The Trick; An Alberta Tragedy

For the boys at Sylvan Lake who asked for an autograph 

All Barnett needed was in the old Ford three-quarter ton. There was food in cans and jars, bread, energy bars, energy drinks, bottles of water and a supply of cold bottled coffee. He had paperback mysteries, a change of work clothes and a pup tent. The natural gas wells Ananke Resources hired him to evaluate contained no deadly hydrogen sulphide so there was no need for a flare stack to burn the gas he’d vent during the tests. Also no need of an extra man to help with the labour and act as safety backup. As for company, he preferred to work alone. 

The wells were in snake country. In their own compartment of the tool box were the boots he bought for protection against rattler strikes while working in the East Texas oilfields years before. He was fond of the boots and pleased to have an excuse to wear them. 

Peering into the morning sun, he left his sprawling white brick bungalow overlooking Sylvan Lake, drove to the province’s main thoroughfare and turned south toward Calgary. Despite a lingering hangover, it felt good to be on a job. Good to leave the house that was, despite the months gone by, no less empty without Nicole. 

The highway took him past oilseed and grain fields and ranches where cattle clustered sociably and horses, paired or alone, stood sleeping along fence lines. Here and there a pumpjack worked, an iron slave. Occasionally a drilling rig or the shorter mast of a service rig rose against the distant backdrop of the Rockies. 

He used to enjoy the drive. Now, with normal traffic speed increasing to around a hundred and thirty, it just made him tense. It didn’t help that keeping the old Ford on a straight line required two hands and vigilance. The truck needed more than just a wheel alignment. He would have traded it in years ago if he didn’t have a hard time letting things go. 

There were interchanges on the highway but on its oldest sections the occasional municipal road still crossed it regulated only by stop signs. In the distance a flash of silver on one of those crossroads caught Barnett’s eye. A vehicle was raising a giant squirrel’s tail of gravel dust as it sped toward the highway. 

The air, weightless and cool above the calm lake as he’d sipped a coffee with a kick on the patio at dawn had grown heavy and hot. He wished he’d thought to bring a cushion to fill the swale the years had excavated in the seat beneath him. A tractor trailer unit carrying strands of black drill pipe in a chained triangle hauled past him at one-twenty-five at least. Ahead, the silver car rushed along its road, tail tall and proud. 

Looking again, he realized the car wasn’t slowing. His stomach tightened. Then his teeth clenched and his breath caught. 

A second earlier and the silver car would have collided with tons of drill pipe. As it was, it made it safely across the southbound lanes. It crossed the narrow median and the first lane coming north. A heartbeat before it was free to raise another squirrel tail on the far side of the highway, a semi popped it high into the air. An open door hung from it. A section of chrome held the sun in what seemed a gap in time. 

Barnett didn’t see it land. Stiffening his arms and tightening his grip on the wheel, he let the Ford charge into the dust cloud. The risk was that vehicles ahead or to the side wouldn’t hold their line or maintain their speed, but they did. His hand slid into the sports bag beside him. Keeping the wheel steady with the help of his knees, he pulled out a bottle of rye. 

East of Calgary he stopped for gas then walked across the service station tarmac to a liquor store in the adjacent mall. He limited himself to just another mickey. Two and a half hours later he ate chewy pork chops, canned peas and watery mashed potatoes in a country café on a secondary highway. He was the only customer. The waitress asked if he was working nearby. 

She moved slowly and carefully, like someone accustomed to exhaustion. Barnett judged that her bulging eyes indicated hyperthyroidism. 

“South a bit,” he told her. 

“Seismic?” 

He shook his head. 

She brought him coffee. “Will they be drilling around her again, do you think?” 

He stirred milk into the coffee and told her he didn’t know. 

“We could stand having crews coming in again.” She looked out the window at the empty road and told him in one long sentence that she grew up on a farm, became a farm wife and was a waitress because they lost the farm on account of bills. 

Barnett had checked into the motel next door before coming to eat. The woman who answered the call bell also needed to talk, mentioning that she and her husband owned a farm. It was, she said, prime grain growing country but often the weather made it a tough go. Finally getting the key, he’d gone to his room to shower. As he dried he drank what was left in the first bottle. He was still thirsty now but not for the water in the glass by his plate. 

Saskatoon pie with ice cream topped off his meal. He figured that eating so much proved he was okay. After all, alcoholics didn’t eat. Recently, he’d been eating very little. He missed dinners with Nicole and their conversations. She was a voracious reader. He liked hearing the plots of her books. They were always more complicated than his mysteries. 

As the woman refilled his cup, it struck him that she was a person who had forgotten how to smile and his heart went out to her as someone not much different from himself. When he left the café she was staring through the window as if something among the fields might have changed. 

He sipped rye from the new bottle mixed with cola from the pop machine in the motel lobby and watched the news from Calgary. The semi driver and the driver of the silver car were dead. 

He finished the bottle in the dark. Without alcohol, he was afraid he’d lie awake tortured by the crash, not the one on the highway today but the one that was his never-ending tragedy. As he waited for the potion to put him to sleep, the rye did nothing to quell the longing for Nicole that regularly made him insane. 

After midnight his eyes fluttered open and via his intoxicated imagination came the impossible sliver of a belief that she was waiting by the pop machine. The conviction tugged until he chose to have a look, if only to put the matter out of his mind so he could sleep. Thick-headed, he staggered to the lobby in his pants and socks but no one was there. 

Awake and feeling foolish, he watched a few minutes of something silly with zombies and slept again. Waking at five, he brewed the motel coffee and drank it as the sky above the parking lot lightened. 

The café opened at six. The dinner waitress was now the cook and breakfast waitress. She fixed his steak and eggs, served them and went to the window. He supposed she retained the farmer’s habit of nervously reading the heavens. In a heartbeat the sweetest blue could turn to black thunderheads with hail that flattened crops like an army marching through. 

Pointing the Ford south, Barnett was already looking forward to the chicken sandwiches and pie she’d packed for him. Rarely used roads led him across treeless land undulating to a horizon that never came nearer. 

Having made it through the night, he felt valiant, the way a self-sufficient man might on the pampas or the Steppes or in the Outback, no other humans around. At a weatherworn sign announcing an Ananke Resources well, he left the road for a dirt track and came to an agglomeration of pipes, flanges and high-pressure valves in the company’s fading colours. 

He stopped the truck, got out, yawned and stretched and watched a red-tailed hawk easy riding a thermal. Lowering his head, Barnett’s eyes shot to a pile of rocks just beyond the wellhead and the innocuously coloured green and beige rattler basking on it. It was a juvenile. Still, it was large enough. 

Three shovels were permanent features of the Ford: a spade for digging, a grain shovel for hefting and a curled blade for pushing snow. He considered each as a tool for scooping the snake off the rocks and concluded that with any of them he would simply create a disturbance that would likely send it slithering into the pile. He didn’t want it that close while he worked. 

The long-handled spade would be best for killing it. With luck, he would chop the head off. He didn’t like snakes. On the other hand, it was against his nature to kill if options were available. In the end, he chose to sweep it away with the stiff broom he used to clean the truck box. 

He exchanged his runners for the boots. Inching forward, he hoped the vibrations from his steps wouldn’t drive the creature into the pile and out of sight. Eyes on the tail, he braced for a precision sweep. 

But he was tired after his night of poor sleep and short-tempered from dealing with a steering wheel that had a mind of its own, and his timing and judgement were seriously off. Also, the boots were stiff at the ankles from lack of use and didn’t give as they should have when his body twisted half around and pain exploded in a viciously wrenched knee. Losing his balance, the broom fell from his hands. As his torso met the rocks he felt more than saw the snake fly past his face, rattles whirring. The reptile disappeared into the stiff prairie grass. The human limped to the truck. 

The ankle didn’t bother him much but his knee was on fire. He wrapped it in the tensor bandage from his first aid kit and let it rest. The burning only worsened. He wanted a drink to keep him focused through the pain but the plan had been not to bring liquor into the field. The plan was to prove he could do without. 

Slowly, laboriously, he unwound the well’s sticky twelve-inch wheel valve. The natural gas escaping through an eighth of an inch hole in a round metal plate in Barnett’s instrument, a critical flow prover, made a shriek so commanding it would have deafened him had he not worn adequate ear protection. 

For ten days he would collect data. At home he would compute the numbers and draw lines on apple green graph paper informing Ananke’s staff of each well’s declining capacity to produce gas as pressure in its reservoir declined. His reports would be transmitted electronically. Hard copies, crimped with his professional engineer’s seal, he would courier to their Calgary office. Then he would wait. Ananke was always eager to have the information but notoriously laggard in paying for work done. 

At nightfall at another site while he read his wellhead pressure gauge by flashlight, Barnett sensed that he was being watched. Back in the truck he activated the light bar atop the cab. Disoriented by the intense glare, a coyote faced him. Its wide-open eyes soon closed, breaking the light’s spell, and the animal turned and loped into the darkness. 

As a child, Barnett slept to the yelp of coyotes. In a bedtime story his sister made up for him, the coyotes missed the buffalo that roamed the land their house sat on and the reason they howled was to guide the big animals back from wherever they’d gotten lost. 

Pushing the truck door open, something seemed to push it back. Sweat burst from him. He pushed the door again and it opened normally. He didn’t believe in the supernatural but he couldn’t help thinking Nicole had said hello, playfully as was her nature. 

Finished that well, he set up the pup tent and lay down. He didn’t expect to sleep with the bothersome knee but he did and he dreamed that Nicole was leaning against the pop machine in the motel lobby. Flushed with happiness, he hurried toward her. Though his legs carried him forward and she did not move, the distance between them stayed the same. He woke lethargic and depressed. 

Carrying his equipment to the truck after testing another well, Barnett’s knee finally gave out. He lay on the dry dirt until his heartrate returned to normal then crawled to the truck and climbed in awkwardly. Raising the bad leg onto the seat, he unwound the tensor and rewound it tighter than before. 

He stayed in the cab the rest of that day and through the night. At dawn he ate canned Brazilian beef balled in bread slices. Then he drove to the next site. Hobbling to that well, he felt as exposed to unknown dangers as a water strider in Nicole’s birdbath. But there was no one for miles around. 

Another night he imagined he’d ventured into the wilderness to confront and overcome his weaknesses, like a warrior. Or, he considered, like any ordinary man who needed to fill his emptiness with a scream no one could hear, not even himself with the screech of the high-pressure gas. 

Energy drinks and bebop from an NPR radio relay in Montana helped him function the next day. He called to Nicole as the well roared, “I’m a foul-smelling wretch but I’m dry. Not a drop since I arrived out here.” 

He did want something for the knee, though. As he seldom took more than aspirin for pain, he had not stocked the first aid kit with anything stronger. His map showed a town an hour to the west. From the size of the dot he surmised that the town might be large enough to have a clinic. But with a twinge of paranoia he fantasized that if a doctor ordered him off his feet, he would need to call his contact at Ananke and beg off finishing the tests. He could not afford that. 

Coulees wrinkled the rounded shoulders of the shallow, waterless, uninhabited valley where the next well waited. The tranquility of the valley was heaven-like. He wished he could enjoy it. He set up the instruments, took the first readings then slumped in the truck seat’s swale with a book. Too tired to make sense of the information laden first page, he put the book back in the sports bag, flung the bag backwards into the truck box and nodded off. 

This time when the curtain rose on a dream he found himself behind the wheel of the silver car as it sped toward the highway, and he was panicking. The accelerator was stuck and the brakes had failed. He could hit the ditch to stop the car but at that speed he wouldn’t survive. His one hope was that a gap would open in the corridors of traffic ahead. Nicole spoke to him but gravel striking the undercarriage destroyed her words. He woke in a sweat, drank some water and stumbled to the flow prover trying to disregard the thirst that water did not quench. 

His knee continued to burn. He told himself again and again until it was almost a mantra that a drink would erase the discomfort, lift his mood, even put an end to the disturbing dreams. A sip or two would be enough. Just a neighbourly wave and a little hand up from the genie in the bottle. 

He berated himself for scheming like an addict. The wave would be a one-finger salute, not friendly at all; the hand a fist for a sucker punch. Now he reasoned that no matter what the doctor might advise he could at least get a prescription for analgesics, have it filled and be back without skewing his schedule too badly. 

He sped past the entrance to the next well. Then he braked, backed up and turned onto the lease road. Electing to do one more test before succumbing to the pain’s demands brought a rush of pride in his mettle. 

Number six of thirty-six was a weak old thing, almost dead. Because it didn’t make Ananke much money it was poorly maintained. Barnett nudged open the heavily corroded valve with his four-foot pipe wrench lengthened with a three-foot lead pipe cheater. Then he had to wait for the well to stop slugging water with its slack gas stream before beginning the test. Later, force gingerly applied was required to close the valve. Too much coercion with the beg wrench could snap the handle off while it was still spewing gas. Gaining a few centimeters with each delicate tug, the hiss’s decibels were wrestled into silence. 

The truck’s air conditioning quit working a couple of years ago. As Barnett drove toward the town with the windows open, the desiccated air sucked the water from his body. But when a stretch of washboard caught the truck, sending it tracking violently sideways, he had enough moisture left for a tsunami of sweat. The truck lurched, his head hit the roof and his healthy knee banged the underside of the dash. His forearm muscles were braided wire as he choked the wheel trying to regain control of the stubbornly shuddering mass of metal. Tools bouncing in the box made a hellacious racket. The right rear wheel left the road, tore through a patch of brown-eyed Susans and threatened to tip the Ford onto its side. 

It emerged from the washboard with a drastic over-steer. Barnett got it on a straight line again before the road funneled onto a short wooden bridge across the top of a narrow gully. The bride had no railings. Crossing it there was another fight to keep the vehicle on a straight line. More washboard lay in ambush the other side of the bridge. He rode it out. Several miles later the road merged with a paved two-lane highway. 

At the town’s outskirts Barnett pulled into a service station. The attendant gave him directions to the doctor’s office. Almost as a hobby, Barnett memorized the location of liquor stores in places he thought he might return to one day so he also asked about the nearest one. 

It was only a block away. The red-roofed structure had bars on the door and window. Bordering the parking area a cluster of cottonwoods rose from a hollow that he supposed held rainwater if it ever rained enough. He hadn’t seen a tree in days. Their shade was irresistible. He parked in it and closed his eyes to let them rest. But they wouldn’t stay closed. And somehow, each time they opened, he found himself staring at the liquor ads in the barred window. It wasn’t long before he climbed out of the truck and went in. 

The store was as familiar as a clubhouse. He picked a twenty-six of rye off the metal shelves then glanced at the vodkas. Vodka was Nicole’s drink. She’d had a v and t while they watched sail boats skim the lake and she made a list of things to buy at a mall in Red Deer that fateful day. Before getting into the Buick she read the list aloud to see if he had anything to add. He remembered every item. 

The young clerk shied away from him, shuffling back a step as he reached to give her the money for the rye. It was as if she knew all about him, he thought, and liked none of it down to the knot in his gut that he imagined was warning him away from the purchase. She was tight-lipped when he handed her a bill then thanked her for the change. 

In the shaded truck he broke the seal on the bottle, unscrewed the cap, tipped it to his lips and with an enormous sigh enjoyed the familiar burn surging toward his heart. 

He sat in the shade thinking about nothing until an impulse totally devoid of reason sent him back into the store. This time he paid no attention to the clerk, simply dropping a bill on the counter and silently pocketing the change. The vodka was not for drinking. He didn’t know why he bought it. Sentimentality, he supposed. 

He shook his head and smiled. He was becoming unhinged. Nicole would have mocked him. She could make fun of him in a way he found enchanting. Was that why he loved her so much?  

He gathered up his garbage and took it to a barrel at the corner of the building. He supposed he should have found a café for a hot meal while he was in the town but he wasn’t hungry. Besides he still had the chicken sandwiches and pie. Sweeping fly husks from the dash, he recalled the June bugs in Texas thick as blizzard snow in service station lights and the brains on toast on café menus. 

The truck tidy, he shoved the two bottles along the seat so they were out of reach then turned the Ford around. His angry knee had cooled considerably. He was sure it had. If it became intolerable again he knew where the doctor was. 

As he sped along the pavement he thought of Nicole again. This time, in an attempt at clear thinking, he decided she wouldn’t have made fun of him. She wouild be concerned. And sad because she had made him sad. 

“Nicole, I miss you.” 

On the gravel, the first rough spot bounced the rye back to him. Then the vodka came, unwilling to be left behind, he imagined. He set the whiskey between his thighs and worked off the cap. Keeping the Ford steady with one firm hand, he took a healthy hit to intercept a bubble of melancholy that threatened to escape as a sob. Ahead a hawk glided, head down, master of its universe, ready to drop like a stone and kill. 

Barnett capped the rye and pushed it away. Further along the little road, which he was finding pleasant, he reached for the vodka. For a few seconds he held the bottle to one eye in a shambolic salute to Nicole and her way of seeing the world clearly, logically and with precision focus. He’d long known that her brain was more fit for science than his. 

He jammed the bottle into his crotch, straightened his back and drove with a purpose that was vague at first but became clearer as his emotions relinquished their control of him.                     

In the flash of an epiphany he recalled that in researching the stages of mourning he learned that the mind could play a truly evil trick. Akrasia, the trick was called and the mind played it on itself. What it did was make a person unable not to do something though it was against their better judgement and their will. Socrates saw how it worked and gave it its name. The kid with no criminal propensities before or after shoplifting a chocolate bar could be its victim. It was the devil in the devil made me do it. 

Barnett now reasoned that akrasia duped him into stopping at the liquor store. The cottonwoods’ shade was a convenient come-on and trap. Akrasia opened his eyes on the booze ads. It took him through the door. As the truck bounced him out of the swale it sent him the rye. He received the bottle almost without registering it and scarcely noted the burn in his throat. 

He visualized the washboard ahead, the narrow bridge without railings, and confronted himself with a question so crucial the answer would mean everything, the whole shebang. It felt as if he’d been expecting it since the day Nicole died. The question was, which would prevail, his will to remain in the world or his desire to be free of an existence that no longer contained her? 

“I love you, Nicole.” 

His foot pressed the accelerator to the floor. The motor hesitated and threatened to stall but it caught and the Ford cut loose like a seasoned old horse craving a challenge. 

• The Trick originally appeared in my book, Tracie’s Revenge, Guernica Editions, now out of print but available in libraries.