Order of Good Cheer (28 page)

Drew said he'd never been able to figure that stuff out.

“But, decent name,” Andy said, tapping his wrist where a watch would be. Drew had always been in love with his son's slang. He'd loved it, for instance, when at twelve Chris said he was going to make tennis his bitch, and when he started calling high school “the taint.”

HE TOOK THE EAST
lift to the bin tops, choosing this clanky, open-sided, and unnerving elevator because he pictured taking Laura up here too, when a slacker supervisor was on. From this lift — a rusty cage open on two sides, a red bar your only barrier to freefall — you rose through a good view of the terminal's dank and rusty guts, all dark and hissing and banging, a chaos of heavy-duty, of industrial revolution, nothing prettied up for public viewing, no soft giant turning cogs Charlie Chaplin could ride on without getting crushed. The shape of all metal was designed for function; enough bare light bulbs dangled so
eyes could just see; red paint indicated what would kill you; a lift that said
Max 5 Person
probably meant it. If you stood in one spot for a minute you might see a spectacularly plump rat trot by. Grain dust went in and out your lungs, always. And it smelled stronger than a cheap apartment block at dinnertime. Andy could hardly smell it any more but visitors said the place smelled overwhelmingly like dry pet food fermenting.

Yet not even counting the paid reading time, it wasn't bad here. He'd tell Laura that despite the American takeover the paycheques were still robust, at least for those kept on full-time. And, Laura, there have been entertaining things. In the early days up on the gallery, guys drove countless golf balls over the road as far as the blue Pacific, much laughter and money changing hands, and it went bad only when cars became targets, the poor coal-terminal bastards speeding home after their shift. Not another golf ball was hit up there after Bert Stempniak's windshield got nailed and he went into the ditch and his airbag broke his collarbone and glasses. And there was rat-plinking: guys bringing pellet guns and on their own time having contests, the laughing rationale to supers being, “For less rat part in Chinese dumpling!” There was the summer Galloway, nicknamed “Newman” after the
Seinfeld
fatty, busted a bathroom sink right off the wall while having day-shift sex with a still-unidentified woman. No one wanted to picture it and said so. There was that summer of the seven pot plants growing up on the annex against the sunny side of his tin shed, Andy swearing to a supervisor not only that they weren't his but that he didn't know whose they were, though he did. Grain dust was purportedly the best medium for growing absolutely anything, but PR apparently wasn't tropical enough and the spindly plants never got more than two feet tall, and the supervisor merely pointed at them and laughed and walked away mumbling about Charlie Brown Christmas trees.

The lift banged to a stop. With no need to please the public, the braking mechanism involved no rubber or springs and for one instant you were a hundred pounds lighter. He imagined Laura beside him, both of them leaning over the red rail to take in the two-hundred-foot drop to the dim concrete far below, feeling this same big flip in the belly.

Andy was glad he was five minutes early because he relieved Dean, one of his brasher coworkers. (Dean typically carried his coat and wore only a beater underneath, to better showcase his several heavy-metal tattoos.) This afternoon Dean brushed by him with a flat “Yahoo,” where often he had a joking complaint about Andy's bookshelf lacking porn, or why weren't the rest of them allowed a tv. Dean might mock himself to Andy with a purposely mispronounced, “What do I know, ain't been to a
libary
in my life,” a
sort of
compliment, but like being licked by a dog that hated you. (One time Dean had more or less called Andy a liar. A group of guys, some of them rec hockey players, were recalling funniest-ever team names they'd heard, and Andy blurted one he'd read about, “The Swastikas,” and Dean had said simply, “Bullshit.” Andy had to explain that it was a women's team, from Edmonton, from the ‘20s, before Hitler, and while some of the guys looked dubious, or impatient, possibly because he'd bothered including a women's team, he had to mumble further that swastikas were actually a religious symbol, not just in Hinduism, and . . . sometimes it was just too complicated to open your mouth at all.) But Dean did seem impressed once at lunch when, after marvelling over how long a glue-strip-stuck rat in B Annex had stayed alive — fucking
days
— Andy let slip that rats were the one animal that could go without water longer than camels.

He stowed his lunch, checked the screen, saw that the ship currently tied up was on a long canola fill, which would last the
night. Aside from two scheduled shutdowns to let deckhands on board change holds, Andy could put his feet up and finish Lescarbot's story about the Order, an account far more complete than Champlain's, with descriptions of songs and skits performed. Lescarbot seemed to be taking most of the credit for the idea.

First Andy stepped out to stretch a bit and breathe the evening air. Laura, this wasn't too bad a job. Noisy, but the noises were expected, machines doing the hard labour, doing what your computer screen said they were. Smelly, but a body got used to anything. Like his nose, his ears had also adapted. According to his latest on-site medical, the decibels had been killing cilia — the little hairs — in his inner ear. He could see this in two ways: he had suffered a twenty percent hearing loss, or he had adapted to the noise and was now more comfortable.

Some hundred metres distant, there floated
Highlander
, a mid-sized freighter typical for its Panamanian registry and Filipino crew, and probably owned by some Russian potentate who lived in nouveau riche New Jersey. The ghost-orange halogens were already on and the vast expanse of decks was lit up so as to suggest empty midnight basketball courts in an oddly deserted city. He could see a few deckhands leaning half over the rail, literally hanging around, bored senseless, noodle-arms dangling like they wouldn't care if they just fell and got it over with. Ship duty no doubt drove these poor souls mad — less than ten miles away from a downtown with lights and bars and women. Filipino sailors generally had less pocket money than even the Chinese, but it would still be fun to walk up and down some strange streets. There on the other, seaward side of the ship, it looked like a clutch of them, at least, were fishing.

The Philippines was a Christian country, and Andy wondered what those guys down there felt about being at sea at Christmas. Probably similar to the boys here called in from layoff exactly
three days before Christmas to handle fresh traffic, pissed off to work the holidays but happy for some time-and-a-half, and double time on the day itself. Rum 'n' eggnog money, right on cue. Buy Junior the latest twitch system, be a hero after all.

Andy turned to go in and read when a small plant caught his eye, growing in a wedge of grain dust gathered near the silo edge. He wondered if it could be mint. It looked like it, the classic leaf shape, with those wrinkles. He didn't like going that close to the edge, so he'd leave it be, but it would be nice just to step outside one's shack and pick something wild, wouldn't it? Did mint go with moose? He should go online to search out more spices the French had. He should be phoning Leonard. Mussels. Moose.

Andy closed the door to his shed. He swept Dean's lunch crumbs (he could smell tuna) off the metal table, feeling as he did so its odd surface, layers of thick paint over carved graffiti. Boredom's strata. But it really wasn't a bad place. He could tell her stories about some characters here, yes he could. Though some of the more high-octane stuff was troubling. Laura would have heard about Pauline's father, who fell maybe fifteen years ago now. Andy was up in his annex shack when Joe was reported missing, and he took part in the search, poking into the few nooks and crannies up on the bin tops, and peering over the edge in the spots that had safety rails. Pauline's dad was a supervisor and could be anywhere on site. Ten minutes in, Andy saw the arc lamp they'd brought to illuminate something, and then he could see Joe, lying way off, tiny and spread-eagled, two hundred feet down under Silo B. No one had a clue how Joe Mulders could make this mistake. He drank a bit but was a regular sort. There was no possible connection, but maybe the weirdest thing was that Pauline's father died a year and a day after Drew's mother had gone into the river.

Andy only heard about another one, a big prank gone wrong. Sam Cuthbert decided not to quit but get himself fired because it was easier to get pogey that way. But in the old days it was actually hard to get fired. If caught drinking or smoking dope you got suspended, which people called the unpaid vacation. Cuthbert conspired to get fired in a blaze of glory, timing everything for the toughest super, Jackson. Cuthbert had wild hair and beard and a huge flabby torso, and his better friends called him “Hogbody.” Hogbody's idea: a conveyor belt cornered near the door to the general office, and if you roller-bladed against the flow, with the help of a friend's signal, Jackson would emerge to encounter a naked Hogbody skating at him hard. There was some question as to whether he'd jump on Jackson then or what. Cuthbert practised blading the belt a couple of times, and he did attempt the prank, except he was drunk on this his last day and fell after only a few strides, flew away on the belt, flipped at the bend, and got caught in the rollers. All Jackson saw was a naked man stuck in the belt fifty yards down, screaming for real though barely heard above the noise. Sam Cuthbert lost a leg mid-shin, and the pinkie and ring fingers of one hand, and it became a difficult anecdote to entertain someone with, because you could be sure Cuthbert himself has never laughed at any of it.

Then there was Andy's own first day bin-digging, the rite of passage to which they used to subject every new employee. It was horrifying, Laura! You're nervous enough, guys joke about death by methane as they strap you into a leather diaper-thing and clip it to a thin cable, and now they're sticking a weird hard hat on you, a tin one with a miner's light on it, the only light you'll have down there. Then the ratty old gas mask, which looks First World War and snaps to the hard hat with rotten leather straps; so they weren't kidding about poisonous gas. They hand you a shovel! The job is to loosen up crusted grain at the bottom
of the bin, hardened from the tons of pressure. (Sort of like coal? Andy joked, nervous. Sort of like
diamond
, some wag hissed back.) They tell you that, at the bottom, some choose to step out of their harness because it's hard digging while attached to the cable, but then there's the danger of drowning in loose grain, which is
worse than quicksand
, someone adds. And because it contradicts the crusted coal image so much, you realize they're just trying to get you nervous with the worst stuff they can think of. Still, he was lowered two hundred feet, through poisonous air, in the dark, on a WWI cable. Laura — it was horrifying! But you wished new guys were still made to do it, all the same.

THAT NIGHT AT TEN
, an hour left in their shift, Drew called from downstairs.

“So, yeah. We're splitting up. After New Year's I'm moving out.”

“You're kidding. Where?”

“Those blue apartments on 6th, past the hospital? Third floor. Decent view.”

“Holy cow.”

Drew had chosen a phone call, at work, to have their heart-to-heart.

“We're thinking the weirdest part'll be that we're both still in town. I mean, we'll bump into each other. We'll hear that so-and-so was with so-and-so last night.”

“Holy cow.” Andy thought for a moment. “Hey, is that what happened? Does one of you already have a so-and-so?”

“No.” Now Drew paused to consider. “I can't even imagine a new so-and-so. I don't even know what you do to get a so-and-so.”

Drew's romantic history: two decades with the same person. Andy doubted either had ever cheated. So Drew had never dated as an adult, never been a free agent, on the hunt. But surely he
wasn't now seeking advice from his best friend, whose own dating tactics apparently involved sitting around waiting almost two decades for his girlfriend to come back.

“You still splitting up even with Chris back here?”

“What's Chris got to do with it?” Drew asked, calmly. This was raw, skinless territory, and Andy could sense Drew trying to come up with something funny. “I'm paying him back. I'm running away from home. Show him what it feels like.” Drew paused, and his tone shifted. “He won't even know I'm not there.”

Andy shook his head at his friend's complicated pain. He remembered Pauline telling him how Drew thought
he
was depressed. Maybe when Drew saw him he saw complicated pain. But now wasn't the time for that talk. Likely there wouldn't be a time. Droning comfortably into the phone, loud enough to be heard over their respective nearby machines, they talked about little things, Christmas things. Pauline wanted Drew to help her cajole Chris into going to midnight Mass, “just once, for the experience,” but Drew wasn't playing along, because there was “just no good reason to go, even to gawk.” Then Drew remembered something he wanted to ask Andy, and it was whether he still had that Chinese woman's —“not the pretty one's”— phone number.

“Who, May? May E?”

“Yeah. Not the pretty one.”

Andy explained that he'd given her his number, not the other way around, and asked Drew what was up.

“I guess something weird happened,” Drew began, and then went on to tell Andy what his father had told him, which was that it seems “the other one, the pretty one —”

“Li.”

“— had left town last week, flew back to China presumably, but called the PR police station from the airport to make a
confusing complaint that sounded like sexual assault, but maybe not, and she mentioned one name —‘Danny Boy'—and described two men, and one sounded like Art Tanner.”