Bittersweet Sands (2 page)
A man in front spoke up: “I like six-tens. They give me a chance to get home Sunday, sleep in, wash my clothes, get skinned up.”
Men surged towards the desk. One by one, they handed the dispatcher any certificates that could land them the job. The man at the microphone noted each man's information on a white slip. Then he placed the paper into the date/time stamp, and with a loud crack that could be heard in the farthest corners of the hall, the slip was stamped. Another man sent to work. Another contract between union and company made.
Bang! Another man sent to work. Bang! Another, and another, one by one until that group melted away, running home to pack, gas up, and get in a goodbye hump with the wife.
The crowd shrank. The remaining men ebbed towards the desk.
“Golden and Fliese, twenty-four-day shutdown, travel in and out paid, camp job, seven days a week, ten hours a day. Possibility of going to seven-twelves....”
I joined the crowd at the desk.
A man murmured:
“Best-managed company in Canada.”
Another jean-clad worker answered:
“Naw, they took those decals off their trucks, too many guys were spitting on them.”
A third spoke up:
“It's top-rate and what the hell, it's only twenty-four days.”
A fourth spoke:
“Twenty-four very long days.”
I leaned towards the dispatcher, who looked so hard his spit bounced.
“Who's the crew?” I asked.
“You accepting?”
I was about to snap a smart-assed reply when I was jostled out of the way by a tall boy, almost a child. The youngster smiled a smile so beautiful I suddenly wanted to hear what he had to say.
“Hi, I was supposed to be here an hour ago, but for the last twenty miles my alternator started to give up. The lights went out an the car started to sputter. So I followed a semi all the way into town. If it wasn't for that semi, I wouldn't have made it.
The dispatcher and I looked at each other, then back to the boy.
“So I gets into the city an' I can't stop, because if I do I'll just stall. So I glided right through the intersections.
“Well, there's this one guy in a station wagon that I must have cut off, and he starts to chase me. I didn't see who the hell he was. All I could see was some guy in a station wagon chasing me.
“So I pull into my driveway with this guy in the station wagon right on my ass. He gets out of his car and starts screaming at me. He was wearing a windbreaker and starts coming towards me, so I pop him one and tell him to calm down. Then he tells me he's a cop.
“So he takes my license and registration and I have to go downtown to the cop shop. I had to wake up my roommate to come and get me.
“So they sat me in this chair and I had to answer all kinds of questions, things that had nothing to do with traffic tickets.
“So I get charged with speeding, dangerous driving, blowing a red light, not stopping for a cop, assaulting a police officer, and operating a dangerous vehicle.”
The boy looked back and forth between me and the dispatcher. The dispatcher deadpanned:
“So?”
“So, that's why I'm late.”
The young man stared at the dispatcher. The dispatcher's eyes bounced between me and the young man.
“Golden and Fliese?” I asked, returning the dispatcher's attention back to me.
“You accepting?”
I nodded.
The dispatcher gave me a cold smile and, keeping his eyes on me, he addressed the young man. “Go stand over there. What's your name?”
“Doug, ah Doug... Doug Hyland,” he stuttered.
“Okay, Mr. Dougdoug. Go stand over there, I'll call you.”
My eyes followed the boy. “There goes an accident walking.”
The Dispatcher shook his head. “If you can keep him out of jail,” he mused.
“Who's the rest of the crew?”
“Well, you got Pops as one of the welders, and for riggers, so far...” He looked at the clipboard. “You got Stash...”
“Shit.”
“Actually, he's been pretty good lately. I guess being beaten by half the reserve calmed him down some.”
“Well, if you're gonna steal a truck, steal the chief's.”
“Then you'll be with whatever comes outta here. Total of twenty.”
“Members?”
“Most, let's see... There's Lobotomy, Mongo, Scotch and his old lady Double Scotch, some travel cards, a couple of Permits off the street.”
“Piss tested?”
“It's McMurray.” The dispatcher gave me a withering look.
“Well, it's only twenty-four days.”
Bang! The dispatcher smashed the white slip of paper into the time stamp. Picking up another clipboard, he leaned towards me and smiled.
“Take care of the kid.”
“Oh, thanks, thanks a bunch.”
“Are you going to be on my crew at Fort Mac?” the kid exclaimed. There was a long silence as I squinted at the kid through a haze of winter condensation. We stood at the door of the Union Hall.
“I'm going to Fort McMurray,” the young man said loudly, as if he were alerting the media.
I watched an old green moving van rumble down an Edmonton side street. I turned and gave the kid a slight nod and offered my hand.
“Rick.”
“Doug, Doug Hyland.” He grasped my hand. I was surprised at the power of his grip.
“Dougdoug.” I smiled.
“So you're off to McMurray.” I suppressed a snort.
“Yeah,” Dougdoug enthused.
The moving truck was having trouble getting from one gear to another. I watched the truck grinding down the street. When the truck's gears finally thudded into the right set of cogs, I turned back to the boy.
“What's it like?” Being a... a Boomer?”
I studied the kid.
“In there,” he said, indicating the union hall, “the guys called you... a Boomer.”
This is getting old real quick, I thought.
“I wrote my pre-employment test,” the man-child said.
I smiled, a little. “We get so many shoe salesmen telling us how good they are, and when they get to Fort Mac they can't tie a knot. You never know.”
“I've never sold shoes.”
I chuckled. In the middle of the laugh I caught myself. My face muscles ached from lack of use. “Shoe salesmen is what we call guys that try to fake their way in.”
“I'd... like to start booming. Be a Boomer,” Dougdoug blurted.
The laughter stopped. I wiped a rough hand over my chin. The gesture was not lost on the boy.
“My Dad does that,” he said.
“You're a first-year apprentice. You think it might be a little early to start talking booming?”
“My cousin is a boomer in McMurray and he makes great money.” “I'll bet he drives a huge truck.”
“Yeah, it's really nice. It'sâ”
“And he's got a boat, trailer, and a quad too.”
Dougdoug looked at me.
“And he's got alimony and child-support payments.”
“Yeah,” said the younger man, slow.
“You don't just decide one day to become a Boomer. You just...” I searched for the perfect word, then decided to just blast. “It's not movement that makes you a Boomer, it's skills. You need to be the best welder, the best rigger, the best mechanic on the claim.”
“Boomers go from job to job, kinda like cowboys, right?”
I rubbed my face again. “You're not catching what I'm pitching,” I said. “Most of them are money-hungry, and they come from everywhere. Listen to the talk in Fort Mac. All they talk about is money. All they talk about. Take a good look at the license plates up in McMurray. It's a real eye-opener.”
Our breath hung fat and white in the frozen air.
“Look kid, a Shutdown is like is a football game, a game where everybody gets the shit beat out of them. But nobody lets you stop. There's no time-outs, no rests between quarters. You play offence and defence. The best you can hope for is at the end of the day you aren't hurt. And the noise! The noise is so loud it pounds your ears, face, even your chest vibrates. It's everywhere. It never stops. Stories about how romantic booming is are usually told by people who were never there. And they only tell the good parts.”
“How so?” the kid asked.
“You're working on a real bitch of a job. For two months. Then one night you go to the bar and see a naked pole-dancer and an old boilermaker scrapping. Which one are you going to talk about?”
“That really happen?”
“Slapped him so hard they found his false teeth under the band's drums.” I smiled at the memory.
“When you tell it like that, Boomers sound like employed vagrants.”
“The only thing a Boomer can depend on is his skills and that the job is going to end soon. Boomers gotta keep moving. As soon as guys arrive at the shutdown, they start looking for the next one. I saw a boilermaker that drove seventeen hours through a blinding snowstorm from Thunder Bay to The Pas, Manitoba to get to a shutdown. When he finally got there, he was so tired he staggered.”
I shivered, and turned my collar up. The cold and the company was getting to me.
“A couple of shifts into the job, he started to squirm. Something was always wrong. The work was too dangerous, the foreman was an asshole, the hours too short. Come the first layoff, he's gone. He'd heard about a shutdown in Sarnia, and he took off. Left halfway through the shift, didn't even turn in his tools. Down the Trans-Canada, looking for another shutdown. Like a dandelion seed in the wind.”
I studied my hand. I'd never worn the wedding ring.
“A Boomer's got no family. He knows a lot of guys by their first names, but nobody they could phone up and get invited over. The closest these guys got to a home is a fifth wheel.”
The boy's innocent face was getting to me. I wanted to either shake him or hold his hand.
“You gotta have skills. If you don't have the skills, you can run around all you want, but you are always going to be the last hired and the first laid off. That's not a Boomer, that's a vagrant. And it's lonely, too bloody lonely.”
I reached for the door to end the conversation.
“The only thing good about booming is the money.”
The winter sun was hard in the rear view mirror as the truck chased its shadow north. The music played, the tires hummed, trees and farms passed. My world became snow-covered fields sliding behind me like the engine's rumble.
I left the outskirts of Edmonton around noon, heading north. Once I saw that unbroken horizon beyond that crack in the windshield, a shiver of freedom washed over me.
All those telephone lines, white lines on the road, tar streaks on the asphalt, everything disappears into a fuzzy blackness far out in the distance. I imagined getting so small I saw my body going inside that dot deeper and deeper. I saw where the road should end, but I knew I would never reach it. Sometimes the dot disappeared around a corner or down a hill, but it always came back when the highway straightened. It would swing away for a moment, teasing.
Makes you wonder. Was that what it would be like in a spaceship, going into a black hole? Getting darker and darker and smaller and smaller until you were so dark and so small you joined with all the black into a cosmic nothing?
There isn't anything sweeter than the rumble of eight cylinders and four tires on an open road. The sound sank deep inside my heart, like being spellbound by thunderous music in the front row of a ZZ Top concert.
You have to know that at the other end of those chrome tailpipes there's a thousand pounds of metal that means business. When I touched the gas, an angry sound rattled like a Gatling gun.
I played the CDs loud. The songs were raw, dripping of moonshine, smoky bars, and callused vocal cords. I sang along at the top of my lungs to the songs with four beats to the bar. Not much different from beating on a hollow log, but I'm going north on Highway 63, I'm going to McMurray.
Double lanes take the pressure off. Everybody's going the same way, the same speed. It's funny: you inch up on a car ahead, and it seems to go faster. When I passed, I checked the people out: old ladies, businessmen, kids asleep in the back seat, farmers picking farm-dirt from their noses. Once my truck passed them, it seemed to slow down, even though the cruise control had never moved. It's funny.
The double highway ended too soon.
My truck rumbled past a field near Newbrook where workers had nailed hardhats on top of the fenceposts. There's a mile of different coloured hardhats, each put there by people who had no more need of them, and wanted the world to know it.
The oilfields are easy to findâjust get gas at Grasslands and turn left at the huge green sign that reads FORT MCMURRAY.
Slowly, that black spot got bigger. It spread along the cracked windshield and the horizon. I turned the headlights on. My world became the windshield, the green and red circles of the dashboard, the music, the heater, the steering wheel.
I passed the place where several years ago I had seen people running beside the highway, the black underside of a car in the tall green grass and a splash of black-red blood on the edge of the asphalt. I remembered the overturned car and the crowds rubbernecking, and a woman in a black blouse and bare white arms holding her mouth in horror at something in the grass.
I see that woman's revulsion-filled face every time I pass that spot.
There are a lot of places like that on Highway 63.
Time drifted like smoke in the wind. The humming of the road became my world. All the miles folded one into another sliding behind my truck, going into that same goodbye.
A car passed doing at least 130 kilometres an hour, then another and another. A four-car convoy of testosterone-dripping mouth-breathers who figure if they travel in packs, the cops can only catch the last one. I moved over and rode the rumble strip and let the knuckledraggers pass.