Bittersweet Sands (13 page)

“Clip the monitor to your breast pocket close to where you breathe. It does you no good inside a pocket or in the lunch shack.

“H2S, hydrogen sulfide, or sour gas, is that rotten-egg smell that occurs naturally in swamps, garbage dumps, and in our case, oil refineries. It's the natural by-product of rotting organic material.

“These monitors are set to start beeping at five parts per million of sour gas. After five parts per million and your monitor starts beeping, you are to immediately clear the area and head to the muster point. Believe me, after a good whiff of sour gas, nobody will ever have to tell you twice to get your ass away.

“Hand them in at the end of shift and if they have been activated for any reason, tell us so that the monitor can be re-calibrated...”

BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP!

Twenty sets of eyes turned to the tiny woman in their midst. Double Scotch smiled a red-cheeked smile.

“'Scuse me.”

( A Lesson in Love )

“Today, Sonny Jim, I will make you a man!”

My apprentice Dougdoug looked at me. “Does this entail whips, chains, and midgets?”

“Not yet, but hold that thought. No, today I teach you the fine art of... of... wait for it... steel fabrication!”

“Oh... joy,” Dougdoug shrugged.

“Look on the bright side.”

“There's a bright side?”

“Well, kid, when you work with me, you get to say the word ‘fuck' a lot. Try that working at Wally World.”

“Bonus.”

“I can see you are underwhelmed, my young appren-tye.”

“Well,” Dougdoug shrugged.

“I'm not kidding, kiddo. We have a tray to replace inside the coker. It's a pretty good job, really.”

“I'll take your word for it,” Dougdoug said.

“Okay, kiddo, write this down. We need a grinder, an extension cord, extra grinding wheels, cutting torches, hoses, gauges, a welding machine and welding cables, a couple of quick slaps, welding rods, mark-out chalk, and don't forget the cuddle. Now read that back to me.”

In the middle of the reading, Dougdoug stopped. “What's a couple of quick slaps?”

I slapped Dougdoug's face, twice.

“Hey!”

“So now you get the cuddle.”

As I opened my arms wide, Dougdoug ducked.

“Very funny, Rance,” he groused.

“It's construction, Dougdoug. Don't trust anybody. Just be glad I didn't send you to the tool crib for a four-inch Fallopian Tube.”

“A what?”

“Eight inches are better, but a four-inch Fallopian Tube will do.”

Dougdoug shook his head as I cackled.

I kept up a steady stream of banter as we assembled the equipment. Once everything was in place, the lines laid, the string of safety lights hung, and the hand tools assembled, I called a break. We sat inside the coker, swinging our legs over the edge of the tray, three stories above the next level.

“You know, kiddo, I love this... this... making shit. The grinding, the cutting, the making something out of nothing. I love it.”

Dougdoug gave me a quizzical look.

“If I have to explain it to you, then you don't get it. All those ‘Human Resources' experts, with their white shirts and red suspenders, they all talk about job satisfaction, but if you want real job satisfaction, try working with your hands. I love it. An' working with metal is as old as time.”

“What do you mean?” Dougdoug asked.

“Working with metal is not about history; working with steel is history. You ever go to Sunday school?”

“Yeah.”

“You know Abraham, the father of Isaac and the twelve tribes of Israel?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, in the Bible, he was from Ur of the Chaldees. You know what they did at Ur of the Chaldees?”

“No.”

“They mined copper. If you go to Iraq today, you will still find those same pits at Ur, pits that they dug out of the sides of the hills to get the copper. They dug with their bare hands, three thousand years ago.”

“Humm.” Dougdoug started to sound interested.

“They would pound out the copper mines using rocks, their bare hands. Yeah, and their Personal Protective Equipment was a loincloth. Once they got enough ore, they piled the gravel and copper in fire pits, and then they would burn the rocks. For days.”

“Pretty tough apprenticeship,” said Dougdoug.

“Wait, it gets better. Once they had that fire blazing, they all sat around it, heads stuck in that smoke, with nothing on but their sweaty loincloths and sweatbands holding long pipes made of leather or clay. They blew into those pipes into the base of the fire. Breathing in copper fumes gives you chills and convulsions, a metallic taste in your mouth, vomiting, and a whole lot of other crap.”

“Ouch.”

“Not only that, after a couple of months of inhaling copper fumes, it turns your shit blue. That's when you know you've got a real good dose.”

“Blue shit?”

“With streaks of blood in it. Read that in a Safety Book.”

“Nice.”

“So they'd sit there for days, their heads in smoke, blowing into those pipes, while someone stoked the fire, refining that copper. That's where they got the expression ‘Blow, don't suck.'”

Doug grimaced.

“After a couple of weeks of blowjobs, they would dig the bloom out of the fire. A bloom is just a bagel-sized lump of copper, twigs, rock, dirt, and crud. So then they would all sit around and beat the shit out of that bloom. Finally, after about a month of beating their lump, they would get enough copper to make one sword. One bloody sword. Abraham must have been a metals trader rather than a metal worker.”

“How do you know that, Rance?”

“Because he gets on his camels and heads off to so some trading in Canaan. If he actually made the stuff, he'd be dead long before he had twelve sons. And you know why Abraham had twelve tribes?”

“Why?”

“TV was the shits.”

Dougdoug shook his head.

“Well, let's get to it,” I said, reaching for a welding electrode. “Hmmm. I see my working-class humour is lost on you.”

I explained to Dougdoug how, in laying out metal, there are no absolutes. Sometimes you use the measuring tape, sometimes you make a template, and sometimes you estimate. I told Dougdoug how to use his eye to line the metal pieces up, how to use his bare hands to feel for the “high-lows” or distortions, how to use his fingers to feel for the smoothness of the finished joint.

“So, Dougdoug, do you know what part of your body you use most when you're screwing?”

“Huh?”

“Do you know what part of the body you use most of when you are making love?”

“That's a stupid question.”

“It's a trick question, Dougie.”

“It's...”

“Wrong.” I barked. I wiggled my fingers in front of Dougdoug's face. “It's your hands.”

“Oh. You meant with other people.” Dougdoug grinned.

“Very sharp, kiddo. Mind you don't cut yourself. You use your hands to feel, touch, probe, just like you would working on your old lady. I mean, for fine tuning, use your hands, use your hands.”

“I wonder how my girlfriend will like it when I start marking her out with a chalk-line.”

“Let alone the grinder,” I chuckled.

The day passed. The coker's walls echoed with my old man's cackle, rising as the punchline of each of my wonderful stories came to an end. Our laughter, echoing inside that giant vessel, stopped every so often as we ground the metal, and finally to listen to the ripping-paper sound of an arc welder.

I told Dougdoug how a welding rod works the way the force of water on a hull of a ship pushes the ocean aside. The molten arc pushes the metal outward and aside. But when the arc passes and the metal cools, the steel behind the arc is pulled together, only now it pulls back more than the metal was originally.

“This is all natural, Doug. You can make the forces of nature work for you, and make it look easy, or you can beat the hell out of the steel and make it look like a golf ball.”

“You really like doing this, don't you, old man?”

“Working with steel has been my only absolute. It's the only thing that I can depend on. I instinctively know how steel will move, how it distorts. I just know. Try saying that about a woman,” I added with a half-smile. “You know what I think, Sonny Jim? I think... every major change of history or development of mankind has been to do with metal.”

“The pill?” Dougdoug asked.

“I said mankind.”

Dougdoug chuckled.

“I always found women to be... hard to... Well, I dunno, if a guy doesn't like you, he punches you. I can live with that. I think, if there is love, or call it what you want, the best construction workers like us can hope for is loving your work, like this.” I pointed to the work we had just completed.

I got up and turned away from the young man, making like I was examining the weld. I was too embarrassed to open my heart and say this to another construction worker face to face. I hoped he didn't hear my old man's voice quaver.

“Making things with your hands is... is the best job in the world.”

Day Nineteen
( You Can't Drink Him Pretty )

Pops and I stood high up on the coker away from the crew, looking out over the silver and tar towers of the refinery. When our eyes did meet, it was quick.

Pops did the talking. He needed to talk. But he needed me to be there.

“He's gone... Lobotomy is. The kid never stood a chance. I knew his mother. She was absolutely beautiful. Crazier than a shithouse rat, but beautiful, once. Lobotomy told me the last time he saw her, she was pushing a shopping cart full of clothes down a Regina back alley. His own mother, for Pete's sake.

“He can be so... so innocent and batshit crazy at the same time.

“Some people look for trouble, Lobotomy didn't. He was like those Play-Doh molds kids get at Christmas. He'd just takes on the personality of whatever person he attached himself too. I told him once that the penitentiary is full of guys that just went along.

“I had him as my apprentice in Fort Saskatchewan. Best apprentice I ever had, for a while. Then it dawned on me that Lobotomy couldn't make his own decisions. Shit, he couldn't even live his own life.

“He started to follow me around, sat when I sat, picked up the tools when I did. When I noticed him starting to wear the same type workclothes I did, that really started to creep me out. I made some noise about it being time for him to work with other tradesmen, see different ways to work. Really? I just wanted to get away from him.

“The morning I told him that he was on the other crew, Christ, it was like kicking a puppy.

“You should see his tattoos; they're something else. He keeps 'em hidden, has to. Got involved with a gang of skinheads, couldn't win a fight unless there was six of them up against a nun in a wheelchair, but they were pretty good with the tats. So Lobotomy got all tatted up. Really ugly. Other than paying for it, with all that blue crap all over his skin the only way he was ever going to get naked with any sane woman was if they were in the same mass grave.

“So last night he goes into McMurray and buys it.

“Him and his lady of the hour go upstairs in the hotel. Right in the middle of them bumping uglies, he made the mistake of ripping off his T-shirt. He's got this huge swastika on his chest, and this Aryan Nation Adolf-fucken-Hitler crap all over that skinny little body of his.

“The hooker, she looked up at all those tats and screams. Lobotomy said she didn't so much scream as gag. He said that a couple of times. He said her lips curled, and she wrung her hands, like his body was covered in green snot.

“The hooker grabs her clothes and runs out of the room, screaming. She's running down the hall, trying to put her clothes on, and all the time crying.

“Lobotomy's trying to get his clothes on and go after his money. I think he really wanted to calm her down. Make her not get sick of the sight of him.

“She runs into the bar, still putting her clothes on, and she runs over to some ironworkers and asks if she could sit at their table. I hear she was pretty much babbling.

“She's sitting there... hunched over, really... when Lobotomy comes running in. She screams, ‘That's him!'

“The guys in the bar put two and two together and get five. They start calling him a pervert and a freak and start laying the boots to him. The whole bar joined in. About five guys chase him out of the bar into the parking lot.

“He made it to his truck and took off with all these guys hanging on. By this time his eyes were so wide he just wanted to kill something, anything. He said he couldn't get that woman's retching out of his mind. Really? I think he wanted to kill himself.

“Across the parking lot, he thinks he sees a railway fuel-tanker car parked. So he aimed the truck at the car, and floored it. The bar's security guard says by the time the truck reached the end of the parking lot, it was almost airborne.

“I guess he planned to take out that fuel train, everybody in the bar, and himself in one gigantic fireball.

“Everybody in the lot dove for cover.

“But what he thought was just a piece of grass between him and that tanker car was a ravine, some pine trees, a creek, four or five boulders, and a chainlink fence.

“You go there today and there's just a long line of truck parts starting from the parking lot into the ravine and up the other side. The only thing that actually bounced off the tanker car was his side mirror. Besides, the thing turned out to be a water tanker.

“He's laying in the dirt all broke up when the crowd got to him.

“Lobotomy's gone.”

Day Twenty
( Stretches )

“Ricky! You're leading the morning stretches today.”

“Aw, I don't want to. And don't call me Ricky.”