Like Utah’s Bingham Canyon Mine

by Hannah Holborn

To celebrate my nineteenth birthday, I balanced in the rain, considering the fine line between extreme sport and acts of desperation. As an ex-champion diver, I had superior kinaesthetic awareness and planned to execute a reverse pike from a girder of Lanten, Saskatchewan’s yellow water tower into the sixty centimetres of rain that had fallen since the previous day–that is until Gwendolyn Morelos pulled up in her custom painted ‘59 Pontiac Bonneville that she called the Pickle Car.

Gwen stood in the mud to peer at me through the rain. “Didn’t your mother tell you to finish the life on your plate because children were starving in India?” she shouted.

I felt the tower’s happy face totem smirk behind my back.

“I’m here to enjoy the view.” To make the claim true, I admired the valley with its sputtering lights and Holstein-deep flood waters. My parents were out there, drinking double martinis while they zipped the family jewels and insurance policies into waterproof baggies. I wondered if they’d thought to worry yet about their only child’s welfare.

“You can’t live for enjoyment, Cindy Gourlie,” Gwen said. “Come on down.”

“‘Come on down’ is what the stripper Mandy Minx told my fiancée on the same night that I nicked my wrists in Kentucky Fried Chicken’s parking lot. “If that advice is wrong for others,” I said, “what makes it right for me?”

Gwen repositioned the ladder that I had used to reach the bottom girder. “Come down and I’ll let you ride in my car.” Standing in the rain like that, Gwen looked gorgeous. Her black hair shone and her blue eyes gleamed. Thanks to surgery and orthodontics, parts of her mouth were perfect. I wondered why I’d never noticed before.

Once, in my old life and with my old clique, I’d stolen more than a glimpse of the dashboard shrine that Gwen had created using a jaw spreader, multiple hospital bracelets and the epithet Cleft and Proud of It. There was also a photograph of her posed dressed for First Holy Communion. She looked euphoric in a white gown embroidered with a picture of the Virgin Mary, but I knew better. My parents had hosted an after party complete with a piñata and Boffo the clown for seventeen of the eighteen communicants. Gwen was the lone Bride of Christ out.

I squirreled down the girders and perched on the top of the ladder. “Want to know what my mother says about you?” My mother was Holy Cross High’s councillor for students H-M.

“Not particularly.”

“She said that you resemble lungwort. It’s a plant with bright blue flowers.” I failed to mention the prickly leafs and root system that suffocates everything in its path.

The sun rose to fill a clear gap on the horizon. Instead of touching farmland and a snaking river, the light sparkled on a transient sea. Closer yet, people canoed down the streets of a residential district. The houses, built after World War II, were just big enough to fit an amputee and his wife. Now, retired dairy farmers, redundant fishermen and ex-independent bookstore owners inhabited them. These people favoured wind socks in primary colours and drove electric scooters with bumper stickers that said things like, My Other Car is a Ferrari. Despite their low elevation, none of the houses were protected by sandbags. “My father commandeered a generator and two pumps for our executive rancher in Eagle Ridge Estates. There isn’t a chance in hell we’ll need them.”

“And you’re telling me this why?”

“Penance, I suppose.”

Gwen scooped up a pickle jar full of aquarium figurines from the passenger seat of her car. She fished out a chubby hula dancer for herself. I got a knife-wielding diver embroiled in a death roll with a thrashing shark.

“Feeling better?” Gwen said.

Because ‘yes’ was the expected answer, I made the shark say it.

Like Utah’s Bingham Canyon Mine, Gwen’s grin could have been seen from space. A fresh onslaught of rain hissed on the water. The rain played castanets with the Pickle Car’s wiper blades. Gwen raised her face and then stuck out her tongue to wet it. “A toast to the good old times,” she said.

I was hungry, confused and a little hypothermic. The world tipped precariously beneath the ladder. “The old times weren’t so good,” I said. “Not nearly as good as I remember.”

Gwen made the hula girl dive into a newly formed stream. “Be free, Cindy Gourlie,” she said, as though granting absolution came that easy.

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~ This piece was posted on Wednesday, April 20th, 2005 and was filed under Writing, Short Story. You can make comments on it below. ~