By Lucy

It’s cold Tuesday morning. Too cold. Waaaay too cold. We can see our breath in the lunchroom. If my fingers start changing colour, I’m going home. The other trades all get heated trailers to camp out in. It’s just the scaffolder who are trash.

We’re still slow for some reason. Leif sends us out to the yard to “clean”. The wind howls between the buildings and peels the skin off our faces. I run out of extra layers to put on and Duff offers me his sweater, but I decline. He’s running himself so ragged I have to repeat myself in the lunchroom and his eyes are still glazed over.

Finally we get a job. Bottom floor of the digester, joy of joys. I don’t know what I smell like when I come home anymore. I’m resigned to it.

There’s a hose lying next to us at this job. Twice it comes to life for no apparent reason, dousing me and Dennis. Unfortunately, what you don’t want when you are balanced 10 feet up on a tube 2 inches wide in a room so cold you can see you breath is to be drenched in ice-cold water.

I do enjoy working with Dennis more than Duff and I feel guilty about it. Duff is too wound up this time. I was trying to perfectly level the build and Dennis said, “If you stare at that too long you’ll go blind.” And that’s when I realized Duff was the cause of my anxiety. Maybe a break is a good thing. Dennis mostly lets me do my own thing unless what I’ve done is hilariously wrong, and then he’ll correct me.

The work areas are getting congested. Pipes here, hoses there, welders’ torches everywhere. This and that area flagged off.

People get in each other’s way. A welder took umbrage with where the Vagabond’s team was working and yelled at them and Leif had to be called over to sort it out.

I’ve noticed a lot of Dewalt hammers around. Hammers go through styles, for some reason. Last year I was the only person with the yellow handle, but now about half of the guys have them. You can usually tell a bit about someone by their hammer. A lot of the baby boomers have Estwings, with blue handles. I’ve also noticed a lot of guys have Helly’s, like my new boots, but then boots wear out faster than hammers.

Speaking of my new boots, they hurt! They pinch the back of my ankles, for some reason.

“I always know it’s lunch cuz I can hear you stabbing your meal.” Duff says, sliding in to the lunch table.

“Hah hah.”

“It’s true, I bet they can hear it all the way down in Bleach.”

“I like to make my presence known.” I say dismissively. There is no quiet way to open these things.

I took too long to go grab my food from the microwave. Mr Dangerous Newf is waiting impatiently by the microwave as it beeps. I resist the urge to jump up and run over. “Oh, of course it was you who is taking so long.” He snarls.

“Oh, I’m sorry, did I inconvenience you?” I say sweetly. “I lost track of time.”

I open the microwave and grab my food. He steps as if to block my path, but then his eyes slide behind me. I know who he’s looking at.

I walk off, leaving the microwave door open for him.

“I’m on to you!” He calls after me.

Please don’t be.

Towards the end of lunch, the Vagabond and Mr Dangerous start fighting. The note of real anger in their low voices makes anxiety curl in the pit of my stomach. Mr Dangerous raises his voice; the Vagabond’s stays low but terrifying.

“Do you want a punch in the mouth!” The Vagabond finally exclaims, still low but clear enough for everyone to hear.

Dennis makes us leave the lunch room right after.

I started getting nervous when I didn’t get the email for my Factor meals. I confirmed it after work; they hadn’t been delivered. Yay! I’ve also lost my order of jerky, missing in the mail. I went to Nofrills and grabbed some zucchini and a spaghetti squash, and some cranberry juice.

Then I went to the liquor store and grabbed a mickey of vodka. The kid in the line in front of me was counting out nickels for his single can of alcohol and it was depressing enough that I almost put my bottle back. As he ran out of the store, I went up to the cash. The usual guy was serving me and smiled.

“That’s depressing.” I commented.

“I’ve seen worse.” He says.

I bet you have.

Threw the squash in the oven with the roast I had grabbed the other day. I’ve got dinner for a few days. I called Factor and they assured me my food would be in the next day.

I had some plan to just have a couple of shots, but as the night went on I found myself thinning out the glass of cranberry juice with more and more vodka. Why can’t my stuff get delivered on time and on location? I’ve slipped more on my resolve and agreed to go to dinner with Eli, who is coming back tomorrow. He’s in the hospital for his toe.

I felt wretched Wednesday morning.

Did I drink too much? Probably. Drinking too much knocks you out of keto, but maybe I was just regular hung-over. Or exhausted.

Into the car, away to work.

I’d really love a day off. I wasn’t even working as hard as we usually do, but this was the most days in a row of a certain intensity. I could feel my body struggling to put on muscle, but I kept kicking the ground out from under it. My biceps are bulging more and more each day, nonetheless. I’d gone upstairs and tried Kathy’s scale and I’ve lost 5 pounds somewhere, but then most days I am hitting 3’000 calories burned and I am not eating that much. The highest calorie count of a Factor meal is 650, and a Soylent is only 400, which leaves me shy of 2000 calories as it is, not to mention how much I may or may not be absorbing.

I still feel pretty good and capable. This is the best year for me so far; walking on the ledgers and climbing up the standards feels easy.

We finished up the job at the bottom of the bleach plant and were given yet another job in turbogen. It was a lifting beam for one of the steam headers, which is annoying because it’s at an awkward angle. It’s hard to find space to put the jacks, or to move gear into the space.

I guess Duff started annoying people – or rather, their annoyance maxed out – and they gave him a build to do in recaust and sent the new girl with him. He comments that no one’s even taught her hand signals, but that’s pretty standard. No one cares if you sink or swim in this industry. As the two of them wander off, I wonder if I’ve been replaced. I also wonder at which point Duff is going to get a reputation, as this is the fourth or fifth young female apprentice he’s had. Not that those aspersions mean anything; Duff has never tried anything with me or Adrienne.

Mr Dangerous Newf is not here today and neither is his buddy. I wonder if he did get in a fist fight with the Vagabond after work, or if he chickened out.

Or just split in general. Some of the guys have left. Work’s slowing down, the boiler and the digester are almost done, soon there will be layoffs.

“I don’t know why but I keep feeling like there’s bugs crawling under my skin. Hey, do you think this bread is moldy?” Duff asks me at lunch.

“Yes, you should throw it out.” I say, glancing at it.

“Nah, I’ll just cut the moldy part off.”

“Duff, do they not pay you enough to buy a new loaf of bread? That’s rye, you’re giving yourself ergot poisoning.”

“What’s that?”

“Look it up, I’m not arguing with you.”

Dennis doesn’t even pretend to pay attention to where we are and where we are going and just relies on me to lead him around. I found a laydown tucked behind RB3 and we started pilfering it for spare parts so we didn’t have to go back to the yard for a bunch of gear.

Shortly before last break, as we were taking stock of what we needed (no point in making a separate trip to grab gear when it’s all in the lunchroom anyway) the shriek of a fire alarm split the air. The welder next to us lost his mind and freaked out, which was funny cuz us three scaffolders just looked at each other and shrugged. We couldn’t smell smoke… it’s not in here.

As I waited for the world’s slowest crane to lower the cart to ground floor, I texted Dylan. He replied that supposedly there was a fire in the digester. Kathy also texted me, asking why there were fire trucks flying across town (she works near the mill). As we stopped at the smoke pit for Dennis’ pre-break smoke, the guys there said they heard it was a smoker in the digester.

Happens every year. Someone is jonesing for a smoke, lights up in a vessel, sets off the alarms.

(It later turned out that someone was welding and something caught fire)

Mark was around, which was nice. Not the annoying Mark from before. This Mark is an insulator who can also do scaffolding work if they’re really low on guys. 2 years ago he was with us and drove Adrienne to and from work, and she stayed at his place in Thunder Bay for the shutdown there. He’s a genial guy and usually makes a trip out of his way to say hi to me in the lunchroom even though he hasn’t been back as a scaffolder since.

I also asked Dylan if I could come over and use his sauna again. My legs were so rubbery it felt like I was dragging a ball and chain behind me. You get so tired you start fantasizing about getting hurt so you can take some time off.

He was moving a buddy until late, but I was determined anyway. We didn’t get into the sauna until 8. His buddy was still there and hopped into the sauna with us. Dylan was cranky – understandably – and it was funny to see him being dismissed by someone who’s known him for a long time. He is a bit pretentious and know-it-all. He was talking about stepping up his nitrous use and at that point it is an addiction, even if it isn’t physically addicting. He uses it too much.

On Thursday, they took Robbie away from us – they needed a labourer elsewhere – and me and Dennis worked on our own for the first quarter. After first break, they put Eli and Reese with us.

Reese is a nice kid. He’s, like, 23 or 24, but he’s got the hometown hero vibe to him. A moptop of brown hair and an easy smile. He’s a good worker and no one has anything bad to say about him. He also went to school with Jeremy and his brother.

Eli was extremely annoying all day. He takes over every build and does it his way, but then he also disappears for large chunks of the day “for a smoke” and we’re left to try and figure out what he was doing.

Duff asks me to grab a bottle of whisky for him because the liquor store closes before his shift ends. He’s gotta stay ’til after 6. He gives me cash to pay, but I would have fronted it for him either way.

As I leave for the day, Steve is getting ready to go in, in the parking lot. I go over to his car.

“Hey, so the rumor mill is going about me.” He says.

Tell me about it. Last year was wretched for people spreading rumors about me and the Vagabond. They’ve been silent about that this year, thank goodness, but I’m willing to bet there are new rumors about me and Duff.

“Someone broke into my hotel room last night, but I set them straight.”

Umm, that’s not a rumor, Steve, that sounds like a 911 call. But whatever. We chat a bit more. As I’m about to leave, he says, “Hey Lucy, can I ask you something?” When I indicate he can continue, he adds, “Do you have a boyfriend?”

Hah! Not even a little bit interested, Steve. “No, why?” I ask cynically.

“Just wondering if I could call you to chat in the evening sometime.”

“Sure. Even if I had a boyfriend, that wouldn’t stop me.” This is how I get all the really good gossip.

“Love it.” He gives me a fist bump. “Have a great night!”

I go to the liquor store to grab Duff’s whisky first. Then to QSL. No packages for me! I go to Shoppers next. My package isn’t there, but it might be at the other office that closes at 5. Kathy is going to check for me Tomorrow. I grab some more muscle relaxers.

Duff calls me as I get out to the car, “Where are you?”

“Shoppers.”

“Ok, I’ll be there in a minute.”

When he gets there, he invites me to try mounting his bike to see if it’s comfortable to me. I don’t find it too high, although it was a little high for standing around in. The pegs are at a good height and that’s all that matter for riding.

“You look good on that bike, sis.”

I blush. Is that some sort of sexual thing… motorcycle-as-manhood? Still, I’d take it over the Vagabond being threatened that I wanted to learn to ride.

“Oh yeah, Steve got fired. He kicked in someone’s door at the hotel.” Duff adds.

Makes sense. The second call the hotel would make is to the boss. We can’t have our guys making a mess of the hotels, so that’s an instant boot out the door. Probably unhireable to the company now.

“Funny that, he just asked me out in the parking lot.”

Duff stares at me blankly.

“I said no, obviously. What do you think he’s on, nose candy or crank?”

He shrugs.

“Alright, take your whisky and go home and sleep. Your a zombie.”

I don’t have a drink that night. I fall asleep before 9.

Friday morning.

The rumor mill is churning. Steve supposedly got into a fistfight with Mr Dangerous at the grocery store, before following him back to the hotel and kicking his door in. Steve texted me his own version of events that I don’t believe, but either way I know more about Mr. Dangerous than Steve knows I know, so it wasn’t entirely unjustified. Just stay away from the guy. I nicknamed him that for a reason.

In his morning meeting, Leif informs us that the gas testers have been testing the chlorine dioxide tanks wrong. It’s a ‘sticky’ gas that requires a specific test and they weren’t doing it right, so every tank was turning up a false negative. Fortunately no one died or suffered any obvious symptoms, but it does mean we have no idea how much CLO2 anyone was exposed to.

So much good news in so little time.

Me and Dennis are stuck with Eli and Reese. I say stuck because Eli takes over each job and makes us build it his way, and is less interested in teaching me than in belittling me and calling it teaching. Whatever, it’s a double bubble day. Yell at me all you want for 50 bucks an hour.

Actually, technically we all got a raise on Thursday, isn’t that fun?

The day drifts by in a fog. All I can think about is how bone-tired I am. At one point we end up on RB4’s roof, the guys smoking while we look out over the city.

When we came back for lunch, Duff was teaching some of the apprentices how to make a hanger, out of spare gear. His eyes were shinning and the kids were rapt with attention.

“Why aren’t you in a classroom?” I asked him at lunch.

“They won’t pay me to do it. Also, I love being on the tools.”

But you are a good teacher, and that is so rare.

At the last quarter we get a job at the top of the digester. Fortunately the elevator is working today. They pull basically everyone for it, so the Vagabond ends up on my crew, as does Zach. I have a hard time taking Zach seriously because I saw first-hand how pathetic he was when Adrienne left him and he talks a big game at work. At one point he belts out Fallout Boy unprompted and he has a pretty good singing voice. And pretty hair.

We also ended up with a cocksure apprentice. When I explained my “I go to New Zealand for the winter” plan to him, he pats me on the back and says “go Lucy, you’re not just a pretty face!”. Later on he says he doesn’t believe in touching scaffolding because “he’s a carpenter” and carpenter’s don’t touch steel. Janessa tells me he’s got a job doing hole watch at the Thunder Bay mill. He is extremely punchable.

We’re pulling a scaffold off the top of the tank next to the digester, which means I end up standing on a catwalk 6 stories above the ground. And it really is like something out of Star Wars. There are no floor between me and the ground – anything dropped is gonna be falling a long time, including me. But I’m handing stuff to Janessa, so I put on a brave, cocky face, and teach her how to chain properly.

We have about half an hour to kill ’til the end of the day when we’re done, so we just hang out on the digester roof.

When was the last time I was here?

Feeling ambitious, girl?

Ah, yes, two years ago. I remember it like it was yesterday; the hot sun – it was a heatwave in early June – the smell of the softwood drifting in from the chip pad, the dust being blown down the city streets. Everything was shiny and new. Him grabbing my hammer out of my belt – “where did you get this” – and the fight to get it back.

How much has changed since the last time I stood on this roof. I wouldn’t recognize me.

To keep my mind off the recent past and the ghosts in front of my eyes, I get to know Janessa better. She’s only 18 and fresh of a pre-apprenticeship program, but she’s cynical and jaded already. Lost her license to a DUI.

One thing I think is interesting, and in hindsight makes a lot of sense, was the trend of chick-lit in the early Aughts being about guys who were objectively awful but subjectively a catch. They were hunky and rich and dangerous, but also just jerks. They really reached pop culture osmosis with Twilight and peaked at Fifty Shades of Grey, and I remember much hand-wringing and shirt-rending over the idea that Christian Grey was something any woman would want, nevermind a majority of the population.

But, of course, with the out-and-out rise of the manosphere, it really starts to make sense. The other day, when I was telling Kathy about Eli apologizing, she commented, “A man who apologizes? How rare! I wonder why that is.” I replied solemnly, “Because we don’t raise them to.” I’ve noticed more and more that the baby boomers seemed to think they were raising little feminists, while laughing at “boys will be boys” and not forcing them to do any of the “feminine” chores. The bar for me dating, and honestly the reason I left most of my long-term partners, was; has job, cooks dinner, does laundry. And it’s pathetic how hard that bar has been to reach. Most guys know how to cook, insomuch as they know how to not burn water, but they know nothing about budgeting for a week’s groceries, putting together a plan or a grocery shop, or planning out time to cook and clean. And that list goes on and on for skills they have but never flex.

And that’s the sad truth, that many women live with a man who is basically Christian Grey but with a beer gut and a minimum wage job. Christian Grey is horribly abusive, controlling, not very good at sex and ignores consent left right and centre, but he’s still rich and that’s the only step-up from the guys they are currently dating. The only one, but it’s not nothing when you’re living hand to mouth and resigned to it.

That was the subtext for the Vagabond too. Because he was so determined to never be tied to another person that he learned to be self-sufficient, it put him head and shoulders above most men on the dating scene. Even before we were dating, he would do my laundry and cook me dinner. So yeah, maybe he got drunk and started a lot of fights with me, but I didn’t have to come home from a 12 hour shift to no dinner, a sink full of dishes and laundry still in the wash machine, which was a huge step-up and worth the drunk fights at the time.

Isn’t that sad.

---

After work, me and Eli go out for dinner. He wore me down. I always feel awkward going out with Eli cuz it looks like I’m treating a homeless man to dinner, with his missing teeth and his multiple raggedy layers of clothes. We have a good conversation – he’s got dentures paid for, finally – but he sneaks in a few pointed questions, notably asking if I’m dating Duff. Hah! I like the idea that the Vagabond is stewing over that every night, especially cuz he’s not so vain as to not appreciate the irony.

My Keto Chow came in. I whipped up a batch and me and Kathy tried it, the strawberry cheesecake flavour. It’s actually really good, I could see myself drinking it even when not on keto, if not for the price. I went and ordered some more, cuz the sample box only came with 6.

Fall asleep at 9 again.

The next day we’re all still on the same crew. There’s a ‘contaminated condensate’ tank we need to build a roller inside. What is contaminated condensate, you ask? Good question, because I still don’t know! I will say that after I had been in the tank for an hour helping Reese and Shane build, I had a headache and a sore throat. The walls were thick with mud and our gloves and coveralls were black with it. After an hour they kicked us out to do a gas test, which passed, although after the CLO2 screw-up I don’t feel terribly confident in it.

During first break, I had microwaved my Factor meal and just popped the plastic for it when Leif came up to me.

“Hey Lucy, we gotta let some people go.”

I blink at him.

“Sign out for ten.”

Ah. You couldn’t tell me before I heated up my lunch?

Well, if anyone thought me sitting with Duff would give me some sort of immunity, they were wrong. Not that I thought it would.

They axed about half of us, probably more, including all the apprentices. Which is always strange cuz apprentices are cheaper, but I guess they went with the “less is more” of journeymen and labourers.

It still took us about half an hour to get out, as everyone rushed to say goodbye, exchange phone numbers, shake hands. We were also still locked out for the condensate tank and had to go back and remove our locks.

I went back home, showered and threw laundry in. Remove the mill from my person as quickly as possible. I still had a headache from the condensate tank and napped for 2 hours.

At 6, when Duff finished work, I went down to hang out with him at his trailer. He downed three shots of whisky in rapid succession and cracked open a beer before he put steaks on the grill.

He kept trying to convince me to stay the night and said he wasn’t angling for sex, and I believe him, but I still declined. A lot of days I end up walking a strange line where I’m sexy, but I look too innocent to defile, like everyone’s kid sister, and they all want me to confide in. A doe-eyed confessor, a pretty face to ease the pain. But I’m afraid if he comes to rely on me at all, he will rely on me too much.

I did accept some whisky. 1 standard drink an hour, still safe to drive. Plus I brought gatorade and ate dinner.

While he was cooking dinner, he threw me the keys to the bike and told me to take it out for a spin. It is a KTM with good off-roading tires, but it had too many bells and whistles compared to my old bike, which just had kilometers and gears on the dash. I did a few laps of the camp ground, not really getting out of second gear. Still, it felt nice to be on a bike again, feel the breath in my lungs.

The sun went down. The sun goes down late here, less than 8 hours of darkness now, I believe.

We talked about a lot of things. There was a lot of mutual complaining about how our respective health conditions prevent us from kicking all the butt we want to at work. That’s probably where a lot of our bond came from, watching each other’s backs on the job site. Both of us would probably be better served picking a job that’s less physical, but neither of us are willing to give up.

Duff commented that the Vagabond seems short around him, and that Eli had been attempting to get close to him and asking about “us”. Later in the evening, when he was too drunk to remember anything I said, I told him about some of the things the Vagabond had done to me. Things only another addict would understand. Things only another person who’d met him could talk to me about.

He thought about it for a while.

“You are… you are such a ball of bright, shinning light, most days. I think that’s threatening to some people, who aren’t very comfortable with themselves. They want to bring you down to their level.”

I smiled at the shinning light part – Lucy, fiat lux.

That makes sense and I’d mused it to myself as well. It was part of the reason I had a hard time being mad at the Vagabond. The extent to which he can’t comprehend that people live lives completely divorced from the kind of life he leads. I think he also had a hard time believing a “good girl” could be interested in him, that every good girl is secretly waiting to go bad, and the way I stubbornly resisted all his attempts to drag me down. By the same token, the fact I had been telling the truth and came back, and hadn’t just hopped into another relationship out of convenience, was also baffling and twisting him into knots. It must suck to be him.

Duff told me about some of his failed relationships, grabbed out his guitar and played some songs for me. It was a new level to see him that vulnerable, chin down on his guitar so he could feel the music he was playing.

“Don’t let people put your light out either, eh.” I told him. He’s too hard on himself. He has too much integrity for this industry. Like me, he’s also trying to lift people up even as they try to tear him down.

When we went outside for me to leave, some of the other scaffolders were in the park having a bonfire. I stayed to have a final drink with them, most of them about as liquored up as Duff was and spilling their guts. At one point, Mikey mentioned the number of other scaffolders he knew who had committed suicide.

I gotta get out of here.

I almost made it back to where I was staying when I got pulled over by a cop. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been pulled over, and I was shaking. Fortunately, he just stopped me because he noticed my headlight was out and he wanted to make sure I wasn’t driving all the way back to Thunder Bay in the middle of the night with one headlight. Yes, I should have changed it sooner, but I wasn’t in a rush when I was driving during the day to and from work, and working so many hours makes it hard to find the motivation. He let me off with a warning.

Still shaking when I got home, so I started drinking.

“Don’t let them put out your light…”