Burrard Inlet Read online

  By that point Clayton’s getting pretty hammered.

  ‘I cheat on my wife,’ he tells us.

  ‘You’re married?’

  ‘Yeah. But I go pig-fucking sometimes.’

  He explains that pig-fucking involves picking the biggest, ugliest girl in a bar and taking her home for the night. I can’t get a line on his tone. It’s part boast, part confession – he’s proud and ashamed at the same time.

  ‘Got one chick pregnant. Still paying alimony on that little piglet.’

  I wash it all down with another beer.

  I learn more about Clayton from Kurt’s mom while we’re doing the dishes one night. She tells me he wasn’t always a drunk, didn’t always act like he does. In school he wrote plays and got all the other kids to perform them. He even won an essay-writing contest.

  ‘Clayton?’ I ask. ‘Are you kidding?’

  ‘I used to volunteer at the school. Everybody adored him.’

  ‘What happened?’

  She shakes her head, places the last cup gently on the draining board.

  Sorrel’s teaching herself to ride a bike – this rickety low-rider with spoke beads and a banana seat. She doesn’t have training wheels and nobody wants to help her so on the weekend I’m recruited to be her trainer. The idea is for me to jog along behind her, balancing the bike by the back of its seat. She wears Neil’s dirtbike helmet for protection. It’s too big and keeps slipping over her eyes, but she doesn’t seem to mind.

  ‘Ready, cowgirl?’

  ‘Let’s roll.’

  Once she gets up a head of steam, handlebar streamers snapping in the wind, she signals for me to let go. I do, and she immediately wipes out in the gravel. She hops up and starts kicking the bike, the helmet bobbing crazily on her head. Her knees are skinned and bloody, and there are tears on her cheeks but she’s not actually crying – she’s more furious than hurt. Once she wears herself out she picks up the bike and gets back on.

  ‘Well?’ she demands, looking back at me. ‘Ready to go again?’

  I wonder if I could convince my parents to adopt her.

  Our next contract is for a plot of land an hour from Prince George. Clayton has arranged to have us all stay at a nearby campground. Walter drives his own car so we can pick up a new crew member along the way: Brady. He’s our age, with a smooth, feminine face and eyes so blue that they look somehow feral, wolf-like. The first thing he says to me is, ‘You’re a city-sucker, huh? From Vancouver? I can tell by your skin. It’s gone all yellow from hanging out so many chinks.’

  Clayton finds that hilarious. With Brady around it’s worse than day one; I become the source of all their amusement, the target of all their mockery. They make fun of my clothing, my hair, the way I talk. And when they’re not ridiculing me, they’re telling jokes about the chinks and the chugs and the ragheads and the nippers.

  I keep my mouth shut and my head down.

  The only good thing about the new place is where we sleep. Instead of tents Clayton has rented a battered aluminium trailer for the crew to share. Kurt and I take the double room, isolating Brady in a single. This pisses him off even more, makes him like me even less. Before dinner on the first night, the rest of the crew go off to smoke up and hackey-sack; Annie invites me along, but by then I’m sick of it all and say I’m going to stay behind.

  ‘He wants to jerk off,’ Brady says, and mimes tugging at his crotch.

  Everybody laughs, including Kurt.

  Clayton and his wife stay in a separate trailer, which doubles as our mess hall. Over dinner Clayton tells us about the girl on his crew who got mauled by a grizzly the previous summer. She was listening to her Walkman and didn’t hear the bear until it was right on top of her.

  ‘Stupid,’ Annie says.

  ‘Practically tore her head off. All those fuckers who want to ban bear hunting should have seen what it did to that girl.’ Clayton glances at his wife. ‘Right, babe?’

  His wife nods in demure agreement, serving up another helping of sloppy Joes. The meat is chewy and smells strange. She’s not as good a cook as Kurt’s mom but she’s prettier. In her polka-dot apron, with her permed hair, she looks like the housewife from one of those old appliance ads. Watching her, I find Clayton and his pig-fucking even more bewildering.

  Later, as we’re getting ready for bed, I ask Kurt about Clayton.

  ‘Your mom said he used to be different. He wrote things.’

  ‘I remember that. He could have got a bursary to go to UNBC, if he wanted.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Kurt unzips his sleeping bag – one of those mummy bags that tapers around the feet – and wriggles inside. ‘He never went. I don’t think he even finished high school. Not as many guys do, up here. That’s why my folks sent me down to the city.’

  He tells me it’s easy to get work, in the forestry towns. There’s the lumber mills, the tree planting, the logging companies. You can make good money doing any of those jobs.

  ‘Probably more than he could have with an English degree.’ Kurt yawns, rolling away from me and curling in on himself. ‘And Clayton’s always liked to party. You’ve seen him.’

  It’s not much of an explanation, but it’s as much as I’m going to get. I reach over and click out the bedside lamp. I lay in the darkness and listen to Kurt snoring as I wonder about Clayton’s other life, and all the things he could have done.

  Brady and Clayton are convinced that the Chinese are taking over Canada. They explain their elaborate theories to me in the pick-up on the way to and from the planting ground.

  ‘It’s a chink conspiracy,’ Clayton says.

  ‘Sure,’ Brady says. ‘They come to Vancouver, get their immigration status, then fly all their relatives in. Pretty soon there’ll be more of them than us.’

  ‘Amen, brother. A-fucking-men.’ Clayton’s features twist as he struggles to hold in his lungful of smoke. ‘And next they bring in their drugs, set up their gangs. We wouldn’t have half the drug problems if it wasn’t for the chinks. Those Yakuza motherfuckers.’

  I say, ‘Yakuza are Japanese.’

  ‘They’re all in it together.’

  Brady’s never been to the city, and Clayton’s only been once. All he remembers is the tall buildings and the junkies on Hastings Street. He and his wife saw some guy, dressed in a burlap sack, standing in traffic and staring at the sun. After that they stayed in their hotel bar.

  I try to think of some defence that will make sense to them.

  ‘There’s some pretty cool Chinese people, too.’

  ‘Chink-lover,’ Brady says, blowing smoke in my face.

  My only refuge is the forest.

  Nobody can touch me there. I just plant and plant and I do it better and better each day. My blisters have hardened into calluses and my body has hardened, too. I’ve become a machine, running on a steady supply of weed and billowing smoke as exhaust. My totals are climbing. The only one who plants more than me is Clayton, and he’s a veteran, a highballer. Kurt has been trying to keep up, and getting more and more frustrated. I’ve considered lying to him about my totals, but it’s no good because Clayton gets us to announce them in front of everybody at the end of each day.

  I’m in the woods, thinking about that, when I hear a snorting and pawing and grunting coming from a cluster of trees. I put a hand to the knife strapped to my belt and start singing at the top of my lungs. Clayton’s told me to make noise if I come across a bear. The snorting gets louder. The bushes are shaking. I turn, getting ready to run. There’s a wild roar and the snapping of branches and Brady appears, arms outstretched as he charges towards me.

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ he says, laughing so hard he can’t breathe. ‘Your face was priceless.’

  I’m still gripping my knife. I feel like I could stab him.

  ‘I knew it was you,�
�� I say.

  ‘My ass.’

  Back at our stockpile, over lunch, he tells the others about the prank. They all love it, and there’s a lot of laughter at my expense.

  ‘So the rookie fell for it!’ Clayton says.

  ‘Poor kid,’ Annie says.

  ‘Once a city-sucker,’ Kurt says, ‘always a city-sucker.’

  I look at him. He’s got the decency to look away, at least.

  Around the others Kurt and I have kept up pretences. But back at the trailer, in our room, we no longer really act like friends. We’re quiet most of the time and move around each other, as if we’re both living there alone. I listen to my music and read dog-eared paperbacks that I’ve found in the trailer: Stephen King and Clive Cussler and Tom Clancy. Kurt smokes roll-ups or hacky-sacks by himself or lies on his cot, staring at the ceiling. Sometimes I try to pinpoint when and how things changed between us, but it all seems childish and petty and strange.

  Usually, Kurt’s the last to quit each day – frantically trying to top up his total – so when I go to reload my sacks on Wednesday afternoon I’m surprised to find him lounging by the boxes of yearlings, his equipment strewn about him. It’s only two o’clock.

  ‘How you doing?’ he asks me.

  ‘All right. You?’

  He yawns dramatically, and waves a hand as if shooing away a mosquito. His gesture takes in the equipment, the baby trees, and the surrounding forest.

  ‘I’m all through with this.’

  The next day, Fred picks him up in their family van, an old Chevy Astro. The rest of the crew, except for Clayton, come out of the trailers to say goodbye. We shake hands and wish Kurt luck and nobody mocks him for bailing on us. He climbs up front into the passenger seat; Fred gives us a nod, and then they’re pulling away. Kurt doesn’t look back or wave.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Annie says.

  ‘Fucking couldn’t take it, could he?’ Brady says, and spits.

  ‘Just seems weird. Especially when your dad’s the contractor.’

  I try to imagine explaining it to my own dad. It wouldn’t go down so well.

  ‘Shitty for you, man,’ Clayton tells me later, when I’m helping him unload firewood from his truck. ‘Come all the way up here, then have your buddy sell out on you like that. That’s tough.’

  It’s not, though. It changes things for the better. Clayton eases off on me, I suspect mostly because he can’t afford to lose another crew member. Brady seems to be less hostile, too. In part this is Annie’s influence; it’s obvious he’s got a crush on her. Instead of bullying me, he flirts with her. He’s always trying to tickle her or wrestle with her or chat her up, and he likes having me there for their mating rituals. It takes the pressure off, I guess.

  As a result, camp life becomes less of a torment. During our downtime, the three of us just hang around, smoking and drinking and badmouthing Kurt. Sometimes Walter joins us, sometimes there are other crew members; if we ever fall behind schedule, Clayton calls in a few of his friends, casual highballers, to help us catch up. Annie sells me my own bag of weed, and at the end of each night, I lock myself in my room, light a joint, and crank the volume on my dad’s Walkman, listening to Neil Young’s high, rasping keen.

  The hours pass, and the days, in a hazy, almost hallucinatory fog.

  On weekends we abandon camp.

  Everybody else gets to go home, but I’m forced to stay at Kurt’s. He’s sleeping in his old room, now – the charade of his independence having fallen apart. Fred and Miranda treat me politely, if a little coldly. Nobody ever mentions Kurt quitting, and I wonder what he’s told them. Whenever I go inside, Kurt finds an excuse to keep himself occupied. I ask him to come have beers with me, to smoke a joint, to toss the football around. He’d rather play on his computer, shooting monsters or building alien cities.

  The one person happy to have me back is Sorrel.

  She doesn’t seem to have many friends from school, and spends most of her time with me. I help her ride her bike and toss horseshoes with her. She’s only six but she can read and write and likes me to read her books in the yard. Her favorite is one about a vampire bunny that sucks the juice out of vegetables. I read that to her a dozen times, both of us laughing at the good parts like we’ve never heard them before. While she listens, she has a habit of twisting her hair in a knot around her forefinger, tight enough to turn her fingertip white.

  When Clayton picks me up on Monday mornings, I always see her pale face peeking through the curtains, watching me go.

  Apparently, we’d have a lot more tree-planting work if it wasn’t for the Indians. Just like the Chinese are responsible for all of Vancouver’s problems, according to Clayton everything from bad weather to petty crime can be attributed to the local Native Americans.

  ‘All they do is huff gas and rip people off and steal our work.’

  He goes on to tell me that the Natives are given a certain amount of tree-planting contracts by law, and other companies are encouraged through tax breaks and bonuses to support the Native community, because of its unemployment problem.

  ‘So they get all our fucking cream just because they’re Indians.’

  Brady says, ‘If that’s not racist I don’t know what the fuck is.’

  Walter just nods along, like always, even though he’s part Native himself.

  I take the morning joint that we’re sharing, toke long and hard – scalding my throat with smoke – and point it at Clayton. ‘Maybe they’re getting something back for all the times our government screwed them over.’

  But my voice is squeaky from holding my breath, and Clayton just snorts.

  ‘Chug-lover,’ Brady says, and elbows me.

  ‘Leave him be,’ Annie says. ‘You sound like a bunch of fucking rednecks.’

  There’s a pause. Then Brady sniggers.

  ‘We are rednecks!’ Clayton shouts.

  Even I have to laugh at that.

  Campfires become our nightly ritual.

  Clayton and his wife carry over the stereo from their trailer. If we’re blitzed enough we make our own music. Walter brings a rusty harmonica that he blasts on. Annie has a five-string guitar and a voice like an old bullfrog. Everybody sings along.

  ‘That’s great,’ Brady says, slapping his thigh. ‘Listen to that, huh?’

  We’re always drunk, always stoned, always happy.

  I’m flying, now – earning one-thirty, one-forty a day. Then the ground gets gnarly: rocky and rugged and hard as concrete. You can feel every shovel stroke from your tailbone up to your skull. We’re being paid a little more per tree but our totals have been cut in half.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Clayton assures us, one night at the firepit. ‘We got some cream lined up for Monday.’

  He’s been hyping the cream all week, and I finally get the guts to ask him what he’s talking about. He looks at me like I’ve got a dick growing out of my forehead. He explains that cream is the holy grail of tree planting: soft, open ground that melts under your shovel like cheesecake. Usually, since it’s so easy, the price per tree is dropped, sometimes to as little as a nickel. But Fred’s hooked up a deal for us – ten cents a tree. Clayton slaps me on the back, tells me I’ll plant my thousand.

  ‘First rookie to hit a thousand always gets a case.’

  I laugh. ‘I’m the only rookie now that Kurt’s bailed.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Clayton says, ‘but the dog-fucker wants in on this.’

  We fall silent. Clayton picks up a rock, throws it skittering into the bush.

  ‘Don’t worry – I’ve told Fred what I think of that.’

  I wonder if that was such a good idea.

  The thought of that cream gets us through the rest of a gruelling week. Come Thursday, we’re ahead of schedule and Clayton lets us take the day off. He goes shopping for food supplies with his wife; the rest
of us fuck around all morning and spend the afternoon smoking up, bragging about how sweet the cream’s going to be. Brady attempts to punch a hole in the trailer wall, doesn’t, and nearly breaks his wrist instead. Annie wraps it up in a tensor bandage from the First Aid kit, treating him with more sympathy than he deserves.

  Maybe he’s doing something right.

  Before dinner, we decide to make a beer run into town. On the way back from camp, Walter tears up the dirt road, fishtailing Clayton’s truck around every corner. We’re singing ‘Buffalo Soldier’ together, shouting the chorus out the windows. I’m riding shotgun and for the first time since I came up here, I feel like I’m part of something. Then I see the caravan lumbering around the next bend. The road isn’t wide enough for two vehicles.

  ‘Shit!’ I shout. ‘Watch out!’

  Walter’s already seen, and pumps the brakes. The truck goes into a skid, twisting left, right, left, and he works the wheel to compensate. Walter’s good – he holds the road – and as the caravan approaches I’m convinced we’re going to squeeze past until our front wheels bite and lurch to the left. There’s a crunch and the shriek of metal on metal as we grind along the side of the caravan. Then we’re sitting in silence and a cloud of dust.

  One by one we pile out to assess the damage.

  Clayton takes the news of our accident surprisingly well, considering we were wasted and mangled the front of his truck, and that most of the liability will be with him.

  ‘Insurance will cover it,’ he says.

  But his face is hard. There’s something else on his mind. We’re standing around the table, in the dining room of the trailer he shares with his wife. He clears his throat and looks out the window; it’s almost dusk and I can hear the cicadas whirring in the underbrush.