a swing at him. He sees it coming, ducks, and a boy from the other team who’s trying to check him from behind takes a thick forearm smash flush on his face-cage and crumples to the ice.

  The parents from the other team, who are sitting on the other side of the rink — part of an unwritten rule that keeps opposing parents away from one another — get to their feet as one and begin leaping over the seats to get at their kid’s assailant.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Esther says. “I’ve seen this too many times before.”

  By the time we get up to the rotunda level the parents from both teams are flailing away at one another in the stands while the kids mill around aimlessly down on the ice, wondering if they’ll get to finish a game that they alone seem to understand is supposed to be fun.

  WENDEL PULLS UP IN my car as we reach the arena’s front entrance. He sees us, and just to piss me off he floors it and jerks the wheel hard so the rear end spins around, spattering filthy snow and gravel across the just-cleaned plate glass that protects Esther and me. Then, as we watch, he pushes open the car door and leaps out in one motion, as if to tease me with his agility. Esther thinks he’s funny, as always, and she’s laughing out loud as he pushes the arena doors open, sticks his head in, and tosses my keys at me.

  “Screw you, Weaver,” he says, and is gone.

  I’M FOND OF MY car. It’s a five-year-old Lincoln Town Car, a fourdoor jet black number with leather seats, the only one in town. I got it in an auction three years ago from the City, which was conducting one of its phony austerity drives prior to the civic elections. Mantua’s long-time mayor, Garvin Snell, extracts one of these cars from the city budget every two years, with the degree of slashing and chopping depending on how popular the candidate stupid enough to make an election run at him happens to be. Snell sobers himself up for a few months before elections, announces an austerity program, kisses a few babies, pulls a crowd-pleasing stunt like selling off the nearly new City limousine, and gets himself reelected. Nobody seems to care that the manoeuvre always ends up costing the city more money than it saves, or that it enables Snell to run the city in his customary alcoholic daze for another term.

  Since I’m the beneficiary of one of his stunts — I picked up the Lincoln for eight grand — I guess I shouldn’t complain. It’s just that the way people let themselves be suckered and deceived around here drives me crazy. If it isn’t one thing it’s another, and it’s been going on since Alexander Mackenzie first came down the river and started screwing the native people out of their birthright.

  You think I’m kidding about this? Let me tell you a few stories.

  Back in the mid-1950s, a Swedish millionaire announced that he was going to build a monorail from here to Vancouver. The government promptly promised him timber rights all over the area along with the rights of way along his proposed route. A stampede was soon underway, with speculators — local ones included — buying up useless land and flipping it, and everyone generally overdosing on their own greedy adrenaline. Then, big surprise, nothing happened. Eventually a stretch of monorail was built in Seattle for the 1962 World’s Fair, but when it proved to be expensive to build, dead slow, and unreliable, the lights still didn’t go on. Anyone with an ounce of common sense could have figured out that monorails were too rinky-dink for hauling sawlogs, but so long as the real estate prices kept climbing no- body here had the common sense of a beagle. Anything connected to the real world was labeled “negativity,” and negativity was treated as a form of communism.

  In the ’60s it got worse. There was the hydroelectric craze, and the same bunch of clowns who boostered the monorail got busy touting the government’s plan to dam up the Peace River a couple hundred miles north of town. The government was in so much of a hurry divvying up fat contracts to their political allies that they didn’t bother to log the valley floor or clear out the animals. When the lake was filled it drowned five thousand moose, and by the time they’d finished pulling out the carcasses and burning them it was time for the trees to start rocketing up from the lake bottom and killing boaters. Fifteen years later they were still hauling dead trees out of the water and burning them — a million board feet a day, I heard. The Americans got cheap power, and the government got a whopping project cost overrun we’ve been paying interest on ever since. The Indians got flown-in booze, junk food, and welfare cheques to live on instead of the fresh valley air and moose they’d begun with.

  Mantua did get cheaper industrial power rates, it’s true. That netted us multinational-owned pulp harvesters and supermills to slag the forests more efficiently than our own people could. More than five hundred of the six hundred small, locally owned mills Mantua started with closed down over the next ten years. The multinationals stunk up the valley with sulphur, polluted the rivers, tossed the mill-workers and most of the loggers out of their jobs, and shipped out the product and the profits. The eight-hundred-kilometre-long lake the power dams created, meanwhile, screwed up the ecology of the entire Western Subarctic. The weather patterns to the south changed too, with fog banks rolling down the Rocky Mountain Trench to carry the pulpmill stench right into our beautiful downtown. It did put an end to the minus-fifty winters, but we’ll probably pay for that in some horrible way too, eventually.

  And listen, those are just some of the delusions. You ought to hear Wendel on the subject of how they’re handling forestry today. He makes me sound like I’m the publicity agent for the Chamber of Commerce.

  SIX

  I EASE MYSELF BEHIND the wheel of the Lincoln, crank it up, and wait while Esther uses the rear-view to touch up her makeup. She knows I don’t like her using the rear-view for that but she does it anyway, never mind that there’s a mirror on the back of the passenger side visor, lighted.

  This morning I watch her without a trace of irritation. In fact, today I’m finding it — and her — pretty fabulous. Her vanity isn’t the same as a guy, say, combing his hair. Esther’s vanity isn’t tied up in her ego. Or if it is, it isn’t going to start any wars or ignore what’s around it. I can’t say if it’s essentially female, but it’s Esther Simons.

  I didn’t always feel this way about her. The first time around, I wasn’t capable of seeing much of anything in her except the opportunity to get laid. I don’t think Esther had much of an essence yet, actually. Even now, her essence is the kind that sort of sneaks up on you. When I came back here seven years ago, it took more than a year for me to realize how terrific she is, even though she was right under my nose. And it wasn’t until I saw her with her clothes off and saw the freckles that I realized she was the concession girl I slept with all those years before.

  She was hanging around with Gord when our second go-round began, although I’m pretty sure she wasn’t sleeping with him. They were friends, and she was still — not officially but in her own mind — mourning the death of her husband, Leo. According to what Gord told me about Leo Simons, he was a good husband and father, and a successful logging contractor until the day he decided to show one of his fallers how to clean up a big spruce the faller had dropped between two others. Leo got the chainsaw into one of the standing trees, and the vibrations loosened the hung-up tree, which slid along the trunk of the tree he was cutting. You can imagine the rest.

  Leo left Esther comfortable enough financially. The house was paid for — the one she and I live in now — and she owns several large chunks of industrial land next to on
e of the pulp mills. One of them is the parcel Wendel uses to carry on his greenhouse ventures.

  Esther doesn’t need to work, and she generally takes the summers off unless a client is having really serious difficulties. I don’t know for sure, but I think she and Jack tinker around with stocks and bonds the same way he and I do. I steer clear of that part of her life, she keeps her nose out of my business, and we both like it that way.

  Like I said, it wasn’t until I got her clothes off and saw the freckles that I realized who she was. I mean, really. There couldn’t be another set of freckles like that anywhere. Blurting out that I’d already slept with her didn’t seem like the sort of thing that would deepen the experience, so I kept my mouth shut. And since there was nothing I did (in bed or otherwise) that gave me away as the boy she’d had a late-night drunken grope with, she was none the wiser. I didn’t seem to have made much of an impression on Esther while I was Billy Menzies anyway. Within a year or so she’d married Leo Simons and was pregnant with Wendel.

  Trouble is, not telling her who I was saddled me with a permanently delicate problem. There doesn’t seem to be any civilized way I can tell her much of anything about my past, either the part of it she’d been in or the rest of it. I don’t want anyone to recognize me as an older Billy Menzies. Partly that’s because I’m somebody else now, and I want to be judged as Andy Bathgate. But there’s the practical side to it. I’m pretty sure there’s there’s still a warrant out for my arrest.

  “ANDY,” SHE SAYS. “WAKE up. You’re making me think I should have taken you to the hospital last night.”

  “Why?”

  “You’ve been acting like a zombie all morning.”

  “I’ve got some things on my mind, that’s all. It’s nothing.”

  “Like what have you got on your mind?”

  “I dunno. Like why Wendel dislikes me, maybe.”

  “That’s no big mystery,” she says. “You’re sleeping with his mother. It’s an instinct. I’ve explained the Oedipus Complex to you. Stop taking it personally.”

  “Well, I do.”

  “Well, don’t. Grow up. And if you really wanted to get along with Wendel, you could try harder yourself.”

  “What do you mean, ‘try harder’? I do try. I just let him drive my car, didn’t I?”

  “Ooh, my,” she answers, her voice dripping with sarcasm, “How generous of you. Why don’t you start listening to what he says, instead of teasing him all the time. He’d like you better if you acted as a parent instead of a competitor.”

  “I’m not his parent,” I say, “and he doesn’t want me to be.”

  The moment it’s out of my mouth I regret having said it. Esther’s eyes flash, and she crosses her arms. “Let’s get going,” she says, her voice suddenly tight and hard. “We’ve got errands to do.”

  IN LATE JANUARY MANTUA doesn’t remind anyone of April in Paris: mall parking lots filled with mud-splattered pickup trucks and the discarded furniture and green garbage bags people kick off the backs of those pickups late at night, after the City’s privatized trucks don’t pick it up in front of their houses. Huge, dirty snowbanks line the streets, riddled with winter debris — road sand, discarded milk cartons, cigarette packages, candy bar wrappers, more green garbage bags.

  These days, there’s a new kind of debris on the streets: surplus human beings. They’re unemployed loggers, most of them. They hang around waiting for the industry to go back into a boom, which it does regularly, but without hiring anyone back who got boosted out in the last downturn. The loggers hang around town drinking off their unemployment insurance cheques and, when those run out, their welfare cheques. They aren’t street people like you see in bigger cities to the south, but that’s because anyone who tries to camp out in these streets will wind up as a human popsicle.

  This kind of poverty makes people struggle and straggle on, selling off the RVs and Ski-Doos they bought during the gravy years, then their second cars, and, finally, their houses. Eventually most of the families break up, and the women and kids move elsewhere, usually south to Vancouver or the Okanagan Valley. Or, for the women whose husbands go crazy before they’re dead broke and beaten, into shelters.

  The men don’t get off much easier. They end up living hand to mouth in the low-end hotels and rooming houses, lurching from drunken brawl to hangover and back to the bar, sucking up every omen that the old days are coming back. I don’t know what to do about it, and neither does anyone else.

  What I do know is that the answer the politicians keep coming up with — more logging — isn’t an answer at all. If what Wendel and his cronies have been saying is halfway true there aren’t enough trees left to continue at the present cutting rates, let alone enlarge the cut. Gord told me once that civilization is a place where people don’t lie to one another in order to stay alive. If he’s right, this isn’t civilization anymore.

  Once you get a few miles out of town — if you steer away from the huge clearcuts — this is the most beautiful landscape in the country. It’s what brought me back here and now keeps me here — aside from Esther, of course. I mean, the climate isn’t Hawaii, but there are compensations. Hawaii? I spent a week there once, and don’t take me back, ever again. It’s nothing but a giant outdoor hot tub lined with souvenir shops and wall-to-wall assholes. They don’t play much hockey there, either.

  ESTHER GIVES ME THE silent treatment while we do the grocery shopping. Eventually it sinks into my thick skull that I’ve seriously pissed her off, and I begin casting around for some way to get myself off the hook. It isn’t easy to come up with anything. The truth is that I need her more than she needs me. I can’t, as a matter of fact, see a single thing about me she absolutely has to have. I know she enjoys my company — most of the time — and I guess I make her laugh more than most men could. But I’m just a guy, and Mantua is full of guys. And today I haven’t made her laugh at all.

  Aside from the grocery shopping, for instance, our errands are all mine. I’ve got to go to Northern Sports to pick up a pair of hockey gloves they’ve put new palms into, and I need another half-dozen sticks — broke two on Friday night, so I’ve only got two left. Gord keeps trying to convert me to the new carbon sticks, but I’ve been hung up on Sher-Wood pmp 5030s since they started making them. The trouble is, I shave the shafts so thin they break all the time, and each one requires about twenty minutes of surgery before they’re usable.

  When we get to Northern Sports, Wally, the owner, informs me that the shipment of sticks hasn’t come in, and he only has two left-side 5030s left, one of them with too much curve on the blade.

  I’m a little cheezed off. “Jesus, Wally,” I whine. “I told you I’d need more sticks three weeks ago. We’ve got a game with the Roosters tomorrow afternoon. You know you can’t safely go into a game with those clowns with just two sticks.”

  “What I am supposed to do?” he hoots. “Mug a bunch of Old Age Pensioners and take theirs? You’re lucky the factory is still producing these antiques. And anyway, what do you care about safe? You’re just cheap. If you were really interested in safety you’d buy a proper helmet, and start using modern sticks. And you’d talk No Neck into wearing a helmet.”

  “You know damned well they don’t make helmets big enough to fit his head,” I answer, ignoring his crack about me being cheap. “And don’t call Gord ‘No Neck,’ or I’ll bring him in here and let him stuff your head down your neck and pull it out through your asshole like he keeps threatening to.”

  “Oh pulleeese, not again,” Wally pleads, and then becomes serious. “Do you want me to phone around and see if anyone has 5030s?”

  “Don’t suckhole,” I say. “I can always get them at Canadian Tire. I just shop here because I like you.”

  We drive over to Canadian Tire and pick up six 5030s — all they have. I’d prefer not to buy anything from the franchises, because I hate the idea that all the prof
its leave Mantua — I’d rather give up my bucks to a local business, even if it costs more and it’s a smartass like Wally I’m paying. Besides, I’ve never seen a franchise in my life that gave a crap about service. They’re there to merchandise products, and if they don’t have what you want, then screw you. It’s one of the few things Wendel and I agree on.

  Esther gets out of the car when I do, but she doesn’t come into Canadian Tire with me. As I’m about to enter, she veers off with out a word and whips out her cell. The moment she leaves the car, I get it: I’ve forgotten to cancel the physio appointment, and she’s doing it for me. See what I mean about who needs who?

  When I get back to the car with the sticks bundled under my arm, she’s already sitting inside tapping her fingers on the elbow rest, her eyes still cloudy with annoyance. The stew she’s been simmering since we left the Coliseum is about ready to serve. I can’t recall having seen her this annoyed at me, and I’m ready to do anything she demands. More than. I’ll shave my head. Wear day-glo pink undershorts. I’ll marry her and adopt Wendel. Anything.

  She lets me have it the moment I get into the car. “You’ve really got to straighten things out with Wendel,” she says.

  “Okay,” I answer, with perfect sincerity. “I will. How?”

  “How the hell am I supposed to know that? You’re a guy, and this is a guy thing. But if you want to go on living with me, you’ve got to get along with our son.”

  I shake my head. “What did you say?”

  “I meant my son. You know what I meant. It just slipped out …”

  Her voice trails off, and, amazingly, she begins to cry. What the hell is going on here? If I didn’t know better, I’d be tempted to say it was woman trouble — that time of the month. But it isn’t, and besides, she isn’t any different than usual around that time of the month. Esther Simons isn’t a woman who cries unless there’s a pretty damned good reason.