Steel Animals Read online

  “Hush,” says Gus. “It’s a woman and you didn’t hit.”

  Wanda, a cane lying across hers knee, is overwhelmed by the emotion in the three male faces. “Ben, these men are the kindest people in the world. Don’t be angry with them. It was my fault. They risked their lives to stop.”

  Gus nods. He looks at both her hands, but they are hidden in her lap. Turning to Swan, he sees he is crying. Gus gives him a mint.

  “I was drinking, Ben,” Wanda says, “and I walked right out into the middle. This man, this expert driver, spun around three times attempting to stop. Everyone thought the taxi was going to fly off the bridge.”

  “Fly?” says Ben. Wanda, who sleeps at his side, knows that Ben toils on the fifteenth floor of a skeletal building and dreams every night of dropping his tools and flying.

  “They almost drove over the rail and into the water just to save my life. It was almost their lives.”

  Swan seems to be crashing emotionally, his face drawn. Inspired to help, she reaches out her hand to thank him. Their eyes meet, and she allows the hand to come off in his grip.

  “Good God!” he cries out, then, gaining control, he says wonderingly, “it’s a prosthetic!” He turns to Gus, who once saved the child Wanda, a young skier in the snow.

  “Sorry,” Wanda says, “I can be disarming. Yes, the hand is a prosthetic.” She puts the prosthetic back in its place. Then, she extends her hands and Gus embraces them, feeling clearly that one is not real. The two men rise to go.

  “Ben,” says Wanda, “do you ever feel like you know something before it happens, like the colour of a truck coming down your street, or the face of a person running into your arms?”

  She rises from the chair, still smiling at Gus, who now stares back at her in boyish curiosity.

  “Call us if you ever need your life saved again,” he says, and he hands her his card. The sliding doors hiss, and the pair are gone.

  Testing, Wanda hobbles from the drink machine and back again with her cane. “Let’s walk backwards,” says Wanda.

  “But you can barely walk frontwards,” Ben says.

  “Let’s walk backwards and talk backwards all the way to Vespa’s house … and sit in cafés with words painted on the windows backwards, so we can read them from behind as if nothing is strange at all. And, baby, let’s quit work.”

  Ben nods consent, and as the two lovers leave the hospital, they place their feet backwards in the footsteps of the men who carried her in.

  3.

  JACKIE HAD OTHER NAMES: “Sparky,” “High Volt,” “Hammer Hips,” “Chipper.” She had a lot of other names when she was working her regular job as a welder with a Vancouver outfit that contracted her out—when she was out. Some of the other names she was called by the part-time workers who encountered her were not nearly as endearing because Jackie was not an easy woman to get to know. She was not as interested in people as some people felt a woman was supposed to be. This opinion was most often voiced by men. And she was not certain they were a scientific necessity in the first place, only that they were responsible for ninety percent of society’s violent crimes. Jackie had rubbed a few women’s fur the wrong way as well. When she was a girl, not many people were around to look after her, which made her a loner. She needs someone to care about her, and she does not even know it. Her ambivalence about gender rules is healthy, her ambivalence about which side of the law she is on is hurting her. Kindness is something wavering in the distance like a heat mirage, and to her credit, she moves towards it, but she cannot grasp what it is or be certain it is real.

  Walking alone as a child, she had gone to the shipyards in Vancouver and watched the warm fire of acetylene and the electric blue of arc welding in the enormous hangars by the docks. It was the arc machines that filled her with her first sense of meaning, and a further feeling of love; they were warm, responsive creatures that made her feel safe. Jackie was in love with arc welding, and the machines were in love with her.

  To Jackie, the instant banking computer was not only a machine with money and no life, it was an entity without a soul. When she stole one, her final, crashing, forklift-operating argument was difficult for an automated banking machine to reject, cancel, or contradict with a preprogrammed series of greetings and replies. To those ATMs that were removed by Jackie’s forklift and transferred into the back of her truck, a visit from her was a dream come true. To exchange their predestined animation with a brush of her restless, indestructible soul actually meant more to their solitary spirits than any amount of money she could dream of tearing from their vandal-proof magnetic stripe-reading bellies. After a spell of hard drinks, it became obvious to Jackie that they pined for her, they dreamed of a woman like her, and they were nothing but flattered when she tore cash-issuing dispensers and paper currency free from their submissive frames. Sensitive to machines, Jackie ripped out their cables and wiring with all the fury in her small body, loading their overstuffed selves onto the forklift in a rough manner that contradicted their sedentary experiences up to that moment. It was just this longed-for destiny that sent their circuitry into surrender.

  Rough handling soon became a signature of Jackie’s moonlight work, and at night, money and broken pieces of cash-dispensing coils lay scattered around her in an anonymous Vancouver storage locker on the edge of town. She extended her naked body across them, threw back her head, and laughed soundlessly. Bedding down on a cardboard box for the night, she sipped a beer, stroked her calloused hands across her muscular torso, and dreamed that computer cables enamoured with love were winding around and around her legs.

  4.

  IT’S HAPPENED AGAIN. She has just done another six-week stretch for possession of a stolen vehicle that was not ever in her possession, a stolen vehicle that, finally, no one could even prove she had stolen. Because of her unrepentant involvement in past robberies, the Vancouver police are beginning to perceive her as a recidivist with a limited social conscience. If she is ever to develop a mature sense of her own morality, someone needs to save her.

  She is only twenty-one, but she feels a thousand years older than everyone else. The only good thing that has happened is that just before this stint, she had met Wanda, a woman with a perceived understanding of the truth in the world, and someone who phoned her every day she was inside.

  Wanda has told her she is going to prove it is better to live in Toronto than out West. Wanda had run East with Ben to Toronto after her bridge accident, determined to make a new start. But now her boyfriend has returned to Vancouver to visit his sister, Vespa, to convince her to join them in Toronto. Wanda tells Jackie that Ben has plans to open a motorcycle shop, might even be someone Jackie could meet.

  “Come join us as well,” says Wanda.

  Jackie considers the promise of a warm, humming arc-welding unit waiting to heal vintage motorcycles in Ben’s shop. “I’m not certain if I can travel yet,” she tells her. Wanda’s promises are hard to gauge.

  Wanda and Ben have roots in Toronto, Jackie has not. Ben’s sister, somewhere in Vancouver, is someone Wanda has assured her she would completely love to meet, telling Jackie that they would all make a fabulous team. Jackie doesn’t know anything about love, yet the words flow from Wanda over the long-distance line in a way that is enticing. It makes Jackie want to trust them, realizing that trust is also something she knows nothing about.

  At the moment, to cover her ATM tracks, Jackie has decided to break her biggest rule. She has taken a job with a fast-paced, dangerous Vancouver construction company. Ben had worked there and been fired. There is no picket line, no protest, but she knows that she is taking over the job of one of twenty workers who had walked off the job together.

  The story behind their employment does not endear her to the other welders at her site or them to her. But with a mask to protect her from the arc weld, a monkey suit, a gritty face, and an anti-social attitude, each worker remains unrec
ognizable.

  The pay is next to nothing, but it is an immediate position. “My name is Patricia,” Jackie tells the men at her workplace, and before she takes the job, she dyes her hair an amber-brown colour that while not quite convincing, is at least her most memorable feature. She brings her own gear and uses company-supplied machines.

  “Second-rate, danger…” she whispers her first day, having arrived on-site earlier than anyone else. Around her, half the machines have exposed cables, peeling electrical tape from previous repairs, and other broken or improvised parts.

  “I choose this one.”

  The machine she chooses has a strong, reliable electrode holder, but the ground-lead clamp has lost its tension and has to be double-taped wherever she goes.

  As the other workers arrive at the high-rise site, the supervisor begins to give them each specifications as to what to do, while she discovers that the machine she has chosen has a creep upwards in amperage that has to be checked constantly. Jackie maintains a rhythm of scrambling back and forth every few welds to adjust it; the only way to stay out of conflict with her supervisor and hold on to her job.

  She begins to rise earlier and earlier to check in ahead of the other workers, to secure a different and hopefully the most reliable machine. Labourers drop out like flies, new workers take their places, and the job moves along at a pace slower or equal to one where the work is done properly. It is the cutback method of getting cheap work done fast, but it is not working, and is costing the company and causing the supervisor to drive them harder than ever before.

  Because Jackie has become a familiar presence, her supervisor leans on her extra hard. Because she is a female, he orders her to do double the job of men. Having heard somewhere this scrap of feminism, he has convoluted it to throw at her every day as motivation. She grits her teeth, loads a new electrode, straddles the I-beam she is welding and receives an eighty-volt jolt on her ass. She reaches forward to catch herself from falling and grasps at nothingness. She tries to pull off her helmet as she falls. Eleven feet down, she makes impact with a pile of drywall covered with a plastic tarp. The glass inside her visor shatters and she closes her eyes. Other workers gather around her, shouting as to whether or not they should sit her up. Jackie takes off her helmet and rolls to her feet. Without saying a word, she jogs down the piss-smelling concrete stairs floor by floor to the bottom of the building and picks up her cheque at the trailer. She does not even know if the broken machine has made it to the attention of the contractor. She does not even care. She blows the cheque on beer and a body massage and falls asleep on her face.

  The next morning, she wakes before dawn. “Early girl, up before the sunrise,” she says to herself. “The dark before dawn can be the best time of day for a few rare souls,” she remarks, dressing. “Let’s hope I’m one.”

  She climbs inside her car and drives to a bank across the city from her. Letting go completely of her sense of moral worth or social responsibility, she pulls a ski mask over her face, snaps on some gloves, and enters the bank machine area with a card she found a year ago on the street and had saved instead of returned. She spray-paints the sole camera, then rolls her oxy-acetylene kit into the space, and sets it against the wall. Powering up a carbide-bit reciprocating saw, she cuts the machine open in less than twenty seconds, pulling it apart like a hinge. The machine moans in what sounds so like a cry of human rapture, Jackie loses five seconds looking around for a weirdo on the street. Deciding it is her imagination, she sparks the oxy-ace machine up and in another fifteen seconds she has cut through to the dispensing stacks within the machine.

  “Easy, lady,” she tells herself. “Patience, lady. Easy does it.”

  Switching off the tanks, she pries the dispenser and cash tray area apart with a crowbar, counting between her gritted teeth another ten. This time, the cry of the steel-and-platinum walls and popping plastic parts is closer to a human voice than a violin is in the arms of a virtuoso. The thermal printer spits a small note, reading an empty balance and the words, “THANK YOU,” in large block print.

  Jackie takes the note, slides it in her back pocket, and watches the monochrome display flutter and blink off. The bank notes are dropped inside a mailbag she has attached to the back of the dolly kit. She swings the saw over her shoulder and is almost overcome with her own soaking heat.

  “Just like butter,” she remarks, and her car pulls away from the curb with the hatchback bobbing half-open and the kit lying on its side.

  Pulling up outside an unused warehouse, she brings the kit into the front. She puts the volatile acetylene upright before it has time to settle and become explosive. She straps it into the passenger seat. She bleeds the hoses and drives both kit and saw to the storage locker she has rented with falsified identification. Dropping the boots, coveralls, and ski mask into a garbage bag, she deposits them into a dumpster underneath a heap of rotting garbage.

  Jackie wheels the car back to her garage, papers the windows, and paints it gold-flecked brown. The money she places behind a panel inside her apartment wall. As the sun begins to climb the sky, her wristwatch reads six-thirty. She scrubs up and calls a taxi, then hops into the work clothes she kicked off the day before. She throws her gear into a bag with a new helmet to replace the one that was shattered. She will not use the car for some time. She tells the taxi driver to pick her up at the same place the following week. As they drive to the B.F. Turner twin towers site, Jackie observes it is six-forty-five. “I’m ten minutes ahead of myself,” she grins, “and fifteen ahead of anybody else.”

  She selects the old machine with the broken ground-lead clamp and is back on the site when her super and the other labourers begin to trickle in at seven. Her supervisor tells her that she is fired and to leave the crew at once. “How can I be fired?”

  “Because you fell on your ass yesterday!”

  “But I’ve been working at the site longer than anyone else on this floor! It could have happened to anyone!”

  She expects to hear the workers around her volunteering the names of unemployed friends ready to step into her place, but there is silence. Then one of the workers objects, and a second voice joins in, “Let her stay. Let the chick keep her job.”

  “She probably has kids and stuff. You gotta work to eat.”

  “Her welds are clean. Let her stay,” says another, and finally,

  “It’s not her fault she fell! These machines are half-busted and you know it!”

  The supervisor lets out a sigh. “Okay, back to work. Fair enough, she’s twice as good as the lot of ya!” A cheer echoes from the workers around her, and Jackie raises her hands in a victory salute. She tucks her chin down and nods back into to her helmet.

  “Loyalty—I love that in a stranger,” says Jackie.

  She laughs and loses herself in her work.

  5.

  BEN IS DRINKING café au lait on Robson Street with Rudy, who glances left and right as if he thinks he is surrounded by spies.

  “I can’t believe I went to design school for this, this! All I do is sit on my ass all day and listen to other people. They think I have some kind of promise. And look at me now, Ben, I’m bringing in the Gs. If I told you how many Gs I was bringing in, you would fall right off of your ass! Off of your ass and out of your chair! I’m bringing them in…”

  Ben smiles. He knows Rudy wonders. As youth, they had talked about the resistance Ben sometimes meets compared to the way people seem to rush to Rudy, who he has known since they were both boys. For Ben, it’s not the cold wall of negation anyone can encounter when they are vulnerable and all their creative torches are lit, it’s the not knowing. It’s the trying and then not being certain. It’s the shadow of racial bias that seems to block the very sun. Ben and his sister were born to a renegade earthwitch who toured and raced motorcycles, children produced through flings with different men. One was a black man; the other was white. Neither man ev
er materialized; neither had a clue that she was pregnant or that they were fathers. Rudy knows that Ben lives with the psychologically eroding uncertainty of being a young black man in a culture that never acknowledged his reality growing up. Together, as they matured, he saw Ben forced to cultivate a level of maturity that made Rudy admire him. In comparison, Rudy is an emotionally disturbed, passionate splat of panicked paint on a bright canvas. And yet Rudy is suddenly wildly successful.

  “How did you land the job?”

  “Drawing, baby. Drafting, designing, I’m a good artist … that’s what, that’s how I landed it, ’cause I’m good….”

  “Cut to the chase,” says Ben. “Fourteen months ago, we were working in construction and you were drawing on the side for scraps while you finished your art school. I leave with Wanda for out East, and a year later, Vespa tells me you’re building a high-rise building and living in another. So I fly back to check it out. And to visit my sister, remember her? You used to date Vespa, for Chrissake! Yes, she’s in trouble again, I think. She’s become a failed sculptor who’s good at welds. I want to encourage her to come back East. Wanda and me have a nice place outside Toronto now. I wish you could see the new ’65 CZ motorcycle I just picked up. New — well, it’s from 1965. I brought you a photo.” He digs in his pocket. “Sure, I flew out to see my sister, but I also came to see you. And look at us now! Here we are. Getting drunk up in the air. How could you have an office in a Robson Street tower, Rudy? Less than two years ago, you were an underfed, strangely dressed, bad-smelling…”

  “If you would let me tell you, do you promise…” Rudy makes a signal with his mouth, a gesture of closing a box and throwing away a key.

  “My friend,” Ben answers him, “your sordid little life story is forgotten to me already!”

  For some reason, this strikes the two men as enormously funny. Coffee splashes from their bowls, causing the waiter to look up. Rudy had bought them martinis earlier and finding themselves together in a restaurant hundreds of feet above the street is making them giddy and boyish.