Burrard Inlet Read online

  I tell him that I do. I think I do, anyway. And that seems to calm him. He hammers in the next bolt and takes another step down the hull, getting closer to me. About half of the strake is in place, now, and I don’t really have to hold up my end, but I still am – just to have something to do. As he starts on the next section, Frank keeps talking, but I can tell he’s not really talking to me anymore.

  ‘It’s like out there, somewhere,’ he waves his mallet up towards the sky, ‘is the essence of what this boat is meant to be. The form of it, if it was built perfectly. You’ll never get it there entirely. You’ll never make it perfect. But if you want to be a shipwright your job is to get as close as you can. Or keep it close as you can. Not many people know that. Not many people understand it. They think it’s crazy talk.’

  He looks at me, then. As if I’m gonna call it crazy talk.

  ‘I know what you mean,’ I say. ‘It’s about getting it right.’

  ‘That’s it. That’s just it. Getting it right.’

  He’s about to swing the mallet, then seems to change his mind. He flips the mallet around, takes a few steps towards me, and holds it out, handle first. I just stare at it.

  ‘Your turn, scholar,’ he says. ‘Give it a go.’

  I reach for the handle. The wooden grip is worn and stained from years of use. I can feel the slickness of Frank’s sweat, and the warmth of his palm, as if the wood has soaked it up, absorbed it. I stoop to take one of the bolts from the box on the ground at our feet. Then I step up to the hull. He’s already drilled the pilot holes. I just have to fit the bolt to the hole and hammer it on in. I brace it against the strake. Then I hesitate. I’ve got this image in my head of my first blow knocking the whole boat apart – the kind of thing you see in those old cartoons: the bolts shooting out like shotgun slugs, the planks peeling off in huge strips, the frame crumpling and the cabin collapsing. The entire skeleton going down in a slow-burbling scuttle. And me left standing there with the tools in my hands, a Looney-Tunes expression on my face. I glance back at Frank.

  ‘Go on,’ he says.

  I swing away. The mallet connects sweetly with the bolt, and I can feel the repercussions resonate through my hand, my elbow, right up into my shoulder and chest. It’s as if my whole body is resounding. I’m so startled that I miss my next swing, denting the strake, but the third and fourth are on the mark, driving it home.

  ‘Not bad, scholar,’ Franks says. ‘Now do it again – after me.’

  He shores up the next section of strake, drills the pilot holes, and steps aside to let me drive in the carriage bolts. We keep on going like that, swapping positions and taking turns, adopting a tag-team routine. I’m so slow that the job probably takes longer than if Frank were doing it alone. But if that bothers Frank, he doesn’t show it none. Eventually we’re nearing the end of the strake, which Frank has left long to ensure an exact fit. He takes a measurement and sheers it off, and we pound the butt into place, cushioning the mallet blows with a block of wood. Then we step back to survey our work.

  ‘Job done, eh?’ I say.

  ‘Still got to caulk the seams.’ Frank’s squinting a little, as if he’s already envisioning the work to come. ‘But I’ll fit the other strakes first. You around to help some, tomorrow?’

  ‘Boss has got me clearing out the gear locker.’

  ‘Too bad.’

  But he says it as if it doesn’t really matter, and I guess it doesn’t.

  Somewhere along the way, the day has evaporated. The sun is sitting lower in the sky and the gulls have all settled on the roof of the cannery. We’ve worked right through our afternoon break. My shoulder is smouldering from the constant swinging and my throat is parched something fierce. I hold out the mallet, offering it to Frank. He takes it back and begins packing his tools away. For the last quarter hour, I putter around, gathering up any remaining junk and loading it onto the tug. When the five-thirty buzzer sounds, all the union guys appear like clockwork men and start marching up the docks. I feel it, too: that reflex relief. All I want to do is crawl into my car, cruise home, and crack open a cold Kokanee.

  I sidle over to Frank, and offer to ferry him back on the tug.

  ‘Save you the walk through the marina,’ I say.

  He’s gazing at the next strake, laid out on the sawhorses.

  ‘Reckon I might get one more ready for tomorrow,’ he says.

  He reaches for his planer, and begins to shape and scrub the plank. I stand there for a few minutes, resigned to watching again. I reckon he’d probably let me stay, and teach me, if I asked him. I don’t, though. I just turn and shuffle away towards the end of the dock, where my tug is tied up. Hopping aboard, I start the engine and cast off. Frank, already engrossed with his sculpting, doesn’t notice or acknowledge my departure.

  I make my way back alone. There’s a late-afternoon wind blowing up the inlet. The water coming into the marina is choppy, and my tug, she doesn’t want to steer straight. She keeps swinging back and forth like a compass needle, searching for true north. Eventually, given time, she steadies out and finds her course.

  Shooting Fish in a Stream

  I’d loaded all our gear for the shoot. Jake was still inside the house. As far as I knew, he was still asleep in bed. But I wasn’t about to go back in and get him. We’d already had a fight about it, and if I went back in we’d probably have a real fight. So I opened the back of our Chevy van and sat with my legs dangling off the bumper, and dozed there. In the yard next door our neighbours’ kids – these two blonde kids, one of whom is mildly disabled in some way I’ve never been able to figure out – were running around and screaming, looking for eggs and chocolate. Apparently it was Easter, which I’d kind of forgotten about. In our family, now that we were older, Easter didn’t mean much; it just meant a day off. Our dad was watching golf and our mom was writing letters to her relatives, and me and Jake were doing this shoot. Or we were supposed to be doing it.

  Half an hour later, Jake appeared at the back door. He paused on the steps to spit in the bushes and light a cigarette. He’d taken up smoking again, at around this time. I waited as he shuffled casually down our drive, trailing smoke, and eased himself up against the van.

  ‘Did you remember the spear?’ he asked me.

  That was it. He didn’t thank me at all for loading the goddamn van. I mean, he was the one who was supposed to be running the show. It was his thing. But he’s like that, Jake.

  ‘The spear’s with the fishing rod,’ I said.

  He cupped his hands to the window and peered into the back seat.

  ‘I don’t see it,’ he said.

  ‘It’s inside the bag.’

  ‘So long as it’s there.’

  I stood up and tossed the keys at him. They bounced off his chest and flopped onto the driveway, all spread out like a metal squid. He looked down at them, wrinkled his nose, and nudged them with his toe back towards me.

  ‘You’re driving,’ I said.

  ‘I’m too hungover to drive.’

  ‘I loaded the van.’

  He sighed and scooped up the keys. ‘You little dinglehopper.’

  To get to the stream where we intended to shoot, we had to drive halfway up Indian River Road. Neither of us had been out that way since Otis had died. It wasn’t as if we’d been avoiding it; there’d just been no real reason to go, until now. The road starts at the base of Mount Seymour. From our house, first you have to get onto Deep Cove Road and follow that past Myrtle to the Raven and Dan’s Kitchen and this place that used to be a gas station, until the pumps got closed and it became an auto repair shop. The sign says Central Motor Service but everybody just calls it Tony’s, after the old guy who runs it. At Tony’s you hang a right and head up Mount Seymour Parkway, to Parkgate Shopping Centre, where you take another right. Then you’re just about there.

  The van was low on gas, so we stop
ped off at Parkgate. We had to stop off anyway, for the fish. While Jake filled her up, I went into Safeway. At the fresh food counter near the back, they had all kinds of seafood laid out on a bed of ice: crab, shrimp, mussels, haddock, seabass, flounder, and lingcod. I saw all that but I couldn’t see any salmon. When I asked the guy working the counter, he shook his head.

  ‘Shipment’s due in today.’

  ‘None at all? I don’t need sockeye or anything. Just pink.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Give me a couple of trout, then, I guess.’

  He yawned at me, displaying molars riddled with silver.

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Two big ones.’

  He scooped them up and slapped them down on his scales. It came to just under ten bucks, but I couldn’t pay him there. I had to get in line at the front and pay the cashier.

  When I came out, our van was parked in a disabled bay, its hazard lights on and its engine idling. Jake wasn’t in the driver’s seat. Then I saw him trotting across the parking lot, a six-pack dangling in one hand. The cans clicked and clanked against each other as he ran. We both climbed back in the van, and he dropped the beers between us on the floor.

  I said, ‘I didn’t know the liquor store opened that early.’

  ‘Apparently it does.’ He put the van in gear and pulled out; as he drove, he reached back and tugged his seatbelt over one shoulder, wearing it casually without actually buckling it up. He was breathing hard. ‘You get the fish?’

  ‘I got trout.’

  ‘Otis wanted salmon.’

  ‘They didn’t have salmon.’

  ‘Hell.’

  ‘We could go to Superstore.’

  Jake stopped the van at the turn-off to Mount Seymour Road, and we sat there with the signal ticking. He was thinking. Superstore was another twenty minutes away.

  ‘Do they look good?’ he asked me.

  ‘They’re fresh.’

  ‘Frozen would have been cheaper.’

  ‘They wouldn’t have thawed in time.’

  ‘And these ones look good?’

  ‘They look like fish.’

  A car had come up behind us. The driver laid on his horn. Jake lazily flipped the guy the finger, and then took his foot off the brake. The van nosed forward.

  ‘Fuck it,’ he said. ‘I guess it doesn’t matter.’

  The first part of Indian River Road zigzags past a series of cul-de-sacs and crescents. All the houses up there look identical, as if they’ve been pre-cut in a factory and shipped out here for assembly. Each one has a peaked, shingled roof, a single or double garage, lightly-coloured siding – beige or grey or baby blue, usually – and a driveway long enough to park a bus in. The yards are about the same size, with wide green lawns, and one or two are marked by the stump of a tree that had to be cut down. Sometimes the stumps can’t be removed – the roots go too deep – so they just stay there, clinging to the ground like giant grey barnacles.

  Hixton Place is the last cul-de-sac, and just after the turn-off for it we drove past these three signs. The first showed a set of lines coming together, signifying that the lanes ahead narrowed; the second had an arrow on it, snaking back and forth, and warned that the road was winding for the next five kilometres; the third just said, ‘No Exit.’ Beyond the three signs the houses gave way to forest, dense and dark and deep. The roadside was lined with shrubs and ferns that encroached on the shoulder, and massive Douglas fir trees rose up, leaning at eerie angles, creating a canopy that blotted out the sky. It was so dim and murky we could easily have been driving at twilight. The pavement was cracked and buckled and webbed with tar. We felt every bump through our seats because the shocks on the van were all shot to hell.

  ‘This goddamn road,’ Jake said.

  ‘You’d think with all the money in this city, they could afford a better road.’

  ‘They could at least build it straight, without so many hairpins.’

  ‘It’s a fucking deathtrap, all right.’

  Jake sort of snorted at that.

  ‘No shit,’ he said.

  As we approached the next corner, a logging truck appeared going the opposite way. It took the turn too wide and veered into our lane, so Jake had to swerve onto the shoulder to avoid it. The vacuum-effect of the truck’s passing pulled at our van and rattled the windows. Jake leaned hard on his horn but by then the truck was already behind us, the logs on its flatbed rocking back and forth in their chains. Jake swore and steered us back onto the road.

  We still had maybe three klicks to go.

  Jake said, ‘Hand me one of those beers, would you?’

  ‘Not now.’

  ‘Don’t be such a bitch.’

  Driving one-handed, he leaned over and felt around on the floor, searching for the six-pack. I hooked a finger under the plastic rings between the cans, and lifted the beers out of his reach. As I did he made a quick swipe at them. The whole car lurched with the motion, and he had to grab the wheel with both hands to keep her straight.

  ‘You dildo,’ he said.

  ‘Wait till we get to the stream.’

  ‘One beer never hurt anybody.’

  ‘It definitely didn’t hurt Otis.’

  ‘That’s the stupidest thing you ever said.’

  I thought he might try again, so I sat bent forward, clutching the cans protectively on my lap, like a basket of eggs. Jake had bought Extra Old Stock, which was what Otis used to drink. I don’t know if that was deliberate, on Jake’s part. Maybe it was. The cans were cold and beaded with water and I could feel the chill on my thighs, through my jeans.

  Then Jake said, ‘As if you haven’t done the same.’

  It took me a second to figure out what he was talking about.

  ‘Not like that. Not that drunk.’

  ‘Sure. Like you weren’t that drunk when you drove home after my birthday.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So it could have happened to any of us.’

  ‘That’s the point. That’s why we can’t do that no more.’

  ‘I didn’t realise we were making The Last Boy Scout, starring you.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  A kilometre further on we passed the shrine. I’d heard about it, so I knew what to expect. It was right on one of the hairpins. Jake slowed down as we approached, and I got a decent look at it. On the ground, in front of the tree, was a wooden cross, looking stark and white and strange against all that greenery. Around the base of the tree and cross there were bouquets of flowers and gifts and cards. There were also trinkets dangling from the branches, but I couldn’t tell what they were. Weird hippy stuff, maybe. That was all I saw, and then Jake gunned the gas, accelerating around the corner so our rear wheels fishtailed off to the left.

  ‘Take it easy,’ I said.

  ‘Did you see all that shit?’

  ‘I saw it.’

  We drove for a long time in silence. Then I told Jake that I’d heard Otis hadn’t been wearing his seatbelt when it happened, and Jake said that he didn’t care what I’d heard.

  He’d known Otis a lot better than me.

  We left the van at that strange tower you reach halfway down Indian River Road. It might be some kind of radio or television transmitter. I’m not sure. It’s built like a miniature Eiffel Tower and surrounded by a chain-link fence. From there we hiked up an old logging road. We were both laden down with thirty or forty pounds of gear. We had straps criss-crossing our chests and bags hanging off our backs, and we trudged along together like a pair of pack mules. After half a kilometre that logging road reaches a fork, and hidden on the left is a hiking trail that not many people know about. We turned off onto the trail and kept going.

  We took turns being on point because of the dew and spiderwebs. The sky was still overcast and beneath the canopy of pine tre
es it was cold – too cold for spring. Nobody else was on the path. At a certain point, maybe three or four kilometres along, we started looking for the stump. That’s the place where you turn off the trail. It’s easy to miss, and we didn’t want to do the same while carrying all that gear. But Jake spotted it. Then it was a matter of thrashing our way through the underbrush for another few hundred yards. The ground was muddy from recent rains and covered in winter mulch that squelched under our shoes. The terrain dropped down gradually to the streambed. Up over the other side of the ravine was the spot where we’d gone camping a bunch of times, with Otis and some of the other guys, but today we weren’t going that far – we were filming everything at the stream.

  On the near side of it was a gravel bank where we dropped all our bags and sat down to catch our breath. Jake tugged two beers from the six-pack and passed one to me. As we sipped them we poked and prodded among the equipment, slowly unpacking.

  ‘Goddamnit,’ Jake said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘We forgot the tripod head.’

  ‘It’s attached to the camera from last time.’

  He checked, and it was.

  ‘That’s something, at least.’

  It had been six weeks since we’d filmed that scene, at Superstore. The story was supposed to be about a guy, this loser guy, who works in the grocery department stocking shelves and taking shit from everybody. Then one day he freaks out and decides to live in the woods, or imagines he does, or something. I was never quite clear on that. Jake and Otis had come up with the concept. I was just an actor, a prop. I just did what they told me. They’d filmed a few scenes of me at Superstore, and then another of me walking along a riverbank, slowly shedding my clothes, getting back to nature. All that had been preamble for today’s scene, the climax. But a week before we were meant to film it, what had happened had happened, and we gave up. Now Jake had decided that we needed to finish it.

  ‘Should I strip down?’ I asked.