Saltwater Cowboys (11 page)

The door to one of the houses opened and a woman in a fox fur coat emerged, a young copper-haired man beside her. She sang out a pleasant hello and approached Angela and Wanda with her hand outstretched.

“That's Tanya Ann, the mayor's wife, and their son, Tyger,” Wanda whispered to Angela. “Missing home yet?” she said to Tanya Ann.

“We do miss Calgary, more than you can imagine. There aren't any manicurists here or cowboys to open doors for me while I'm out shopping,” Tanya Ann said and laughed.

Wanda laughed a little too loudly. Angela smiled weakly.

“We're hoping Tyger will settle down. He's got a great job as controller of the mine. He lives down the street from us, in that brown house,” Tanya Ann said and pointed to a rustic home with floor-to-ceiling glass windows. Wanda's eyes glistened.

“Do either of you play bridge? Most of the women I've met want to play bingo, and I can't stand that game,” Tanya Ann said and laughed again.

“I play bridge,” Wanda said and adjusted her bay accent ever so slightly to match Tanya Ann's.

Angela tried not to laugh. Wanda hated bridge.

Tanya Ann asked if Angela would join them. Angela shook her head. “I have three children, not much time for activities outside the home.”

When Tanya Ann and her son drove off in their Jeep Cherokee, Wanda squealed with excitement.

“You've always hated bridge,” Angela said and shook her head.

“Doesn't matter, I'll pretend I like it,” Wanda said.

“Why?”

“We want to fit in here, don't you?”

Angela shrugged; she hadn't given it much thought. All she wanted was a roof over her head and hot meals on the table. With that, she was fine.

The month passed quickly: the men worked all day, Wanda and Angela took turns making supper and served it when the sun set at four o'clock, followed by a card game in the evenings. Katie told stories about her new school. In the afternoons, with the children in the sled, Angela and Wanda explored the town on foot. Every day more and more U-Haul trucks moved families into town. The trailer park filled up until finally Jack and Angela moved into a mobile home of their own.

The oblong mobile home sat on the curve of the crescent. It was cream aluminum with milk-chocolate-brown trimming. There was a small plot of land in the front for a lawn and a small backyard that backed onto the endless forest full of wolves, rabbits, and foxes.

“A small sand-dune succession in the summertime,” Dwayne had said.

Angela stood on the front stoop. “It's really quite lovely,” she said awkwardly.

“It's not big enough for you,” Jack said.

Jack opened the door and they trundled in. Lily was promptly put down to crawl over the new linoleum floor. Maggie ran to the kitchen and plunked a new plant — a fern, the cashier at the grocery store told her — on the bare windowsill.

“Frost will eat that,” Angela said, motioning to the plant. “Move it to the living room and we'll put it on the table when we get one.”

Jack brought in the bags from the car and put them in the living room. “Well?”

“It's fine, my love, the new baby can sleep in our room. The girls can take turns sharing and then each experience having their own bedroom. What more could we want?”

Lily climbed in the suitcase and fell asleep curled into one of Angela's summer scarves, the one with the shiny red cherries and green twigs on it. Angela unrolled the foam mattress, unpacked dishes and plates and cups, spread out sheets and pillows.

“We'll have a picnic,” she said and dished out a stew Wanda had made and stored in a mint-green Tupperware container. Jack had brought a loaf of bread at the supermarket when they picked up the fern, and they dipped the crusts in the murky broth with onions and oil rings floating on top. They sat around the fern and carolled.

“Christmas is coming,” Angela whispered to Jack. He nodded and they both sighed.

“Another expense,” he whispered back.

By nine o'clock they had fallen asleep in a clump, all five of them on one mattress.

The next morning they woke up seemingly all at once, a ripple of movement from someone's leg and an arm while a foot untwined itself from someone's calf. Blankets were bunched like snakes, wound through thighs and necks and the crooks of bent arms.

Jack, the first to sit up, smiled and tickled Maggie's nose. Lily sat up and rocked from side-to-side on Angela's chest. She handed Lily over to Jack and got up to make cream of wheat for breakfast.

At last
, she thought as she stepped onto the cold scuff-free linoleum,
a kitchen of my own
. Half the size of what she had in Brighton, but it was hers. To decorate how she pleased, to cook in and eat when she wanted and to keep as messy or as clean as she wanted. She turned on the new stove, and bright orange curled through the coil. Then she turned on the tap, and toffee-coloured drips of water sputtered out.

“Jack,” she called.

Jack came in the kitchen and crawled under the sink.

“The pipes froze,” he yelled, on all fours with his head buried in the cupboard. “Don't worry, I'll call Pete, we'll fix this.”

Angela turned off the stove, buttered cold bread, and brought it to the living room for the children to eat.

After their first week in their mobile home, Angela felt settled. When Jack arrived home from work on Friday at four-thirty, Angela and the children greeted him in the doorway. He smiled lovingly at her when she wrapped her thin arms around his neck. Kate wore plaid gauchos, Maggie thin, stiff corduroy pants, and Lily a brown-and-beige gingham Holly Hobbie dress. They scrambled over the fabric of their outfits, hugged his knees, and giggled in unison.

Jack was suddenly very proud. He felt satisfied, loved, and secure. He had done the right thing by taking them away from their hometown, out here to the west; they were warm, fed, clothed, and together as a family.

He looked to his left toward the kitchen with the brown-and-white linoleum; each square had foliage in each corner and a flower in the centre with three petals. In the centre was a wooden kitchen table, beside which gauzy yellow curtains hung from the small window. The countertops were white and brown, speckled with yellow and gold. They held a few brand new appliances: a sterling silver toaster and a white microwave oven, several upright canisters with the letters
F
for flour,
C
for coffee,
S
for sugar, and
T
for tea sat in the centre, rendered in raised white coloured plastic.

The kitchen stove and refrigerator were mustard-yellow and bulky (they'd come with the mobile home) and nested cozily in the room, the fridge beside the main door and the stove between the sink and cupboards. Above the stove hung a tiny rust-coloured macramé owl with big brown knobby beads for eyes. Angela had brought this from home. It reminded Jack of Angela's mother, big, old, wide open, always-fixated-on-Jack eyes, an unsatisfied, wise old beast, peering knowingly into his soul, stirring the guilt that she could so easily brew.

Jack moved his eyes over the top of Angela's head. She was resting comfortably on his chest, rocking gently back and forth. She smelled like freshly chopped onion and savoury, the sweet green packet of spice they'd brought from home and used for the dressing in the chicken. He surveyed the living room, the thin, flat, rust-coloured carpet, the rust, brown, white, and plaid chesterfield — sofa or couch they called it on the mainland, but to him it was a chesterfield — and two wide chairs, one flat-bottomed, the other a fashionable recliner. They had a coffee table and two end tables. They couldn't afford the lamps this time, so they'd wait until they'd paid off their credit account at the local Hudson's Bay Company at the Civic Centre.

The Bay manager had been quite welcoming, eager to give all the new mining families liberal credit accounts. A small man from Edmonton, he was jovial, enthusiastic, kind to the children when they entered the store. He asked a young salesgirl to escort them and watch them in the toy department, telling them they could each pick out a Smurfette doll of their choice, compliments of the store, of course. He had assured them they would be fine, and a newly relaxed Angela and Jack had picked out far too many new things for their new home.

Jack's eyes moved slowly through the living room, admiring the new purchases, not very expensive but stylish and up to date. He felt proud. Their bedroom extended off from the living room at the far right of the trailer, and to the left of the trailer, through a hallway off the kitchen, was the bathroom, a small linoleum-lined playroom, and side by side, two small bedrooms for the girls. Kate had one to herself, while Maggie and Lily shared the other. They'd bought bunk beds, dressers, and small shelves for the girls. Jack had put a fresh new wide chalkboard on the wall. He'd nailed it to the panel board last night, much to the delight of the girls.

They were dancing around their parents now, three little linked petals, arms and hands moving around like seawater, waving. Their rose-pink cheeks, wintry static hair — which stood up at the bangs and at the crown of their little mushroom cuts — were nothing short of adorable, their parents were entwined in the middle, locked in an embrace. Beneath the cooking smells on her skin, Jack could still smell Angela's perfume. It was cinnamon, doughy and sweet, resembling a vanilla-and-caramel coffee cake, the kind her mother liked to bake, or a cinnamon bun with cloves, the kind Peter Mooney back home liked to bake for community fairs.

Angela suddenly broke free and rushed over to settle the pot of potatoes boiling over on the stove. The children settled down and Jack took off his winter boots.

“In class today we put baking soda and vinegar in a Coke bottle and it exploded,” Katie said.

“I made a snowman. It didn't explode,” Maggie said, competing for attention.

“Is that right, my love?” Jack said and helped set the table. The five sat down to a hearty meal of roast beef, potatoes, peas, carrots, and dressing.

Back at work the next morning, Jack sat slumped on a yellow, aluminum-legged chair at a splintered wooden table. Workers' names, dirty jokes, and crude cartoons of male genitalia were scrawled in black marker across its surface.

Members of the blasting crew opened their metallic lunch tins. Most of them ate bologna sandwiches on thin squares of white bread, smeared with dull ochre mustard, or spotty pink Klick sandwiches — ribbons of white fat dominant — with light green lettuce that had dried darkly at the edges. For dessert they ate their wives' homemade sweets or small plastic packets of chips, and drank cans of Coca-Cola that sweated in the underground heat.

Jack snapped open the lid of his cola to guzzle the fizzy, sweet drink. He bumped the small man beside him, Charlie Watson, five-foot-four and from northern B.C., who wore his hard hat tilted as far back on his head as possible.

“Watch it,” he said gruffly.

“S-sorry,” Jack stuttered.

“I was a crack-filler before I went into mining,” Watson said.

“I bet you were,” Wisnoski, the large, gap-toothed miner next to him said suggestively.

“Tough work it was, putting hot tar into cracks in the highway all day long. One day the flag girl sent out the wrong signal to the other flag girl on the other side of the one-lane highway. We had a fleet of cars coming on both sides of the lane. The first car pulled over to the gravel shoulder and the rest followed, nearly had a smash-up, we did,” Watson said.

Wisnoski let out a long, slow whistle. The others nodded, appreciating the danger and the wherewithal it took to work on the highway repairing the tears that heat and cars and cold weather could easily etch on the concrete.

The room was stiflingly hot. The miners finished their drinks and loosened their clothing, mopped their brows with handkerchiefs, the balled up red-and-white cotton grimy from the muck and machinery grease.

Bobbi walked into the underground lunchroom. She'd washed the grime from her face and hands. Her blonde hair was in a loose ponytail and her blue eyes were twinkling. She held her hard hat between her hip and bent arm. One of the men whistled and her face tightened.

She took her lunch tin out of the fridge, sat at the end of the table, and her hardened face — a tough concrete mask — crumbled when she opened her lunch tin. The miners had placed a picture of a naked woman in a hard hat drawn with black marker inside the lunch tin. The men jeered and snickered. She picked up her lunch tin and stumbled out of the lunchroom, kicking empty cola cans and scraps of wax paper amid the men's catcalls.

Jack slowly pushed his chair back, reached for his lunch tin, and left the room. He slipped through the dark corridors of the mine stope as trucks drove past him. Blinding light beams sliced the dark to reveal slumped, tired men behind the wheel, cigarettes dangling from clenched lips, dark eyes vacant holes as they trudged through another day. A large rat scuttled by, Jack jumped and his heart tightened, grateful it was dark so the other miners couldn't see him. He found the men's washroom, with one toilet, urinal, a sooty, cracked mirror, a dusty light bulb suspended from an iron plate in the rock, and a small bench, where Bobbi's crumpled figure slouched over her lunch tin.

“Missus —”

“Go to hell.”

“I'm sorry they did that to you.” Jack stopped and reached into his lunch tin. He silently offered her one of Angela's homemade muffins, arm outstretched gently, watching her patiently.

She looked up, snatched the muffin, and mumbled weary thanks. “Why aren't you with the rest of them? You know how they'll treat you now.”

“I'm not afraid of them,” he said, brazenly lying.

“Well, you should be,” Bobbi said sharply. “I got a feeling they're a tough bunch.” She straightened her shoulders. “I've been a blaster for five years. My dad and brothers are miners too. I've been on two other crews, and this is the toughest one yet.”