Travelling Light (7 page)

Lyle disappeared and returned half an hour later with a pair of rusty shears and a brown paper grocery sack. “You can do all the killing,” he promised. “I'll just cut off the tails.”

In the afternoon's dry green heat they moved through the meadows. Jerry did all the shooting. The little bullets slithered through the high grass. By mid-afternoon they had six gopher tails in the paper sack, which was seeping rust-­coloured gopher blood. They were down to the last five bullets.

Lyle said he knew a new game to play but they needed Wayne, who was back at the cabin, tied to a rope so he wouldn't wander.

“What kind of game?” Jerry asked suspiciously.

“Wait here, I'll go get him,” said Lyle. He started off towards the cabin and Jerry sat down on a log by the riverbank. After half an hour Lyle hadn't returned and Jerry began firing at the river. He skipped four bullets off the water's surface and was loading the fifth when he saw Lyle leading Wayne through the high grass. Lyle carried a spade over his shoulder.

“Don't waste ammo,” Lyle yelled. He came to where Jerry was sitting and grabbed the rifle before Jerry could stop him.

“Follow me,” Lyle commanded, sliding down the bank and wading out into the river without taking off his boots.

Jerry and Wayne followed, fording together, Jerry holding the little boy's hand. They struggled up the slippery bank, which had been muddied by cattle, and followed Lyle into a stand of aspens on the other side. Lyle was carrying the rifle and the spade and shouting, “Hup-two-three-four, hup-two-three!” The high grass was thickened with wild roses, corn silk, devil's paintbrush.

Lyle yelled, “Halt!” and propped the rifle against a tree. “First we'll make him dig his grave. Wayne, start digging!”

Wayne squatted down and began scratching at the ground with his fingers.

“You give him a hand,” Lyle said to Jerry, holding out the spade. When Jerry didn't move, Lyle slung the rifle over his shoulder and started kicking the spade himself, breaking up grassy clods, shovelling out gravelly soil underneath and piling it alongside the hole.

“Give me my rifle,” Jerry said.

“Not when I'm under orders. I'm a soldier. I got to do what they say.”

The hole was four feet long, not much more than a foot wide, and a foot deep. The earth was mounded neatly beside. Lyle threw down the shovel, pulled off his belt, and used it to tie Wayne to the trunk of an aspen tree. Taking a bandana from his pocket, he tied a blindfold over his brother's eyes.

“What are you doing?” said Jerry.

“Executing the prisoner.” Lyle worked the rifle bolt, pushing in the last cartridge, and began stepping backwards, counting off his steps.

Wayne giggled and whispered, “Lyle? Lyle?”

Lyle wrapped the sling tight around his forearm, settled the butt into his shoulder, and lay his cheek against the stock. “Ready,” he called. “Aim.”

It was happening so fast Jerry felt dizzy. It didn't seem real. It was like watching a cartoon.

“Fire!”

The shot cracked out. A splinter of wood sparked off the tree trunk a couple of inches above Wayne's head. Lyle worked back the bolt, ejecting the spent .22 cartridge. Jerry could smell gunpowder. He walked up to the tree and untied the little boy, then pulled the blindfold off. Wayne grinned and blinked. There was a white scar on the tree where the bullet had torn off a scrap of bark. There was a white gob of spit in the corner of Wayne's mouth.

Lyle grabbed his brother by the arm. Jerry seized hold of the rifle barrel and, after a moment of silent contest, Lyle relinquished it. He led Wayne over to the hole and made him lie down in it. Wayne lay still while Lyle spilled some handfuls of dirt over him. Wayne giggled, happy he was still included in the game. Then Lyle began scooping dirt in a frenzy, using both hands, like a dog burying a bone. Wayne shut his eyes and still didn't try to get up. He was still smiling.

“Give me a hand!” Lyle said.

“Stop it,” Jerry said weakly.

Lyle picked up the shovel and scraped in more dirt. The little boy was being buried but he didn't say anything or try to stand up.

“You can carry the rifle,” Jerry said, “but you better stop.”

Lyle ignored him.

Not knowing what else to do, Jerry started walking away through the quaking aspens. He soon came to the river. He could still hear the shovel at work. He hesitated, looked back, then, wading into the river, started splashing across. After pulling himself up the slippery bank he kept going across the hayfield. After stumbling through the deep ditch, he climbed up onto the graded gravel section road. He could see the cluster of dark spruce around the Cunninghams' cabin and started walking in that direction. His boots and socks were wet and felt squishy.

As he approached the cabin he could hear music from a radio inside. It sounded like a transistor, not a house radio. The rope Wayne had been tied to lay in the yard. His father's red pickup was parked alongside the old rusty machines.

Jerry thought he could hear his father's voice inside the cabin, mingling with the woman's. Were they singing? What were they doing? Instead of going nearer he stayed out on the road and kept walking, even though he was headed not in the direction of home but the other way. He walked as fast as he could, the road ahead of him so white and straight and pointed like a needle to the line where everything disappears.

VULCAN

Out there jobs were easy to come by. I quit the rigs in August that year. The grain harvest was coming in and I knew there would be a shortage of hands. The Manpower office in Calgary found me a job, trucking, at a grain farm down at Vulcan, Alberta. I took a locker in the Greyhound depot, stored my gear, and bought a ticket on the next bus south.

The farmer met me at the café where the bus stopped. His name was Steve. We drove out to his farm, nine miles from town on the provincial highway. In the fields swathers were laying down the wheat and barley, and on some fields the threshing had started. The air was full of dust and chaff and the highway was streaked with yellow grain slopped from trucks rushing to the elevators in town.

As we drove into the yard I saw a combine and two trucks with grain boxes parked in front of the barn. The house was set on one side of the yard and on the other side an
ATCO
trailer was set up on blocks. There was an old Ford half-ton in front of the trailer, its hood propped open with a broken hockey stick. A man and a boy were peering at the engine.

“That's the hand I hired yesterday,” Steve said. “He done nothing yet but poke around in the piece of junk that brought him here. Little fellow's my boy, Pete.”

Steve shut off the engine and opened his door. “Found out what's wrong with her?” he called. “I think your old beater may have given up the ghost.”

The hired hand stepped back and pulled away the hockey stick so that the hood dropped with a heavy iron
clang
.

“Rings,” said the kid.

“No,” said the hand. “Plugs need cleaning, like I told you.”

He sounded irritated at being told something by a twelve-year-old. He looked about nineteen himself, a lowlife, just the type you always find out there.

“There's a bunk for you in the
ATCO
,” Steve told me. “My wife laid out bedding for you. I set up the shower for you boys behind the barn. Go easy on the hot water.” He started walking towards the house. “Supper in an hour,” he called back.

The kid offered his hand. “I'm Pete. He's Duane. You and him drive the grainers. Duane's already took the Dodge so you get the International.”

Duane had slid behind the wheel of his pickup and was trying to start it. It was turning over but it wasn't firing.

“He'll never get it running right the way it is. Duane, what we ought to do is pull the plugs and check compression.”

The trucker spat onto the ground. “That's what you think. It's the plugs are old, that's all.”

“No way.”

“Yes! What do you know about trucks?”

“More than you,” the little boy said calmly. “I wouldn't have bought this piece of junk.”

“Need a tune-up, that's all. Anybody could do it.”

“Not you. You don't have any tools.”

I left them arguing. The truck was no good, anyone could see. I got my duffel and went up the steps of the trailer. Inside were two bunks. One was neatly made up with army blankets and flannel sheets, the other was a mess.

I sat down on the fresh bunk. My people were miners and fishermen in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, but there was none of that by the time I came around. I've been back home a couple of times but I can't stay. Things aren't the same in Nova Scotia as out here — if you get a job there, you hold onto it for dear life. And the pay is nothing. In three months up on the rigs I earn more than my father would have made in a year of fishing and collecting unemployment.

An outfit in Edmonton leases
ATCO
trailers. You see them everywhere. Leave one job for another, and six months later and five hundred miles away you find yourself sleeping in the very same trailer. Men scratch their names on the walls. They write dates, and the names of places that now sound to me like prisons — Fort St. John, Grande Prairie, Fort McMurray, Alsask.

Duane pulled open the screen door and stepped inside.

“Why don't you take your boots off,” I said. “This place is bad enough.”

He muttered something but he knew I wasn't fooling around. I'd drop him in about three seconds if he didn't come to heel. He kicked his boots into one corner and fell down on his bunk.

“Next time leave them outside,” I said.

He was a lowlife and I didn't like the idea of sharing that damn
ATCO
with him for however long it took us to bring in the crop. For a moment I had the idea to just pick up my gear, sling it over my shoulder, and walk out of that trailer into the sunlight, across the shit-smelling yard and down the section road. Just get down to the highway and hitch a ride away from it all. I thought of my father's house on Cape Breton, which was white and shining and perfectly clean, and of meadows that slant down to the sea. When I left there, I left the world of people who dwell in houses, and since then I have always lived in trailers or motels.

“That kid don't know nothing about trucks,” Duane said.

You can't do anything about trash except ignore it. I want a ranch of my own, land I can afford, maybe in south Saskatchewan. I'll get my brothers out from Cape Breton and we'll raise horses.

A woman's voice was calling us for supper. Duane pulled on his boots and I got up from my bunk and we left the trailer and walked across to the house.

It was clear to me Steve and his wife, Donna, did not trust Duane. They were afraid he couldn't do the job and his mistakes would cost money.

“The thought of that boy operating a thirty-thousand-­dollar grainer is making my hair grey,” Donna said.

The three of us were having coffee in the kitchen. Supper was over. Duane and Pete had gone back outside to work on Duane's pickup.

“It's hard to find hands,” Steve said. “We get crazy people from the city or boys like Duane without a brain between their ears. How the hell are we supposed to bring a crop in?”

“Government does not think of the hard-working farmer these days,” said Donna.

“The men we used to have are all getting rich up on the rigs,” said Steve.

“Or on unemployment insurance, hanging around the beer parlours in Calgary,” said Donna.

“Pipeline, tar sands,” said Steve. “That's where the money is now. We're stuck with the likes of him. He says he paid two thousand for that half-ton in Prince Albert. Whoever sold it to him ought to be arrested. The thing's not safe to put on a road.”

“Where does he come from?” I asked.

“He says he was washing cars in P.A. He's been a harvest hand before. I drove around with him in the Dodge and he knows how to split-shift, anyhow. He says he wants to go up on the rigs.”

“That'll be the day.”

“God help us if he smashes into the combine,” said Donna.

“Pete's going to ride around with him. Pete can help him out. They get along okay. Pete's quite a mechanic — he's got more tools than I do. Maybe Pete can even get his pickup running.”

“I don't want our son spending a lot of time with him,” Donna said. She stood up to get the coffee pot from the stove. “How old are you?” she asked me.

“Twenty-five.”

“You look older.” She poured coffee for Steve, then me. “You look like one of the men we used to have around here. You look like a worker.”

“Why did you leave Nova Scotia?” Steve asked.

“What is it you're all after, coming out west?” Donna said.

“Jobs. Money.”

I sipped coffee. I like kitchen coffee they make on the farms. I like old houses with curtains on the windows and kids' drawings posted on the fridge. I like looking through the window to the row of windbreak poplars out on the road. I like the taste of that coffee. On the rigs, in the dining halls you get your coffee from a steel urn, with twenty men in front of you and twenty more lined up behind.

Steve said, “You'll keep an eye on that Duane, will you.”

“Sure.”

“I hate having to depend on someone like that. If Pete was old enough we'd only need to hire one man.”

By ten the next morning the dew was off the crop and the threshing began. Steve and his father drove the combines. The machines never stopped moving — when a hopper was full, one of the grainers would draw up alongside then move down the row in tandem while grain spewed into the box. As soon as it had a full load the truck pulled away, bouncing across the stubble towards a break in the fence, then speeding down the section road to the granary bins or to the elevator in town.

We ate food brought in glass dishes from the house and served from the back of a station wagon. We sat on folding chairs around a card table set up on the wheat stubble. If Pete was around, he and Duane bickered about Duane's old pickup. When Pete wasn't around, Duane didn't have much to say. Once he asked me about the rigs. “You been up there, ain't you?” he said.

“Yes, I have.”

“Well, I'm going next year. What's it like?”

When I first came out west, my big idea was getting rich on the rigs. I worked along the Saskatchewan border and up on the Beaufort. Sooner or later I always quit to try something else, but sooner or later I always go back to the rigs. That is where the real money is.

“I want to make real money,” Duane said. “I want to fix up my truck. Pete says I need to rebuild the engine but I'd like to put some mag wheels on her is what I'd like.”

I knew he could never get work on the rigs. He was too dumb and too scrawny. The work would kill him. They'd take one look at him and turn him down. They are hard men up there, none harder than some of the Cape Bretoners. Duane wouldn't last a week. I tried telling him, but of course he didn't understand.

Every now and then we'd shut down early and get a night off. I'd borrow Steve's pickup and go into town. I met a girl one night at the beer parlour and got a thing going with her. She was blonde and pretty and just out of high school. We never had trouble. I hated the beer parlour, with all the harvest hands drunk and getting into fights. All the lowlife. A couple of glasses of beer, then I'd take this girl and we'd go down to the river.

This was not the way I was meant to be. I never thought of myself living this kind of life. I don't know what I expected. People on the rigs have money and you can get all the things you think you want — trucks, powerboats, trips to Hawaii. They need the workers, they pay you well, and when you're working, you can't spend it anywhere but the beer parlour or the lottery. When a job is over, there's no reason to stay, so you head to another job; you sign up for six months on a seismic crew or road construction so you don't have to think about where you're going — which is nowhere. In small towns people won't talk to you. You're a transient. You get into fights.

I think,
I will save money and get back to Nova Scotia
. But I've been out here too long and don't believe I could ever go back to stay. I remember the things I hated about it — the dead quiet of those towns on a Sunday, the church with no one inside but old people. Everyone on Cape Breton seemed to be just waiting to die.

I'll buy an old ranch in southwest Saskatchewan, east of the Cypress Hills, and breed horses. It's ghost towns down there. Too dry even for wheat. Land is cheap. I don't know a lot about horses but I could learn. I'll get my brothers out there. We'd all be happier than on the rigs.

Duane I don't think owned more than the clothes he wore, plus a cowboy hat kept hanging on a peg, and his old half-ton. Sometimes I would ask him, “You want to come into town?” because I pitied him and not because I wanted him around, but he never wanted to come. The only person he had any time for was the kid, Pete. When we came in from the fields, the two of them would get to work under the hood of Duane's half-ton, as long as there was light to see by, or until Pete's mother called him in to bed.

Half the time the piece of junk wouldn't even start. Pete fiddled around with pliers and a screwdriver while Duane sat pounding the wheel. Then Pete would yell, “Give 'er!” and Duane would grind the starter, smacking the dash with his palm and cursing. Pete and I would have to laugh. The motor would finally catch and the whole truck would be shaking and coughing blue smoke. Duane gunned it until it warmed up, then Pete jumped in and the two of them would head out on a test drive. Sometimes they'd stall in the middle of the road and Pete would prop up the hood and start fixing the problem while Duane just hunkered down and pitched gravel at cattle in the pasture.

I asked Pete about Duane's truck.

“It's crap,” Pete said. “Compression's no good. He hasn't really let me drive but I can tell the front end's wobbly, so the ball joints are probably shot.”

“Why bother working on it?”

“It's fun. I like old trucks. You learn a lot. You know what Duane's doing with his harvest wages?”

“What?”

“Paint job. Two thousand bucks. In Red Deer.”

“Maybe you should talk him out of it.”

“He's nuts,” Pete said. “You can't talk him out of anything.”

One night I went to town but my friend wasn't there. I had a couple of beers and came back to the farm. We were going to finish threshing in another few days if the weather held. We'd been working eighty hours a week and we were all tired.

Driving down the section road I was thinking about where I'd go when the crop was in and we got paid. Half a mile before the farm, I passed Duane's heap coming in the other direction. Duane was in the passenger seat and Pete was driving. He waved as I drove past.

I was lying on my bunk when Duane came in an hour later. I heard him pull off his boots outside and then the squeak of the springs when he lay down. He always slept in his clothes. He turned on one of the overhead bulbs and picked up a skin magazine. I could hear moths crashing into the screen.