When Is a Man (22 page)

Wandering back through town, melancholy and half-asleep, he was pricked awake by coarse laughter. Three women stood on the sidewalk outside a small pub in the basement of a brick building. They gathered in a loose, wavering circle as they smoked. One of the women staggered, swore, and laughed again. He recognized Gina's laugh. She leaned against a black crew cab with dual rear wheels, floodlights positioned on the roof above the windshield, a snowmobile perched high on a metal ramp on the back. The truck, with its dark colour and behemoth proportions, absorbed Gina as though she had fallen backward into nothingness. Paul ducked into the shadows, creeping away from the streetlight and brightly decorated shop windows. A door opened at the bottom of some stairs, and men bellowed from the threshold, calling to the women, yelling crude goodbyes to someone inside the pub. Paul hurried up the icy sidewalks toward home, sliding backward now and then, every muscle clenched and taut from the effort of staying upright.

The Barber Chair Pub met the requisites of a pub in the barest possible way: a few small windows (a parade of winter boots passing by—the pub sat below street level), scuffed white walls, thin wooden tables and metal chairs and stools, video lottery terminals along one wall. A single bartender served the patrons—all men. This was the daytime crowd, Daryl Pilcher told Paul. A few more women came at night, but not many. Most of the men were long past retirement, blowing their pensions on beer and lotteries. Stacks of crumpled pull-tabs and pencilled-in Keno sheets littered the tables. He wasn't sure why he and Daryl hadn't gone to the other bar. The atmosphere here was not particularly welcoming. And this was the same pub he'd watched Gina stagger out of the other night.

“Can I run this idea past you?” Paul asked. He'd set his digital recorder on the table, along with a contour map of the valley. Daryl was alternating sips of watery draught with handfuls of sunflower seeds from a brown melamine bowl. “A trapper's relationship to both the land and community would be substantially different than a farmer's, right? I've been thinking about your dad, and picturing life in the valley existing on a horizontal plane between contour lines. If that makes sense.”

Daryl nodded, jaws working. Paul went on, pointing at sections of the map. “The ranchers and farmers, they occupied the low, flat plane by the lakeshore, with the fertile soil, alluvial fans, wetlands. Their whole life was there, between those broad contour lines. The loggers and miners, they belonged where the contour lines are squeezed together—the mid to high elevations, the steeper slopes, the forests. Trappers, on the other hand, they lived vertical lives—their traplines went from valley bottom to mountain top. This would have shaped their perspective of what happened. They still had something left after the flood.”

To Paul's surprise, Daryl burst out laughing. A bunch of logger types glanced over. Why had he chosen this place?

“That's great,” Daryl said, wiping his eyes. “That takes me back.”

“To what?” Paul shifted in his chair, trying to block most of the pub from his view.

“University. You know, smoking pot with the philosophy and chem students, bullshit sessions in the pub. You remind me of some of my buddies in Monashee, good old eggheads.” He stared at the ceiling, chewing thoughtfully. “Well, you might have something there. Guess I'd have to think about it.” He handed Paul a sheet of paper. “Now here's something from a trapper's perspective. Brought it because I figured you wouldn't know these stats. Most don't.”

Animals disappeared from Immitoin Valley, estimated count, 1971.

• 800 black bear
  
• 1,500 mule and whitetail deer
  
• 400 elk
  
• 150 moose
  
• 20,000 ducks and geese (drowned-out nesting sites, lost marshland)
  

Daryl said, “My first job, I'd just turned fourteen. Family had been relocated from our squatter's cabin, of course. Government hired Bishop men to drive tugs and clear up deadheads, stray lumber, plastic, and scrap metal floating around. Dad and I were on dead animal patrol. We'd use peavey hooks and whatever else to drag what we found onto a barge. Or stack them on beaches. Anything from rabbit to moose and bear. Most people think animals just wander uphill when the waters rise, but it's not that simple. Maybe they get surprised, or they're stubborn, maybe they can't comprehend what's happening, I don't know. Between the carcasses and the sludge, the valley stank the whole summer.”

“Must have been tough for your dad, seeing that.”

“That, and he'd already lost the cabin and most of his trap­line.”

“Did your family get any compensation for that?”

Daryl shrugged. “Six hundred bucks for the line, plus enough for a new shack in Bishop to call home. Well, to be fair, Monashee Power had a difficult time assessing the value of a trapline. Or any property. Even when trappers had land titles—when they weren't squatting illegally—most of those properties had barely any improvements. A cabin, a small clearing for a garden, some chickens. Squatters tended to move into old miners' shacks and abandoned homesteads. Most of them got burned out by Monashee.” He paused and took a long drink. “Chucking carcasses on the barge was pretty awful. But we were lucky to have the work. When we came to Bishop, we had nothing except a couple of suitcases and a pile of furs. Yeah, furs. I shit you not.”

“What was Bishop like?” Paul asked.

“Tough. No one knew us or liked us much. We were outsiders trying to live among a bunch of disgruntled Lambert folk. Not many kids my age from Bishop made it past high school, but my folks made sure I went to university, because they knew I was going to be a better trouble-maker than a logger, if you know what I mean.”

A scuffling of chairs and boots from behind him, a creak of floorboards, and Paul turned around to see three old men approaching their table, followed by a man in his early forties.

“Heard you talk about burning cabins and so on,” one of the old men rasped. “Weren't talking about us, were you?”

“I know better than that, Cyril,” Daryl said. “Have a seat if you like.”

The youngest of the men—Paul assumed it was Billy Wentz—dragged over a neighbouring table, the legs loudly scraping across the floor. He swaggered, holding his arms farther from his body than he needed to, clothing himself in imaginary muscle—though he had plenty of real muscle, easily hefting metal chairs with his veiny and scarred forearms. Beneath his oil-stained ball cap, worn, tired eyes, a hard jaw and cheekbones, a red moustache tinged with grey. He scowled at Paul, and didn't sit at the table, choosing to watch from above.

Cyril and the other old men slowly folded themselves into their chairs, all of them grizzled, lean, and bent, their lumberjack muscles atrophied but still somehow present, ghosting at the edges of their frames. They looked like those canes made from stretched and dried bull pizzle—yellowed, cracked, and leathery, brittle.

Cyril looked at him. “Heard about you interviewing people for a book or whatnot. My folks knew all those trappers, including Joe Pilcher. In the winters, my dad and I would run them supplies from Lambert, dogsledding it through the woods. One fellow, he had a cabin so deep in the hills, Monashee never found him. Maybe you remember him, Daryl.”

Daryl was gesturing to the bartender to bring a pitcher of beer. Neither man looked very happy.

“That old trapper didn't have a clue what was going on,” Cyril said. “Told me later he was hunting up on a ridge and saw the valley filling up with smoke, the water rising. Had a bird's eye of Lambert slowly going under.” He paused and drank—flashing bad teeth beneath wet lips—then leaned closer to Paul. “I know when you talk to people they tell you Wallace's crew worked for that goon squad they called the Acquisition and Resettlement Commission. Boys in this pub know better. Wallace's crew was my crew—I was the foreman when my dad and Donald Wallace got too old. Donald Wallace hated the dam more than anyone. Hell, he lost more than anyone, except us.”

“Elsie Hubert said as much,” Paul said. “So you didn't work for Monashee Power at all?”

“We did—we cut and milled poles for their lumber and utilities division. We had fuck all to do with the bullying and burning.”

Cyril was eager to talk about his family, sliding the digital recorder closer to himself so he could speak directly into it. He was born, he said, in Lambert, in 1936. His father, Frederic Wentz, was one of the first in Lambert to choose logging over agriculture. “It was my dad's idea to build the flumes at Dalton Creek, but he didn't have money or the backing. It wasn't until Wallace got into the business late that we had capital enough to build the flumes and mill.”

“What do you mean Wallace ‘got into the business late'?”

“Donald Wallace was the last big orchardist left standing in the valley. He limped along until the end of the forties, and after that, he pumped his savings into our operation. He also brought in guys from the orchards. Fruit pickers and deliverymen, the arborists that tended the trees—they needed the work, but most were green. So whenever there was an accident and someone died, it was usually one of them. Drop a tree on themselves, put a saw into their leg. Drown in the log booms. Saw men go like that.”

Billy, who'd stood quietly glaring in the background, suddenly became animated. He slid into the last empty chair. “You know what a Barber Chair is, bud?” he said to Paul. “It's when the tree splits vertically as it's felled, usually because you bunged up your backcut. There's a thin strip of wood keeping the tree to the stump, and it'll twist according to where the lean is. According to its own fuckin' rules. So now you've lost control over the thing. It'll go where it pleases, usually straight back at your head.”

“That's what they named this pub after?”

“Something wrong with that?” But Cyril hushed him—he wanted to keep talking about the logging days. The other old men had their stories as well—building the flumes, sending logs down the river or loading up trucks with milled lumber. Billy, obviously trying to intimidate Paul, told mostly violent stories—machinery accidents, skidders flipping over on their drivers, a bear mauling a timber cruiser.

Cyril said, “So, yeah, the golden years were mostly Monashee contracts. Once folks heard about the dam, they wanted us to pick a side, and we needed to make a living. But the funny thing was, around the same time Monashee started buying up properties, Monashee stopped giving us work. Can't win for losing. Once the land agent came along and hired away half our crew, we knew we were fucked.”

“He stole half your crew?”

Cyril shrugged sourly. “He had deeper pockets. And the kind of work that didn't break your balls.”

“The land agent,” Paul said. “Do you mean Caleb Ready?”

Cyril squinted at him for a moment, then slowly nodded. “That's the one. Caleb Ready. Boy, haven't heard that name in a while.”

Paul didn't buy that. “You didn't hear what happened to Ready?”

“Nope. Who gives a fuck about him?” Cyril stumbled off to the bathroom, and Daryl, who'd been slouching in his chair, hiding behind his beer, took the opportunity to slip away. “Think I'll play some
VLT
s,” he muttered, then beelined for the exit.

Billy had not stopped trying to stare down Paul. “Gina ain't told me squat about you,” he said, a gravelly drawl. The two old men snickered and mumbled.

“No?”

“No, and I don't think she likes you bothering her. I don't like it.”

Paul, hating Daryl in that moment, didn't match Billy's stare but looked at his shoulder, which he'd heard was a good tactic when confronted by a wild animal. She must have seen something in him, some redeeming quality. Maybe the surly temper manifested itself differently in the outdoors, when the work was hard-going. And when he wasn't half-drunk in the afternoon, he was probably a handy and capable guy. Strong, obviously. He wished the word
virile
didn't come to mind, but it did.

Billy tried again. “Harassing people.”

“All right,” Paul said.

“Leave him be,” Cyril said, returning. “I just wanted to get some facts straight, not stir up shit.” He wiped a puddle of spilled beer from Paul's map, then stopped and tapped at the spot he'd cleaned with his sleeve. “That's the old family lot, with waterfront. That acreage was Billy's inheritance. It'd be worth a million by now—vacation rentals, maybe a vineyard. But no point bitching about it now, is there?”

“Did you ever try suing the government, like other residents did? To get fair compensation?”

“Lawsuits. Tie your whole life up that way. What you do, you work your ass off and get something back. You compensate yourself.”

Paul was exhausted, holding his own against these gruff, reticent men. Cyril was starting to look bored. If he had any good questions, he'd better throw them out there now. “Were you there on Lambert's final day? I haven't found anyone who was.”