Presents or Presence?

He’s been building a train in the January cold for over three hours. It’s nearly midnight, and they haven’t even hit the road yet. The switch list which contains information about the proper whereabouts of all freight is royally fucked. Over an hour of the last three was spent trudging through the knee-deep snow in between each of the ten tracks, marking down the proper numbers and then bringing the crumpled pages upstairs to print out new switch lists and then start again from scratch.

Now the train is built but the customers still need to be serviced. Nick climbs into the engine, where Danny has the heat set to “Surface of Sun.” The drastic change in temperature instantly makes Nick feel feverish and light-headed. He sits down on the torn leather seat of the cab and puts his feet up on the small microwave in front of him. Danny is smoking import cigars from the middle-east, somewhere in Saudi Arabia, he thinks. They’re strong and contain a rich and thick smell. The window is cracked not even an inch. It’s too cold, so Danny makes believe that he’s airing out the cab while he smokes, but it isn’t doing anything. The smoke and strange eminent flavor of the cigars float their way to the back of Nick’s throat and he coughs.

He’s young though, and Danny has been doing this job since before his father was born. He’s pushing 70 and he isn't going to retire until someone forces him to. Until that day, he’s going to sit in the engine, smoking import cigars, whistling ole Dixieland tunes, and not listening to a word uttered from any mouth, unless it’s his own. If it’s his own, then it’s prophetic. Like the Ten Commandments.

So Nick keeps his mouth shut. He’s young and green. Not a railroader in essence. Not one in soul. He’s just a railroader because he passed all the tests in Winnipeg and found his way back to Annandale, believing it was the right thing to do. Believing it was the only thing to do. Months spent on the other side of the country, watching the birth of his son on a cellphone.

The engine takes off slowly, heading east towards the sawmill, then it’ll continue until they reach the peat moss plant, then another sawmill, and on the way back they’ll have the propane, fertilizer, and one last stop at the pulp mill, which will likely take an hour, possibly two. All depending on the list, and if it’s right. Which, the way this evening is going, he’s figuring it isn’t.

Nick looks out the window at a dark river illuminated by the lights on the Van Horne Bridge. Cars drive across slowly. Danny is whistling next to him, and Nick is tired. He isn’t built for this life, he knows it. He supposes in a lot of ways he always knew it. But Cassandra got pregnant. She sat on the edge of their bed gripping their checkered pattern duvet. They’d only been together for a New York minute at that time. She was nervous, and he figured, rightly so. He didn’t react well. He was holding his guitar case, feeling excitement from a great jam session with a buddy of his. They were rehearsing for some weekend gigs. They were doing the rounds of all the downtown pubs, and one uptown bar and grill. He was going to be a musician.

Then she said they were going to have a baby. It didn’t register in his head. Christ, the baby was born now and he still had a hard time believing he was a parent. He looked at his father, and his father’s father, and they were goliaths. He looked at himself and only saw a scared and inexperienced kid.He figured the railroad would cure that. But it didn’t. It just added guilt into the concoction which was his fucked-up head.

And now he sits in the engine, exactly a week from Christmas. It’s been several days since he’s last seen his son. Three, or four. And the last time he did see him, it was just to say goodnight, give him a kiss on the forehead and lay him down in his bassinet.

The engine continues east, picking up speed as it crosses over the Iron Bridge to the highway below. Christmas lights begin to whizz by, turning into a flurry of greens, and reds, and whites. A large blow-up grinch stands nearly 20 feet tall in front of an old house, next to an equal sized T-Rex eating a large sack of presents. It makes Nick smile. His little guy would laugh at this too. He promised Cassandra, and Luke that he’d take them driving through town to look at the Christmas lights one of these evenings. He told Cassandra, he’d make his famous homemade hot chocolate and they’d put it in their mugs, and they’d take a drive. But he hadn’t yet, and he wasn’t feeling overly optimistic about it either.

Danny continues to whistle, lighting another cigar, as the engine hits track speed and they’re heading 50 mph in the darkness. The houses are gone. The lights are gone. It’s the darkness of the engine, and the dull humm. Nick sheds his layers of clothes. Balaclava, soaking wet work gloves which he places on the heater to his left, tuque, jacket, sweater, and the spiked covers that go over his work boots. He microwaves a small cup of green tea, and sips on it, burning his tongue, and spilling some on his chest, as the track bumps.

His eyes are heavy, and he rubs at the skin beneath them. Outside the small window is miles of forest, and he’s miles away from home. His wife is either sleeping lightly and restlessly, or she’s up breastfeeding in a semi-conscious trance. He wishes he were there, holding his son himself and wrapping his arms around her, and whispering that it’s okay to sleep. That he has it covered, then softly kissing the nape of her neck, and holding on to her and feeling her calm rhythmic breathing.

But he’s on an engine, in the middle of the woods, with an old man smoking Saudi Arabian cigars and whistling.

After thirty minutes, they reach the sawmill and the engine slows down to a crawl. Nick is fighting sleep with every fiber of his being. An exhaustion that runs much

deeper than just sleep. An exhausting of the entire body, and the soul.

He takes five minutes to put all his stuff back on and grab the list of the freight at the sawmill, before taking a deep breath and opening the small steel door to the open cold. The wind howls angrily as a warning, that nothing good happens outside in these northern winds, at this time of the night. Again, the quick change from sauna heat to arctic cold makes his body stiffen like he has that disease that renders your muscles beyond the control of your brain.

Nick climbs down the stairs, and jumps off as the engine continues by blowing its whistles deafeningly loud as it approaches a crosswalk. The snow is up to his knees, and he’s looking at the freight going by, telling Danny when to stop. The radio procedure is to tell the engineer how many cars he has left before he needs to stop, telling him every time it reaches half of the preceding number.

Each car means fifty feet, and Nick starts at 10 cars, which is 500 feet. Then he says, 5 cars, which is 250 feet. Then 3 cars, 2 cars, 1 car, half a car, 15 feet, 10 feet, 5 feet, then stop and stretch, meaning that the engine stops and that Nick needs to wait until all the slack is gone before getting in between the freight.

He needs to climb up on eight different box cars and tie handbrakes on them. Cranking them as hard as he possibly can. They’re stopped on a steep grade, and one handbrake not tightened properly could mean a runaway train soaring blindly down the track. He climbs up the ice covered steel railing of one car, trudges in snow up to his knees to the second car, the same thing, all the way to 8 and then trudges back to the starting point. Nick is breathing so heavily, he doesn’t think he’ll ever catch his breath. Icicles hang from his thin beard, and from his nose. His ears are burning, succumbing to frostbite because the balaclava dulls the sound of all the already scratchy and low-fi radios, and he’s taken it off. Now, when he lifts his tuque at the ear to listen to what Danny is saying, his ears burn with cold.

Then he jumps on the remaining cars and backs down a track that’s over 2 miles long. He wants to be in bed. He wants to be in the spare room of their new home where he plays his acoustic guitar and writes songs, or watches videos of instructors providing lessons on better understanding the fretboard. He wants to be playing with blocks on the hardwood floor with his son as he laughs that sweet, depression-curing baby laugh of his. He wants to be in bed with his wife, as her legs are wrapped tightly around his lower back. She’s softly moaning, and smiling, and kissing him. He wants to be present. He wants to be home driving around town, sipping hot chocolate. He wants to be present.

He’s down by the river now. The wind is beyond his ability to explain. A piece of plywood covering an open manhole and being held down by two cement blocks, breaks free and goes soaring through the air like it weighs no more than a single piece of paper. Danny is mumbling on the radio, and Nick is repeatedly yelling, “WHAT? COULD YOU REPEAT THAT?” And Danny is getting mad. He’s sitting in the warmth of the engine, eligible for retirement for the past six years, smoking cigars, and eating crackers and cheese, and he’s getting mad because Nick can’t hear through the open-river wind that’s screaming at him to get out of there. So, he pretends he understands and continues hoping for the best.

He tries to keep the thoughts of the new trainee who was out west with him at the same time, getting killed last week by doing this exact thing. A 35 year old single father, trying to make a living for his kids, gets killed because of assholes like Danny who operate on less than zero patience, and let anxiety and ridicule flood the bodies of new hires like poison, until they’re risking their lives instead of going up to the engine, grabbing them by the scruff of their shirt, pointing a finger in their face and telling them, “You better knock off the horseshit or so help me God, I’ll drive my fist down your fucking throat.” He wishes he could say that, but he just can’t.

He remembers his father telling him when he first started over 25 years ago, that the guys gave him some shit too. One of the older guys, not Danny, but Billy Dunn, tried that with him and he stood in between the tracks, looking up at Billy who was sporting the world's greatest shit-eating grin, and Nick’s father, yelled at him from the ground and told him to get his ass out of the engine right now, and he guarantees that he’ll never speak that way to him again, with his fists in front of his face like a prize fighter. And that was the end of it. How simple it seemed to just stand up for yourself. Yet, he didn’t have the heart to do it.

The switches are frozen solid and at the mill in Lone Pine, Nick throws his back out. It’s 3 in the morning, and the pain takes him first to his knees and then to his back. He lays on a patch of ice that circles around the concrete of the switch stand and looks up at a clear sky filled with stars. He tells Danny to give him a second, that he fucked up his back, and Danny mumbles something unintelligible into the radio, and Nick lays there.

That’s the moment he decides his short career as a conductor on an old decaying rail line is coming to an end. The money is good, he knows that. He also knows that he’ll never make this kind of money in his life. He’ll likely spend his life struggling to make half of what he makes here. But what does it matter, he thinks? What does any of it matter?

Nick pushes through the pain, telling himself that he just has to switch these freight cars out and then he’ll get to sit for an hour before the fertilizer plant. He still has the pulp mill which will be the worst of all, but he’ll sit for an hour and let his back rest before he thinks about that. Maybe it’ll be better by then, he lies to himself. He’s had these spasms before, and this pain will be circling his back like a ring of hell-fire for at least three to four days, and that’s if he doesn’t fuck it up worse serving the rest of the customers.

The ride west is similar to the ride east. Darkness broken up by the occasional crosswalk and streetlight that reminds Nick he’s actually part of the 21st century. Then there’s the occasional customer track as well, that’s hanging on by God’s will alone. The tracks are on industrial life-support.

After the fertilizer plant and the pulp mill, Danny and Nick pull back into the yard, and it’s now 5 a.m. It’s been over 30 hours since Nick has slept. They put the engine back in the shop track and he exits, and walks slowly on the skating rink which is the parking lot of the shop, and holding on to his work bag and his lower back makes his way inside.

He quickly does the paperwork on the computer upstairs, and then sits on the bench in the changing room and grabs 4 Tylenol from the bag, and swallows them dry. He slowly takes his jacket off, and his boot covers, then his overalls, his sweater, and his slacks. He sits on the bench with just a t-shirt and underwear, both drenched with sweat, and his back is aching. Danny is whistling outside on the computer, happy as a clam. Sitting and waiting, for something. Probably nothing. Just sitting and letting time on the clock drag on. More overtime coming his way.

Nick eventually musters the strength to put his jeans on and change his t-shirt. Then he grabs his work bag, and doesn’t utter a single word to Danny before he makes his way down the steel-grate stairs and out into the cold, and into his car.

The car is cold, he forgot to start it. The glass is covered with a thick sheet of ice, and he turns it on. He’ll wait. He’ll wait until it defrosts, he’s not going outside again. Not until he’s home.

After ten minutes, it’s clear enough to back out and head through Annandale. The streets are quiet, still deserted, at least for another hour or so. Then moderate traffic will begin to appear as the sun rises over the Appalachian Mountain range across the river.

He lives 110 kilometers from the shop. And as he hangs a left onto Route 11, he’s not sure how he’ll stay awake for the hour-long drive in the darkness. He rolls the window down and rolls it back up, he slaps his face. He turns the radio loud, and then puts his music on. Loud heavy metal music. But he’s still in a heavyweight bout with the sandman.

Nick looks into the rearview mirror and sees a man who’s lost. There will be a lot of Christmas presents under the tree this year, of that, there is no doubt. But what’s more important, he asks himself. Presents or his presence? What would be better for Cassandra? What would be better for Luke? He’s lived so long believing that money meant being a good parent. A providing father. But he wants to provide his family with himself.

He’ll find another job. He’ll find something in an office that’s warm. A nice cup of coffee next to him. He’ll find something that doesn’t pay great, but allows him to be home for supper every evening. And allows him guaranteed time with his kid.

A thin smile begins to spread across his face. He knows himself, and he knows when he’s made a decision. And this decision has been made.

No more of this shit. He’s coming home and he’s staying home.