Bittersweet Sands Page 12

  Day Twenty-Three

  ( Spider )

  On a winter’s night, the steam clouds from a hundred vents hang silent above Albian Sands Extraction like a formation of dirigibles. The lights make the bellies of those steam clouds glow a mottled orange. When there is no wind, those silent clouds spread, join, then slowly sink between tanks and passageways, making the edges of the buildings and pipes glow a soft orange. You half-expect to stumble over a body.

  The Extraction Building is where boulders and sand go one way and crude oil starts going the other. It’s an ominous, dripping place that shakes and smells of tar and damp and a touch of fear. The massive conveyors growl and hurl acres of rock and sand and boulders into giant vats. The tumbling, Toyota-sized boulders growl and foundation-shaking thuds rumble the building when the sand gets ripped from its treasure. On the death-cold cement floor, pools of water tremble in cadence with the thump of powerful motors. When they walk past, workers give those tanks space.

  The building has the smell and feel of newly tarred roof beside a cold mountain waterfall. Circles of shimmering gold lights bleed down the walls in futile shafts of light that give the walls dimension but no illumination, so the roof of that huge building is lost in an indistinct black.

  Me and my apprentice walked through the mist, sidestepping a six-ton front-end loader that “meep-meep-meep”ed past us. The yellow-and-rust steel dinosaur pushed the fog aside, and just as quickly disappeared, leaving the smell of burnt diesel in its swirling wake.

  “This place reminds me of Mordor,” Dougdoug said.

  “Huh?” I grunted.

  “Lord of the Rings. You know, Mordor.”

  “You mean with all this yellow fog and the trucks an’ the scary noises? Why would you say that?”

  Dougdoug smiled.

  “Guess what that makes us,” I said.

  “Orcs?

  “I prefer hobbits.” I snorted. “You know, laddie, in the summertime when the doors are open an’ there’s no fog, this place looks like one of those huge buildings they got down in Cape Kennedy, the ones with the huge doors where they put together those rockets. I saw one once on one of my trips to the Keys.”

  The apprentice stopped mid-stride. He knelt and picked up something, and held it in his gloved palm. Both of us studied the dot. It was a spider. There was nothing special about it. The spider was just an ordinary black spider. This one had a slight limp, and rather than move around and explore, the insect sat in Dougdoug’s damp glove. Eight eyes stared back at us.

  “Musta rode in on the conveyor.” Dougdoug studied the insect.

  “Quite a ride.” Both of us listened to the rumbling of a particularly huge boulder tumbling in that vat behind the mist.

  “First bug this year,” I said. “It’s still February.”

  Dougie was quiet for second. Then he looked up. “Can you imagine? You’re sittin’ in your spider-hole, all fat, dumb, and happy, waiting for spring, and this gigantic claw comes down and grabs your whole world and dumps you into a truck, and then dumps you onto a conveyor, and then dumps you into a bin...”

  “I know, ruins your day. C’mon, kid, let’s go.”

  I stopped, then looked at the young man as Dougdoug continued to study the insect. Dougdoug spoke.

  “Gee, it makes you think.”

  “About what?”

  “About just how many other animals get eaten by these machines. After we’re done with it, that sand comes out as white as talcum powder. After we’re finished with it, the ground’s just sterile... dead.”

  “It’s a spider.”

  “You can’t even grow weeds on the shit after we’re done with it. Where’d all the animals go? You can’t hide from something that takes a twenty-foot bite. Nothing burrows that deep.”

  “An’ they boil the soil to get the oil. C’mon, let’s go, Mr. Save-The-Planet.”

  “You know in that movie when that Death Star blows up that planet?”

  I put my hands on my hips. “Where are you going with this?”

  “Well, that’s what it must be like to these insects. Kablooie!” Dougdoug blew up an imaginary planet.

  “You know what, kid? These last three minutes, I’ll never get them back.”

  “Where can we put it?”

  “What?”

  “This.” The young man held up the spider.

  “You’re not reading the memo, Dougie. Let’s go!” I showed Dougdoug the closest drain. Dougdoug scowled and walked over to the wall. He placed the insect behind the warm heat pipe.

  I muttered. “It’s a spider.”

  “It’s not... just that spider.”

  “You know, kid, with that live-and-let-live attitude, I’m afraid you’re not going too far in the oil industry. Besides, this dig-and-dump is the old technology. The new way is to leave everything on top, drill sideways, and suck the shit out. It’s spider-approved.”

  Dougdoug looked at me, then laughed. He said, “We’re digging ourselves a huge karma debt here. Payback’s gonna be a bitch.”

  “Once you been here for a while, kiddo, you get to know who’s lying to you, and it ain’t always the oil companies. But for what it’s worth, Miss Muffet, you’ve saved a spider.”

  We walked for a bit. Finally Dougdoug mumbled.

  “The Egyptians have their pyramids, we got tar ponds.”

  “Kid?”

  “Yeah?”

  “It was a spider.”

  Day Twenty-Four

  ( The Great Eastern )

  “Don’t ya love that sound,” Jason said.

  “What sound?” Pops asked, looking up from Gwen’s desk. “Oh, that.” Pops stared at the wall in the direction of the coker, listening to the rattle of impact wrenches closing up man-ways. “When is Gwen getting back?”

  “Haven’t a clue.” Jason said. “Once we got the call about Lobotomy—ah, Tim—was in the hospital, she grabbed her stuff and took off. Said something about running interference. Took the truck too.”

  “They were close?” Pops asked.

  “Apparently.”

  The two men stopped to listen to the staccato metal-on-metal bang of another impact gun, tightening metal nuts the size of fists until the steel almost distorts, closing up the man-ways, getting the men ever closer to home. Jason smiled.

  “You know, Jay,” Pops said, “twenty-four days ago, if you walked inside the coker and saw the broken steel trays, walls with huge divots in them, metal in shards, you’d have thought, How the hell are we ever going to finish all this in twenty-four days? Then the guys start working like ants on a sandwich, and somehow it all comes together. She’s done.” Pops set down his coffee mug by the computer, creating another coffee ring on top of Gwen’s spotless desk.

  “You’re lucky Gwen’s away,” Jason said, looking at the desk.

  “A guy told me once that a bunch of years ago in Sarnia, he and his buddy were working together on Tower Fourteen. As he comes out of the tower for the last time, the mechanics were sealing up the man-ways. He turned to his friend and said, ‘Where’s the tools?’ They look at each other, then back at the tower. They didn’t tell anybody that they had left the tools inside the tower. That’s not something you’d advertise. Even the guys would give you static, not to mention the bosses.”

  “Yeah, no shit,” Jason said.

  “So, a year passes. There’s another shutdown in Sarnia. These two guys are working together again. One says, ‘I wonder if those tools are still there?’ So just after the crew opens the man-ways again, they climb back inside.”

  Jason stared at Pops.

  “All that was left was the galvanized pail’s bottom ring where they had put it down. What was left of the flashlight was just wires, and an outline on the steel where the batteries once were. And the hand wrenches? They were all shiny and clean, laying there, just like new.”

  “What did they do with the wrenches?” Jason asked.

  Pops shrugged. “Put ’em in another pail.”

&nbs
p; The old welder leaned back and put his feet on Gwen’s desk.

  “I used to weld in the double bottoms of icebreakers in the Arctic. The ship was built with one hull inside another hull, so if a hole gets ripped in the outside hull, the ship won’t sink. Well, that’s the plan, anyway. The space in between the outer hull and the inside hull is divided up into small—I mean really small compartments. Each compartment was about the size of four coffins. You could lie down in them, but you couldn’t stand up, not fully. The only thing you could do is kneel, kneel, and crawl.

  “Everybody got a compartment to weld. One compartment, one lightbulb. Shit, it was dark. Dark, smoky, noisy, and real easy to get scared. I spent three months singing to myself so I wouldn’t panic. I had this repertoire of songs I would go through. It got to the point that once I went through all the songs and got to ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb,’ I knew I was close to freaking out. Time to get out and check the welding machine, whether it needed it or not.”

  “‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’?” said Jason.

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s not a song.”

  “I know my nursery rhymes.”

  The office went silent, except for the sound of two men humming.

  Jason coughed and looked around. “Did you ever hear about the Great Eastern?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “The Great Eastern was a steel-hulled ship that was made in England. Men were still wearing stovepipe hats. Back then they riveted the ship together, no welding. The shipyard rattled so much with all those riveting guns going that everybody was deaf by the time they were thirty.

  “The Great Eastern was so underpowered it could barely get out of its own way. When they launched the ship, the wave came across the river and drowned a couple of people. The architect who designed the ship died young. The shipyard that made the ship went bankrupt. The company that owned it went under. For twenty years, everybody who even came close to the Great Eastern suffered. It was a jinxed ship.

  “The only time the Great Eastern made any money was as a storage ship for the first telegraph cable laid under the North Atlantic. No other ship in the world had enough room to hold all that cable.

  “After that trip, they sold it for scrap. When the guys in the scrap-yard was tearing the Great Eastern apart, way down at the bottom they found the skeletons of a boilermaker and his apprentice. They had been accidentally sealed up into the hull when they first made it.”

  Jason’s face was still. His eyes watched Pops.

  “Can you imagine?” Jason said. “You’re down there, in the black, and when you go back the way you came, now there’s a wall. At first you can’t believe it’s happened. They can’t hear you scream because they’re making so much noise with the riveting. You hit the wall with your tools, your fists, anything. But the whole ship is vibrating with noise. You scream and scream. Nobody can hear you. You kneel by that wall, and die in the black. If you’re lucky, the compartment is airtight and you die within a couple of hours.”

  “If not?” Pops said.

  “Have you ever seen a guy who’s suffocated?” Jason asked, grimacing.

  For a long time, the only sound was the static crackle of the two-way radio. Then the distant rattle of an impact gun filled the trailer.

  Jason jumped up so quickly, Pops started. “I’m going to check on the men.”

  “Yeah,” Pops said. “Count ’em. Twice.”

  ( Lonesome Road )

  There are landscapes in the memories of my long-agos, points of reference in the graph line of my life. There was that day when the spray of a sunset caught the yellows of a Saskatchewan wheatfield. I stopped the truck just to watch God end the day. Once, after a shutter in McMurray, I was surprised by a herd of bison in a green field south of Cold Lake. The herd lay in the tall blue grass with their heads up like they were rising out of the flax field, going towards the matching grey green thunderheads above. There’s that first sight of those broken-toothed Rockies along the horizon west of Calgary. It’s the colours and the smells of the land that I remember, only the land.

  I hear a song, and memories come flooding back. As the music plays, I would instantly be transported from freezing in this Fort McMurray winter, to driving into the orange sunset down a Saskatchewan gravel road in July, the smell of newly-cut hayfield warm in my nose, the sun on my face, and the prairie wind roaring in my ears, covering the rattle of the crickets, the birds, the truck’s radio.

  But there are few happy faces in my memories, only memories of the relief of leaving a tension-filled house, and the guilt of being an absent father.

  The music would play, and I would get homesick, but I couldn’t go home.

  “Where you going from here?” the crew would ask.

  “Ah, I’ll try to grab another shutter in Fort Saskatchewan. I hear there might be a sixty-day shutdown in Regina. Maybe I’ll even try to get on with that nuke plant in Ontario. I hear guys are making a hundred thou a year.”

  “Where’s home?”

  “Winnipeg.”

  I stay in Winnipeg on the chance I might get invited to one of my kids’ homes, where I would see my grandchildren. The last time it happened, a wet-diapered cherub had climbed onto my lap and nestled there for a glorious half hour. I lived for a week with the memory of the smell of that angel’s hair.

  Jason spoke to the crew as they dressed. “Everybody comes back here at last coffee. If you’re not here for last coffee, I’m not paying you for the day. Stay until last coffee, and I’ll pay you for the entire shift.”

  “Layoff’s payoff?” I asked.

  “You know you only get a cheque at layoff time if the job’s less than a week,” Jason said.

  “Worth a shot. Can we take a long coffee break?”

  “Don’t push it.” Jason smiled.

  “Roll back all the welding cables except one. Roll back all the air hoses except one. Bring all the tools down to the tool room. Leave enough tools to close off that last man-way.”

  “When’s the engineer coming to do the final inspection?” Double Scotch asked.

  “After lunch. I told him if he’s late, he’ll button up that last man-way himself.”

  The crew bundled up one last time. They shuffled towards the coker’s stairs like a line of dirty blue penguins climbing a black ice floe.

  I watched them go and thought,

  These scraggly hunched men with their ripped and muddied coveralls are all that’s left. Injuries, violence, and personal disasters so prevalent in construction it’s almost trivial. We started with over twenty men three weeks ago, and we end up with what? Less than enough warm bodies to make up a good poker game. Typical shutdown.

  Tonight they’ll go home to their families and for the first week it’ll be like Christmas, and a honeymoon, and winning a lottery all rolled into one. They’ll have screaming monkey sex, dine out like corporate execs, try to rid the world of alcohol, all for a week.

  Then one morning, he and his old lady will wake up, and something will set one of them off. They’ll have a huge screaming match. The kids will cry, the dog will bark, and the guy will realize that he’s only a disruption in their lives. They don’t want him back. That’s when he either starts looking for a steady-Eddie job in town, or he starts filling that duffel bag that never left the foot of his bed.

  He’ll pack his duffel bag and go down to the union hall for a job, any job. Going back to being that distant, perfect father rather than being that houseguest, hanging around bothering everybody.

  He’ll accept a job in a new boiler off towards the lakes, or an oil tank farm north of McMurray. Next morning, when his wife wakes up, the bed will smell of him, but it’ll be empty. She’ll get the kids off to school, wash the sheets, and get back to normal.

  The day inched along. The engineer came and went. The cables, airhoses, and tools were packed in toolboxes. The men hung around the heaters on the seventh floor, waiting.

  At ten minutes to three, the lunchroom door slammed
open. With shouts and laughter, the crew exploded into the lunch trailer, throwing off coveralls, boots. Any gear that belonged to the company was flung into corners, the floor, anywhere.

  Men frantically gathered their winter clothes, lunchboxes, personal items, and ran out the door with it all, like a TV game show where housewives try to gather as much money as they can carry in their chubby arms.

  “See ya on the next one!”

  “I was looking for a job when I found this one!”

  “Hey! Give me a ride to town, wouldja?”

  “I know the first thing you’ll do when you see your old lady, but what’s the second thing you’ll do?”

  “Put my suitcases down!” everyone shouted in unison.

  “Whaooo!

  “Rick! Goodbye!”

  “See ya!”

  “See ya, see ya on the next one!”

  The last man ran out as the door slammed, shaking the trailer. The trailer, still vibrating from the shouts of the departed men, went silent. After a long time, the sounds of the refinery crept back.

  The foreman’s voice startled me out of my reverie.

  “Rick, it’s been good working with you.”

  “Thanks, Jay. You too.”

  “You can go if you want.”

  “I’m in no rush.”

  “When you going to slow down, enjoy your pension?”

  I rose from the desk and gathered up my winter parka.

  “Damned if I know, Jay. Damned if I know.”

  Epilogue

  The hum from the tires got louder as that Fort McMurray radio station buried itself in snow and static. My eyes squinted into the mid-afternoon sun and the treed horizon, the long shadows a preview of the night.

  Going south.

  This truck is my home.

  I wondered about the men I worked with. One by one, the faces will fade into the slow darkening of past jobs until those men will just be a vague feeling—at best a flicker of scenes, like some jerky silent movie.

  If I meet one of my crew within a year, we’ll laugh and slap each other on our backs and ask, “Whatever happened to...?”