I guess it isn’t fair, with me prattling on and on about how no one should be out on their own, and then I grab my gunbelt and I take a trip by myself.
But you know what? Life isn’t fair. I always wanted to be three inches taller and I certainly didn’t choose to start growing my forehead at age twenty-six.
I gave Sara and Fiona their hugs goodbye before I left, with both of them shaking their heads at what a charming hypocrite I’ve become.
I took Nelson Road around the north side of McCartney Lake, riding by the cottages we set up for the Tremblays and the Porters, as well as the other half dozen houses that are sitting empty and slowly crumbling. I looped around the forest at the end of the road, taking the east route so I’d stay out of the shade, and then I was on the trail that curves up and around Coleman Lake and finds its way up to Highway 652.
The healthy trees end here and the destruction starts, with an old farmhouse that didn’t survive the fires. I turned right and made my way to Murphy Road, just before the West Gate, and then I followed it north to that little marshy pond that always smells a little like gasoline.
I’ve gone further than this before, all the way up to the banks of the Sucker River, riding alongside it until I reach the little collection of burnt houses that used to be known as Florida for some stupid reason. I’ve let Fiona come with me a few times; she takes the mare and I take the gelding, since whenever he isn’t hitched he has a strange walk that’s always a little too close to a trot and it takes some effort to keep getting him to slow down.
Today I wanted to be alone. I didn’t even really want to ride a horse, so I climbed off the mare at that cruddy little lake, and I took a whiff of that toxic smell that I’ve somehow grown to miss. You wouldn’t think you’d miss the long lost smell of gas station. I slipped on the mare’s halter and hitched her to a thin birch tree, and I started walking along the edge of the water.
That’s when I saw something that didn’t belong, a rubber glove lying in the muck. You get used to garbage when you grow up in a city, but up here you just don’t see that much of it, and usually it’s beer cans or fishing line or old shotgun shells from even older shotguns. A rubber glove is not something you expect out here. It’s surprisingly rare to encounter such a thing as a deep woods enema.
I didn’t pick it up or anything, since it’s not much more appealing to touch than a used condom, and I kept walking until I found a second glove. That made sense in a way, two gloves for two hands, but it made the whole scene look less like an accident and more like waste disposal. And then I saw the broken glass. It wasn’t cloudy like a beer bottle or thick like a mason jar; it looked more clinical than that, like something you’d want to test your urine with. It was enough to make me curious.
I started scouring the area looking for more, and it wasn’t long before I found it, more glass, another set of gloves, and then something completely out of place, a two or three foot diameter well with some kind of hard plastic cover. I knelt down beside it, stuck my fingers into the grip holes, and then I slowly lifted it up and to the side.
It’s times like that when I wonder how many other people get the urge to pee into a well.
But this wasn’t a well; instead of a dark hole it was a hole down to something bright… well, not bright but certainly not total blackness. And the hole came with its own rope ladder.
If you’d have come upon something like this in Panjwaii District, the proper procedure would have involved lobbing a grenade down the hole, or if you enjoy risking your life unnecessarily, you could always toss something down that’s more in the stun and surprise category and hope to climb down and disarm whoever’s there before they shoot you. I wasn’t equipped to do either, and I knew at this point that if anyone was down there they were probably well aware of the idiot who’d just removed their manhole cover.
But it was probably empty, telling from the dirt and spiderweb that had covered the lid and the fact that I had trouble believing that anyone would be hidden underground so close by without us running into them at some point in the past eighteen months.
As I climbed down the ladder into the hole and moved toward the greenish light below, I knew that I was possibly on my way to making the dumbest mistake of my life, especially since I had a perfectly good set of body armour just a half hour’s ride away.
What I found at the bottom was light fixture of LEDs, inside what looked like a school bus with the seats ripped out. The windows were there, looking out on dirt and grass roots, while along one wall was a cheap laminate countertop on top of a bank of cabinets. I felt water at my feet and I looked down to realize that there was a good inch and a half of water along the floor of the buried bus. I guess one drawback to burying something in marshy land is that marshy land tends to be pretty wet.
My first thought was that it was some kind of shelter, a hastily constructed retreat that someone came up with when they found out the comet was coming. But it was too hasty for that, as if they’d just thrown an empty school bus into a pit and thrown some dirt over it. I wasn’t even sure there was proper ventilation down there.
I opened one of the cabinets and I saw thick plastic bags of what looked like ice chips, or even crushed up icicles. I’d never seen that stuff before, but I knew what it was. And I knew there had to be some kind of ventilation in that buried bus if they were cooking meth in there.
There were at least twenty bags, each one weighing at least a pound. I checked the next cabinet over and found around a dozen more. The next cabinet had what looked like the cooking supplies, a full-on chemistry set along with various boxes and bottles. I checked the next cabinet over and found some burners and a few bags of President’s Choice potato chips. The last cabinet had more plastic bags, but those held little yellow pills with embedded maple leafs. I had no idea there were people who cooked both meth and ecstasy, but then again I didn’t know people generally buried their drug labs in a marshy pit in northern Ontario.
I’d found what probably amounts to millions of dollars in illicit drugs, more the meth than the MDMA, since you can get some not-too-trippy government-issue ecstasy for cheap with a phony prescription. Well, I guess you can’t get any of it now, since things like that disappeared from every pharmacy, clinic and hospital in the district long ago. So all of it’s valuable now, not that drug dealing is part of my life plan.
But we’re scavengers now, and when you find something that has value, you take it with you. You don’t just throw it away.
I grabbed a bag of each, just in case I decided on any show and tell, and I climbed out of the buried school bus and back up to the noxious pond. I took off the mare’s halter and headed back to the cottage, her saddlebag carrying enough dope to cause some serious trouble.
I’m not sure if there’s a way to make that trouble work for me.
LISA
Ant’s cast of characters:
Lisa is trouble. I like trouble, but sometimes she’s too much even for me.
She likes to drink, as per her drunken indian stereotype, and that works out well for me since she seems to like short French guys while under the influence of the old fire water. It’s happened more than once and that’s more than fine by me; I’m an equal opportunity sex god. I’m not so sure Graham would approve of me in-and-outing his on-and-off girlfriend, but as I have stated before categorically, Graham can go fuck himself.
I don’t have a problem with him other than the fact that he seems to have a problem with me. I say live and let live, come sit down and have a beer with me. But there was some kind of horrible farming accident when Graham was a kid on his parent’s goat farm down in Jesusland, and that metal rod must have gotten shoved so far up his ass that surgery was never an option. It’s too bad, because I hear he used to play football or baseball or one of those lame-ass sports that isn’t hockey.