Lynch

Tanks

By Gerald Lynch

“What are you doing here?”

I touched upright forefinger to my lips, anxious as a puppeteer whose cover is failing him, then whispered, “Same as you.”

“Hey, Pat, how’s U of T? English, right? Still writing the poe-tree? How’re the Toronto babes?”

Frowning: “Sh-sh, fine, fine.”

But he continued at volume: “Didn’t I read in the Observer you’d snagged some big scholarship?”

“I dunno, Dennis, did you?” I was now crouching slightly, trying to shrink, and patting the air with both hands. Again he ignored the signal, which was typical Dennis Luske: loud and only ever with enough brains to cause trouble. I sat in the desk beside him, twisted and whispered, “Don’t believe everything you read, Luske. Anyway, the scholarship money isn’t great, I need this job badly.” I glanced round the filling room and said most quietly, “I’m here as a permanent hire.”

He still didn’t get it. “You still with Penny Maclean?”

“Shut up, Luske.”

Entering the sparsely occupied room I’d spotted Dennis Luske sitting alone in the back corner, just as he’d always been left to do in high school. It had been over a year since I’d seen his weaselly face. I’d hurried to him only because anxious about his blowing my cover. I knew he’d gone to the University of Windsor for Fine Arts, so assumed he’d been hired in the student summer-work program. It had quickly filled its quota. I’d had to lie to the wary Employment Insurance agent, which got me a referral to Imperial Oil. There, I’d lied again, telling the suspicious interviewer that I was quitting school, getting married, my fiancée was pregnant—raised-brow grin from her—so I was looking for fulltime work. And of course Imperial was my first choice. So many fat whoppers to start weaving a weird web.

When the Imperial interview ended, the older woman turned casual and said she’d known my father, who’d managed the tool crib for decades. “A good man, your dad. He’d have been pleased to see you here, Pat.”

I took a breath and smelled the permanent stink of Refinery Row, Oleum’s miles of petrochemical plants. “Yes, he said university was a waste of time.”

She pushed away and came round her desk, shook my hand; it was like being careful not to crush fragile bones wrapped in brown-spotted onion paper. “That’s good enough for me, Pat.”

I left knowing I had the job, and feeling like shit. My father had been proud that I’d been accepted at the University of Toronto, though he’d disapproved of my chosen major: English.

I mouthed slowly at Luske: Shhh, don’t tell anyone.

Still he smirked and all but shouted, “Permanent? You? You’ll be making two bucks an hour more than me! But you are going back to uni, right? … Are you back with Penny Maclean or what?”

I dropped and shook my head slightly, then forced myself to make my very best cautionary eyes at him. Now it wasn’t only my fear of his blowing my cover, if still mainly that, but the second reminder of Penny. She’d been my girlfriend through the final two years of high school. It had ended when she stated that Oleum and a career in health-care there were her choices (she’d be going to Oleum College). She’d asked me point-blank if I loved her. I froze. Her last words to me were “I’m saying this for your sake as much as my own, Pat: but are you sure you’re not making a big mistake?” When I didn’t answer, she turned and walked away. Her long narrow back …

I had no notion what she’d been up to in the nine months since. I’d sunk myself in school work, reading and writing, English Literature. I wanted to be a real writer, and believed that leaving home and cutting all ties was the way to go. At the end of the first year I was rewarded with a prestigious but small scholarship. I’d believed that I was past the pain of Penny, but Dennis Luske’s having merely said her name put me in a worse way in the already bad situation of my first deceitful day on the job.

This time my widened eyes and tipped head were meant to signal Dennis that the guy sitting ahead of him (Les I’d learn was his name, because he shook hands with everybody that first day), that Les was cranking back his head and smiling weakly aside. His legs were stretched into the aisle. He sported new work boots whose tanned leather reflected the overhead neon tubes, stiff khaki pants, and what looked like a new blue-plaid shirt. His fair thin hair and plump cheeks made me think “Momma’s boy, Oleum northender.” He twisted farther and took us in with a nod—sparkling green eyes—then returned to face-forward. I again raised my brow at Dennis and nodded sideways at Les in a See?

Dennis squinted his confusion. “So uh, like, if you’re not with Penny, you’d be okay with me asking her out?”

I was better able to process the mention and tried to sound blasé: “What Penny does or doesn’t do is her business.”

But stop it already, Luske. I did not need to be reminded how raw my feelings still were. Had I deceived myself, made the mistake of a lifetime? That question had often blindsided me.

I had to re-focus on the threat of Luske revealing my present deception to the guy, Les, whom I instantly disliked. Not only for the way he was dressed but more because the jerk, a total stranger, posed a threat to my future. Without the job, I would not be able to return to university. Dad had died without life insurance, and though there was an Imperial pension, we were a big family, and Toronto was expensive.

Two casually dressed older men entered the room. Before turning his attention to the front, Luske startled me by saying “Deal” and reaching out, I made a fist to bump, but he held his hand open for the traditional shake. What ‘deal’ had we made? He would keep my secret? Not that in return he was licensed to contact Penny—which I didn’t, or didn’t want to, care about?

“Good morning … gentlemen, as I see there are no ladies in the room.” Only Les guffawed, then blushed when both men looked at him blankly. “We have had intakes where upwards of half the group is female. Imperial Oil is an equal-opportunity, inclusive employer.” I imagined hearing Les’s new work pants crackle, he squirmed so from the reprimand. He bowed his head and raised two hands like someone surrendering. Both men at the front grinned at him. The speaker then actually looked at the two Asian guys, and glanced at Toka de Polaire, whom I recognized from the Indigenous reserve.

“Well now, I’m Jim and that galoot is Bill. It’s our first meeting, and already we’re two days behind.” General laughter, too much from Les, little from me, and none from Dennis. Bill held a fist at his chest and shook it once like someone about to throw dice, growled, “Are you ladies ready to work?” Only some shifting discomfort. Bill repeated it more loudly and slowly, like a dressing-room coach: “I said, are you, ready, to work?” This time the dozen of us answered “Yeah!” with Les punching straight up. I’d surprised myself.

The first speaker, Jim, reclaimed authority. “Those of you here as summer-student workers—I believe that’s three—but please raise a hand.” Dennis’s shot up in my periphery. The other two students were the Asian guys who sat side-by-side, the only ones wearing their white plastic helmets. “Yes, well, you boys will be gaining invaluable experience in the real working world.” Some loud dismissive snorting from Dennis, which made the speaker smile small. “Permanent recruits are on probation for three months. You know you’re starting at the so-called bottom. But the promotion ladder at Imperial Oil, which starts here and now—at the end of week one we will be selecting your Team Leader—you should also know that the promotion pathway at Imperial is shorter than you likely think. What’s more, it can lead to blue-collar positions in Operations and white-collar positions in Technical and Administrative, even in Project Development.” He let that sink in. “Most of our mid-level management, such as myself and Bill here, we began in the field, just like you men are doing.” Everyone looked pleased. Jim cued his large partner with a nod, who went to the door and turned off the lights, while concurrently a drop-down screen was unrolling slowly. “Imperial Oil was established in Oleum, Ontario, not long after the accidental discovery of oil—a farmer was drilling for water—just east of here at Black Creek, the current Oil Springs. …”

Before anybody could do any work, we had to complete the two-week orientation program. We recruits were assembled each day in that same room very much a classroom, with its green boards and student desks and mechanical drop-downs. Nothing cyber, we’d received instructions (by email) that phones were not allowed in the classroom. Although the history of Imperial Oil took up the whole first “class,” the emphasis of the remaining days was on safety. But safety first or not, a lot of clues about how to succeed at Imperial were dropped. Those hired on a permanent basis were distinguished from the summer-student workers by the attention they paid to such asides. Seeing so, I too pretended to perk up at the tips. And though there was an embarrassingly easy test on the final day of training—“If fire is discovered, you should a) find your Team Leader and point it out to her or him, b) take time to secure all nearby flammables, c) pull one of the many fire alarms and immediately evacuate the area”—the true test had been enduring the two weeks of boredom and watching what I said.

Only one true test. At the end of the first week, I was called to a meeting with our two teachers and the HR official who’d known my dad, in a swank office with a panoramic view of the St. Clair River. There were joking preliminaries from Jim and Bill, followed by the awkward pause, then the question from the HR woman. “Pat, it’s come to our attention that you are actually planning to leave us at the end of August and go back to school. That you’re really a summer student here on false pretenses.” Then Jim unsmiling: “Is that the case, Pat?” And burly Bill: “Tell the truth, son.”

I didn’t hesitate: “No, that is not the case, not the truth.” There was another extended silence, given depth by the plaintive caw of a seagull on the sill with its ass to the closed windows. The rat was Les, of course, who’d been made our Team Leader that morning.

Jim, looking at the HR woman: “Okay then, a man’s word is good enough for me.” We shook hands all round, burly Bill gripping with a force and a stare that made me think he wasn’t fooled.

The HR woman with the bird-bone hand said as she held mine limply, “Your father was a good honest Imperial worker for decades, Pat. I trust we’ll have the same future with you.” She didn’t believe me either.

That hurt. But I had to care only about me and my true future. I’d no choice but to deny the truth.

Otherwise the two weeks were sort of promising, especially the first few days. Every two hours a cart was wheeled in bearing thermal carafes of good coffee, fresh muffins and Montreal-style bagels, butter and cream cheese with chives, real knives. But it’s also true that after the first few days, neither the coffee was as hot and fresh nor the edibles as tasty. Only Dennis Luske, who’d never had much sense, complained. His loud comment was for general consumption, though he spoke at me, who happened to be waiting behind Les at the cart when Dennis turned away from it with loaded tray.

“The coffee looks like cooked piss now, the fries are as limp-dick as our Asian buddies, and the muffins could have maggots. I guess Imperial pollutes more than our air and water. What happened to all the good stuff? Up in the execs’ lounge, I’ll bet.”

Les looked around, found the teachers, who’d not yet left for their break in Dennis’ imagined swank lounge. Les spoke loudly too: “That’s racist, Luske. And you even read the benefits package? Of course, you’re a student,” he said prissily. “What are they teaching you at that college? We’re the lucky ones, Luske.”

Dennis puffed derisively. “What’s ‘the wife’ feeding you at home, Les? Must be less than this shit.”

I wanted to close my eyes and bow my forehead into palm. Dennis Luske. Instead I watched Les, who flexed and straightened, set his coffee on the cart, and appeared to be pondering his options. I don’t know if anyone picked up on Dennis’s pun, though no one could miss the tone or import. The Asian guys were frozen, the Indigenous guy grinned big, others shuffled. The teachers saw what was brewing, paused momentarily, then were out the doors. Perhaps they thought what appeared impending would be “team-building.”

Les turned on Dennis. “What’d you say, Luske?” The baby face had darkened. “Say it again.”

Stupid Dennis was about to comply but I took him by the upper arm and pulled him away, that way missing my morning snack and identifying myself as Les’s enemy. Regardless, Les followed us into the far corner with a heaped tray, smiled before setting it down and said, “No hard feelings, eh guys?” I pinched my lips and nodded. Dennis poked the back of my hand with a plastic fork when I reached for a limp french fry.

The teachers returned to a somber classroom. Jim sensed it, for he centred himself at the front … waited till he commanded attention.

“Get over it, boys, whatever it was. Here we work as a team. You will be performing the essential maintenance field work we informally call tanking. Imperial will be totally automating the process anon.” Partner Bill furrowed his brow and echoed, “Anon?” I recognized a routine, designed and practiced no doubt to resolve workplace tension. Jim grinned and continued: “The two principal rules in tanking, Imperial’s prime directive if you will, are these: one, never, ever, enter a storage tank unless you are wearing your Scott Air Pack, and then only after a team member has checked that it is properly secured. Which you will then check again for yourself. And two, never ever enter a tank without having your Scott Air Pack securely in place.”

Some relief laughter. Burly Bill flapped a hand at him and exited.

“But I’m serious, fellas, deadly serious: literally, deadly, serious. Which is why we’ll again be devoting the rest of this day to rehearsing the correct use of the Scott Air Pack.” Everybody groaned. He cracked a small grin and glanced toward the door, took a deep breath. “The refresher then: the Scott Air Pack is a self-contained breathing apparatus, S-C-B-A. It is designed …”

He nodded sharply at the door. Big Bill came in, dressed in something like fisherman’s green wading gear, and wearing a Scott Air Pack. He made me think of sci-fi movies where the travellers disembark on a planet of unbreathable atmosphere. As if having sensed our discomfort, he spread his arms sideways and waved them like somebody walking on the bottom of the St. Clair River. Which made no sense. He removed the mask, which had covered his entire face and a lot of his head and already left him flushed and puffing. What was I getting into?

Jim spent another hour telling us in technical detail how the filter worked, then two more demonstrating on all twelve of us how to wear it, and how to check a fellow worker. Then we had to do it all over again in pairs (Dennis and I partnering). Then it was afternoon break time, which was again as tasty and plentiful as on the first day (an effect of Luske’s protest?): cheeseburgers, homemade fries, gravy, peas, and banana cream pie for dessert, all we could eat. When we were done, big Bill joked he hoped we’d still fit in the outfits. Already comfortable with each other (excepting Dennis and Les, or everybody with Dennis)—we were all on a first-name basis, even using diminutions and nicknames (Jimbo and Billy Boy, Down Pat, More-or-Les, and such)—only a few felt compelled to laugh. Toka patted his considerable belly. To move us along, big Bill said, “You eat any more of that pie, Denny, and you won’t fit through a tank’s access hole.” He grinned at Toka and patted his own belly: “Don’t I know it!”

Dennis snapped, “Fuck off, Billy Boy.”

The shuffle of our finishing-up silenced. Not because of the fuck, which by then was everybody’s second word, but because Dennis, in adding off, had responded nastily to habitual teasing among fellow workers. I remembered more clearly about Dennis Luske: his lame wit was often too blunt for his own good; he possessed no sense of the effect of his cutting remarks on others, and consequently of the danger to himself. I had seen him in a few close calls, and once getting punched out at Chipican Beach by a biker because Dennis had flirted with the guy’s girl. I’d witnessed it from the parking lot while waiting for Penny to stop talking with her friends. When she came over she followed my gaze to where Dennis stood with nose dripping blood into his palm. “Isn’t Luske your friend?” We looked at each other till she smiled small. “No, you’re my only friend, Penny.”

In the awkward lunch room, Les placed both hands flat on the table and flexed as if to rise, but he rested on his fingertips and looked around. “Did you say ass-hole, Bill? I don’t think the team’s that tight yet.” The pause extended, then laughter spurted. “And speaking of access holes, when do we well-fed workers go into a tank and earn our keep?”

Jim exhaled relief, said, “A week from Monday, More-or-Les.”

Incommensurate relief laughter all round. Or almost all round.

Dennis said half-under his breath, “Brown-noser,” but was ignored.

I was impressed, seeing what Les had managed. It came as no surprise that at lunch the next day, Friday, he was announced as our Team Leader. Later that day I had my meeting with HR, after which I put one and one together and figured Les had ratted me out. A long career here? Thanks, but no thanks.

They look gigantic even at drive-by distance, Imperial Oil’s storage tanks, hundreds of them, dazzling white in sunshine, each stamped with the styled word Esso in red inside a blue ellipse. Growing up in Oleum, I had passed them many times, and always imagined the tanks as identical pieces on a giant checkerboard, and further that the players would have trouble keeping track of which markers were theirs, what to jump, what to crown, who wins. Up close, which I’d never imagined being, a tank filled the field of vision. A circuit of one on route to its access hole was a dreary walk, especially so first thing on a sharp summer morning … a sensory clarity that clouded the nearer one approached the diesel-pungent tanks. The service holes were on the opposite side from the public road, so that the clean-out teams—all dressed in pea-green overalls and heavy jackets and topped with white plastic safety helmets—were hidden. Hidden too were the wholly wooden tools lying about, the crude rakes and busted parts of sleds for moving the sludge inside the tanks.

Each clean-out team of twelve comprised four crews, who worked inside the tank in fifteen-minute shifts. At any one time there would have been half a dozen tank-maintenance shut-downs occurring at Imperial Oil, so some seventy-two men and women working in the field of gigantic containers like the Stone-Henge leavings of some lost techno civilization. You could be fired on the spot if caught not wearing a helmet, whether handy or not, no matter that the threat to lungs was ever-present (thus the much-ballyhooed Scott Air Pack). But inside the tank—with nostrils stinging from diesel, with eyes burning, with the very petro-taste instantly abrasive in the throat, with shortened breath and the immediately acquired cough—none of that was publicly visible either, of course. Only those inside the tank were required to wear the air packs, which upon exiting they passed to the next three going in. The passing of masks was something of a superstitious relay, as the air packs didn’t help much; in fact, they hampered breathing and cooked the face and head.

Inside the tanks was dim as a crepuscular evening (I loved that word, which I’d learned in my first-year poetry class and was eager to use in a poem; I was thinking an internal rhyme with “muscular” but had got no further). The helmets had LED lights that were forever failing, and only the one mechanical lamp somehow suspended from the ceiling way up there. We found our way more by foot-feel and muscle memory than sight; we slid and slipped and sometimes fell, or strained muscles catching ourselves.

The acrid tank had been drained of its fluids, then left to dry only for as long as made financial sense (three days). What remained was a thick layer of toxic sludge some five feet high. The three-sided wooden sled made from two-by-twelve planks was some four feet wide, with well-braced three-foot-long arms, and open at the front. It was heavy and awkward and could have passed through the access hole, which was about eighteen inches in diameter, only with great difficulty. So it had been glued and expertly dovetailed inside the tank, using rubber mallets. I say so because the true prime rule of working in the tank wasn’t wearing the Scott Air Pack always but that absolutely no metal was allowed anywhere near a tank’s access hole, let alone inside. Zero tolerance for such as keys and zippers, never mind a nail. Before leaving for the tank field we changed out of zippered jeans and exchanged footwear for thick, one-sized, green rubber boots, which by the end of the day added foot pain to the ache of head and throat and lungs. Only the Team Leader was permitted a digital timepiece on site, which was encased in rubber and which Les regularly pulled like a badge from deep in his rubberish pocket.

The routine was this: two workers manned the wooden sled, picking it up (it had to be close to a hundred pounds), tossing it onto the sludge, then pushing it down like some nightmarish cheese cutter. Thick ropes from the ends of each arm of the sled were hooped round the shoulders, and the sled was dragged to the access hole, a distance which increased as the work progressed. At the hole waited a suction hose and the crew’s third man. He used the wooden rake to keep the hose’s mouth sucking sludge. Then again, again and again, for fifteen minutes that felt like an hour. If it wasn’t truly as bad as, it had to have been close to those legendary forms of backbreaking work: cotton-pickin’ slave labour, crawling miles through mature coal mines, convict rock-breaking.

My threesome included Dennis and Les. I hoped our teachers figured Dennis needed watching and that Les, already Team Leader, would keep an eye on him and report any problems. And me? Was I thought unreliable? Deceiving? In the permanent stream, I was on probation. My true future being at stake, I worked like the devil to look aiming for a career at Imperial.

Although the practice was to alternate positions, Dennis always wheedled his way onto the rake, so that Les and I manned the sled. Because I knew he’d ratted me out to the teachers, I wouldn’t talk to him. He tried some worker-buddy banter, which I met with dismissive noises. Soon we worked in silence. Carried the heavy sled to the pile. Swung it back once and tossed it on top. Pressed it down. Shouldered the ropes and dragged the sludge to the access hole. Where Dennis, refusing to keep the air pack on, waited bowed to the access hole and so oblivious of our arrivals. Finally, because Les and I were again waiting with a new load and Dennis was still pushing the last dumping toward the suction hose, Les said through his mask, “C’mon, Luske.”

Dennis said, “Where we going, Les?” Then barked, “Break time!” and threw down his rake close to Les. It clattered and echoed. He exited through the hole.

I looked at Les: “Is it?”

He checked his time piece. “It’s early.” First he finished Dennis’ work, then sweepingly gestured me towards the hole.

We joined the team sitting back against the tank, some drinking straight from flasks, no one eating. Dennis stood facing us munching a bag of chips. Tossing the crumpled bag aside, he cringed at the team and repeated the rant he’d been saying at least once a day since we came into the tank field: “Man, I do not know how you permanent guys can stand the idea of a future doing this? You know that talk about fast promotion is all bullshit! You’ll be laid off day after this tank is cleaned. You are being exploited by late capitalism! On top of which--you are complicit in Imperial’s destroying the planet! How do you live with yourselves?”

The team had come to ignore Dennis. Toka de Polaire picked up a sizeable piece of gravel and threw it at him, which Dennis looked comical dodging. “Fuck off with that shit, Luske.”

Les’s head had been hanging at his drawn-up knees. He did the donkey’s share of our threesome’s work, shamed to say. He sometimes told Dennis to switch off with me, but himself never took the rake. Les was always too tired at breaks to do anything but hang his head. He’d sometimes give away the well-wrapped tasty treats his wife prepared. Now, he raised his face and said meanly: “Yeah, put a cork in it, Luske.”

“Go fuck yourself, asswipe. What’er ya gonna do, Mr. Big Team Leader? Report me to the fucking principal? I’m outta here end of August. You and the rest of these guys are fucking lifer losers.”

The team fidgeted on their asses. Les stood and went towards Dennis, who looked too afraid to run. Les stepped past him, picked up the bright chip bag and crumpled it in a sizeable fist at Dennis’ chest. “Can we have a private word, Luske?” Dennis snorted, it was bravado. Les continued down to the gravel road. Dennis looked at me sheepishly where I sat between the Asian guys and Toka, then followed Les. They stood face-to-face over the garbage drum, looking like two fishermen disagreeing about the weather forecast. Les reached across, Dennis flinched, and Les put a hand on Dennis’ shoulder as he said his parting words. Luske looked hangdog. Les returned to us, timepiece in his hand. “Break’s over, boys, let’s bop.”

Toka pressed too hard on my knee and groaned to his feet. He snapped a salute and said in mock-alacrity, “Aye-aye, mon capitaine!”

Les grinned. “Okay, big guy, but I don’t think Pat and Dennis and me completed our shift inside, we’ve still got five minutes on the clock.” He didn’t look back at Dennis, simply went to the hole, put on the air pack and disappeared inside.

I called to Dennis, “Let’s bop, boy!” Toka laughed loudest and slapped my back. I liked that. More and more the team, having frozen out Dennis, had been warming to me.

Dennis: “Wha … but we …”

At the hole I asked, “What’d our fearless leader say to you?”

He hmphed. “That if I spoke to him like that again, he’d be waiting for me after work and stomp the living shit out of me. And that I was welcome to report him too.”

“Too?”

“Yeah, I dunno, we better get in there, like, because … you really need this shit job, right?”

The only surprise working in the tank with Dennis and Les was a pleasant one: Les’s voice. The man could sing, acapella and all, which proved his talent. In the echoing tank he sounded … there’s no other word for it: sensational. As we learned, he and his wife had been in a band, with her on keyboards and Les lead guitar and vocals. Having been in a bar band restricted to local venues, where oldies were the only requests, Les knew every popular song from the past century.

At first, with the headgear on it was like hearing submerged singing, and I’d thought the toxic air of the tank had me hallucinating. I paused dragging the sled—Les’s side slid forward before stopping—looked all around, and came to rest on Les. The singing stopped and he smiled at me through the mask. He tipped it up off his face, which we frequently did to ease the pressure. I raised mine. He grinned big, cocked back his head and loudly finished Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” singing clearly, ringingly, echoingly.

“Wow! That’s some set of pipes you have on you there … uh, Les.”

He smirked, replaced the mask and shouldered the rope.

At the end of that shift, with the three of us still standing inside the hole, Les took the mask off and belted out the old Beatles’ tune, “Oh! Darling.” What volume! The echo was like being inside a bell. When we emerged, a few of the team were standing there. Toka said to me with a pretend threatening face, “What, thee fuck, was that? You can’t have a player in the tank!” I said, “Nope, and it definitely wasn’t me, my friend. Turns out our fearless leader here has the voice of an angel. Plays a pretty mean air guitar too.”

Les pushed my shoulder, and we all went to sit on the sloping ground that banked the tank. The team was hard-working (but for Dennis), and most were young family men. I’d grown uncomfortable with Dennis’ repeated shitting on this life they’d either chosen or had no honourable choice but to pursue. The life Les would be proud to live. … I had to remind myself that he’d ratted me out. And reminded myself to ask Dennis if he’d contacted Penny, though I didn’t know if I really wanted to know. Truth is, I knew what I wanted less and less.

Dennis was sitting beside me. He turned his head and spoke loudly: “Notice that our singing fearless leader wasn’t wearing his Scott Air Pack?” I did not like his echoing me. “Maybe we should report him.”

Les stood and crunched his snack-wrappings, headed for the garbage drum.

I said, “Cool it, Luske. And there is no we.”

More loudly: “You afraid what these losers think?”

Toka, on my other side, spoke particularly to no one in particular: “No we, Luske. I like that.”

“So the guy can warble? So what? He and prego wifey were in a crappy local band, big deal. They failed there too, didn’t they?”

Les stood still halfway to the garbage drum, head hanging for a bad spell. He proceeded to the road.

Some of Dennis’ chips had speckled me, I brushed them back at him. He said, “I do not trust that guy, he’s a company rat.”

Turning my head as far from Toka as it would go, I whispered, “I know, drop it. Remember what he just said. Uh, have you called Penny?”

“You know? … But yeah, she wasn’t too eager to talk, till I told her I was working with you.”

I felt my eyeballs heat up. “Do you know if she’s with somebody?”

“Nope. She said we could meet at Chipican Beach some day before I go back to Windsor, as old friends. You still okay with that?”

“Stop shitting on everybody, Luske.”

“What? … Oh yeah, Penny wanted to know if you’re still writing poetry, and she said not to tell you she asked.”

“I’m no poet, you can tell her that, Dennis.” I pushed to my feet. “Break’s over, boys! Let’s bop!”

Still standing before us, Les shifted from scowling at Luske to grinning at me. “Good man, Pat!”

In the first weeks the team had learned about each others’ lives. Toka wanted to move into Security, get his family off the reserve and into Oleum. A bit embarrassed at the disclosure, he’d said, “What brings you to the armpit-slash-asshole of Ontario, Down-Pat?” I said, “Dunno, my friend.” He’d not been pleased. The Asian guys, Akio and Haru, were from northern Japan and the first of their related families to go to university, like me. They were continually reminding each other of events back in some place called Sendai, and to speak English. Out of the silent blue on a baking afternoon break, Bob DeJar tipped his head back against the tank and quietly said, “Guys, I’m gay.” No one reacted, outwardly anyway. Till Les announced, “Well, I’m not, so keep your distance when I’m going into the tank, my man.” Which made Bob, then all, laugh in relief. And Les and his wife, who was near full-term, had indeed been the nucleus of a local band, Bluewater Bridge, which had recently broken up. He didn’t elaborate, but I was strangely moved thinking they’d had a dream that died.

It was the middle of August. The team was on morning break, sitting on the dirt bank that supported the tank. Noontimes we were picked up and taken to one of the good lunchrooms. Dennis looked at Les, crumpled his usual chip bag and tossed it aside.

Les, who was snapping the lid on a salad container, didn’t even look up: “I’m tired of telling you not to litter, Luske. And you should be wearing your helmet. One of the company’s silent electric trucks could come by, you’d catch some serious shit, and me too as Team Leader.”

Dennis stood, faced us and smirked at me. “Oh, fearless leader, why don’t you go fuck your helmet.” He slid sideways down the embankment, turned and screwed up his face at the team. He articulated emphatically: “How, do you stand, this guy? He is such a, fucking, keener. Big Bill told me that Lester here is always reporting shit about us. That’s why he’ll be promoted first. Deny if you can, Lester boy?”

Les still didn’t raise his face. “It’s Leslie.” Then he looked mildly at Dennis: “And how did you come to hear all that, Denny boy? Why would you be talking to Jim and Bill so much? As Team Leader, it’s part of my job to report, but only on the progress of our work, no gossip.” His face went blank, and I imagined I could hear his molars grinding. “Is there anything else you wanted to say, Dennis? I mean, to my face?”

Toka, beside me, puffed out his cheeks and shook his head in bemused expectation.

I held my palms toward Dennis and mouthed stop. But his face was an unstoppable sneer. “You guys are such fucking losers, you deserve this shit life and leader Lester here. Like him and his prego wife deserve each other and … shit.” He’d run aground, or facing Les he saw something I couldn’t.

Les stood. He was a fit big guy. He took two steady strides down the embankment and delivered a straight right to Dennis’ face that crumpled him. Toka shouted “Whoa!” Dennis lay flat-out. No one else moved either, till I hurried to splash water from my bottle on Dennis’ face. He revived and I helped him to his feet. Once again his nose wouldn’t stop bleeding, he couldn’t manipulate the sleeves of his shirt for good stanching, so in the weird silence the blood continued to drip into his cupped palm like fluid from a failed device (Dennis’ head). It was Les shoved at him a bunch of the napkins he always had in his big cooler, then went down to the road. When I saw that Dennis, with head tipped back and numerous napkins applied, could stand on his own, I left him. Les eventually flagged a company pick-up and Dennis was taken away.

I was surprised to learn that Dennis said he’d tripped inside the tank and fallen on the sled. Our team heard so from big Bill in the change room after work that day, who’d wanted to confirm the details that he’d told us. I waited alone with Les, knowing he was always last to leave. He’d already been called in to talk about Dennis, as any injury on the job was a big deal. Les said he’d had a talk with Imperial’s safety guy, who’d been satisfied. Our two old teachers had been present at the meeting, and when the guy left they held Les back. They assumed a fight had occurred and wanted to know if it signalled bigger problems within the team. Also satisfied, they had then winkingly explained to Les that they’d fed the accident story to Dennis before his meeting with Safety, and that he’d been happy to exchange the truth for time off. Les said it was clear they did not like Dennis, who was always bugging them with gossip and requests.

There in the change room, both of us standing in only white jockeys, Les placed a hand on my shoulder, which made me uncomfortable, as anybody could walk in. “I like you, Pat. To state the obvious, I do not like Luske, so I like that you’ve been distancing yourself from that whiny shithead. I mean for the sake of your future here. If Luske is what university makes you, I’m glad I chose the real entertainment business. But tell me straight, Pat: do you see a future here? Or are you going back to school in September too? I’ll be honest with you: it’s Jim and Bill want to know.”

I was through with lying. “I honestly don’t know, Les. What I do know is that we’d better put our pants on before somebody comes in and breaks Bob’s heart with a story of you cheating on him.”

He pursed his lips and lisped, “You’re more my type, Patty pie.”

I clutched my pants to my chest and called quietly, “Bob, help!”

We laughed. He said, “Are you with anybody, Pat? I mean hetero-wise?”

I smirked. “I also don’t know that, Les. But I am definitely outta here, for now anyway.”

Dennis’ nose had been broken. He was given two paid weeks off, and when he returned it was for one day only at the end of August, a Friday, which was also the end of the summer student-work program. A new man had showed up, a woman actually, and Dennis’ place in our three-man crew had been taken by Toka, a great worker. No one spoke to Dennis on his last day, I acted too busy for more than a see-you nod. But he came up to me and, too obviously keeping his back to the team, gripped my upper arm. “Pat, you’re not staying here?” He’d not been quiet.

With my face visible to the team, with Les taking particular interest, I couldn’t signal Dennis to keep it down. I said lowly, “I don’t know.” Then loudly, “You off at last, Luske?”

“Yep. And in a week back to Windsor, no more shit work, just art. Hey, guess what? I have that beach date with Penny on Labour Day. I had a fuck of a time getting her to commit.”

“I gotta get to work.”

“I’ll give her your best, or mine anyway, if you know what I mean.” His eyebrows going like Groucho Marx’s.

Then I really had to get to work, or I’d have laid him out à la Les. He had to hang around till quitting time and, crewless odd man out, spent the rest of the afternoon alone on the far side of the tank.

Before we started work the Monday morning after Dennis’ last day, we were visited in the field by Jim and Bill. They both acted all buddy-buddy, then Jim abruptly shifted gears and asked pointedly, “So: who did it? Team Leader?”

Toka stepped up a little between Jim and Les, said, “Luske tripped and fell on the sled, but.”

I had also thought they were further investigating Dennis’ injury. With the continuing run of media stories about Refinery Row’s old workers getting all manner of cancers, and because the petro-chemical plants were under continual assault by lawyers for insurance companies, Imperial Oil investigated any accident extensively. So I wondered: Where’s the company safety guy then?

Jim and Bill made pained faces, then asked us all to follow them round to the side of the tank facing the public road … where passing cars were honking? Both men stopped and pointed, and the honking increased. At about seven feet up the white tank somebody had printed largely in black sludge:

Tanks But No Tanks
Fuck You Imperial

A number of us sputtered and laughed, which at least convinced Jim and Bill of our ignorance. They told Les to clean it off pronto and to keep a better eye on his team. They left.

A pissed-off Les looked at me: “I think you’re the man for the job, Pat. Go back to the tool crib for a brush and bucket.” He grinned humorlessly: “Or would you leave like your fellow author Den—”

“No.”

“No?”

“It needs a comma after you.”

“Me?”

“And should end with an exclamation mark. I’ll clean it off.”

I hurried to the other side of the tank, where the idling pick-up waited on the gravel road. I raised a hand signalling them to hold on. On the ride to the tool crib they talked teasingly, per usual, then shifted to seriousness, which I’d long since recognized as their act. Big Bill said, “It was Dennis Luske, wasn’t it, Pat?”

“How would I know?”

Jim held the wheel. “Your loyalty is commendable, Pat. But it was Luske told us you were lying about a career at Imperial. I’ll ask you only one more time: was it that fucking weasel Luske defaced company property?” He waited a bad spell. Jerked the truck into drive and we shot off, the gravel rattling beneath.

When the noise settled I answered: “I honestly don’t know, Jim. I’ll clean it off pronto, but I’ll need a bucket of water.”

Bill again: “Good man, Pat. We really do admire your loyalty. Do you have a girl, son?”

I kept silent. We bounced along, in the side-mirror a white cloud of dust spreading in our wake.

Jim leaned forward and spoke loudly past Bill: “Going from what your Team Leader tells us, Pat, we believe you could have a good future here. Les says you’re a good reliable worker, and that you have a way with words. True?”

Suckered by flattery, I blurted, “I’m an—I was an English maj …”

“We know that too, from Dennis Luske, remember? That little prick was always after us for something. Now, I don’t know what the literature business is like these days, but if artsy-fartsy Luske is anything to go by … The company’s always in need of a talented writer for advertising and PR and the like, especially these days. You could be out of the tanks in a matter of months, Pat, with our recommendation. What would your girl think of that?”

“I don’t have a ‘girl’.” They likely missed the correcting inflection. Good.

Big Bill: “No? You and Bob special buds? Uh, sorry, I shouldn’t talk like that, it’s homophotogenic or something, right? Bob’s a good man. But seriously, Pat, you get into Imperial admin and you’ll have more Oleum babes than you can shake your stick at.”

“Shouldn’t say that either, Bill.”

They laughed along.

Jim: “And this big galoot is snuggling up a bit too close for my comfort, Pat.”

Bill turned his face to Jim and made a few kissing noises. We laughed again.

We pulled up to the long grey tool shed … where my father had spent his working life.

Jim, as I was about to close the door: “Think about what I said, Pat.”

“About sexual-suspect Bill here?” Jim hooted and Bill slammed the dash in mock-anger. “No, seriously I will, thanks, guys. And thanks for the ride.”

“I’ll have a bucket of hot soapy water sent over. If it doesn’t wash off, we’ll sandblast and repaint.”

I watched the truck head towards the shiny central admin building, whose best offices had wide windows facing the river. Seagulls were perched on the edges of the tool shed’s corrugated metal roof, cawing to beat the band and crapping mindlessly. Dad had been happy here, both parents content, we were well kept, a good life. I was the oldest, the pension was liveable but Mom could use some … help. No: don’t excuse yourself, Pat. It is just too easy to shit on Oleum and Refinery Row (see: Dennis Luske). But in a world crazed by selfie ambition, whether for your own spotlight or Ukraine or the whole Middle East, a decent family life in Oleum was looking more and more attractive. Dad had been so proud when I got accepted at U of T, the first of his family to attend university. One good thing was he’d not lived to hear me report on what English studies had become: reading the best that’s been thought and written replaced by the ‘study’ of TV reality shows and movies and graphic novels (comics), and the like crap (there was an English Literature seminar titled “Taylor Swift I: The Country Years”).

Down the road where it became paved, the pick-up pulled into admin’s parking lot. The morning dimmed suddenly and the glassy building stopped sparkling. Their unintentional reminder of Penny, so of what Luske had said about a date with her at the beach, still hurt. I hoped Labour Day would be … crepuscular (I’m no poet, muscular or otherwise).

Labour Day the following Monday begins promisingly overcast, but by mid-morning it’s sunny. I ride my bike for hours trying to decide what to do. Classes begin Wednesday. I want to talk with Penny. But as I ride aimlessly about the south end, I’m careful to avoid her street. After no lunch I pedal out to Chipican Beach.

Overdressed I’m sweating like a pig in the rising heat. As I approach, the indistinguishable beach sounds are like hushed nightmare warnings. I prop my bike at the edge of the sticky tarmac parking lot and stand scanning beyond the crowded beach far out the dreamy mysterious yonder. … When I snap myself out of it and come back to the beach, I notice a guy waving insistently in my direction, his hand held high. Yes, streaky Dennis Luske, reaching to about the same height as the graffiti on the tank. He is with Penny. They’re about three-quarters of the way to the water’s edge. Luske keeps waving, throws something to the ground and begins moving towards me. He disappears.

He must have mentioned me, for she turns to the water but doesn’t move off. She’s wearing her white one-piece of some thin material, when every other female sports a colourful bikini. She’s not been in the water today. Penny’s brunette, and I’d never told her that the crotch of the old white suit darkened when wet, excitingly so. She always regretted her lack of a bigger booty, and her sinewy thighs, and that she had only enough breasts not to worry over. I’d never worried over anything Penny, had always reassured her, a favour which she returned (“I loved the poem about starling murmuration!”). Her shoulder blades like cropped wings topping the long back do the most damage.

Standing there fully dressed, it’s not only that I get more heated at the thought of another man’s hands on that back, but it is that too. A year has passed since we talked, a year of other hands, but mostly a year lost. I remind myself why I went away, why I’d thought I had to. And see clearly that studying literature that way—like our primary mission was directly to make the world a better place—had nothing to do with the little real writing I’d managed at university (a few poems in the undergraduate student newsletter, though first place in a short-story contest). What I need is practice, much more real reading, and more practice, doing the thing I want to do, over and over till I wonder why I’m doing it but can’t think of doing anything else. It would be more profitable in every sense to be writing for Imperial Oil than wondering how what we’re reading hurts or helps such as Toka’s people. Given the opportunity Toka himself will do just fine without the professors’ help, thank you. Imperial Oil is providing that opportunity. And Les, I see him content living his life in Oleum, more fulfilled than I’d ever be trying to live some long-lost legend of expatriate Paris. Les will use that lovely voice to sing to his future children. He and his partner will sing together again, different tunes for a new audience. That’s a life.

The sun beats down on me, I feel woozy. Sounds of children and performing teens, cautioning parents, and back of it all small waves forever patting the shore. I step off the tarmac and my runners twist and sink into the sand. I need more, more reason to act, a more convinced understanding, more … I don’t know what, God help me. The fucking sun … And then I do know: I had been using a false fiction to shape my real life, a shopworn story of how to become a writer. My writing professors mostly ignored the actual work of writing and promoted the old romantic image of the rebel writer who must leave home so he can shit on it. Pushing their social-warrior agenda just like everyone else, they acted like they, tenured bohemians, were the real thing. Not to say that I know what the real thing is, for now only what it isn’t: that. I need a true story. And it begins here.

I approach, pause at Luske when he stops and raises a traffic cop’s hand. He says, “Hey, bro, shouldn’t you be packing for tomorrow? I’m good to go. Wanna get wasted tonight?”

I look him in the eyes. “Dennis, I’ve decided I do care that you’re here with Penny. Fuck off.”

“What?” But he must see it in my eyes. “Uh, okay, I was leaving anyway, like. Penny does not like me and, like, she talks too much about you. Uh, would you tell her I had to go and that I’ve charged you with seeing her home?” He snickers.

For that one good turn, Denny ol’ worker-buddy: Tanks.

I arrive. She turns and smiles brightly as she never does. “Hi, Pat, long time! Aren’t you a little overdressed for the beach?”

“Hi, Penny. Yeah, for sure.” She’s nervous of course and my whole face has been baking. More to help us through this moment, I pull the light grey sweater over my head.

She trills falsely: “It’s the beach, Pat, you can take off the T too!” I whip it over my head. She’s genuinely surprised. “My God, a farmer tan! You? Oh yeah, Dennis said … I’m sorry. How have you been, Pat?”

“Confused.”

“What are you doing here? Dennis—where did he go?—he said you guys were heading back to school tomorrow. I’m starting a practicum in the neonatal unit at St. Anthony’s.”

Nothing moves, like a cinematic trick where the noisy world is removed and her face fills the field. “No. Are you with anybody?”

“No?” She blinks. “And no.” She’s dropped the girly cheerfulness. Then she smiles small, where the corners of her mouth actually turn down a touch, in the true way only I know and have missed so: knowingly, indulgently, memorably. “Are you sure you won’t be making the mistake of a lifetime?”

In the pause the world comes back. A seagull has come up close to her feet and is dislodging a shiny chip bag (Luske). Understanding it’s been deceived by glitter, the bird flies off cawing in that way like a hurting human, not a child’s cry, an adult’s.

“No—I mean yes, I am, thanks.”

Gerald Lynch was born on a farm at Lough Egish in Co. Monaghan Ireland and grew up in Canada. He has published 10 books, 8 of them fiction, as well as numerous short stories, essays, and reviews. His new novel, Plaguing Jake, is forthcoming in June from At Bay Press and available to order wherever books are sold: https://atbaypress.com/books/detail/plaguing-jake