Twenty-Six (27 page)

They’d exchanged a few letters and seen each other infrequently since then.

Although they’d been separated for years and had only been in contact intermittently in the meantime, their former closeness had survived, and it was as natural as breathing now to settle in across from her, to feel himself relax, his whole body loosen again, in Meta’s presence.

Ziv had been through so much, he wished he could tell Meta all about it all at once, send it to her telepathically so she’d immediately understand how he felt. His eyes began to fill up, and seeing this Meta said, “Oh, Ziv!”

He felt himself recoiling from his own emotion. He collected himself and sat up straighter in his seat.

“How’s the land of the rising yen?” he laughed.

They chatted for a while about Meta’s life in Japan. She told him she was banking between a thousand and fifteen hundred dollars a month.

“Wait a minute,” Ziv said. “You’re
making
a thousand to fifteen hundred a month?”

She shook her head. “I’d hate to tell you what I’m making. What do you make at Zellers?”

When he told her, she said, “Doesn’t it bother anyone in that company that a full-time employee can’t even afford to live?”

“Full time? I’m not even part-time. You know what they call my job? ‘Extra’! Almost everyone who works there is
extra
. The biggest mistake I ever made was not going back to school. Now I feel as though I’m stuck.”

“It’s not too late. You can go back.”

They stopped speaking for a few moments and the noise of the coffee shop rose up around them. There was the taste of lukewarm coffee in Ziv’s mouth and the smell of cigarette smoke. He noticed Meta’s hands. He’d forgotten how beautiful her hands were, how he’d used to admire the slender elegance of each finger and the incongruously homely nails, which she habitually bit to the quick.

He looked up to her face and could sense the seriousness, the tender concern of her gaze.

“Ziv,” she said. “Tell me how you’re doing.” She reached out in his direction as though she wanted to take his hand. “I’ve been thinking about you and your family. It was hard for me to be so far away.” Suddenly there was anger in her eyes, “How the hell could such a thing have happened?”

“That’s what we’re all wondering. It seems like such a shock. But at the same time, looking back, it seems obvious that something like this was going to happen.” He looked down into the small space between them, as though that were the place the whole world had fallen. He reached across the table, held out his hands for Meta to take. When she held them, he felt relieved, as though some of the pain lodged in him had found its release.

Meta drove her parents’ car from Tim Horton’s to the parking lot behind the Heather Motor Hotel. Her ability to pay for the room, cash, without flinching, without even thinking about flinching, gave her a sense of freedom and power. She flipped on
the light and walked into the room as though it were a new house she’d just bought.

In the middle of the hotel-room floor, they undressed each other. She unbuttoned his shirt and slipped the white T-shirt beneath it over his head. He seemed so large and hairy. His shoulder muscles were round, his chest hair crept up in a V from beneath the waistband of his pants. Motion became liquid as he unclasped her bra. She felt the cool air of the room on her breasts. They warmed again as he cupped them in his hands, brought his mouth to her nipples. Gently she tried pushing him to the bed, but his pants were halfway down, at his knees, and he toppled over, bounced, laughed. After pausing a moment to take her own pants off, she began rubbing the palms of her hands over all of him. She wanted to feel all of him at once. She pulled up on his knees until he was curled into a ball on his side and draped herself over him like a blanket, spread her arms to touch all of him. This feeling, the feeling of covering him, possessing him, was what she’d been thinking about, somewhere hidden at the back of her thoughts, since leaving Tokyo. The relief she felt was momentary. When it had gone it was followed by an empty feeling deep inside her, a hunger. She pushed back on the thigh of his upper leg, slid a hand over his hip to touch the penis that revealed itself as he moved.

Beginning at the bottom of his ribs, she moved her lips slowly along the skin of his belly until she felt his warm erection at her cheek. She turned her head and took it into her mouth.

“Oh,” he said, and exhaled.

She held his penis in her mouth and tasted the salty heat of it. She moved on it, up and down. Felt it sliding on her tongue.

He began to speak her name. Softly. So softly. She could hardly hear. “Meta. Meta. Meta. Meta.”

When it was over, Ziv began to cry quietly. She pressed herself into his back and felt the sobs shaking him. Soon she was crying too, and when they’d both stopped crying, they were asleep.

On the day of the explosion, Gavin Fraser had called the mine office without even thinking about it and told them to put him on the list of draegermen. While he’d been employed there he’d been the best-trained mine rescue worker Eastyard had, so he felt obligated to be a part of the rescue by his bond to the men he’d worked with. It had not been very long since he’d quit, and Roseanne, the member of the office staff who answered when he finally got through, was obviously not aware he didn’t work there any more. “It’s funny we didn’t call you already, Gavin,” she said. He could hear her shuffling through papers, looking for his name on some list.

He’d been placed with a crew who had come, within hours of the explosion, from New Brunswick, and since none of them was familiar with the operation at Eastyard, his main job with the team was as guide. The captain of the team was one of the New Brunswickers.

They sat in their full gear in the change room, and after they’d all been introduced they had nothing left to do until they got the word to go down. Gavin was sick to his stomach, and the little wooden benches in the change room, with lockers around them
full of the clothing of the men who were underground, seemed like they were made of broken glass. None of the men from the rescue crew could get comfortable on them. Though they all knew they should be sitting down, conserving their strength for what they’d have to do underground, they each spent more than half the forty-five minutes they were kept waiting on their feet and pacing. The men from New Brunswick knew Gavin had worked with the crew that was underground at the time of the explosion, otherwise they might have made a few jokes to cut the tension.

Someone from outside the room opened the door a crack and told them to proceed to the portals, the entrances of the main deeps. They all breathed a sigh of relief to be on their way finally, but at the portals, they had to wait again in a little camper trailer.

At last somebody came with the go-ahead from the rescue co-ordinator for them to proceed down the main decline. In the hour or so they’d spent together waiting for the signal to go down, the men had been mostly quiet, but the moment they entered the portal they fell completely silent. The place smelled charred, a sickening mixture of every burnt thing from the shafts below. Everything, every pipe, every arch, every piece of steel and concrete debris, was covered with a hard, black coating, the burnt remnants of the explosion. Gavin felt himself start to gag, but he knew that if he threw up now, it would slow down the progress of the whole team, so he fought his nausea and kept going.

They took the first five hundred feet slowly, careful of every piece of debris underfoot, watching the roof overhead for any signs of weakness. Thick concrete bulkheads had been thrown far back up the shaft and smashed into little pieces. Big pieces of steel, once part of doors that towered to the ceiling, were strewn about, twisted almost out of recognition. The men came across
two tractors slammed together with such force that at first Gavin thought the debris heap was one smashed vehicle, until he counted eight tires underneath it.

Looking at this mass of compressed metal, Gavin stopped in sudden shock. He looked down for a moment, at his own feet and legs, at how the dust and soot had gathered on him already. He turned his back to the rest of the draeger team and felt himself well up. His vision blurred dangerously in the already poor visibility and he shuffled carefully until he could steady himself with a hand against a stone wall. A sob welled up in him, followed quickly by another. He closed his eyes and spoke aloud to himself briefly. “Okay, get hold of yourself. Get hold of yourself.” He took a few deep breaths of processed air.

When he pulled himself back together, he took the team captain aside. Without anger, he confronted the man. “I think I’ve figured out what this rescue is really about.” The man had dark features and a bushy black moustache that made his face even harder to read beneath his breathing apparatus. “Is someone on this team carrying body bags?” Gavin asked. The captain looked down at the floor a moment, at the charred and strewn debris, then nodded without speaking.

In an old scrapbook, something put together by a relative he never knew, Gavin had a clipping about the Moose River mine rescue of 1936. The clipping did not mention his great-grandfather, Leander Fraser, who had been a draegerman at Moose River, but Gavin knew about his family’s involvement. He knew that the reporters of the time referred to all the rescuers as draegermen, although most of them were not. Leander Fraser was the real thing, trained in the use of all the equipment and techniques. His brother’s name was William Barkhouse Fraser.
He was a member of the Acadia Rescue Corps in the twenties. William’s picture appears in James M. Cameron’s book,
The Pictonian Colliers
, dressed with his team members in the full rescue gear of the time. Gavin took that book off the shelf in his bedroom from time to time and looked at the picture of his distant uncle, searching for something of himself in a man he never met.

At Moose River, the Pictou County miners, unpaid volunteers all, had worked for eleven days, at times with pickaxes and bare hands, to save three company officials after the main shaft in a gold mine collapsed. Two of the three men were brought out alive, both with a Pictou County man on each arm to guide him. Descriptions from the time used the word
elated
to describe the rescuers, who were lauded as heroes on radio and in newspapers around the world.

Gavin had first read the article as a kid, and he’d had to look up
elated
in a dictionary. It was such an exhilarating word. He used to say it aloud to himself when he’d flip through the scrapbook, and it somehow became connected with how proud he felt to be descended from such a skilled and brave man as Leander Fraser. Elated.

A
fter Arvel’s funeral, a funeral held without a body present to consecrate or bury, she and Colleen had packed most of the furniture and belongings in the house into a rental truck and put them into storage in Halifax. And now, three weeks later, she was back, pulling again into the driveway of the house on Pleasant Street in Albion Mines for the final time. The new renters would move in the next day. There were still a few belongings for her to collect, and if she wanted to get back the damage deposit, she’d have to do a little cleaning. Kate had started school in Halifax, but this was March break, so Jackie had taken both kids to daycare and left them for the day. If she was going to be a little late getting back, Colleen was working the eight-to-four shift and had said she’d pick the kids up and get them supper. They were still at Colleen’s apartment, but Jackie was hoping a unit would come open in the same building within the next month or so.