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