Bittersweet Sands (9 page)

The fisherman sat on the edge of the hotel's sofa, twisting his beer in his hands. “Well, first thing you gotta do is make sure there's fish where you set up. Ask around, find out what type of fish there is. Ah, in your spot.”

“How do you do that?”

“Ask at the place they sell fishing gear. If they don't know, nobody does. Once you find out what fish you are looking for get the proper...”

“I thought we were going to get naked,” blurted out the smallest of the welders.

“...bait.”

Dimples looked directly at the small man. “It's Sunday.” She glared at him. “C'mon, ladies, time's up.” She stood.

“No, no, no!” said the big welder. “It's okay! Stay. Please.” He looked at the smallest man, who had said the unthinkable. “If these ladies leave, so will you.” The other welders looked at the man. “And they'll be allowed to come back.”

The small man took a quick pull at the beer, glaring at the rug.

The women settled primly back in their seats, their eyes flickering at the door once or twice.

The fisherman got up and opened the door to the hallway. The ladies settled back into their chairs. Dimples smiled at the fisherman. “So you picked your spot, what then?”

The fisherman looked at her. “Oh, oh. Aw, well... then you look for bait. And you make sure the hook is small enough so the fish can swallow it.”

The fisherman talked about setting the hook, making the proper knot, getting the right bait, and on and on. The room fell silent as the women and the welders listened to a man who truly loved his hobby. Late into the night, the man's voice resonated, interspersed with the softer voices of women asking questions. Fishing rods were handed around, lures were discussed, and the wicker creel for storing fish was tried on.

North of Fort McMurray, past the massive Syncrude and Suncor refineries, there's a construction camp just to the west of Highway 63 called Barge Landing. If you drive past that thousand-man camp and continue down the hill, you'll find a huge dock where barges land and off-load equipment from the Athabasca River.

When dawn came to Barge Landing, it found a tall Métis fisherman with four giggling ladies standing around him trying out their newly learned casting technique. Off to the side were three welders making love to their last beers and staring into the bonfire.

The next day, every man in the crew went out and bought fishing rods.

Day Nine
( Oxygen Content )

CRACKLE.

“Jay, are you there?”

CRACKLE.

“Come in, Jay.”

CRACKLE.

“What's up?”

CRACKLE.

“Jay, the Hole-Watch won't let us enter the coker because she says that
her oxygen reading is off the charts.”

CRACKLE.

“Well it should be reading between nineteen-and-a-half and twenty-three
percent. What's the reading that she is getting?”

CRACKLE.

“The Hole-Watch says it's eighty-point-two.”

CRACKLE.

CRACKLE.

“Turn the monitor right-side up. What's the oxygen reading now?”

CRACKLE.

CRACKLE.

“What's it read now?”

“Twenty-point-eight percent oxygen.”

CRACKLE.

“I think you can go into the coker now.”

( Emeralds and Snakes )

“Ouch! Ouchouchouch!”

“What happened?” the old man asked.

“Banged my finger,” I said, examining my ungloved finger.

Pops joined in the scrutiny. “Hmm, well, could be worse,” he said. “Could be my finger. So let's take a break.”

I sat back, shaking my head. “I can keep up, if that's what you're thinking,” I said, every muscle, bone, and joint in my sixty-four-year-old body aching. “I just want this smoke to clear.”

Pops smiled.

The string of safety lights jerked the shadows inside the coal-dark stomach of the coker. No colours escaped the all-pervasive black. I took off my glove to examine my finger. The age lines on the back of my hand were black and deep in the brittle light. Our eyes were pits, all expression hidden in the shadows.

The work had been going well. We made a good pair. Pops and I had about a gazillion years' experience between us. Pops had said several times that we should be finished our job well before the end of the shift and we could afford to steal a moment.

“How long you been a boilermaker, Pops?”

Pops looked away and was silent. I shifted my position. He spoke as he looked towards the wall, reliving long-forgotten pain.

“Too long.”

“No, really.”

“I had my twenty-second birthday working night shift, welding in a bloody gravel pit. All night long, every time I shut off that portable welder to refuel or take a break, I could hear music coming from a party at a golf club across the highway. You could just hear the sound, kinda shimmering, coming and fading away at the same time. Once, I heard a woman's voice laughing. I stood in that fucking gravel pit, listening.”

Pops replaced his glove, worked his fingers once or twice, and continued.

“I imagined her. To me, she had blonde hair, wide-set eyes, smiling face, low-cut red dress, no bra, and nipples you could hang your coat on.”

“You should have gone and joined them.”

“Yeah, I could just see it. Me and my welding leathers and helmet, walking into some rich man's party.”

“That'd work.”

“I never felt so low. Here I was pouring welding rod, swatting mosquitoes, listening to rich folks having a party. Happy bloody birthday. Well, anyway, that job fixing equipment in a gravel pit got me a job in Brazil.”

“Brazil?”

“I was working for that same construction company when they got a job punching a road through the jungle. I had just gotten married, and I figured I'd make a whole lot of money fast. I wanted to be one of those laughing voices at that golf club.”

“What, this ain't good enough for you?” I smiled, indicating the black cavern surrounding us.

“Being this dung beetle? No. My wife didn't want me to go. She cried, but I wanted to make that money. I wanted to go... make a fortune... so bad. I'd do anything to get out of that gravel pit. So I ended up driving a Cat through the jungle.”

“Gravel pit to jungle,” I said, my voice flat.

“It was a D9 Cat, the biggest... well, at the time, the biggest Caterpillar Tractor they made. I started off trying to knock down the trees like we do here in Canada: raise the blade and beat hell out of the tree. But I learned real fast that if you did that, snakes would fall out of the trees and onto you. We had huge umbrellas attached to the Cats for shade. When a snake fell and hit the umbrella, you'd hear this thump and see a shadow squiggling down off the umbrella. Then the snake would drop onto the hood, the tracks, or the back of your seat. I spent months driving tractor while looking around my feet and ass for snakes.”

“Poisonous?”

“Real poisonous. They told us, ‘Red and black, you're all right Jack. Red and yellow will kill a fellow.'”

“Anybody got bit?”

“I had one try to bite me. I'm working away, minding my own business and I felt something bumping against my pantleg. I look down, and there's this snake trying to bite me. But his mouth was too small. I guess if he could have got ahold of the skin between my thumb and finger, he would have killed me, but he was too small. You could tell he was mad. Just what I wanted: a pissed-off poisonous snake on my leg. So the new camp they dug out of the jungle is infested with snakes: under your bed, in the shower stalls, everywhere. The camp manager goes out and hires local kids to kill the snakes.”

“What did he pay them?”

“Five cents each, and that was the problem. These kids didn't see five cents a year. Some of those kids were bringing in twenty, thirty snakes at a shot, then going home and getting robbed by the men in their village.”

“Wonderful thing, civilization.”

“So pretty soon, there's no more snakes, none. The camp manager thanks the kids, and then tells them to fuck off.”

I leaned closer to hear the story better.

“A couple of days after the kids were fired, the camp is infested with more snakes than before. It was so bad, we had to sleep in the trucks. Shit, there were snakes everywhere. It turns out, the kids the guy fired went back out into the jungle, caught as many snakes as they could carry, and threw them all over the fence into the compound.”

The only white in the coker was Pops' smile.

“So the camp manager decides, screw the kids, he's going to get something that'll kill snakes and not turn on him. So he gets in a planeload of pigs. Pigs eat snakes. Pretty soon we got this herd of pigs wandering around, killing all the snakes in the compound. In a couple of hours, all the snakes are gone.”

“That's it?”

“Oh no, it gets better! To a native, a pig is riches. Whole villages can only afford one pig and our small crew had a dozen. Within a day, we got all the natives from miles around standing outside the fence, staring at those pigs. They just stood there, nothing moving but their eyes, staring at all those pigs.”

I shifted, trying to stay warm.

“First night the pigs came was real quiet. Next night, in the middle of the night, all you heard was ‘creekcreekcreek' as one pig after another got stolen. And some of those pigs were big. It got so that we only had one pig left, and he had to be kept locked up in a pen. The camp manager had to go out and hire a local to guard that pig.”

“I'll bet he loved doing that.”

“Oh, he was pissed.”

“Finally,” said Pops, “the camp manager had to rehire those kids to catch the snakes, but this time, he only paid them a salary. So we got to know the local villagers through those kids. One day, one of the kids brings in an emerald. Every white guy in the place drops what he's working on and rushes over. First the kids, and then the entire village started bringing in more and more emeralds. Then the local mining company comes over to the boss and tells him to get us to stop. We were driving up the prices.”

“Did you get lots of emeralds?”

“My pockets were full. So where was I? Oh, these mining guys, they were hard cases, one up from banditos. They told us not to buy from the villagers, and they told the villagers not to sell to us or their wives and children would disappear.”

I stared at the older man.

“Just before the job was over,” he continued, “we rented a boat, one of those thirty-foot canoes with an outboard. And we go about forty miles upriver, right into the place the emeralds were dug.”

“I thought the villagers did it.”

“We thought so, too. But turns out, the villagers were the first in a long line of middlemen. These guys we visited upstream were the guys that actually dug them out. We were buying emeralds for fifty, sixty bucks each.”

I let out a low whistle.

“The day after we got back to camp, we shipped out. We heard the mining company guys were real pissed we had trespassed all over their claim.”

“Makes you wonder what they did to the guys that sold you the emeralds.”

Pops shrugged, thought a moment, then said, “Well, they were employees.... Anyway, we get into Rio and we're going to fly up to Canada the next morning. Everybody takes their emeralds and jams them into toothpaste tubes and hollowed-out soap bars. They even took condoms, filled them with emeralds, and swallowed them. I get back to Winnipeg, and my apartment was empty. All there was, was an empty wine bottle. My wife had taken off with some guy. She left me a note, though. It was from some lawyer. She charged me with desertion.”

“Ouch.”

“I'm not much of a letter-writer,” said Pops.

“What do you mean?”

“I didn't write.”

“How long were you gone?”

“Nine months.”

“Nine months and you didn't write one letter? Did you phone her?”

“We were in the jungle.”

“At least you had the money from the emeralds.”

“After the lawyer's bill, it was pretty much a saw-off. I got to keep a couple of stones but everything else went to her and the two lawyers.”

I lowered my head but my eyes studied the old man.

“You know,” he said, “about a year after I got back, there was a party out at that same golf club. Most of the club was off-limits, but I walked in that hall, all dressed up and waiting. I thought that club, well, you know, owed me.”

Pops was quiet for a while.

“Pretty cheesy, actually. A lot of fake wood and attitude.”

Day Ten
( Lobotomy's Phone In )

“Golden and Fliese, Gwen Medea speaking.”

“Hi, Gwen.”

“Hi, Lobotomy.”

“I'm not coming in today.”

“I'm shocked.”

“No, really, the Doc says that I have a touch of narcolepsy and I have to stay home and get some sleep.”

“Really.”

“Yeah, really. I'll be in tomorrow.”

“I'll bate my breath. Get that doctor of yours to sign a note because you'll need it to get back on site.”

“Okay, Maybe I'll be in later today.”

“Miraculous recovery there, Lobotomy.”

“I'm a quick recoverer.”

“Yep.”

( That Loud Man )

“I had been working on radar sites in the Canadian Arctic for four-month stretches,” I said. “Just flew from site to site to site, finishing one job and then packing up and off to another one. Never saw anybody, just worked. I knew after a hundred days, I sort of went squirrelly.”

I looked across the table at the silent man. The late-afternoon sun came sideways through the empty dining hall at Borealis camp. The sun cut crags in his neck, and his forehead looked like a pack of wieners. The man remained silent as I continued.