Travelling Light by Peter Behrens Page A

houses with curtains on the windows and kids’ drawings posted on the fridge. I like looking through the window to the row of windbreak poplars out on the road. I like the taste of that coffee. On the rigs, in the dining halls you get your coffee from a steel urn, with twenty men in front of you and twenty more lined up behind.
    Steve said, “You’ll keep an eye on that Duane, will you.”
    â€œSure.”
    â€œI hate having to depend on someone like that. If Pete was old enough we’d only need to hire one man.”
    By ten the next morning the dew was off the crop and the threshing began. Steve and his father drove the combines. The machines never stopped moving — when a hopper was full, one of the grainers would draw up alongside then move down the row in tandem while grain spewed into the box. As soon as it had a full load the truck pulled away, bouncing across the stubble towards a break in the fence, then speeding down the section road to the granary bins or to the elevator in town.
    We ate food brought in glass dishes from the house and served from the back of a station wagon. We sat on folding chairs around a card table set up on the wheat stubble. If Pete was around, he and Duane bickered about Duane’s old pickup. When Pete wasn’t around, Duane didn’t have much to say. Once he asked me about the rigs. “You been up there, ain’t you?” he said.
    â€œYes, I have.”
    â€œWell, I’m going next year. What’s it like?”
    When I first came out west, my big idea was getting rich on the rigs. I worked along the Saskatchewan border and up on the Beaufort. Sooner or later I always quit to try something else, but sooner or later I always go back to the rigs. That is where the real money is.
    â€œI want to make real money,” Duane said. “I want to fix up my truck. Pete says I need to rebuild the engine but I’d like to put some mag wheels on her is what I’d like.”
    I knew he could never get work on the rigs. He was too dumb and too scrawny. The work would kill him. They’d take one look at him and turn him down. They are hard men up there, none harder than some of the Cape Bretoners. Duane wouldn’t last a week. I tried telling him, but of course he didn’t understand.
    Every now and then we’d shut down early and get a night off. I’d borrow Steve’s pickup and go into town. I met a girl one night at the beer parlour and got a thing going with her. She was blonde and pretty and just out of high school. We never had trouble. I hated the beer parlour, with all the harvest hands drunk and getting into fights. All the lowlife. A couple of glasses of beer, then I’d take this girl and we’d go down to the river.
    This was not the way I was meant to be. I never thought of myself living this kind of life. I don’t know what I expected. People on the rigs have money and you can get all the things you think you want — trucks, powerboats, trips to Hawaii. They need the workers, they pay you well, and when you’re working, you can’t spend it anywhere but the beer parlour or the lottery. When a job is over, there’s no reason to stay, so you head to another job; you sign up for six months on a seismic crew or road construction so you don’t have to think about where you’re going — which is nowhere. In small towns people won’t talk to you. You’re a transient. You get into fights.
    I think, I will save money and get back to Nova Scotia . But I’ve been out here too long and don’t believe I could ever go back to stay. I remember the things I hated about it — the dead quiet of those towns on a Sunday, the church with no one inside but old people. Everyone on Cape Breton seemed to be just waiting to die.
    I’ll buy an old ranch in southwest Saskatchewan, east of the Cypress Hills, and breed horses. It’s ghost towns down there. Too dry even for