February (15 page)

This was something he’d bought when Sophie was still with him. John liked to try things. He had that kind of intelligence and a photographic memory and the small gift of knowing that if you went at something long enough, hard enough, you got it. That was called certainty. Sophie had said she wanted a baby. I’m not certain, John had said, that I want children.

Red McPherson closed the manila file. I was told about you, he said. You’re the kind of guy who is given a person’s name just once and you remember it for the rest of your life.

That is absolutely true, John said. Mr. McPherson, sir. A person enjoys hearing his own name. Red.

But a guy, people also say, who keeps his cards close, Red McPherson said.

John’s job selling drill bits, the job that came after inspecting tanks, had required that he go all over. Alberta was different from Newfoundland. John could tell you that, no question. He knew some people who’d had knives held to their throats on a rig off the coast of Nigeria. He knew that in Iceland people buried fish in the ground and ate it crawling with maggots. They were into alternative energy in Iceland. They had hydro buses and hot springs. The place stank of sulphur and the people glowed. In Alberta people were macho. Texas, you got a steak the size of your head. You didn’t find a lot of women on the oil patch.

Newfoundland, you did your job and kept your mouth shut. There was a culture in Newfoundland: Shut up out of it. What you said could come back and bite your arse.

Then he’d got the call from Shoreline Group. They were an efficiency agency and there was room for movement, they’d said. Shell was a customer, and Mobil. They were all customers.

We’re an independent arm, Mr. McPherson said. John tried to think what an independent arm might be. It occurred to him that the situation was not full of the sort of legitimacy he had imagined, and for which he had hoped.

Impartial, Mr. McPherson said. John felt the interview had turned before he’d had the chance to speak. They wanted him.

You came recommended, Mr. McPherson said. The man swivelled towards the window and joined his fingers as if in prayer and touched them against his lips.

John thought of Sophie and how she was probably still in bed. He thought of her back, of how he had sometimes slept with his hand on the small of her back. And of how the hair at the nape of her neck was a little damp and warm and tangled.

John was a lucid dreamer and once Sophie had found him struggling to get the big window on the third floor open. He’d turned and said, I’m going to have to go out there. Sophie had led him back to bed.

You had a father on the
Ocean Ranger
, Mr. McPherson said. What was distracting was the guy’s tie. John knew the oil industry inside out. Ontario, they might wear a tie like that. Or somewhere in Texas. A man who was colour blind.

We are impressed, Mr. McPherson said, with your degree.

Oil was like the military—they trained their own, and they wanted you to learn their way. On the rig, if you had a degree they thought you were full of yourself. A degree, and you had better prove something. You had to lose a finger or crack a collarbone, and John had cracked a collarbone, and finally here was a company who nodded when he said engineering degree. Here was a company that could appreciate.

The chair squeaked when Red McPherson swivelled back. There was an orange light blinking on McPherson’s phone. John thought of a hotel room in Edmonton where there had been messages on the phone from everyone who had ever called in to the room. For some reason the messages had never been erased, and one night he had listened to perhaps two hundred messages, some of them in foreign languages.

He had just broken up with Sophie for good. All of the messages were full of the kind of voice people use when they are talking to a machine: dislocated longing, tentative, mildly regretful. Children called to talk to their dads. Girlfriends said ordinary things in sexy voices. Or they said profane things in ordinary voices. Someone had to pick up an entertainment centre at Sears. A man named Tony had to use a go-forward strategy. A very young child said, Nighty-night. Someone’s father had stabilized for the evening. Someone’s plane was delayed. John had pressed his forehead to the cold glass, looking down at the cars fifteen floors below, and watched the fat snowflakes fall from a grey sky, and he missed his mother and he missed his sisters and he was in love with Sophie, but it had taken breaking up with her to find that out.

We want someone like you, Mr. McPherson said. There was a sheet of hard plastic under his chair and one of the castors had edged off it and the man was slightly tilted. He took hold of the edge of the desk and rocked the castor back onto the plastic sheet, wincing with the strain.

Someone who can hold sway, McPherson said. Shoreline Group was a company that went on the rigs and checked out routines, and there was a culture of safety, Mr. McPherson told John, that was detrimental to efficiency. That’s what we want to trim.

Trim, John repeated.

Absolutely, Mr. McPherson said.

John had sold a shitload of drill bits, and the line his company gave was all about penetration. The terminology was sexual and violent: The bits were hard and the sea floor was wet and it resisted and finally gave, and there was nothing a good bit couldn’t penetrate.

Shoreline Group, on the other hand, worked to eliminate redundant safety procedures. They offered a cost-benefit analysis of the safety procedures in place and drafted modification plans, Mr. McPherson said, that impacted directly on waste and redundancy, and the general good for communities at large, and profit margins, and there were stakeholders to consider. There were safety procedures that did nothing but tie the hands of people looking to make things run smoothly out there. Shoreline Group wanted men who could think for themselves. Mr. McPherson wrote a figure on a piece of paper and folded it twice and pushed it across the desk to John.

Yes, my father died on the
Ocean Ranger
, John said.

They’d found his father’s glasses tucked away in his shirt pocket. John’s father had taken off the glasses and put them in his pocket. He couldn’t see a thing without his glasses. He must have stood on the deck as the rig was tipping, removed his glasses and put them in his shirt pocket, and then he probably jumped. His father would have had all his bones broken if he’d jumped from that height. But he might still have been alive when he hit, John thinks. John imagines he was alive. He has always imagined it that way.

My father knew they were going down, John said.

This is what you’d start with, Mr. McPherson said.

John opened the paper and it was more than he’d imagined and he kept a neutral expression.

. . . . .

Helen Making Wedding Dresses

HELEN HAD TRIED
yoga and she had taken up running and when she was in her thirties she had started teaching a waterfitness program for women over fifty at the Aquarena, youth being her only qualification. She had worked those old ladies hard and she had learned how aqua-fitness was like everything else, dragging your limbs through all that water, jogging on the spot through a massive weight.

In the 1990s she had developed a hobby making wedding dresses, evening gowns, prom dresses, a hobby that became something of a business. She had nearly lost the house after Cal died; it took a long time for the settlement. She’d almost lost everything. The bank had threatened, but she had kept the house.

The family went without, certainly. But children don’t need much, Helen thinks. She had raised her kids on nothing. They had not been spoiled. She could certainly say that about them. She’d shopped at the Sally Ann. Children needed food, yes. They needed a warm bed. She and her kids had got through.

My girls are unscarred, Helen thinks. My girls are frugal and shrewd, but they know how to have fun. When her girls were young, Helen had an idea she wanted them to be free of guilt. It was not an idea she had been able to put into words. But it was what she had wanted for her girls.

John could brood. He spent every cent he got his hands on. The girls had been wild until they’d had children of their own, and then they’d become serious. They read parenting books and nodded at the wisdom and told their children, You were not bad, your
behaviour
was bad. I think you need a
time-out
.

Helen had called her own children
little Christers
and told them she would lash their arses or skin their hides if they gave her any sauce, or she’d threaten to horsewhip them. She had flicked her slipper at them when they were rude and, she reminds her daughters, it had worked well enough for them.

A good swift kick in the arse, she would tell them. They were going to get a clout.

Now Helen babysits the grandchildren and makes her daughters go out and get drunk. She bought the babies pacifiers when the girls were dead set against pacifiers, and said, Who’s a saucy baby? She smiled until the babies smiled back. A baby can smile back a couple of hours after she’s born. It’s not gas, like the books say; what bloody nonsense.

She fed her grandchildren ice cream for the first time when they were five months old and watched their little faces. She watched as they smacked their lips and thought about the cold and got their first real hit of sugar, and how gleefully they went after the spoon. Oh-da-dear.

Helen spoils her grandchildren as best she can.
We don’t need to mention this to Mommy
.

Maybe it is true that John was her favourite. He didn’t fit in when he was a kid. He was always hugging someone or wrestling someone to the ground. Johnny was a little scrapper. How many times have I told you? When will you learn? He shouted out in his sleep, a deep ongoing argument. If Johnny cried he’d claim something had got in his eyes and he’d rub them hard with his fists.

Dust from the stupid carpet, he’d say, and kick the old rug with his sneaker.

Cal had bought him Jesus boots one afternoon at a yard sale. Cal couldn’t swim but he coached John from the wharf. Come on, Johnny, you can do it. Two Styrofoam pontoons, one for each foot. The squeak when Johnny worked his feet into the holes. It had gone through her.

You never saw a father so proud of his kids. Helen could say that about Cal. Cal told Johnny that with these boots on, he could walk on water. The white pontoons kept Johnny upright for a few strides before his legs scissored out and he splashed down and went under, coming up laughing and gasping and punching the surface with his fists, swimming after the freed pontoons sailing on their way with the wind.

But after his father died, Johnny was afraid of water. Wouldn’t put his face under the shower head if he could avoid it.

And John has no children. John is capable of hard work, and when he drinks, he really drinks. He forgets to call. He travels when he feels like it, or he goes away on business. Sometimes he is remote. He can lie easily when it suits him. He is, Helen thinks, clutching the phone somewhere in New York right now, talking with a near stranger, the woman who will be mother of his child.

. . . . .

Helen and Louise Are Lucky, August 2008

AND THERE WAS
Louise striding across the beach, and I said, Louise, I said, you’re fifty-eight years old and you have a bad heart. I said, If you attempt to rescue those children you won’t come back and I can bloody well guarantee it.

This poor young mother was racing up and down the beach screaming for help. She had two small children—what were they, Louise? Eight and six years old maybe, and they were on an air mattress and the undertow had carried them out, and there was Louise.

They were out there so fast, Louise said.

We go to Topsail Beach every weekend when it’s nice during the summer, Helen said. Bring a picnic, have a few swallies.

These youngsters screaming for help and the mother gone cracked, Louise said.

Nobody else could swim, Helen said. So next thing, there’s Louise striding across the beach and into the water and she’s giving it to her, batting the jellyfish out of her way.

I didn’t care about the jellyfish, said Louise.

You know what that water is like, Helen said.

I didn’t mind the cold, Louise said. And people were standing up on the beach saying, Who’s the old lady. Look at the old lady go.

Louise was in the paper for saving the children on the air mattress. Her white hair smoothed down and the zebra towel and a big smile.

We had seen what was going on and Louise stood up, and I said about her heart. I said to her, Louise, let someone else do it. She just stood up and ran down the beach and dove right in. And then the crawl. Which we’d learned as children. Head down in the water and turning to the side for breath and the arms straight and the fingers straight, and each wave passing over Louise. She just kept going and there was a flare on the ocean and Louise was almost a silhouette, and I could see the heads of the children but I couldn’t hear them, whatever way the wind was blowing. And when Louise got there, she hung on to the edge of the air mattress and she must have been trying to calm the children, or just catching her breath. Everybody on the beach up to their knees in the water.

She’s too tired, someone said. The old lady is tired. The old lady won’t make it.

This is my sister they were talking about. And I’m going, She better Jesus make it! Then a speedboat came around the spit of land from the next bay, and not a second too soon I’d say, and the boat was upon them in a minute and turned a hard turn, throwing up a wave of water, and they cut the engine.

And everyone was pulled into the boat, first the children, and then Louise.

. . . . .

Minor Redemptions, October 2008

BARRY’S CELLPHONE RANG
and he unsnapped a tiny leather case on his tool belt and the thing was invisible in his hand.

There was a kind of carpenter who cleaned up after himself, and Helen gathered Barry was that kind. He’d worked big sites but he could do the small jobs too. He had built a boat alongside his father and he mentioned this while looking at the sky one evening, and Helen found it very Old World and romantic. But this was not the old world. Or, they still lived in the old world but it was not romantic.