The Last of the Lumbermen (11 page)

TWELVE

W
ENDEL OPENS THE BACK
door and barges into
the kitchen, oblivious to everything but what's sizzling in his
private frying pan. For once, I'm grateful.

“What's with you guys?” he asks, stopping
in his tracks as a flicker of recognition alters what
began as a greeting into a real question. He isn't used to seeing his mother in tears.

“Oh,
silly stuff,” Esther answers, wiping her nose with the
back of her hand. I reach up and pull a
Kleenex from the box on top of the fridge and hand it to her.

Wendel
glares at me — this must be my fault,
he's thinking — while Bozo happily shuffles ar
ound his legs, demanding attention. Wendel leans well
over her so he can scratch her ears without
getting a face-full. With a Newfoundland, position is an importan
t tactical consideration unless you're wearing snorkeling gear.

“Well,” Wendel says without looking
up, willing to be satisfied with Esther's bland explanation
and with me as the source of all domestic evils,
“I've got some news. The government's going to cut the
annual harvest by forty percent. The Coalition finally got to the Ministe
r.”

“How'd you hear this?” I ask, suppressing any
trace of scepticism. I've heard these rumours before, usually via other Coalition members — the college professors, local industry screwees,
and the one or two union members I know who a
ren't so terrified of losing their jobs that they're
more pro-cut than the multinationals.

When it comes to
forestry, Wendel is always willing to talk, even
with me. “You know the routine, Weaver,”
he says, sitting down at the table beside his mother
. “Everyone in Mantua who isn't on a respirator knows
the multinationals have been overcutting the forests for thirty years.”

I nod, hiding my skepticism.

“Course,” he
says, “now the multinationals are going to put on a
big show about being upset about the cuts. And you
know what bullshit that is.”

I shrug. “That's their way of stoking
up everyone who's dependent on the industry. What do
you expect? They're out to whip up whoever thinks the
forests are the only gravypot in the
universe. If you threaten to downsize the industry,
you're threatening their livelihoods or their pickup trucks or whatever.”

“It's so stupid,” Wendel
complains. He goes on to explain what he thinks is
going to happen, though it's murky: someone sent him a fax
outlining a still-secret Cabinet document that will rec
ommend sharply reducing the annual cut, and so forth.
Normally I'd be teasing him for sucking on his own wishbone,
supposing that a government is capable of planning further ahead
than the next election. But not tonight.

“What's the difference between this and
all the other times cutbacks were supposed to happen?” I ask, trying to sound neutral.

All he's got
on that is his optimism. “Well, this time it's
going to happen, for one.”

“Then what?”

“Hopefully the bastards will pull out, and
leave us to do our own logging.”

I've heard this befo
re, too. It's an idea that is teasing the brains
of a lot of people around here, and not just the greenheads. But tonight I want to hear his version. “Explain how that will work.”

He looks at me to see if I'm setting him
up, decides he doesn't care, and launches into it. “The
theory behind it is pretty simple, once you accept
that we don't have to do exactly what our pr
edecessors have done for the last two hundred
years,” he says. “First, you stop clearcutting the forests.”

“Stop? How do you stop it?”

“It's easier than it
sounds. For one, you won't
have
to kick out the
multinationals. Once clearcutting has been banned they'll close down
on their own, because the equipment they use won't be
efficient and neither the harvest nor their profits
will be fat enough. Having them leave won't involve the huge
loss in jobs most people think, because the harvest technologies
they're using have become so labour-efficient they don't provide that many jobs.

“There's something
else about multinationals nobody pays any attention to. In the twenty-o
r-so years since the takeover of the forests began
here, the profits have completely stopped going through
Mantua. The resource simply gets harvested and exported” —
he pauses here for effect — “and so
do the profits. The multinationals don't just take the
profits out of the region, either, they ship
them out of the country. What we're doing
right now is letting our future be shipped to
Hong Kong, Tokyo, and New York without any compensation.
And with stumpage fees as low as they are, and
with all the raw log exports, it's a com
plete giveaway.”

“So what you're telling me is that since
nobody around here is getting anything out of
the harvest the logical thing to do
is to close down the industry? Okay. But how does
the alternative work? You can't just do nothing.”

“We start small,” Wendel answers.
“We wedge the locals into what's left of the
forests to harvest trees on a selective basis.
But to make this practical there has to be a
local co-operative to scale and sell the logs to the
highest bidder — hopefully someone in Mantua who can do some
local added-value manufacturing and create more jobs. The result? More jobs locally, and whatever profits are produced stay in the community
. It's called Equivalent Community Value.”

“What does that mean?”

“It's a political idea. It
means that a community has a right to a fair
share of the profits that come from
the use of the natural resources around it.”

“Okay,” I
say, sitting down across from him. “But
what are you going to do about practical reality?”

“Practical reality?” he hoots.
“You call what's been going on practical? It's totally nuts.”

“Nobody ever said
practical means sane. The multinationals have got a billion-or-so dollars
of capital investment invested here. They aren't
going to leave willingly. They've also got their dicks stuck
in the government and the big unions up to the
hilt, and whenever people like you try to shake them
loose with common sense they hump harder, and what's
already loony gets worse.”

“It takes a leap of faith,”
Wendel says, sounding a little lame. “We're all going to get fucked if we're as cynical as you a
re.”

“I didn't say I don't agree with you.
I think you're right about this stuff. But what
have you got so far? Some grunting by a
few powerless Cabinet committees, and the usual horseshit promises that
the interests of the community are, har,
har, foremost in the minds of the experts?”

He doesn't buckle. “That's
just more cyncism,” he says. “What if you turn
it inside out? There isn't any alternative
to what we're proposing. Not in the long
term. The locals have to get off their asses.”

I
don't know what the hell Wendel was doing at
school while he was in Junior hockey, but he's
got his head further around this than I
have. My cynicism and my twenty-some years of exper-
ience seeing little guys being worked over by bigger guys
haven't taught me anything. I stand up. “Okay, kid. I think you're onto something here, if you can get around all the ifs.”

“Geez, thanks for telling me,” he answers, his voice dripping sa
rcasm.

He
is
onto something. And he's not about to
listen to any advice. Being twenty — twenty-one — he
doesn't see how power- ful those ifs are.
Life may have gotten nastier around here than
it used to be, but it's like everything else about
living in a fat, wealthy country: relative. There's a
point where getting screwed forces people to smarten
up, but we haven't reached it around here.
There's still beer in the bars, money and perks
to buy off local politicians, and now there's
fifty channels to keep us in front of our
TV
s.

“Wher
e's your truck?” I ask, hoping to distract him
from further sermonizing.

“Still in the garage. They want to
replace the queen pins, or whatever.”

Wendel's grasp of
auto maintenance is a touch lighter than his grasp of
forestry. “They're king pins,” I say.
“I hope those clowns haven't been messing around with you again.”

“Whatever,” he answers. “Queen
pins, king pins. Who cares? It'll be ready Monday night, so …”

“You can
keep the pickup until then,” Esther interrupts, free
- ing him of having to ask. “I'm not going
anywhere Andy can't drive me to.”

With that settled, Wendel cheerfully
shifts his focus from us to the refrigerator,
which was his original motive for coming over. He hasn't
lived with us since he returned to Mantua fr
om Regina and Juniors, but he hasn't exactly been a strange
r, either. He comes over five or six
times a week to hoover the fridge. Esther hoped he'd find
a steady girl and settle in with her — or
maybe that was me, hoping to cut the grocery
bills. I can't quite remember, all of a sudden.

Whatever we wished, it
didn't happen, and not because Wendel has been short
of girlfriends. There was a steady one for
a while, but they didn't move in together. He just brought her with him to help apply the vacuum to the food supply.

“There's nothing in here,” he complains f
rom inside the fridge door.

“We ate Chinese tonight,”
Esther says by way of explanation. “Aren't there some chicken pies in there somewher
e?”

I can't stop myself. “If you'd gotten here half
an hour ago you could have fought Bozo for the chow mein.”

Wendel ignores us both,
and pulls out a loaf of bread, a jar
of mayonnaise, and a block of cheddar, and moves to
the counter to fix himself some sandwiches.

WHILE HE'S BUSY WITH
this I have
a good look at him — a parental look.
It's hard to see how I missed our physical
similarities. He's built the same way as I am, larger
and a little more spectacularly muscled, sure, but
he has the same square shoulders and long waist.

When
he turns and I see him in profile the
resemblance isn't so strong. His jawline is str
onger than mine, the forehead broader. Ha
rd to say about his nose, since mine's been b
roken enough times that its impossible to say what it
would look like if I'd grown up to be a toe-tapping banker or violinist.

He
has Esther's features — and her strength
of character. When he turns to ask if we've got
another half gallon of milk in the basement fridge,
I see that his eyes are hers too: la
rge, deepset, and the same luminous green.

Without me realizing it,
he's helped me to make a decision. I'm not going
to drop the truth on Esther until I
can establish a few more solid links between Wendel
and I. He's going to be a tough nut to crack, though.