Burrard Inlet Read online

  She poked her head in and said, ‘That guy lodged a complaint.’

  ‘I heard. What’s the verdict?’

  ‘I backed you up. You’re clear.’

  Ben could only stare at her. He was just so relieved.

  ‘Go grab some chow why don’t you? Don’t worry about that guy.’

  ‘Thanks, Jane,’ he said. ‘Thanks, eh?’

  The cafeteria was packed with the usual end of day rush. People sat shoulder to shoulder at the long tables. There were families and older couples and packs of teenagers and larger groups of schoolkids. Jackets hung dripping on benches and off the backs of chairs. The laminate floor was slick with slush and melted snow, and a haze of grease hung over the grill at the back. Ben got in line behind two boys in ski suits who were swatting and poking each other. They couldn’t stop giggling.

  ‘You bailed so huge!’ one said.

  ‘Whatever,’ his friend answered. ‘I’d rather bail than wuss out.’

  The food was sitting in steel serving trays under heat lamps. Ben loaded up his plate with fries and peas and chicken nuggets, then waited in another line to flash his staff pass at the cashier, who waved him through. He found a spare seat and sat down next to some girls about his age. One of them glanced at him and said something and the others giggled, but he ignored them. He was burning out and had a bad case of the munchies and didn’t want to do anything except eat, which he did quickly and mechanically – raising and lowering his fork, shovelling back mouthful after mouthful. The food was old but still good and greasy. As he was eating like that, behind him he heard two voices emerging from the background noise.

  ‘Can I have some fries, Dad?’

  ‘Eat your sandwich.’

  ‘I ate my sandwich.’

  ‘What’s that, then?’

  Ben didn’t have to turn around to know who it was. He put down his fork and glanced towards the door. People were passing in and out. He could see the glare of the sun on the snow, white and pure as icing sugar. He pushed his plate to one side and pressed his palms onto the tabletop, ready to stand up and go. Then he just stayed like that. Not moving.

  ‘Can I have some for my birthday?’

  ‘Be quiet now, Michael.’

  ‘But Dad—

  ‘What did I say?’

  There was scuffling, followed by a muted whine.

  ‘Dad – that hurts.’

  Ben turned around in his seat to look. Schroeder had Michael by the back of the neck – gripping it with one hand. As he spoke he shook his son to drive the points home. In the din and chaos of the cafeteria nobody else had noticed and if they had Ben doubted it would have mattered. It was the kind of shit that went on every day, everywhere.

  ‘You have been misbehaving ever since we got here, haven’t you?’

  ‘I’m sorry…’

  Ben stood and picked up his tray. He was going to walk back to the rentals shop and lock himself in the workroom and turn on the sharpening machine and spend the rest of the day holed up in there, grinding edges, drowning out everything else with the sound. That was what he intended to do. But when he moved instead of heading towards the door he was walking over to them, up to their table. He dropped his tray, with its half-finished plate of food, down in front of Michael.

  ‘Here, buddy – I’m done. You can have mine.’

  It wasn’t much. Just this pile of tangled fries, smeared with ketchup. Schroeder stared at it, then up at Ben as if he couldn’t quite understand what was happening. He still had his hand on Michael’s neck. He seemed to remember that, and released it. Pushing back his chair, he slowly stood up, so that he and Ben were facing each other across the table.

  ‘What is this?’ he said.

  ‘I just heard him say he wanted some fries.’

  ‘Take your goddamn plate away.’

  ‘Or what? You’ll lodge another complaint?’

  Schroeder swept the plate off the table with his forearm. The plate shattered and nuggets went skittering across the floor. Up until then the confrontation had gone unnoticed, but the crash cut through the cafeteria racket: conversations tapered off, and people stopped eating to watch. Amid the silence Ben heard a familiar buzzing sound, soft and persistant.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re doing,’ Schroeder said, ‘or think you’re doing, but now’s the time for you to walk away.’ He leaned across the table, his whole face quivering. Ben stared at those spots of blood in Schroeder’s bad eye. They looked even bigger now – as if they were spreading. ‘Do you hear me? Just go away.’

  Ben didn’t go away and he didn’t say anything; the noise in his head had crescendoed to a drone, as loud as the grinding disc, so loud he couldn’t even hear what Schroeder was saying. His mouth was still moving, flapping on the hinge of his jaw, but all that came out were these faint murmuring noises. Ben stood there without hearing until Schroeder shouted something that reached him mutedly, as if from underwater.

  ‘What are you, some kind of retard?’

  As he said ‘retard’ he poked Ben hard in the chest. That was when the roaring in his head broke like a wave and the tension inside him uncoiled and he reached for Schroeder and grabbed him by the shirt and tried to pull him forward, but the table between them got in the way, and Schroeder was squirming and struggling and all Ben could do was sort of shove Schroeder’s face down against the tabletop and hit him like that, the punches glancing off the back of his scalp.

  Then Ben was being dragged back by somebody: two cooks from the cafeteria had him by the arms and he strained against them, struggling to break free and go again, and he didn’t stop straining until he heard a plaintive voice, from just behind him, saying, ‘Leave my dad alone. Please don’t hurt my dad.’

  Ben let up and went limp. The two guys guided him to a chair and eased him down, and the crowd pressed in around them. A handful of people went to help Schroeder. He was up, now, and bleeding from his nose. He started yelling about getting Ben fired and pressing charges and suing the whole fucking mountain. As this went on Ben sat with his head down and his elbows resting on his knees and his hands cupped in front of him. He was quivering and the front two knuckles on his right hand were purplish and split and already starting to swell. He knew that Michael was standing off to his left but he didn’t look that way for a long time. When he finally did, Michael flinched and stepped back, towards his father.

  Scrap Iron

  Me and Wilbur are crouched in a pit the size of a shallow grave, dug into the sand and gravel beside the boathouse. There’s no boat in the boathouse. It’s more of a shack, really. The company rents it to a fisherman we call Chinese Henry who keeps his crab traps and lobster pots in there. The shack’s crooked and rickety and looks ready to collapse, teetering above us on rotten pilings. Beyond them, the reflection of our ice barge, the Arctic King, wavers in the shallows. The air around us is filled with gnats and flies, engaged in an endless dogfight, and every so often one detaches from the fray to dive-bomb me or Wilbur. The stench down here is something terrible. It must be all those crab traps, baking in the heat of the shack.

  ‘What a shitshow,’ Wilbur says. ‘What a total shitshow.’

  He picks up his magnet and shoves it into the sand. They gave us both magnets – these big red horseshoe-shaped magnets, like the kind you see in cartoons. We’re using them to poke and comb through the sand, picking up old bolts and screws and washers and ingots. We shake the scrap metal into a bucket, banging our magnets against the side to clear them off. It’s like being a beachcomber – except without the hope of finding anything valuable.

  ‘Of all the jobs they ever saddled me with,’ Wilbur says, ‘this tops it.’

  Wilbur’s the deckhand from our sister barge, the Icecap Rider. For about a week near the end of season they moor up alongside us, at an old dock near the Westco shipyards. The two crews work together, cleaning the
barges and offloading supplies, before a tug comes to tow the Icecap further up Burrard Inlet.

  ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘They sure stuck it to us this time.’

  ‘They stuck it in us this time, more like it. Fucked us royally.’

  Back in the day, the fishing company we work for dumped all this scrap iron along the shore, right next to our dock. It was their land and I guess they figured nobody would complain. They didn’t, either. Except, twenty years on, that iron is starting to rust, and some guy from Environment Canada has detected the run-off – traces of iron oxide, leeching into the water. It didn’t take him long to find the source, and contact the company. Roger woke me up early this morning, to break the bad news. At least he had the decency to call it that. He said, ‘Seems like they want somebody to clean it up. All that iron.’ By ‘somebody’ he meant me and Wilbur.

  ‘The thing that gets me,’ Wilbur says, shaking off his magnet, ‘is that I know they’re sitting up in the barge, drinking coffee and watching TV. Sitting on their asses.’

  ‘Roger’s oiling the chains in the ice bin.’

  ‘Shit – I know that,’ Wilbur says. ‘I wasn’t talking about Roger. I meant Bob and Mabel. It would take a cattle prod to get them off their asses these days.’

  Bob is Wilbur’s boss, the skipper of the other barge. He runs it with his wife Mabel – just like Roger and Doreen run ours. All four of them are well into their sixties.

  I say, ‘Guess they’re getting older.’

  ‘They should fucking retire, then.’

  Wilbur tosses his magnet down in disgust. He’s a lanky guy with thick-rimmed glasses, held together by a piece of white tape on the nose-bridge. His hair is thinning and stringy, like the silken tufts on the tips of corncobs, and he always wears the same plaid shirt and tattered pair of jeans, whatever the weather or temperature. Today it’s about twenty-five degrees and climbing. His face is already shiny with sweat, which the dust sticks to like make-up powder.

  ‘Hell – I’ll retire myself if they keep giving me jobs like this.’

  He says it like he means it, but I can’t really imagine him quitting. He’s worked on the Icecap for years. I get the impression that he’s vaguely related to Bob and Mabel in some way – a nephew or a cousin or something. It’s hard to tell. Maybe it just seems like that because the three of them have been stuck with each other for so long.

  ‘Hopefully we’ll get it licked this afternoon,’ I say.

  ‘You kidding? We’ll be here for days. Look at all this.’

  I don’t need to look. Our little sand pit seems to just keep getting bigger and bigger, the sides crumbling like a shale slope – each layer revealing more scrap iron to be removed. I don’t know how we’re supposed to clear it all out. It could go on forever.

  ‘What would you do?’ I ask him. ‘If you quit, I mean.’

  He pokes at the sand with his magnet, looking for answers there.

  ‘Get a cabin up north. Could maybe grow some weed or something.’

  That’s all he says, and for awhile we work in silence. I can hear a helicopter circling overhead. Probably a traffic chopper eyeing up the Lions Gate Bridge. In the shadow of the boathouse our family of ducks – seven in all – are squawking away. Roger will be happy to know they’re doing well, especially since we had to wait so long for them to arrive this year.

  ‘Jesus,’ Wilbur says, stretching his back. ‘I’m dying, here.’

  By that point, our bucket is almost half-full. It takes both of us to lift it up and carry it to the parking lot in front of Chinese Henry’s shack. Our rental truck is parked up there, the flatbed already covered with a rusty mound of scrap metal. We empty our latest load onto the pile – the bolts and nuts rasping out of the bucket and clanking atop the rest. For a minute or so we take a breather. Just slump against the tailgate and stare out at the dock. Next to it, the two barges are nestled side by side like bloated geese, resting in the shelter of the harbour.

  ‘I’m thinking of quitting, too,’ I tell him.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Might go see a girl I know, in Wales. On a working-break kind of thing.’

  ‘Can’t be any worse than this.’ He yawns and checks his watch, rubbing grime off the face so he can read the digital display. ‘Speaking of breaks, reckon it’s time for ours.’

  He goes to fetch two cans of Coke from the fridge on the back deck of the Arctic King. I stay up by the truck, walking in circles and stretching my legs, wondering if I’ll manage to do it – if I’ll actually get my shit together and go to Wales. When Wilbur comes back, we crack open our cans and hunker down in the shade of the boathouse. A breeze is wafting in off the water, fanning my face, and with my eyes half-closed I sit listening to the tinny noise of Henry’s radio. He’s hard at work up there, mumbling to himself in Cantonese. Or Mandarin. I think it might be Mandarin, but I’ve never asked where he’s from. I should. I should ask him what it’s like to leave home. He’d probably just smile and nod. That’s all he ever does, really. He doesn’t speak much English.

  While we’re resting like that, Bob happens to waddle up from the dock to the parking lot. In passing, all he sees is the two of us drinking pop, slacking off in the shade.

  ‘Hey!’ he calls. ‘Looks like you guys got it pretty good, eh?’

  He’s this big guy with an enormous potbelly, one of those potbellies that balloons out, pregnant with lard, right above the waist. I sort of grin and wave him off. He doesn’t really mean anything by it – he knows we got a raw deal – but of course Wilbur is raging.

  ‘Plenty of room for you over here, Bob!’ he yells back.

  Bob doesn’t hear, or pretends not to. He’s getting in his car, an old Pontiac saloon, and shutting the door. As he drives off, Wilbur slams down his can of Coke. It bounces once and lays there, fizzing brown froth. Then he grabs his magnet and stabs it into the dirt, over and over, as if he’s trying to kill something underneath.

  ‘That fat bastard,’ he mutters. ‘Show him. Get off his fat ass.’

  I sip my Coke, watching, waiting for it to blow over.

  ‘You know what?’ Wilbur says, and jabs at his can. It’s not magnetic and won’t pick up, so he starts poking it around, leaving a slug-trail of pop. ‘I’m through taking his shit.’

  ‘You gonna grow your weed?’

  ‘To hell with growing weed. I don’t need another job. I’ll go on E.I. for awhile. Rake in a fat pay check for sitting on my ass. See what that’s like for a change.’

  He flips the can up, chipping it towards me. It lands between us in the sand.

  ‘I got a friend who done that,’ I say. ‘Good money.’

  ‘Damn right. I would have left already, if it weren’t for Jane.’

  Jane is Don and Mabel’s daughter. This farm girl who works on their barge as a deckhand every season. Lean and tough and tanned. The only woman we see for months at a time. The only one that counts as a woman, anyways. I catch glimpses of her whenever our barges cross paths, but Wilbur gets to work with her throughout the season.

  ‘I mean, without me who would help her? They’d make her do everything.’ He shakes his head, as if it’s a bona fide tragedy. ‘They’d drive her like a mule.’

  ‘If you left they’d probably hire somebody else.’

  ‘No,’ Wilbur says. ‘They couldn’t do that. No way.’

  He’s resting his elbows on his knees, now, staring at that can. And as he stares he starts telling me about this time, during herring season, when he took Jane out in the skiff.

  ‘It was during a lull – one of those long lulls that bores you to hell.’

  I know exactly what he’s talking about. There’s always a rush to get our barges out to sea. Tugs tow them hundreds of miles up Georgia Straight. We drop anchor near the tip of Vancouver Island, and start making the ice. Everything’s got to be ready. A few skippers migh
t stop by for a smattering of ice, to chill their holds. But after that, it can take days – weeks even – before the herring season opens, before the boats come back for water and ice and temperature readings. Hurry up and wait, Roger calls it. He and I kill that time doing woodwork: cutting patterns with his scroll saw, carving salad spoons and forks, making fruit bowls and candle lanterns and napkin holders. Roger likes to have a project.

  ‘Took some crab traps with us,’ Wilbur says. ‘Just as an excuse, you know. Drove Jane way out into the middle of the bay, away from the barge and all the boats, away from everything. Then I cut the engine and let us drift. “Hear that?” I asked her. So she goes, “Hear what?” And I just look at her and say, “Exactly.” How do you like that? Exactly!’

  Wilbur’s told me this story before, and I know that’s the whole point – the punchline. So I grin like he expects me to, and tell him that it’s really something. Wilbur just nods and gazes past the pilings to the flickering water, as if he’s spotted something important out there.

  ‘I bet Jane likes me,’ he says. ‘You think maybe she’d go out with me?’

  I’ve seen the guys Jane dates. They pick her up some nights during the pre-season, when we’re moored here in Vancouver. They’re all big men who wear big boots and drive big trucks. The last one worked on the rigs, I think – the kind of guy who wouldn’t so much as glance at Wilbur, let alone see him as a threat. I don’t know how to answer him, so I make this sound in my throat and stare at the ground, like I’m still considering his question. Next to his can I notice this slender piece of metal, exposed by our digging. I bend down to pick it up, and find that it’s a loop of cable, half-buried in the ground.

  ‘Hey,’ I say, ‘what the hell?’

  I tug on the cable. It’s maybe an inch thick, with fine strands woven together like a rope. I stand up, grab it with both hands, and give it a good yank. The loop comes free, and now we can see that it’s connected to a longer line. A section rises up like a snake emerging from the sand, shaking off dust. I tug loose about two or three feet before it gets stuck again. The rest is buried deep. Wilbur, who’s on his feet now, comes around to join me.