“Oh fuck off,” Sweetland said. He lit up what was left of the joint and smoked it down to the cardboard filter.
The weather moderated while he was at work on the map. Cold still, the wind blowing strong, but there was nothing falling. It was going to be a bitter night at the Priddles’ cabin with no wood to burn and Sweetland decided to make a run for the ATV. He put the lighter he carried with him and the Bic he found at the cabin in the baggie with the second joint and the rolling papers, tucked the package away in the inside pocket of his coat. He packed up his few things with the Kraft Dinner and Cup-a-Soups and then took a look around the room to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything. He went across to the map of Newfoundland, nipped the push-pins from the wall. Folded the paper in four, stuffed it into his backpack.
“Let’s go,” he said to the dog, and it came as far as the door but balked there. “Come on,” Sweetland said. “We got to move we wants to get home out of this.” And he pushed the dog out with the toe of his boot. Grabbed the gas can from where it sat beside the generator in the shed.
It was a steep climb out of the valley and he was breathing heavy by the time they reached level ground. He set the gas can at his feet before they left the trees altogether, shook out the numbness in his arms. The dog sitting beside him, waiting. The temperature had somersaulted above freezing again, but the wind was going to be full on in their faces when they turned inland at the lighthouse. “Gird up your loins, Mr. Fox,” he said. He was still stoned, he knew, which accounted for the lightness in his tone. He had a mind to turn back for the cabin suddenly, thinking he wasn’t in any shape to know sense. But the notion went astray just as quickly. “Hup, two,” he said and he hefted the gas can.
It had started to rain by the time the keeper’s house was in sight, a steady fall that soaked through the shoulders of his jacket and his pants. The dog’s hybrid fur useless in the rain, sopping and pasted to the scrawny frame. Sweetland struck by just how little there was to the creature beneath the wild coat. Before they topped the rise the rain had turned to sleet and he could see the dog was shivering, not enough meat on its bones to keep warm. It kept glancing back at Sweetland mournfully. He called the shaking dog over, setting it inside his coat and bringing up the zipper so it was just the animal’s head exposed to the air. A steady quiver vibrating against his chest as he went on, the wet soaking through his shirt.
He was on the stretch of path over bald rock that ravelled out within a few feet of the headlands, the ocean roiling black below. Not hard to imagine Jesse losing his way here in the fog. The wind whipped at the gas can Sweetland carried, wrenching his shoulder with every gust, threatening to take him over the edge. He stopped long enough to tie a length of string to the handle and hauled the red container over the ground behind him like a sledge. He guessed he was half an hour’s trudge from the ATV and he carried on with his head down against the driving sleet, stopping now and then to turn his back to the wind. He couldn’t feel the skin on the good side of his face and he winced and chewed and yawned, hoping the motion would bring some life back into the flesh.
He was two hundred yards past the ATV before he knew it, his eyes at his feet and nearly closed against the sleet. Turned his back to the wind to catch his breath, spotted the lonely machine behind him. Another fifty yards on he would have missed it altogether.
His hands were numb with the cold and he had trouble fitting the finicky nozzle on the gas container. The dog had disappeared into his coat where it had shivered itself to sleep and he kept an arm across his stomach to support its weight. Spilled a tumbler’s worth of gas trying to set the nozzle in the tank’s opening one-handed, swearing under his breath. After he filled the tank he tied the rest of the gas onto the carryall and started up the machine.
He turned into the wind and drove slow, leaning behind the handlebars for the little protection they afforded, peeking over the top now and then to be sure of the path. Grateful to be sitting down, to be conveyed. He cut across Vatcher’s Meadow, drove by the King’s Seat, and inched down the steep path into the cove. He set the quad away in the shed but didn’t bother with the tarp. Wet to the skin and ready to lie down beside a fire. He went through the porch into the kitchen and unzipped his jacket halfway, the dog stirring at the cold air, its black muzzle coming into the open.
“Now, Mr. Fox,” Sweetland said. “Who’s got it better than this?”
It stretched its neck up to sniff at his face. Licking at the mess of snot and spittle frozen to his chin.
~ ~ ~
THEY WERE LAID OFF CONSTRUCTION in mid-September and almost left for home before they hired on at a steel mill in Hamilton, lucking into the union positions through a connection at the Caribou Club. Sweetland was against taking the job. He’d met men who planned to work in the steel plants a winter and had their twenty-year service watches from the company. But Duke had spent most of what he’d earned over the summer at the Caribou. His wife at home nursing the youngster and the new baby.
I can’t go back to her with nothing, Duke said. We won’t even have time to go on the trawl if we leaves now.
Sweetland shook his head.
Two-ten an hour, Duke said. Think of the ring you could bring back to Effie.
Promise me, he said, we’ll go home out of this.
Back by Christmas, Duke said, on my mother’s grave.
The steel mill was a city unto itself. Massive coke ovens, storage tanks and elevators, engine rooms, stock houses the size of city churches, miles of train tracks and gas lines and elevated piping that criss-crossed the blackened acres. Cooling stations, smoke and creosote and slag, the molten glow of the pour-offs at the open hearths like some evangelical’s vision of hell. Everything was in motion, cranes and railcars, conveyor belts shifting ore pellets to the blast furnaces, coal cars shuttling from the battery to the ovens, sheets of heated strip steel rolling through rotating cylinders. All of it seemed to be moving at cross purposes and the unremitting noise of the place was a physical thing, hammering against them. The air heated and condensed, packed with dust and steam and a nauseating chemical sweat. Men darting among the machinery like rats, their faces grimed with soot.
They worked seventy hours a week and couldn’t drink enough in the off-hours to wash the taste of the mills from their mouths. They went to work hungover and nursed their heads with a thermos of rum and Coke. They met a university dropout in the lunchroom who introduced them to marijuana, rolling and smoking before the shift started. Sweetland didn’t feel a thing from the weed that he could point to, but the place seemed almost bearable when he was stoned.
They kept an eye on the foreman through their shifts, taking their chance to sneak into the noisiest, most inhospitable crannies to pass a joint. They lit up somewhere different each time, as if they were trying to throw a tracking dog off the scent. The relentless mechanical whirl moving around them at impossible angles, at breakneck speeds. And as he wormed out of their most recent pot den one October afternoon, a corner of Sweetland’s clothing caught in the contraption and he was sucked into that vortex, his pants and underwear ripped clear of his body and he was dragged along a few interminable seconds before the alarm tripped out and everything shuddered to a halt. Sweetland still in the grip of the thing, one shoulder skinned raw and the right side of his face unrecognizable, his free hand cupped around the sear in his butchered lap.
He came to briefly in the ambulance. Duke was tucked into a corner, his appendages in that narrow space folded away like the blades of a Swiss Army knife. Sweetland lifted one hand to gesture in his direction. That’s the last fucken advice I ever takes from you, he said.