Minister Without Portfolio (20 page)

Oh great, Martha said.

It made me laugh at my own plight but deep down I was even more alone.

Poor poor you.

Do you want to hear this.

Go on I'm sorry. We always talk about Tender and never about Nora.

Your sympathy is coated with pleasure.

You can take it.

My heart was broken, he said, and John Hynes had phoned him then from Alberta to say, quietly, it's over now Henry it's all
changed, the old way of life is gone entirely. John was shaking on the phone. John is like that. He cares for his friends. I felt like that character in
Alas, Babylon
who gets the phone call from a friend in the loop and the codeword hits his ear and he realizes armageddon is waking up on his doorstep.

So you do read.

We read that book in high school. That's the last novel I've ever read.

Rick Tobin had been talking to John and John was passing on the info. Something primitive rose up in Henry, a red crest of broken feathers that we all feel resides, like a diaphragm, underneath the heart. So that was how he got to be over there with Tender, and how he ended up in the jeep that morning.

It was the most words he'd said about the past. Martha wasn't looking at him but then she was. She's always looking at me, he realized. Well what else would she pay attention to, we're indoors, we're in bed.

He took her hand and held it up in the air, a foot from the ceiling.

Martha said I suppose we should eventually get up in case someone comes over.

15

He was on the roof now, finally, with a flat shovel. Tearing off the old felt. Bent over in the afternoon sun he rammed the shovel under the head of a nail, then pried it up. He was happy to have work gloves on and old jeans and a shirt he must have bought ten years ago. It still had some life in it. Martha tossed him up a bottle of beer.

Hot dipped, she said.

Come here and I'll galvanize you.

He stood tall and crowed over the land and a cool northerly was blowing in off the ocean. He waved at Silvia next door who had loaned him John's truck for the drive to the dump. Then he got dizzy because of the drop in blood pressure. The tingle in the back of the knees. He leaned against the old chimney wrapped in blue tarpaulin. When you're on your roof you own the view. You become kingly. My land, you say.

But bad weather was hauling in around Aquaforte. A leaky roof is miserable. He shovelled until there were bare planks and then ran down the ladder and collected the strips of shingle that had blown away and made a neat layering stack of the strips in
the back of John's truck. He weighed down the shingles in the truck bed with the old fridge and roped it all down.

He said he'd be an hour.

He drove the truck with the oldies radio on and his elbow out the open window. He lifted one finger perceptibly from the top of the steering wheel when a vehicle passed, and saw a finger go up too. He was part of it all. They were living a rural life.

He drove down to the Aquaforte dump.

He idled at the little cinder-block gatehouse to show his garbage receipt. No one there. So he drove in a little more.

You're in a hurry, the man said.

Henry shifted into reverse and stuck John's receipt out the window.

Mr Burden asked what was aboard. The fridge it goes down there—he pointed to a peninsula of old appliances. And the rest up the ramp. That was Henry's first look at the incinerator, a cast-iron teepee three storeys tall belching out raw green fumes, the flames licking out of the open shaft at the top of the ramp.

He drove slowly to avoid puncturing a tire. There was a full-size pickup parked down by the fridges and stoves. He knew the truck, it was the one that carried the orange horse. Henry idled and jumped out and untied the fridge and slid it out the back. It caught a corner and tipped and the fridge door opened for a last embrace. It felt good to harm large appliances. The two men were watching him and he saw that it was Baxter Penney. That surprised him. His sense was Emerson Grandy drove him around the bend. But there he was with the man with hooks. Why on earth they'd park here to have a conversation he could not fathom.

He drove back up and reversed onto the ramp. It felt high up there. Keep the wheels straight, Henry.

There was a chute and, as he peered in, he saw the furnace of flame down there sounding wet with fire. It was licking its chops. He walked back to the tailgate and tossed a piece of felt in. It wafted down heavily but then paused and blew into bright flame, mid-air. He threw in some more pieces. You could only get so close to the opening because of the heat, so he fired the shingles in one by one. Slow going, and the smoke began billowing up. He hadn't brought a mask. Particulate from any number of really bad things down there. Car batteries and vats of clotted cooking oil and the general debris of flammable waste. It was cooking good and compounding and the heat was lifting the small bits of felt back up now, little magic carpets, and they were aloft, landing back in John's truck. Little fires sitting there.

I'm going to catch the truck on fire, is what he thought. There was a long heavy piece of felt on the floor of the truck. I'll slide it all in at once and jump in the truck and gun it. He hauled on the length of shingle, he put his hips into it. He needed momentum but there was no transference of that pull into a sliding motion. The sheet of felt split apart and he fell backwards. He moved his feet apart for purchase, but there was no floor under him. The floor was slanted. He tumbled into a silver dented slant of a chute. His knees spread out and his elbows, the edges of his body sought something to snag upon, just twist around and grab out with a hand, but it was all sheer. They make these chutes so dumptrucks can empty without a hitch.

He turned completely around and realized he was falling feet first and a terror blew over him and he knew his life was over. It was bright as he fell though he did not feel heat, just an absence of colour and shape and the intense panic of death. Life turned white and he knew he would land in a vat of burning oil, or hoses
spraying flammable propellant, his feet in contact with rotating blades to churn him into a hurried fire. It was over now, the finish, my god I'm done.

His feet stopped and his knees buckled, and something in him flexed his legs so he sprang off the peak of fire and fell further, to the side of a heap of burning, he was below the fire now on soft ash. He crouched instinctively in a bed of cinders and he was alive. Above him the pyre of mad flame and whiteness, a sound of hungry rushing. He was dry and unhurt. Those high fast flames, preoccupied and unaware of him. The fire did not have horse's eyes, but the eyes of an alligator, on the front of the head. They were staring up and did not know he was there. He felt no heat. He did not feel a thing but the sound of rushing air beside him. It was hilarious that he was alive and exactly the same except he was inside a church, it felt, that was burning down. But that wasn't it. That wasn't the unusual event. This was ordinary, this church here was going about its everyday business. It always contains an assembly of fire. Fire is its congregation.
He
was the unusual event. He laughed to himself about this, quietly, crouching there: he had survived. I have a good story to tell. Where's the way out.

He gave the wall a kick but it was cast iron two inches thick. There was no door but there were ventilation slits around the base of the incinerator. Ash drifted over his face. Earlier he had been on his roof, and now he was under his roof. The roof was piled above him, burning. He looked up at the hatch again where he had fallen through and the shape of a helicopter whipped past in the small parcel of sky. He waved. It couldn't possibly be looking for him. It was not a military aircraft but something he knew marine biologists travelled in to study bird islands. A fluke to see it.

He felt his ear. His ear was hot. He knelt again and turned back to the ventilation slits. He crawled over to breathe in the fresh air. He could see outside. But there was no door.

The only way out was the way in. They were going to have to hose in a ton of fire retardant and lower a ladder. He was happy with this answer until he sensed the heat in the kiln of the walls. It would take a long time for this fire to cool enough to allow him to climb out. His shoulder felt hot and his elbow, the hinges of his body. He heard a heart beat. Had he ever noticed the shape of his lungs or the air in them. His lungs felt warm. A new shock. He wasn't going to burn to death: he was cooking.

He yelled out for help.

His own voice surprised him, the word “help” had blurted out without him thinking to do it. It was polite. He didn't want to cause trouble. You're going to boil to death, Henry. He yelled and kicked at the ventilation slits and saw the tongues of his shoes fall out. What the hell. His laces had vanished and the soles of his shoes were soft and covered in gummy ash. He cupped his hands to his mouth and bellowed with all his might. His arm was cooking now, the elbow painful where he bent it to cup his mouth. He turned around to give the other side of his body a turn. A sheet of his own shingles fell down on top of the fire. Roofing felt. What the fuck was going on. Was someone up there emptying the truck? He yelled again and repetitively, he yelled long and loud with his hands to his mouth and when he bent his elbow he felt pain. Help. His only hope was those two men.

16

Emerson Grandy passed over the bottle and Baxter drank from it. They watched a truck amble into the dump. Undecided. Then it pointed down near them and stopped. A man unroped a fridge and dropped that and then turned the truck around to back up towards the incinerator. It reversed, slowly, up the ramp.

Emerson: That's John Hynes.

No it's his truck.

Emerson Grandy watched Henry unload the truck.

Emerson was not happy with how he was going about it. He was apprehensive. He drank the rum. As he lifted the bottle and dropped it again he lost sight of the young man.

He must be bent down for something, he said.

But there was no return of him. And he knew something wrong had happened. The entire approach to unloading was not done the proper way from the get-go. The truck parked a foot from the chute of the incinerator. Smoke partly covering the truck.

It looks like he might have fallen in.

What do you mean.

I don't see him no more.

The men pulled open the doors and ran up to the ramp. The truck was alone. But they heard him shouting.

Baxter Penney ran to the front gate and got old Mr Burden. That fellow just fell in. Mr Burden had a grey cell phone eighteen inches long. There was no signal. Come on, Baxter said.

They ran down to the incinerator where Emerson Grandy was peering into the chute. Baxter threw in a bunch of felt. Just to see what would happen to it—the way you might throw a coin if you dropped one accidentally and were wondering where it might roll. To see if they could see him, I guess. Emerson put his hooks to his mouth and yelled down, Get to the back! Then they all climbed down the embankment. The incinerator was built into a hill. Two large iron doors were held together with three lengths of rebar cleated at the top, the doors eight feet tall and they were opened once a year to scrape out the lead and metals that had not burned.

They found a boulder and together the three of them knocked out two of the hinges. The third was over their heads and they had to angle the rock carefully to push it up and out of the hinge. Then they swung wide the doors and peered in. A figure in motion. A shape running around the perimeter, low to the ground, and out past them, a burnt shoulder, running. The man who fell in. He ran out over the dozered fill and kept running until the shoes fell off him and he hit the edge of the trees and then he staggered into the trees as if hiding there in his sock feet. He stopped beside two big juniper and looked to talk to them before turning around. Then he saw the men and resumed being a cared-for citizen. He came back to them, frightened.

You're all right, Baxter said. It was one of the men from the truck. He was shaking his head. We thought we were going to have to go in there and get you.

They came towards him like he was an animal. They picked up his shoes and helped him out of the marsh. They sat him on the old fridge he had just dumped and they went at closing up the doors he'd escaped from. Henry let the fridge embrace him.

17

They walked back up to John's truck. The truck still needed to be unloaded, and Henry was in shock. But they helped him. They fired in bits of felt. He was standing pretty much in the same spot he'd been before, but this time with Emerson Grandy and Baxter Penny and Mr Burden from the gate. They heard the licking and Henry shied away. Mr Burden peered into the bed of the truck with his hands in new work gloves, watching them work. Mr Burden was upset. He was going to have to fill in a report. Usually I'm up here with them when they unload, Mr Burden said. I been here ten years now, and you're the first to fall in.

You're never up here, Baxter said.

I heard one of you shout, Get to the back. But inside, Henry said, I couldn't tell where the back was. The voice had sounded like it came from within his own body, the way they say a ptarmigan sounds when it takes to flight.

Emerson Grandy said, You need a drink of rum.

Where's the bar? Henry said.

They walked down to their truck. They had been sitting in the truck drinking Lamb's out of two styrofoam cups. They
handed him the flask. If they hadn't been there. Drinking at the dump.

I know this truck, Henry said. You drive a horse around in it.

He downed their rum and, in the lee of the open truck door, he felt heat on his arm. The wind had kept him from noticing. I should get to the hospital, he said.

They shook hands and Henry thanked them. He half hugged Baxter Penney. Baxter understood the need.

There's a cottage hospital four minutes from the incinerator— Henry has often passed it and wondered what a hospital was doing this far from humanity. Now he was grateful for it. He strolled in, cinders head to foot. Nurses in blue flannel pyjamas. What happened to you, my love. They wrapped wet towels on his arm and face. Then a young doctor, from Syria, checked his lungs.