Who by Fire (38 page)

“I’ve missed you too.”

“I’m hoping we can see each other again.”

“I’d like that.”

“You might not when you hear my conditions.”

“Fire away.”

“I want you to see a counsellor about the gambling.”

“I’d do that. I tried once in Mac but couldn’t get the guy to talk to me.”

“I’m hoping you’ll try again. This is what I’ve done. I phoned a psychologist in Fort Mac and told him who I was and where I live. I said I had someone close to me who works in the oil sands and has a serious gambling addiction. Sorry about the next part. I said I thought the person might be suicidal. He said the person should come in.”

“The psychologist will think I’m Native.”

“That’s the idea. If you’re white, you won’t get in. They’re too busy. But if you’re Native and you work in the oil sands, chances are much better. Suicidal clinches it.”

“He sees me, then what?”

“I never said anything about your being an Indian. If he says, ‘You’re white, go away,’ you can go to Human Rights and complain.” Marie gave Bill a name and number. “Since I turned it into an emergency, you’ll have to go quick. But maybe now that you know my conditions, you’ve changed your mind.”

Fort McMurray

IT WAS THE SAME
social services building he had gone to before. After a long sit in the crowded waiting room, they moved him into a small room and offered coffee. Three chairs at a round table; tissue box. He was thinking how exactly the same everything was when the psychologist walked in, the same one as before. He stopped abruptly.

“So the friend who called on your behalf is Native but you aren’t. And we didn’t ask.”

“Guess so.”

“Joke’s on us.”

“On me too. I didn’t know it would be you.”

They studied each other.

Bill said, “Bad idea all round. I’ll go.”

“No. Please.” He was holding out his hand. “Joe Fistric.”

Bill shook his hand. “Listen, Dr. Fistric, I’ve got the same puny gambling addiction and intermittent reliance on alcohol as before. I haven’t become more interesting.”

“I’m not a doctor, not a medical one. Your friend mentioned suicide.”

“I told you back then, I’ve thought about it but not seriously.”

“Listen, Bill, I can’t stop you going, free world and all that, but you must have needed counselling to come here.”

“Yes.”

“After you were here the first time, I felt like crap. I’ve never been farther below professional conduct than I was that day. I wanted to apologize, but by the time I put that thought into action, our secretary had deleted your name and number.”

“Don’t worry about it. Let’s call it square and I’ll hit the road.”

“I have another suggestion. This clinic still has more clients than we can deal with. If I took on a non-violent, non-suicidal client, my partners here would freak. What I’d like to suggest is a kind of friendship.”

“I have no idea what you mean.”

“We could meet for dinner or walks, or drinks. You’d tell me whatever you came here to tell someone. No fee involved.”

“What’s in it for you?”

“I’m assuming I’d talk too. That’s why I’m saying friendship.”

“I’m an engineer, Mr. Fistric. We’re not known for our insights into human nature.”

Fistric laughed. “It’s a compromise. If I could see you in the normal way, or think of someone to send you to, I would. What I’m suggesting is on my own time. Nobody else’s business.”

To get to the appointment on time, Bill had gone straight from the highway to Fistric’s office. On the way to his condo afterwards, he remembered that Lance Evert’s letter would be waiting. He pulled to the curb and watched a go-cup bob in a melt lake beside him. The sign for the corresponding coffee shop leaned into the road ahead. He drove there and parked.

He drank two cups of coffee, ate a doughnut, and finally considered the question of why Lance’s letter was scaring him so. Why, when faced with the prospect of reading it, was he catapulted into the condition he’d been in before he left for Donna’s?

At his building, the mailbox was empty. When he got to his apartment, the door pushed against something that turned out to be a pile of envelopes and fliers. On top was a note from the caretaker: “When you don’t empty your mailbox, the mailman shoves it in. It goes all over my floor!”

He nudged the pile apart with his foot. The envelope from Lance was there. He had printed
CONFIDENTIAL
on both sides.

Bill made coffee and took the letter to the table. What he should be feeling about this letter was sorrow, but he felt mainly fear. The room was stuffy, and he got up to open the balcony door. The track was jammed, and he shook it hard until the ice broke. A burst of birdsong entered.

He propped the letter against his salt and pepper shakers. He reached for a pen and a flier with a blank side. Wrote: “After the farm, I came back to Mac. I saw a psychologist. On the way home, I felt afraid. When I saw the letter from Lance, it got worse. I had my hopes up. I had started to feel better with my sisters. Then Marie said that we might try things again. But the letter set me back. When I go back, it’s never just a step. I go all the way. Maybe Donna’s right and I got wrecked when I was just a kid on the farm. Maybe that’s what I go back to.”

They were in a restaurant, and Bill had given Joe Fistric the note he’d written.

“So what did the letter say?” he asked.

The place was Fistric’s favourite, called Peking Surprise. It was bugging the hell out of Bill. If they were in a bar, full of cranky addicted people, he might have a chance of telling this guy his story. In this chamber of lucky colours, with parents teaching their children how to use chopsticks, it was no go.

“I really can’t talk here.”

Fistric looked around in search of the problem. That he was unable to understand was not helping Bill’s confidence.

“Could we go to a bar?”

When they were standing outside, Joe Fistric suggested they look for a place without gambling machines.

“We might as well go home, then.”

Piggy’s, the cavernous sports bar Bill chose, had lots of gambling machines as well as parimutuel horse betting in a back parlour. But it was a dark night in the NHL and the place had more echoes than people. As they walked through, Bill counted three couples in the dining area, all bleary with drink. Through an arch, five elderly punters were hitting themselves with racing forms.

Bill led Joe to the far side of the horseshoe bar. The fake plank was empty and gleaming. They mounted barstools.

“That feels better,” Bill said.

Joe frowned. “I find this place depressing.”

The bartender swirled a damp rag over the clean bar, leaving greasy circles. Said what’ll it be. Fistric wanted beer but could not think of a brand. It was like he’d immigrated yesterday, from Tehran. Bill asked for an IPA, and Fistric said likewise.

“Do you know what IPA means?” Bill asked when the bartender moved away.

“No idea.”

“You don’t come to places like this much.”

“Too likely to see clients. Clients don’t like it if they see you where they drink. They want you to be above all that.”

The beers arrived.

“Where do you want to start?” Joe asked. “And cheers, by the way.”

They clinked their pints. Bill tried to think of a starting point. The thoughts that came were mostly things he’d prefer not to talk about.

“India Pale Ale,” he said.

“How about we start with the letter?” Fistric suggested.

“I don’t think we’ll get far with that.”

“Why not?”

“I haven’t read it.”

“I’m confused then. At the restaurant, I asked how you were, and you said, ‘Not so hot.’ You gave me the note that you’d written referring to a setback caused by a letter from a friend.”

“The man who wrote the letter is dead. I can’t face what it might say so I haven’t read it.”

“Okay. You realize you’re going to have to tell me who this guy was. And why a letter he wrote before he died could make you feel so bad you can’t read it.”

Bill took a deep drink, then said that Lance was the man who had trained him to be a gas plant engineer; that Bill had married Lance’s niece. He said a few other things.

When he stopped, Fistric said, “I think you must’ve skipped the part that made you unable to open the letter. Unless that’s your response to grief over his death.”

“That’s not it. What I left out is that I disappointed Lance in important ways. He was a great engineer and a great teacher. I tried to be as good as he was. Then some things happened, and afterwards I was content to be average. I also left his niece and our children.”

“I guess you should tell me about the things that happened.”

“Maybe it’s only one thing. My father died.”

Fistric left a gap. He took a tiny sip of beer. Drummed his fingers on the bar.

“We should talk about that,” he said. Then he looked alarmed. “You okay?”

Bill did not want to think whether he was okay or not okay. The moment had raced up; he was suddenly there. He felt he had
to say it quickly or he might lose courage and never get this close again.

Everything collided on his tongue. When it started to come out, it did so in tangles, out of order. He couldn’t imagine he was making sense, but Joe Fistric listened steadily, intensely. His fingers had stopped drumming.

“So, you’re talking about loyalty,” he said when Bill ran out. Fistric’s face had become gentle, thoughtful.

“Betrayal,” said Bill.

“But what’s betrayal? A failure of loyalty, I think. But there’s something I’m not getting. You said your father was okay with your going into the oil industry. With this Lance. So what made it a betrayal?”

Something rose in Bill. He turned on the stool and hung forward. The feeling was big and swarming. When the force of it ebbed, he said, “Sorry.”

“Don’t be. This is all good. But you look pale. Why don’t you take a walk around the room, or go outside? After that, if you feel like stopping, we will. If you want to go on, we can do that too.”

In the deserted bathroom, Bill washed his face over and over. He would wash it with cold water, dry it with a paper tower, then long for the cool water and start again. After drying off the last time, he stared at himself in the mirror. There was something in his expression he didn’t think he’d seen before. Exhaustion wasn’t the right word but in the ballpark. He was often told he looked young for his age. This was not a young face.

He returned to his barstool and said he wanted to continue.

“Do you want to talk about your father? Or about Lance?”

“About Tom. My father.”

“It upset you when I said your father was okay with your becoming an engineer. It wasn’t like that? He wasn’t okay?”

“When I came home that spring, I was expecting to work on the farm, like I had every summer. When I got there, Tom said I should check for work at the plant. Lance gave me a job. The plant was a messed up sour gas plant, and my father had fought it for as long as I could remember. Even after it was obvious he’d never get anywhere, he kept fighting. He was trying to launch a lawsuit against them. Then his only son goes to work for them, and he’s fine with it?

“That summer I went to work for Lance, Tom was suddenly different. Really different. He didn’t talk about the lawsuit at all. I was willing to tell him everything he wanted to know about the plant, but he had no interest. He accepted things that used to make him crazy.”

“Are you saying he had a temper?”

“Legendary. Then, poof, it was gone.”

“You sound disappointed that he changed.”

“I thought it was fake. I even thought he was putting it on to make me feel bad.”

“And it did make you feel bad?”

“He was so mild it was making me sick. It was like he was saying, ‘If this is what everybody wants, I give up.’ He sold most of his cows that summer. I don’t know what to call that.”

“Prostration?”

“You’ve got it. He was prostrate.”

“Did other people in your family see it that way?”

“Ella, my mother, said I was making this stuff up because I felt guilty.”

“Do you think your mother was right? In hindsight?”

“I did feel guilty. But what I saw with Tom wasn’t something I’d invented. I had to be the cause of it, at least partly.”

“Later on, when your father died, did you feel that again? That you’d caused it?”

Bill felt bashed again. He stared at a scrunch of napkin. It floated above the black floor like a lily. He wanted to wash his face again. “He died young, I take it,” Fistric said.

“He was the same age I am now.”

“You know, don’t you, that a lot of people feel responsible when a parent dies, especially if the parent dies young?”

“I know that. My sisters felt responsible too.”

“How many sisters?”

“Two. Both older.”

“What do you think? Do you want to call it an evening, or do you want to talk about Lance? Why the letter is a problem.”

Bill was about to say he wanted to go on but realized he could not.

Later, in bed, he thought about Marie. He wanted badly to call her, but what could he say?
I saw the therapist in a sports bar. We’re calling it a friendship. Gambling didn’t come up
.

“How about the letter? Are we going to get around to it tonight?”

Fistric was sawing through a steak in Bill’s usual restaurant.

“Guaranteed,” Bill replied.

“Why so confident?”

“I read it before I left home.”

“And?”

“Let’s finish eating.”

“Okay, sure.”

“You can talk if you want.”

After suggesting he wanted these sessions to be mutual, Fistric had proven reluctant. He’d been divorced in the last year, and, if he tried to talk about it, he got tongue-tied and glum. He did so again for a minute or two now, then shrugged.

“Let’s keep going with you. It’s more promising.”

By the time they finished their meal, the adjacent lounge had emptied. They moved across and settled into a pair of chocolate armchairs. Bill pulled Lance’s letter out of his shirt pocket, shook out the folds. He had marked certain passages. He read the first one to Joe.