Country of Cold (2 page)

The barrel riders had left their mark on the town, however, and even now were remembered in neon signs along Main Street, announcing perpetual vacancies to the world at the Splash ‘n’ Dash Motel and the price of grilled cheese sandwiches at the Foamy Water Café. The townspeople remembered, as well, the sight of the terrified young men and women as they walked up and down the sidewalks of Main Street the night before their attempt. The bartenders, at one time, were adept at judging how many hours the prospective rider had to wait from the rate at which their jauntiness eroded. Just pulled into town: swaggering and laughing. Six hours to go: lips pulled tightly back, eyes narrowed, disposed to vomiting. But the riders were all gone now and the town was the less for it. The floodlights danced against the falling water and it was still beautiful, but duller.

After many minutes of not talking, Lester and Cindee both stood up and walked back to the stairs down to the bar.

“Hey Lester?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you mind waiting until I get to the bottom before starting down?”

“No problem, Cindee.”

“Thanks, Lester.”

When they got back, Marilyn was in a white-hot burn. Harold’s trousers bulged as if a trio of fattened ground squirrels had wedged themselves in there. The line of eager beer purchasers was twenty deep. Lester set to tending bar. Somebody was spraying beer into the mouth of somebody’s girlfriend.

Cindee cashed out fifteen minutes after closing time and grabbed one of the cabs waiting outside beside the still-milling crowd. Ten minutes after that, Sam showed up. Lester was sweeping the floor and Marilyn was counting her money. She tipped out five dollars to Lester. Just to make herself clear. Sam knocked on the door and Lester let him in. He felt guilty, for knowing what was in store for Sam before Sam did, and he would not compound that by being rude to him.

Lester poured him a bourbon and Sam sat down at the bar. “Cindee’s not around?”

“Just missed her. You want some chicken wings with that? They’re still hot.”

“Well, if they’re still hot.”

“Coming right up.”

Lester brought a platter of wings the size of a garbage can lid and pulled up a stool opposite Sam at the bar. He opened a beer for himself. “How are you, Sam?”

“Fine as wine, Lester. Could use some more work these days, but otherwise I’m fine.”

“What kind of work do you do again?”

“I’m a welder.”

“What do you weld, Sam?”

“I can weld anything. Aluminum, stainless steel, titanium, magnesium, anything. Electric arc, tungsten inert gas, oxyacetylene, I do all those. Got my tickets for aeronautical work and pipelines. Since the Rockwell plant shut down, there’s not much call for the fancy stuff anymore. I liked that work—delicate, precise joints in wild alloys. But even black iron is fun to me. Pulling the bead along a plate never gets old for me.” Sam lifted his glass to that. Lester too.

“Sounds kind of stupid, making such a fuss about it like that, but it always gives me a charge. I think it’s great work—making things out of parts.”

“Sounds like it.”

“You mean stupid or great?

“Oh no, great. Melting metal so that it is joined to another piece. Smoothly and evenly.”

“Yeah. It is.”

“You about done that bourbon?”

“Are you offering?”

“I’m offering.”

“Then I’m accepting.”

Lester refilled his glass.

“Cindee looked okay when she left, did she?”

“Sure. I guess she’s been a little moody lately,” Lester said.

“She’s got a lot on her mind,” Sam replied.

“I guess so.”

“It eats at her.”

“Nice woman, though.”

Sam looked right at him. “Yes.”

They went to work on the wings then. Lester ate four-fifths of them and even so Sam leaned back stuffed before Lester wiped the last of the sauce up with a bread roll. They drank their drinks, two men never previously alone with one another, full of barbecued chicken wings in the empty bar. The lights bounced off the heavy cigarette smoke that hung like fog. The cashout was done and the staff had scurried out, headed either for all-night restaurants or late-night television, and just like he always was, Lester was the last one there, nearly alone. Like always.

He stretched and turned around on his stool, away from the bar. “This is a stupid job for a man my age.”

“You don’t like it?”

“It’s easy, but it’s not, you know, not very beautiful. The way welding is, say. I never talk about bartending like that.”

“Welding is the only thing I talk like that about.”

“It’s something.”

“It is.” They sat there another few minutes and then Sam started rubbing his eyes.

“I don’t know how you guys manage to work in all this smoke. Hey, do you want to get out of here, go for a drive?”

“Sure.”

And they got up and walked to the door. Lester stopped to turn on the alarm and lock up behind them. Then Lester got in his truck and Sam got in his. Sam pulled out and Lester followed him out to the lake road and into the industrial park. They pulled into one of the lots. Sam got out of his truck and unlocked a chain-link fence gate and opened it. They drove inside and Sam locked it behind them. Around them were stacks of old car wrecks, train axles, and farm machinery. Among and through this a path led to an old corroded Quonset hut that they could just make out in the moonlight. The two men walked there and Sam opened the door with a key. “I rent this place for a hundred bucks a month. It’s where I spend most of my time these days.” He reached inside and flipped a breaker switch.

Floodlights lit up a cone of night filled with twitching and flickering insects in the sky and spirals of twisted and deranged-looking steel on the ground. Around them, the shadows withdrew before dozens of shining and bent towers of steel and aluminum. There was a tyrannosaurus just a few feet from them, towering and menacing beside a stegosaurus in stainless steel, cringing on the oil-stained concrete floor. Lester gaped. In the last year of his life there had been no unexpected whimsy at all; even before that, stretching back years, he could not remember anything like this.

“Sam,” Lester said, “this is just beautiful.”

“Thanks. It’s just busy work, stuff I do when I don’t have enough to keep myself occupied.”

Lester sat down on a sawhorse. He felt comparatively unambitious—all he had done in his spell of inactivity was eat. The stegosaurus with its twisted neck, looking up at the tyrannosaurus, had an obvious terror about it, a sense of immediate misery that Lester, for one, felt qualified to assess. It was deeply frightening.

“Who’s going to win?” he asked, nodding at the creatures.

“I don’t know. Depends on who’s the most scared, or hungry, I guess.”

“Looks like the tyrannosaurus is.”

“I don’t know. When I built them I thought that, too, but lately I’ve been looking at them and I think the stegosaurus might have a chance. Don’t you think he looks like he has a trick or two left?”

“Maybe. That tail looks pretty formidable.”

“Think about getting hit with that in the centre of the head.”

“Just when you thought you had lunch all sewed up.”

“Yep. You want to see something else?”

“Sure.”

Sam walked to a tarp-covered mound in one corner of the shop and uncovered a silver cylinder, closed at one end, with a hatch screwed shut in the other. “Before I left Rockwell, the project we were all working on was an escape module for the submarines that they were
going to propose to the navy, after that sub went down in the Bay of Fundy. She’s half-inch stainless steel all around and was designed to be able to withstand the water pressure at ten thousand feet. The project was never that well thought out, though, and was cancelled when real paying work came our way.”

Lester stared at the silver cylinder. “So this is it, this is the escape module?”

“Well, it was one of a bunch of prototypes.”

“No kidding.”

“When they told everyone that the contract was cancelled I was home with the flu. When I came in the next day the place was empty. I explained to the security guard that I had to pick up my tools and he just waved me in. When I was standing in the shop with everything lying where it had been dropped and nobody there, well, I just put the module on a ceiling hoist and put it in the back of my truck beside my tools and covered everything with that tarp.

“It’s been here ever since, over ten years now. I’ve been thinking about what I could use it for.”

“Not having a submarine of your own,” Lester said.

“Yeah.”

“Do you have any ideas?”

“I’ve been thinking that it would be a great barrel to ride over the falls in.”

“Of course.”

The next night after work, Lester drove to the Billy Burger Drive-Thru and then he drove off onto a side street to eat in his truck. He was listening to the all-night deejay talking about something to do with mad cow disease and the CIA when he saw Rhonda walking down the sidewalk with someone. He didn’t recognize the man but he was tall and thin and had one arm around her. They walked like they were a little drunk. He watched them for a couple of blocks and then they turned and went into a townhouse. Lester didn’t know if it was his place or her place or their place. He finished his Billy Burger and milkshake and onion rings and then he drove ahead. He looked in as he passed. There was a light on in the living room. There were car parts on the front lawn and the grass needed cutting. Lester kept driving and as he made his way back to his trailer his massive body shook. When he pulled up in his own debris-littered front yard he sat there and sobbed.

The next night after closing, Lester and Cindee sat at the bar, drinking. “Sam and I hung around the other night.”

“He said as much.”

“Are you still determined to move out?”

“I don’t know. He pretends, but we lie about five feet apart in bed. Some days I feel up to just walking and other days I think, This is as good as anyone can realistically hope for. I’m not some model, I can’t blame Sam for not seeing me as one.”

“I don’t have anything smart to say about that stuff.”

“Me either.”

“That’s quite a shop he has out there.”

“Did he show you his dinosaurs?”

“Yeah. I liked them.”

“Did he tell you he thought you were a loser?”

“He seemed to me like a good guy.”

She smoked her cigarette and patted him kindly on his massive arm.

That night after he locked up, Lester drove past the townhouse again. There were no lights on. He parked his truck down the street and then he sat down on the curb and watched the house. There was no movement. It was almost three in the morning. He picked up a pebble and threw it at one of the windows. There was no response. He picked up another pebble and threw it at the same window again. All quiet.

Lester walked back to his truck. He lowered the gate of the box and pulled out the object that was back there. He carried it to the townhouse, where he pushed the old manual lawn mower onto the grass and began cutting the lawn. It wasn’t as noisy as a gas mower but in the still night the squeaking of the long-unused mower rang out as he pushed it back and forth on the front lawn. Lights flashed on up and down the street and Lester could see shadowy heads poking through windows. He ignored them. In the wet dew-laden grass, the mower did not cut well, and Lester had to redo many stretches,
but after an hour he stood before the nicely trimmed lawn panting heavily, with sweat running down his face. Then a bright flashlight shined off of him like he was a jack-lit deer. At first the police officer did not know whether Lester was bawling or what.

“Lester, what the hell are you doing?” Jack Thompson asked.

“I’m cutting the grass.”

“When did you move here, Lester?”

“I didn’t. My wife did.”

“Oh yeah. Been drinking, Lester?”

“A little.”

“Did you drive here?”

“Maybe.”

“Ah, Lester,” Jack said, “now why are you getting mixed up in one of these situations? She’s been gone what, a year? And you’re pulling the crazed ex-husband thing now?”

“Eighteen months.”

“I’d better drive you home.”

“Okay.”

The next night there were four fights in the lineup to get into the bar and the deejay played nothing but late-seventies disco for three hours, in a spasm of nostalgia for a better and hairier time. The kids thought it was great, the staff complained mightily, and only Lester was stirred nearly to tears, leaning against the bar and the mirror frame simultaneously and blinking.

Lester was thirty-six years old. When this music had come out he had been fifteen and thought it awful. He still did. Then he had been going to high school up in Dunsmuir like it was a conveyor belt, riding it there in the morning, through his classes, and then home. After he got out of the Air Force he moved to Rushing River, and worked for eight years in a plumbing supply warehouse. He played hockey in a no-contact league and spent more and more time at the Rushing River Bar and Grill after games. Everyone liked him there, he never got sloppy drunk, and when one of the bartenders got hurt in a car accident he was asked if he wanted some part-time work. He said yes and made more money in a weekend than he made in a week at the plumbing supply store and so he stayed at the bar.

He bought his trailer and met Rhonda; they went to movies on the weekends for a year and then she moved in. She wanted them to buy a house and they started saving for one. He had owned four automobiles in this time, and had had one DWI charge that had shook him up. No accidents, hadn’t cheated on Rhonda, was losing a step in hockey. The last year he and Rhonda had sex less often but they didn’t fight at all. Sometimes she wouldn’t hear what he was saying and then would turn to him and without moving her eyes say, “Sorry, what was that?” And then she left and he had taken it a little hard. This was his life, since K.C. and the Sunshine Band had been on the charts. There was little that was remarkable
here: without succeeding at anything conspicuously, he had managed to create a world that treated him gently for the most part and made him feel at home. And now, if he were trussed up and hanging naked on a hook in a meat freezer he couldn’t have felt worse.