THE NORTHLAND

 

 

 

t’s dawn, a long time ago. Off the Greyhound, looking for work. Difficult to find work that’s not hard. Hard to find work that’s not difficult.

Past the prison farm, its protective hedges of black stinging flies, bigger than in Siberia. Better food here. More prisoners.

Look at the multicoloured waters. Brown water, green water, black, yellow, grey. Blue water looks anomalous. Tailings, ponds look ashamed. Rocks browned and burnt black. Thin birches, smell of new rubber. Little trains up on the crest: tipping down fire, dragons’ tails just slag down grey, burnt out ash.

Don’t want to go down the fucking mine; only thing they’ve got here. Give the earth a rest, leave its guts alone. Nickel for bullets and for plating tanks. Battle for the earth still undecided. Aliens needed for the decisive battle. Down the hole. Hell, no. I won’t go.

Off the bus with Roman, my new friend. He’s coming home, off our pilgrimage, the northern route, Wawa to Rouyn. Perhaps to drive the ore trains. He asks, ‘Why you go to a mining town if you don’t want to go down the fucking mine?’

He doesn’t like the mine at all, but worked them all, from out east, from coal to cobalt, then gold is hot, ‘Then you go down in asbestos, gives you something else, but no so hot’.

Talks like a Frenchman, but doesn’t say too much. Takes me to this old guy, an old, old Finn, his face is silver like a birch, his clothes all black and black felt, like stuff out the roof. Mr Vapaus, and he says to me, ‘You an Indian’, and I say, ‘No, just kind of shabby, stepping out of nature in this way,’ and he asks, ‘Your hat,’ ‘Yes,’ I tell him, ‘Yes, an Indian gave me.’ It was a Micmac, and he told me another Indian gave it him, and so it passes along the northland’s path of guys like me, who have to look for work, and don’t much like it when they have it, especially if it’s down the fucking mine.

Mr Vapaus says, ‘You Indians higher than a Frenchman, but should be back in nature, all of you,’ and I only think to say, ‘It’s boring for them Indians, just with the same bunch of people that you know, and maybe selling blueberries,’ but Roman is telling him, ‘Mr Vapaus, now, we want to work, but not go down that mine, nor even in that smelter,’ and the Finn has heard it all before.

He says, ‘You go down that mine, there’s everything. There’s Frenchmen, Indians, communists, there’s Russians red and white, there’s Finns, Ukrainians white and red, and most of all there’s guys who didn’t want to go,’ and there is smoke all round, everything is blowing, blowing smoke – the little ore trains on the crest, and the high stacks, and a group of guys with long Cuban cigarettes.

We spend the day not going down the mine. Drinking tequila in a lounge, and Roman says the good kind has a worm in and when you get to it, that tastes like tequila too, and perhaps the worm thinks as it eats you, you taste of tequila too.

A trapper brings in a big beaver, with an evil eye, its tail slaps against each table, and I make the sign against its eye, but Roman says, ‘Well, you’d look angry too, if you was dying,’ and he ought to know, because the girl who had his little girl went with a miner who went poking at a chimney that was plugged, down there, and got a thirty ton of rock down on his head; and that’s why Roman doesn’t say so much, even though he’s younger than me by quite a bit, he’s had all his experiences now, just chews them over, quietly, not letting you see if there’s smoke or fire.

And so we have that bottle, and another one, and at how many bucks a shot – the mine is getting nearer, and the smoke goes shooting up, the guys come off one shift, go on another, and a guy tells us if we draw the smelter, not to go on the dust machine.

‘All you do is watch it. Watch the dial. And if it goes too high, then what your job is, is run like hell. It sends you crazy, all the time, just watch the dial, watch the dial.’

And Roman asks him if, all things considered, the life’s hard there. ‘No, no. There isn’t anything to do. The union takes care of that, if you’re unskilled. Just stand where no one can see you. But you must show up for work. And mind if they blow your section, boy, or your head comes out that mine quicker’n your body,’ and I think it will be better for us all, when we aren’t here any more at all, all the troublemakers kicked out somewhere.

‘But where’ll we all go?’ I ask, and Roman says, ‘They’ll find some other hole to put us all, some other hole, some other ground,’ but it still seems to me life would be more integrated if we had some other place to go.

We listen to some other guys, some union guys, and they are saying when the company tries to bring another union in, and how someone was caught, shooting at the helicopters, the mounties flying them, and got off by saying the rifle was a toy, ‘Yeah, and the little helicopters up so high, with toy pigs riding in them,’ and in between all this, I win a girl at shuffleboard. I win her off the guy she’s with. One thing I did improve, I’d say perfected, was shooting that straight-board, after I’d quit school, and not from being stupid, just not having much to say and getting it down straight – the summer before I banged up that long line of cars through driving on too straight, and too precise, and being stubborn.

She was a good shooter too, and French, and even better on the board than me, especially now that things were getting drunker. Her name, ‘Madeleine’, she kept saying and I forgetting, and she again, ‘Mad’len, you duff head, what are you, some stupid Indian?’ and I’d just laugh, and say, ‘Just my hat – an Indian gave,’ until she laughed and said I wasn’t clever enough to be French, but at least I wasn’t a fucking anglo, and I said her face looked like a doll’s, not because hers specially did, but because at that point almost everyone looked either a beaver or a doll. And she says, ‘I do things a doll can’t,’ and I say, ‘You do things a doll won’t’, and that made her fasten on to Roman for a while, who just stays quiet, quiet, and then she says, ‘I’m making up to him to divert suspicions,’ but of what I couldn’t think. She liked being in the middle, she said, between two pigs, but she wasn’t lesbian, and we won a heap of money at the shuffleboard, and drank ourselves right through the other side, to a sobriety and peace, as if the mine closed down, there was a strike, the water turned all blue, and all us guys – well, what? Just disappeared. Turned into hermits.

Madeleine took us out, and drove us round a bit, and says to Roman he should look after me, at least better than he does, and then he showed the pictures of his family and the little girl, and that put Mad’len back with me, and Roman felt cut out, and he insisted, he forced us, to go to Mr Vapaus. And I knew the scheme was terrible, but Roman was determined, and Mad’len went all soft, and says she likes to be accomplice, and so my body drifts along, into the mess, my mind just stays outside and hums, like it’s not interested, but knows a heap of other, more absorbing things. And it did seem the way of stop going down the mine, stop being suckered down into that black hole.

Roman said that all the Finns had guns, if was for the revolution, or if not, then for bears, and maybe other Finns. And Mr Vapaus let us have the gun, although he said he’d only lend it if we didn’t load it. And Madeleine said we were all drunk or crazy, and no fun and dangerous. And if we didn’t get ourselves killed, or caught, she’d drive us out of town next day, and fix a place, but now her fucking shift was starting, and I suspect she meant her old man had just got off his, and so she should go home – but the suspicion came slowly, over many years, and at the time all I felt was betrayed.

And it seems that if you don’t go down the fucking mine, you end up as a deviant with a gun, though mostly you aren’t so lucky as to find someone will lend you one so easy. And Roman boasted that he knew the manager at the Motor Inn, and if we played it right, we’d get the takings. And he pulled on an Indian rubber mask, because the manager knew him from drinking there, and this here Mr Castagne, a Frenchman would just hand everything over, and we’d split, off on our pilgrimage again. And I didn’t know if I was too drunk or too sober to do it, so I went along, and Roman explains that with Castagne we can plead poverty, he’d throw the money at us, but if there was the English guy, though, that Mr Hardwick, we should talk tough and say we come from Montreal. As we walk back into town, he’s fooling with the gun, and there must be something in there, and he blew out the rear window of a car, and I say, ‘If we’re sober, we’re in trouble,’ but he says it doesn’t count, that here’s a different time zone and among the rocks a brothel where the cops go, and sure enough we see a lot that’s full of cruisers empty, just the radios clacking on like dead voices, and no one here is up to any good, just having fun.

And are we drunk or sober as we climb the stairs, and here’s the manager’s room, and Roman waves the gun about and says, ‘We’ve made it – out in the open. The penalty for carrying a concealed weapon is extreme,’ and he’s got fixed on that word, extreme, and used it like a flag, and I think, ‘He’s proud! He’s an idiot, but he’s proud of what he’s doing,’ and I go along, to see what’s happening, and if we get away, I have a chance of seeing Mad’len again, when her old man’s off down the hole, and we are free and maybe rich. Besides, Roman’s the only friend I have, and now I know him pretty well, though in his Indian mask he could be anyone.

And it is Mr Castagne, and he starts off, ‘Yes, you boys, what can I do for you?’ as if he’s reading Mr Hardwick’s lines, and he ignores the gun, or maybe doesn’t want to see it, and he says to me, ‘So, you an Indian, son? The hat, the hat, you know,’ and I begin, ‘No, no, an Indian gave—’ but Roman waves the rifle, and Mr Castagne just sits, and I see he has a waitress or a secretary sitting there, and doesn’t squawk or anything. And Mr Castagne has a hairpiece, slipping, slipping down in a decadent way, and it occurs to me, ‘He’s drunk,’ and I want to laugh, because we are all three of us, all drunk, and maybe the secretary or waitress is even drunker, as she just says, ‘Oh my’, just once, ‘Oh my.’

And Roman says, all thickly, ‘Money, give the money. Give the money, and I’ll tell you a secret. This here gun’s not loaded.’

And I think, ‘Here’s something wrong, and after so many years of life, here’s me and Roman giving a real poor, a stupid, show, just not to go down the mine, or watch the dust machine, or maybe brush up cinders with a burning brush.’

And Mr Castagne says, ‘Well, now, you boys. You tell me your secret, and I’ll tell you two. The first is – in this here drawer, I don’t keep a gun, and so I can’t blow your tails off. And the second,’ and his hair slips off, so there is tension beneath what seems a humorous person, ‘The cash is all downstairs. Those monkey waiters is still raking in and splitting all up between them. You should have waited round till later, maybe taken on another drink.’

And Roman says behind the mask, ‘How could we wait, we’re drunk already,’ and I think we should give Mr Vapaus back his gun or there’ll be trouble too, and Roman says to Mr Castagne that he is a real white man, though I think ‘and a bald one too’, and as we shuffle down the stairs I hear, ‘Oh my’ again.

The cops are out the front, and in the bar I see a black-blue thicket, cops all drinking. The place is full of guys going on the graveyard shift, or deciding they don’t want to go, and so we find a table and sit there with a guy who says he was a mountie – married to an Indian woman somewhere in Manitoba, so he left the force. And he is our good conduct, so he says, and so we park the rifle by his chair, and he’s too drunk to notice. And he’s full of praise for Indians, saying they’re the only people who don’t want to take over the world, and that should make them like Canadians but it doesn’t seem to, much, and perhaps the Indians own the world all along, though he finds the reservation uncomfortable, and his job got him laughed at, so we leave him, when Roman says he’ll put me on the bus.

We make it to the bus station. It’s full of Ukrainians. And I think that I shall never see Mad’len again, but at least another day and none of us has gone down the mine, and how labour made the country what it is, and that I should go North or South, but which? And Roman says the South, because there’s more people, though it seems smaller.

He’s talking away to the Ukrainians, and I say, ‘I didn’t know you were Ukrainian,’ and he says, ‘I’m all right, but what are you?’ I lie and say, ‘I’m a Polack’, but I don’t know what I am, and I don’t care. He says, ‘These old guys think they’re going to be free one day,’ and I say, ‘Good for them.’

North? South? Better South.

He drops some acid. It was all a long time ago. He drops some acid, babbles of green fields, a world class of peaceful guys, leading us sheep somewhere, all weapons buried, and I remember Mr Vapaus’s rifle – disappeared. Like the whole thing was a put up-job, for nothing. When the revolution comes, Mr Vapaus’ll have to borrow a gun, just like we did.

I see the pools of green, black, brown water, a present immovable, savage. Value my lucidity, my reason, unemployment. Roman hallucinating – all that tequila.

The smelter peppers us with acid shot, like we are birds. I can get the bus at dawn, Mad’len doing her duty still, as she will come to wait in vain for me, her Northern knight. Heading South. And she was real honest, but a sad person. Wow, so sad.

A Ukrainian says, ‘That hat there’s Indian,’ and I think, it kept me out the mine, and say, ‘He gave me, you can take it, like I did. This Indian got it off an Indian too. A lucky hat,’ and so, it goes. Rather, it stays, I go. And so that guy gets to be an Indian too. And maybe will find Mr Vapaus, in his roundabout way, saving him from death.

The hat, first having it, being recognised, then getting rid of it. When being recognised becomes a danger. Kept me from harm, saved from the dark mine, the fiery smelter. A damn shame, though, to lose a magic Indian hat.

Letting me slip, unruffled, as I step on to the bus, back into nature.