Who by Fire (20 page)

“Why didn’t you tell us?” were Jeannie’s first words. Before he could reply, Donna suggested he was embarrassed at the nature of his problem. She told him how stupid that was in a grown man. He agreed with her; it would be stupid if that was his reason for not calling. In fact, he had doubted they would be interested. He neglected people and expected them to neglect him back.

When he was finally deprived of his morphine and evicted from the hospital, he had returned to the trailer, to its frightening,
propane-smelling emptiness. He found he owned very little now that his girlfriend’s effects were removed, and he decided he would move too. He would leave his job at the sour gas plant by the mountains and look for something up north. There was a boom gathering in the Alberta oil sands, which some were calling the last mega-deposit of petroleum on earth. Bill decided to go there, to be one more luck-starved Klondiker.

Dingbat got antsy when the first boxes appeared. Given Bill’s condition, riding her seemed out of the question. He lacked a horse trailer in which to move her, and the boreal forest was an unlikely place to find horse pasture. Dingbat would hate forty-below.

He decided to give the mare to his landlady, or, really, to her horsey granddaughter, a strapping blonde who knew how to keep a horse civilized. The whole time Bill packed and loaded his truck, Dingbat leaned over the fence and gave him shit.

“I used to ride quite a lot at one time.”

By the halfway mark between Red Deer and Edmonton, Bill was sick of the trip and exceeding the speed limit. His wallet was so fat with profit it was giving him a sore back. He threw it on the dash. He had another roll of twenties inside a sock in his suitcase.

The American was far from the first person to be affronted by Bill’s lack of enthusiasm in a casino. It made him unpopular with casino workers too. The bosses and staff wanted players to hoot and holler, kiss their partners and lovingly polish the machines with their sleeves—all crucial to making the gambling public run to the cash machines with their debit cards.

Instead of feeling happy about the money, Bill’s body surged with unpleasant after-effects. His lungs seemed too large, felt as if they were crawling up his throat. He’d been yearning in the direction of every VLT lounge in every town he passed. In his trailer days, he’d
played them all. The only way to stop feeling disgusted over the waste was to gamble more.

His job was the only thing that could reliably stop a binge. In this way, work and gambling were essential to each other. The balance between them had to be maintained if he himself was not to crumble. Part of his legend in the oil sands was that he was the only unit boss who came back from holidays early, claiming to have had an intuition that something at his plant was going wrong.

Covered in shame after a binge, Bill would send cash to his children. “Here’s for nothing,” he’d scribble on a note folded around the bills. He used to send money to ex-wives and girlfriends too, until he realized it insulted them and made them hate him even more.

By the time Bill had passed Edmonton and was back on Suicide 63, his thoughts had shifted again, to his only serious attempt at curing himself. It happened in Mac in 2008, in the months before the Wall Street collapse. Still in the boom, dozens of companies were digging new mines and pumping steam into in-situ fields. New upgraders were a-building, and companies clambered over each other for machines and men. To keep him from jumping ship, Bill received a lavish pre-emptive raise. The next weekend, in less than two hours, he lost four thousand on his lucky VLT.

The nausea that usually waited until next morning came at him like a tight pattern of darts. He was still in the casino, still at the losing machine and intent on losing more. That’s when he looked up at the “When It’s No Longer a Game” sign and memorized the helpline number. It felt so important that he broke his rule of silence and told the woman beside him what he was planning to do. She wanted to know how much he’d lost, and when he told her, she laughed at him. She said she’d lost three times that much in one day. She pointed at the sign Bill had been looking at.

“I’ll tell you, my darling,” she said, “it’s never been a game for me. It’s damn hard work.”

Like everything in the world, getting help hadn’t been as neat and simple as he’d imagined. He’d thought it would be like the emergency surgery on his hemorrhoids: the person at the help number would hear his problem, and he would soon be on a shrink’s couch. But after he had stated his predicament to the woman on the help-line, she offered a placement in a therapy group in Edmonton. He took down the information while knowing he would never go.

Instead, Bill figured out where the McMurray psychologists were clustered. They were in the same building and shared a phone number. Their receptionist asked him a long list of questions, and, next thing, he had an appointment.

When he got to the office, the waiting room was nearly full, but it was not long before his name was called. He was directed into a small room. Three chairs, a low table, a tissue box. The psychologist entered and sat in the chair opposite. He was a younger, chubbier man than Bill was expecting, and he lost faith accordingly. He could not imagine this fellow understanding his problems.

The psychologist looked no more pleased with Bill.

“When you called our receptionist, she listed some categories. You said your problem was addiction. Is it a drug problem?”

“I’m not a crackhead.”

“Why don’t you tell me what you are, then?”

“My problem is gambling.”

The psychologist sat forward with his pen poised over a writing pad on the table.

“And alcohol,” Bill added.

“How often do you drink?”

“Couple of times a week. My days off.”

“A twenty-six per sitting? Or more?”

“A bottle or two of wine usually. A twenty-six of anything hard would make me sick.”

“Let’s look at the gambling. Do you lose a thousand a week?”

Bill calculated.

“Let me rephrase that. You look like you have a professional job. Does more than forty per cent of your net income go to gambling every month?”

“Maybe a thousand a week if I’m gambling. But I don’t gamble every week.”

The psychologist set his pen down. He pushed his chair back from the table and let his chubby hands hang down between his knees.

“Are you suicidal?”

“I think about it. I assume everyone over thirty-five does from time to time.”

“How often do you think about it?”

When he saw Bill struggling with the question, the psychologist thumped back in his chair. “How often did you think about suicide last week?”

“Couple of times. It was a bad week.”

“And what made it bad?”

“I blew four thousand dollars on a VLT in one session.”

“How about in the month before that week? I’m still talking about suicide, not your wins or losses.”

“Hardly at all except for last week.”

The psychologist bent forward and picked up the pen, clicked the point back into the body, clipped it in his shirt pocket.

“I’m going to level with you. There are not nearly enough psychologists in this town. To say we’re overloaded is a hilarious understatement. You got in because you used a phrase that is a red flag for potential suicide.”

He paused to see if Bill would comment, then went on. “I treat meth addicts, crackheads, alcoholics who beat their wives and children so badly ambulances have to be called. Guys going home to their wives in Newfoundland carrying STIs from camp whores. Pedophiles who work in daycares. A woman who cooks in a camp and has fantasies of mass murder. There are many rapes in this town, and sometimes the rapists and their victims both come to me as patients. A lot of people who come here kill themselves anyway.”

Bill slapped his hands down on his knees and rose. “You’ve been a great help.”

“I don’t need your sarcasm.”

“Do you generally send people away feeling worse than when they came in?”

“I’m asking you to leave. I have a button under my desk. If I push it, a cop comes. I’m serious. Go right now, or you’ll wind up with a criminal record. As for your problem, if you feel it’s that serious, call the ‘When It’s Not A Game’ helpline. There are therapy groups and counsellors who deal with your type of problem.”

Ryder Farm, 1962

COMSTOCK
’
S REFUSAL
to buy the farm hit Tom and Ella hard. For Ella it was like the Bible story where God asks for a sacrifice. After she had suffered over the decision and agreed to it, God changed His mind. She could have been relieved except for the way it left her: vulnerable and full of guilt.

The effect on Tom was hard to gauge except that it drove him even further away. The refusal caused something like a blind to draw partway down behind Tom’s eyes. Week by week, it dropped the rest of the way. Together in the house or car, they spoke so little it was barely human.

“The milk cow is drying up.”

“Billy needs bigger shoes.”

“Some of the hay bales are frozen to the ground.”

In the house Tom did not volunteer anything but would answer any question from Billy or Donna. Billy’s were the scattershot questions of an inquisitive child. Donna’s were mostly about her club calf. Jeannie had no questions for Tom, nor he for her. But there was something about Tom’s look that made Ella think he was no longer comfortable with himself. Everyone left the kitchen after dinner, children first, then Ella, leaving Tom alone at the table. That was not new. But when Ella passed through the kitchen, Tom never seemed
to be doing anything. His Christmas books sat closed beside him, the newspapers were by the radio, his pencil and scrap paper were in a drawer. All he did was stare at the table or scratch at it with his fingernails—and smoke; he always smoked.

The look on his face was not anger or worry, but something less, she thought, something like embarrassment or confusion. Whatever it was, he hung on it, like a sack from a hook. She longed for the days when they had sniped at each other. At least there’d been life in that.

Ella had thought the club calf a stupid project, but now she felt relief when Tom and Donna went to look at the animal. The steer’s shed had previously been used for young calves, a place to warm them during a blizzard. In the summer, Tom had cut the door larger and strengthened the fence, lashed in a water barrel. When Donna lured him down there, he would lean over the fence while she fooled with the calf. She led the steer around on a halter, in circles and figure eights, and this brought a wan smile to her father’s face. She brushed the steer until he shone.

When neighbours dropped by, Tom held up his end of the conversation. As Vic Sebald and he drank coffee one day, Tom let slip something he had not told Ella. Vic asked how the 4-H calf was coming along, and Tom said with sudden anger, “It’s no damn good. It was the best one in the bunch as a calf, but it should be a third bigger by now.”

“Why would that be?” Vic asked.

Ella turned so she could see. Tom said nothing, only jutted his chin at the window, at the plant.

Ella felt for Donna. She did not want her girl to be humiliated by the judges in front of the other kids and parents, come July. But she was pleased to see Tom’s brief fury.

During that winter, Ella felt lonelier than at any time in her adult life, an echo of the loneliness she’d felt when she was a girl and an
only child. She still missed Lance, but now she missed Tom too. Her girls were mostly lost to her: Jeannie with her boyfriend and Donna with her preference for her father. Ella could have visited Dora Bauer or picked up the phone any time, but she didn’t, because the things that bothered her could not be said. Instead, she spent her time imagining what went on in Tom’s head. Was he blaming her for their situation? Thinking they could have been gone on the heels of the Bauers, except for her feelings about home?

She found herself arguing back. What about your stupid horse-trading? That was why Comstock had punished them. If Tom hadn’t been so determined to get the better of the deal, there might have been a deal today.

At times, when she was feeling angry, she imagined Tom that way too. She imagined them roaring in each other’s faces like bears. In reality, the only thing she found to do with her emotions was to go to her sewing room and cry. When the sobbing stopped, stone-cold thoughts remained like gravel on a floor. There is no court, she said to herself, no judge. There is just Tom and Ella trapped in silence.

As that winter deepened, Ella’s thoughts became more refined. Comstock’s refusal to buy them out, Tom’s and her rejection of the half-deal, meant they had chosen to stay. It was a choice to go on imperilling their children. That was what they could not say to one another, and any conversation lacking that statement was not worth having.

They were waiting, and the only thing they could be waiting for was disaster.

Billy took to arithmetic. He had started school in September, and by February was adding and subtracting like nobody’s business. He never had enough work from school to satisfy him and was always plaguing his mother to write down more problems. “No, Mom. Harder.”

Lately, he was drawing pictures too, and it was both happiness and heartbreak to see him hunched over the paper with his pencil clutched.

At the end of February, the health study started. A government man brought a wooden box twice the size of a dog house into their yard. Billy was beside himself. He spent that day standing in front of it in his hooded parka and scarf, staring through its one glass side at the coloured pens that drew lines on a circle of cardboard.

“It’s a clock, Mom.”

“No, Billy. The man said it was a Titrilog.”

“It’s still a clock.”

“He’s right,” said Tom, who had wandered up. “The cardboard circle is geared to a clock.”

“Fine,” she said. “It’s a clock.” And left.

No matter how many times she came to pull Billy away from the Titrilog, to get him to come in to eat or sleep, he would unfailingly tell her, “Blue is hydrogen sulphide. Red is sulphur dioxide.”