I Don't Want to Know Anyone Too Well, and Other Stories Read online

  It was the way he mentioned money that brought back those classes in salesmanship we had at high school where we had to stand in front of the class and pretend we were selling something while the teacher criticized our technique.

  “Besides, it’s a job,” the tall man said, “finding the right lake. There are thousands like them. And the bush pilots are just as likely to put you down on the wrong one.”

  I said I would take the company’s train.

  Sault Ste. Marie was the kind of place that I had been in before. The quick stay in a small town where I knew that after a few years, I would remember very little of it, in this case a zoo. Away from the main street I walked in a residential area. The houses were set back from the sidewalk by lawns; grass, trees, but no flowers. One wooden house with a large veranda had a cardboard sign, Room To Let, nailed to a veranda post. Above the bell-button was a metal plate, L. M. Kalma. Music Teacher. Qualified. I rang the bell. I could hear the bell ringing inside. But the tall, grey door remained closed. I rang and knocked and waited. A window on the top opened but no one looked out. Then I heard steps.

  The woman who opened the door was small. She had a dressing gown on over a nightdress. Her hair was grey, fuzzy, and held in place by a net. Though it was early afternoon the fact that she had obviously just come out of bed did not seem as startling as her face. The eyes were there. So was the mouth. But where her nose should have been there was a flat surface of scarred flesh with two small holes.

  “You caught me undressed.”

  I told her I wanted a room for one night. She led me upstairs to a bedroom. A square room with a window and a large four-poster bed. “It’s a feather bed,” she said. “They are much better than spring or rubber. The feathers, they sleep with you like another person.”

  My first impulse was to make some excuse, leave, and find another place.

  “The clever doctors, to them I ought to be dead.”

  She said this without sadness or humour. Then she showed me the bathroom, the light switch, asked me if I liked music, if $1.50 was not too much for the room, and placed on the kitchen table some cold chicken with sliced cucumber that she had taken from the ice-box. She insisted that I sit down and eat. I ate the food and she talked. She talked as if we had known each other for a long time. Like boat passengers who have been forced into each other’s company only for a particular journey and are safe with the knowledge that no matter how much one says or does, there is no consequence to be faced. I now found a strong physical attraction to her face.

  Later in the evening when I returned with my bag from the station, it was difficult to recognize her as the same woman who opened the door. She had on a dark dress instead of a dressing gown, but her face was different. She wore a false nose attached to a false piece of skin that stretched from one ear to the other and by wearing glasses held it in place. Face powder and rouge generously put on only helped to show the falseness. I preferred the scarred face with the two air holes to this manufactured monstrosity. In her attempt to look normal she looked ugly.

  Next morning the train did not begin from the railway station but from a private siding by the Algoma Ore Properties’ office. In the coach, besides myself, were four middle-aged Americans dressed in bright lumberjack shirts, with fishing gear piled around them. The only other person was the ticket collector who, I discovered later, was also our cook.

  The coach was old and of a type I had not seen on either the Canadian National or the Canadian Pacific. The inside was like a worn-out billiard table with large patches eaten out of the green. The seats were hard and uncomfortable. Gas brackets hung from the ceiling. In the centre of the ceiling, a light bulb did not give much light. But we did not go through many tunnels. Travelling into the bush we continually crossed trestle bridges, curved by small lakes, and moved slowly through miles of pine and softwood. By noon the journey had gone on much too long. The total distance was less than a hundred miles north and we had travelled half of it when the ticket collector came and asked me if I wanted some grub. I followed him into his compartment at the head of the coach. One side had deep shelves from the ceiling to the floor and the shelves had tinned goods in them. The ticket collector took a tin from a shelf. He showed me the tin. Grade A. Specially Selected Ready To Serve Chicken. “Want this?” he asked. “Go to your seat and I’ll call you when she’s ready. Here. Have a funny. It’s on the house.” He went over to the loose papers on top of a bundle. “What do you want? Annie. Tarzan. The Katzenjammer Kids.”

  A dog barked. In the corner opposite to where we were, a cocker spaniel was kept in a large wicker cage.

  “She’s going the same place as you’re going,” he said.

  I looked out from the small observation window. The train was going through a narrow valley. The earth was banked along the track. We were travelling so slow that it was possible to see the cracks in the soil. The ticket collector put down the chicken tin and filled a bowl with water from a kettle.

  “You don’t mind if I give her water. Trains give them this thirst.”

  He made a clucking noise with his tongue and walked over to the wicker basket and put the bowl down so that the dog could reach it.

  “She belongs to an engineer at the mine. He sends her to the Soo whenever she’s on heat.”

  He knelt to the dog and fell over as the coach jolted. Instead of getting up he lay sprawled on the floor and talked to the dog.

  “Was it good girl? Eh, my beauty. C’mon tell me—”

  I left the ticket collector talking to the dog and returned to my seat with the Katzenjammer Kids and looked out of the window. The first excitement of seeing so much green and trees had passed. The trees were monotonous and I wanted the journey to end. I wondered why I was going to the mine. Part of it was for the money and the experience. But I felt convinced that there was something else. Four years of lectures and campus enthusiasms had given me an overdose of books and words and examinations. I felt as if l was on a see-saw, stuck to the one side that was raised, where my head was the only part involved in “the goings on.” Not that those four years were unpleasant. They only seem a waste of time, looking back.

  I did not see the mine until sundown. From the train it looked like an old ruin on top of a hill where the hills around were without trees or grass. The station was at the bottom of the hill and we stopped by a long wooden platform. The train picked up water. Parcels and crates were moved from the train to the waiting trucks. Then the spaniel, free from the wicker cage, was given to someone in a car. A cream-coloured bus was also by the side of the platform. Some men were inside. I went to the bus. The driver sat like a sparrow over the wheel, a jockey cap on his head. He wore an orange sweater with a large H in green across the front.

  “Your name Tree?”

  When I said it was he said, “Hop in.”

  The men by the station were watching the reunion of the spaniel with her owner. There were some guttural jokes made at the spaniel’s friskiness, for they knew where she had been. Then the bus backed, turned, and drove off.

  We came to a lake with wooden houses on one side. The bus stopped by a general store. Several men with black lunch-pails climbed in. They called the driver “Jack” in various accents. He punched small cards that the men held up as they entered the bus. We drove around the lake and up a hill. Above us a steel cable carried large buckets of iron ore from the mine to the sinter plant. We stopped at the top of the hill, beside a wooden building. I asked the driver where the office was. He said to follow him. He carried a mail sack over his shoulder.

  “Where you from?”

  “Montreal.”

  “Play ball?”

  “A bit.”

  “What position?”

  “I pitch.”

  He remained silent as we went through a wooden gate and into a frame building partitioned off for several offices. The bus driver dropped the mail sack
on the floor and a girl came out of one of the partitions.

  “Hi, Glorie. Someone from Montreal.” And he went out.

  She came to the counter, unsmiling, and took some paper, spread it flat.

  “When did you come?”

  A skirt and sweater, and on her sweater at the neck she wore a black cross.

  She took my name, age, and home address. Her eyes moved nervously. Her other features were coarse. When my card was filled out she told me to go to the cookhouse, a building some twenty yards away, and ask for the cook.

  I crossed the bare, hard-packed ground and saw a man with glasses, stripped to the waist, holding a white apron. He stood by the cookhouse near several large barrels filled with garbage and looked towards the horizon. I asked him if he could tell me where I could find the cook.

  “Where you from?” he said with a Scottish accent.

  “Montreal.”

  “Montreal.” He said the word slowly. “It’s seven years since I’ve been there. How are the Canadiens doing?” Not waiting for a reply, he became excited and talked quickly. “The last time I was there I did a food crawl. I started at Pauze’s with a dozen oysters, then I went to the Bucharest for a steak, Ben’s for a smoked-meat sandwich, Chicken Charlie’s on St. Catherine for spare-ribs, and ended with spaghetti and meatballs at FDR’s, and before I caught the midnight train I took a taxi to a place called Au Lutin qui Bouffe where somebody blind played a piano while I had frogs’ legs and my picture taken giving a baby’s bottle of milk to a little pig.” As spontaneously as he started, he stopped. To cover up his embarrassment he became silent, then formal, as he led me to his cookhouse office.

  In his office he issued me a new black lunch-pail and I signed a slip for it. He told me to scratch my name on the lunch-pail with a nail and that supper was at seven thirty, so that I still had half an hour to get a place to sleep. We walked outside, through the dining hall. Unpainted large wooden tables. Benches on both sides. The first table near the door had chairs, and a sign, Staff Only.

  He showed me a building about fifty yards down the hill.

  “Go to room nine, laddie, and ask for Willie Hare.”

  The cable stretched over the cookhouse and I could hear it creak as the buckets kept passing overhead. Where the cable crossed between cookhouse and office a steel net was suspended above the ground.

  I found number nine in a building smelling of paint. Outside the door a bundle of dirty laundry was tied together by a shirt. Some time passed between my knock and the door being opened. At first I thought he was a boy, then he switched the room light on and I could see that he was old, unshaven, and sleepy. He could not be much more than five feet, a thin frame covered by a dirty white shirt buttoned tight at the neck, collar crumpled, and grey trousers that were too small. He wore no shoes but heavy woollen socks. His fly-buttons were undone.

  “My name is Tree. The cook told me that you would let me know where I sleep.”

  He hesitated, then turned back to the room leaving the door open. He went to a cupboard and pulled out a large piece of cardboard. Then he sat down on his bed and began to examine the large writing on one side of the board.

  I looked around the room. It stank of old age. Shelves covered an entire wall. In these shelves toothpaste, soap, razor blades, shoe laces, and chocolate bars were propped up in open boxes. Above his bed, pasted to the wall, was a map similar to the one hanging in the company’s office in Sault Ste. Marie. Covering most of the map were pictures of boxers, hockey players, movie stars, old Christmas cards, pin-up girls, and an old calendar advertising life insurance.

  “Yours will be number forty-two .”

  He spoke with difficulty, for he had no teeth. They were sunk in a glass of water on the floor by his bed. “You’ll have another student in with you later. Tree.” And he laughed. “That’s an easy one to spell.” He licked the end of the pencil and printed my name large on the cardboard. “You can get most things from me.” He showed me the cupboard built into the wall where he returned the piece of cardboard. Inside sprawled hundreds of paper-backed books. “Mystery, cowboy, sex stories, no need to pay. It’ll come off your cheque.” He gave me the key to my room and returned to his bed, entering between the sheets fully dressed.

  “By the way Tree, where you from?”

  “Montreal.”

  I waited. There was no reply.

  As I walked out he called back. “Shut the light.”

  Number forty-two was a square room freshly painted white, with one window directly opposite the door. Two beds. Two dressers. A naked light hung from the ceiling. I tried to raise the window but was able to move it only a few inches. I could see the side of a hill, the sky, and trees. The outside air tasted cold in my throat.

  I unpacked and had put on a sweater and old flannels when I heard a bell tolling. There was nothing urgent about the sound. Silence. Then the sound again. I went out of the room and looked out of the window in the passage. Men were pressed tight to the door of the cookhouse. Others were running towards it. Suddenly the door opened and those that were there disappeared inside. By the time I reached the cookhouse the tables were crowded with men eating. Latecomers, like myself, were running from one table to the other until we found a place on a bench.

  At my table they were speaking German. The only one not speaking was deformed. He sat opposite me. Stubbles for fingers on a wrist which was raw. A large red handkerchief, tied around his head, went underneath his chin. He used this handkerchief to hold his jaw together. To eat he would loosen the knot above his head and with one stubbled hand he would slide the food from the table to his mouth while the other worked the jaw up and down.

  “You a Canadian?”

  He had bad teeth.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Look at the monkeys eat.”

  As a platter of food was placed on the table, often before it reached the table, bodies pushed, hands snatched whatever they could get. In less than ten minutes it was all over.

  Outside, the tramline continued to creak. The men stood waiting by the side of the cookhouse where, on to the main wall, a wooden booth was built. It stuck out like an ear. Steps without handrails led to a door. Someone shouted. “Here he comes.” I saw Willie Hare coming from the office towards the cookhouse, his hands full of letters and newspapers. He gave the letters to the first man, then went up the ladder to the booth and threw the papers inside. “Shout them out.” Another man took the envelopes away from the first man and began to call out names. Letters passed from hand to hand. After all the names had been read out several times the DP s went through them again.

  I woke next morning to the sound of blasting followed later by the steady tolling bell. Breakfast was a repetition of the supper last night, except that different faces were at the table. After breakfast I walked over to the office. The manager had not yet arrived. Glorie suggested that I go and see the doctor as I had to have a medical before I could begin work.

  The doctor’s office (a wooden building, as were all the buildings on top of the hill) was a few minutes’ walk from the cookhouse. His hours according to a sign were 10:00–12:00. I arrived after 10:00 and it was now 11:32 and still no one had arrived. A man with a crewcut, wearing white shorts and an open shirt approached. I asked him if he was the doctor.

  “I’m not that lucky,” he said, and walked on.

  The doctor arrived at noon. He was the palest person I had so far seen at the mine. A long head on a tall thin body. His face reminded me of a goat. Straight black hair parted on the side. A thin mouth. It was difficult to guess his age. He could as easily have been in his thirties as in his forties. He opened the door and indicated that I enter.

  “They said in the office to come and see you about a medical.”

  He remained silent, took off his jacket and flung it onto the leather couch that was near his desk. The room was small and stifl
ing. All the windows were closed. Papers were on the floor. A file, like a broken accordion, lay on the floor with papers sticking out from the bellow pockets. A telephone was on the desk. Beside it, piled high on top of each other, were old telephone directories. On the desk, a dish had dried apples, overripe pears, and an onion sprouting. A green filing cabinet stood against the wall by the window. On top of it several parcels, tied crudely together, had holes in the brown paper as if the rats had been there. A picture of Mickey Mouse was the only bright spot in the room and it hung as a target on a piece of cardboard underneath the eye-chart. There were three chairs and a leather couch to sit on.

  “You another student?”

  I said I was.

  He began to listen to my chest.

  “Where you from?”

  “McGill.”

  He looked up, surprised.

  “And how is the dear place? Are they still after you asking to give money for some building or drive, writing you letters, telling you how important you are to them—”

  “I just graduated,” I said.

  “You’ll get them soon enough.”

  He did not bother to examine me further but went over to his filing cabinet, unlocked it, and from the back he brought out two large glasses and a half-full bottle of brandy.

  “It’s all right, Tree. I was there myself. Good time. Best time I ever had.”

  He poured the glasses nearly full and we drank.

  “We must have a reunion. You know you are the first McGill man who has hit this God-forsaken hole. The others at the staff table are a bunch of hicks from all the hick colleges across the country.” Then, as if he remembered something, he came and shook my hand.

  “My name is Crepeau.”

  We continued drinking. I told him who on the faculty had died, who had left, and he appeared to be interested when I said a name he knew. The conversation jumped from the campus, to Montreal, to sport, to the different places we had seen. “Look at yourself,” he suddenly interrupted. “You talk. You can talk like I can talk. We both can make talk. Talk on anything. They have seen to that. But what good does it do you, or anybody else? They’ve sandpapered all your rough edges, your instincts, your intuitions, then turned you out with a fake smartness like a car on the assembly line. You happen to be the 1950 model. I was the 1933. The funny thing is we like it.”