Light Lifting (26 page)

It is more difficult to calculate the value of the benefits. The kids' braces and top-of-the-line Green Shield for their prescriptions. The education fund. He marched for those things. They walked arm in arm carrying the banner. Campaigned for the need to make progress, to look out for working families, to stand up against the big guys. Ken and Buzz and Bob making their speeches. A union puts you inside of something larger. Tickets for Tiger games and a rented bus. Tickets to the Wings and the Spitfires. Everyone sitting in the same section. All the good money his daughter picked up working TPT – Temporary Part-Time – in the summer. The card tournaments. The Christmas party and the Christmas bonus. The employee incentive plan. It was impossible to say no to the deal they gave you if you just bought what you built. Straight out of Henry Ford and the original Model T. Make enough to drive what you make. Four in a row. They went through four different vans before the last one. Hundreds of thousands of miles piled up. The kids grew up riding back there. It was their sole means of transportation.

He remembers turning around and telling the boy to shut up. The only clear part left. Hand on the wheel, craning his neck around. Looking at him closely. Wife sleeping in the passenger seat. Daughter already away at school.

His son. The teenage slacker called up from central casting. Lying down sideways in the back seat, high-tops up against the window. Head on the armrest. Game Boy. Ear phones. Distortion coming out of his head. Tight jeans. Black hooded sweatshirt. Hair in his eyes.

What a kid can do to a parent. A wave of disappointment washing through him as he drives. Bitterness, like the taste of ammonia, coursing through his mouth and his entire bloodstream. He feels it in his feet. It has been nothing but continuous argument for months. The boy talking even though he can't hear his own voice through the music. How it all sucks. His parents are hypocrites. They say one thing and do another. Smart teenager with bad grades and stupid friends. Comes home one day with an idiot tattoo on his shoulder blade. A tide of complaint that will not stop. How he doesn‘t want to be here. How this is stupid. How he's going to run away. How he's going to move out the minute, the minute, he turns sixteen. You think you own me. You don't own me.

They cannot make him understand why it is important for a family to do the same thing every year. Why you have to hold on to your little traditions. It's only one day, his mother says. A trip to the county in the fall. Follow the Number Three and go to Ruthven. Joe Colosanti's Tropical Garden and then Jack Miner's Bird Sanctuary. Plants and birds. Muck and Cluck, his wife used to call it. Maybe this weekend we'll go for the muck and cluck. What do you say?

At Colosanti's Tropical Garden they will sell you a miniature cactus in its own clay pot for two dollars. Get the one with the purple head. It can live on nothing. Push your finger against the needles for fun. There is no threat from a Colosanti's cactus. It is what the kids will remember. The greenhouses. The turtles and a little alligator swimming in its pond. The humidity and the baby animals wandering around, goats and chickens. They will remember that you have to keep your palm flat when you feed an apple to a pony.

Then on to Miner's. Every year the same thing. Canadian Geese by the thousands returning to Crazy Jack. A hundred years of banding and tracing routes and charting schedules. A warmer fall means a later departure. It doesn't take long. You drive by and it's over. You hear and you smell. The sound and the stink: incessant honking and acres of bird shit. That is what you get from a visit to Jack Miner's.

But there is something else, too. Something a person has to see at least once. The way an entire field can take off at the same time. The land deciding to become the sky. Everything lifting at once. Tight formations and instinctive patterns. That V writing itself on the clouds. You look at that and you don't forget you saw it. It can make you believe in order if you are the kind of person who wants to believe in order.

He remembers turning around and telling the boy to shut up. Last words. I'm getting so sick of your bullshit. Watch, he said. You watch. A couple of years down the road, you'll be thanking us for this.

Turning back, he catches a glimpse of his face as it passes the rear-view. The sneer. An angry man caught in a bit of glass. The red glint of the brake light comes through first, starts in the corner of his eye, then straight ahead. The back end of the flatbed. Too close. Already there. No chance to slow down. He tries to swerve, but they hit full tilt. Then rolling. They are strapped inside a rolling metal object. The V6 with 251 hp – a fire burning in the middle of a metal cube – the new fuel injection system. The driver's side airbag explodes out of the steering wheel, knocking him back against his chair. The back of his head slams into the rest. Bad twist in his neck. Sharp pain and an instant numbness in his legs. Powder burning in his eyes. His vision blurs. It happens fast but he sees it slowly before the total black comes down. Two seconds worth of action is more than enough to fill in all the rest of the time that follows.

The airbags on her side do not deploy. The bags on the whole right-hand side of the vehicle do not deploy. They do not do what they are meant to do. Instead, they sit patient and useless, like a pile of neatly folded white towels in a linen closet.

Almost no visible change in her body. She is sleeping before her head goes against the window frame. Too hard. He knows it. The unnatural angle of her neck. The end of his wife. The way her ear moves too far to the side and her chin hangs too far down. One beat later, something flying past, about the size of a black hockey bag, thrown through the side window. He watches it move, following a smooth trajectory, an arc in the sky. That movement is the last thing he sees. It can't be processed. Elegant, he thinks, or something like that. The curve in the air.

Two days later he wakes up in the hospital. Can't feel his legs. His daughter holding his hand. She looks thin. His first thought. You need to eat more. Take better care of yourself.

There are six airbags in the Dodge Grand Caravan. Standard equipment, even on the base model. Safety sells. Front, side, and rear impact zones. They were the first to make it to market with protection like that. Went from design to production in an eighteen-month turnaround and caught everyone by surprise. Brought a little momentum back into sales. The car met or exceeded all standards set by the National Highway Transportation Safety Association. New sensors woven into the bumpers and the panels and the doors. Scored above average on all the tests. You watch the crash test videos and see what you see. Those are the standard factory models.

In the videos it all works. Everything and every time. The bumper touches the test obstacle – the same immovable cube for all vehicles – and the bags deploy. Long before structural damage. Long before the crumpling of the frame dissipates and redirects the force of the impact. The dummies inside get tossed around. Sturdy back coils of spring in their necks wobble back and forth. Their fibreglass arms and legs extend, but you can tell they are going to be okay. If they were alive they would be okay. Everything behaves as it should. The touch on the bumper, the explosion of compressed gas inside the cabin. No hard surfaces left. No space at all. Nowhere to move. The vehicle becomes a solid mass. A wrecked exterior with a safe place at its core.

An electrical short, he figures. One circuit. A single wire that did not carry current the way it is supposed to. Failure of design or manufacture or installation. Everything is possible. Corrosion, perhaps. Not enough consideration made for the deteriorating affects of road salt. The back of the flatbed too high. Again, not standard. Higher than the test cube. The boy's unbuckled seatbelt. Nothing anybody could have done about that. A flaw outside of everything else. Mentioned in all the reports. Passengers are rarely thrown from a moving vehicle when seatbelts are used properly. Cops and their cameras. Images of everything. Pictures you shouldn't be allowed to take. A stranger's finger pushing down on a button. Numbered evidence. Accident recreation teams. Investigations. Measuring tapes. Insurance people with their duplicate sets of forms. The length of skid marks. Indexed to tread wear. The angle of impact. Angle the car left the road. They work backwards with their calculations. Crumple zones. Vectors. Radius of broken glass. Distance from the car to the body in the field.

Twelve weeks in the hospital. Then twenty weeks of physio after that. The benefits covered everything and an officer at the Local made sure the paperwork moved along and the claims were filed on time. He had to learn to walk again, how to wiggle his toes, make his bowels churn on command. He lost almost half his weight and his hands callused against the railings. Messages sent from his brain and only slowly received. Twitching toes, half-bent knees, hips that took months before they remembered how to work right.

There was a moment to choose. An opening that wouldn't last long they said. Everybody talking about the same things. The Big Three going down. For real this time. Bankrupt and bailed out. Negotiations and concessions. The new deal and its different terms. Never going to be like it was before. Peak oil. Calculations that depended on the shifting value of a Mexican peso. Rising interest rates. The Environmental Protection Agency. Californian emission targets. Household debt levels. Burning wells in the Middle East. Security for a pipeline in Nigeria. Drilling in the arctic. What the average person in India does in their spare time. They said it all mattered.

He wasn't sure how it fit together, but when Essex Engine went down and the Foundry disappeared, he'd paid attention. When the fire in the Foundry went out for good – after burning for sixty years or whatever – that was important news. Ford guys told him that when they pulled the plug on the Foundry, even when they cut it off, the smelter burned hot for another week all by itself, with no external source of power, like a star, like the sun, generating its own heat and living on its own internal explosions. Then they went in with the heavy artillery and tore the whole thing down. You go to the Foundry now and it's gone.

A visitor sitting in the chair in his hospital room said, If they could get rid of us all and start again, that's what they'd do. You know that, right? That's what I'd do anyway. If I was in their shoes? I'd blow up the whole goddamn operation and blank slate it. Get all younger people to come in for less and do more. A fucking mess is what it is. Big fucking mess.

He signed as quickly as he could. Scribbled his name on the line and wrote the date like it was yesterday. You wait till it happens to you and see which way you go. Only an idiot says no to a buyout. Need to consider the facts. The numbers the company will put down to make you go away. This much to come to work tomorrow and tomorrow like usual. Or this much to stay home. You add in the pension, the best in the business, the RRSP's, the insurance, and the value of a big empty house. You get a figure. He read the statements, the digits and the commas spreading out beside his name. Couldn't quite catch the full meaning. Everything, everywhere in the world is falling apart, but he is okay. It will be like the depression they say, 30 percent unemployment and food rations, but it never comes. He has more than enough, more than he will ever need. Money like a foreign language he used to know but doesn't understand anymore.