When Is a Man (21 page)

Paul blinked, dumbfounded. “Congrats,” he said. “On the festival. Wonderful stuff.”

Tanner beamed as he looked around the crowded pub. “You said hi to Beth yet?”

“No.” He spotted her among a circle of women, tall, almost his height, her blond hair gathered and held by something glittery. The women looked like they'd been at the opera, all sheer dresses and glittering necklaces. Completely out of place, though he could appreciate the effect it had on the regulars of the earthy pub. There was definitely a buzz in the air. Tanner dragged him over, but two giddy young men intercepted and swept Tanner off to their table, and Paul found himself alone with Beth. She gave him an unenthusiastic hug. “I heard you've been sick,” she said—was he imagining the vague tone of distaste? Of course Tanner would have told her everything.

“Getting better.” He sipped his beer self-consciously. He started to bring up the old days, but after stuttering along he could sense those things—favourite hangouts from years ago, mutual friends—weren't wanted here. She rattled off a list of what was keeping her busy, how she taught yoga and helped run the daycare for the ski resort. Took a pottery class in the evenings. Trying to get pregnant, if Tanner hadn't mentioned it. After an awkward few minutes, talk petered out, and Beth turned toward one of her friends.

Flustered, he pointed to his empty glass, a gesture Beth half-acknowledged, and he headed back to the bar. His fault, he thought sourly. During their undergrad, he'd more or less ignored her. The roommate's piece of fluff, while he was off trying to get his own. He should have invited them over this last month, tried to make amends for the past. Interesting, though, the aggressive and emphatic way Beth located herself
here
, rather than Vancouver. It took unrelenting effort to become a local, he supposed.

A group of men, middle-aged and older, hunkered around a small table in the far corner by the dart board, ill at ease with the film fest crowd that had invaded their watering hole. He recognized one of them from his last day at camp, a long-haired fisheries technician named Daryl who'd led Paul's team up Basket Creek to count redds. He'd talked in a raspy voice about the spawning habits of bull trout with a wry intimacy, a bit of fish-gossip mixed with science.

Paul weaved his way through the crowd to the table. “Rasmussen, sure.” Daryl shook his hand. “Pull up a chair. We're just shooting the shit.”

“Rasmussen,” an obese and bespectacled man said. “No relation to Ken? The welder?”

Paul shook his head, and Daryl laughed. “In every Canadian town lives a handy fella named Rasmussen. He's the one I told you about,” he said to the man, a Monashee technician named Morton. “Same cancer as you, in remission.”

Morton had a mop of grey hair and an easy, toothy grin. He shook Paul's hand. “Gleason Score 7,” he said and was delighted when Paul repeated the same. “It's a great life, isn't it? Every time I fart, I pee myself.”

“Sounds about right,” Paul managed.

Morton apparently spent part of each day in online chat rooms and forums for men recovering from prostate cancer. They'd run through the vast gauntlet of prostatectomies—unilateral and bilateral nerve-sparing, laparoscopic radical, the da Vinci robotic—and other treatments. Transurethral resections, radiation, and hormone therapies. A lot of talk about the relative strength of one's urine stream—one either pissed like a race horse or like a kitten—or how keenly they missed the sight and sensation of their own ejaculate. Yes, Paul had skimmed similar forums, thinking this was an ethnographic study tailor-made for him—he could study his participants covertly, develop an instant rapport, because he would be one of them.

What kept him away was the language. Brutally explicit, filled with raw emotion—and courageous, he admitted, like when a forum member would joke about the best post-op underwear or announce his own imminent death. Their stories brought his own experiences swinging into queasy, too-close focus. He couldn't read a full page of discussion without feeling faint. Talking to Morton right now was making him nauseous.

Morton turned to the others. “Wife still wants sex, right? We talked about me using a strap-on. I said, you sure about that, honey? 'Cause you know I'll buy the biggest goddamn one there is. Great life,” he repeated while everyone laughed. He didn't sound entirely insincere.

“How's the research?” asked Daryl. “Taking shape?”

“What's he doing?” another man asked, a hand up to his ear. “More fish stuff?”

Daryl filled him in, somewhat inaccurately. The man nodded. “Tell him about Joe Pilcher,” he said with a great deal of satisfaction. “Joe fuckin' Pilcher.”

Daryl rolled his eyes. “My old man,” he explained to Paul. “We had a trapline and a squatter's cabin in the woods north of Lambert.”

“Before the dam?” Paul asked.

“Definitely not after. It's sitting below the high water mark by about twenty metres.”

“I should be talking to your dad, then.”

“Not much chance of that, I'm afraid.”

“Sorry.”

“Could talk to me, though. It's a great story.”

“If you knew what I was doing, why didn't you contact me before?”

“Waiting for you to ask,” Daryl said, eyebrows raised in a hurt expression. He grinned. “No. I had to make sure of your politics. People come here, say they're doing historical research, and it turns into anti-dam rhetoric and nostalgia. Oh woe, the steamships are gone. Like we'd still be using fucking steamships if there was no dam.”

“I'll mark you down for definitely not anti-dam.”

“Doesn't matter.” He waved a hand toward the window. “There she be, whether you like it or not. There's good and bad in everything, right? You and I wouldn't have had jobs this fall without it.”

“True enough.”

“From what I hear, you're impartial. So far.”

“I just want people's stories.”

“I'm a Monashee guy. No one's saying the dam didn't bugger a lot of things up. That's my life's work, trying to improve habitat.” He waved both his hands in circles, a man describing a conjuring trick. “Fix mistakes. Bear witness. Witness bears.”

Morton nudged Paul. “Here's a conundrum I've been chatting about online. My daughter's getting married this summer: do I do my
PSA
check before or after the wedding? You see the problem? If I wait, I might be too nervous to enjoy the wedding. But if I do it before, I might be too depressed.”

There was a shifting in the wall of people, and Tanner appeared, bug-eyed and growling like a stage pirate, a pitcher of beer in his hand. Daryl fished a card out of his wallet and handed it to Paul. “Buy me a beer later this week and we'll talk.”

Paul nodded, then turned to Morton. “Before. Because the news might not be bad.”

“Good man—you're an optimist,” Morton said, and Paul had a good laugh.

Roger
(b. 1948, 61 yrs old)
and
Betty
(b. 1950, 59 yrs old)
Tierney

Recorded at their home in Shellycoat, December 1, 2009.

Roger: The road to Shellycoat back then was pure hell. Especially in spring. The tire ruts were so deep, you'd get hung up if you had anything lower than a crew cab or a crummie. That was one of the promises that came with the dam—road improvements from Bishop to Shellycoat.

Betty: It
was
easier to get around, after.

R: Sure. They wanted to get people excited about the jobs the dam would bring. Of course, that doesn't make people forget they're losing their homes. I can sympathize with that.

Paul:
So did you get steady work, then? On the dam?

R: I worked two, three months before construction started, clearing the shores with a cat. Just before winter, a bunch of us were laid off. Told we didn't have enough experience, that we needed to sign up with the right union. All of a sudden there's Portuguese and Italians, Indonesians, all up from the coast. We said, “What about the rule to hire local?” Eventually we got our jobs back. Betty and I moved from Lambert to Bishop to Shellycoat in the span of a year and a half.

Thing about the dam, there's places you can live now you couldn't before. Spring floods downriver from Shellycoat were nasty. The dam controls the levels, everyone's properties are safer. Less mosquitoes too.

B: We enjoyed being in town. More things to do, social events and movies. Sports teams and music recitals for the kids.

R: Close to all the shops, the library, and the movie theatre.

B: You weren't so cut off from the outside world. Mind you, that's exactly why some hated being relocated.

R: They didn't want to have anything to do with the outside world.

Not everyone held bitter memories. Or they'd given up grappling with the strangeness of their land no longer existing. The children of those who “did all right” in negotiations, or those landowners who'd been starved for a more comfortable, modern life, gave a different interview than someone like Elsie Hubert. Some people were secretly relieved to give up their homes, so difficult and costly to maintain. Some had grown weary of the relative poverty and isolation, others had parents who needed to be in a rest home, not a dilapidated farm.

In Castlegar, in 1993, the Kootenay Symposium (he found a video cassette copy in the archives) had given those affected by the dams on the Columbia and Kootenay Rivers a chance to vent their anger in a public forum. There'd been nothing comparable in the Immitoin Valley. He'd got a taste of bottled-up resentment with people like the Kruses and Elsie, but he wanted more—he hoped for shouting, rage, tears. But tears proved elusive. Maybe because to show grief would be to admit defeat. Or because, really, it was none of Paul's goddamned business. Wasn't that obvious? Men didn't want to be subjects. They wanted to relate events from a distance, to be the historians of their own lives. The women wanted to talk but did not trust.

He was always aware of being the outsider. He didn't live here, he was
in the field
, the community of Shellycoat-after-the-dam. Closed within the bubble of what was called his ethnographic position, which demanded that he be both stranger and observer, that he abide—blend in if he was lucky—but not belong.

The work was satisfying, at least. He was rolling along, his mind firing on all cylinders. It was only the early stages, but he knew that what he was delving into was real and substantial—he wouldn't have to force connections from what he gathered, the patterns were already there, waiting for him to catch up if he could.

After he interviewed the Tierneys, he went to the coffee shop where Gina had promised to meet him. For two hours, he sat alone by a window with his headphones on, playing back interviews, hating the sound of his own voice more and more.

In the hallway that led to the back porch was a storage closet. It lay directly beneath Jory and Sonya's stairs, separated from the steps by a thin layer of particle board, and tall enough on one side for Paul to stand while he sorted through his stuff. Early one evening he was rummaging through one of his boxes for an old essay he'd written when he heard a soft repetitive thumping from upstairs. Someone cried out—Sonya's voice, a guttural yelp that accompanied each thump. He held his breath and moved deeper into the closet where the sounds grew clearer, amplified by the wood. They were in the living room, he guessed, on the couch close to the stairs.

He closed his eyes, focusing on the quieter, more telling layers of sound: the huff of Jory's breath, the faint smack of flesh, the protesting joints of the couch frame. Sonya groaned, an upward inflection, astonished at something, and then her cries went up a notch. He couldn't tell whether the sounds she made were genuine. Perhaps she exaggerated her pleasure to some degree, but maybe not. They were young, their own bodies could still surprise them.

He became greedy for their voices and noises, absorbed and invested in their rising joy. He knew Jory and Sonya well enough now to call them friends—he had coffee with them on the porch regularly, brought leftovers upstairs when Gina had made too much food—but not enough that decency overcame his curiosity. The creaking and groaning upstairs brought his own erotic memories to the surface, sharpened by his being deprived of physical arousal and release for so long. In his mind, he inhabited both Jory's frame and his own, younger self. He forced those playful yelps not just from Sonya, but from a procession of women from his past.

When Jory came with a ragged, socked-in-the gut moan, he left Paul cold beneath the stairs, alone in his flesh and clinging to the image of Jory collapsing on Sonya's back. They wound down with matching sighs, their wordless protests that something so wonderful should leave them.

A viscous, salty saliva filled his mouth, which he washed away with a single swallow. He slipped quietly out of the house and wandered into town. The stores were closed, the streets nearly empty except for a handful of city workers on ladders and cherry-pickers stringing Christmas lights and ornaments on the streetlights, trees, and utility poles. He kept on until he reached the park. Along the river, old-fashioned-looking streetlamps cast a dim yellow glow, and beyond their reach, the Immitoin rolled past, muted and dark. There were benches along the path, each marked with a small memorial plaque. On one lay fresh flowers and stuffed polar bears and beavers with toques. On the plaque, a woman's name, Yolanda Hayward. She'd died last winter, died young. A crossed pair of skis were engraved underneath her name.
LOVED FRIENDS AND FAMILY, LOVED LIFE.