The River Burns by Trevor Ferguson

Author:Trevor Ferguson
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

■ ■ ■

Arriving at work, many of them late, truckers were advised not to start their engines. “You’ll be going nowhere soon,” the dispatcher’s assistant let them know. Off and on they caught sight of the dispatcher through the window of his office, on the phone and pacing, and whenever he hung up he was obviously expecting the blessed thing to ring again. He was giving out no further information.

The men were remarkably subdued.

In pairs, a few of the younger guys balanced on a hefty log and endeavoured to wrestle one another off it. Denny considered the sport silly, given that the log lay flat on dry land. Float that thing in the river and then see who could stay upright on it and for how long. This is what they should have been doing with their lives, riding logs downstream. Any battle for supremacy then would not have been a mere logger sport but a life-and-death daily activity that determined their worth, and a skill that aided their ability to survive. Instead, number 2 diesel fuel ran through their veins and a few younger guys thought that balancing on a log on dry land meant something. Denny quashed an urge to yell, or even step right up to the fellow who apparently won that absurd contest and punch his lights out. He exhaled, to let his unbidden rage subside.

Older guys smoked and kicked around a few ideas about what would happen now, and out of that discussion one wizened, diminutive fellow started up a pool in which the object was to guess the date a new bridge would open to traffic.

“One thing wrong with that idea,” Big Bill Fournier touted.

“What’s that?” a sidekick asked.

“Who says a new bridge will ever get built?”

He spoke loudly, as though he knew whom he was talking to, but Denny didn’t rise to the bait. For the time being, he let it pass. If Big Bill thought that burning the bridge was a bad idea, he could suck his own tailpipe, and Denny was on the verge of saying so. He’d offer to help shove it down his gullet.

Those few comments aside, the morning was remarkable for the lack of references to the fire. People kept their opinions to themselves, and no one was willing to publicly harangue, or celebrate, the arsonists, whoever they might be. By the same token, no one was so foolish as to speculate that the fire might have been an accident. Truckers knew what happened. They believed they’d be the beneficiaries, eventually, so it stood to reason that a few of their number were guilty of the crime.

Silence, then, was a form of thanks, rather than misgiving.

Denny came close to asking André Gervais for a cigarette but caught himself, realizing how bad that would look, the two of them huddled around a lit match. An image that snuffed out the craving.

The dispatcher ventured out at last and men came away from their logs and rigs and huddled groups to form a semicircle around him.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.