Saltwater Cowboys (7 page)

As they filed into the washroom, Jack relished the break. When they returned he put down the empty teacup and rose to get the door. Weary and aware of the task ahead, he put on a smile and hoisted Lily on his neck. He carried her to the car and strapped her into her car seat.

That night they stayed in a motel outside of St. Jerome. Jack had longed to stop in Montreal and show Angela the shops, old Montreal, and the Basilica. She'd love the big church. But he'd kept driving; it was snowing and the roads were getting clogged.

“Snow's no better here,” Angela said, emerging from the bathroom, a towel wrapped around her wet hair. The television was on, and the forecast predicted more snow all across southern Ontario and the north. “Do we have to keep going?”

“We'll just have to plow through,” Jack said.

The next morning they drove steadily, making it west of Ottawa by lunchtime. Along the highway Maggie had spotted a pair of golden arches. The girls begged Jack to stop. He pulled over at the next service station along the highway and reversed, heading back east to get to the McDonalds. Katie and Maggie sprang from their seats and ran into the restaurant. The smell of starch and hot grease enveloped them, the shrill buzzing of the fountain pop machine and the slush of ice cubes. Katie and Maggie ran around the interior then returned, their faces tear-stained and bewildered.

“What's wrong?” Angela asked as she buckled Lily in the ketchup-stained high chair.

“Ronald McDonald and Grimace and Hamburgler aren't here,” Maggie said.

“Don't worry, my love, we'll get you a toy version,” Jack said. He returned a few minutes later with a tray of Happy Meals, Cokes, and burgers for Angela and himself. He slipped on an open pack of vinegar and the tray upended. The mess of food was drenched with cola; ice cubes squashed some of the steaming fries. The head of the toy Hamburgler snapped off and rolled under a vinyl booth.

Angela bit her lip. Jack sank to the floor as the girls wailed and clamoured around him in the hopes of rescuing the food. Angela wanted to curse. She wanted to smack him. The manager came over. Angela looked sheepishly at him.

“It's alright, we'll get you another order,” he said and asked one of the high-school kids to clean up the mess.

Jack sat down and avoided Angela's eyes. The manager returned with a full tray of food.

Jack ate silently, the girls happy enough with their plastic toys, Angela with no more time for anger, the burger satiating the pangs in her belly.

By nightfall they were outside of Orillia. They stopped in a motel and in the morning swept the cloddish drift of snow from the windshield and drove until they were outside of Sudbury.

“Anyone you know working in the nickel belt here?” Angela asked.

“Used to be, but the mining strike has turned this town upside down,” Jack said.

The sable roadside rock looked as if it had been painted with soot.

“Mining did that,” Jack said and pointed at the rock.

The ebony hills allowed the world above to get a glimpse of the mining world below: the charred rock, scraped of all its worth, so much like the deep, dark canyons underground that the miners colonized, gnashed, and tore at, year after year, for survival and providence. Posterity unheard of, you took from the rock all you could, and all you could now, never worrying about the future or how some town or city would look when you were through. Raven hills be damned.

The scant snow seemed gauzy, a light webbing spread over the town and rocks, temporarily dressing the wounds left by miners, a snow easily blown away by a driving wind. It swirled over the windshield. The growing cold formed a damask-patterned print of frost on the windows of the car as it slunk slowly along the highway.

“We should stop for the night,” Angela said.

They pulled in at the next motel. The room was cheap, airy, and cold. They spent the night under woollen blankets Angela had pulled from the trunk — itchy and thick as dried scabs.

It took the better part of the next day to reach Sault Ste. Marie. The leaden snow had covered the roads. Plows removing snow and spraying salt moved at glacial speeds. The children, barely visible behind a mountain of toys, fought over each toy the other picked up.

“For the love of —” Jack shouted angrily.

“Honey,” Angela said soothingly.

Jack turned up the radio to drown out the noise. A nerve in his leg was throbbing. It was time to stop and find another motel and get something to eat. At the dimly lit restaurant in the roadside motel on the outskirts of Sault Ste. Marie, the waitress placed Jack's order before him. He bit into the small butterscotch brown pie crust. He thought it would be filled with beef. It was sweet and sticky and tasted of cinnamon.

“The menu said mincemeat pie,” Jack said. Angela had a loose string of mozzarella cheese hanging from her chin. She took a bite of his pie and her nose wrinkled.

“That's not ground beef,” she said.

When the waitress returned with apple juice and soup for the girls, she told them it was, in fact, a mincemeat pie.

“It can't be, it's not ground beef,” Jack said.

“A mincemeat pie is made with raisins and currants and spices,” the surly waitress said. She walked away languorously, collected used plates and cups, dropped peas on the floor, and smashed them underfoot with her salt-stained Ski-Doo boots.

Jack shrugged. Baffled, Angela raised her palms.

Things are called different here
, Jack thought.
It's like a whole new language. Like French, only harder because you're supposed to know what things are. That mincemeat isn't ground beef.
If you thought otherwise you'd be looked at like you had evolved no higher than the ground yourself.

He was suddenly gripped by a stitch of embarrassment. Shame for his kids who would be expected to know all kinds of words they'd never heard before. They would be mocked in that cavalier way children have when they are unwittingly cruel. He gulped his tea and made sure Lily had enough arrowroot cookies and juice. He lowered his voice and tried to decipher the slang in the language the contrary waitresses used. He would learn, and he would learn quickly.

The next morning Jack looked at the wrinkled map, a paper cup of acrid tea in his hand. The road ahead seemed to bend and curve around a misshapen lake. It would be a challenge.

“The snow seems at its worst yet,” Angela said, standing by the motel window. The car looked like it had a white plastic carrier on top, so thick with undisturbed snow that had fallen overnight. The sparse, leafless trees with spindly branches looked like cotton plants, round balls of snow on their edges.

Jack thought of the roads, the lake, and the snow. This leg of the trip worried him. When they got on the road they drove the slowest yet. It took them all day to go around the lake. The north shore of Lake Superior, with its solid brown roadside rock drifts and run-off, frozen in mid-air, looked like iced waterfalls. The towns scattered along Lake Superior seemed dangerous and wild, devoid of population, yet abundant with natural riches, wildlife, and as Jack had pointed out, lumber, pulp mills, and newly discovered minerals.

He thought about the amount of explosives it had taken to blast through these cocoa-bean-coloured rocks. How many backbreaking hours of blasting had it taken? How many hours of hauling and dumping — and where was the pit? Where was the leftover rock thrown? Jack pictured the men, snot-nosed, beards full of blackflies in the summer, frozen with spittle in the winter, clearing out when the rocks exploded, trucked back in when the rocks were reduced to chunks, strewn all over the intended road, clawed out of this rugged land.

They had been driving for hours, winding and curving round Lake Superior's choppy coastline. They turned a corner and suddenly they came upon a lone moose, stark and still in the middle of the highway. Jack slammed on the brakes and the girls heaved forward, books and toys falling to the floor with a thump.

“Jesus,” Angela whispered.

“What a beast,” Jack whispered and eyed the tremendous antlers, snout shaped like a butternut squash, spindly legs, and massive rump. The moose eyed them lazily, reared its mammoth brow and trotted off back into the woods.

“Can we stop now?” Angela asked.

“Yes, of course,” Jack said firmly.

They were just outside of Thunder Bay. He took a left turn off Highway 17 and drove into town past Current River. It was a frothy mess of moving water tumbling rapaciously over itself. As they approached the waterfront they were awestruck by the slab of dark rock shaped like a supine man.

“Let's get some sandwiches and have a picnic,” Angela said.

Jack drove until they found a supermarket. Angela ran in and grabbed a loaf of white bread, peanut butter, jam, milk, and bananas.

They parked near the waterfront and ate noisily, famished and tired.

“The clerk told me that it's called The Sleeping Giant,” Angela said and gestured to the mound of rock.

They watched the sun set over the Sleeping Giant and the girls fell asleep in the back. The dappled sun grazed their cheeks, making them look like bobcat cubs, spotty shadows brown and sharp orange.

Angela wanted to nuzzle them, curl up beside them, and hibernate for the rest of the drive.

“Let's get another motel,” Jack whispered.

Transport trucks with yellowed logs piled like rolled cigarettes plugged the highway from Thunder Bay to the Manitoba border. Pulp mill towns along the shoreline emitted grey, woolly streams of thick smoke that filled the air with the smell of boiled eggs. It took the full day to get to Manitoba. They seemed to glide across the province in one straight slick line.

“Where are we?” Angela asked over a plate of hot spaghetti.

“Outside of Brandon.”

Back on the road, the tight chug of a train, the doleful whistle, and the scrape of the wheels on the algid track. The train ran alongside the highway, across what in summer would be flax fields. The flatness of the city limit farmlands was a relief from the rugged Canadian Shield of northwestern Ontario.

In the morning they reached Saskatchewan, bypassed Regina, and drove straight through to the rural areas. Bales of hay, frosted with ice and snow, hedged the highway. Lone grain mills stood strong and defiant in the face of the acerbic wind and snow. Weathered barnyards looked drafty and cold.

“We're almost in Alberta,” Jack said.

Angela felt a twinge of excitement. “We're almost there, girls,” she yelled over her shoulder.

A
few hours outside Calgary, Jack pulled into a roadside diner. It was close to suppertime and the family had been driving all day. Angela was restless. She'd been trying to read in the front seat and had kept her feet curled up underneath her, so her muscles were numb. The children were cramped and tired. Jack was exhausted from the week-long drive across the country.

“We're in Brooks, Alberta,” Jack announced as he looked at the map.

Angela got out wearily. She stretched and yawned, warm breath visible in the cool Albertan air. “Are we staying the night?” She sat across from him in the booth, plates jumbled on the tabletop. Jack nodded and shook salt over his meal for the third time. Angela smiled and the children cheered, excited by the prospect of jumping on the motel beds. Angela knew they didn't have much money left; most of the moving expenses had gone on the credit card since the company didn't offer re-location assistance.

She smiled at Jack between mouthfuls in the hopes of demonstrating patience and faith, but he was unreachable, far-off. Worried about where they were going, she assumed, but focusing awkwardly on the girls, trying to make it fun for them.

He pantomimed and the girls howled with laughter. He crossed his eyes and juggled his potatoes. He stopped when he noticed two men in the next booth staring at him.

“Good day,” one said as he tipped his black leather cowboy and smirked at Jack.

Jack nodded slightly, reddened, and mumbled, “Yeah, my kids, driving all day.”

The two cowboys seated across from each other laughed.

“Where are you coming from?” the dark, tall one asked, his face as wide as the rear of a truck, his nose long and thick like a horse's neck.

“He must be from out east, ‘down home' you say, eh?” the smaller one said, smiling. His eyes were wide and slow, and they blinked lazily as he passed a toothpick from side to side in each cheek.

“Newfoundland,” Jack said slowly.

The bigger cowboy appraised Angela. She held her fork midway to her mouth and pushed black strands of stray hair away from her face with her left hand, tightened the collar of her pink winter coat, and smiled weakly at the burly men.

Jack cleared his throat. “Where are you from? Round here?”

“Well,” the large man said, his eyes on Angela, “we work on a ranch a few miles south of here.”

“Are you coming out here to work?” the smaller one asked.

“Yes, we're going up to Foxville to work, to live, I mean.”

“Well, well we got us a real Saltwater Cowboy,” the bigger man said and winked at Angela. He faced Jack and his gaze travelled up and down his pinched face. “Real fishes out of water, eh?”

His small friend smirked.

“Up here working on the ranches, the oil rigs, the rock up north, hell, we've even got some of you pumping gas at the Shell, eh, Mike?” the bigger said and looked at the small one.

Mike nodded.

“Wrangling a piece of the pie up here in God's country,” the big man said loudly and spread his massive arms.

The children stared at the big man in silence as their feet dangled underneath the table; their legs scraped the chair's red vinyl, sounding like salt crunching under snow. Angela's upper lip stiffened.
I've got four babies to protect, I'm not going to let you push us around
, she thought.

“Welcome to your
new
home,” the big man said as he lowered his arms and slapped his palms on the table. The ice cubes clanged against glasses. “The name's Rob. Where are you guys staying tonight?”