Vulcan, a short story by Peter Behrens

VULCAN
a short story by Peter Behrens

from TRAVELLING LIGHT. Astoria. Toronto. 2013
First published in The Atlantic Monthly. Boston. June 1985

Out there jobs were easy to come by. I quit the rigs in August that year. The grain harvest was coming in and I knew there would be a shortage of hands. The Manpower office in Calgary found me a job at a grain farm down at Vulcan, Alberta. I took a locker in the Greyhound depot, stored my gear and bought a ticket on the next bus south.

The farmer met me at the café where the bus stopped. His name was Steve. We drove out to his farm, nine miles from town on the provincial highway. Swathers were laying down wheat and barley in the fields, and in some fields the threshing had started. The air was speckled with dust and chaff and the highway was streaked with yellow grain spilled from grainer trucks racing to the elevators in town.

As we drove into the farmyard I saw a combine and two trucks with grain boxes parked in front of the barn. The family's house was set on one side of the yard. An ATCO trailer was set up on concrete blocks on the other side. There was an old Ford half-ton parked in front of the trailer, hood propped up with a broken hockey stick. A man and a boy were peering at the engine.

“That’s the hand I hired yesterday,” Steve said. “He done nothing yet but poke around on the piece of crap that brought him here. Little fellow’s my boy, Pete.”

Steve shut off the engine and opened his door. “Found out what’s wrong with her?” he called. “I think your old beater may have given up the ghost.”

The hired hand stepped back and pulled away the hockey stick so that the hood dropped with a heavy iron clang.

“Rings,” said the kid.
“No,” said the hand. “Plugs need cleaning, that's all.” He sounded irritated at being told something by a twelve-year-old. 

He looked about nineteen himself, a lowlife, just the type you always find out there.

“There’s a bunk for you in the ATCO,” Steve told me. “My wife put out bedding. I set up a shower for you boys behind the barn. Go easy on the hot water.” He started walking towards the house. “Supper in an hour,” he called back.

The kid offered his hand. “I’m Pete. He’s Duane. You and him drive the grainers. Duane’s already took the Dodge, so you get the International.”

Duane had slid in behind the wheel of his pickup and was trying to start it. It was turning over but it wasn’t firing.

“He’ll never get it running right the way it is," the boy said. "Duane, what we ought to do is pull the plugs and check compression.”

Duane spat onto the ground. “That’s what you think. It’s the plugs are old, that’s all.”

“No way.”

“Yes! What do you know about trucks?”

“More than you,” the little boy said calmly. “I wouldn’t have bought this piece of junk.”

“Need a tune-up, that’s all. Anybody could do it.”

“Not you. You don’t have any tools.”

I left them arguing. The truck was no good, anyone could see. I got my duffel and went up the steps of the trailer. Inside were two bunks. One was neatly made up with army blankets and flannel sheets. The other was a mess.

I sat down on the fresh bunk. My people were coal miners and fishermen in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia but there was little of that left by the time I came around. I’ve been back home a couple of times but I can’t stay. Things aren’t the same in Cape Breton as out here. If you have a job back there, you hold on to it for dear life. Even if the pay is nothing. In three months up on the rigs I'll earn more than my father ever made in a year of fishing and collecting his UIC.

An outfit in Edmonton leases ATCO trailers. You see them everywhere. Leave one job for another, and six months later and five hundred miles away you find yourself sleeping in the very same trailer. Men scratch their names on the walls. They write dates and names of places that now sound to me like prisons. Fort McMurray. Fort St. John. Grande Prairie. Alsask.

Duane pulled open the aluminum screen door and stepped inside.
“Take your boots off,” I said. “This place is bad enough.”

He muttered something but he knew I wasn’t fooling around. I’d drop him in about three seconds if he didn’t come to heel. He kicked his boots into one corner and fell down on his bunk.

“Next time leave them outside,” I said.

He was a lowlife and I didn’t like the idea of sharing that damn ATCO with him for however long it took to bring in the crop. For a moment I had an idea to pick up my gear, sling it over my shoulder and walk out of that trailer into the sunlight, across the shit-smelling farmyard and down the section road. Get out to the highway and hitch a ride away from it all. 

I thought of my father’s house on Cape Breton, which was white and shining and perfectly clean, and of meadows that slant down to the sea. When I left there, I left the world of people who dwell in houses, and since then have always lived in trailers or motels.

“That kid don’t know nothing about engines,” Duane said.

You can’t do anything about trash except ignore it. I want a ranch of my own, a few sections I can afford, maybe in south Saskatchewan. I’ll bring my brothers out from Cape Breton, and we’ll raise horses.

A woman’s voice was calling us for supper. Duane pulled on his boots and cowboy hat  and I got up from my bunk and we left the trailer and walked across to the house.

It was plain to me Steve and his wife, Donna, did not like Duane or trust him. They were afraid he couldn’t do the job he was hired for and that his mistakes would cost money.

“The thought of that guy operating a thirty-five-thousand-dollar grainer is turning my hair grey,” Donna said to me. "It's an old truck, sure, but that's what it would cost to replace."

The three of us were having coffee in the kitchen. Supper was over. Duane and Pete had gone back outside to work on Duane’s pickup.

“It’s hard finding harvest hands,” Steve said. “We get crazies from the city, or boys like Duane without a nickel between their ears. How the hell are we supposed to bring a crop in?”

“Government does not think of the hard-working farmer these days,” said Donna. 

“Men such as we used to have are all getting rich up on the rigs,” said Steve.

“Or on the unemployment insurance, hanging around the beer parlours in Calgary,” said Donna.

“Pipeline, tar sands,” said Steve. “Fort Mac–that’s where the money is now. We’re stuck with the likes of him. Says he paid two grand for that piece-of-whatever half-ton up in Prince Albert. Whoever sold it to him ought to be arrested. The thing’s not safe to put on the road.”

“Where does he come from?” I asked.

“He was washing cars in P.A. He’s been harvest hand before. I drove around with him in the Dodge and he knows the split-shift, anyhow. Says he wants to go up on the rigs.”

“That’ll be the day.”

“God help us if he smashes into the combine,” said Donna.

“Pete’s going to ride around with him. Pete can help him out. They get along. Pete’s quite a mechanic — got more tools than I do. Maybe Pete can even get his pickup running.”

“I don’t want our son spending a lot of time with him,” Donna said. She stood up to get the coffeepot from the stove. “How old are you?” she asked me.

“Twenty-five.”

“You look older.” She poured coffee for Steve, then me. “You look like the men we used to have around here. You look like a worker.”

“Why did you leave Nova Scotia?” Steve asked.

“What is it you’re all after, coming out west?” Donna said. 

“Jobs. Money.” 

I sipped coffee. I like the coffee they make on the farms, in their kitchens. I like old houses with curtains on the windows and kids’ drawings on the fridge. I like looking through the window to see a row of windbreak poplars out on the road. I like the taste of that coffee. On the rigs, in the dining halls you get your coffee from a steel urn, with twenty men in front of you, and twenty more lined up behind.

Steve said, “You’ll keep an eye on that Duane, will you.”

“Sure.”

“I hate having to depend on someone like that. If Pete were old enough we’d only need to hire one man.”

By ten the next morning the dew was off the crop and the threshing began. Steve and his father drove the combines. Those machines never stopped moving — when a hopper was full, one of the grainer trucks would draw up alongside and move down the row in tandem with the combine while grain spewed into the box. As soon as it had a full load the truck pulled away, bouncing across the stubble towards a break in the fence then speeding down the section road to the granary bins on the farm or to the elevator in town.

We ate meals Donna brought from the house in covered glass dishes and served from the back of a station wagon. We sat on folding chairs around a folding card table that she set up on the wheat stubble. If Pete was around he and Duane would bicker about Duane’s old pickup. When Pete wasn’t around, Duane didn’t have much to say. 

Once he asked me about the rigs. 

“You been up there, ain’t you?” he said.

“Yes, I have.”

“Well, I’m going next year. What’s it like?”

When I first come out West, my big idea was getting rich on the rigs. I worked along the Saskatchewan border then up on the Beaufort. I was tool pusher on some. Sooner or later I always quit the rigs to try something else, but sooner or later I always go back to the rigs. That is where the real money is.

“I want to make real money,” Duane said. “To fix up my truck. Pete says I need to rebuild the engine but I’d like to put some mag wheels on her is what I’d like.”

I knew he could never last on the rigs. He was too dumb and too scrawny. The work would kill him.  They are hard men up there, none harder than some of the Cape Bretoners. He wouldn’t last a week. 

I tried telling him, but of course he didn’t understand.

They would be threshing every night as late as they could go until the damp came down on the crop. Often we were in the fields until midnight, or past. Every now and then the damp would  down early and we'd get most of a night off. I borrowed Steve’s pickup to go into town. I met a girl from the next town at the beer parlour and got a thing going with her. She was blonde and pretty and had done one year at university. We never had trouble. I hated the beer parlour, with the cowboys and harvest hands drunk and getting into fights. All the lowlife. I thought it was too rough for her, but she didn't seem to care. A couple of glasses of beer, then we would go down to the river in her car. Her father's car. A nice car, a Monte Carlo. 

This was not the way I was meant to be. I never thought of myself living this kind of life. I don’t know what I expected. People on the rigs have money and you can get all the things you think you want — big trucks, powerboats, trips to Hawaii. They need the workers, they pay you well and when you’re working you can’t spend it anywhere but the beer parlour or the lottery. When a job is over, there’s no reason to stay, so you head to another job; you sign up for six months on a seismic crew or road construction so you don’t have to think about where you’re going, which is nowhere. In small towns people won’t talk to you. You are a transient. You get into fights.

I think, I will save money, and get back to Nova Scotia. But I have been out here too long now and do not believe I could ever go back there and stay. I remember the things I hated about it — the dead quiet of those towns on a Sunday. The church with no one inside but old people. The priest at the school, yelling at children. Everyone else on Cape Breton seemed to be just waiting to die.

No. I’ll buy an old ranch in southwest Saskatchewan, east of the Cypress Hills, and breed horses. It’s ghost towns down there. Too dry for wheat most years. They rarely get a crop. Land is cheap. I don’t know much about horses but I could learn. I’ll get my brothers out there. We’d all be happier there than on the rigs.

Duane I don’t think owned more than the clothes he wore, and a cheap cowboy hat kept hanging on a peg, and his old half-ton. Sometimes I would say, “You want to come into town?” because I pitied him, not because I wanted him around, but he never wanted to come. 

The only person he had any time for was the kid, Pete. 

When we came in from the fields, the two of them would get to work under the hood of Duane’s half-ton, as long as there was light to see by, or until Pete’s mother called him to go to bed.

Half the time Duane's piece of junk wouldn’t start. Pete fiddled around with pliers and a screwdriver. Duane sat pounding the wheel. Then Pete would yell, “Give ’er!” and Duane would grind the starter, smacking the dash with his palm and cursing. Pete and I would have to laugh. The motor would finally catch and the truck would be shaking and coughing blue smoke. Duane would keep gunning her until she warmed up, then Pete jumped in and the two of them would head out down the section road on a test drive. Sometimes they stalled in the middle of the road. Pete would prop up the hood with the hockey stick and start dealing with the problem while Duane hunkered down and pitched gravel at cattle in the pasture.

I asked Pete about Duane’s truck.

“It’s crap,” Pete said. “Compression’s no good. He won’t let me steer but the front end’s wobbly so the ball joints are probably shot.”

“Why bother working on it?”
“It’s fun. I like old trucks. You learn a lot. You know what Duane’s doing with his harvest wages?”
“What?”
“Paint job. Two thousand bucks. In Red Deer.”
“Maybe you should talk him out of it.”
“He’s nuts,” Pete said. “You can’t talk him out of anything.”

Saturday night I went to the beer parlour but she didn't show up. I didn't blame her. I had a couple of beers and came back out  to the farm. We were going to finish threshing in few more days if the weather held. We had been going at it seventy hours a week. We were all of us tired.

Driving down the section road I was thinking about where I would go and what I would do once the crop was made and we were paid off. Half a mile before the farm, I passed Duane’s heap coming in the opposite direction. Pete was at the wheel, Duane in the passenger seat.  Pete waved as we passed by.

I was lying on my bunk when Duane came in an hour later. I heard him pull off his boots outside and then the squeak of the springs when he lay down. He always slept in his clothes. He turned on one of the overhead bulbs and picked up a skin magazine. I could hear moths crashing into the screen.

I was near asleep when the door banged open. I sat up in a hurry. Steve DiCesare took two steps over to Duane’s bunk, grabbed him by front of his shirt and hauled him to his feet. The magazine Duane had been looking at fluttered away.

“They ought to hang people like you!” Steve yelled. “They ought to cut off your balls!”

He pulled back, threw a punch and I could hear Duane's nose crack. There is no bone but there is cartilage and it makes that sound. Steve slapped him from one side to the other. His blood sprayed on the plywood wall.

“What’s he done?” I said.

“You stay out of this. He went after my boy. I’ll teach him.”

I got in between them and began pushing Steve back.

“Keep out of this!” he said. He tried to get around me but I kept shoving him back.

“You’re as bad as he is!” Steve said.

“You’d kill him — you don’t want to do that. Go back to the house. I’ll get him out of here.”

I pushed Steve outside. The trailer’s flimsy door had been pulled right off its hinges. Behind me Duane was snorting through his busted nose. Steve was about ready to take a swing at me, I could tell. There was a light in the upstairs window of the house. 

I could see Donna standing there.

“She told me to get rid of him! But I wanted to make my crop!” Steve was almost crying.

“Go back inside,” I told him.

“Get him out of here before I kill him!”

“I’ll get rid of him for you,” I said.

“Get him off my land. Now! Tonight! Now! Don’t wait till morning!” He was retreating towards the house. “I see him again, I’ll kill him!”

I waited until Steve was inside. Then I went back to the ATCO. Duane was on his bunk, snorting, crying, bloody. Sheets and blankets and the wall spotted with his blood.

I made him sit up, and started pulling his cowboy boots on his feet. I took his cowboy hat from the peg and jammed it over his ears. He didn’t have a duffel, just a grocery sack. I threw in whatever I grabbed of his stuff. I handed him a t-shirt to try to stop the blood. He wasn’t talking or making sense, he was bleeding and whimpering as people do who have been whipped. I went through his pockets and found the key to the half-ton.

I helped him outside and put him into his truck, then I got behind the wheel, fired her up and drove out through the yard. She was smoking oil like a bastard, front end shaking like it was going to fall to pieces.

At the little hospital, an old nurse sat behind the reception window in the ER. There was no one else. She didn’t look happy to see us. Duane was holding his bloody t-shirt to his nose. I never have seen anyone bleed as much, it was all over the truck. Both his eyes were swollen almost shut.

“Looks like someone’s been in a fight,” the nurse said.
“I found him behind the beer parlour,” I said. “Someone’s punched him out.” 

“Well,” the nurse said. “Are you harvest hands?”
“I don’t know who he is.”
“Do the RCMP know anything about this?” She started tapping her keyboard. “Does he have his Alberta Health card?”
“Lady, I don’t know, I just found him.”
“He must be working on one of the farms.”
“Why don’t you just help him?”
“And where are you employed?”

I had to get along. We'd be threshing in the morning. I leaned Duane against the wall and let go of him.

“Come back here!” the nurse called.

No way. I went out and across the parking lot and started walking quickly through the town. If the Mounties saw me they would have stopped me for a suspicious character, on the streets, alone, past midnight. I crossed the train tracks. I walked past the row of grain elevators looming over that town like ocean ships tied to a wharf. After I got out to the highway I had to walk a few miles, almost to the section road, before I was able to hitch a ride back to the farm.

I was paid off five days later when the crop was made. They wanted me to stay on for fall ploughing but I headed back to Calgary. Signed up on a seismic survey crew. We’re in the bush, working ninety days straight, nowhere to spend wages. The money piles up. When this job is done I could go to Hawaii for a couple months. Maybe Thailand. I don’t know. Somewhere with pretty girls, cold beer, a beach.

Back home I’d be just another poor fisherman, wouldn’t I?

Deireadh