Or, perhaps, it was the job. Stan had once
described the job as sweet. He had no recollection
of this now, and if he had expressed thoughts such
as this to anyone, he had no recollection of such
expression. I mean, there's no such thing as a sweet
forestry job. There are jobs where you can make a
lot of money in a relatively short time, but those
jobs require a level of manual neighbor that most
people in Western society have not experienced. Not
Stan, anyway. All he knew, was that he would
spend 10-12 hours a day with a bunch of hick
assholes with shit for brains, slogging through the
bush and rain, bitterly cold no matter what kind of
clothes he put on and brutally tired most of the
time.
All to make an amount of money ‘that was about one
tenth what a pot dealer could make on a slow
week. Not that with Stan's home-life, the job was
made easier.

To begin with, every morning just as the
sun was about to rise, Eustace would come into the
living room where Stan slept on the couch, and
would just stand. He would watch as the boy
became subconsciously aware of a foreign presence,
and then as he would -again slip into a deep sleep.
Now was the time to strike.

With his skewed vision of parental
responsibility, Eustace saw it as his duty to get the
"prissy little city-boy” used to the country life, or
his own loose interpretation thereof. Uncle E had
always felt that the best way to wake up was
fighting, and the best way to wake someone up was
to attack. There were a variety of methods. The
dogs trained to bark on command. Heat. Cold.
Eustace had a recording of a New York big band
doing Hank Williams’ greatest hits (a rare eclectic
mix that Eustace had written away for, the members
of the group were pleasantly surprised to send such
a devoted fan a copy...), which at high volumes was
a brutally effective weapon.

Stan was a man divided, or maybe cut in
half. He was desperate. As he saw it, his continued
stability required him to stay with the job and
Eustace. But this thinking was coming from an
unstable sleep deprived brain. If he could have a
day to get some perspective...But then, by this time
he would have needed a couple days. He wasn't
getting them, anyway, and as far as he could see he
was stuck. Part of it was a leaden obstinancy: he
just wouldn't give up, especially when he'd spent so
long telling himself that he couldn't. His eyes
bleary, filled with sand, he would sit at the greasy
kitchen table with his hands shaking ever so
slightly, nursing the sludgy coffee that Eustace
would place in front of him ( it was black, Eustace
didn't believe in dairy, he'd never been breast-fed,
he'd never had milk ( it made him sick ), he'd
turned out just fine). One part of Stan would calmly
chastise, "Oh settle down, we had to be up
anyway..." while another part would state, " He
dies.”

Not a pretty situation.

As soon as Eustace knew that Stan wasn't
going back to sleep, he would cease in his kitchen
aria of banging pots, rummaging through dishes,
sorting this or that, shouted encouragement to "rise
and shine”. He would then wander off and putter
about his rag-tag demenses, his progress punctuated
by a crash or a long string of curses. Stan would
sit at what passed for the kitchen table staring at a
particular grease stain, listening to where his uncle
was. He would brood in that way you can brood
early in the morning. The brain is not quite up to
speed, so it could take an idea and listlessly toy
with it for a couple hours. Added into this brew of
thought was Stan's stomach, upset from a premature
and harsh awakening, the coursing of adrenalin
associated with such awakenings, the acidic taste of
the coffee. Stan woke up fighting and then took the
morning to convince himself not to fight. Thus, he
would go to work.

The van was green. It would rattle and
shake it's way through Quesnel, collecting the red-
eyed and grouchy. There were eight in all,
including Stan, and they were an ornery group.
There would be a screech and a shudder and the
smell of gravel dust. It was a premonition of Stan's
that never failed him. Soon after, the honk that set
the day in motion would follow, and methodically
Stan would go to work.

The green van, the dented van, smelling
of, well, all sorts of things. And me at the wheel.
He was just an address to me, Stan was, just
another new guy to pick up on that first day. A
skinay sort of guy compared to Gus or Marcel, but
his eyes...they were steely or something. He was
the new gut so he got to sit in the front seat. As a
rule, he would always turn down the music. At
first, people yelled, but Stan would just hunch
down, and the guys didn't know how to take it, so
they ended up leaving him alone. No one really
wanted trouble that early, anyways.

Well, I'm still not sure how it happened,
but Stan never left the front seat. He was the last
to be picked up and just always sat there. It
seemed right. One time, Gus sat in Stan's seat and
it felt wrong. Everyone looked at him and we all
knew it was wrong. Roger climbed in after kissing
his wife goodbye and he paused at the door.

"That's Stan's seat,” he said, “and he'll be
pissed off."

That was all that was. said.

Gus snorted, but the big man was unsure
and a nervous energy came off him in waves. The
tension built all the way to Stan's house and
conversation quieted to nothing. Stan was almost
ethereal in the morning light, wearing his black
jeans, hair a nest. He paced evenly out to the van
not looking up until he'd opened the door. He
looked out of hollow sockets and pale visage, cool
and solid as iron. Gus was sitting stiff, staring

straight ahead, with his nostrils flared and his eyes
bulging. :

"Get out of my seat, Gus.”

Everything was silence bui you could hear
the dogs rattling the cage in the distant
background, the sound of a long and fluid stream of
violent cursing. Stan's eyes did not move.

Things were building to a fever pitch when
Gus moved, not looking back saying, "O.K. Stan, I
was just...uh, that is, I was...um, keeping it
warm..." Was Gus scrambling?

"Hey whatever,” Stan was quietly
magnanimous. &

We were all a little amazed, and no one
more than Gus, who seemed quiet and small. I
mean, Gus was not a small man, he was a large
man, a force of nature. I had seen him lift a log
from off of a trapped man like it was nothing. |
guess Stan was a force of nature, too, and a bit of
a bigger one to boot. He just got in, closed the
door, and turned down the music.

It was on that day that I first spoke to
Stan.

Anyone could see that Stan was a troubled
person. He was hard and wound and he had this
vibe. It was fairly difficult talking to him at first,
because you would say something to him, there
would be a pause, and then he would narrow his
eyes and reply. Usually he would reply with a
single word and usually the reply would be a
negative. Picking gingerly through the marshy
swamps of these first conversations was a difficult
progress, and to this day I'm not sure how or why
I perservered, but I did. I guess I've always had a
strange fascination with violence, too.

It started slow, my god, it started slow. It
was like the thaw of a glacier, except it wasn't a
glacier, it was a volcano, or an office building made
all of glass that explodes. It happened, though, Stan
began to talk to me. To...confide.

He never went in to his past in any detail,
you could tell by the way he referred to things that
they were hazy because they were. Stan himself was
unsure of the details, and that was the way he
wanted to keep it. Stan surely did have a grip on
the present, though.

When I was a kid I used to be scared to death of
pressure cookers, because my mom used to describe
these horrible accidents, probably more urban myth
than reality. I was young and didn't know better
and when I would touch one I could just feel the
pressure. That was always the way I felt about
Stan. I could sense whatever was mounting inside of
him, and it scared me.

Well, I guess Stan's stories scared me at
first. Then, hearing them every day for as long as I
talked to Stan, I became bored. God, I only knew
the guy a few weeks but it felt like years: I heard
it all, and I thought I had been there. Stan sure

had a way with words. He would describe
situations and instances, petty hatreds and small
vendettas. It sounded like Stan and that old man
were cooped up in that ratty little house just trying
to break each other, but the old guy had been doing
it for longer, and he was winning. Also, he was
more focused than Stan, who at first had wanted
things to work. At any rate, Stan was a pit of
‘rattlers who were pissed off about being in a pit.
All they had to do to not be pissed off would be to
get out of the pit...But dammit, they were just too
pissed off. Besides they had to be in that pit. There
was nowhere else to go.

" My memory is muddy,
What's this river that I'm in,
New Orleans is sinkin’,

And I don't want to swim."

--Gordon Downie

"Fine," was all he said.

I guess I could say that I didn't know
what I was getting into. I mean, I'm sure that no
one holds me responsible, but I. knew. Somewhere, I
could tell that all this was an accident waiting to
happen, but I was desensitized.

"NO. YOU don't understand. YOU don't -
live with him. YOU can’t understand. I don't expect
you to. You make me sick. Live in your insulated
little world. Man, I'm telling you, he takes the
rabbits, and he puts them on the fishing line, and
he LOWERS THEM INTO THE FUCKING CAGE. HE
TEASES THEM, AND THEY'RE PRACTICALLY EATING
EACH OTHER...AND THAT DOESN'T EVEN GET
INTO..."

"Stan, shut up.”

"...ALL THE CLEANING, AND THE
AGREEMENTS, THAT HE CONSTANTLY..."

"STAN. I DON'T WANT TO HEAR IT."

"\..I'M JUST NOT GOING TO...huh?"

"I said shut up, Stan, I'm sick of your
shit. Kill the old bastard, I don't care, just don't
tell me about it anymore."

I wasn't looking at him when I said it, I
was just staring at my sandwich. I'd spent so much
time with Stan, that I sort of forgot about the Gus
incident. I looked to Stan with my mouth open to
say more, though, and I remembered that look of
death boiled over. I was looking at it.

"Fine."

They had been drinking, that’s the way I
heard it, Stan and Eustace. Marge at the liquor
store said she remembered Stan buying the gin. The
neighbors heard them fighting, not an unusual thing,
and then there'd been a crash and another crash.
They'd found Eustace totally mangled and barely
alive just outside the cage. You could see the story
written in the still fresh mud, and it was bloody.
Stan was trying to free the dogs, maybe onto
himself, and Eustace, first in rage then in fear, had
been struggling to stop him. The dogs had run out
in a mad pack, a shadow in the night, a blackness
in the black. They had passed right by Stan and
gone straight for Eustace.

Stan had stolen the car and roared off in
the rain. The dogs are still spotted sometimes,
roaming the hills, and the population of small to
mid-sized rodents has fallen drastically. No one
knows where Stan is and Eustace didn't want to
press charges, he said the car was a gift. He just
gardens a lot, now.

Somewhere on a highway, the rain has
stopped, and the stars have come out. Stan drives
fast, and the wind is in his hair, and he's very,
very loose.

Or, perhaps, it was the job. Stan had once
described the job as sweet. He had no recollection
of this now, and if he had expressed thoughts such
as this to anyone, he had no recollection of such
‘expression. 1 mean, there's no such thing as a sweet
forestry job. There are jobs where you can make a
Jot of money in a relatively short time, but those
jobs require a level of manual neighbor that most
people in Western society have not experienced. Not
Stan, anyway. Al he knew, was that he would
spend 10-12 hours a day with a bunch of hick
assholes with shit for brains, slogging throush the
bush and rain, bitterly cold no matter what kind of
clothes he put on and brutally tired most of the
time.

All to make an amount of money that was about one
tenth what a pot dealer could make on a slow

week. Not that with Stan's home-Iife, the job was
made easier.

To begin with, every morning just as the
sun was about to rise, Eustace would come into the
living room where Stan slept on the couch, and
‘would just stand. He would watch as the boy
became subconsciously aware of a foreign presence,
‘and then as he would again slip into a deep sep.
[Now was the time to strike

With his skewed vision of parental
responsibility, Eustace saw it as his duty to get the
“prissy litte city-boy” used w the country life, or
his own loose interpretation thereof. Uncle E had
always felt that the best way to wake up was
fighting, and the best way to wake someone up was
to attack, There were a variety of methods. The
‘dogs (rained to bark on command. Heat. Cold
Eustace had a recording of a New York big band
doing. Hank Williams’ greatest hits (a rare eclectic
‘mix that Eustace had written away for, the members
of the group were pleasantly surprised to send such
4 devoted fan a copy...), which at high volumes was
a brutally effective weapon

Stan was a man divided, or maybe cut in
half. He was desperate. As he saw it, his continued
stability required him wo stay with the job and
Eustace. But this thinking was coming from an
unstable sleep deprived brain, If he could have a
day to get some perspective...But then, by this time
he would have needed @ couple days. He wasn't
getting them, anyway, and as far as he could see he
was stuck. Part of it was a leaden obstinancy: he
just wouldn't give up, especially when he'd spent so
Jong telling himself that he couldn’. His eyes
bleary, filled with sand, he would sit at the greasy
kitchen table with his hands shaking ever so
slightly, nursing the sludgy coffee that Eustace
‘would place in front of him ( it was black, Eustace
didn't believe in dairy, he'd never been breast-fed,
hed never had milk ( it made him sick ), hed
turned out just fine). One part of Stan would calmly
chastise, “Oh settle down, we had to be up
anyway...” while another part would state,” He
dies”

Not a pretty situation

[As soon as Eustace knew that Stan wasn't
going back 10 sleep, he would cease in his kitchen
aria of banging pots, rummaging through dishes,
sorting this or that, shouted encouragement to “rise
‘and shine”, He would then wander off and putter
about his rag-tag demenses, his progress punctuated
by a crash or a long string of curses. Stan would
sit at what passed for the kitchen table staring at a
particular grease stain, listening to where his uncle
‘was, He would brood in that way you can brood
early in the morning. The brain is not quite up to
speed, so it could take an idea and listlessly toy
with it for a couple hours. Added into this brew of
thought was Stan's stomach, upset from a premature
‘and harsh awakening, the coursing of adrenalin
associated with such awakenings, the acidic taste of
the coffee. Stan woke up fighting and then took the
morning 10 convince himself not to fight. Thus, he
would go to work,

The van was green. It would rattle and
shake i's way through Quesnel, collecting the red-
‘eyed and grouchy. There were eight in all,
including Stan, and they were an ornery group.
There would be a screech and a shudder and the
smell of gravel dust. It was a premonition of Stan's
‘that never failed him. Soon after, the honk that set
the day in motion would follow, and methodically
Stan would go to work

The green van, the dented van, smeiing
of, well, all sorts of things. And me at the wheel
He was just an address to me, Stan was, just

~ another new guy to pick up on that first day. A

skinny sort of guy compared to Gus or Marcel, but
his eyes..they were stely oF something He was
the new gut so he got to sit in the front seat. As a
rule, he would always turn down the music. At
first, people yelled, but Stan would just hunch
down, and the guys didn’t know how 10 take it, 0
they ended up leaving him alone. No one really
wanted trouble that early, anyways
Well, Hm still not sure how it happened,
but Stan never left the front seat. He was the last
to be picked up and just always. sat there. It
seemed right. One time, Gus sat in Stan's seat and
it felt wrong Everyone looked at him and we all
knew it was. wrong. Roger climbed in after kissing
his wife goodbye and he paused at the door
“That's Stan's seat,” he said, “and he'll be
pissed off."
That was all that was said
‘Gus snorted. but the big man was unsure
and a nervous energy came off him in waves. The
tension built all the way to Stan's house and
conversation quieted 1 nothing. Stan was almost
ethereal in the morning light, wearing his black
jeans, hair a nest. He paced evenly out to the van
rot looking up until held opened the door. He
looked out of hollow sockets and pale visage, coo!
and solid a6 iron. Gus was sitting stiff, staring
straight ahead, with his nosteils flared and his eyes
bulging
“Get out of my seat, Gus.”
Everything was silence but you could hear
the dogs rattling the cage in the distant
background, the sound of a long and fluid stream of
violent cursing. Stan's eyes did not move
‘Things were building wo a fever pitch when
‘Gus moved, not looking back saying, “O.K. Stan, 1
was just.uh, that i, 1 was.um, Keeping it
warm...” Was Gus scrambling?
“Hey whatever.” Stan was quietly
magnanimous.
We were all a little amazed, and no one
more than Gus, who seemed quiet and small. 1
mean, Gus was not @ small man, he was a large
rman, a force of nature. 1 had seen him lift a log
from off of trapped man like it was nothing. 1
guess Stan was a force of nature, to, and a bit of
fa bigger one to boot. He just got in, closed the
oor, and turned down the music
t was on that day that I first_ spake to

Stan

‘Anyone could see that Stan was a troubled
person. He was hard and wound and he had this
vibe. It was fairly difficult talking to him at first,
because you would say something to him, there
would be @ pause, and then he would narrow his
eyes and reply. Usually he would reply with a
single word and usually the reply would be a
negative. Picking gingerly through the marshy
swamps of these first conversations was a difficult
progress, and to this day I'm not sure how or why
T perservered, but 1 did. 1 guess Ive always had a
strange fascination with violence, too

11 started, slow, my god, it started slow. It
‘was like the thaw of a glacier, except it wasn't a
slacier, it was a voleano, or an office building made
all of glass that explodes. It happened, though, Stan
began to talk to me. To...confide

He never went in to his past in any detail,
‘you could tell by the way he referred to things that
they were hazy because they were Stan himself was
unsure of the details, and that was the way he
wanted to keep it. Stan surely did have a grip on
the present, though.
When I was a kid I used to be scared to death of
pressure cookers, because my mom used to describe
these horrible accidents, probably more urban myth
than reality. I was young and didn’t know better
‘and when I would touch one I could just feel the
pressure. That was always the way I felt about
Stan. I could sense whatever was mounting inside of
and it scared me

Well, I guess Stan's stories scared me at

first. Then, hearing them every day for as long as I
talked to Stan, I became bored. God, I only knew
the guy a few weeks but it felt like years: I heard
it all, and 1 thought 1 had been there. Stan sure

hhad a way with words. He would describe
situations. and instances, petty hatreds arid small
vendettas. It sounded like Stan and that old man
‘were cooped up in that ratty Title house just trying
to break each other, but the old guy had been doing
it for longer, and he was winning. Also, he sas
more focused than Stan, who at first had wanted
things to work. At any rate, Stan was a pit of
rattlers who were pissed off about being in a pit.
All they had to do to not be pissed off would be to
set out of the pit..But dammit, they were just too
pissed off. Besides they had to be in that pit. There
was nowhere else to go.

* My memory is muddy,
What's this river that I'm
New Orleans is sinki

‘And T don't want to swim."

Gordon Downie

“Fine,” was all he said

1 guess I could say that 1 didn't know
what { was getting into. 1 mean, T'm sure that no
fone holds me responsible, but I knew. Somewhere, 1
ould tell that all this was an accident waiting t
happen, but 1 was desensitized

"NO. YOU don't understand. YOU don't
live with him. YOU can't understand. 1 don't expect
you to. You make me sick. Live in your insulated
Tittle world. Man, 'm telling you, he takes the
rabbits, and he puts them on the fishing line, and
hhe LOWERS THEM INTO THE FUCKING CAGE, HE
TTEASES THEM, AND THEY'RE PRACTICALLY EATING
EACH OTHER...AND THAT DOESN'T EVEN GET
INTO...”

“Stan, shut_up.”

"ALL THE CLEANING, AND THE
AGREEMENTS, THAT HE CONSTANTLY...”

"STAN. | DONT WANT TO HEAR IT.”

"I'M JUST NOT GOING TO...hubh?™

“L said shut up, Stan, T'm sick of your
shit. Kill the old bastard, T don’t care, just don't
tell me about it anymore.”

T wasn't looking at him when I said it, 1
‘was just staring at my sandwich. Td spent so much
time with Stan, that 1 sort of forgot about the Gus
incident. 1 looked to Stan with my mouth open to
say more, though, and I remembered that look of
death boiled over. 1 was looking at it

eae

They had been drinking, that’s the way T
hheard it, Stan and Eustace. Marge at the liquor
store said she remembered Stan buying the gin. The
righbors heard them fighting, not an unusual thing,
‘and then there'd been a erash and another crash
They'd found Eustace totally mangled and barely
alive just outside the cage. You could see the story
rn in the still fresh mud, and it was bloody.
‘Stan was trying to free the dogs, maybe onto
himself, and Eustace, first in rage then in fear, had
bbeen struggling to stop him. The dogs had run out
jn a mad pack, a shadow in the night, a blackness
in the black. They had passed right by Stan and
‘gone straight for Eustace,

‘Stan had stolen the car and roared off in
the rain. The dogs are still spotted sometimes,
roaming the hills, and the population of small to
rmid-sized rodents has fallen drastically. No one
knows where Stan is and Eustace didn't want to
press charges, he said the car was a gift. He just
gardens a lot, now.

Somewhere on a highway, the rain has
stopped, and the stars have come out. Stan drives
fast, and the wind is in his hair, and he's very,
very loose