What Is Time to a Pig? by John Straley

Author:John Straley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2019-11-07T00:48:33+00:00

Chapter Six

The mildewed pillow smelled like failure to Gloomy now. Failure, boredom, and painkillers mixed with vodka.

All he had ever wanted to be was a logger. He had worked a few years in the woods of Alaska and several on the west side in Washington, making good money falling second growth on Indian land, but he worked in the Oregon woods for only one day as a cutter. He had gotten the job through a friend who was the foreman on a helicopter logging outfit flying near Bend. Gloomy had bought a new Swedish chain saw and an automatic grinder to keep all his chains sharp. He spent one day in camp getting settled, and early the next morning he hiked through the cut to begin his strip. He cut the face to control the direction of the fall. The big ponderosa pine, teetered a bit and as he began the back cut, and the tree ripped up the middle then split halfway up, as if on a hinge. Gloomy tried to pull out the saw, but the massive tree fell and pinned him to the ground, crushing his left hip. Fallers call this a Barber’s Chair when a tree splits that way, and Gloomy thought about that term as he lay on the dusty cone-covered ground with his face butted up against a rock. He shut his eyes and wished he could take his mistake—the bad cut or the miscalculation in the tree’s weight—take it all back, but the three-hundred-year-old tree lay on him like history, and he could not get up. The pain burned up his waist and through his entire left side. The boys hurried over and blocked up the tree, running their saws to remove the limbs that were in their way. Once the trunk was stable, they dug in the earth around him and dragged him free. Gloomy remembered the chattering of the saws, the chips from the chains, and the sappy smell of the green wood on the ground.

For six weeks, he stayed in different hospitals, and when he was discharged, a friend who had been a hook tender on his crew drove him to the basement in Seattle. Gloomy didn’t tell his father what had happened. His mother had recently written to him, and Gloomy didn’t have the heart to write her back. He just lay in the basement for five months watching TV, eating multicolored painkillers, and washing them down with vodka. He read the Bible and tried to pray for a different kind of future, one he was starting to imagine as he breathed in the mildew and studied the water stains on the sheetrock.

Gloomy hadn’t really felt the sting of any kind of remorse in that damp basement room. He knew he was in trouble. He knew his injury was serious. He would walk with a limp if he was lucky, but working in the woods would be painful. But he was aware that he was becoming a drug addict, chewing endlessly on painkillers.

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