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Choking

Mike Carson

    The foreman finds the man’s body shortly after three in the afternoon. He sees the vivid orange of a safety vest sticking out of the snow at the base of a felled tree. He digs away only enough snow to see that a man is wearing the vest and that the man is not breathing. The foreman knows the dead faller well; they were once good friends.
    There is no hurry now so the foreman sits on a nearby stump smelling the sap and wood and watching the shadows lengthen as the sun drops below the distant mountains. He looks down at the dead man and thinks of the calls he will have to make tonight, calls to the RCMP, to his boss, to the man’s wife and son. He is not unsympathetic: it is simply that this has been a long day and he had looked forward to a few hours of peace before turning in. Things are more complicated now.
    It was too much to hope that the Death Crone wouldn’t be working: I knew nobody up there would be cutting me a break any time soon. I stand in the dusty parking lot for a minute or so, considering going somewhere else to buy booze, but that would be too much of a pain in the ass so I suck in my breath and pull open the door with its cracked glass and fly-specked Counter Attack poster and face the music—which, incidentally, is the worst Country music anyone has ever heard; I think they must pipe this shit in directly from Cowboy Hell. The song that’s on now sounds like what you might hear if you strolled by some farm hands sodomizing sheep while, in the background, someone was beating Tennessee Ernie Ford with a steel guitar. The Death Crone is really grooving on it: she bobs her mullet up and down to the merciless twanging and doesn’t look up.
    I stroll around the grubby store like I’m some big-shot connoisseur who actually gives two shits about what sort of overpriced hooch he buys. After what I figure is a reasonable length of time, I pick up a mickey of 5-Star whisky. Five stars, what a joke. The stuff is like a fiery enema. The only good thing about it now is how damn cheap it is. Used to be, though, that the bottles had plastic stars on them, but the cheap pricks stopped sticking them on in favour of the far less classy paper ones. I guess they figured some drunk was gonna lose an eye or something.
    When I was a kid, though, after a weekend with my old man, I used to search through the empties and pick out all the old 5-Star bottles, peel those plastic stars off, and then my friends and I could play sheriffs versus ninjas—sheriffs got badges, ninjas got throwing stars. Christ, I could deputize the whole neighbourhood—we’d have a regular posse—after a payday Friday night at my place.
    Anyway, I plunk my bottle down in front of the Death Crone who stares at it with her one good eye, then she looks up all cockeyed at me like maybe I just took a dump on the counter or something. Finally she manages to choke down her disdain long enough to punch in the numbers on her cash register.
    “Eight ninety-five,” she says.
    Her lazy eye is wobbling all over the room, and I want to say, “Hey, I’m over here,” and laugh and laugh but I never do ‘cause I think that eye can see right through you and I think she knows I’m a drunk even if I wouldn’t admit it to myself. And a drunk is about the worst fucking thing you can be.
    “Wait a sec’,” I say, grabbing a six-pack of Black Label from a big ice-filled chest shaped like a giant Pepsi can, although I doubt anyone ever bought a goddamn Pepsi in this shit-hole.
    I flop the beer on the counter like I’m impulse-buying or something, when what I really need is one for the road and she looks at me like I’m a cockroach pinned to the counter, wriggling my arms and legs all over and wondering why the hell I’m not getting anywhere. She waves her enormous hair around a few times to get it just right, and then she blows through her fat, pink lips like she’s got something better to do. Finally she rings up the total and I can pay and get the hell out.
    “Have a nice day,” I say.
    Finally I’m out of there and into the warm June evening and I feel a little guilty because I should want to get out and enjoy it but all I can really think about is drinking until it’s time to sleep it off and head to work tomorrow. And so it goes.
    It is immediately clear to the foreman what happened to the faller: as the man was making his back-cut, the big spruce shivered violently causing an entangled snag to break away and drop straight down onto the man below. This is called a widowmaker.
    The foreman imagines how the tree would have hung for a moment before inexorable forces brought it crashing down onto the man, crushing him into the snow at the base of the tree.
    Work. Just the thought of it pains me in my ass; I’m a chokerman, in case you were wondering, which is about the shittiest job you can have, next to—maybe—the window cleaner at a peep-show, although Windex-Boy probably has more interesting conversations and a better view.
    In the summer, choking isn’t so bad. I get up around 4 am and drive my sorry ass out into the middle of nowhere on some dusty washboard of a logging road. My first mind-numbing task is to grease the skidder—that’s the part where I roll around in the dirt trying to locate mud-caked grease nipples while the skidder operator, a fat, toothless bastard everyone calls Thumper—I figure he got this nickname because he’s had two bypass surgeries and now you can hear his erratically beating ticker from several feet away—yells at me to go faster as if I’m dragging the job out, you know, really milking it, because it’s so damn fun.
    Anyway, after the greasing party, Thumper fires up the machine and I start to run. I run beside the skidder out into the bush where I start setting chokers: the line skidder, if you’ve never seen one, looks kind of like a scorpion: a four-wheel drive, balloon-tired, turbo-charged scorpion with a big winch at the back and a heavy cable that runs out over a boom (that’s the scorpion’s tail); shorter, thinner cables called chokers move along the larger mainline cable. My job is to pull out the main cable and connect the chokers to logs. Six logs make a full lift, and then I can run beside the skidder back to the landing and unhook the chokers all the while trying not to be killed by other large pieces of logging equipment that are crashing through the bush around me, not to mention the flying limbs and roots that get kicked up when the logs are being winched in.
     If nothing else, it’s an excellent way to lose a finger or hand if you’re not quick enough on the release and some overzealous operator starts reefing in the logs with your hand still caught in the choker.
    The dust is thick and fills my nostrils and eyes and the noise cannot be believed. All day my throat is parched and I feel like I want to puke but I just keep running while Thumper bitches at me and I fumble with the goddamn chokers and he bitches some more and I hate his guts and I hate myself because I know I’m not much use and I just take it because I need the job and because I know that Thumper—fat, heart-attack-waiting-to-happen-AGAIN Thumper—is a tougher man than I’ll ever be. That’s choking.
    At coffee time I can finally stop running and sit down and Thumper shuts off the skidder and climbs down to tell me for the millionth time how he used to be a bad man who drank too much and took too many drugs but now he’s found Jesus and he wants to share the miracle of Jesus with me which is great because you know damn well Thumper never would have shared any of his booze; most days I wish to God Buddha had saved Thumper because I’m pretty sure no one has ever been bitched out at work by a born-again Buddhist but no luck because Jesus is Thumper’s co-pilot now and I start hoping that the Rapture rolls around and Thumper’s fat ass ascends to Heaven (in fact, I think I’d pay to see it happen) and leaves me in peace; either that or I’m hoping the skidder crushes me flat before the lunchtime sermon. And that’s choking too.
    Setting chokers in the winter is even worse: there’s no dust, but it is colder than a polar bear’s sphincter and my hands crack and bleed and my face goes numb and Thumper’s sermons become longer and more fatalistic. The roads are treacherous with ice and logging trucks and I drive to work in darkness and I never look up at the sun because my head is down and the chokers are frozen, unyielding and sharp in my hands; I never look up because I’m running all day long and then I drive home from work in the darkness and I drink myself stupid and rise again and start choking.
    The dead man’s pickup is parked on an unused landing about a quarter of a mile away. The door is unlocked and the foreman sits behind the steering wheel. The interior of the truck is covered with hoar frost and frigid sawdust and smells of chainsaw oil and cigarettes. The foreman finds two empty whisky bottles under the seat. He throws them out of the window into the deep snow at the far end of the landing. He sits behind the wheel again and calls his boss on the dead man’s radio. Next he calls his wife to tell her that he will be home late.
    It is more than two hours later when the foreman sees the headlights of the RCMP Suburban bouncing over the rough, icy road ahead of him. He leads the police and the coroner to the dead faller’s body. It is beginning to snow, and the beams of the police officers’ flashlights sparkle on the falling crystals. The foreman tells the police what he knows, and how he found the faller. The police tell the foreman that they can take it from here and that he can go.
    The foreman lingers in the darkness just outside the halo of light where the officers and the coroner are working. He waits until the faller’s body has been removed from the snow and placed on an aluminum sled and the officers have dragged the corpse back to their vehicle and loaded it inside. He waits until the taillights have vanished back the way they came before he begins his own journey home. The foreman suddenly feels very tired.
    I don’t want you to think I’m just a whiny punk complaining about having to work; it’s not really like that. I know lots of guys who love working in the bush, but I know just as many that hate it and want the hell out but they don’t know any other way. My old man was like that; he always told me he never wanted me to have to make a living the way he did, that he’d always wished for something different, but he couldn’t even say what it was, he just knew there was always something just out of his reach. I guess that’s why he drank so fucking much.
     I was off to university right after I graduated—that probably surprises you, foul-mouthed bastard that I am, but if you start quoting from “The Hollow Men” in a logging camp you’re bound to get an ass-kicking. I can be quite fucking eloquent in the correct company. I decided to major in English, not because I could ever get any sort of a job with a literature degree, but because I had always loved stories, poems, plays—a fact I’d had to hide from my friends when I was growing up.
    University was so much better than high school, which featured endless grammar worksheets followed by worksheets on poetry and we all wondered why the hell we had to learn about trochaic metrical pattern and all that shit when most of us were headed straight for the green chain anyway where the only rhythm was two-by-four, two-by-four, two-by-four, coffee-time, two-by-four. . . . Every poem we read in school had to rhyme, and it was made clear that only dead white guys had ever written anything worth reading and Shakespeare was the deadest, whitest guy of them all and he was the only one who’d ever written a play.
    I couldn’t believe it when I hit university and started reading modern stuff: poems that didn’t rhyme by poets whose lives seemed even more screwed up than mine, and books like A Clockwork Orange and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? that were wild and strange and new. I read everything from Beowulf to Bukowski and I loved it all because I found a world in those words I had never known existed.
    Anyway, I was doing all right at SFU until the old man died; I left school right away to look after things and now I feel like I can’t go back until my mom can take care of herself, and she’s getting crazier by the day so I guess I’m stuck and I don’t resent anything except that I wish I didn’t know that there was another world beyond working and spending and getting drunk because I think it’s worse to know it’s there and you can’t have it than to live in oblivion choking and buying and drinking as if no one has ever had a thought that didn’t originate in his guts or balls.
    You know what Dylan Thomas said just before he died? “I’ve had eighteen straight whiskies. . . I believe that’s a new record.” He’d have been a hell of a chokerman.
    The Coroner’s Report reveals that the dead faller’s blood-alcohol level was 0.28% at the time of death. The foreman has already received phone calls from the Workers’ Compensation Board. The foreman lies to the woman on the phone on behalf of the dead faller although he does not believe that the Board will pay the man’s family any time soon, if ever. The foreman knows that the owner will not pay either. That is Company Policy.
    I think I know how my old man felt. Every time you reach out for something beautiful, something greater than yourself, there’s this thing you can’t even name—some dark shadow—obscuring things that should be clear, complicating things that should be so goddamned simple because there’s so much beauty all around you never see because your sight is blocked by dust and cheap plastic stars and shit and your ears are assaulted by cheap country music and mundane babbling.
    I want to stammer something beautiful, but what comes out is meaningless. The Shadow falls and I feel like I’m running in place chasing something I can’t see or name but I know that I need it or I’ll wither and die. And that’s choking too.
    The funeral is held three days later. The foreman wears his only suit. It is made of black wool and feels too tight: the collar digs into the flesh of his neck as he stands rigidly beside the hole that has been dug in the frozen earth of the cemetery. He watches the coffin lowered into the ground. Snow begins to fall.
    The foreman looks across the grave at the dead man’s wife and son and turns away.
    My mom is home when I get there and this is not necessarily a good thing. As I said before, she’s a loony old bat. She has always been a bit on edge—I mean, she named me Virgil, for Christsakes, and not after the poet, either, but after the guy in that song by Robbie Robertson—and I guess my dad’s death just put her over the brink.
    Now, before you think I’m being unfair or disrespectful to her, let me tell you what she does for a living and you can judge for yourself: my mom is an artist. Not so strange, you say, it worked out fairly well for Van Gogh—except for the part where he mailed his ear to his favorite prostitute, drank turpentine, and shot himself, of course—but at least he worked in a medium people wanted to hang on their walls.
    My mother paints on cow skulls. Not only is this not a lucrative occupation, it is right fucking weird.
    She is sitting on the front deck of our trailer—only people who sell these things, or have never lived in one, call them “mobile homes”— painting a skull which is balanced before her on a vertical beam: just picture the Graveyard Scene in a bovine version of Hamlet and you’ll have it: “Alas, poor Betsy; I knew her, Horatio . . . .” Behind her hangs a large wooden sign that reads, Caution: Artisan at Work.
    I remember my dad making that sign for her as a welcome-home present when my mom came back from the hospital after her first “breakdown.”
    She smiles at me as I come up the steps. The sunlight softens the lines on her face and burnishes her hair. Her eyes sparkle, “Come and see,” she says, indicating her work, “I think it’s my best one yet.”
    The skull’s hollow sockets stare out at me from behind a wash of swirling colours; it’s all there: the sleepy village, the jagged cathedral, the luminous stars and rolling hills. Starry Night.
    “It’s wonderful,” I tell her and, for what it’s worth, I mean it.
    I imagine cattle dying in a desert, sacks of bone wrapped in hide rotting under a blazing sun until all that remains is this skull, half-sunk in dust, reflecting back twilight and fading stars and I know my subconscious is filing this one away in that special folder marked Hellish Nightmares for Drunks and I’m consciously scratching that book of Hieronymus Bosch paintings off my mental list of possible birthday presents for her; I wouldn’t sleep for a week if she painted one of those on some poor ex-cow and I know the world isn’t ready for Hieronymus Bossy anyway.
    Still, there is something soothing about the van Gogh painting but I can’t say what. Maybe it’s that the sky is just the right colour, or maybe it’s that the moon has that haze like it did when you were a child looking up through tears at the night sky; there’s something haunting about it, too, I suppose.
    “I think it is your best one.”
    “Thank you,” she says and reaches up to touch my face. Her hand smells like marine paint and old bone. She looks at me for a while, her eyes far away.
    Suddenly she’s back. “Oh, Jim phoned. He wants you to call him.”
    Shit. This is definitely not in keeping with my plan, which is to sit around getting pissed and feeling miserable, but I know damn well Jim is going to keep calling and calling and I should probably try to “Choose Life” like it says on those stupid fucking tee shirts everyone is wearing so I grab the phone and tell him I’ll meet him at the pub after I clean myself up but I can’t be out late ‘cause I have to work tomorrow unlike his unemployed ass and he calls me a pussy and makes cow noises with his smart mouth until I hang up. Christ.
    So I’m at the pub and there’s a decent crowd because it’s two-for-one night. The booze is flowing freely and I’m doing a pretty good impersonation of Old Thumper, interpreting how he might behave if he came across Burt Reynolds and a group of canoe enthusiasts exploring some back-country waterway in the Ozarks and everyone is laughing their asses off and somewhere in my head is that last little vestige of sobriety, that nagging little Urkel voice that’s doing mental math out loud: “Well now, let’s see, Virgil. If you get to bed right now you’ll only get four hours of sleep and that’s not very much, so. . . .” I drown that annoying little bastard with a few shots of rye.
    It’s long after last call before the manager finally kicks us out and I’m out on the street with the crowd and guys are shoving each other and a couple of fights break out and the cops are circling the block like cruising sharks and someone decides we ought to head out to the river and party and I come up with what seems at the time to be a brilliant plan which is to skip sleeping altogether and head straight to work from the party.
    I’m right in the midst of putting Operation Drunken Shithead into action when I see her walking towards me and right away my heart is beating faster and I feel hollow inside because she’s the only one I’ve ever loved and she left me and it was my own damn fault and here she is now walking towards me like a Messenger of Hope and I know I’m going to blow this one before I even open my stupid mouth.
    “Virg,” she says, smiling, “It’s been a long time. What have you been up to?”
    “Still choking.”
    “I’m so sorry about your Dad.” She touches my shoulder and I want to hold her and bury my face in her hair and sob and beg her never to leave me again but I don’t.
    “Is there anything I can do?”
    And those words just hang there in space, weighted down with possibility and I want to cry out, “yes oh yes oh Christ you can save my soul,” but instead I give in to pettiness and pain and say something so crude I can’t even write it down and all she can do is start to cry and turn away and leave me alone again with the drunken laughter of the foolish and the damned.
    Why couldn’t she have come to me in the morning, or alone under starlight, or any other time when I’m so hurt and broken and lonely I would have wept and promised her everything? And I’d have meant it, too.
    I’m at the river and I’m pissed drunk just like everyone else clustered around the fire drinking and yelling and brawling and the firelight casts long, grotesque shadows that ripple along the stones of the beach and entwine themselves in the darkness of the trees and if you could just step out of yourself and take a sober look at this scene you’d wonder what it is that draws people to this river, this fire, this futile pursuit of oblivion, but I’m trapped in this moment now and things unfold as they must.
    A group of Neanderthals in a monstrous pickup truck are the self-appointed DJs for the evening; They have the speakers on the cab and the music cranked to an ear-splitting roar and they are playing Twisted Sister’s Stay Hungry album over and over again and I wonder why these guys would spend so much money on a stereo system only to play such shitty music. My final mistake of the night is sharing my thoughts with them.
    The fourth time I hear, “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” I saunter over and engage the lead Troglodyte in what I hope will be a sophisticated discussion of popular music and I’ve got a pretty good opening worked out in my head but what spews out of my mouth is some drunken babble about how Dee Snider and his band blow goats and then I offer to loan them a couple of good mixed tapes I have so no one has to be assaulted by their crappy music anymore. The Bush-ape declines my offer by punching me in the face.
    I’m lying on my back and I can’t get up although I’m not trying too hard and the stars are shining down on me and I think they’re beautiful and I’m trying to get a good look at them but someone’s fist or boot keeps temporarily obscuring my view and I think about how much this is gonna hurt tomorrow and how I wish I’d kept my big mouth shut and how I’m not putting up much of a fight and wondering whether this guy will actually kill me.
    When I come to I’m in the cab of my truck which is parked in my driveway. Some friends I’ve got. Shit.
    I look at my face in the rearview mirror and I’m glad they didn’t wake my mom, though, ‘cause The Sasquatch sure made a mess of her little boy: my face is covered in dried blood and my right eye is swollen shut. I roll my tongue around my mouth and feel a hole where a tooth used to be. My head is pounding and it hurts when I breathe and I know it will hurt even more when I run which I’m going to have to do today all day long because when I look at my watch I see that it’s four in the morning: time to go to work.
    I stop at a 24-hour gas station and clean up my face as best I can and I know I reek like booze but I don’t know what else to do because anyone can be a chokerman, so if I don’t work someone else will and I need the money.
    The drive to work is sheer hell and I’m afraid I’m going to pass out but I make it in time; it’s still dark and Thumper’s not around when I pull onto the landing. I start greasing the skidder and I guess I must have dozed off because the next sensation I have is of being pulled out from under the machine by my legs.
    “Leave me alone, Thumper. Just run me over with the skidder.”
    But it’s not Thumper dragging my sorry ass over the dirt; it’s the foreman, and I feel my heart sink because Jurgen, apart from being one of the toughest men I’ve ever seen, is entirely devoid of humour. He takes his logging seriously and he doesn’t take shit from anyone.
    Jurgen looks at me for a minute and then he shakes his head. He sits down beside me and leans back against one of the skidder tires. It seems like forever before he finally says anything and I’m just sitting there feeling bad and wanting to die.
    At last he looks at me. “I knew your father,” he says, “did you know that?”
    I nod but don’t dare open my mouth to speak.
    “He was my friend for more than twenty years. I found his body, you know.”
    “I’m really sorry. . .”
    Jurgen’s look shuts me up. He’s not one for making speeches, so if he’s got something to say, it’s best just to listen.
    “Your dad, he drank too much. I knew this.”
    Jurgen shakes his head. “But I never said anything. That was a mistake. I gave you this job because of your dad, because I knew you needed the money. Because the goddamn company owed him something, owed you and your mother something, for all the years they took from him. I think now that was a mistake, too.”
    “No, it was really good of you. Look, I really messed up but I won’t do it again.”
    “Yes, you will. You will because this is not for you and you know it,” he says and I know he’s right.
    “You go home now. Come back tomorrow if you want to. Be sober if you come.”
    Jurgen looks around him at the dusty landing, the log deck, the skidder. “There’s nothing out here worth dying for. Go home.”
    The foreman watches as the taillights of the boy’s truck fade away into the distance. He picks up the radio transmitter. He will phone the boy’s mother, and then he will make a more difficult call he knows he should have made a long time ago.
    My mother is waiting for me when I pull into the driveway and seeing her seeing me makes me feel sick but she throws her arms around me and tells me that Jurgen called and then the owner called and I’m surprised at this.
    “He’s offered us some money. For Dad’s accident; I think Jurgen threatened him or something.”
    She smiles and I see tears sparkle in the corners of her eyes.
    “It’s quite a lot of money,” she adds.

    I’m sitting on the deck and it’s quiet and dark and I don’t know how all of this will turn out but I figure I owe Jurgen more than a thank you. I guess I will go to work tomorrow. Hell, I’ll work all summer and save up some money and in the fall, who knows? Maybe the local college is worth a shot.
    I lean back in my chair and look up at the stars and know I’ll never reach them but at least I’ve got a clear view.

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