Kanata (47 page)

They sat down at a small table. Babiak ordered four draught and sat silently until they arrived, then he knocked one back in a single slug and started talking. “Was working High Tower No. 5, digging holes in the foothills, never found anything. They had a driller named Donahue, drank some. Not so much on the day shift, when the push was around. But slow drilling graveyards he'd get a skinful. Sometimes he was out cold, sleeping on sacks of sawdust and the motorman had to make the connections. Well they set up on the eastern slope, early summer. Donahue's crew. Around the end of shift change, he gets that derrick hoisted. The cable's holding it snug, except Donahue, he's had a few snorts in his coffee and he's a bit relaxed. And he doesn't put the pins in to hold it. It's just that cable holding twenty tons of fucking steel. The wind is blowing pretty hard over those hills. Donahue gets in his truck, takes a few shots from his flask, and he starts driving down the lease road. Looks in his rear-view, and he sees that derrick starting to sway. It hits him that the pins aren't in. He stops the truck and sits there. That cable finally snaps and the derrick kind of waves up there in the wind for about five seconds then starts to go. It just heads down, a hundred forty feet of steel and when it hits, you know it, man. The dust comes up. Derrick's twisted and buckled. Ain't worth shit now. Useless as three Arabs. Old Donahue sees all this in the rear-view and he takes a jolt from the flask and he just keeps driving.” Babiak let out a big laugh and took a long pull of beer. “No one has seen the son of a bitch since. I heard he was logging for Schlumberger out of Oklahoma.”

Curtis came in, dressed up, his face open and nervous, and stood at the bar. Babiak stared at him. “Kid don't have a lick of sense,” he said. He drank the last of his beer.

“Hey, Trouble,” Michael yelled, and waved. Curtis spotted them, looking relieved, and then got his face looking nonchalant as he walked over.

B
y midnight, there were six of them at the table, all telling stories. Wells that had blown in, sending pipe out of the hole like spaghetti. Water tanks that had rolled off the truck and into pig barns, farmers that had shot the boilers up, fingers lost in the spinning chain, drunken roughnecks that fell into sump tanks, grass fires, rattlesnakes in the doghouse, threeday poker games, waitresses who broke your heart and took your money, Cadillacs that caught on fire. They worked on the rigs every day and every day they cursed them, and on their break they talked about them for six hours straight.

But they never spoke of oil, Michael noticed. It was an abstraction. Sometimes they talked about women, though they were abstractions as well. This was a womanless landscape. There were maybe two hundred men in the bar and fewer than fifty women, drinking with their men, not saying much, clinging to the wreckage. The songs were all about women, though. The band was playing “Humpty Dumpty Heart.”

Curtis said he had to take a leak and got up, and Babiak started telling them about a guy he worked with who got in a fight over a pool game in a bar up near Grande Prairie. “Ahern, Bobby Ahern, about five foot fuck all, but wide as a house. So he flattens this guy, and the guy's girlfriend picks up the eight ball and lets fly. And this girl's got an arm. Ball's coming at him from six feet away. It hits Bobby's forehead at
about fifty miles an hour and it sounds like someone smacked the boiler with a ball-peen hammer. He just stands there, though. Don't go down. His eyes are glassed over like he just found Jesus in the Cecil Tavern. We lead him to his chair and he sits. ‘Damn near knocked me off my feet,' he says about ten minutes later.”

After every story, Babiak's head went back and he'd roar. Michael listened to a few more stories, then said softly, “Curtis.” He hadn't come back.

“Shit.” Babiak got to his feet quickly. He and Michael raced to the men's room. Curtis wasn't there. They followed the hallway at the back of the bar to the back door. They opened the door and there was Curtis lying on the pavement by the kitchen bins, groaning, his face bloodied. They didn't need to search his pockets. His hand-tooled boots were gone too.

M
ichael had kept the news to himself, but on the last day of August he told Babiak: He was going to university in September.

Babiak looked at him. “I figured you for higher things. But I'll tell you the truth, you're too damn old to learn anything. I hope you're just there for the pussy. I quit school when I was eleven. No fucking regrets. Who am I going to send up the stick?”

“Maybe give Curtis a try.”

“Christ,” Babiak said. “He'll blow away. Have to pick him off a weather vane in Drayton Valley.” He lit a cigarette. “What they going to teach you up there, Studhorse?”

“History.”

“Like we don't have enough of that.”

6

M
ACKENZIE
K
ING,
K
INGSMERE,
1950

His breathing was laboured and wet, as if each breath had to swim to the surface. If his brother, Max, were here, he would cure him. Or Louis Pasteur. King noticed that his skin had a bluish tinge. He coughed some blood into a handkerchief. The grey man of politics suddenly colourful.

What was it that Frank Scott, that miserable poet and dedicated critic, said about him? That King would be remembered wherever men honour ingenuity, ambiguity, inactivity, and political longevity. King was the longest-serving prime minister in Canada's history—twenty-two years, the longest-serving leader in the English-speaking world. His mother's faith had been well placed, his own
doubts without cause. He had risen to the challenge. What Scott and so many of his critics failed to understand was that greatness lies in what you prevent rather than what you create. He had brought the country together, or at the very least, he was the prime minister who divided Canada the least.

Looking back on the state of the nation, he was rather pleased. Communism had been stifled, the war won, the Depression ended, French and English were living comfortably (if not happily) beside one another. Canada had inched further from Britain (though dangerously close to America). Villains had been punished. The events had been biblical, threatening the very globe. And in this maelstrom, Canada had flourished, and he had played an important role. Surely history would grant him this.

The war was the sorest test. It would be a pleasant reunion with Franklin, who he had already spoken to. He wondered about all those souls from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That fearful demonstration would haunt the world, no doubt. The blast had imprinted people like shadows onto the sidewalk. Thank God it was the Japanese who received the atomic bomb and not white people. The Americans had dropped leaflets on Nagasaki, warning of the bomb's awful power, though they had been dropped after the bombing. To lessen the awful consequences, Truman told the American people that Hiroshima was a military target. He was already rationalizing. But Nagasaki had no strategic purpose, no military goal. What would history make of that? What was that Japanese slogan—“Extinguish Britain and America and make a bright new map!” It had been chanted by schoolchildren apparently. And in those flashes in August a bright new map had been
created, one that would chart the future of mankind. King had found Truman a curious man, the Missouri haberdasher trying to grow in the giant shadow of FDR.

How would King be mourned? He knew there wasn't going to be the love that had spilled out of the nation's heart when Laurier died, or when the flawed Macdonald, or even the deeply flawed D'Arcy McGee, passed on. His accomplishments would be appreciated over time though, of this he was certain. No less an authority than Lorenzo de' Medici had assured him of it, a man who understood history. His legacy would form, gathering power like a summer storm, first a hint of breeze, a change in the air, then the deluge. And he would watch it, like a sporting event perhaps, seated with his mother, his dogs Pat I, Pat II, and Pat III (hopefully there won't be any trouble there), with Laurier, and his beloved grandfather. They would watch his stature grow over time. Like Laurier, he would offer his own counsel to those who were progressive enough to seek it.

His chest ached, a saw going through it with every breath. He was shaking with fever, chilled even under the blankets. Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Even the darkness is not dark to thee, the night is bright as the day; for darkness is as light with thee.

His mother stood over him with her hand on his shoulder. “It's time to go,” she whispered.

LULL

1961–1963

In the 1950s I studied history at McGill in Montreal, a city in its prime, the largest in the country then, still the richest, certainly the most complicated. The life of a campus is youth, young men and women filled with doubt and debate and sexual longing. I was fifty, older than many of the professors. I had a brief affair with a twenty-year-old woman in my class, and it made me feel even older.

Montreal looked like a religious city, governed by murmuring Jesuits, a city of spires, and like every religious city, reliably sinful. The presence of all those churches was oddly comforting, but I never went inside. Occasionally I went to a nightclub on Mackay to see country-and-western bands. I found that plaintive music soothing.

When I came back to Calgary in 1953 it wasn't quite a city. It was a conservative place, a wall of order, the hand of God visible, perfectly balanced between optimism and dreariness. It was in the 1950s that I found love. The fifties were the necessary lull after the bomb. It seems unlikely now that anyone could find love in that tentative time, especially at my age, but I did.

Michael looked at Billy's quiet face. Seventeen was all about yearning. Yearning for the girl who sat beside you in home-room and smelled like honey, whose pens were arranged in a neat row on her desk in the gradated hues of the rainbow, her eyes filled with kindness, her unattainable hair. Or yearning for your friend's mother, whose hand on your forearm was electric.

Michael had been pulled toward a hundred women. He remembered a woman he'd seen on a Paris street forty-seven years ago. A woman he'd never even spoken to who still clung to his imagination. Something in her face, the set of her eyes, her lips parted as if she was going to tell him something, the way she stood; he could see a lifetime in her. She smelled like straw when he stood near her, waiting to cross the busy street. Like an animal he read her through gesture and scent, attaching moral equivalents to these cues (she would be a wonderful lover, he thought as she delicately straightened her dress, and this when he was virginal himself). What if he had stopped to talk to her? They talk, have a glass of wine, fall in love, get married. His life goes in some other direction. But he was a bumpkin then, walking Paris with a soldier's numb relief, and he didn't have any idea how to approach a woman.

As for Billy, who knew? Maybe he loved Nancy Baxter, the blond distraction that sat in class curling her hair with her pencil, revelling in the desire that flowed from every boy in the room. Michael doubted this, though: Billy loved the idea of love. He was unfulfilled. But so were millions. People huddled together in the Depression out of necessity, embraced during war out of fear, allied on the prairies out of loneliness. Not every union was perfect. But the heart keeps seeking, looking for love in books, or old lovers, or strangers. We are all explorers.